Bakhtin’s theory of enunciation is a ‘carnevalesque’ integration of all
the elements that Hannah Arendt’s theory of action and the word had
emptied out or subordinated to the totalising power of language. The
recognition of the multiplicity of the semiotic, the polyphony of
matters of expression (both verbal and non-verbal), the heterogeneity
of linguistic and non-linguistic elements, becomes on the one hand, the
basis of a ‘strategic’ theory of action between speakers whereby it is
possible to define meaning as an ‘action on possible actions’ (to use
Foucault’s expression) [1], and on the other hand, it is the basis of a
theory of creativity and production of subjectivity.
Bakhtin’s theory has no room for the concept of the performative
beause ‘all speech acts’ are ‘social acts, not just performative ones.
All utterances are ‘speech acts’ that engage a ‘social obligation’.
Despite an homology of terms, there are remarkable differences between
Austin’s and Bakhtin’s theories of speech acts. To begin with, the
latter affirms a difference of nature between language and the
utterance. In order for words, propositions, and grammar rules to
become complete utterances and linguistic acts, there needs to be a
‘supplementary element’ that remains ‘inaccessible to all
categorisations and linguistic determinations, one that linguistics
cannot grasp’.
The word, the grammatical form, propositions, and statements
separated from the utterance (from the speech act) are ‘technical
signs’ at the service of a signification that is only potential. The
individuation, singularisation, and actualisation of this potential of
language operated by the utterance (this ‘achievement’) allows us to
enter an other ‘sphere of being’: the ‘dialogical sphere’. What makes
us turn words and linguistic propositions into complete utterances,
into a ‘totality’, are pre-individual affective forces and social and
ethico-political forces that whilst being external to language are
actually inside the utterance.
‘The enunciated, Bakhtin says, is completely traversed by these extra-linguistic (dialogic) elements.’
In the theory of the speech act, speakers are not first and foremost
linguistic or psychological subjects, but ‘possible worlds’ –
(singularities or existential cristallisations – in the language of
Guattari). They occupy ‘chronotopes’ (blocs of space-time, ‘existential
territories’, in the language of Guattari), and these are absolutely
irreducible. The dialogic relationship between possible worlds and
processes of existential singularisation is constituted by affective,
ethical and political forces. Through the utterance, these express
friendships and enmities, agreements and disagreements, sympathies and
antipathies. They organise the relation of cooperation that opens to
the creation of possibilities or, on the contrary, establish relations
of domination that fix the same possibilities.
The origin of all of these forces is not linguistic, even though they
express themselves through language and signs. Rather, they are
variables internal to the creation and transformation of the utterance.
Affective and ethico-political forces are firstly expressed by the
voice. In an important article, Guattari notes that in the utterance
one finds both the ‘pre-individual voice’ that expresses a will based
on emotional evaluations (in his words, sensible affects) and ‘social
voices’, ethico-political voices that express ‘universes of references
and values’ (the beautiful, the just and the true), which are
problematic affects in Guattari’s words.
Wherever linguistics wills structural and differential relations
between signs, Bakhtin, like the enlightened, the idiots and the mad,
‘extends the voices, their dialogic relation’ and the existential
territories that support them.
This voice is deployed on this side of articulated language.
According to Bakhtin, the voice or intonation, not yet captured in the
‘phonetic abstraction’ of language, is always produced ‘on the
threshold of the verbal and the non-verbal, the said and the non-said’
and it is through it that it addresses itself to the other. This
address is affective and ethico-political rather than linguistic. It
‘appropriates, travels, avails itself of linguistic and semiotic
elements, confirms and drifts away, critiques and legitimates meanings
and established intonations’.
Voices operate a singularisation of language that we might call
strategic because they distribute and ‘name’ speakers according to a
proto-political model that structures the space of the word along the
lines of power relations between speakers. The voice already engages a
specific mode of action of discourse that with Foucault we can call
‘the action on possible actions’, because it expresses evaluation,
differences and values.
‘Intonation seems to indicate that the world that surrounds the
speakers is full of animated forces: it is menacig, indignant, loves or
flatters objects and phenomena’. In the voice, we find again the
‘animism’ rivendicated by Guattari, that is to say, the taking sides in
an ethico-political way in relation to others and the world.
