Article

Bakhtin’s realism and embodiment: Towards a revision of the dialogical self

Culture & Psychology 17(2) 263–277 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354067X11398308 cap.sagepub.com

James Cresswell Northwest Nazarene University, USA

Cor Baerveldt University of Alberta, Canada

Abstract How can we understand socially constituted selfhood? H. Hermans has addressed this question with the notion of the Dialogical Self that he draws from the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. We focus on Bakhtin’s discussion of realism in relation to how he has been interpreted by Hermans. This notion of realism (which we coined ‘‘expressive realism’’) highlights how sociality is inseparably related to embodied experience, thus making way for a sociocultural psychology that takes into account life as it is experientially lived. We point out how Hermans’ vision of the Dialogical Self neglects such embodied experience. This discussion leads to the claim that Bakhtin sees the self as social insofar as our most primary embodied experience is social, where Hermans anchors the sociality of self in inter-subjective exchange. Accordingly, an extension of the Dialogical Self is offered through discussion of these points. Keywords aesthetic expression, Bakhtin, Dialogical Self, embodiment, realism

Introduction Understanding the self requires recognition of its inseparable entwinement with culture. This statement has been central in the work of Hubert Hermans, who often claims that psychologists embrace Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum and treat the self in terms of a grand-I—a grand homunculus—that runs counter to this

Corresponding author: James Cresswell, Behavioral Sciences and Cultural Studies Department; Northwest Nazarene University; 623 S University Boulevard, Nampa, Idaho, USA, 83686 Email: [email protected]

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inseparable entwinement (e.g., Hermans, 2001, 2002, 2003; Hermans & Kempen, 1993, 1995; Hermans, Kempen, & Van Loon, 1992). As such, he argues that psychologists who work from this Cartesian perspective operate under the assumption that the self is locked within a separate and enclosed (self-contained) mind, upon which culture operates as merely a source of external stimuli. While it may be difficult to actually locate any major theorist who is a strict Cartesian, we are compelled to acknowledge that the emergence of the social constructionist movement (e.g., Gergen, 1985) and cultural psychology (e.g., Bruner, 1990; Shweder, 1991) has undermined the taken-for-granted assumption that self is self-contained subjectivity. In order to reject self-contained subjectivity, Hermans has led a move to understand the self in terms of multiplicity instead of singularity. He argues that the self is better considered in terms of ‘‘dialogue’’ and Hermans often draws on the Russian philosopher M. Bakhtin to make this point.1 Of interest to Hermans is Bakhtin’s notion of the polyphonic novel that involves an authorial style where the heroes are not written to convey an author’s single message. Rather, heroes are written as independent voices. By drawing on Bakhtin’s discussion of the polyphonic novel, he argues that the self is ‘‘dialogical’’ in the sense that it is a narrative construction emergent in inter-subjective exchange among interdependent personae that are not marshaled by a single grand-I. However, a discussion of Bakhtin’s notion of ‘‘realism’’ shows how the self is social at an embodied plane in which inter-subjective exchange is anchored. When we refer to the embodied plane, we are referring to the experiential livedness of life into which people find themselves thrown. That is, we seek to account for experiential immediacy of life that is exemplified in instances such as an immediate revulsion at the grotesque, a breathless arrest at the sublime, an irresistible care and commitment to another, and so on. Revisiting Bakhtin makes us aware how this aspect of psychology is lacking in Dialogical Self theory as Hermans conceives of it. Reviewing Bakhtin’s discussion of the novel and comparing it to the way that Hermans has interpreted Bakhtin enables us to point out a way to extend the notion of the Dialogical Self. First, we will show the centrality of embodied experience in Bakhtin’s notion of realism (we refer to this as ‘‘expressive realism’’) and how Hermans neglects the social quality of lived embodied experience. We then discuss what realism in novels revealed to Bakhtin. Specifically, we address how the social quality of embodied experience in Bakhtin leads to a re-thinking of what ‘‘dialogue’’ means; we compare this to how Hermans uses the notion. Based on the foregoing, we are able to sketch a version of the Dialogical Self which is different from that put forward by Hermans.

