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Plurality in Dialogue: A Comment on Bakhtin

Department of Sociology and Anthropology The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

In the following analysis I will focus on Bakhtin's concept of dialogical plurality, arguing that in spite of his position against the finalization of speech and his attack on monologistic, authoritarian unity, his dialogism is itself based on a supposition of wholeness. By insisting on dialogue as a remedy, Bakhtin's dialogism tends to oversimplify the instability and threat inherent in dialogue. The present study explores plurality as dependent on a shift into dialogue. The threshold of entrance and of exit which defines the `betweenness' of dialogue comes out as a rather problematic, torn link. It requires a constant making of a topic and is threatened and informed by forces of coercion, exclusion, break, strangeness and silence. Plurality becomes a critical trope in social theory that focuses on the very threshold of dialogue rather than on either a simplified and smoothed version of the dialogic connection or on an exclusive version that splits between the dialogic and the monologic in an overstated ethics.

Key Words: Bakhtin • dialogue • poetics • plurality • silence • sociality

Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 2, 243-263 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/S003803850000016X


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