The Bakhtinian self and beyond: Towards a dialogical phenomenology of the self

Investigating the self as a developing system: What beyond verbal reports?

I have been working for a decade or more in diverse empirical research projects that have investigated teenagers and youngsters in their way up to adulthood, considering different institutional settings and developmental conditions, constraints and barriers. Having investigated along those years, mainly by means of narrative analysis, I have frequently caught myself wondering if it was really possible to grasp other selves’ developmental dynamics by this exclusive methodological tool, or, if not, whether we had been doing more than the mere (re)description of verbal reports instead of providing a congruent interpretation of personal experience in the irreversible time. In other words: Is it possible to reach integrative understandings of one’s personal history through dialogue, that is, only by means of his/her symbolic elaborations addressed to interviewer? What is this that represents the gate to reach some congruent connections between the moving, diachronically-organized self and the here-and-now of the dialogical meeting that joins researcher and research participant?

Driven by such questions, our research group has worked with the category of self as a developmental construct (Lopes de Oliveira, 2003, 2005, 2006, Lopes de Oliveira & Vieira, 2006). From a cultural semiotic developmental approach, I have conceived the self as a singular personal image, dependent on alterity, and built from culturally-framed semiotic transactions, within concrete communicative practices taking place in specific social-institutional settings. The self is considered as the dimension of Me that is microgenetically carved along daily interactions, whenever the individual engages in a shared world, converting it into a personal world through active and restless (re)positionings. Additionally, our investigative goal is to broaden and re-conceptualize the construct of internalization. This is a central category to cultural psychology according to the Russian tradition, as well as a vivid spatial metaphor to describe and understand the process of reconstructing the social world in the intra-psychological space, in terms of an endless outside/inside symbolic migration. Along the flux of this ongoing re-conceptualization, self-formation continues to be conceived as the emergence of an inner world, somehow located within the boundaries of the skin, functioning as this inner-outer, personal-public, and practical-reflexive sense of Selfness.

Mixed up with those interrogations, I found this work of Creswell and, inspired by his reading, I went back to some of the Bakhtinian initial works motivated to step in a diverse direction than the one I was familiar with in reading Bakhtin. The idea was to approach not only his contribution in providing a general principle to a dialogical understanding of the mind, but also, if possible and adequate, his own comprehension of the self as psychological stance.

So, in order to discuss Cresswell’s developments on the concept of self, I will bring other voices and theoretical perspectives that, along with dialogism and Bakhtin himself, have provided meaningful elements for a re-elaboration of self category in social sciences. Particularly, I would like to refer to our practice within contemporary developmental psychological research. As I move myself towards this direction I will speak of: (a) two of the writings from Mikhail Bakthin’s phenomenological period, in search of his initial contributions to a phenomenology of the self; and (b) aspects of the semiotic approach of the self, paying special attention to pragmatic theorists such as V. Colapietro and N. Wiley.

What are the potentials of bringing together Bakhtin, Wiley and Colapietro? Advancing some of the arguments that will be further developed in this article, I can say that while the young Bakhtin exposes a troubled philosopher urging to pave his way out of German formalism (and gradually assuming act/action as the center of the so-called “responsible self”), the two contemporary North American pragmatists from the Mead-Peircean tradition follow a trail that leads from action to inner speech and reflexivity. According to Sobral (2005b), although Bakhtin was openly critical of the Pragmatism a la William James (for his focus on adaptation and on the individual action, mainly), he shares with both Charles S. Peirce and G. H. Mead some theoretical points of contact, especially the I–Me system, and the notion of subject-positioning. I guess that the dialogical combination of both authors potentially adds innovative contributions for this situated approach of the inner-outer “frontier self” we have been in search of.