The voice expresses itself, vibrates in a dialogical space that is a
sui generis ‘public space’. The voice can produce itself on the basis
of ‘different fundamental tones’ (Bakhtin) that depend on the power
relations in the ‘public space’ where it evolves. These are power
relations (of domination or of cooperation) that modulate and influence
its modes of expression. The voice can be deployed and differenciate
between an ‘athmosphere of sympathy’, of ‘complicity’ or of ‘defiance’
and ’embarassment’.
In each voice there is a double address. the voice addresses not
only the addressee but also the ‘object of the utterance’ in so far as
the object is called into being both as ‘judge and witness’ and
therefore, as its ‘ally or enemy’.
According to Bakhtin, one must radically distinguish between the
‘evaluative expression’, which can be affective and axiological, and
‘semantic expression’, because – contrary to what Wittgenstein claims –
the latter can never replace or substitute the former. There will
always be a iatus, an irreducible disjunction between desire and
affective expressions, on the one hand, and language (its words and
statements) on the other. Linguistic exclamations that we learn can
never replace or substitute the cry of pain of the body.
Here lies the difference between linguistics and the philosophy of
language: pre-signifying corporeal semiotics (gestures, postures,
moves, attitudes), the ‘universe of values’ and existential
territories, are part and parcel of the components of the utterance.
They are, notably in Guattari, an autonomous power of the production of
speech.
‘Intonation and gesture are linked by a close relation that finds
its origin in bodies – the ‘primary and ancient matter of evaluative
expression’. In each gesture, as in each intonation, always lingers and
sleeps in waiting an embryo of attack and defence, menace and
tenderness. For this reason every utterance always puts the speaker in
a position of ‘ally or witness’, friend or enemy.
Even the poet, says Bakhtin, ‘always works with the sympathy or antipathy, consensus or dissent’ of the listener.
It is only when the voice penetrates and appropriates words and
statements that the latter loose their linguistic potentiality and turn
into actualised expression. It is only at that moment that words and
statements are encumbered with the a unique and non reproducible role
in verbal exchange.
2. The active and creative dimension of dialogic relations, their
character as strategic games of ‘possible worlds’, and the existential
singularities and spaces that support them, is evident when one
compares them with the linguistic elements of the statement. Whilst the
latter are ‘reproducible’ components, dialogic relations represent the
‘non reproducible’, always renewed elements of the utterance, whereby
singularity arises from the evenemential nature of the utterance. These
two dimensions (reproducible and non reproducible) are clearly
distinguishable both in the address and in the response that the
utterance calls for.
All speech acts are addressed to someone or something, respond to
someone or something and through this addressing or this response they
express values, points of view, emotions, affects, sympathy and
antipathy, agreement and disagreement in relation to the situation, in
relation to the other and to one’s own utterance, in relation to other
utterances and also in relation to the utterances that circulate in the
public space (notably those that refer to ‘the true, the just and the
beautiful’, as Bakhtin remarks). All these speech acts aim to an
agreement or a disagreement, refer back to an enemy or a friend.
All speech acts are questions that interrogate others, oneself and
the world. Bakthin’s theory of enunciation implicates the world as a
problem, as an event and as something that is never accomplished,
unlike Austin’s theory of performativity and speakers, which entails
the world as convention, institution, and something to reproduce.
In his last years Guattari refers to a 1924 text by Bakhtin that
talks about poetic creation, from which he draws lessons for a theory
of the utterance and of the production of subjectivity in general.
Even in the case of poetry, it works not only on the signifier, but
always refers back to the existential point of view. Bakthin underlines
how if one wanted to account for the address it would be insufficient
to stay at the level of the mere material of language. One needs to
refer to material languages that are non discursive.
In the speech acts (here poetic speech acts), it is affect, the
existential function, that uses and appropriates different semiotic
elements to compose them and keep them together, to accomplish them and
achieve them.
The existential function that Guattari calls the refrain relies on
certain ‘discursive chains’, on certain linguistic elements, and it
detaches them from their meaning and normal signification and
denotation to confer to them their own movement, ultimately another
meaning. In this way it plays the role of an ontological existential
affirmation.
