"The creation of an integral self is the work of a lifetime, and although that work can never be completed, it is nonetheless an ethical responsibility."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
Bakhtin locates this project, the project of self, in language. Asking us to fully experience the words we use and how we use them. He asks us to not simply swallow the prose of life but to chew, spit and sometimes throw it up.
What narratives do we accept in the way we frame and express our thoughts?
What stories do we invoke?
Which authors?
Which authorities?
He asks us to question the way we breathe—the thoughts that inspire us, giving our lungs their ability to transport the substance necessary for life. Thought and spirit have an oxygen of their own. Anyone sucking thoughtlessly on the pipe of life refuses to accept their responsibility as maker. Life is a creative project requiring a morality and ethics of answering back (to what has already been spoken). Life requires voice—a voice of one's own.
Bakhtin insists on this project, allowing no alibi in being. He declares each individual's ethical responsibility to do more than claim existence, saying we must engage in the intimacy of giving our lives shape—shape in the process of taking on the authoritative discourse, and working at the substance of our own internally persuasive discourse.
Showing posts with label Bakhtin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bakhtin. Show all posts
20 August 2012
16 August 2012
Obsolescence
Iannis Xanakis: Metastasis
Order to Complexity to Disorder
Kundera on Xenakis. Xenakis severed relations between himself and music. Music as defined by a certain tradition, a heritage. He was not "new" he was "other." Unlike.
Xenakis "does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of it's legacy."
In this turn he locates a new origin for sound, not in the notes of man, but in nature. The sound the world makes, alive with rain, with dry heat and machinery.
Xenakis looks to the world of sound, sound with origins not confined to the heart of one man, or his intellect. In this turn he breaks with the authoritative notion that man is the heart of society, a person elevated above other life forms. In this turn from the lie of sentient beings, he takes his place within nature, where man and woman are small parts that do not define the whole.
Bakhtin also takes a turn from the I of writing to the world of speech. In his turn he locates the world of sound within an utterance— man at once a part of the grand dialogue, no more or less than a speaker.
About Xenakis' legacy: "Will he be remembered by music lovers?"
That is a question of music: what harmonies and scales are being agreed up, what instruments played, what opportunities for vocalizations, what beings expressed and realities explored.
They both fondle the dichotomies that have divided Nations, thoughts and music: man/nature; man/woman; oral/written; civilized/savage.
About Xenakis: "What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone has dared to tell European music that it can be abandoned. Forgotten."
So many parts of life are accepted as inevitable, events that cannot be avoided or evaded, certainties. This may be why some twist themselves around the barbed wire of free will and original sin. They are so certain,—as sure to follow as night follows day— of the story of their life, an appropriate score, an authority to empower their position.
Kundera mentions the circumstance of Xenakis' life: being sentenced to death, civil war, disfigurement. In his mind these circumstances "Led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul's subjectivity."
Many artists and many children of war (especially survivors of wars of extermination) break open in the attempt to understand. Arahon Appelfeld writes, "The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in a prolonged silence." (Beyond Despair)
The first time I heard Xanakis I thought of Beckett. I also think of Broch, beginning The Death of Virgil while interred by the Gestapo, finishing it in poverty and exile. None of these artists accept the inevitable. They have lost the certainty of day following night. And they respond with compositions: Metastasis. Pas Moi. The Death of Virgil.
Order to Complexity to Disorder
Kundera on Xenakis. Xenakis severed relations between himself and music. Music as defined by a certain tradition, a heritage. He was not "new" he was "other." Unlike.
Xenakis "does not stand against some earlier phase of music; he turns away from all of European music, from the whole of it's legacy."
In this turn he locates a new origin for sound, not in the notes of man, but in nature. The sound the world makes, alive with rain, with dry heat and machinery.
Xenakis looks to the world of sound, sound with origins not confined to the heart of one man, or his intellect. In this turn he breaks with the authoritative notion that man is the heart of society, a person elevated above other life forms. In this turn from the lie of sentient beings, he takes his place within nature, where man and woman are small parts that do not define the whole.
Bakhtin also takes a turn from the I of writing to the world of speech. In his turn he locates the world of sound within an utterance— man at once a part of the grand dialogue, no more or less than a speaker.
About Xenakis' legacy: "Will he be remembered by music lovers?"
That is a question of music: what harmonies and scales are being agreed up, what instruments played, what opportunities for vocalizations, what beings expressed and realities explored.
They both fondle the dichotomies that have divided Nations, thoughts and music: man/nature; man/woman; oral/written; civilized/savage.
About Xenakis: "What will remain is the act of enormous rejection: for the first time someone has dared to tell European music that it can be abandoned. Forgotten."
So many parts of life are accepted as inevitable, events that cannot be avoided or evaded, certainties. This may be why some twist themselves around the barbed wire of free will and original sin. They are so certain,—as sure to follow as night follows day— of the story of their life, an appropriate score, an authority to empower their position.
Kundera mentions the circumstance of Xenakis' life: being sentenced to death, civil war, disfigurement. In his mind these circumstances "Led Xenakis to side with the objective sound of the world against the sound of a soul's subjectivity."