The Bakhtinian self: Initial writings

It is interesting to bring to attention two of Bakhtin’s initial works: Author and hero in aesthetic activity (Bakhtin, 1993a, 1997), and Toward a philosophy of the act (1993b). The former is a very well-appreciated and frequently quoted book by those developing a dialogical approach in Psychology nowadays. The latter refers to a manuscript that has probably been written in the same period as the former, but which has only been discovered a few months before the author’s death, together with a set of unpublished manuscripts in a wood deposit in Saransk. So, it has not been published in Russia until 1986. Maybe for this reason it is an almost unquoted work, even among dialogical psychologists (for an exception, see Bandlamudi, 1999; Lyra, 1999).

The two pieces are considered as part of the same underdeveloped philosophical project designed by the young Bakhtin, that is, the philosophical struggling he conducted against German philosophy, neokantianism in particular (Bakhtin, 1993b; Sobral, 2005b). At that time, Bakhtin was a lecturer on Kantian philosophy and was a harsh critic of Kant’s ideas. He severely criticized Kant’s ethics’ imperative, that is, the principle of universal duty. Both essays present an alternative philosophical position against theoreticism, and emphasize the situated experience lived by concrete people living in their world (Bakhtin, 1993b). While German formalism and main philosophical traditions praised the divorce between life and culture, Bakhtin was deeply concerned with moral philosophy, and was not older than 30 when he first conceived and elaborated the idea of a deep intertwining between responsibility, language and culture. Coherent to his commitment to overpass theoreticism, the author elects Art (particularly literature) as the specific dimension of culture of his concerns. Young Bakhtin highlights the unity of the human thought and action in literary analysis. Literature is one of the cultural products that best reflects ideological aspects of a given social-historical setting. Literary analysis is at the midway between aesthetic analysis and moral philosophy.

The act that is responsible

What is the core aspect of such endeavor? The idea of the responsible act. The responsible act, as opposed to a simple event, occurs whenever an act and its consequences are treated as part of the same whole. It is worth noticing that, according to Bakhtin, the relationship between act and consequence is not reducible to a logical, causal, conventional or other predefined/predetermined link. Alternatively, it is constructed in the very setting of its reconversion into meaning, amid concrete linguistic transactions integrated into broader semiotic settings. He emphasized that our living world is not organized as the world of Mathematics, but as a fuzzy awkward world. In order to make sense of such fuzziness, we need to position ourselves partially in and partially out of this world, in what he calls the “non-alibi” existence. The non-alibi refers to the only and unique standpoint each person may occupy in the world, favoring a singular perception and a unique comprehension of a given situation. The non-alibi is precisely what prevents each of us from avoiding the responsibility towards the other, the world, and ourselves, as well.

Hence, the responsible act expresses the intimate “relation of the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse” (Bakhtin, 1993b, p. ix), involving the mediation in one’s responsible consciousness. The responsible act implies a strict interpenetration of personal life and the social life of a community, that is, it constitutes a situated ethics that guides the person in his/her participation within cultural worlds. In other words, the responsible act is an expression of the responsible thinking, or participatory thinking. Thus, if the responsible act is considered the synthesis of action and thought, the philosophy of the act, according to Bakhtin, is the philosophical basis for the responsible act (Bakhtin, 1993b, p. 17). Responsibility is the basis for the ethical process that transforms a nonsensical event into a committed act.

Although a deeply hermetic work (Sobral, 2005a and 2005b), that Bakhtinian paper clearly exhibits a draft version of some of the main theoretical elements of his philosophical architectonics: There we can find the intellectual seeds of the dialogical perspective, the intrinsic connection I–Other, as well as the main topics of the future debate uniting literary critics, ethics and aesthetics. These topics were developed in an embrionary form, anticipating conceptualizations such as responsibility, authorship, and exotopy/outsideness.

Yet, Bakhtin’s elaborations over the responsible acts are particularly interesting considering the clues they provided to the unfolding of the Bakhtinian self. We should consider that Bakhtin’s initial philosophical elaborations were severely critical towards psychologism, that is, a psychology based on concepts and methodologies that separate human beings from their concrete living settings, conceiving the subject as an autonomous self-contained being. For this reason, words such as self, selfness, subjectivity are not found in his work. Thus, in order to grasp his ideas regarding the personal self, we need to make an effort and indirectly search for it. Conceiving, as he did, human act/activity within sociocultural and personal life, understanding his notion of subjectivity demands a search within activity. So, how was the acting subject sketched in this initial work?

