Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian philosopher, critic and scholar who wrote many influential works of literary theory and criticism. His works, dealing with a variety of subjects, have inspired groups of thinkers who have incorporated Bakhtinian ideas into theories of their own. These some of the more interesting ideas include:
Language is learned through contextualized social interaction. (from: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). It lives "in a living impulse toward the object", in a specific located social interaction.
Consequently all language use is language use from a particular 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 therefore ideological.
Any language has certain centripetal forces which work to render it monoglossic, a "unitary language" – there are forces of regulation and discipline; this includes literary expression.
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.
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. Bakhtin suggests that 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 into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, languages of generations and so forth.
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.
Bakhtin sees the "language" or ideolect of a class or social position, etc., as a potentially a prison, constructing its own set of understandings beyond which the person imaginatively cannot go -- a dogma, he says, "a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia." Bakhtin therefore believes that one can think only what one's language allows one to think.
Specialised dialects (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.
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
To Bakhtin, 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, interaction, history, and the parodic.
Within the same community one will find approximately the same vocabulary and grammar, as well as people with differently oriented social interests and perspectives.
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.
From Art and Science of Change Ubuhibi Media used with permission