Many artists and many children of war (especially survivors of wars of extermination) break open in the attempt to understand. Arahon Appelfeld writes, "The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in a prolonged silence." (Beyond Despair)
The first time I heard Xanakis I thought of Beckett. I also think of Broch, beginning The Death of Virgil while interred by the Gestapo, finishing it in poverty and exile. None of these artists accept the inevitable. They have lost the certainty of day following night. And they respond with compositions: Metastasis. Pas Moi. The Death of Virgil.
13 August 2012
Language
"Both the authority of discourse and its internal persuasiveness may be united in a single word—but such unity is rarely a given—it happens more frequently that an individual's becoming, an ideological process, is characterized precisely by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one, the authoritative word (religious, political, moral, the word of a father, of adults and of teachers, etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code."
We confront these authorities every day—consciously or not. Sifting between these words and worlds is not difficult. The authoritative word is familiar, it grows everywhere, rusting the substance of people, and the substance of conversation. Authoritative words and worlds don't go down easy—they choke, they stretch the esophagus, stripping the sides, and making it difficult to pull in the oxygen required of thought. If you do not agree—you cannot go forward. When you agree, you go only where your movement is required. Is that motion or relocation?
"The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determined the history of an individual ideological consciousness."
Struggle, dialogue, and history, each of these words open and close of their own account. Considering Bakhtin's point here, "are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness," the use of the word determine whispers a declaration, you are shaped in ways you can be significantly unaware of and still feel you've come to some conclusion.
But, "It is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us, rather, it demands our unconditional allegiance."
I return to the process of sifting. Sorting through language in this way is not difficult, but few take the smallest amount of time to do it. Instead we speak, we think, we pledge allegiance to the flow of words, the exchange of ideas, the pattern of interaction the authoritative discourse demands of us. But we think we are speaking, thinking, exchanging. Why?
"It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority—with political power, an institution, a person—and it stands and falls together with that authority. One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part."
Political power determines citizenship, mobility, economies and to a large degree basic safety. Political power defines necessity and then applies those definitions to our bodies (earth, human, plant and animal). Political power requires a licence. Institutions and people serve the same functions, standing and falling by the authority of these words (business hours, days of the week, languages, and ceremonies). There are innumerable worlds outside of these, but this world of words refuses to recognize their existence.
"The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it."
To some extent, when we are not sifting and sorting, we are agreeing. That agreement is coerced, but it is agreement nonetheless. Disagreements are punished, severely—but disagreement allows for dignity.
"All this renders the artistic representation of authoritative discourse impossible."
We must moan, scream or cry. We must cough, and spit. We must retain something capable of bearing life.
"An independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being."
all quotes are from: M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Edited by Michael Holquist, Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (pages 342-4)
We confront these authorities every day—consciously or not. Sifting between these words and worlds is not difficult. The authoritative word is familiar, it grows everywhere, rusting the substance of people, and the substance of conversation. Authoritative words and worlds don't go down easy—they choke, they stretch the esophagus, stripping the sides, and making it difficult to pull in the oxygen required of thought. If you do not agree—you cannot go forward. When you agree, you go only where your movement is required. Is that motion or relocation?
"The struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determined the history of an individual ideological consciousness."
Struggle, dialogue, and history, each of these words open and close of their own account. Considering Bakhtin's point here, "are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness," the use of the word determine whispers a declaration, you are shaped in ways you can be significantly unaware of and still feel you've come to some conclusion.
But, "It is not a free appropriation and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us, rather, it demands our unconditional allegiance."
I return to the process of sifting. Sorting through language in this way is not difficult, but few take the smallest amount of time to do it. Instead we speak, we think, we pledge allegiance to the flow of words, the exchange of ideas, the pattern of interaction the authoritative discourse demands of us. But we think we are speaking, thinking, exchanging. Why?
"It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it. It is indissolubly fused with its authority—with political power, an institution, a person—and it stands and falls together with that authority. One cannot divide it up—agree with one part, accept but not completely another part, reject utterly a third part."
Political power determines citizenship, mobility, economies and to a large degree basic safety. Political power defines necessity and then applies those definitions to our bodies (earth, human, plant and animal). Political power requires a licence. Institutions and people serve the same functions, standing and falling by the authority of these words (business hours, days of the week, languages, and ceremonies). There are innumerable worlds outside of these, but this world of words refuses to recognize their existence.
"The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it."
To some extent, when we are not sifting and sorting, we are agreeing. That agreement is coerced, but it is agreement nonetheless. Disagreements are punished, severely—but disagreement allows for dignity.
"All this renders the artistic representation of authoritative discourse impossible."
We must moan, scream or cry. We must cough, and spit. We must retain something capable of bearing life.
"An independent, responsible and active discourse is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal and political human being."
all quotes are from: M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Edited by Michael Holquist, Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (pages 342-4)
07 August 2012
Translation
"How shall I respond to another person's suffering?"
"Empathy?"
"To the extent that such empathy is possible it is also sterile, 'What would I have to gain?' Bakhtin asks, 'If another were to fuse with me? He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would only repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
(M. Bakhtin, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity)
"to be means to communicate"
(M. Bakhtin, Toward A Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book)
"For any individual or social entity, we cannot properly separate existence from the ongoing process of communication."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
I spend most of my time reading about people unlike myself in translation from languages I do not speak. I do my best to know them, at least to listen.
