Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin on Language

Note: when page numbers are given in parenthesis, L refers to the text "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" in David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory, H refers to The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays , the edition of Bakhtin by Michael Holquist which contains most of what is referred to here (and a lot else), RW refers to the selection of "Discourse in the Novel" in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader .

There are references as well to Volosinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language . There has been a belief that this work was actually written by Bakhtin; whether it was or not, Bakhtin seems to share Volosinov's sense of the nature of language.

language is learned through contextualized social interaction. (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language ). It lives "in a living impulse toward the object" (H 292), in a specific located social interaction.
consequently all language use is language use from a point of view, in a context, to an audience. There is no such thing as language use which is not dialogic (having and addressee, real or imagined), which is not contextual, and which is not (hence) ideological.
any language has certain centripetal forces which work to render it monoglossic , a "unitary language" -- forces of regulation, of discipline; this includes the literary.
any language, however, as it is lived, socially, over a variety of social, professional, class and so forth positions, is really an interacting and at times contesting amalgam of different language uses. Hence every language instance is marked by centrifugal (heteroglossic, socially distinguishing) as well as centripetal (monoglossic, societally unifying) forces. (Warning: Bakhtin at times uses the term 'language' to refer to the use of a particular class of persons, sometimes to refer to the language as a whole.)
each of these 'languages' embodies a distinct view of the world, its own sense of meanings, relations, intentions
People of different generations, classes, places, professions, have their own dialects , or ideolects; there are differences among genres, among activities, even from day to day. Hence in "Discourse and the Novel" he writes,

At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but are also -- and for us this is the essential point -- into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of view, literary language is itself only one of these heteroglot languages -- and it in its turn is stratified into languages (generic, period-bound, and others). And this stratification and heteroglossia, one realized, is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward. (R/W 199)(H)
these dialects contain within them traces and implications of values, perspectives, and experiences; hence any contestation of dialects is in fact a contestation of these embedded aspects. Language carries as part of its nature the viewpoints, assumptions, experiences of its speakers, and it does this because it is personally and socially situated, not an abstract system.
of genre in particular (of interest to we literary types), he writes,

Certain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre; they knit together with specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of a given genre. (H 289)
Bakhtin sees the 'language' or ideolect of a class or social position, etc., as a potentially a prison-house, constructing its own set of understandings beyond which the person imaginatively cannot go -- a dogma, he says, "a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia." It is clear, then, that Bakhtin believes that one can think only what one's language allows one to think.
hence the value of polyglossia , the contestation of languages, hence of ways of thinking -- "Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language." (Prehistory)(L 140, H 61) -- and of heteroglossia , the contestation of voices and dialects within a language.
in fact as he writes at one point, monoglossia is always in essence relative, as one's own language (or presumably one's own dialect, ideolect, voice-zone, whatever one chooses to call it) "Is never a single language: in it there are always survivals of the past and a potential for otherlanguagedness...." (Prehistory)(L143)]
in terms of both artistic and social expression the clearest way to achieve heteroglossia is through the parodic -- through a deliberate displacement and subversion of the ideological constraints of the system. The novel is inherently heteroglossic, as it is made up of languages objectifying other languages and entering into dialogue with them. The novel opens up language and hence culture. The carnival performs the parodic function on the level of social life.
these dialects or monoglossic 'languages' (which are also social and ideological sites) can be internal as well, that is, a person can speak from different social sites; in fact the psyche is a made up of different socio/cultural sites, is inherently dialogic in itself. Consciousness is "inner speech", which, like outer speech, is a social formation. Bakhtin's position consequently sorts well with poststructuralist conceptions of the de-centered self.
people can occupy different ideolects without being conscious of the disparity between or among them. A function of literature is to force the reader to recognize disparate ideolects and their at times conflicting ideologies -- "the critical interanimation of languages" is a term he uses for this forced recognition
as the social, through language, through the "already said", is what is formative of consciousness, Bakhtin is antagonistic to the ideology of individualism.
as should be clear, then, language is inherently ideological. It is material, historically located, performative. Ideas, expressed in language, are located as outcomes of social and historical processes. As an interactive part of ongoing historical processes, language, and hence ideology, is open to change; and it is open to it through dialogue and narrative, heteroglossia and polyglossia, interaction, history, and the parodic.
because within the same sign community, the same (roughly and generally) vocabulary and grammar, there are people with differently oriented social interests and perspectives, "differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes and arena of class struggle." [from Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language]
we can view reading itself as dialogic, a process of entering into exchange with a voice or voices. This would revolutionize our reading of texts with which we 'disagree', for we could see them as a process of interaction with our own views, not as a simple embodiment of feelings or positions we find alienating. One could think of such reading as being four-pointed: ourselves, our cultural milieu and the questions we have to face, the text, the text's milieu and the questions it had to face.
creative language use discovers and illumines the heteroglossic. As Bakhtin writes,