Bakhtin’s discussion of realism & the social quality of embodied experience Bakhtin was concerned with aesthetic terms of what art like the novel expressed about human life (Emerson, 1997). Indeed, Bakhtin praised the works of

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Dostoevsky for its ‘‘realism’’ in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a, pp. 38, 60–62). Bakhtin is potentially valuable for psychologists if we work towards unraveling his claim that Dostoevsky’s realism involved an ‘‘artistic visualization’’ (pp. 60–62) of significance that has something to do with the ‘‘inner man’’ or ‘‘self’’ in more current parlance.2 Such an unraveling cannot begin unless we are clear about what sort of realism is at stake.

Expressive realism in Bakhtin In regards to the sort of realism that is at stake, Bakhtin stated, ‘‘Dostoevsky believed that this new task cannot be adequately performed by realism in the usual sense, that is, by what is in our terminology monologic realism’’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 61; original emphasis). Monologic realism referred to the claim that there is a reality about the self that is finalized and complete. Such a reality could be definitively represented in descriptions of universal covering laws. This sort of realism would involve a definitively completed artistic expression that represents a given reality. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky does not give such a definitive account of anything. Bakhtin writes, ‘‘[a]rtistic form, correctly understood, does not shape already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen for the first time’’ (1984a, p. 43). Bakhtin offers an alternative sort of realism that is different because it involves a kind of revealing of reality that is also constitutive of it. We seek to explore this difference by referring to the sort of realism Bakhtin had in mind, coining the term ‘‘expressive realism.’’ We will unfold how Bakhtin claims that Dostoevsky realistically expresses something about human experience regarding the self through his artistic visualization. Dostoevsky was not the only author that Bakhtin praised for his realism (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981, 1984b, 1986). With regards to the novels of Franc¸ois Rabelais (a Renaissance writer), Bakhtin writes: The total makeup of the [artistic] image itself remains thoroughly realistic, but concentrated and compacted in it are so many essential and major aspects of life that its meaning far outstrips all spatial, temporal, and sociohistorical limits – outstrips them without, however, severing itself from the concrete sociohistorical base from which it sprang. (1981, p. 223; emphasis added).

Aesthetic expressions, such as Dostoevsky’s novel or the grotesque imagery found in the work of Rabelais, involve rich expressions because they extend beyond the immediate socio-historical situation. The specific constituents of a particular culture such as its language, history, geographical location and so on shape and enable an artist to express his work. However, aesthetic expression is not limited to the immediate socio-historical place of its writing because it speaks to people living in a different time and place. Dostoevsky’s work was realistic to his contemporaries, but it also has meaning to us who read him today—especially for psychologists who are interested in what Bakhtin saw in regards to the self. This is

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why Bakhtin talks about the aesthetic activity as ‘‘outstripping’’ and going beyond situated expression. A key to art extending beyond itself, thereby interpreting this generality of human experience, lies in understanding what Bakhtin meant by the ‘‘concrete sociohistorical base from which it sprang.’’. When Bakhtin claims that, for Rabelais, ‘‘the biological could not be separated from the social, historic, and cultural element’’ (1984b, p. 406) and that ‘‘[Rabelais] wants to return both a language and a meaning to the body. . . and simultaneously return a reality, a materiality, to language and to meaning’’ (1981, p. 171), he is discussing the way in which the world of experience is simultaneously social and corporeal (see also 1984b, p. 438). Bakhtin so relates the ‘‘concrete’’ to the ‘‘sociohistorical.’’ In Bakhtin’s philosophy, the corporeal experience of life cannot be separated from the sociality of life because these are two moments of the same experience. That is, an artist with admirable artistic visualization brings into focus corporeality entwined with sociality. Bringing these two moments together in art means to express something of the experience lived by one appreciating a work of art. In his discussion on artistic expression, Bakhtin (1990) addressed how one’s own embodied felt experience is expressed in the art itself. Nowhere is this meaning more clear than in Bakhtin’s (1984b) discussion of the grotesque imagery in the work of Rabelais. Grotesque imagery where the body is catalogued, exaggerated, and blown out of proportion constitutes a central motif throughout Rabelais’ work. Consider Bakhtin’s discussion of the character Friar John in Rabelais (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981, p. 172; 1984b, pp. 193-196). The fine anatomical detail of how Friar John is described as killing and dismembering his opponents is experienced as excruciating (Rabelais, 1946, p. 148). Bakhtin notes how Rabelais expresses detail where the body is ‘‘manifested in its structure and all the processes of life’’ (1981, p. 173). Bakhtin thereby claims that the grotesque image of the body is not expressed for the purposes of glib exhibitionism, as in a gratuitously violent horror film. The use of grotesque imagery accomplishes the important task of bringing readers into embodied awareness of the images present. Grotesque imagery of the sort we find in Rabelais brings about an embodied participation with the work, in that there is something in the work that the reader feels she has in common with the work itself—the reader may feel ill at ease with a detailed description of people’s dismemberment. Readers of Rabelais experience an embodied participation in their corporeal response to the aesthetic imagery. Not only did Rabelais and his contemporaries have such an experience, those of us who read him today go through a comparable experience. To understand how this is possible is to take a step towards understanding what it was about the self that is expressed in Dostoevsky by way of expressive realism. At several points in his discussions of Rabelais, Bakhtin wrote that the body should be thought of as a social entity and not a personal entity. He wrote that ‘‘[t]he individual feels that he is an indissoluble part of the community, a member of the people’s mass body. In this whole the individual body ceases to a certain extent to be itself’’ (1984b, p. 255; emphasis added). One enters into unity with others by virtue of being caught up in the ‘‘people’s mass body’’ in enacting a corporeal style

