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For his thinking, the counterpoint Bakhtin chose was Ferdinand de Saussure’s^§MS3d “abstract objectivism.” Saussure, he says, focuses “language as a system of normatively identical forms” at the expense of the “individuality and randomness” of utterances. This he tracks back to an occupational hazard for linguists whose starting point was the “ancient written monument,” texts that can only now be “defunct, monological utterance … European linguistic thought formed and matured over concern with the cadavers of written languages.” Having in mind, surely, that Saussure was a Sanskrit scholar, Bakhtin says, “Despite the vast differences in cultural and historical lineaments from the ancient Hindu priests to the modern European scholar of language, the philologist has always been a decipherer of alien, ‘secret’ scripts … foreign and incomprehensible to the profane. To decipher the mystery of sacred words was a task meant to be carried by the priest-philologists.”⁴³

Bakhtin was interested in the profane, the ordinary, the everyday, where meaning-system is always in play with the infinite variability of contexts, “the uniqueness and irreplaceability of my place in the world.”⁴⁴ So, the meaning of a word “is inseparable from the concrete situation of its implementation. This meaning is different each time, just as the situation is different each time.” Language is not a “stable and always self-equivalent signal, but … always changeable and adaptable sign.” As it is “a ceaseless flow of becoming, … there is no real moment in time when a synchronic system of language could be constructed.” This fluid reality of meaning in language Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia.”⁴⁵

Nor is this just a matter of speech. No social meanings are wholly expressible in words, hence image, music, ritual, gesture, and action.⁴⁶ Embodied feelings may cross between a suffering person and a person empathizing, though of course there is a huge difference between suffering and empathizing; each is motivated by fundamentally different interests, albeit always, we would say, sociable.^§AS2.5b Ethical actions “such as assistance, rescue, consolation” may be motivated by “the emotional and volitional tones which pervade this world of objects,” and bodies.⁴⁷

Here Bakhtin is considering embodied meanings “at the borderline … between the organism and the outside world.” Or hunger: “even the cry of a nursing infant is ‘oriented’ towards its mother.” A person “can apprehend one’s hunger apologetically, irritably, angrily, indignantly.” Or a collective can experience hunger, and protest, in which case their “experience [is] to achieve ideological clarity … [T]here is an extremely subtle and complex set of possibilities for intoning an experience.”⁴⁸

Bakhtin’s life was dominated by the closed rhetoric of Soviet Communism. He nevertheless managed to maintain his own remarkably polyvalent voice. He was arrested in January 1929 for speech crimes, including association with a Russian Orthodox Christian sect and “corrupting the young with his ideas.” He was sentenced to six years’ exile in Kazakhstan. By then, he had written a number of major books, one on Dostoevesky⁴⁹ under his own name, but also, most probably written by him, books on Freudian theory⁵⁰ and language⁵¹ that appeared under the name of V.N. Vološinov, a friend who taught at Leningrad University, and a book on The Formal Method of Literary Scholarship⁵² by P.N. Medvedev, who worked at the State Publishing House.

Perhaps it was easier to get the books published under the names of people more closely connected with the government. Or perhaps Vološinov and Medvedev contributed some to the final texts, though that now seems unlikely, or at least their contributions were minimal. Either way, Bakhtin was safely exiled during the most vicious of Stalin’s purges. His only publication in this period was an article in the journal Soviet Trade, management lessons from his experiences now working as a bookkeeper on a collectivized farm. Vološinov died young. In March 1938, Medvedev, then a professor at the Tolmachev Military Academy, was arrested and shot.⁵³

In 1936, Bakhtin moved back to Russia, though safely out of the way, as a one-man world literature department at the newly created Mordovian Pedagogical Institute in Saransk. The people of the region, known also for its prison camps, spoke the Finno-Ugric language, Mordovian. When asked by the Saransk City Party Committee, he gave a public lecture on “Lenin and Stalin on Party-Mindedness in Literature and Art.”⁵⁴

Only in the last decade of his life did Bakhtin’s work gain recognition in the Soviet Union. Old manuscripts were republished. Fragmentary texts were reconstructed, including remnants of a manuscript of a book on the novel – one copy had been lost when the publisher’s offices burned in the Nazi siege of Leningrad; Bakhtin had used his other copy to make cigarette paper.⁵⁵

In the 1960s, linguist Roman Jakobson^§AS1.4.1a drew Bakhtin’s work to the attention of intellectuals in the West. In Russia, the daughter of the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, learned of his work in a seminar at Moscow University and arranged for Bakhtin and his wife to move to Moscow for medical treatment and a comfortable apartment.⁵⁶ Andropov later became the General Secretary of the Communist Party, where he promoted Mikhail Gorbachev and designated him his successor. Gorbachev was to be the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s last General Secretary.

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⁴³ V.N. Vološinov, 1929 [1973], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 58, 60, 61, 71, 74.

⁴⁴ M.M. Bakhtin, 1919–24 [1990], Art and Answerability, translated by V. Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 23.

⁴⁵ V.N. Vološinov, 1929 [1973], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 101, 68, 66.

⁴⁶ Ibid., pp. 15, 19.

⁴⁷ M.M. Bakhtin, 1919–24 [1990], Art and Answerability, translated by V. Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 25.

⁴⁸ V.N. Vološinov, 1929 [1973], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 26, 87, 89, 87.

⁴⁹ M.M. Bakhtin, 1963 [1984], Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, translated by C. Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

⁵⁰ V.N. Vološinov, 1927 [1976], Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, translated by I.R. Titunik, New York: Academic Press.

⁵¹ V.N. Vološinov, 1929 [1973], Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

⁵² P.N. Medvedev, 1928 [1985], The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

⁵³ Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, 1984, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 141–42, 110–11, 144–66, 257, 264.

⁵⁴ Ibid., pp. 259–60.

⁵⁵ M.M. Bakhtin, 1979 [1986], Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by V.W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press, p. xiii.

⁵⁶ Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, 1984, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 331, 336.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 206–208. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

M.M. Bakhtin’s “Heteroglossia” §AS2.1.2b