In the process of literary creation, languages interanimate each other and objectify precisely that side of one's own (and the other's) language that pertains to its world view, its inner form, the axiologically* accentuated system inherent in it. For the creating literary consciousness, existing in a field illuminated by another's language, it is not the phonetic system of its own language that stands out, nor is it the distinctive features of its own morphology nor its own abstract lexicon -- what stands out is precisely that which makes language concrete and which makes its world view ultimately untranslatable, that is, precisely the style of language as a totality. (Prehistory)(L 141) * 'axiology' is the study of values

and

The actively literary linguistic consciousness at all times and everywhere (that is, in all epochs of literature historically available to us) comes upon 'languages' and not language. Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia.... ("Discourse in the Novel") (R/W 200)(H)
the concept of parody which Bakhtin sees as central to the life of ancient and mediaeval times is not the sterile concept of today, but a joyous, chaotic, subversive, energetic play with/play against the dominant language forms for the purposes of shaking free the mind and spirit, an energy and activity often officially recognized and sanctioned -- the Saturnalia, the bacchanal, the carnival, the holiday of fools, and so forth. Bakhtin thinks that the language we speak today is not the same as it once was, that "the complex and multi-leveled hierarchy of discourses, forms, images, styles that used to permeate the entire system of official language and linguistic consciousness was swept away by the linguistic revolutions of the Renaissance." (Prehistory)(L 146) Democratic language is desacralized, leveled, built on a sort of parodic refusal of the higher languages, hence cannot generate the full parodic, in literary or social terms. Parody must be, in a sense, bilingual, speaking with and against that which it is parodying.
the free indirect style which is at the heart of the novel form is innately dialogic in that the 'speaker' is quoting another voice, continually representing that which is not her but another. (If the voice were not quoting another, we would insist that it was an autobiography, not a novel.) The more a novel relies on dialogue, on showing ( mimesis ), the more it foregrounds different voices; however the more it relies on diegesis, i.e. reporting, rather than showing, the more it rests on the internal, intonational quotation characteristic of the free indirect style, "the novelistic image of another's language." (Prehistory)(L 127).
although the author is inevitably speaking the voices of others and hence entering into dialogue with them, the author does not disappear, rather, it seems, the author remains as the omnipresent center of the web of language use; in a sense the author authorizes by being the connecting focus through which ideolects, conventions, quotations, enter into relationship and mutual reframing.
the basic tasks for a stylistic in the novel, as Bakhtin gives them in Prehistory, are:
- the study of specific images of [representations of] languages and styles
- the organization of these images
- their typology (for they are extremely diverse)
- the combination of images and languages within the novelistic whole
- their dialogical interrelationships. (L 132)
Bakhtin has a peculiar view of poetry in that he sees it as driven toward a monological form, in which the intentions of others inherent in language are stripped away, "words and forms...lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language and their connection with specific contexts." (H297); poetry operates in a sense in a closed system, hinging on the symbol, the central unifying image which erases specificity and dialogue; rhythm itself interrupts the normal strucutre of language and "serves to strengthen and concentrate even further the unity and hermetic quality of the surface of poetic style, and of the unitary language that this style posits." The language of the prose writer, in Bakhtin's view,is precisely the opposite.

One might ask the extent to which Bakhtin's understanding of language leads to ideological reading, and the answer is, I think, that it enables ideological reading substantially. It assumes that language determines and is determined by cultural formations, that it is a material production of a particular time and place, that it has the world-view of the speaker embedded in it, that monoglossia mystifies experience by disappearing all experience and perspective other than that taken by the language, that social control can be exercised through cultural formations (language, art), that revolution, demystification, oppositional thought is healthy and necessary.