Speak Into the Mirror: A Story of Linguistic Anthropology

John Doe

1988

Chapters 1-11 of this book have presented the conventional anthropological-linguistic account of language and its relationship to social life. Chapter 12 introduces an alternative view called "translinguistics," one based on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Chapter 12 An Introduction to Translinguistics (pages 183-92)

Mikhail Bakhtin was shaping translinguistics at the same time that Franz Boas was shaping American anthropology. And the forces that drove tbese two pioneers were similar. Both scholars were acutely aware of the oppression and suffering that had been wrought in the name of modern progress in science and technology. They recognized that modern progress means plush living for some, but to everyone modernity brings a sense of homeless ness, of groundlessness, and, specifically, a sense of the loss of community. Bakhtin and Boas both shared the view of John Donne who in 1611 wrote:

T'is all in peeces, all cohaerance gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,For every man alone thinkes he hath got To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

Gone, Donne says, are the ties that bind people together. In modern times each person stands alone, self-generated and selfgrounded, significant by reason of what is within rather than by what is between.

Driven by a thirst to reconstitute the lost coherence of social life, both Bakhtin and Boas developed utopian disciplines. Boas, anthropology; Bakhtin, translinguistics (literally, beyond linguistics). Both their disciplines aimed to portray the nature of human community and to move modern humans a step in the direction of recovering a sense of being at home in the world, and of knowing, as Chief Dan George says in the film Little Big Man, "where the center of the earth is."

Boas's program was, we have seen (chapter nine), an ingenious blend of scientific method, of a Romanticism that celebrates the nobility of primitive peoples, and of language-centeredness. Being language-centered, Boasian anthropologists assumed that a common language was the foundation for shared values, thoughts, and feelings. And, in his view, shared values, thoughts, and feelings are the core of human communities.

Bakhtin's program differed from Boas's on all three fronts.Whereas Boas confronted the problem of modern social life as a scientist, Bakhtin did so as a theologian/philosopher/literary critic. Whereas Boas's program is shot through with backwardlooking Romanticism, Bakhtin's program is forward-looking in the sense that it finds communal potential in the bustling jostling noise of modern life. And finally whereas Boas's program is language-centered, Bakhtin's is communication-centered.

Bakhtin's Theology Bakhtin's translinguistics arises out of a tradition of Russian Orthodox theology (Clark and Holquist 1984). And, as we are about to see, this specific tradition of Russian Orthodox theology is diametrically opposed to the theological tradition that undergirds the practice of modern science. If we are to understand Bakhtin's aversion to a science of language and society, we must explore the contrasting theological foundations of translinguistics and of science. As these foundations contrast so too do trans linguistics and the scientific language study contrast.

We have seen, in chapter eleven, that the practice of science in the seventeenth century had a great deal in common with the religious practices of the Quakers in that same century. Moreover, both the scientism and the Quakerism of that era had a great deal in common with gnosticisms that preceded and fundamentalisms that. followed--the root of the word "gnosticism" is the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge. All these "isms" share a common feature: they all assume a dualist world in which God, mind, and knowledge are essentially good while world, body, and society are essentially evil.

Along with this dualism, these "isms" a'll assume that Christ bridged the division between God and world through his resurrection. The resurrection is nothing less than a divine intervention into the world, specifically for the purpose of elevating humanity above the level of the world and the body and above the mortality that is characteristic of the world and the body. In this view, Christ's resurrection is the central mystery of Christianity; the resurrection is God's gift to humans, a divine liberation from the threat of death.

The gnostics had a very clear sense of how this divine gift of the resurrection fitted into the scheme of human life (Pagels 1979). First, they reckoned that every human being is born with a spark of divine Light, a share in God's life which was primordially lured down into the world by the forces of evil in a time before time. The resurrection is, in effect, God's promise that if each individual cultivates that spark, then God's Light will spring into a bonfire whose power is so great as to virtually raise the individual beyond the worldly level of human mortality.

The gnostic prescription for proper cultivation of divine Light is this: first, one must flee the world, the flesh, and all that is associated therewith; and second, one must cultivate the mind through prayer, meditation, and study. Hermitages, monasteries, convents, and later, of course, universities, arose as institutions through which to pursue a gnostic salvation through the cultivation of mind, consciousness, and knowledge.

In the Renaissance we can see a resurgence of gnostic thought and practice. The counsel of the fifteenth century spiritual guide, Thomas 'it Kempis, summarizes the antagonistic stance of resurrectional Christianity towards worldly human relationships: "Every time I go out into the world, I come back less a man." The great Thomas More's life is, in a sense, a study in gnosticism for he inveighed against the sham and pretense of courtly life on the one hand while he searched for a more substantial inner reality on the other. He was thus "poised between engagement and detachment," tortured by "perpetual self-estrangement" and "forever aware of (his life's) own unreality" (Greenblatt 1980: 31). Such is the gnostic way.