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along with others. In the act of living traditions together, people come to have a felt sense of life that brings about a felt unity with others. In short, we come to learn what it means to frown by frowning along with others. Our own ‘‘inner’’ experience, which grounds our emotional-evaluative stance in and towards the world, is ultimately social by virtue of our living life with others. People participate in activities together that are re-enacted time and time again and, in the course of joint participation in social practices, establish a communal style of corporeal expression. Sympathy reaches its most acute point when our understanding of the experience of another involves a felt sense of what the other is in the midst of experiencing, instead of an intellectual or conceptual grasp of the other’s experience (see Poole, 2001 regarding such sympathy). Two persons grieving over lost children cannot be said to have the same experience because the circumstances of each are different. However, the communal body into which both have been socialized brings them onto a plane of communally felt experience. Each can look upon the other and have a felt sympathy of the other by virtue of the embodied normativity into which they have been socialized. Hence, Bakhtin enables us to propose that even our dearly held experiential emotional-evaluative experiences are social. We have proposed elsewhere that the inseparability of sociality and the body is central to Bakhtin’s notion of ‘‘speech genres’’ (Cresswell & Baerveldt, 2006). The speech genre is a notion that has been noted by several Bakhtin scholars to be a consistently central idea throughout Bakhtin’s work (Brandist, 2002; Gardiner, 1992). We proposed that a speech genre is, for Bakhtin (1986), the embodied expression of a community. For example, members of the military may use a common jargon, walk with measured strides and a straight back, and characterize nations in terms of enemies and allies. While Bakhtin used the term ‘‘speech’’ in reference to speech genres, it should be noted that we are illuminating how he used this notion to conceptualize a complete and deeply pervasive way of being similarly enacted by members of a community. In other words, a speech genre is another way of describing the communal body lived by members of a community that constitutes a ‘‘concrete sociohistorical base’’ of aesthetic creation (see Creswell & Teucher, 2011). One learns to competently embody a speech genre in a tacit manner, such that it is unreflectively lived according to a felt normativity (Baerveldt & Voestermans, 2005; Cresswell & Baerveldt, 2006). An appropriate way of enacting a world is deeply normative, such that it is not often questioned but rather lived as given. In the case of the novels, a kind of life is expressed that is both lived without reflection and treated as given by members of a speech genre. For example, descriptions of the dismembered body are simply taken as being revolting in their offense of our sensibilities and this revulsion is expressed in the art. This means that the lived experience is one of acting out a speech genre as if it were the naturally appropriate manner of expression. Such lived experience is, for all intents and purposes, lived unreflectively such that it is all but unknown. Bakhtin’s (1990, 1993) early work on aesthetic activity addressed the role of the artist in light of this unreflective living of the ‘‘concrete sociohistorical base.’’ He claimed (1990) that an artist is able to ‘‘consummate’’ and ‘‘give shape’’ to what is

