Wild Publics and Grotesque Symposiums: Habermas and Bakhtin on Dialogue,Everyday Life and the Public Sphere

Ethics and intersubjectivity

Habermas' concept of communicative reason is essentially about establishing formal criteria, which are simultaneously inclusive and universal, of what constitutes (relatively) ideology-free dialogue oriented towards genuine consensus with respect to issues of public concern. Behind this conception of moral reasoning and discursive democracy is a wish to dispense with the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ that has bedevilled earlier theories, so as to embrace an intersubjective model. But in seeking to grasp the generic and universal features of human communicative action, and to incorporate these elements into a comprehensive social theory, a significant problem emerges. Habermas' thoughts on rational dialogue and the public sphere do not in a substantive way concern themselves with, much less address, the embodied experiences and activities of actual people in the context of their everyday lives. As Ted Stoltz observes, because Habermas focuses almost entirely on the legal-juridical principles that ‘regulate the flow of discursive will-formation,’ his theories are effectively ‘subjectless’ (2000: 150). This is somewhat overstated: perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is a Habermasian subject, but it is a rather insubstantial entity, one marked by an interchangeable, ‘minimalist’ body (mainly having to do with the human capacity for labour), subtended by a rational mind that engages in purposive dialogue and moral reflection. Such a Habermasian body does not seem to be marked by difference, of a gendered nature or otherwise, and nor does it evince the kind of dense, material ‘fleshiness’ that thinkers like Merleau-Ponty have striven to comprehend, via what Hwa Jol Jung (1990) has usefully termed a ‘carnal hermeneutics’. It can be argued (albeit not without qualification) that there is something of a de facto mind/body dualism operating within Habermas' theories, one that has received relatively little attention in the critical literature to date. ² An important exception is Joan Alway's article ‘No Body There: Habermas and Feminism’. Although preoccupied mainly with the limitations of Habermas with respect to feminist criticism and politics, Alway makes several valuable points germane to our discussion:

The recourse to such dualisms in Habermas' work helps to explain his overly schematic and underdeveloped account of the nature and significance of everyday life. For purposes of illustration, let us focus briefly on one such dichotomy: the universal versus the particular. This is a distinction that bears directly on the connection between ethics and communicative action, which is especially noteworthy given that everyday life is to a significant degree about the experience of particularity and contingency. As Habermas writes in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, ethical reasoning ‘comes about when the social world is moralized from the hypothetical attitude of a participant in argumentation and split off from the world of life. [Moral] questions are thereby dissociated from their contexts and moral answers are dissociated from empirical motives’ (1990: 180). Accordingly, evaluative questions—about relatively abstract issues pertaining to the nature of the ‘good society’, or more specific concerns about everyday ethical decisions—are considered by Habermas to be entirely separate from considerations of justice. Issues of care or affective regard for others are viewed by him as personal concerns that must be separated from the realm of morality per se, whereas all quasi-utopian talk about what a good society might look like involves the ends of dialogic democracy, but not the procedures through which such dialogues are to be carried out, and hence are not relevant to his communicative paradigm.

But others have argued that such evaluative or contextualizing judgements, which are rooted by and large in the circumstances of everyday life, cannot be easily separated from moral reflection. There are, that is to say, coherent alternatives that do not jettison the promise of rational dialogue by embracing some sort of spurious postmodernist relativism, yet do not subscribe to the Habermasian image of a disembodied and idealized public sphere. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin stands as a useful example of just such an approach. In his early writings (circa 1919–24), Bakhtin develops what could be termed an ‘ethics of personalism’, which turns on an unequivocal acknowledgment of the value of otherness in the context of everyday sociality. His thoughts on such a personalistic ethics are developed through a critique of Kant's moral philosophy. Kant, as is well-known, asserted that people's moral decisions had to be premised on the belief that they had universal applicability. This is what he famously called the categorical imperative, which expressed the binding ‘universality of the ought’. However, Bakhtin feels that Kantianism is too abstract and prescriptive, and its use of transcendental a prioris renders it unable to address ethical problems as they emerge within everyday life. Kant's moral philosophy is an example of what Bakhtin calls ‘theoretism’: in maintaining a disjuncture between immediate experience and ‘extra-local’ symbolic representations, and by privileging the latter, such approaches subsume the open-ended and ‘messy’ qualities of real-life communicative and social acts into an all-encompassing explanatory system. For Bakhtin, this suppresses the ‘eventness’ of the everyday social world, its sensuous particularity. It can only be combatted by a repudiation of theoretical abstraction pursued as an end to itself, so as to grasp the concrete deed as the axiological centre around which our existence revolves. We must remain aware of the fact that the terrain of daily life constitutes the paramount reality in which ‘we create, cognize, contemplate, live our lives and die—the world in which the acts of our activity are objectified and the world in which these acts actually proceed and are actually accomplished once and only once’ (Bakhtin, 1993: 2).