The Quakerism of the seventeenth century is founded on a similar resurrectional Christian principle of salvation through the cultivation of divine Light within. However, the Quakers did not flee the world by erecting artificial communities for meditation. Instead they confronted the world head on by speaking God's truth in the face of worldly, societal iniquity. Their calling was to witness to the Light within. No human relationship was to stand in the way of such witnessing. For example, since, in God's Light, all humans are equal, Quakers refused to employ conventions of politeness which implied social distinctions. They would not doff their hats to others, because such behavior failed to witness to the message of the Inner Light, a message of human equality.

Scientists, too, like Quakers, aimed to speak the truth...no matter what. From the mid-seventeenth century to the present, scientific practice has implied a flight from human relationships beca use human relationships are sources of bias which cloud one's clear vision of the truth. For Quakers and scientists alike, human relationships are worldly distractions from life's central task of nourishing the growth of God's Light in the mind.

The current practice of science has dispensed with the talk of God's truth and of Inner Light, though, as Carl Becker (1932) demonstrates, such talk was not far from the lips of scientists through the eighteenth century. However, the view that human relationships are distractions' from proper conduct of science remains as sturdy a pillar of science today as it was in the seventeenth century. Modern science, like the theological foundation on which it rests, is thoroughly anti-social at least in its approach to data-gathering.

Bakhtin's kenotic Russian Orthodox Christianity starts from a Christian mystery different from all the "isms" described above. And it leads to a different understanding of the human condition and to a different perspective on human knowledge. In the simplest terms, Bakhtin's kenotic Christianity celebrates, rather than obviates, human relationships.

The central event in kenotic Christianity is not the resurrection but the incarnation, the event in which God becomes human. Kenotic, incarnational theology focuses on this event of God becoming human--the root of the word "kenotic" is the Greek word kenosis which means an emptying, as in Christ's emptying himself of all divinity. Kenoticism finds in that event a distinct promise of salvation: because of the incarnation, the world is sacralized; the world is transformed into a world-full-of-God. Because of the incarnation, there is no longer a dualism of God above and world below, but only a monism of divinized materiality (panentheism). In the kenotic world view, the humblest aspects of life become holy; the blackened pot becomes a sacred vessel.

The human challenge, seen from the perspective of kenotic Christianity, is not to flee the world, but to embrace it and celebrate it. The human challenge is not to avoid human relationships or to convert them, but rather to give oneself over wholly to human relationships even as God gave himself over wholly to the human.

The kenoticist's commitment to the world, however, must be a searching commitment, not by any means carefree or hedonistic. An unsearching embrace of the world may be a misplaced embrace: the Romans, according to Augustine, certainly embraced their city and all that it stood for; but, failing to search for the "city of God" within their "city of man," their celebration of the city and its tradition was inappropria te. It is for that reason, he argued, that Rome fell. In summary, the kenoticist must live in the world while searching for the divinity within it.

Kenotic, incarnational Christianity has had its moments in the limelight, but, in Europe at least, it has been overshadowed, in the course of the past 2000 years, by resurrectional Christianity. Many of the earliest Christian communities on record were decidedly keno tic in their operation, but Pa ul's resurrectional theology gradually came to dominate the early Christian scene. One example of that domination: early on, the Eucharistic celebration involved a communal feast, but Paul's reprimand (See I Cor. 11: 20ff) separated out the worldly feasting from the sacred celebration.

Augustine, as suggested above, championed a subtle and carefully thought-out kenotic sociology/theology in his City of God (P. Brown 1967). However, he is most often remembered either for his early Manichean, dualist views, or for his role in laying the groundwork for the consensus in Christian theology that persisted in Europe for a thousand years and which became increasingly dualistic and resurrectional as it ran its course.

Recently, Teilhard de Chardin (1959) worked out an extraordinary kenotic theory which portrayed the divine as evolving through biological and social evolutionary processes. For that theory, he was sanctioned by the Church. Today, Teilhard is most often thought of as a utopian dreamer and a gullible dupe in the Piltdown hoax.

Again, and even more recently, kenoticism has emerged in what have been called "Death of God" theologies. Harvey Cox (1965), for example, described modernization, with its homelessness, anonymity, and its commitment to science and technology, as part of the working out of the divine plan, a plan which was set into motion with the mystery of the incarnation. The jury is still out on such proposals, but if press and publicity are any indication of trends, then "Death of God" theologies are dead, and fundamentalisms of all sorts are thriving.