I have been silenced by interruption, often, especially as I've had to detail my physical needs to medical professionals who believe patients talk too much and know too little. Last year, particularly, I kept saying "I am a human being and this is my body." My statements were only heard as further indication of my position as a novitiate in medicine.
My reading and life have taught me to attempt to follow the details and to keep those details in mind. Learning, in my house, was a process of observation. I was never told what to do, though I was certainly expected to do something. The content of my actions were to be shaped by the content of my life, which was shaped by the details of my observations.
What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding comes. Sometimes I recognize a turn of phrase, a look, or a feeling in my body I can locate in language. What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding never comes, but I still maintain the conversation, if only in savings.
A world confined to myself is an impossibility, and my idea of torture. I don't want to fuse or dissolve into you. I desire to retain my own shape. I have the same desire for you. In communicating, in being, we can then share those shapes and the changes they make over time and a consequence of experience. I find compassion a better word for this than empathy. It speaks to the level of awareness, the attention to detail, the process of listening and manner of reaching for meaning I pursue.
"Empathy?"
"To the extent that such empathy is possible it is also sterile, 'What would I have to gain?' Bakhtin asks, 'If another were to fuse with me? He would see and know only what I already see and know, he would only repeat in himself the inescapable closed circle of my own life; let him rather remain outside me."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
(M. Bakhtin, Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity)
"to be means to communicate"
(M. Bakhtin, Toward A Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book)
"For any individual or social entity, we cannot properly separate existence from the ongoing process of communication."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
I spend most of my time reading about people unlike myself in translation from languages I do not speak. I do my best to know them, at least to listen.
I have been silenced by interruption, often, especially as I've had to detail my physical needs to medical professionals who believe patients talk too much and know too little. Last year, particularly, I kept saying "I am a human being and this is my body." My statements were only heard as further indication of my position as a novitiate in medicine.
My reading and life have taught me to attempt to follow the details and to keep those details in mind. Learning, in my house, was a process of observation. I was never told what to do, though I was certainly expected to do something. The content of my actions were to be shaped by the content of my life, which was shaped by the details of my observations.
What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding comes. Sometimes I recognize a turn of phrase, a look, or a feeling in my body I can locate in language. What I do not understand I save for later. Sometimes understanding never comes, but I still maintain the conversation, if only in savings.
A world confined to myself is an impossibility, and my idea of torture. I don't want to fuse or dissolve into you. I desire to retain my own shape. I have the same desire for you. In communicating, in being, we can then share those shapes and the changes they make over time and a consequence of experience. I find compassion a better word for this than empathy. It speaks to the level of awareness, the attention to detail, the process of listening and manner of reaching for meaning I pursue.
06 August 2012
Language
"It is. . .inaccurate to speak of entering into dialogue, as if the components that do so could exist in any other way. To be sure, particular dialogues may break off (they never truly end), but dialogue itself is always going on."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
Dialogue is the key. Bakhtin understands dialogue in several ways, and I am in conversation with his work. Dialogue require people. People who speak, listen, and respond. "There can be no dialogue between sentences. " When we speak we "turn to someone." Without this turn, the utterance "does not and cannot exist." (Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres)
I am turning to you, and in turning I face the language of your life. According to Bakhtin every utterance (speech genre) is dialogic by definition. Words do not pop into an existence where nothing has been spoken. The world, in this view, is not made of up signs, but of transformative speeches. When we speak we enter the stream. When we are silent, we enter another. Like all energies in motion we can allow ourselves to be moved, we can resist, and we can join the energy we have into the conversation. Together we exchange words, words carrying their own energy with them.
"No word can be taken back, but the final word has not yet been spoken and never will be spoken."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
Often people want to suppress dialogue, by declarations: it's over. Enough has been said, and I've said it. These authoritative means wield power over speakers and listeners and claim to be (not represent, but actually define for all time the content and form of the world) undeniable. If we remember the lie underlying these authorities and participate in the dialogue we can face life ethically and communicate.
"The very words [we use] carry the intonations and evaluations accumulated in daily life, in diverse contexts and heterogeneous speech genres whose existence has not been recognized."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
I am speaking of speech. Every day talk. Sometimes the dialogue is familiar, we recognize and agree on the terms. Sometimes the dialogue is strange and we are required to invest some aspect of ourselves (time, patience, intellect) to finding a way to relate, a means of offering some meaningful response in return. These processes are never complete, life requires that much of us. The dialogue goes on. We utter our words. The dialogue continues.
"The most interesting and most unfinalizable aspects of any interaction arise from the relative disorder of the participants."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
The relative disorder requires each of us to show up: awake to the shape of each moment, aware of our place, and willing to "turn to someone." From Coltrane's Ascension and Meditation to Auten's Sense and Sensibility, "we all need someone to listen to us." We speak, we moan, we take a moment to catch our breath and blow.
