On the usefulness of dialogism, the chronotope, and heteroglossia as analytical and generative concepts in architecture

BAKHTIN LECTURE Spring 1998
ed keller

In The Dialogic Imagination, read:
--- intro
--- 'Epic and Novel', pp 33-40
--- 'From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse', paying attention to pp. 45-51, 59-68
--- 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', pp 84-129, 243-258
--- 'Discourse in the Novel', 259-275, 288-296, 320-344, skim to end
--- cf the definitions of dialogism, heteroglossia, hybridization, and zones in the glossary

"...According to Bakhtin, a subject establishes his/her identity and consciousness with sign (linguistic) material, in dynamic interaction (dialogue) with other subject(s): his inner speech and utterances are reaction to the utterances of other subjects, i.e., to the tradition as well to unfinished, ever open contemporaneity. His utterances also allow for various possible answers to his ethical, value positions. A sign must carry a value accent, since a subject always speaks from his/her existential and social position. Bakhtin finds this kind of dialogism in individual’s existence, in the fictional worlds of a novel and its characters, as well as in the broadest social and historic events from prehistory to modern times that involve interaction between various languages, ideologies, cultures and traditions. It would be therefore possible to say that dialogism in Bakhtin’s sense connects several key topics of contemporary humanities and enables a logical transition from the written word to the human spirit, from textual microstructures to cultural systems. Bakhtin included in his discussion phenomenological problems of conscience, psycholinguistic and psychoanalytical theories of inner dialogue (and the role of the Other in it), theory of narrative, stylistics and poetics of genres, hermeneutic questions of our active understanding and appreciation of texts, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and ethic placement of the utterer in social environment, in multitude of utterances and languages. He also discussed socio-cultural processes, in which he ascribed an important role to genres and forms of communication (e.g., folk culture of laughter, carnival, parody, novel) that undermined every kind of totalitarian and authoritarian discourse. Therefore, Bakhtin in the time of real-socialist totalitarianism created an appealing and up-to-date utopia of radical democracy that strived for equal dialogue, consideration of differences, an individual and society open to their Other. " -- Marko Juvan

Summary:
Topics of interest covered will include: the importance of heteroglossia versus mono and polyglossic work; the concept of the chronotope; the techniques by which one would challenge monovocity or a monoglossic framework (which Bakhtin identifies as parody and hybridization in language and the novel, and which we will search for isomorphisms to in architecture) and perhaps most importantly, the idea of a dialogic relationship between a text , image, or space and the user of that artifact .
Vis a vis the dialogic formation of social relations, this approach suggests that it is possible to map some of the devices in architecture, culture, literature, cinema, etc., and establish a working methodology that intelligently responds to the devices' potential as mapped. Architecture clearly facilitates a specific set of dialogic relationships, inherently different ( though not essentially so) from those enabled by cinema or the novel. This territory ,which allows a relat ionship to develop between ( for instance) an individual, cinema and architecture-, could be one site for this analysis.
Importantly, there are also ethical ramifications to a heteroglossically inclined methodology which Bakhtin both explicitly and implicitly explores. We should consider and test these within an architectural framework.
NB: Except where noted, all footnotes taken from The Dialogic Imagination., ed Holquist, M., University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981

Bakhtin says, near the end of his life, that:
"There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of the past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue's subsequent development along, the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a next context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival. The problem of great time." (Speech Genres 170)

I will argue that Bakhtin's analysis of the novel- that in fact, his use of the term 'novel'- might be extended to incorporate other cultural forms and flows, and in fact that, in light of his model of dialogism and heteroglossia, it is incumbent on us to do so.

Speed will be a key criteria for us when evaluating the application of these models to architecture, popular music, film, or television, versus the novel. Although Bakhtin sees the dialogic potential spanning great sheets of time , the dialogic depends on an immediacy of reply to fully actualize the heteroglossic scenarios which then align with very concrete ethical capacities. Locating the moments where that reply actully takes place must be one of the crucial tasks in this project; i suggest that such a dialogue may find itself in both linguistic series and material flows. As well it will be part of a fairly complex analytical process to determine how architecture might foster certain aspects of dialogism- cf. for a partly negative example the incomplete analyses proffered by Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction .