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lived unreflectively yet compels our life. An artist’s creative use of the materials of expression, such as words in the case of the novelist, gives new meanings that bend their traditional use. This newness is the very creative quality that brings a reader outside of the life she normally lives. When reading a great novel, the work brings one into apprehension of aspects of one’s own life that are usually tacitly lived. In other words, an artist grants a reader a purview by which she can get outside her continually tacit enactment of a speech genre. A novelist like Dostoevsky, for example, expresses speech genres in the dialogue of his heroes and a reader finds their dialogue evocative. The artist expresses something that is already lived in an embodied practice by members of a speech genre and enables them to get partly outside the speech genre so that its place amidst other genres in society is illuminated (of course, one cannot step outside a speech genre wholly because it is so deeply woven into the body). A work of art, in its creative genius, extends beyond a speech genre because it exposes life’s tacit livedness. Presumably, Bakhtin also experienced such a revelatory experience in his reading of literature. Art permits content, that is, tacitly lived speech genres, to be found and seen for the first time in the way that it enables one to see what one already lives. An adequate critique of an artist should thereby not regard the way that the artist failed or succeeded to represent reality but the degree to which the artist faithfully expresses the communally embodied world of experience. The realism in the novel is an articulation that is faithful to what is embodied as given to members of a community while also exposing their lives as situated within a particular sociocultural tradition—making life less given. For example, authors of novels only bend the meanings of words enough to prompt such exposure, because too much innovation would make their novels nothing but nonsensical foreignness. Rather, Dostoevsky’s artistic expression brings about a dawning awareness of a life already lived.

Implications for extension of the Dialogical Self It is Bakhtin’s work on the novel that has partly inspired Hermans (e.g., Hermans, 2001, 2002, 2003; Hermans et al., 1992; Hermans & Kempen, 1993, 1995), but Hermans has not taken Bakhtin’s discussion of realism into account. In what remains in this section, we will spell out how neglecting expressive realism leads to a neglect of embodied experience in Hermans’ work. Hermans tends to follow Bakhtin to some degree by turning to the use of aesthetic notions such as metaphors in an effort to do away with monologic realism. His discussion often revolves around Bakhtin’s ‘‘metaphor’’ of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel (e.g., Hermans, 2001, 2003; Hermans et al., 1992; Hermans & Kempen, 1993). Hermans discusses the notion of metaphor particularly in terms of Lakoff & Johnson’s (1980; and especially Johnson, 1987) work on metaphors, which rests on what they call ‘‘experiential realism’’ (see Hermans et al., 1992; Hermans & Kempen, 1993). Experiential realism and the notion of metaphor it involves emphasize how we construct our knowledge-of reality by understanding

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one conceptual domain in terms of another. Hermans and Kempen (1993, p. 9) state, for example, ‘‘metaphor is an indispensable structure of human understanding by which we can figuratively comprehend our world. . . [it] is an implicit comparison between two unlike entities. The quality of one entity is transferred to the other entity’’ (emphasis added). Thus, Hermans generally looks to the polyphonic novel as a metaphor by which we can conceptually understand the human mind, presumably to cast a new light on the latter. The important point is that his reliance upon this notion of metaphor traps their interpretation of Bakhtin on a conceptual plane: Bakhtin’s metaphor of the polyphonic novel becomes a way of conceptually ‘‘comprehending’’ the self and mind. What will become apparent is that this view pervades the kind of theorizing that comes forward in the Dialogical Self. We concur with Hermans’ efforts at moving away from monologic realism. Our concern is not one of expressive realism in opposition to monologic realism. Rather, we are concerned with where to go after moving away from monologic realism. While it is unclear exactly what ‘brand’ of social constructionism is at stake for Hermans, it is clear that Hermans draws upon experiential realism and is generally concerned with socially constructed narratives that constitute conceptual knowledge-of experienced life, instead of being concerned with embodied experience. Namely, reliance on experiential realism, despite what the name implies, neglects experientially lived life. Where Herman’s reliance upon Lakoff and Johnson’s work on metaphor keeps his interpretation of Bakhtin on a conceptual plane, our discussion of Bakhtin is more concerned with how the bodily living of self is socially constituted. Acknowledging the social body inherent in expressive realism opens the door for an account of the experiential immediacy of life seen in disgust, revulsion, irresistible care for one’s children and so on.

What expressive realism made available to Bakhtin We will now turn to an explication of what Bakhtin claimed was revealed by Dostoevsky and others who managed to extend beyond their own ‘‘concrete socio-historical base.’’ Unfortunately, space permits only a preliminary sketch of our proposed extension of the Dialogical Self (for more detail see Cresswell, submitted; Cresswell & Teucher, 2011). We will sketch out what expressive realism made visible to Bakhtin about dialogue and how it can be extended beyond the manner in which Hermans conceives of it.

