[MD] The (Dialogic) Intellectual Level

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Arlo had previously said]
The "intellectual level" is NOT the "individual level". Individuals give rise to
the emergent intellectual level through social collective activity. "Ideas" are
historically dialogic.

[Arlo adds]
For those unfamiliar with the term "dialogic", I present this from Wikipedia, as
the idea developed in the Russian Formalist tradition, labeled "dialogic" by
Mikhail Bakhtin.

"The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of
literature. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous
work, but informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic
literature is in communication with multiple works. This is not merely a matter
of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and the previous
work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is."

"The term 'dialogic', however, does not just apply to literature. For Bakhtin,
all language - indeed, all thought - appeared dialogic. This means that
everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things that have been
said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. We
never, in other words, speak in a vacuum. As a result, all language (and the
ideas which language contains and communicates) is dynamic, relational and
engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world."

"... European social psychologists also applied Bakhtin's work to the study of
human social experience, preferring it as a more dynamic alternative to
Cartesian monologicality. ... Wikipedia in this light becomes an intensely
dialogic phenomenon, doing away with the idea of knowledge as emanating from
single, authoritative, closed (what Bakhtin would call 'monologic') sources and
instead embracing the idea of knowledge as collective, relational and dynamic."

This harkens directly to Pirsig's writings on the mythos in ZMM, and on language
(citing Bohr and Kluckholn) in Lila.

Pirsig writes in ZMM. "We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of
awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world." Then, "To
understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the
landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the
middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this
figure is not to see the landscape at all."

This "figure sorting sand" does so guided by the mythos. Indeed, one could say
this figure is an internal simulacrum of the mythos. To wit, of the organizing
effects of the mythos, Pirsig writes, "Thus, in cultures whose ancestry
includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object
differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp
natural division of subjects and predicates."

Pirsig places us back on "grammar", and takes us there again Lila. He cites
Kluckholn, "  Any language is more than an instrument of conveying ideas, more
even than an instrument for working upon the feelings of others and for
self-expression. Every language is also a means of categorizing experience. The
events of the "rear world are never felt or reported as a machine would do it.
There is a selection process and an interpretation in the very act of response.
Some features of the external situation are highlighted, others are ignored or
not fully discriminated.

Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole
their experiences. The language says, as it were, "notice this," "always
consider this separate from that," "such and such things always belong
together. " Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways
they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of
life."

Here he uses "trained", a word I find sharply related in his use to the notion
of "symbolic violence" expressed by Pierre Bourdieu. From Wikipedia, "When a
holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who
holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic
violence.... People come to experience symbolic power and systems of meaning
(culture) as legitimate." Thus, "education", as well as social and peer
pressures, shame and humiliation and other forms of enforcing conformity to
social norms is a form of violence (symbolic violence). In ZMM, Pirsig refers
to this a "mass hypnosis". But the effect is the same.

Of this, Pirsig cites Ruth Benedict, "The cultural pattern of any civilization
makes use of a certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes and
motivations just as . . . any culture makes use of certain selected material
techniques or cultural traits. The great arc along which all the possible human
behaviors are distributed is far too immense and too full of contradictions for
anyone culture to utilize even any considerable portion of it. Selection is the
first requirement. Without selection no culture could even achieve
intelligibility and the intentions it selects and makes its own are a much more
important matter than the particular detail of technology or the marriage
formality that it also selects in similar fashion."

Back to the dialogic nature of intellectual patterns. On of the more perverse
distortions that occurs (here, of course) is the base reductionism to say that
if "an idea is NOT monologic, then any one speaker is irrelevant". This is
simply not true, a distortion if you will to create a war where none exists.
Just as the body is made up of individual cells, so is an idea made up of
individual voices. But it is the collective, historical dialogicity of those
voices that give rise to a greater pattern than any single voice (if such a
thing was possible) could ever utter.

Was Bakhtin an "enemy of the individual". Only to politicizers. From Wikipedia,
"Bakhtin's conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a
person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in
the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the soul;
Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by
Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's
potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul."

But Bakhtin also recognized that "every person is influenced by others in an
inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be
isolated. ... As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of
others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also
in how a person thinks and how a person sees oneself truthfully." (the quotes
are all from Wikipedia)

Finally, to wrap up a rather long segment (sorry, must be the four cups of
coffee), a split quote from the Wikipedia entry on John Dewey.

"For Dewey, this distinction [between the individual and society] was by and
large a false one; like Vygotsky, he viewed the mind and its formation as
communal process. Thus the individual is only a meaningful concept when
regarded as an inextricable part of his or her society, and the society has no
meaning apart from its realization in the lives of its individual members."

The next passage demonstrates that this "dialogism" between individual and
society does not devalue the individual, "However, as evidenced in his later
Experience and Nature Dewey recognizes the importance of the subjective
experience of individual people in introducing revolutionary new ideas." 

Still here? 10 points for you!