What Bakhtin is striving to outline here is a phenomenology of ‘practical doing’, one that focuses on our incarnated activities within the lifeworld. Only if we think and act in a ‘participative’ fashion, in tune with the rhythms and textures of everyday life, can we be wholly answerable for our actions, in the sense that we are conscious of and can actively respond to their existential and ethical implications. Being-as-event must therefore be lived through, and not passively contemplated from afar. And a crucial aspect of answerability involves an unconditional recognition of otherness, because for Bakhtin no genuinely moral philosophy can be formulated outside the ‘contraposition’ of self and other. Any attempt to answer the solicitation of the world must be aware of the fact that self and other commingle in the ongoing event of Being, yet remain distinctively incarnated. This co-participation in the everyday lifeworld, which is constitutive of selfhood and evinces affective, value-laden and ethical qualities, cannot occur solely through the medium of ‘cognitive-discursive thought’. A fully participative life requires an engaged and embodied—in a word, dialogical—relation to the other, and to the world at large, mainly because the architectonic value of my embodied self can only be affirmed in and through my relation to a concrete other: ‘the body is not something self-sufficient, it needs the other, needs his [sic, and passim] recognition and form-giving activity’ (Bakhtin, 1990: 51). Our capacity for abstract cognition and representational thinking is, on its own terms, incapable of grasping the incarnate linkage between different subjects within the fabric of daily life, cannot comprehend their ‘organic wovenness’ in overlapping (but non-merging) contexts.

What conclusions can be drawn from the above discussion vis-à-vis Habermas' account of rationality and ethics—and, by extension, his perspective on everyday life? First, it raises important questions about precisely how, and in what manner, Habermas is committed to a theory of intersubjectivity. On the surface, admittedly, Habermas does appear to reject the notion of the solitary monological subject by suggesting normative reason must be grounded in communicative exchanges. But in positing a realm of rarified ethico-political debate that conforms to universalistic principles abstracted from real subjects and their daily lives, the result is that Habermas ‘constructs total systems that seek to engulf the alterity of things in the unity of thought. [D]eontological reason expresses this logic of identity by eliminating otherness in at least two ways, the irreducible specificity of situations and the difference among moral subjects’ (Young, 1987: 61). In retaining a sharp distinction between impartial reason on the one hand and the embodied and ‘non-rational’ features of human existence on the other, that is to say, Habermas effectively smuggles a Cartesian mind/body dichotomy in through the back door. Bakhtin provides a useful point of departure here, because for him it is precisely such an attunement to the vicissitudes and rhythms of daily life that is the hallmark of genuine dialogue and the ethical moment. The upshot is that moral reason does not, contra Habermas, have to be impartial and ‘extra-local’, as in deontological ethics, mainly because authentic answerability is not about fidelity to abstract notions of duty or obligation. Rather, it involves continual communication with, and responsibility to, real situations and concrete others. Bakhtin writes that each individual should understand the ‘ought of his performed act [not as an] abstract law[,] but the actual, concrete ought conditioned by his unique place in the given context of the ongoing event’ (1993: 30). Certainly, he would agree with Habermas that a large part of the onus of Being is that we must be ‘answer-ably rational’ creatures. But for Bakhtin this is a practical rationality, rooted in the actualities of the everyday and not detachable from specific conditions and projected as some sort of speciously universalistic and decontextualized ‘Truth’. Whereas Bakhtin argues that we must always put our personal signature, an ‘emotional-volitional tone’, upon any act we perform, Habermas says that it is precisely this personal tone that must be expunged in rational dialogue. To Bakhtin's way of thinking, this sort of abstract moral reasoning would be to remain at the level of ‘cognitive-discursive thought’—or, to use his famous phrase, to find an ‘alibi’ in Being. In attempting to ground moral theory and ideological criticism in the universal norms that he believes regulate speech-acts, Habermas arguably replaces the incarnate and differentiated moral subject with a generic, hyper-rational being. What is lost in such a transcription is our ‘compellent, ought-to-be relationship to the world[,] the actuality of the world[, resulting in an] indifferent Being not rooted in anything’ (Bakhtin, 1993: 47, 43). Or, as Agnes Heller cogently observes, the Habermasian subject lacks ‘the sensuous experiences of hope and despair, of venture and humiliation. The creature-like aspects of human beings are missing’. It is a subject with ‘no body, no feelings, the “structure of personality” is identified with cognition, language and interaction. [One] gets the impression the “good life” [for Habermas] consists solely of rational communication and needs that can be argued for without being felt’ (Heller, 1982: 21, 22).

