[MD] The (Dialogic) Intellectual Level

[Platt Holden]

Arlo, does all this mean no one ever had an original idea?

Platt



> [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! 
> 
> 
>