Committed to an ethical dimension of conduct, Bakhtin reached the concrete individual act-performing self, which he conceived as the only responsible agent for his/her deeds. The main features of the subject are his/her meaningful experience in the living world, and his ability to represent experience in consciousness. It is in the realm of experience that the subject will find his/her inner truth, and his/her responsibility towards the other. In this sense, personal judgment is the result of the relation between truth and the real cognitive act, performed in the context of real life. Instead of predefined moral rules that may guide my consciousness from outside, moral judgment is a fruit of my own responsible self-activity in communion with a real life event, mediated by a responsible participative consciousness in the flux of real actions in a concrete world (Bakhtin, 1986).

The interdependence between ethics and aesthetics is the point where Bakhtin’s initial considerations touch the notion of a sense of self, especially the difference posed between aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic activity. While the former corresponds to an isolated act of perception by the individual self, the latter is defined as a social activity, essentially dependent on empathy to another self, which is considered as a co-participant in the aesthetic activity. Empathy is what pushes the subject out of his boundaries, driving him/her to the identification with the other, to build a world of meaning that did not existed previously to the experience of identification itself. In other words, aesthetic activity involves the complimentary contradictory experience of merging individuality into sociality, on one hand, and the individual confronting social influences, on the other. The aesthetic experience is double-faced. It provides the conditions for the phenomenological experience of the inner self, and also for the self-alter connections. This continuous co-constitutive process along time leads to the development of a dynamic and situated self.

The essay Author and hero in aesthetic activity (Bakhtin, 1993a) is the basic source for our comprehension of Bakhtinian situated self. In this essay, it is the topic of human aesthetic activity that is particularly emphasized. ² The elements of a social psychology of personal functioning, briefly sketched in the former work, is fully developed in this article. In particular, the idea of the aesthetic activity as a mediator between author and hero reflects Bakhtin’s own position regarding human relations, considered the main setting where human beings mutually constitute one another and is influenced one by the others.

The dialogue of consciousnesses in the self-other relationship and the topic of otherness, superficially sketched in his previous work, are further developed here through Bakhtin’s elaborations over author-hero relationship. The core idea, which will be continually developed in his future works, is that we can not know about ourselves if not by means of interactions with others. The aesthetically (and ethically) convincing living experience shared with other human beings is transformative of our consciousness; and, as far as we return back to our private worlds, we take this “other” experience inside to our own selves.

But, the relationship self-other/author-hero is different from love, for instance, in which the otherness of the other is still maintained. Although probably dominated by a profound mutual empathy and identification, lovers still perceive themselves as distinct selves. Within aesthetically co-experienced living settings, a different dynamics occurs: Selves in interactions would be represented by the image of intertwined springs, sometimes fused and indistinct, and sometimes separated and individualized, but always under pressure. In other terms, an aesthetic event implies the meeting of, at least, two distinct consciousnesses that remain fused in the flux of shared experience. However, sooner or later, fusion will leave space for uniqueness as far as consciousnesses succeed to engender a foreigner stance, essential to reach a creative understanding of both the co-lived situation and the other self.

Selfness and non-alibi: The radical alterity

The historical and contextual situatedness of the subject is connected to what we had previously referred to as the “non-alibi in being” (Caliskan, 2006). It is precisely this “non-alibi” stance that enables the positioning of the hero/other outside oneself, providing the author/self with the surplus of seeing aspects that are non-accessible to the hero from within his own life. The radical alterity of the other prevents me, in the position of “the other of the other”, to grasp him as a whole: There is always a dark zone within inter-subjective transactions that will remain forever as a shadow, non-accessible by those involved in a given social transaction. In other words, the complimentary notions of outsidedness, surplus of seeing, and non-alibi may potentially be applied to understand Bakhtin’s arguments, not only regarding the realm of I–Other concrete transactions, but also the I–Me relationships, as well as in the levels of intercultural and semiotic relationships.