For the purposes of this seminar I will consider a set of key terms extracted from Bakhtin's essays in 'The Dialogic Imagination'. These terms will be unpacked in a concise manner.
key themes:
the novel
chronotope
time : duration (cf. Bergson)
space (cf. deCerteau)
the dialogic
utterances
mono/poly/heteroglossia
hybridization (parody, carnivalization)

The novel
'...Novel is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system. ..."novelization" is fundamentally anti canonical....Always it will insist on the dialogue between what a given system will admit as literature and those texts that are otherwise excluded from such a definition of literature.'p xxxi, The Dialogic Imagination

'... the novel inserts in these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with the unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality [the open-ended present].' p7, ibid
Bakhtin's point here concerns the promiscuous overlaps of the novel with other systems of representation. In fact, the novel itself by definition might be considered simply an expanding regime of overlapping genres. As noted above, it is incumbent upon us to determine exactly how 'extralinguisitically' we should reach afield to extend the boundaries of the novel. As Tafuri and DalCo frame the argument in the introduction to their History of Modern Architecture, the question now might be to ask what relations are possible between extralinguistic series and those systems of representation which lodge themselves in words and images.

The question though is reframed by Bakhtin, who insists upon the absolute and real influence upon the sphere of everyday life by dialogue and vice versa. The ethical and political ramifications of this are fundametally different from the closure that Tafuri and DalCo struggle against. Our reading of Bakhtin is concerned with how dialogue itself as a principle would be actualized in this model not only by linguistic series which could have only a limited range of potential to influence manufacturing and economy (as certainly Tafuri and DalCo would argue) but would also occur through the forms and 'series' which are organized by architectural sequence, filmic sequence, program enchainments, and the like.
The novel takes on a role in a disruption of the 'harmony' of the identity of the individual in their everyday life as well, and in this Bakhtin's model of the novel ( as philosophy) takes on a uniquely modern aspect. Similarly the city, the megalopolis, and the medium of cinema have had an absolute impact on the manner with which large groups of individuals understand themselves and each other.

Bakhtin notes that
'The novel took shape precisely at the point when epic distance was disintegrating, when both the world and man were assuming a degree of comic familiarity.... From the very beginning the novel was structured not in the distanced image of the absolute past but in the zone of direct contact with inconclusive present day reality.' p39

The dissolution of this epic distance will be seen to have profound ethical fallout, as Bakhtin defines in parody and carnivalization tactics which, within the novel, achieve a more immediate inclusion of everyday life in the genres the novel envelops. Such a model has clear implications for architecture when worked into a design practice.

To briefly contextualize this statement, it might be enough to say that ancient civilizations (as described by Lukacs, in his early work Theory of the Novel, or by Bakhtin via the earlier greek adventure novel chronotopes) existed without any critical reflection upon their context. Any form of philosophical reflection- modern criticism- would perforce be a disruption of this uncritical directness of self in the world -within myth, language and everyday life. There is a direct connection to the unitary languages and monovocity that Bakhtin suggests the novel challenges with its heteroglossia, inclusions and hybridizations- and the coincidence of self and destiny which ancient civilizations have been described as existing in. This reevaluation is part and parcel with the agenda behind the modern movement in the late 19 and early 20th century. However, Bakhtin suggests that the germ for such a critical consciousness lay considerably earlier and maps specific techniques through which it evolved. Clearly the problem of unquestioned identity and a lack of critical consciousness is not limited to greek culture from the turn of the first millennium or before. This problem has manifestations on both a personal and a global level today: hence the value of the analyses we've just noted.