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
Dialogue is the key. Bakhtin understands dialogue in several ways, and I am in conversation with his work. Dialogue require people. People who speak, listen, and respond. "There can be no dialogue between sentences. " When we speak we "turn to someone." Without this turn, the utterance "does not and cannot exist." (Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres)
I am turning to you, and in turning I face the language of your life. According to Bakhtin every utterance (speech genre) is dialogic by definition. Words do not pop into an existence where nothing has been spoken. The world, in this view, is not made of up signs, but of transformative speeches. When we speak we enter the stream. When we are silent, we enter another. Like all energies in motion we can allow ourselves to be moved, we can resist, and we can join the energy we have into the conversation. Together we exchange words, words carrying their own energy with them.
"No word can be taken back, but the final word has not yet been spoken and never will be spoken."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
Often people want to suppress dialogue, by declarations: it's over. Enough has been said, and I've said it. These authoritative means wield power over speakers and listeners and claim to be (not represent, but actually define for all time the content and form of the world) undeniable. If we remember the lie underlying these authorities and participate in the dialogue we can face life ethically and communicate.
"The very words [we use] carry the intonations and evaluations accumulated in daily life, in diverse contexts and heterogeneous speech genres whose existence has not been recognized."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
I am speaking of speech. Every day talk. Sometimes the dialogue is familiar, we recognize and agree on the terms. Sometimes the dialogue is strange and we are required to invest some aspect of ourselves (time, patience, intellect) to finding a way to relate, a means of offering some meaningful response in return. These processes are never complete, life requires that much of us. The dialogue goes on. We utter our words. The dialogue continues.
"The most interesting and most unfinalizable aspects of any interaction arise from the relative disorder of the participants."
(Gary Saul Morson & Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics)
The relative disorder requires each of us to show up: awake to the shape of each moment, aware of our place, and willing to "turn to someone." From Coltrane's Ascension and Meditation to Auten's Sense and Sensibility, "we all need someone to listen to us." We speak, we moan, we take a moment to catch our breath and blow.
24 July 2012
Translation
"Two speakers must not, and never do, completely understand each other; they must remain only partially satisfied with each other's replies, because the continuation of dialogue is in large part dependent on neither party knowing exactly what the other means. Thus true communication never makes languages sound the same, never erases boundaries, never pretends to a perfect fit."
(Wayne C. Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson)
I have found myself in a narrow world. I have always sought an escape. I often find one in language.
Circumstance—ill health, war, and poverty—often leads to a narrowing of worlds. Survivors, of environments that have closed in, share experiences that often result in a code of ethics among the survivors.
They have bonded. You, if you stand outside, cannot understand. They are sure of it. They are right in their understanding. I don't think we can "completely understand each other." Problems derive from the belief that we should never try.
It is not necessary to so completely dissolve the space between us that it ceases to exist.
My world is shaped by bridges, some natural, others constructed over years. Some of these bridges are near. Some require a great and costly journey to even glimpse them in the distance. They change light. They offer a means of travel. Some are rainbows. Some are stone. Others hard metal stolen from the earth, our mother.
I was in Minneapolis when their great bridge fell. Many were injured as a result of neglect. Bridges must be maintained—at a cost. They cannot be erected from bodies that tire and decay. Bodies are not bridges. We should not suffer the illusion that bridges are problems belonging to others—those not I. Even those who rest confident in their refusal to travel anywhere outside their understandings.
Circumstance—health, peace and wealth—often leads to a narrowing of worlds. Celebrants of these circumstances often develop calluses. The thick and hard are insensitive to meaning. Meanings are fragile, subtle and supple. They cannot bear the weight of hate (of oneself or others).
Survivors and celebrants share in this, the development of codes and calluses. We must work on the project of translation (from me and mine, to you and yours) in light of these bonds and in consequence of these calluses. They keep us from hearing and from recognizing each other's speech as language. They leave us incomprehensible, and estranged with nothing to say to each other.
The idea that "we must not, and never do, completely understand each other" offers several possibilities: continuity, responsibility, compassion and patience.
The idea that "we must not, and never do, completely understand each other" also rests on one significant assumption: desire.
(Wayne C. Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson)
I have found myself in a narrow world. I have always sought an escape. I often find one in language.
Circumstance—ill health, war, and poverty—often leads to a narrowing of worlds. Survivors, of environments that have closed in, share experiences that often result in a code of ethics among the survivors.
They have bonded. You, if you stand outside, cannot understand. They are sure of it. They are right in their understanding. I don't think we can "completely understand each other." Problems derive from the belief that we should never try.
It is not necessary to so completely dissolve the space between us that it ceases to exist.
My world is shaped by bridges, some natural, others constructed over years. Some of these bridges are near. Some require a great and costly journey to even glimpse them in the distance. They change light. They offer a means of travel. Some are rainbows. Some are stone. Others hard metal stolen from the earth, our mother.
I was in Minneapolis when their great bridge fell. Many were injured as a result of neglect. Bridges must be maintained—at a cost. They cannot be erected from bodies that tire and decay. Bodies are not bridges. We should not suffer the illusion that bridges are problems belonging to others—those not I. Even those who rest confident in their refusal to travel anywhere outside their understandings.
Circumstance—health, peace and wealth—often leads to a narrowing of worlds. Celebrants of these circumstances often develop calluses. The thick and hard are insensitive to meaning. Meanings are fragile, subtle and supple. They cannot bear the weight of hate (of oneself or others).