Bakhtin distinguishes between five elements of enunciation:
1) the sound side of the word, its musical aspect;
2) the material meanings of all its nuances and its variants;
3) its aspect of verbal relations and interrelations;
4) the intonation aspect that expresses its emotional and volitional
orientation at the psychological level and its direction in relation to
ethico-political and more specifically social values (pre-individual
and social voices);
5) the sentiment of verbal activity, of the active engendering of its
meaning (the feeling or affect in which one needs to include all moving
elements of articulation, gesture, mimicry and others, all the inner
drive of the person) – Affect expresses the existential apprehension of
the world and the self that presides over the dispositions of elements
of enunciation, their selection and modes of composition.
The first three components of the utterance that constitute the
linguistic and semiotic elements of the utterance represent their
‘reproducible’ parts that can be reiterated, whereas the last two
elements cannot be reproduced, they are absolutely singular, and
created for the first time and in the speech act.
The fourth element is specifically dialogic and expresses both
affective (emotional and volitional) evaluations and social
(axiological) ones.
The last element, that represents the sentiment of activity in the
creation of the word, expresses the existential and ontological force
of affect. It constitutes the non-discursive element that generates not
only the psychic reality of the word, but also ‘meaning and
appreciation’. By means of the utterance, the speaker inhabits an
‘active position’ (she operates in an existential self-positing as
Guattari will say) in relation to the world and others: ‘in other
words, the sentiment and feeling of taking up a role that concerns man
as a whole, of a movement that involves both the organism and semantic
activity, because what it generates is the soul of the word in its
concrete unity’.
Guattari draws general conclusions. With Bakhtin, he says, ‘we can
learn to read the utterance, its multiple voices and its multiple
centres’ (p. 40). The utterance and the process of production of
subjectivity are ‘a composition of heterogeneous modes of semiotisation
(production of meaning)’. An always partial (non totalising)
composition of a multiplicity of elements (both linguistic and
non-linguistic) and an heterogeneity of semiotics (signifying and
corporeal, iconic, pre-signifying and machinic). But it is this affect,
the refrain that operates the ‘enunciative crystallisation’, that
produces at the same time a ‘relative feeling of unity’ and of
singularity, specific each time, to the disparate multiplicity of these
linguistic elements, corporeal and axiological, that traverse the
speaker. The affect is a process of existential appropriation which, on
the one hand, selects the semiotic components by detaching them from
their meanings and ordinary denotations, and on the other hand operates
as a ‘catalyst’, as an attractor that keeps them together as in a
musical ‘motif’, as in the refrain by giving coherence to these
heterogeneous elements through repetition.
It is always affect that has the ability to ‘transversalise’ this
heterogeneity of elements, to give them colour, a tone that makes them
converge, in time, towards the singularity of the utterance.
Affect represents an opening of non discursivity that is at the heart
of discursivity and makes it crystallise and works on it, organises it
and valorises it.
Like in Bakhtin, in Guattari too, the affects that provide the
utterance with the character of an existential singularity are both
‘affects of sensibility’ (pre-individual, volitional and emotional) and
‘affects of problematics’ that activate references that are
‘sentimental, mythical, historical and social’, universes of values and
references.
This active power of the affect, despite being non discursive, is no
less complex, and Guattari defines it as ‘hyper complex to mark the
fact that it is an example of the engendering of the complex, a
processuality that is in a nascient state, a place of proliferation of
becomings’.
The human sciences and in particular psychoanalysis have for too long
been used to think of affect in terms of the elementary entity of
pulsion and instinct. But, according to Guattari, there are also
‘complex affects’, highly differentiated, that inaugurate irreversible
diachronic ruptures and should be called ‘christic, debussyst, leninist
(and as will happen, Sarkosyst). It is thus that throughout the decades
a whole constellaton of existential refrains, of enunciative ruptures,
has given access to a ‘Lenin-language’ that engages specific procedures
belonging to the order of rhetorics and lexicons belonging to the order
of phonology, prose and images’.
One should go back more specifically to the novelty introduced by the
theory of Guattari and Deleuze, that is to say, to the role played by
the existential function of affects in speech and the production of
subjectivity. For the time being I just want to underline the creative
elements, the forces of affirmation and transformation of the
relationship to the self, others and the world, that are non-linguistic
forces, because they are affective, social and political. They are
exterior to language, but inside the utterance.