A Bakhtinian view on dialogue To consider the notion of dialogue in Bakhtin’s work, we will address what he wrote about heroes in the novel. When Bakhtin approached the heroes in the novel, he approached them with special interest in the particular point of view that heroes had (e.g., 1984a, pp. 47–48). The heroes’ points of view were expressive of the social corporeality lived by a community. In other words, Bakhtin treated heroes as expressive of speech genres as we described them above (see 1984a, p. 104).

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What is entailed in speech genres is the embodied experience of life that is socially constituted. It is fair to say that Bakhtin saw this aspect of human life through his own engagement with authors. That is, the embodied experiences expressed in the dialogue of the heroes brought Bakhtin into awareness of how we also are experientially engaged in life even though this engagement is socially constituted. This awareness shaped how Bakhtin conceived of dialogue. He wrote: dialogic relationships are a much broader phenomenon than mere rejoinders in dialogue. . . they are an almost universal phenomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life—in general, everything that has meaning and significance. (1984a, p. 40).

Dialogicality cannot thereby be easily reduced to turn taking between personae, real or imaginary. That is, in contrast to how it is often approached, dialogue is about more than turn-taking that is rhetorically applied to construct knowledge-of self. A passage in Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics revolves around dialogue and it illuminates the richness of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue (see Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 183). Here he indicates that there is a ‘‘metalinguistic’’ or ‘‘extralinguistic’’ quality to dialogue and we propose that this quality makes it distinguishable from discursive rejoinders. Bakhtin’s understanding of how dialogue is ‘‘metalinguistic’’/‘‘extralinguistic’’ is expressed in social corporeality. A community speaks its own metalanguage in the sense that its members enact a generic manner of embodied being. Enacting a speech genre is expressing a cultural tradition that is so deeply ingrained that it is personally experienced in its tacit livedness (Bakhtin, 1990, 1993). There is thereby a deeply embodied social corporeality that is expressed in dialogue and it is this social corporeality that is not captured by considering dialogue in terms of rhetorically organized turn-taking. To put it simply, we propose a conceptual distinction where discursive rejoinders pertain to the socially constructed conceptual knowledge-of self and dialogue in the polyphonic novel is expressive of our own ongoing embodied expressions of communities. This means that, for Bakhtin, his work on the novel revealed to him that dialogicality involves experience of life that is not reducible to discursive rejoinders. Rather, discursive rejoinders—including the knowledge of experience that is constructed by them—rest upon experientially lived speech genres. When Bakhtin was writing about dialogicality, we propose that he was addressing how people are fundamentally social, even at the embodied plane that compels action, and they live as expressions of sociality. We will shortly articulate what such action implies in regards to the self but we must discuss a little more about dialogue before doing so. When Bakhtin writes about dialogical relationships, we propose that he is writing about the juxtaposition of speech genres in a societal condition of polyphony. Just as society is constituted in the juxtaposition of speech genres that are expressed in the lives of people, the polyphonic novel involves the expression of speech genres in the dialogue among heroes (e.g., Bakhtin, 1984a, pp. 27 & 40). Note how, for

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Bakhtin, the distinction between the novel and ostensive ‘reality’ is constantly blurred because he sees the former as expressive of the latter. For Bakhtin, the polyphonic novel is an aesthetic expression of the polyphonic condition of society: both involve juxtaposition of social bodies expressed in our actions. What we suggest Bakhtin saw in authors such as Dostoevsky was the polyphonic condition of society that was already lived: authors such as Dostoevsky and Rabelais lived in polyphony and they expressed it in their novels. Bakhtin in turn recognized the polyphonic condition in which he was already tacitly living. In this manner, novelistic aesthetic expression brought Bakhtin into awareness of life that he already lived, permitting ‘‘content to be found and seen for the first time.’’ It was also the dialogicality of the polyphonic novel that enabled it to go beyond the socio-historical base from which it sprang. The dialogue among heroes expressive of speech genres is universal and not the speech genres themselves. It is the juxtaposition of ways of living that occurs in a polyphonic society and not any single speech genre itself that we suggest was made available to Bakhtin. Aesthetic expression made Bakhtin aware that life is irreducibly polyphonic and it thereby always involves the dialogical juxtaposition of speech genres expressed in the lives of embodied individuals. In other words, Bakhtin’s discussion of aesthetic activity is the articulation that he and presumably everyone else living in a pluralist society was tacitly living life in a polyphonic condition.