Bakhtin is obviously very suspicious of reductive and totalizing theories that dissolve concrete particularities into a system of abstract concepts and relations. But it should not be implied that he fetishizes lived experience or espouses a phenomenology of the immediate. Nor does he always reject the value of abstract theorizing and the use of more generalizing categories and explanations. Although Bakhtin is adamant that abstract contemplation cannot in and of itself gain entry to the terrain of everyday life, because the latter requires ‘actual communion’ with the concrete actions that I perform through my living corporeality, at the same time the answerable deed is not inextricably mired in the mundane and the particular. Rather, the ‘answerability performed act’ constitutes an architectonic activity that brings together the ‘sense and the fact, the universal and the individual, the real and the ideal’. By bridging the gap that separates our ‘small scrap of space and time’ and the ‘large spatial and temporal whole’, the answerable deed brings the sphere of intimate personal life and the more public realm of politics and culture into closer alignment, but without negating the specificity of each (Bakhtin, 1993: 29, 51). In striving to understand such connections and the wider historical and sociocultural developments that condition them, more abstract forms of theorizing certainly have their place in Bakhtin's work (see Gardiner, 2003; Hirschkop, 1999). It also means that he is not as vulnerable to charges of contextual relativism as might be supposed. Bakhtin consistently argues, for instance, that our access to the world is mediated by our body, and our embeddedness in concrete time/space makes each of our perceptual openings onto the world unique and non-interchangeable. But this does not conform to a Nietzschean perspectivalism that, in much contemporary theorizing, slides all too easily into a postmodernist solipsism. This is because self and other continue to inhabit the same world: we are co-participants in a universe that ultimately transcends any particularistic viewpoint. Such an emphasis on intercorporeal ‘blending’, through which we participate collectively in a complexly structured and shared environment, implies that although our placement in the world is not shared identically by any other person, this is no barrier to dialogic exchanges in which the differences between interacting elements are not sublated into an overarching conceptual unity. Hence, in the Bakhtinian view, a given phenomenon should not be thought of as an ‘innate one-and-only, but as a dialogic concordance of unmerged twos or multiples’ (Bakhtin, 1984a: 289).

‘Ideal speech’ versus the ‘grotesque symposium’

This brings us to the issue of language. For Habermas, language-use is oriented towards reaching mutual understanding and rational consensus through the raising and vindication of four major validity-claims (truth, appropriateness, sincerity, and comprehensiveness) that are intrinsic to the speech-act (Habermas, 1979). As is well-known, Habermas regards other forms of language-use (including humour, irony, or parody) as secondary and ‘parasitic’, presumably because they compromise the lucidity and openness that ideally marks the communicative process, or introduce elements of strategic action. T. Gregory Garvey (2000) points out that the key watchword here is transparency, and, inter alia, the ‘purity’ of the ideal speech situation. More specifically, for rational communication to function properly in the Habermasian model, transparency must be evident at two levels: that of the individual (because autonomous action is premised on subjects knowing their intentions through rational reflection), as well as the social (interlocutors must know the motivations of other speakers via rational discussion in a shared vernacular, because any motive apart from a desire to participate fully in the collective search for truth is ruled out of court. Normative legitimations that are not thoroughly understood by all interlocutors and premised entirely on the force of the better argument are prima facie invalid.) As Habermas himself puts it, ‘The experience of reflection articulates itself substantially in the concept of the self-formative process. Methodically it leads to a standpoint from which the identity of reason with the will freely arises’ (1978: 197; italics added). So both the self and socially binding norms are rationalized through a process of ‘self-revelation’, whereby private needs are brought to consciousness and adjudicated through rational dialogue, and which effects a convergence of individual and collective interests. Ideal speech must bracket off potentially distorting material forces and inequities of power and vouchsafe the transparent nature of communicative action, thereby preventing the ‘forms of economic and administrative rationality’ intrinsic to system from ‘colonizing’ the lifeworld, which would result in the ‘one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice’ (Habermas, 1987: 330). Only when speech-acts are brought into the public arena and subjected to collective scrutiny can the rational promise of intersubjective dialogue be brought to fruition.