We find the same fundamental distinctions in the act of response to
the address (‘comprehension’). All speech acts are a ‘question’ that
requires a response, but the response that the utterance awaits is an
‘active responsive attitude’, an ‘active responsive comprehension’ of
the other, unlike the performative, where the other is neither
autonomous nor free. For the utterance ‘nothing is more terrible than
lack of response’. But the ‘response-act’ that operates in the word is
not primarily linguistic.
If, as Bakhtin suggests, rather than the ‘polyphony’ and heterogeneity
of the semiotic linguistic and non linguistic elements of the address,
we consider those of ‘comprehension’, we find the same multiplicity of
linguistic (reproducible) and non linguistic (non-reproducible)
elements. In comprehension, there is an active response-reaction that
we can distinguish.
1) the psychophysiological perception of the physical sign (word, colour, spatial form).
2) the recognition of the sign (as known or unknown), the comprehension of the reproducible (general) signification of language
3) the comprehension of its meaning withint the given context (close and distant)
4) the ‘active dialogic comprehension (agreement and disagreement), the
insertion in a dialogic context, the value judgement, are degrees of
depth and universality.
This last element, the properly dialogical element is the most
important because it is what singularises and gives existential
coherence to the response-reaction. It is what selects, orders and
achieves the multiplicity of the different matters of expression.
Linguistic comprehension is not the same thing as dialogic
comprehension. The first is made up of reproductible elements (the
first two elements of Bakthin’s citation), the second, of
non-reproducible components, singular and created by the same act of
comprehension.
Comprehension is always a taking up a position, a judgement, a response – an action inside dialogical relations.
The responses-reactions express a sympathy, an antipathy’, an
‘agreement, a disagreement, an adherence, an objection, an execution, a
stimulus to action, etc’. All responses-reactions ‘refute, confirm,
complete and stand upon the questions to which they are addressed.’
Unlike the recipient of the utterance in Virno, who only contemplates,
is witness to and judge of the elocution (‘I speak’), who, as in the
classical performative, is only subjected to an institutional effect,
in Bakthin the interlocutor fully participates to the accompishment of
the action. Also as in the later theory of Foucault of power relations
the interlocutor is active and ‘free’. In the event of enunciation, one
determines the dynamics and orients the actualisation. The utterance is
a co-production of a polemical or cooperative co-actualisation of
linguistic virtualities and worlds of values or existential territories
that support them.
Similarly to Foucault’s power relations, the relations of power of the
speech open up an active field of comprehension, responses-reactions,
and a field of possibilities that cannot be determined or actualised
outside the ‘making’ of the utterance.
If we follow the ‘making’ of the utterance, we can easily see that the
nature of the utterance is not performative but dialogical, strategic
and evenemential. The speech act is an action on the possible action of
others that starts from the ethico-political dimension and the
affective dimension of the relation with the other. Bakhtin has an
‘agonistic’ notion of the utterance that functions as a struggle
between speakers, or rather, as a form of government of others that is
expressed through a whole series of techniques and tactics of which
linguistic and semiotic techniques and tactics are part and parcel.
‘When I elaborate my speech, I tend to, on the one hand, determine this
response in an active fashion, on the other hand I tend to presume that
response and this presumed response acts itself on my utterance (I mark
restrictions). When I speak, I take into account the a-perceptive
foundation on which my word will be received by the recepient: the
degree of information that he has of the situation, his specialised
knowledge in the domain of the cultural exchange, his prejudices (of my
point of view) and sympathies and antipathies. Because this will
condition his responsive comprehesion of my utterance’.
The choice of kinds of utterance, the choice of compositional processes
and linguistic means will start from the power relation with the other,
because unlike Saussure’s linguistics the utterance is not simply an
individual process. These choices can be determined only inside the
utterance in the process of their making where the other is integrated
as a living, dynamic and free element.
Written and presented by Maurizio Lazzarato
Translation by Arianna Bove
[1] ‘To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of
actions of others’. (Foucault, ‘The subject and power’ in Dreyfus and
Rabinow 1982: 221)