Hermans’ view of dialogicality relative to Bakhtin Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue can extend how it is used by Hermans, who does not address the notion of social corporeality and how it relates to dialogue. Hermans and Kempen only hint at sociality and the body in their treatise, The Dialogical Self (1993). Instead of expanding this discussion into a theory dwelling on the interrelationship between sociality and corporeality, they develop a notion of corporeality in terms of ‘‘positioning.’’ They argue that people in the social world are positioned relative to one another in metaphorical terms of spatial placement. For example, one refers to one’s superior as being above and one’s inferior to being below. Drawing upon Lakoff and Johnson (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Johnson, 1987), this metaphorical positioning is mapped onto the mind—the metaphorical positioning is internalized. That is, personae (including the likes of parents, teachers, mentors, friends, and so on) are incorporated into the psyche and constitute an intra-psychic population of characters, and these engage in inter-subjective exchange. Accordingly, they believe Bakhtin is praising Dostoevsky for representing a ‘‘society of mind’’ (Hermans, 2002) populated by independent personae positioned relative to one another in a spatially metaphoric sense. The intra-psychic cosmopolitan of positioned personae is what they call an ‘‘imaginal landscape’’ (1993, p. 58) that constitutes the Dialogical Self. It is in this manner that Hermans argues for a conception of the ‘‘body in the mind’’ (Hermans et al., 1992, p. 25). In this context, when Hermans writes about ‘‘dialogue,’’ he generally writes about it in terms of ‘‘intersubjective exchange’’ among real or imagined

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interlocutors (Hermans & Kempen, 1993). Self, he argues, can be thought of as a story that is generated when people give an account of their experience. It is by way of such a conception of dialogue that he treats the self as being constructed. Drawing upon a narrative conception of self (e.g., McAdams, 1985), he argues that personae struggle for an opportunity to tell a self-story in the midst of inter-subjective exchange. Hermans thereby tends to draw upon a discursive conception of dialogue to explain how self-narrative comes to be told. In the course of inter-subjective exchange, multiple voices employ rhetorical strategies in order have their version of the self-narrative told or come to the fore. The self is treated as dialogical, and thereby social, by virtue of such inter-subjective exchange. That is, he treats dialogue as intersubjective exchange and, in so doing, treats it as ‘‘mere rejoinders,’’ in Bakhtin’s parlance (1984a, p. 40). A Bakhtin-inspired view of dialogue can extend what Hermans put forward. We can now see that the manner in which dialogue involves socially constituted embodied engagement in life, and this can be left unaccounted for. Instead of attending to the narrative knowledge-of self that is socially constructed in intersubjective exchange, our view of dialogue can account for how people act from within embodied experience that is itself social. By neglecting expressive realism, it is possible to run the risk of conceiving of sociality in terms of inter-subjective exchange only—denuding it of the expression of the lived social body. Dialogue, we propose, needs to be understood as expressive of the juxtaposition of personally experienced social corporeality, and this grants us a richer role of sociality beyond that of intersubjective exchange. Ultimately, such an account of dialogue leads to changes regarding the constitution of the self.

Implications: Towards a Bakhtin-inspired view on self Recall that Bakhtin was interested in the purviews of the heroes as they were expressed in novelistic art, and this means that he was interested in how the heroes are expressions of social corporeality. The aesthetic gift of Dostoevsky and others lies in how they allow us to see the world from each of the heroes’ perspectives. We gain sympathy for the kind of world that heroes live within—a kind of world that is generic to members of a speech genre. Dostoevsky was able to express, through heroes, the experience of living life in social corporeality (Bakhtin, 1990, pp. 37 & 98). This artistic activity has implications for what it revealed about the self (or ‘‘inner man,’’ in Bakhtin’s terms; 1984a, pp. 60–62). Expressive realism in the heroes of Dostoevsky made visible to Bakhtin how the self is constituted in life lived as a constant unfolding enactment of speech genres. As such, Bakhtin was not referring to the self in terms of private experience but rather in terms of embodied experience that is socially constituted. The constitution of the self becomes dialogical in light of the polyphonic condition, but it does not become less social. Bakhtin’s (1984a) notion of polyphony (‘‘heteroglossia’’ in Bakhtin, 1981) entails the claim that there are many speech genres that constitute society and that an individual can participate in many