There are certainly parallels between Bakhtin and Habermas concerning their respective treatments of language. But on many fundamental issues, especially the role of transparency in language, they are sharply divided. Habermas privileges clarity, in terms of both the intentions of speaking subjects and the semantic content of signs, and the conduct of rational dialogue rests on the ability of any competent speaker to ‘express his intentions in such a way that the linguistic expression accurately renders what is said [and thereby] transparently represen[ts] one's own subjectivity’ (McCarthy, 1981: 280–1). This situation is possible, to a large extent, because Habermas assumes a relatively straightforward referential system that, through the agency of a communicatively competent subject, connects given utterances to a world of objects, motives or norms (see Young, 1987: 70–1). But this formulation is strikingly at odds with the dialogical model of language-use. For Bakhtin, a particular utterance is only part of a potentially endless chain of signification, one that stretches in the distant past and anticipates responses in an unknowable future—what he calls ‘great time’. As such, the meanings that utterances evoke are only provisionally stable because linked to shifting contexts and situations. Moreover, utterances are inherently value-laden; they are ‘always-always’ inscribed with a wide range of moral, cognitive, aesthetic and affective qualities, designed to provoke active responses and express broader perspectives and world-views. ‘Languages are philosophies,’ writes Bakhtin, ‘not abstract but concrete, social philosophies, penetrated by a system of values inseparable from living practice and class struggle’ (1984b: 471). Our utterances necessarily reflect systemic social contradictions, the social location of particular speakers, and the forms of material and rhetorical power that regulate the relevant speech genres. This explains why Bakhtin continually stresses that the word is the terrain of ‘an intense ideological struggle’, and that all linguistic expressions are subject to a continuous process of dialogical ‘re-accentuation’. Speakers are simply not in full control of the semantic resonance of the words they use: ‘Quests for my own word are in fact quests for a word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself’ (Bakhtin, 1986: 149). Or, to be more precise, utterances do not belong to any particular person or group, but neither, for that matter, do they belong to ‘no one’. There are no ‘voiceless words’ not least because utterances are, in an important sense, ‘made flesh’ or materialized in and through the performances of embodied speaking subjects. In dialogue, Bakhtin says, ‘a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life, with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds’ (1984a: 293).

Bakhtin's position here can be summarized as follows: in contradistinction to Habermas' ideal speech, we cannot have a clear, unmediated understanding of either our own or others' intentions whilst engaging in communicative acts. Living discourse (as opposed to an hypostasized ideal language) is necessarily charged with polemical qualities, myriad evaluative and stylistic markers, and populated by diverse intentions. To participate in dialogue is to immerse ourselves in a plethora of alien words and discourses, which ‘inevitably leads to an awareness of the disassociation between language and intention, language and thought, language and expression’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 368–9; italics added). There is no simple homology between the intentions and motives of speakers and the meaning of the utterances they generate—no Habermasian ‘identity of reason with the will’. Of course, individuals can impart their own ‘emotional-volitional tone’ to the word through various techniques (the use of irony, selective paraphrase, parody, and so forth) but they cannot unilaterally determine its meaning, which is constituted through the struggle between polyphonic voices and never subject to closure. This insight prompts Bakhtin to develop a series of overlapping terms to conceptualize this phenomenon, including ‘double-voicedness’, ‘indirect speech’, ‘multi-accentedness’, or ‘words with a sideways glance’. But all express the same basic idea: that utterances are fundamentally ‘impure’ or hybridized constructions, complex amalgams of different points of view, residues of past uses and anticipations of future responses, diverse idiomatic expressions, and the like. They always evince a multiplicity of actual and potential meanings, like a ‘loophole left open’, which ‘accompanies the word like a shadow’ (Bakhtin, 1984a: 233).

Bakhtin's position here further implies that the desire to achieve such communicative transparence indicates an interest in regulating language-use, especially by ranking different social languages according to perceived differences in value and legitimacy, which generally benefits powerful groups in a disproportionate manner vis-à-vis the disadvantaged. Bakhtin says as much when he suggests the belief a given discourse can or should have a ‘direct, objectivized meaning’, with the goal of securing a ‘maximum of mutual understanding’, has historically been complicit in a process of sociocultural and political centralization (1981: 271). So whereas Habermas understands transparency as ideologically neutral, a mere facilitator of non-distorted communication and normative consensus, Bakhtin regards the aspiration to ‘know’ the other's motives and the meaning of their utterances in some sort of clear and unmediated fashion as something that cannot be disentangled from the social position of given speakers and their divergent material interests. The assertion that there is an immanent telos in speech oriented towards ‘mutual understanding’ can therefore have a darker and more pernicious side than Habermas seems willing to countenance. For Bakhtin, the impulse to secure ‘direct unconditional intentionality’ through any privileged discursive form is ‘authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative’ (1981: 286–7). Thus, it can be argued that Habermas' wish to clarify meaning and open up the individual's motives to public scrutiny is, despite his undoubted intentions to the contrary, complicit with this pervasive desire to control the power to mean, to limit the semantic flux of the sign. And insofar as Bakhtin regards opacity as an intrinsic feature of concrete language-use—at one point he suggests the word is best understood as a ‘mask’ that obfuscates, rather than a ‘face’ that reveals—his view would be that semantic clarity can only be ‘forced on the sign by arbitrary social power’ (Garvey, 2000: 380). Habermas wants no ‘hidden agendas’ in dialogue, but the relatively powerless would be at a considerable disadvantage if they accepted without reservation the kind of transparency he thinks is necessary for legitimate dialogical outcomes. In situations of ingrained asymmetries of power, whether relatively informal or more highly structured and institutionalized, the dispossessed often need such agendas, to rely on what Michel de Certeau (1984) calls the ‘weapons of the weak’. Accordingly, for Bakhtin freedom and autonomy are not premised on the acquisition of communicative competence vis-à-vis a particular version of rational dialogue but, rather, on the ability to effectively ‘dialogize’ any given discourse that claims the mantle of truth or rationality, to relate to the ‘alien word’ in a manner that allows us to assess it critically and invest it with novel meanings and associations. Speakers need to become more cognizant of the multiplicity of different discourses at play, to realize that the power of any one language to signify is always a relative and contested one, and to strive to live on the ‘borderline’ between myriad languages, styles of expression, and world-views. Whilst unitary discourses habitually project themselves as universalistic ’ “languages of truth”,’ we need to understand that in reality they represent the restricted point of view of certain ‘social groups, professions and other cross-sections of everyday life’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 367).

