Bakhtin’s dialogical ontology and the question of identity
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For Bakhtin, identity is a never-ending process of negotiation that occurs through dialogical contact with other subjects. Subjects constitute their identities in the concrete-transfigured world, which is perceived through social and personal processes of objectivation and appropriation. Each subject develops their identity in a unique way through their relationships with others from birth to death. Bakhtin viewed identity as a constant becoming rather than a fixed being, as subjects are always becoming through their interactions and relationships with other subjects.
Bakhtin’s dialogical ontology and the question of identity
- 1. Adail Sobral Universidade Católica de Pelotas Rio Grande do Sul – Brazil
- 2. Bakhtin’s dialogical ontology is not a topic Bakhtin or his peers have discussed nor proposed. But we are entitled to think about it considering their works. We may say that, for Bakhtin, the dialogical contact among subjects is not always a place of harmony nor a place where some subjects necessarily dominate other subjects, but a place where there is an undecidable tension of in situ negotiation of identity, or rather of the identification process, which is a never-ending task.
- 3. So, to talk about identity and Bakhtin is entering a dangerous territory, the one of so-bytie , the event of being, which is both something that happens when subjects are born and a task they do from birth to death. Where do subjects constitute their identities? In the world. They are events in the world. But which world is this? It is a world that is concrete-transfigured.
- 4. It is concrete because it is a world that is (phenomenologically) “out there”, before us and around us. But it is a transfigured world, an interpreted world, a symbolic (in Cassirer’s sense), an evaluated world, because it is never perceived without being transformed by the personal-social processes of objectivation and appropriation.
- 5. Objectivation is, more than a reflection, a refracted representation of the world involving social evaluation, and it depends on the way each society, and even each social group therein, is able to see and “say” the world. Objectivation, which has a more social character, is further modified by appropriation, which depends on it, but also alters it.
- 6. Appropriation is the process by which individual subjects represent to themselves, in a personal, but not completely subjective way, the world already altered by objectivation. Social representations are a result of social relationships among subjects, and these are both social and personal.
- 7. Thus, appropriation is a personal way of being social and objectivation is a social way of being personal. Objectivation affects appropriation because subjects find a world already transfigured, but it is also affected by appropriation, for it stems from the several appropriations by different subjects. Subjects change in society, but they also change society.
- 8. Bakhtin does not accept total isolation as our condition, but he certainly proposes a kind of constitutive isolation, that is, subjects must be individuals in the sense of I-for-myself. But they are also relational; they must be I-for-the-other. Bakhtin proposes that the battle of identity, an eternal battle, happens between the ipse (the changing aspects) and the idem (the constant aspects), and between the I and the other.
- 9. This is a difficult task, but it rewards subjects because, by proposing, beyond categories of being, categories of becoming, contextually bound, this recognizes that there are always new opportunities for subjects to complete themselves from the contact with ever new other subjects. We are always becoming the beings we are!
- 10. If, before talking, or acting, subjects are already altered by others, both prospectively and retrospectively, there could not be a level of consciousness that is completely subjective. But individuality is nevertheless, as regards subjects, one of the bases of identity. We are all subjects, but we are not the same subjects.
- 11. The other basis of identity is obviously the relationship among subjects, from birth to death. When Bakhtin suggests, and he does it in many places and many ways, that intersubjectivity is the house of subjectivity, he refers to our being dialogical by nature: we become subjects in contact with other subjects.
- 12. Our first contact with our self seems to us to be a contact with the other: when subjects recognize an image in the mirror for the first time, they do not know it is their own image! Only later will they perceive it to be a mirror image. Identity is then something we create for ourselves from the fragments of ourselves given by others.
- 13. All subjects come to be, or, better, are always becoming, on the basis of their relationships with other subjects. But each one does it in an individualized way! For Bakhtin, being implies the ability for changing, but each subject does it his way: we are always changing according to the relationships we enter into.
- 14. We gain in subjectivity by engaging in ever more relationships with ever new others. We gain because every relationship brings us new fragments about ourselves, and we use them to be more what we are, or better, what we are able to become. The others help us to be more the beings we can become, to be ever more complete, but never with a fixed teleology: we are always completing ourselves.
- 15. So, subjects are a constant becoming, not a fixed being. We are subjects only by always becoming subjects – and the subjects each of us is. We are unfinished and unfinishable. There is no identity as a fixed thing, but only individual ways of identifying. Every subject is in his own way. And this changes according to the different others one relates to. The self is the other’s other!
- 16. Maybe we could say that identity is, such as genres, a relatively stable process: it has a theme (the specific version each subject gives of “being a subject”), compositional forms (the ways this version takes shape according to the context, keeping some constant elements but mobilizing them situatedly) and a style (its specific way for mobilizing theme and compositional form.
- 17. Thus, from the enunciative project which is his self-becoming an unrepeatable subject in life, with no escape from responsibility, the subject mobilizes these elements and creates an architectonic form for his own life, for his own being-in-the-world, in an ongoing process that allows him to be ever more himself while changing.
- 18. So, we have ipse and idem in internal conflict, I and other(s) in external conflict, all this both internalized and externalized: the individual and the social meet at the point where evaluation comes in. Evaluation is the basis of the enunciative project; subjects change from their own evaluative positions, not from some essentialist “ought”.
- 19. Our being-in-the-world, or better becoming-in-the-world, is defined from the distinct situations we are part of and the distinct others we interact with. The total set of these interactions and our being therein, constitute thus identity, or better, identification: a continuous act of “altered” self-creation, a constant identifying.
- 20. In this process, as Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act allows us to say, subjects mobilize the act’s content (aspects common to all identifying acts), the act’s process (aspects pertaining only to a certain identifying act) and their own evaluation, contextually bound, about how to integrate content and process in every identifying act.
- 21. For Bakhtin, each subject is populated by multiple others, is in a sense fragmented both internally and externally, but nevertheless is a unique, irreplaceable being, due to "unfinishedness" and "situatedness": there is no identity as a product, but a continuous self-identification process which begins at birth and ends a death, the only moments each subject is completely alone. Thus, being is becoming; and every becoming helps us to be more what we can be.