Is Bakhtin rhetorical? Does he belong to rhetoric?
This is the main focus of this post for two reasons: one, Bakhtin is generally categorized as a linguist, linguistics being an endeavor that is (usually considered) distinct from rhetoric. Thus, the connections between rhetoric and linguistics will be the first thing that I explore here. Secondly, I’m writing to this question because the version of it that Logie gave us on the first day seemed to be fruitful, so perhaps it will be so again. As such, the second part of what I will explore here will look specifically at Bakhtin’s linguistic writings vis-à -vis conceptions of rhetoric I’ve set up in the first part.
I generally understand rhetoric to be, broadly, one of four things. First, rhetoric is the skilled construction of written or spoken discourse directed toward a delimited, socio-historical, cultural situation. I think this the most dominant conception of rhetoric and it seems to me that you can find some version of it in nearly any theorist from Isocrates to Bitzer and Black in the mid-20th century. Secondly, rhetoric is conceived as an educational practice. This is began in Isocrates, was made robust and canonical in Quintilian, and continued as a practice throughout the middle ages in the foundation of universities all over Europe, into the early modern/modern western world by scholars like Erasmus, and, we now know, Whately. Thirdly, the more marginalized conception of rhetoric, but nonetheless significant one in the history of the field, is philosophic rhetoric or rhetoric and dialectic or the view that language is crucially constitutive of ideas that are otherwise labeled as philosophy. This conception of rhetoric has been.. (I won’t say popularized, but advocated, perhaps?) by Ernesto Grassi and Hans Georg Gadamer in the 20th century. This third conception of rhetoric has historical antecedents in Vico, Italian Humanists, Erasmus, Cicero, and Isocrates. Fourthly, and finally, there is the entity that Ed Schiappa quite conveniently called ‘big rhetoric’. It is a rhetorical development that is confined to the last half of the 20th century and is characterized by ‘rhetorics of…’, the rhetoric of inquiry project, out of which comes the rhetoric of science, etc.
That being said, what then is linguistics? I understand it to be the scientific study of language-the principled, methodical, analysis of what it is and how it works, with, crucially definitional intentions. Linguistics breaks down language into discrete units that can be analyzed and categorized. A passage of Bakhtin’s “Marxism and the Philosophy…� seems to illustrate the methodical, definitional basis of linguistics, a quality that would putatively differentiate it from rhetoric. On p. 1212 (2nd ed), Bakhtin sets out to define the sign. He says “The understanding of a sign is after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding is a response to a sign with signs. And this chain of ideological creativity and understanding, moving from sign to sign and then to a new sign, is perfectly consistent and continuous: from one link to of a semiotic nature…we proceed uninterrupted to another link of exactly the same nature. And nowhere is there a break in the chain, nowhere does the chain plunge into inner being, non-material in nature and unembodied in signs�. This definitional treatment of discrete units that come together to make a structure called language seems to me to be decidedly different from what rhetoric historically or currently, is (see 1223). The concern with method, also, exemplified on p. 1222, seems to differentiate linguistics from rhetoric (except, during a short period of time beginning in the early 20th century and continuing into the mid-late when most of the humanities, rhetoric included became deeply, crucially concerned with method as a legitimating basis). Thus, in terms of his ostensible treatment of his subject, Bakhin’s thought in seems to belong to an area of inquiry that is methodically and conclusively different from rhetoric.
However, contrary to, say, Sausserian linguistics, Bakhtin is deeply concerned with the social, with language as a social phenomenon that acts on (through ideology) and is used by (in utterances) human agents. This idea of the social, of language use being a distinctly social activity, is absolutely foundational to all of the four conceptions of rhetoric I laid out. It might, in fact, be the only feature that aligns those otherwise disparate four conceptions of rhetoric. He seems to theorize an audience, so foundational to rhetoric, though his formulation of it (1212) is theoretically different that much of what would be found in the conceptions of rhetoric. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he assigns a blankness or flexibility to language that is crucial for rhetorical notions of invention (1213).
However, again, there are ways in which it seems that his theories make anything we understand as rhetoric, impossible. For example, he says, in (section? Part?) II of “The problem of speech genres� (1232), “Still current in linguistics are such fictions as the ‘listener’ and the ‘understander’ (partners of ‘the speaker’), the ‘unified speech flow’..these fictions produce a completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech communication…the fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning…of speech he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it, augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding from the very beginning-sometimes literally from the speaker’s first word. Any understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely….�. I think this statement, while not actually making rhetoric impossible, might complicate how we think of rhetoric. Bakhtin, here is not going so far as to suggest communication is impossible in his theory but he is denying a certain transparency, or directness of communication (the ‘transmissive rhetoric’) that rhetoric, or the ‘rhetorics’ I’ve defined at the beginning of this essay, often rely on.
Thus, at the end, I’ve arrived only at a revision of my original question: How do we need to conceptualize ‘rhetoric’ so that Bakhtin fits in? Is it necessary to reconceptualize?