For a further elaboration of the connexions between modernism and this subject, cf. The Anti Aesthetic, Hal Foster ed. , esp. Habermas' essay 'Modernity- an Incomplete Project'.

chronotope
'out of the actual chronotopes of our world ( which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work...' p 253
The chronotope is a concept that insists on the inseparability of space and time. Taken by Bakhtin initially from bio science, we will understand the chronotope as a framework that would argue for analysis of any system in relation to the context it engages spatially over time. As part of this analysis we would also argue that the notion of context and engagement needs to be rigorously developed, and in the case of architecture radically expanded to include series of programmatic, linguistic and metalinguistic systems which are often reductively understood.

In the opening to the Chronotope essay, Bakhtin defines the chronotope within literature as a site where 'Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.' p84

time : duration
This development of the chronotope in relation to a highly charged temporal mise en scene has resonance with Bergson's' thesis of creative evolution, and the responsibility Bergson gives to duration- lived time- in his theories of perception, memory, identity, and awareness. Interestingly, Michel Serres notes in Hermes: Literature, Science, and Philosophy in his chapter on thermodynamics and language, that the organism is a '...converter of time...' and in this we can find another criteria for evaluating the use of the concept of chronotope in architecture. the organism processes energy and time simultaneously, and its organismic potential emerges when the level of information processed inflects the development of the system. If we can align certain spatial practices with affiliated movements of TIME- times that would be moving in fact at a different speed than other times- we might be able to more accurately model the interrelation and behavior of systems within architecture, urban scales, and so forth. This search for multiple laminates of time within systems would have to identify the aspects of the system that a temporal quality latches onto or moves within. For example when one eats an apple while reading this text, one simultaneously converts the time of the apple ( growth, rain, sun, sugars, and so forth) and the time of this text ( the concepts i am imbueing it with, the act of reading it yourself, and so forth.) In this case you are a site for the conversion of multiple times, which operate at multiple speeds- the text is in certain ways much faster and rich with information than the apple, which has 'slowed down' the time of the sun and rain and earth from whence it sprang.

space: cf. deCerteau
Similarly, the idea of space as a practiced place resonates with deCerteau's ideas of the development of the individual through a repetitive engagement with the lived world. The term, 'space is practiced place,' from deCerteau, claims the inseparability of time from the becomings which are inherent in places, that eventuate SPACE. The practice of everyday life is a series, a repetition, and the effects and values which we are looking for in architecture then might be identified in how they site themselves through cycles of reiteration and utterance ( to snatch terms from deCerteau, Serres, and Bakhtin rather abruptly).
To link this set of ideas quickly back to the thesis of the studio, we might say that there are different classes of space in the urban environment, and also at the scale of the individual.

These spaces could then each be understood uniquely as offering the opportunity for certain kinds of practice in the city- or in places in general- practices that would be intimately tied to a socio-economic and cultural framework that predetermined but did not absolutely fix the range of possibilities those places were able to actualize. Hence the agenda given in this studio to identify how certain classes of space become operative could find criteria in the chronotope which would map tendencies that these spaces have, both specifically and generally.

One of the themes inherent in Bakhtin's use of the chronotope to analyze the novel lies in his mapping of the different subjective possibilities that the first type of adventure novel offers to its 'heroes' as opposed to the second type of novel - or even later, as opposed to Rabelais or Dostoevski.
In the first kind of adventure chronotope ( in much the way he and Lukacs fall into step as regards the EPIC and the individual choices the EPIC offers its characters), we find that
'In such a chronotope the world and the individual are finished items, absolutely immobile. In it there is no potential for evolution, for growth, for change...what we get is a mere affirmation of the identity between what had been had at the beginning and what is at the end. Adventure time leaves no trace.'
p110

This is contrasted to the metamorphosis offered by the second type of adventure time, the adventure novel of everyday life, where we understand
'Metamorphosis or transformation (as) a mythological sheath for the idea of development- but one that unfolds not so much in a straight line as spasmodically, a line with knots in it, one that therefore constitutes a distinctive type of temporal sequence. ' p 113