Considering the above-mentioned two papers, we notice many differences also regarding the philosophical positions posed by the young and the mature Bakhtin’s works. At the end of his life, probably thanks to the hard time he had under political persecution, his epistemological identity expanded from a critical philosopher to a critical psychologist (Clot, 2006). His comprehension of the situated subject became progressively intertwined with the dialogical principle that guided him towards the universe of linguistic transactions and social ideological consciousness. Dialogicality was converted into the main aspect to be remembered when considering the heritage of the circle of Bakhtin. Nevertheless, the main elements of dialogism are recognized in the two analyzed essays: They indicate a dialogical activity that is situated in the flux of intentional acts, performed against the background of cultural contexts.

Cresswell (2011) is pretty aligned to the position of the young Bakhtin. He highlights the embodied self, the communicative activity and the phenomenologically immediate experience, as well as conceives of the self as “a kind of activity that people personally live, albeit socially constituted” (p. 479). I argue that similar concern with embodiment, practice and experience, as well as with the semiotic character of embodied experience is also to be found in the pragmatic approach of the self, which will be explored in the following section.

The pragmatic self: Agency, inner dialogue and reflexivity

My effort in this article is to contribute to a dialogical phenomenology of the self, by pointing to the elements of my own tentative version of the non-essentialist, non-realist approach of the self, aiming to reach a sense of self that is simultaneously a practical, experiential and semiotic one. For this reason, I orient myself to the meeting point between the Bakhtinian self and the pragmatic self, which can be named as a semiotic, or reflexive, self (Wiley, 1994). That is because I consider N. Wiley and V. Colapietro as contemporary pragmatists who have added some light over the ideas of G. H. Mead, C. S. Peirce and J. Dewey in social sciences, whose elaborations on the development of the self share many complimentary aspects (as well as in the phenomenological orientation of Bakhtin’s first works). However, some mutual divergent points can also be highlighted between the two (Colapietro, 2006a). The main topic of differentiation between them consists in the movement that conducts Wiley’s writings progressively away from those of Peirce (while developing an authorial position regarding pragmatism within social sciences), while Colapietro remains as a contemporary interlocutor of the North-American semiotician, pretty faithful to most of his original contributions.

Mead’s and Dewey’s (as well as James’) ideas are presumably closer to us, psychological scholars, while Peirce mostly remained as an outsider in the debates within this field. Kinouchi (2009) suggests that James’ popularity was mainly constructed due to his easy-reading books for beginners, as well as due to his adherence to the North-American experimental scientific project, devoted to convert Psychology into a natural science. Therefore, Wiley and Colapietro played an important role in bringing Peirce’s arguments on the semiotic organization of self and society closer to Psychological arena. In doing so they provided novel elements to a semiotic approach of the self as the synthesis of personal experience in the life course.

It is obviously impossible to present an extensive reading of the semiotic debate in the shortness of a single article. Thus, considering the goal of this article, I will concentrate on exploring Wiley’s and Colapietro’s contributions concerning practice, agency, and reflectivity because those are the closest topics to the comprehension of the self we want to develop.

Peirce was as much concerned with practice as Bakhtin. However, while the latter was interested in personal experience in its singularity, Peirce was rather committed to practice in its generality (Colapietro, 2004), providing a broader perspective on the semiotic mediated acts and transactions, in comparison to Bakhtin. For Peirce, the self is firstly a participant in a set of practices ranging from unacknowledged, even disavowed and unconscious ones (such as daydreams, inner dialogues and anecdote-making) to the formally acknowledged and consciously undertaken culturally organized systems of practice (Colapietro, 2006b).