Survivors and celebrants share in this, the development of codes and calluses. We must work on the project of translation (from me and mine, to you and yours) in light of these bonds and in consequence of these calluses. They keep us from hearing and from recognizing each other's speech as language. They leave us incomprehensible, and estranged with nothing to say to each other.
The idea that "we must not, and never do, completely understand each other" offers several possibilities: continuity, responsibility, compassion and patience.
The idea that "we must not, and never do, completely understand each other" also rests on one significant assumption: desire.
11 July 2012
Novels
"Only purely mechanistic relationships are not dialogic, and Dostoevsky categorically denied their importance for understanding and interpreting life and the acts of man. " (M. Bakhtin)
"Thus all relationships among external and internal parts and elements of his novel are dialogic in character, and he structured the novel as a whole as a 'great dialogue.'" (M. Bakhtin)
This is not about Dostoevsky.
This is about being a competent reader.
"What does it mean to be a 'competent reader' of Bakhtin? Surely it means to hear a dialogue, perhaps even to recognize the major voices embedded in it, but it must be a dialogue where no voice is done the 'slightest violence.'" (W. Booth)
Life requires competent readers. Novels require life. Stories describe and ensure our survival, our continuity, our particular understanding of being human. Novels offer us a point of entry into the great dialogue itself. Hearing, recognizing and ensuring that no voice is done even the "slightest violence" can create a world very different from this one. I have taken this project on as a moral and ethical responsibility.
"suffice it to say . . .'the whole' is not a finished entity; it is always a relationship." (W. Booth)
A relationship between the work (art) and the worker (artist). T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. Every thing in the universe is related. A relationship between the speaker and the listener. T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. No word exists in isolation. T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. No person exists without place. T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. Every relation requires an ethics of exchange, an agreement between beings, a willingness to be inside oneself while another is wholely inside themselves as well. Unity and empathy are not achieved by dissolution. The great dialogue is an exchange over time and across terrain (metaphysical, ideological, and geographical), where we do not disintegrate, or retain such rigid exteriors that we cannot hear, and perhaps even recognize the major voices.
Recognition requires developing an ear.
Recognition reaquires familiarity.
Recognition requires vulnerability and a willingness to being seen yourself.
all quotes are from: Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson, Introduction by Wayne C. Booth, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8
"Thus all relationships among external and internal parts and elements of his novel are dialogic in character, and he structured the novel as a whole as a 'great dialogue.'" (M. Bakhtin)
This is not about Dostoevsky.
This is about being a competent reader.
"What does it mean to be a 'competent reader' of Bakhtin? Surely it means to hear a dialogue, perhaps even to recognize the major voices embedded in it, but it must be a dialogue where no voice is done the 'slightest violence.'" (W. Booth)
Life requires competent readers. Novels require life. Stories describe and ensure our survival, our continuity, our particular understanding of being human. Novels offer us a point of entry into the great dialogue itself. Hearing, recognizing and ensuring that no voice is done even the "slightest violence" can create a world very different from this one. I have taken this project on as a moral and ethical responsibility.
"suffice it to say . . .'the whole' is not a finished entity; it is always a relationship." (W. Booth)
A relationship between the work (art) and the worker (artist). T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. Every thing in the universe is related. A relationship between the speaker and the listener. T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. No word exists in isolation. T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. No person exists without place. T'áá ałtso ałhił ka'iijée'go. Every relation requires an ethics of exchange, an agreement between beings, a willingness to be inside oneself while another is wholely inside themselves as well. Unity and empathy are not achieved by dissolution. The great dialogue is an exchange over time and across terrain (metaphysical, ideological, and geographical), where we do not disintegrate, or retain such rigid exteriors that we cannot hear, and perhaps even recognize the major voices.
Recognition requires developing an ear.
Recognition reaquires familiarity.
Recognition requires vulnerability and a willingness to being seen yourself.
all quotes are from: Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson, Introduction by Wayne C. Booth, Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8
10 July 2012
Translation
"That one aspect of Bakhtin's style most inseparable from his personality is the developing idea. Its subtle shifts, redundancies, self-quotations—ultimately, its open-endedness—is the genre in which, and with which, he worked. To translate Bakhtin, I suggest, is therefore not only to translate the ideas (they can be paraphrased) but also to reproduce the sound of the open-ended, self-developing idea. This would be his 'conversation in progress,' his dialogue about dialogue, his interlocution with readers who have still to respond." (Wayne C. Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson)
As a writer and language learner I am constantly trying to use the right word in the right way. I also believe, as a language learner, that making mistakes is a form of community service. The more people laugh, the better.
Different language communities take different approaches to correcting mistakes, and maintain radically different stances regarding when you are ready to speak and when you should just learn and listen. I suppose, like child rearing and dog ownership, this really is an artifact of the parent/owner/teacher involved. Some are loving and playful and others authoritative bullies (I include dog owners who let their dogs run and pounce on strangers, because "they love people so much" as members of the authoritative bully kind).
When speaking I don't mind being laughed at, except in English (which is my first language, and the one I am corrected in most, but that's another idea, developing). But in writing I am afraid. I try to get it right and have often asked others (native speakers) to read over work (though none have been willing to, which is another idea, developing), so I don't write some ridiculous twattle that only makes sense to me.
I had a neighbor from Brazil. We'd spend hours talking. I would talk to her in Spanish. And she would talk to me in Portuguese. We'd laugh. We'd be serious. This time, talking together, bridged the 20 year difference in our age, and the dramatic variation of our experience. My wife would sometimes be with us and would answer in English. My friend's daughter would sometimes be with us and she would answer in English too. They found us amusing. When I'd get stuck for a word or phrase I'd ask her daughter to translate. They'd laugh, her daughter and my wife, and tell us both: you are not talking Spanish and you are not talking Portuguese. We have no idea what you are saying.
A few years ago I wrote my first full page in Navajo. It might be a total mess, but it is true to the people speaking (who are a total mess themselves).
I believe in writing—in the oral tradition—taking language for what it is, an opportunity, a translation. But it was only after reading Leslie Silko's Turqouise Ledge that I started to allow myself to write as freely as I speak. To use my language books, my dictionaries, my tapes to work for me in the project of communication. Keeping our languages alive requires us to speak. Keeping them in print requires a willingness to ask others to speak them as well. Most of the work I read is in translation, and every work I read has some French, Spanish, German, Czech, Italian and Polish thrown in, even if only the names, that require pronounciation. I struggle to get my tongue and teeth around them. I feel them. I hear them. I take them in, literally. They, the translators of these works, expect me to know these languages. The languages have enough weight to warrant the expectation—so they go in the translation, un-translated.
I'm writing with that in mind, knowing the languages I work with (learning and speaking) have the same amount of weight in my own life. So they go in too, un-italicized and un-translated.
My developing idea is this: if to translate is not to betray, and all language is communication, then we should make the attempt to reach from one area in language to another. Sometimes those areas are between people, but they are often within a person themselves. Allowing those areas, allowing the elasticity of mind required of reading through, makes translation difficult and rewarding. Attempting an honest experience of these moments between asks more of the world and from ourselves, and requires that we not only speak, but respond.
As a writer and language learner I am constantly trying to use the right word in the right way. I also believe, as a language learner, that making mistakes is a form of community service. The more people laugh, the better.
Different language communities take different approaches to correcting mistakes, and maintain radically different stances regarding when you are ready to speak and when you should just learn and listen. I suppose, like child rearing and dog ownership, this really is an artifact of the parent/owner/teacher involved. Some are loving and playful and others authoritative bullies (I include dog owners who let their dogs run and pounce on strangers, because "they love people so much" as members of the authoritative bully kind).
When speaking I don't mind being laughed at, except in English (which is my first language, and the one I am corrected in most, but that's another idea, developing). But in writing I am afraid. I try to get it right and have often asked others (native speakers) to read over work (though none have been willing to, which is another idea, developing), so I don't write some ridiculous twattle that only makes sense to me.
I had a neighbor from Brazil. We'd spend hours talking. I would talk to her in Spanish. And she would talk to me in Portuguese. We'd laugh. We'd be serious. This time, talking together, bridged the 20 year difference in our age, and the dramatic variation of our experience. My wife would sometimes be with us and would answer in English. My friend's daughter would sometimes be with us and she would answer in English too. They found us amusing. When I'd get stuck for a word or phrase I'd ask her daughter to translate. They'd laugh, her daughter and my wife, and tell us both: you are not talking Spanish and you are not talking Portuguese. We have no idea what you are saying.
A few years ago I wrote my first full page in Navajo. It might be a total mess, but it is true to the people speaking (who are a total mess themselves).
I believe in writing—in the oral tradition—taking language for what it is, an opportunity, a translation. But it was only after reading Leslie Silko's Turqouise Ledge that I started to allow myself to write as freely as I speak. To use my language books, my dictionaries, my tapes to work for me in the project of communication. Keeping our languages alive requires us to speak. Keeping them in print requires a willingness to ask others to speak them as well. Most of the work I read is in translation, and every work I read has some French, Spanish, German, Czech, Italian and Polish thrown in, even if only the names, that require pronounciation. I struggle to get my tongue and teeth around them. I feel them. I hear them. I take them in, literally. They, the translators of these works, expect me to know these languages. The languages have enough weight to warrant the expectation—so they go in the translation, un-translated.
I'm writing with that in mind, knowing the languages I work with (learning and speaking) have the same amount of weight in my own life. So they go in too, un-italicized and un-translated.
My developing idea is this: if to translate is not to betray, and all language is communication, then we should make the attempt to reach from one area in language to another. Sometimes those areas are between people, but they are often within a person themselves. Allowing those areas, allowing the elasticity of mind required of reading through, makes translation difficult and rewarding. Attempting an honest experience of these moments between asks more of the world and from ourselves, and requires that we not only speak, but respond.
09 July 2012
Language
"We come into consciousness speaking a language already permeated with many voices—a social, not a private language. From the beginning, we are 'polyglot.' Already in process of mastering a variety of social dialects derived from parents, clan, class, religion, country. We grow in consciousness by taking in more voices as 'authoritatively persuasive' and then by learning which to accept as 'internally persuasive.'"
E. B. White claims that to develop style we must accept the whole body of language, not hack it to bits. We must cherish language's form, the classic as well as the modern. We must accept language's variety, its richness. I like White. I often turn to his Elements of Style, especially as I navigate the field of American English and grammar with a style of my own, careful not to hack myself to bits in the process.