As he notes, this is a chronotope in which the individual becomes something other than what they were.
In fact, in alignment with certain ideas of time in relation to modern thermodynamics which we encounter in Michel Serres, he states that 'Here time is not merely technical, not a mere distribution of days, hours, moments that are reversible, transposable, unlimited internally, along a straight line; here the temporal sequence is an integrated and IRREVERSIBLE whole.' p 119

There are limitations to this kind of chronotope which he then catalogues; however, importantly it is a step in the direction towards a chronotope where
' space becomes more concrete and saturated with a time that is more substantial: space is filled with real, living meaning and forms a critical relationship with the hero and his fate. This typ e of space so saturates this new chronotope that such events as meeting, separation, collision, escape and so forth take on a new and more markedly concrete chronotopic significance. ' p 120

To reiterate his construction of the term chronotope- Bakhtin is concerned with its function as a converter of time. 'It is precisely the chronotope that provides the ground essential for showing forth the representability of events. And this is so thanks precisely to the special increase in density and concreteness of time markers- the time of human life, of historical time- that occurs within well delineated spatial areas.' p 250

The final temporal frame that Bakhtin addresses- for him perhaps the limit of what the chronotope can accomplish novelistically- he finds in Dostoevski. A brief set of examples culled from Dostoevski here imply the possibilities within this third model of the chronotope-
'...the chronotope of the threshold; it can be combined with the motif of encounter, but its most fundamental instance is as the chronotope of crisis and break in a life..... In Dostoevski, for example, the threshold and related chronotopes- those of the staircase, the front hall and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and square that extend those spaces in to the open air- are the main places of action in his works, places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions that determine the whole life of a man. In this chronotope, time is essentially instantaneous; it is as if it has no duration and falls out of the normal course of biological time. ' p 248

We would assume, just as he goes on to state that this by no means exhausts the range of chronotope in Dostoevski, that there are entire encyclopaedias of chronotope that may be identified in the urban landscape- practiced on a daily basis and developed and propagated by dialogue. Hence to dialogue.

the dialogic
The dialogic is the device, or the group of devices and processes which fundamentally enable the formation of individuals, of narrative, and provide the engines by which chronotopes come into being and mutate. The way that the dialogic works to accomplish this is framed by Bakhtin through the concepts of utterance, mono/poly/ heteroglossia, and the tactic of hybridization within novel structure.

utterance
Bakhtin defines utterance as
'...a unit of speech communication . . .determined by a change of speaking subjects, that is, a change of speakers. Any utterance -- from a short (single-word) rejoinder in everyday dialogue to the large novel or scientific treatise -- has, so to speak, an absolute beginning and an absolute end: its beginning is preceded by the utterances of others, and its end is followed by the responsive utterances of others . . . . The speaker ends his utterance in order to relinquish the floor to the other or to make room for the other's active responsive understanding. ' (71)
Architecturally, the goal might be to isolate the equivalent forms, space, and programs which would correspond to this definition of the utterance. Mark Rakatansky's handrail project, is one example of an intervention at the scale of the body which organizes an unusual assortment of programs by the assemblage of fairly banal elements that the handrail itself accumulates ( hatrack, photo frame, chair, etc.).

In this case the utterance takes place in two ways: first, on the scale of the handrail at its totality, where dialogue would be found between the individual using it and the programs the handrail clearly organizes. A second more immediate level of dialogue would occur within the individual themselves as they contextualize through memory their own use of the handrail TO THEMSELVES during and after using it. This internal dialogue might be said to actually FORM the possible world of the individual.
Rakatansky himself notes that he has developed the handrail through the concept of troping- a slight modification of a recognizable element in language ( or form) which is then skewed gently to achieve an new and possibly unforeseen use value. The relation here between the trope as an operative concept an d the idea of the swerve/ clinamen which we encounter in Serres is rich with possibility.