Peirce’s commitment to a non-structuralist semiotics led him to include the notion of interpretant to his model, opening space to consider the role of the subject within the whole semiotic dynamics. The notion of interpretant is related to the vagueness of the sign, “leaving its interpretation more or less indeterminate, it reserves for other signs or experience [emphasis added] the function of completing the determination” (CP5.505, in Prates, 2005). Notice that the openness of the semiotic circuit is already established by Peirce. The following step was to reach an interpretive model of the sign, where the experiencing semiotic subject (the interpreter) could also be included. From this perspective, Peirce achieved “an explicitly situated, social, somatic, and semiotic understanding of human agents and their historical practices” (Colapietro, 2006b, p. 173).

The quotation above reflects Colapietro’s own understanding of the differences between Peirce and Kant, when the reflective philosophical turn is considered. It should be evident that for Peirce, reflective agents owe a practical identity in a substantive sense, “not trans-empirical selves but practically identifiable, this historical implicated, actors” (Colapietro, 2006b, p. 175). In other words, the pragmatic Peircean self is not reduced to rational wills, but rather corresponds to a flesh-and-blood being, corresponding to a somatic, social, and historical agent (Colapietro, 2006a). Additionally, the semiotic self goes beyond the mere rational-or-practical poles: The practical-reflective self is simultaneously an affective self, and the affective dispositions define his/her rational agency. Peirce emphasizes the constitutive role of certain human sentiments, conceived as “the logical sentiments” of faith, hope, and love. According to David Savan (1981, in Colapietro, 2006b), these sentiments are considered constitutive because they build up “the substance of the self”.

While claiming for the triadic character of agency (practical-reflective-affective), Peirce reveals his concern with the role of normative conflicts into providing efficacy to the cognitive endeavors (I would add, to self-formation). By its nature, cognition is based on the recognition of the other as a potential source of a confrontation or crisis. Confrontation with the other (I–thou) through experimental inquiries, self-corrective practices and, consequently, the acknowledgement resulting from the process of internal or external debate, represent the main sources of knowledge (Colapietro, 2006b). Concerning the topic of normative conflicts, one may identify a close similarity to Bakhtin, mediated by the philosophical influence of Martin Buber (Buber, 2001).

In Colapietro’s works on Peircean pragmatism, emphasis is given to the practical self. In Wiley’s elaborations, in turn, the main topics are inner conversations and reflexivity. The semiotic self (Wiley, 1994) integrates into a sole model of the self functioning idiosyncrasies of the different triadic models of Mead and Peirce—two pragmatists who, according to Wiley himself, are rarely compared. The intended integration gives birth to a hexagram, a semiotic structure where the temporal stages of the self is graphically disposed. Past–present–future, and I–you–me, are all creatively re-combined into 3 triads: past–me–object; present–I–sign; and, future–you–interpretant. Within the communication act itself, along with the other aspects, Wiley adds reflexivity. The addresser communicates with the addressee through semiotic triads and, at the same time, takes the addressee as a mirror, regarding to whom he/she/it is the reflexive other.

The structure of the hexagram presents a de-centered concept of self, opposite to the Cartesian self. However, notice that the self is not erased from the model, it does not disappear as it usually occurs in the works of many post-structuralist and constructionist theorists, for instance. Alternatively, the self remains as part of the whole theoretical scheme, and it is conceived as a sign. Functioning as a sign, it corresponds to this three-stage (I–you–me) reflexive self-consciousness, without which it would be impossible to think, to have a psychological existence, and to conceive both the objects and oneself. There are four main features of the general structure of the self, as follows:

our personal identity (conceived as the sense of continuity in time);

Another consequence of considering the self as functioning as a sign is that the semiotic process according to which the self operates is equivalent to a triadic inner conversation. Wiley conceives the inner conversation as different from conventional language. At a first glance, language is public, interactive and intersubjective, while the self is private, isolated. The author argues, however, that “within the self, i.e, of this dimension that is commonly considered as private, there is a kind of a public area” (Wiley, 1994), inhabited by an imagined community whose members live in active and constant conversation, be it according to verbal language, or non-verbal language, such as body communication, emotions, sensations, etc. ³