"Finally we achieve, if we are lucky, a kind of individuality."
This is the project. Reading over my work, the best writing achieves a kind of individuality. This has been my goal and my great difficulty. Not in achieving that voice, but in accepting and expressing it. I read outside my area. I live outside my area. I speak outside my area. Migration shapes the whole of my vision and my word choice. Emergence from lower worlds, along trade routes and looking for labor, I am aware of the need to hold simultaneous realities in focus while retaining some impression of my own, something to carry with me from here to there.
"But it is never a private or autonomous individuality in the western sense; except when we maim ourselves arbitrarily to monologue, we always speak a chorus of languages."
I went to Presentation High School for girls in San Francisco to show the world we weren't heathens. I wanted to go Lowell. My first year at Pres. is best described by three (four) words: Old English 800 (tall). My second by one: Smirnoff. These were the years I started dreaming of Jesus.
I stand in a field of blinding light. I hear a moan. Slowly, bit by bit, I can see the field is flesh, the flesh is seared. The vision at a distance, comes nearer. Who is doing this? Where am I? I can see the searing. I keep looking. The moaning grows louder and more frequent. I breathe fast. I am warmed by fear. I am burning myself. I am afraid of dying by fire. The field of white is flesh. I understand, at this moment, flesh marked by burning circles of blood. There are so many they look like freckles, the white turns red beneath them. My eyes, I can see out from them. I see a man. He turns. I see his face. It is Jesus. I ask him who is doing this? Why don't they stop? He can not answer me. He can only moan. He looks down. I follow his eyes. The field of white is his back. I keep looking. It is me. I stand on top. If I could only stand still, but I keep moving. I cannot stop. I keep moving. I wake tied in sheets. My skin a fever.
This was a dream. I told myself, stepping into it, waking out of if. This was a dream. Half of my family took the waters (though more are being born again, a plague of frogs among us). Death through resurrection. Colonization through baptism. Papal Bulls and high school diplomas. I am dreaming. I am found. In a field of words I find myself.
"Anyone who has not been maimed by some imposed 'ideology in the narrow sense,' anyone who is not an 'ideologue,' respects the fact that each of us is a 'we,' not an 'I.' Polyphony, the miracle of our 'dialogical' lives together, is thus both a fact of life and in its higher reaches, a value to be pursued endlessly."
A river of words, a river of names, we wade in deep and sometimes we drown. One I thinking it exists alone, able to offer definitive proof of a status higher than heathen.
all quotes are from Wayne C. Booth's introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
E. B. White claims that to develop style we must accept the whole body of language, not hack it to bits. We must cherish language's form, the classic as well as the modern. We must accept language's variety, its richness. I like White. I often turn to his Elements of Style, especially as I navigate the field of American English and grammar with a style of my own, careful not to hack myself to bits in the process.
"Finally we achieve, if we are lucky, a kind of individuality."
This is the project. Reading over my work, the best writing achieves a kind of individuality. This has been my goal and my great difficulty. Not in achieving that voice, but in accepting and expressing it. I read outside my area. I live outside my area. I speak outside my area. Migration shapes the whole of my vision and my word choice. Emergence from lower worlds, along trade routes and looking for labor, I am aware of the need to hold simultaneous realities in focus while retaining some impression of my own, something to carry with me from here to there.
"But it is never a private or autonomous individuality in the western sense; except when we maim ourselves arbitrarily to monologue, we always speak a chorus of languages."
I went to Presentation High School for girls in San Francisco to show the world we weren't heathens. I wanted to go Lowell. My first year at Pres. is best described by three (four) words: Old English 800 (tall). My second by one: Smirnoff. These were the years I started dreaming of Jesus.
I stand in a field of blinding light. I hear a moan. Slowly, bit by bit, I can see the field is flesh, the flesh is seared. The vision at a distance, comes nearer. Who is doing this? Where am I? I can see the searing. I keep looking. The moaning grows louder and more frequent. I breathe fast. I am warmed by fear. I am burning myself. I am afraid of dying by fire. The field of white is flesh. I understand, at this moment, flesh marked by burning circles of blood. There are so many they look like freckles, the white turns red beneath them. My eyes, I can see out from them. I see a man. He turns. I see his face. It is Jesus. I ask him who is doing this? Why don't they stop? He can not answer me. He can only moan. He looks down. I follow his eyes. The field of white is his back. I keep looking. It is me. I stand on top. If I could only stand still, but I keep moving. I cannot stop. I keep moving. I wake tied in sheets. My skin a fever.
This was a dream. I told myself, stepping into it, waking out of if. This was a dream. Half of my family took the waters (though more are being born again, a plague of frogs among us). Death through resurrection. Colonization through baptism. Papal Bulls and high school diplomas. I am dreaming. I am found. In a field of words I find myself.
"Anyone who has not been maimed by some imposed 'ideology in the narrow sense,' anyone who is not an 'ideologue,' respects the fact that each of us is a 'we,' not an 'I.' Polyphony, the miracle of our 'dialogical' lives together, is thus both a fact of life and in its higher reaches, a value to be pursued endlessly."