It should come as no surprise that Bakhtin's work evinces a distinct preference for a ‘grotesque symposium’ that breaks down fixed and hierarchical distinctions, as opposed to something resembling Habermas' ideal speech, mainly because the latter bears too much of the mark of the ‘authoritative word’ for Bakhtin's comfort. And indeed, one of the most consistent features of Bakhtin's project is his deep suspicion of a purified or formalized language. He soundly rejects the image of an ‘extrahistorical language, a language far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life,’ advocating instead a ‘prosaic’ outlook that retains a ‘deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 331). This is why he would regard with a considerable degree of skepticism Habermas' belief in formalized speech-acts as the vehicle of rational consensus that anticipate the supersession of social antagonisms. For Bakhtin, it is crucial that a primordial heteroglossia ‘wash over a culture's awareness of itself and its language, penetrate it to the core, relativize the primary language system underlying [the] ideology [of a unified language] and deprive it of its naive absence of conflict’ (1981: 368; italics added).

It is worth noting that for Bakhtin the public sphere in European history never did conform to the realm of sober and virtuous debate of the sort that Habermas claims to have identified in The Structural Transformation. The marketplace and public square in early modern times were witness to a tumultuous intermingling of diverse social groups and widely divergent styles and idioms of language, ranging from the serious to the ironic and the playful. Such a ‘free and familiar’ mode of interaction undermined the pretence on the part of any one language to monological authority. In such contested spaces—or what Young calls the ‘wild public’ (1987: 64)—existing social hierarchies were often questioned and subverted through carnivalesque strategies of remarkable variety and invention, including the use of parodic and satirical language, grotesque humour, and symbolic degradations and inversions. There never was a ‘golden age of the communicative utopia’: the real public sphere was always marked by a pluralistic and conflictual heteroglossia. As such, the utopian appeal to a world of ideal speech and pristine rationality without reference to concrete forms of life, one that does not explicitly seek to recognize and preserve ‘radical difference’, merely reconciles the existing contradictions and antimonies of modern society at the level of discourse alone and projects an image of what Theodor Adorno called a ‘spurious harmony’. ³ So precisely what Habermas regards as ‘parasitic’ or derivative in language-use—namely, irony, humour, or paradox, as well as the rhythms, cadences and inexhaustible metaphorical richness of living speech—are not only what Bakhtin would consider to be the most interesting and important features of human communication. They also constitute a crucial resource through which the popular masses can retain a degree of autonomy from the forces of sociocultural homogenization and centralization.