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of them. As one moves from one speech genre to another, different kinds of self are enacted; different expressions of the self are constituted in enacting social corporeality. Because the most personal experience is an enactment of a speech genre and Bakhtin takes us away from a notion of core self that remains unchanged from situation to situation, any form of the classic distinction between the individual and the cultural does not exist in a Bakhtinian view of the self. This strong position that Bakhtin takes on the social constitution of self arguably runs the risk of dissolving the individual self wholly into culture. There would be no account for stylization and uniqueness that distinguishes self from others if Bakhtin stopped at this point. Dialogue, in the manner we explained above, becomes crucial for his understanding of the emergence of individual selfhood (for more detail see Cresswell & Teucher, 2011). Bakhtin argues that individual selfhood, the ‘‘genuine life of a personality,’’ begins at a point of ‘‘dialogic penetration’’ where there is some sort of revelation that takes place (1984a, p. 59). The kind of revelation that takes place is one where we see ourselves from a perspective ‘‘outside’’ a speech genre that we live. In short, it comes about when we see ourselves as another. Bakhtin described how we see another as follows: ‘‘The other’s body. . . is unified and shaped by cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic categories, and by the sum total of external, visual, and tangible features that make up the plastic and pictorial values in it’’ (1990, p. 51). In other words, we see another as an instance of a speech genre and we thereby see her enactment of a speech genre, consequently seeing her enacting predictable generic actions. Outsideness, for Bakhtin, is basically seeing ourselves in this manner, as if we were another. Bakhtin (1990) argued that it is possible to obtain outsideness by way of sympathizing with another. One can come to have a sense of a different speech genre in dialogue with another. In time spent together, people come to recognize generic expectancies that each takes for granted. This recognition occurs in the countless faux pas and other such instances of confusion that range from minor instances to large scale breaches in expectations. Someone may see another’s behavior as unnatural to himself but natural to another and reciprocally see his own behavior as unnatural to another. That is, another has a different purview and does not take for granted what I take for granted but I can come to sympathize with her purview. Where there are points of difference between self and other, the proverbial ‘seeing through the eyes of another’ allows one to apprehend one’s own speech genre from the outside, penetrating its tacit livedness in dialogue. We propose that the experience of ‘‘dialogic penetration’’ is coming to see oneself from partly an outside perspective. We suggest that Bakhtin thought that this aspect of the dialogue among heroes expressed how people engage in a ‘‘sideways glance’’ to take into account another who they know to live a different social corporeality (1984 a, p. 32). Hence, Bakhtin (1990) argued that sympathizing with another enables ambivalence: people experience commitment from within one speech genre while simultaneously apprehending, in the experiential sense of the term, that another has a different commitment. There is ambivalence because, on the one hand, one has an experiential obligation

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to live true to oneself (as expressive of a speech genre) and, on the other hand, one has a sympathetic obligation to another. That is, the polyphonic condition requires that people’s actions be an answer that is faithful to their own speech genres and those of others at the same time. On the basis of Bakhtin, we also suggest that such ambivalence comes from people’s movement through life. New dialogical juxtapositions between self and other bring about a potential juxtaposition relative to one’s own past. As people age and cultivate competency in more speech genres, their actions from the past also come into new light. They must thereby cast a sideways glance to another and to oneself-from-the-past. In being compelled to answer on these multiple fronts, they again come to points of ambivalence. The polyphonic condition of society means that, in every moment, there are many speech genres to which people simultaneously feel compelled. Our claim, on the basis of Bakhtin, is that our actions are undertaken at the nexus of these demands. Such moments of ambivalence constitute the fertile ground for individual stylization as people search for means of acting that satisfy conflicting obligations in a polyphonic milieu. Bakhtin saw how much of life was not simple and how people can often not easily choose one genre over another. As such, he wrote that such ambivalence brings about the potential for creativity that is expressed in attempted resolution of dialogical ambivalence (1981, 1984b, 1990). Stylization means to tailor the expressive style of a speech genre insofar as the expression is individualized (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 358–362). To manage dialogical ambivalence, people individually stylize their actions in order to make themselves acceptable to both genres. A single action could involve the stylized enactment of a speech genre in a way that also fits another speech genre. By way of individual stylization people are able to remain faithful to themselves and to another at the same time. Therefore, we propose the following about the Dialogical Self: to say that the self is dialogical is to say that it is an ongoing stylistic attempt to manage ambivalence among continually shifting obligations that are personally experienced yet socially constituted. There are implications for this conception of the Dialogical Self in light of our discussion of art ‘‘outstripping’’ the ‘‘concrete sociohistorical base.’’ Bakhtin understood good art as extending beyond itself in the sense that it went beyond the communal body from within which it was written. We argue that there is a parallel to the act of self-creation. When one engages in individual stylization one is no longer expressing one speech genre. Rather, one is expressing multiple genres at once in a creative act. The creative act of self-creation is just like that of the author who brings together multiple speech genres in one work. As such, people go beyond expressing any single communal body in their self-creation while still remaining faithful to the genres in question (Cresswell, submitted, involves a detailed discussion of such aesthetic self-creation). Bakhtin stated that Dostoevsky understood ‘‘more deeply the extensive and well-developed contradictions which co-existed among people – among people, not among ideas in a single consciousness’’ (1984a, p. 27, emphasis added) and that