The last feature of the semiotic self to be explored in this essay is reflexivity. Reflexivity refers to a circuit, a feed-forward connection that involves the double process of moving away from oneself, and swerving back, returning to the original point. Many theorists have long recognized the reflexive character of mental world, including Descartes, Kant, the empiricists and the pragmatist semioticians. The main difference among philosophers of distinguished traditions in what regards to this specific topic is the nature of the subject–object relationship, that is, whether the subject may convert him/herself into an object of self appreciation, knowledge, and assessment, while overcoming the blind spot—the neutral stance from where to achieve the true knowledge. While for the formers the “blind spot argument” is considered an heuristic, according to the pragmatists, the blind spot can be overcome, but exclusively through the mediation of the you: The I can only recognize itself as a Me through the interpretation of the You. Therefore, it is plausible to argue in favor of a direct communication I–You and an indirect (or reflexive) communication I–Me, mediated by You. The structure I–Me is, for this reason, a reflexive one, what means that it is dialogical in its nature. In sum, there is no other way to provide the self with some knowledge about itself if not by the mediation of another (the other) self.

Final comments: Cresswell and beyond

Along this article, I have been in tune with Creswell’s, considering his arguments regarding the embodied experience, conceived as the phenomenological immediate experience that provides the self with some degree of stability and coherence in time. Cresswell sees in Bakhtin’s positions a great analytical fertility, considering the semiotic heterogeneous and conflictive intercultural world we currently live in.

According to Cresswell, one’s subjective experience is supported by the community experience. But, in addition, each one’s experience reflects his/her individual consciousness, the way each person perceives (in terms of body sensations) and semiotizes experience, filtering it by mediation of different possible semiotic systems. The immersion within sociality through communitarian experience demands a certain amount of “unwavering faith” in the socially constructed version of reality taken for granted as “the reality”. The Bakhtinian notion of hero, for instance, is conceived as the synthesis of social ideologies, gender and voices, as well as a singular personalized result of uniting all these aspects.

Considering Bakhtin’s elaborations on the pair author–hero, and his understanding of literature as a mirror of social-historical living conditions, Cresswell concludes that Bakhtin comes to a version of the self that is quite close to that of social constructionism. According to Cresswell, the Bakhtinian self is a repetition of the social world, in special, of culturally-styled modes of experience that populate the imagination of a social group, eventually becoming crystallized in literature, romances, heroes: “We are brought to the recognition of how one cannot construct just any self or identity, because one is caught up in language communities that already afford experiential worlds that are taken-for-granted” (Cresswell, 2011, p. 480).

With my own arguments I expect to have made it clear that, since his initial works, Bakhtin’s uneasiness with formalism led him to take a dialogical stance that leaves little, if any, space to a monological reading of sense-making within the realm of personal experience in social contexts. Bakhtin’s other ideas, such as the dialogical penetration and multivocality, also help us to argument in favor of a bidirectional feed-forward movement related to the social fabrication of the self, instead of such a one-way determination, as Cresswell’s quotation above cited seems to suggest.

In the two works of Bakhtin considered here, the topic of the self is pictured mainly as part of the philosophical debate opposing theoretical and practical reasoning. Meanwhile, the pragmatic semiotics endorsed in the second part of this article offers an alternative to potentially overcome the yet dual approach found in the philosophical context of Bakhtin’s circle. Following Pierce’s dialogical orientation to conceiving and interpreting signs, Wiley and Colapietro show that a sign is, at the same time, theory and practice (as far as they constitute symbols and tools), that is, personally and socially crafted devices. In other words, none of the perspectives alone may inspire a deeper theorization on the topic of the self because they do not directly elaborate this concept. However, along with dialogists, pragmatists provide important ideas to further develop the debate beyond its present state. Hence, with them, I rehearsed some further steps in the theoretical venture towards a re-elaboration of the concepts of self and self-formation.