At the same time, the preceding discussion should not be taken to imply that Bakhtin regards some sort of provisional consensus over specific pragmatic issues to be impossible; again, he is not espousing an absolute linguistic incommensurability à la Lyotard. For whilst Bakhtin does stress the agonistic qualities of concrete language-use, he also notes that ‘agreement’ is a very significant feature of dialogue. This notion receives its most sustained attention in his study of Dostoevsky, where he discusses at some length how the dialogic tradition in Western society, at least since the time of Socrates, provides us with an exemplar of an unstructured, non-teleological approach to the ‘testing’ of various ideas and viewpoints through the auspices of free and open debate. Such a position bears a passing resemblance to Habermas' ideal speech situation, which gains more credibility if we take into account two additional Bakhtinian concepts, the ‘superaddressee’ and the ‘confession’. ⁴ But there are telling and crucial differences. In Bakhtin's view, the dialogical tradition provides a vital counterweight to an abstract Enlightenment version of truth, which ‘knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses’ (Bakhtin, 1984a: 81). Such an impersonal and monolithic conception of truth is one that transcends the existential situation of individual speakers and actual communities, and negates the integrity of ‘independent and autonomous speech and semantic centers’ (Bakhtin, 1984a: 204). Dogmatism in any form (which would include various species of rationalism) makes genuine dialogue impossible, in that the process by which truth is revealed is foreordained. But Bakhtin equally rejects relativism, because it assumes a priori the mutual incomprehension of views and renders authentic dialogue superfluous. Indeed, Bakhtin asserts that a ‘unified truth’ can only be properly expressed through a plurality of perspectives and should not be ‘subordinated to the verbal and semantic dictatorship of a monologic, unified style and a unified tone’ (Ibid.). Dialogue should therefore be regarded as an end in itself, and not something that evinces any particular ‘purpose’ or is oriented to specific outcomes. As Seyla Benhabib contends, discourse ethics should concern itself not so much with the question of whether the result of a given dialogical exchange is rationally vindicated or justified but with how we can sustain an ongoing moral conversation, understood as a ‘form of life’ based on an unequivocal respect of otherness. ‘It is not the result of the process of moral judgment alone [ie, a Habermasian normative consensus] that counts but the process for the attainment of such judgment which plays a role in its validity, and I would say, moral worth’ (Benhabib, 1992: 37–8). This shift from outcome to process accords entirely with a dialogical perspective, not least because Bakhtin feels there can only be penultimate words in communicative exchanges. The clash of utterances in the dialogic encounter, even if motivated by the highest consensual aspirations, can never be completely reconciled: ‘even agreement retains its dialogic character, that is, it never leads to a merging of voices and truths in a single impersonal truth, as occurs in the monologic world’ (Bakhtin, 1984a: 95). Bakhtin's position on this score has been cogently described by William H. Thornton (1994: 92) as a ‘politics of impurity—one without final solutions or “finalizable” (positivistic or “poetic”) representation’. If so, the ideal speech situation as Habermas interprets it would seem to be indicative of a ‘politics of purity’, one that, in the words of Iris Marion Young,

The everyday and the lifeworld

Habermas' account of the relationship between language, ethics and rationality is echoed by—and to a certain extent grounded in—his theory of everyday life, which is developed primarily through his system/lifeworld distinction. In the second volume of Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas identifies system as the realm of formal-bureaucratic structures, institutions and processes that utilize the media of money and power, whereas the lifeworld is described as a ‘linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns’ (Habermas, 1987: 124), which are largely implicit but necessary for the conduct of practical social interaction and communication. Such background assumptions and stock knowledges, which are rooted in usually unquestioned cultural traditions, constitute something of a backdrop for the operation of more specialized knowledges and formal institutions. The everyday lifeworld is therefore not only epistemologically and ontologically ‘prior’ to official society; it is temporally prior as well, in the sense that it is linked, though traditions and cultural memories, to a ‘primordial’ or pre-modern form of sociality. Steve Crook (1998) points out, however, that this characterization leads to a curious tension in Habermas' social theory. Habermas says that human morality is based on the practical, reciprocal interactions and speech-acts oriented towards mutual understanding that constitute the elemental fabric of the lifeworld. Yet because the lifeworld consists of sedimented and largely unreflexive meanings, values and orientations—not unlike Gramsci's ‘common sense’—it is not itself amenable to overt rationalization, and must be transcended in the pursuit of ‘higher’ forms of moral dialogue and reflection (see Habermas, 1992b: 110). In part, this is due to Habermas' adherence to Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which supposes that in engaging in post-conventional moral reasoning, the individual rises above the naively pragmatic and inward-looking character of daily existence and ethical considerations can be effectively decoupled from the unexamined ‘cultural givens’ that characterize the lifeworld.

According to Crook (1998: 527), one major problem with this formulation is that although Habermas sets out to distinguish conceptually between the everyday lifeworld and communicative/moral reason, in practice he continually elides the two. But the everyday cannot simultaneously be a realm of unquestioned prejudices (opacity) and the terrain of rational dialogue oriented towards mutual understanding (transparency). It could be argued that this difficulty arises because of Habermas' desire to see the everyday lifeworld as a distinct and relatively undifferentiated realm of sub-institutional social life, what Crook describes as a ‘homogeneous soup of taken-for-grantedness’ (1998: 528). Similarly, as Bakhtin reminds us, ‘Pure everyday life is fiction, a product of the intellect’ (1986: 154). Rather than purify the ‘messy’ and heterodox character of everyday life, the alternative would be to eschew defining it by any specific quality (for example, routinization or taken-for-grantedness), or construing it as a specific, delimited sector of the social world (as ontologically distinct from system, in Habermas' formulation), but instead to see it as riven with numerous contradictions, marked by a considerable degree of heterogeneity, and exhibiting manifold connections to all areas of social life (see Gardiner, 2000). Although everyday life can certainly display routinized, static and unreflexive characteristics, it is also capable of a surprising dynamism and moments of penetrating insight and boundless creativity. The everyday is, as Michel Maffesoli (1989) puts it, ‘polydimensional’: fluid, ambivalent and labile. So whilst Habermas regards the lifeworld as the realm of the mundane and the ordinary—and one that is curiously bereft of life, as Alway (2000) rightly points out—it can also be understood as a complex of knowledges and practices is that is vitally alive and (at least potentially) extraordinary. The ordinary can become extraordinary not by eclipsing the everyday, or imagining that we can arbitrarily leap beyond it to some ‘higher’ level of moral reflection or action, but by fully appropriating and activating the possibilities that lie hidden, and typically repressed, within it. ‘The everyday has its experience and wisdom, its sophistication, its forecasting,’ writes Karel Kosík in Dialectics of the Concrete. ‘It has its replica-bility but also its special occasions, its routine but also its festivity. The everyday is thus not meant as a contrast to the unusual, the festive, the special, or to History: hypostatizing the everyday as a routine over History, as the exceptional, is itself the result of a certain mystification’ (1976: 43).