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‘‘Dostoevsky offers, in artistic form, something like a sociology of consciousnesses – to be sure, only on the level of coexistence’’ (1984a, p. 32, emphasis added). While we explained that the self involves the enactment of social corporeality, it also involves the experience of ambivalence that comes about in dialogical tension in our relationships with others from different communities—others who live different communal bodies. Bakhtin’s vision of the self that is expressed in authors is a vision of human experience of tension among continually shifting obligations that are socially constituted and inseparable from our dialogue with others. Hence, the self is dialogical by virtue of embodied ambivalences.

Conclusion We offer the proposal that Bakhtin was interested in articulating a theory of self that addresses life as it is lived in its embodied richness. Yet, he did not relent in holding to the claim that such embodied experience is socially constituted. Rather than dealing with knowledge-of self, Bakhtin dealt with the constitution of self at a deeply embodied level that involved tensions and ambivalences that enable individual stylization. It is our hope to bring to the research community: (1) a revived interest in Bakhtin and his work on embodiment; and (2) a revived interest in the act of self-creation in light of (1). We have explored Bakhtin’s approach to aesthetic expression in order to come to propose ideas for the revision of the Dialogical Self. While this sketch is preliminary and more detailed work needs to be done in regards to the exposition of Bakhtin’s discussion of heroes, authorship, and their expressive significance, we have offered up an outline for an extended version of the Dialogical Self that may provide a contribution to understanding the sociocultural constitution of self. Relative to Hermans’ current version of the Dialogical Self, our extension brings the entwinement of sociality and corporeality to bear on a sociocultural view of self. A consequence is that the Dialogical Self is potentially capable of casting light on the embodied immediacy of life. Moreover, it sheds light on the embodied ambivalences inherent in dialogicality and takes us beyond a conception of dialogue that only involves inter-subjective exchange. It can potentially offer insight into the stylistic ways in which these ambivalences are expressed, transformed, and sometimes partially resolved in individual stylization. Acknowledgments We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the participants in the weekly Cultural Psychology and Aesthetics Seminar at the University of Alberta Department of Psychology. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the helpful contributions of Chris Lepine, Leo Mos, and Melinda Pinfold.

Notes 1. We recognize that Dialogical Self theory is also informed by American Pragmatism and William James in particular. We focus on Bakhtin in particular not because there are

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problems with other theorists who inspire Dialogical Self theory, but because he offers a way of addressing the experiential livedness of life that we think can be added to current theorizing on the Dialogical Self. 2. The reason that we equate the notion of the ‘‘inner man’’ with self is that Bakhtin’s early work addressed the notion of ‘‘self-expression’’ (e.g., Bakhtin, 1990, p. 72) in much the same way the Dostoevsky’s discussion of the ‘‘inner man’’ is discussed here.

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Author Biographies James Cresswell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Cultural Studies at Northwest Nazarene University. He is interested in examining Bakhtin’s later work through the lens of Bakhtin’s early phenomenology and aesthetics. Additionally, he has applied this theoretical work in the areas of acculturation psychology, ontogenetic development, discursive psychology, and religious experience. Cor Baerveldt is a cultural psychologist and Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. He is interested in the discursive and expressive aspects of self and emotion, the psychology of bi-culturalism and the historical and philosophical foundations of cultural psychology.

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