Russian Orthodoxy, in contrast to European Christianities, has long been kenotic and incarnational in its perspective. And, not accidentally, Bakhtin turned to that kenotic Christianity for the principles of his translinguistics. Between 1918 and 1929, during which time the bulk of Bakhtin's ideas were drafted, he was searching for the utopia which the Revolution was supposed to introduce to the world. He did not look in the direction of a resurrectional Christianity which discouraged human relationships. Instead he turned to his own Russian Orthodox kenotic tradition which celebrated human relationships and human community. Like the Rabelais he wrote about, Bakhtin reached out and wrapped his arms around the world with all its carnivalesque noise and laughter and struggle. Bakhtin's program for living is summarized in his counsel: strong drink, tireless sex, and conversations long into the night. With this counsel, Bakhtin was not advising loose living. Rather he was advancing a kenotic celebration of human relationships and all that goes with them.

The Style of Theological Discourse

The styles or interactional manners of kenotics and gnostics influenced succeeding generations far more than the contents of their theologies. The immersion of the keno tic sage in relationships and the detachment of the gnostic seer established models of behavior, prototypes of social life which were perf ormed, invested with value, and perpetuated in the social lives of the generations of people who lived under the sway of these Christianities. In concrete terms, it is not so much what Augustine wrote that was significant. It was how he wrote, always collaboratively while immersed in long conversations with his friends.Similarly, it was not what Thomas a Kempis said. It was his ascetic and detached demeanor that helped to encourage the rebirth of gnostic detachment in the modern world.

Unity and Diversity The utopian community that Bakhtin envisioned and towards which his translinguistics is directed is a world of diversity rather than a world of unity. In this regard, Bakhtin's kenotic utopia differs from the gnostic utopias that have dominated Western literature.

Since Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, Western utopian writers have sought to outline the perfect community. And always their outlines have circled around the issue of unity. One reason for this fixation on the unity of the ideal community is that religious thinking strongly influenced those utopian writers (Manuel and Manuel 1979), and, in religion, communites have almost always been reckoned in terms of shared beliefs (Bellah 1958). Hence, guided by their religious assumptions, utopian writers generally assumed that the sharing of beliefs is the first step toward the perfect community.

The problem with this view is that no real human communities anywhere show signs of consistent sharing toward perfect unity. As Haraway (1986: 82) has observed: "The tragedy of the West is rooted in number: one is too few and two are too many. To be one should mean to be unified, whole; that should be enough, yet it is lonely. But all human community involves difference. Difference is a challenge to autonomy, to wholeness. Memory, always about the origin, is a bout a lost oneness imagined as sameness. The telos or goal is about perfect union. The origin and the purpose, then both are about the desire to be One."

Like the earl y utopian wr iters, Boasian linguists-anthropologists have usually dreamt of harmonious communities whose members were all of one mind. However, their descriptions of social life continually turned up diversity, rather than uniformity; and as a result, Romantic utopians have always been on the defensive, trying to justify their assumption of unity in the face of their findings of diversity. Sometimes the justifications simply did not work, e.g. the field of culture and personality studies in American anthropology, a field which was closely linked to linguistic studies (Aberle 1968), foundered on the problem of diversity (A.. Wallace 1961). Sometimes the justifications involved the principle, usually associated with structuralisms, that abstract unities lie beneath the surface of concrete realities, e.g. the history of sociolinguistics (chapter seven) is a history of explaining away diversity as a superficial and accidental condition which hides the sharedness and uniformity which are central to a human community.

But by far the commonest strategy used by anthropologists, has been to portray diversity and conflict as inventions of modern life. In contrast to modern communities, primitive communities were unified and coherent. To the anthropologist, the clearest form of a unified utopian community is to be found by looking backward in time. The primitive community of the past, uniform and stable, has been the flag around which utopian American anthropology has rallied.

Bakhtin was vehemently opposed to this "orientation toward unity," whether in the form of backward gazing anthropology or inward gazing structuralism. Regarding programs of language study which emphasize unity, he said that they are "in service to the great centralizing tendencies of European verbal-ideological life" (1981: 274). And he reckoned that if there were ever to have been such a unanimity it would have led nowhere but to "an endless silence of homogenizing harmony" (Ibid., p. 136). In this regard, the utopian translinguistics developed by Bakhtin differs from most Western utopian programs: translinguistics celebrates diversity rather than unity.

Bakhtin's translinguistics expects to find diversity in social life. Translinguists expect the interactions of people to be filled with struggle, conflict, and interruption (Silverman and Torode 1980). Translinguists expect that individuals will continually vy with one another for control of the interactions in which they come together. And translinguists expect all this because they consider individuals themselves to be a jumble of conflicting voices, each in competition with others for the floor within a single skin. In short, the struggle of diverse voices characterizes life within the community even as it characterizes life within the individual.