hybridization (parody, carnivalization)
As a tactic of inclusion, Bakhtin identifies parody and carnivalization as two techniques which expand the novel's horizons to bring it to the almost radical state he finds it achieving in Rabelais and Dostoevski.
The basic purpose of these tactics is to decrease the distance between identities in the narrative and the actuality of everyday and lived time which the narrative might possibly emerge from, or ultimately through dialogue rejoin. There's a connexion here to the quote attributed to Chaplin: 'life in long shot is comic, life in closeup is tragic.' Although the trope is inverted, the relation between the long shot and the closeup, and their differing functions as devices narratively ( and in the lives of individuals) is similar.

mono/poly/heteroglossia
The partial monovocity which one finds within the earlier chronotopic examples that Bakhtin examines in his chronotope essay are contrasted, as above noted, by the heteroglossic conditions which accumulate in the examples from Dostoevski, or even in the daily life of a peasant. Heteroglossia, Bakhtin says, is '...another's speech in another's language....' p324

In heteroglossia, the refracted series of representations is fundamentally different from a unitary language and culture which does not recognize a distance between the individual's daily life, their life within representation, and myth ( cf. also the opening pages from Lukacs' Theory of the Novel).
It is clearly implied by Bakhtin that a consideration of the dialogic and certain principles he identifies as emerging within a novelization of writing and speech genres has an ethical result.

The example he gives vis a vis the illiterate peasant is illustrative of this and should be quoted at length :
'... Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia...an illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in several language systems: he prayed to god in one language ( church Slavonic) , sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried to speaking yet a fourth language...all these are different languages, even from the point of view of abstract sociodialectological markers. ...As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant... then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one's orientation among them began. ' p295-6

This example differs from a cynically critical position (certain strains of modernism and postmodernism) in that it clearly suggests an affirmative practice which might emerge from the employment of hybridized and heteroglossic techniques- or, as Bakhtin clearly states, in the practice of everyday life. In this way it could effect a complete reinvention of value systems, in the midst of conducting a critical practice. The example of the peasant is perhaps closest to the examples that we will extract from deCerteau, and clearly illustrates the potential role of heteroglossia and hybridization as devices to foster an expanded subjectivity. Note in closing that it would be absolutely KEY to identify the architectural and cinematic locations where what Bakhtin in this passage calls the '... critical interanimation of languages...' might occur, as only there could the double affirmation he is suggesting actualize itself.

Ed Keller
January 1998

1.see syllabus for various examples of interdisciplinary work. ; also cf. as interdisciplinary sources, work by Rakatansky, Tschumi, Lynn, Marker, Hall and Keller, DJ SPOOKY

2.we may look here to Michel Serres' model of time as a volumetric rife with turbulences, the folds of which are manifested through cultural artifacts as well as the materiality of things.

3.Note also availability of non linguistic series- models: from metallurgy, for example. These examples may be seen in use in the design work and teaching methodology of offices like Greg Lynn FORM, Reiser+ Umemoto, Evan Douglis, Ed Keller, et. al..

4.to briefly contextualize this summary against one of the films we've seen:
In Chris Marker's Sans Soleil the wildly shifting scales and sites encompass simultaneous perspectives of the global effect of political systems, economic and cultural frameworks, and highly personal results of the changes in these systems. This cross section of cultural fields is accomplished through devices like non-narrative jump cuts , occurring out of temporal and diegetic structure; through the device of the voice-over floating omnidirectionally over the globetrotting of Sandor Krasna's camera... the shifting of scales of attention from the highly nuanced details of Mr. Yamada, the cook in Tokyo who practices the difficult art of 'action cooking', or the ambiance of the cat cemetery- to the vast systems invoked by the footage of the city itself and the trains that cross it- and cross the fictional cartoon skies of Japanese television. As well, the important tactic of collapsing a quasi narrative structure onto a documentary structure of the film further opens up its possibilities as a hybridized/heteroglossic narrative, to use Bakhtin's terms.