This passage by Kosík neatly encapsulates Bakhtin's approach to the everyday, which is a demonstrably more dynamic and nuanced conception than that maintained by Habermas. Unarguably, Bakhtin adheres to what Morson and Emerson (1990) have termed a ‘prosaic’ outlook, in the sense that he is clearly suspicious of the more extravagant and aggrandizing claims of many modern philosophical traditions. Bakhtin continually emphasizes the presence of what Roland Barthes once called the ‘grain of the voice’, the trace of the flesh-and-blood personality that lies behind every utterance or deed. His acute sense of the dense particularity of lived experience leads him to decry the reification of language and the attendant hypostatization of concrete human activities and relationships effected by formalist and rationalist approaches. This explains why some of Bakhtin sharpest critical barbs were reserved for the arid abstractions of philosophical idealism, as exemplified by the ‘agelasts’, the humourless and pedantic scholars that are so often the butt of Rabelais' comic jests. For Bakhtin, dialogism must come to grips with the ambivalent, sensuous materiality of incarnate (and intercorporeal) human existence, and also with the pragmatic moral demands that are continually thrust upon us in the course of our daily lives. But this preoccupation with the everyday and its manifold valences is palpably not insulated from his interest in the carnivalesque, because Bakhtin feels we must understand the transgressive, utopian and festive qualities of human societies as well. Put differently, carnival and prosaics are not antithetical notions, as is sometimes implied in the literature (see Gardiner, 2002). Bakhtin's evocation of the carnivalesque is best understood as indicative of his desire to draw our attention to the underlying sociocultural forces that continually subvert our received commonsensical notions and habitualized viewpoints, and to encourage a renewed awareness of the hidden and all-too-often suppressed potentialities that lie within ‘the dregs of an everyday gross reality’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 385).

Conclusion: wild publics

In this concluding section, I would like tentatively to link up some of the key points discussed above to the debate around publics and counterpublics touched on briefly in my introductory remarks. In attempting to overcome the subjectivist tendencies of earlier monological accounts of moral reasoning, Habermas envisages a form of ethical dialogue that unfolds in an inclusive public sphere and is governed by transparent, universalistic principles. Such a sphere evinces a form of communicative rationality that acknowledges only the force of the better argument; other manifestations of power or strategic action are ruled out of court. The public sphere is ideally insulated from wider systemic conflicts over the distribution of power and resources in society, as well as the prejudices of private life (or else the latter must be translated into a shared vernacular).

Habermas therefore posits the public sphere as a realm of ‘general interest’, which all members of society can participate in and have a stake in preserving. Many critics, however, charge that Habermas' quest for a ‘universal collective subject’ (one that is constituted through rational discourse) is vulnerable to a host of objections. Firstly, it is argued that Habermas' position is idealist in both the philosophical and everyday senses of the word, because it supposes that material conflicts of a socio-economic nature can be effectively transcended or at least effectively sublimated into a rational discourse that can suspend ingrained power differentials. The key objection here is that domination is not simply a matter of the intrusion of ideas or media that reflect particular (rather than universal) interests, or ideological distortions of ideal speech of the sort that can be resolved through rational dialogue. Instead, power is largely a material phenomenon: as Foucault (1980) has frequently argued, the operation of power crucially involves the application of disciplinary pressures on the individual and collective body, and the internalization of these forces by particular subjects, which further means that domination must be resisted first and foremost by bodies. Warren Montag suggests, for instance, that there can be no genuinely neutral or impersonal dialogue between powerful and marginalized groups, namely because ‘between ideas there are relations of force, in that they are embodied in the broader relationship of forces in a society characterized by a perpetual, if latent, civil war that renders some dominant and others subordinate, usually in inverse proportion to their validity or truth and certainly in inverse proportion to the degree of their “criticality”.’ Critical theory, as such, must ultimately be premised on ‘critical practice, upon struggles that diminish the effects of coercion and discipline in workplaces and communities’ (Montag, 2000: 142). A second and related line of criticism focuses on Habermas' position that the public sphere can be a relatively open and inclusive arena. By promoting an ideal of impartial reason operating in an abstract space disconnected from experiential, embodied and affective human qualities, Habermas' vision of dialogic democracy has ‘not simply been dogged by, but is constituted on the basis of domination and exclusion’ (Hill and Montag, 2000: 10). Several prominent feminists have developed this position most extensively, suggesting that Habermas' approach is implicitly masculinist and thereby devalues women's experiences, concerns and styles of expression. Others have elaborated on this basic insight, asserting that Habermas has failed to recognize the innumerable axes of difference beyond gender per se that is the distinguishing feature of late modern (or postmodern) societies. It is not sufficient to simply add more ‘subaltern’ public spheres (of a class or ethnic nature, for example) to the mix, as Habermas appears to suggest in response to his critics, because this still maintains the ideal of a generalized public sphere (or spheres) that functions to erase the differences between particular groups. ⁵ Given this irreducible value pluralism, approaches that are informed by an alternative concept of counterpublics strive to abandon the misguidedly utopian goal of a ‘universalizing ideal of a single public and [attend] instead to the actual multiplicity of distinct and overlapping public discourses, public spheres, and scenes of evaluation that already exist, but that the usual idealizations have screened from view’ (Robbins, 1993: xii).

