Self and Other in Bakhtin's Early Philosophical Essays: Prelude to a Theory of Prose Consciousness

“We think we are tracing the nature of the thing, but we are only tracing the frame through which we view it.” So writes Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) in Philosophical Investigations about processes of social scientific inquiry. We interpretively read social events through various disciplinary lenses; this is no less true of our readings of theorists. My purpose in this reflective essay is to read the work of Mikhail Bakhtin through an interpretive lens that differs somewhat from the norm within contemporary sociocultural and historical theories of psychology and education. My essay hinges on the argument that, among sociocultural theorists, Bakhtin’s work has tended to be aligned with frameworks that focus more on social systems of activity and discourse. Although Bakhtin’s writings do address shared genres of discourse and social action, his work also addresses another aspect of living and learning. As they draw on mediated systems of social action and discourse, individuals construct histories that are ethically particular and attuned to moral ends. Dialogue, as depicted by Bakhtin, entails a form of answerability that is morally responsive to unique others and particular relationships. Considered outside of such moral ends, social actions and discourses lose a crucial part of their concreteness—their embeddedness in relationships constituted by thoughts, feelings, and histories between unique individuals. The complex particulars of morally imbued relationships have been oddly missing from theoretical discourses about learning in social context. Considered in their breadth, Bakhtin’s writings offer a critical alternative: a theory of discourse, selfhood, and social action that draws heavily from moral philosophy and literature and that places high value on ethical particularity. His early philosophical essays argue that discourse and action outside of morally imbued relationships might be true of angels and spirits, but not of subjects engaged in historical moments of living. In contrast, contemporary sociocultural theorists in the fields of education and psychology have tended to align Bakhtin’s writings with an effort to argue for semiotic mediation as a tool for meaningful social action. Because Bakhtin’s writings are so explicit about topics like discourses, MIND, CULTURE, AND ACTIVITY, 7(3), 227–242 Copyright © 2000, Regents of the University of California on behalf of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition