comment on Bakhtin

It won’t let me just comment. Blogs are confusing. Anyway, I was intrigued and a little annoyed by that comment of his about creative individuality. Bakhtin is fascinating, so I don’t want to sound like I disagree with him, but I don’t know about creative individuality having nothing more to do with a person than his/her social orientation. As an artist, I like to think that what I create comes from some spark inside me, but it’s true that I am strongly influenced by images around me and by stories or movies or other art I’ve seen. But I think his meaning is more complex than that. I remember theme and meaning from my discourse and text class last Spring: meaning is just the literal meaning of an utterance, while theme is actually what gives an utterance its meaning between speaker and spoken to. For instance, “I can’t hear you” means literally that the speaker cannot hear what the other person is saying, but the real meaning lies in who is speaking and where, and what about. Say your housemate is complaining again about something you don’t want to hear about, and you’re angry, so what you really mean is, “I don’t want to hear you.” Indirect speech acts don’t always work, and they work best between people who share a social orientation and situation. I guess I’m trying to orient myself on what Bakhtin is saying: a lot of the chapter was really hard to decipher. I do agree with him, though, that what someone says is really less important than its social connotations. Like I said above, the literal meaning doesn’t really “mean” anything, other than that the speaker is unwilling to say straight out what they mean. Indirect speech acts are often about saving face, but in this case, it’s about expressing anger. I like Bakhtin’s idea of communication being like an “electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together.” But, you know, when an artist is really working, the sparks are flying just fine off one person. Going back up to the third question, no, I don’t think I can completely agree with his idea that no two utterances can have the same theme and meaning. They can’t ever be exactly the same, I suppose, because that point in time won’t ever roll back around again, but some utterances are repeated again and again for the same effect, like catch phrases: “Can you hear me now?” But of course, the original utterance didn’t mean what the catch phrase means now. Fourth question, yeah, I think a lot is happening during a conversation that we don’t consciously think about, and I think sometimes people are really clicking together and sparking, and other times they just can’t connect and don’t understand each other, shared social orientation notwithstanding.