Part of this shift in thinking involves locating culture and its role in the formation of identities centre-stage, rather than to view them as ‘pure and corrupting epiphenomenon imposed on a pristine realm of rational openness in which citizens once communicated transparently’ (Polan, cited in Robbins, 1993: xix–xx). It also means that many key Habermasian distinctions, such as between public and private, communicative and corporeal action, or rationality and non-rationality, have to be thoroughly revised. There are, for example, many forms of sociocultural criticism (including aesthetic gestures, street demonstrations, and the like) that are entirely legitimate on their own terms, but which do not conform to Habermas' model of rational dialogue oriented towards mutual understanding. As Alberto Melucci has argued, excluded or underprivileged groups are often motivated to pursue quite different strategies of action and representation than their more privileged counterparts. These subaltern discourses and strategies, which are rooted in the particularistic concerns of everyday life, are formulated at some distance from the official public sphere and aim to celebrate difference through diverse expressions of identity and community. In Melucci's view, new social movements are not simply ‘defensive’, designed to protect the lifeworld from the intrusion of system. Rather, they are much more dynamic than Habermas suggests, in that they seek actively to modify the social order ‘by means of changes in language, sexual customs, affective relationships, dress and eating habits’ (Melucci, 1988: 249). For many commentators, then, public spheres (or counterpublics) are as much sites of impassioned and embodied contestation as arenas of impartial, reasoned debate—and, moreover, such conflicts are not anomalous but constitutive of these spaces (see Asen, 2000). This position underscores why many of the current debates in our society are focussed on the very question of what is and is not political, and what the legitimate boundaries of the polis might be. New social movements often express the idea that so-called ‘private’ and everyday concerns surrounding health, sexuality, ecology or personal morality, of a sort that Habermas would likely regard as inadmissible unless subject to a process of rationalization, are deserving of public recognition and expression. As Anthony Giddens (1991) suggests, we might well be witnessing a movement away from the heroic and Promethean ‘emancipatory politics’ of earlier phases of modernity towards the more existential and everyday concerns of what he calls ‘life politics’ (see also Featherstone, 1992; Gouldner, 1975).

In favouring the notion of multiple counterpublics endowed with diverse rationalities and modes of interaction and expression over a singular public sphere regulated by a narrowly circumscribed form of rational argumentation, the essential point is that we need to ‘foster a conception of public which in principle excludes no persons, aspects of persons’ lives, or topic of discussion and which encourages aesthetic as well as discursive expression. In such a public, consensus and sharing may not always be the goal, but the recognition and appreciation of differences, in the context of confrontation with power’ (Young, 1987: 76). It is my belief that such arguments, which are in many respects persuasive, find considerable (though perhaps unexpected) support in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin consistently strives to protect multiplicity (discursive and otherwise) against the forces of unification, prioritizes the phenomenon of alterity over the isolated, self-sufficient monad, and champions ‘radical difference’ in opposition to an enforced homogeneity. As a post-Cartesian thinker, he strives to grasp the experiential and affective qualities of human embodiment within diverse lived contexts, and is sensitive to full range of interhuman (and human-nature) relations that are not simply cognitive or narrowly ‘rational’. And although Bakhtin has often been criticized for subscribing to an underdeveloped theory of power, I would suggest that his work often evinces a more subtle and realistic account of power, domination and resistance than does Habermas, especially vis-à-vis Bakhtin's thoughts on carnivalesque subversions of officialdom and the nature of ideological and linguistic hegemony. In rethinking the public sphere and theories of ethics and dialogic democracy, therefore, Bakhtin's ideas might well prove to be a fecund source of inspiration.