A river of words, a river of names, we wade in deep and sometimes we drown. One I thinking it exists alone, able to offer definitive proof of a status higher than heathen.
all quotes are from Wayne C. Booth's introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
27 June 2012
Translation
Mikhail Bakhtin's "works in print can in fact be seen as ripped-out segments of one vast philosophical project. . . on the nature of language, literature and moral responsibility."
My own work, on the page, follows a similar course. My ideas have been shaped by my grandmother's nightly reading of the St. Joseph's Missal and my grandfather's constant songs and stories. I was the bridge between their worlds and the distance was vast, indeed.
"What can be said with certainty is that for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication."
The essence of all human communication.
Considering translation as the essence of all human communication has forced me to allow considerable space in all my relations, a loving attention to ways we can be in the same place at the same time with no shared experience of that moment at all. How then can we speak? How then can we hear? If we understand translation as the essence of communication we need to lovingly tend those spaces, those gaps between everyone involved. Even the me involved, the me that is at once 4 years old at my grandparents side and the me that is now forty years older and without them.
"Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts."
I see people talking at and around each other, often. With no consideration of the boundaries they drag themselves across carelessly and without the slightest caress.
Molloy is my favorite literary figure. Beckett's work always points to a project of words, even for a self that is always a word behind, a thought ahead. The earth surrounding them in a sea of image, of silence, of sound. I desire to share those images and sounds. The necessity of your understanding—is sometimes life threatening. I have survived several of those moments myself.
"These languages are not just the bluntly distinct national languages. . .that exist as the normative materials of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different 'languages' that exist simultaneously within a single culture and single speaking community."
I write in and about English, Black English, Spanish, Diné Bizaad, and Sahnish. But the linguistic issue is more complex. I want readers to understand those complexities; they shape my understanding and experience of the world. Especially when I am speaking in the same national language of my listener only to have them say they can't understand me (not my content, but my words themselves, claiming I have an accent—my accent is only San Franciscan).
"In fact, Bakhtin viewed the boundaries between national languages as only one extreme on a continuum; at the other extreme, translation processes were required for one social group to understand another in the same city, for children to understand parents in the same city, for one day to understand the next."
I ask all of us to consider the reality and implications of this continuum. And acknowledge the way this process shapes the kind and character of daily communication. This world requires sympathy, patience and psychological strength. We must speak and listen with these skills, and this knowledge, always in mind.
"These stratifications of language, Bakhtin argued, do not exclude one another; they intersect and overlap, pulling words into various gravitational fields and casting specific light and shadow. Living discourse, unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."
These posts already reveal some of these fields. The shadows and light unique to my own rebellion against the rules.
All quotes are from page xxxi of Caryl Emeron's preface to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8)
My own work, on the page, follows a similar course. My ideas have been shaped by my grandmother's nightly reading of the St. Joseph's Missal and my grandfather's constant songs and stories. I was the bridge between their worlds and the distance was vast, indeed.
"What can be said with certainty is that for Bakhtin, to translate was never to betray; on the contrary translation, broadly conceived, was for him the essence of all human communication."
The essence of all human communication.
Considering translation as the essence of all human communication has forced me to allow considerable space in all my relations, a loving attention to ways we can be in the same place at the same time with no shared experience of that moment at all. How then can we speak? How then can we hear? If we understand translation as the essence of communication we need to lovingly tend those spaces, those gaps between everyone involved. Even the me involved, the me that is at once 4 years old at my grandparents side and the me that is now forty years older and without them.
"Crossing language boundaries was perhaps the most fundamental of human acts."
I see people talking at and around each other, often. With no consideration of the boundaries they drag themselves across carelessly and without the slightest caress.
Molloy is my favorite literary figure. Beckett's work always points to a project of words, even for a self that is always a word behind, a thought ahead. The earth surrounding them in a sea of image, of silence, of sound. I desire to share those images and sounds. The necessity of your understanding—is sometimes life threatening. I have survived several of those moments myself.
"These languages are not just the bluntly distinct national languages. . .that exist as the normative materials of dictionaries and grammars, but also the scores of different 'languages' that exist simultaneously within a single culture and single speaking community."
I write in and about English, Black English, Spanish, Diné Bizaad, and Sahnish. But the linguistic issue is more complex. I want readers to understand those complexities; they shape my understanding and experience of the world. Especially when I am speaking in the same national language of my listener only to have them say they can't understand me (not my content, but my words themselves, claiming I have an accent—my accent is only San Franciscan).
"In fact, Bakhtin viewed the boundaries between national languages as only one extreme on a continuum; at the other extreme, translation processes were required for one social group to understand another in the same city, for children to understand parents in the same city, for one day to understand the next."
I ask all of us to consider the reality and implications of this continuum. And acknowledge the way this process shapes the kind and character of daily communication. This world requires sympathy, patience and psychological strength. We must speak and listen with these skills, and this knowledge, always in mind.
"These stratifications of language, Bakhtin argued, do not exclude one another; they intersect and overlap, pulling words into various gravitational fields and casting specific light and shadow. Living discourse, unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."
These posts already reveal some of these fields. The shadows and light unique to my own rebellion against the rules.
All quotes are from page xxxi of Caryl Emeron's preface to Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8)
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