Bakhtin points to Dostoevsky for an example of the struggle of diversity within the community and within the individual. First, Dostoevsky's novels are showcases of utopian diversity where community life is a carnival of zanies bouncing off one another as if they had eluded the power of the author to hold them to the orderly behavior required for his story. Second, Dostoevsky's very method of writing attests to the diversity of voices within Dostoevsky himself. That is, Dostoevsky wrote his novels by dictating while lying on a couch as if spinning out the conflicts of his own personality to a psychotherapist. The effect of this writing is a radical shift away from an "authoritarian" voice to dispersed voices.

Just as Dostoevsky's novels suggest that individuals, like communities, are diverse and fragmented, so Bakhtin's translinguistics implies a blessed diversity and holy fragmentation of the individual. Boldly waving aside what some scholars have considered to be the "intuitively unvanquishable" principle that persons are unities, Bakhtin sees person to be a convergence of heterogeneous communicative experiences. For Bakhtin, person is no metaphysical unity, but a memory-stored sedimentation of the diverse communicative experiences. A person is unified in the same way that a piece of slate is unified; a person is a compressed result of events that have occurred through time.

On the Unity of Person

Many of the New Age writers who took up the Boasian banner of social criticism (see p. 132) are themselves deeply invested in the gnostic view of the unity of person (Lasch 1987). The meditative, self-sounding, unity-discovering, self -actualizing practices which are so much a part of that New Age literature, spring ultimately from the gnostic principle that God is within and God is one. On the other hand, Bellah et al. (1985) offer us some popular sociology which implies a heterogeneity of the individual (see p. 204).

Communication For Bakhtin, communication, not abstract language, is the foundation of social life. With such a focus on communication, Bakhtin's translinguistics is a logical brother to the discipline of the ethnography speaking.

According to Bakhtin, the life of a community pivots on behavior rather than on knowledge. It is the behavior of persons interacting that gives life to a group. Saussurean linguists, by abstracting linguistic knowledge from communicative behavior, and by adducing rules of grammar rather than describing the give-andtake of interaction, have given away the opportunity of tracking the most important component of community life, the impact of persons on each other through communicative behavior. Translinguists aim to correct that fault by an intense focus on behavior in interaction.

The model for Bakhtin's description of communicative behavior is the discipline of rhetoric. Rhetoric, in Roman antiquity, was a culturally pivotal discipline because through it individuals (the raw material) learned to become Roman persons (the cultural product). That is, by slavishly imitating the communicative behaviors of cultural exemplars like Cicero, the Roman individual, "not only draws encouragement and validation from the moral exemplars of the past, but is actually able to make himself transparent to the values summed up in these exemplars: this is a 'person made into a classic' with a vengeance!...a system of discipline working relentlessly from the outside in" (Brown 1983: 4). Like Roman rhetoricians, translinguists expect persons to be formed from "the outside in" by way of communicative behavior.

While Bakhtin takes one chapter on social formation from the classical rhetoricians, he rejects their companion chapter on prescription. That is, the rhetoricians of antiquity sought to impose one set of rhetorical forms on a group so as to shape the group into a unity. But Bakhtin's trans linguistics, far from imposing, or even expecting to find, a single set of communicative practices in a group, celebrates the diversity of behavior in interaction. For Bakhtin, the natural course of social life leads individuals to be formed "from the outside in" by the cacophanous welter of their communicative experiences. Any stifling of the noise and diversity of their communicative experience, bespeaks a domi na ting, stultifyi ng political force imposing unity from above and operating against the natural life of a community.

Conclusion Translinguistics is an alternative to structuralist linguistics and to Boasian linguistic anthropology. As a program for language research it is attractive to American anthropologists because it pursues objectives akin to the objectives of the Boasians and because it focuses on communicative practices like the ethnography of speaking, rather than on grammatical competence.

Translinguistics is founded on a kenotic Christian theology which celebrates human relationships. In this respect it contrasts with both structuralisms and Boasian linguistic anthropology which, in their adulation of scientific procedures, show themselves to be consistent with resurrectional Christian theology.

Translinguistics contrasts wi th Romanticism of modern language theory in its expectation that diversity rather than unity lies at the heart of all human communities. Whereas structuralists assume that grammars are shared, that is, identically distributed, translinguists assume no such sharedness. And whereas an thropological linguists cast a wis tful glance backwards to the harmonious communities of noble primitives, translinguists suppose that the only unified and harmonious communities to be found amongst humans are the social monstrosities like Nazi Germany which have intentionally taken leave of the noise and disharmony that are natural to human groups.

Finally, translinguists focus on behavior rather than on knowledge or competence. In contrast to Chomsky (1977: 75), who blithely suggests that human nature is a matter of private individual men tal faculties and is independent of social and historical experience, trans linguists suppose that human nature arises in and through the behavior of persons in interaction.

Distinct in these three ways, the program of translinguistics is converging with currents of kindred thinking to form a truly alterna ti ve language theory. The two aims of the f 01lowing chapter will be to describe translinguistic principles and methods, and to point out the con vergeqce of translinguistics and other self-critical social theories.