Branta Mraovic, University of Zagreb
The world we live in changes faster than we can read newspaper headlines about it. When talking about the ways in which digital technologies have reshaped communication highways, one usually has in mind the speed and availability of information, just as more and more authors speak about the abundance of «useless information» as a negative side-effect of these processes. However, it is more important that these new technologies have finally made transparent the fact that meanings are not stable and that they are always in motion.
On an epistemological level, however, the credit for this important discovery goes to Mikhail Bakhtin, the intellectual who, living bravely ahead of his time, developed a new typology of literary discourse, based on a new post-Saussurean theory of language (Lodge 1990). In critical debates, Bakhtin is a poststructuralist pioneer, and an inevitable collocutor, because his theory of speech gives a new meaning to the concept of social dialogue. Hence, we may well say: In the beginning, there was Bakhtin.
Instead of standing fixed in verbal stability, explains Bakhtin (1980), literary script directs us to move in a semantic space. Language as a stable system of normative identical forms is only a scientific abstraction which is not adequate with respect to the actual reality of language. Language is a continuous process of becoming, realized through social spoken interaction of its speakers. Consequently spoken interaction is the basic reality of language, «the structure of utterance is a purely social structure» (Bakhtin 1980:110).
This new reading of text is a turning point in the theory of language, because it refers not only to the world of literature, but is also applicable to all other areas of knowledge. In a business world, such position points to the possibility of a different kind of accounting than the one currently practiced, and Macintosh (2002) calls it «heteroglossic accounting». Frauds and abuses which shake the corporate sector around the world indicate that it is high time to end the use of monologic meanings in the representations of accounting information. Today, corporate social responsibility means much more than a regular and attractively designed reporting; the public has the right to know on the basis of what methodology financial statements have been prepared and what are the social implications of the theories underlying them.
The need for this alternative approach to corporate reporting results from the need for open, dialogic reports which will reflect different perspectives and involve the interests of multiple stakeholders and social groups.
However, the most important result of these processes is that the reader becomes an active participant in the construction of the meaning of the script, that is, the space for discourse is opened in which the representation function in corporate reporting is not some new narrative about the truth, but the reader is invited to discover the truth. As Munro (1996; 1998) says, it is important to note that only one story-line is never offered and that representations involve processes inviting to multiple readings. Discovering the meaning within the script is allowed by the analysis of binary oppositions, providing a mechanism for indicating the inconsistencies in the script through information selection, and at the same time opening up space for examining the communication event located in the environment of the script and its protagonists. This could also lead to traversing the semiotic phase. The methodological path to this goal can be discerned back in Saussure's identification of binary oppositions between langue and parole, which Barthes (1967) analyzed as synonyms for language and speech, while Baudrillard (1988) understood the notion of binarism as the essential and inviolable part of the script.
Bakhtin made a radical turn with respect to Saussure's semiology (2000) by shifting the emphasis from language to speech forms. The key concept of his theorizing is the concept of a «speech utterance» which he understands as a social act involving the speaker and the listener (Holquist 1981; Docker 1994). In this way, the trap of giving words some pre-existing meaning is avoided; on the contrary, the meaning is only realized in the process of active, responsive understanding. However, the utterance cannot be determined by the terms and methods of linguistics and semiotics, but should rather be analyzed as a metalinguistic phenomenon (Matijašević 1980).
In contrast to the formalism of Saussure's linguistics, which takes language as an «impersonal system» for its object of research, and in contrast to the position of Croce's and Vossler's linguistics, which takes the «individual speech act» as its basis, Bakhtin starts from the actual «life of words», from the social language praxis which takes place as spoken interaction between Me and You. Language is not a pure semiological «fact», as modern linguistics believe, but is above all an «ideological sign» (Bakhtin 1980: 49). Languages are concrete, not abstract views of the world and as such, they are inseparable from the social praxis and class struggle. Consequently, the utterance is immanently a social creation.
Words are alive only when they are uttered, in which utterances contain two contradictory forces – centripetal and centrifugal – on the basis of which it is possible to distinguish between the monologic and the heteroglossic novel. In the monologic novel, which is characteristic of Tolstoy, the author dominates over the characters and events, and hence follows the necessity of the centripetal force as the centralizing force which leads the story to its unified, central and final meaning. For Bakhtin, the monologic utterance is an abstraction and not concretum. Unfortunately, according to him, monologism is the basic problem of European linguistics, which has managed to remove from language the man who speaks it, in the name of scientific exactness. Hence, he is significantly more inspired by Dostoevsky, because the «heteroglossia» of his work is ensured by a centrifugal force which leads the novel towards contradiction and complexity with its decentralizing force. Consequently, his characters exist as autonomous, self-conscious and unfinished beings who interact dialogically. Moreover, the meanings only stay alive in the process of a continuous social dialogue which in itself implies multi-voiced, discoursive acts and thus negate all kinds of authoritarian, repressive and monologic ideologies.
Speech interaction, according to Bakhtin, is not only the ontological basis of language, but also the methodological key which can lead to transcending the linguistic mind as monologic and to the affirmation of a new theory of speech as dialogue.
“The main error of the earlier researchers of forms of reporting someone else's speech consists in an almost complete separation of this speech from its context. Hence the static quality, the immovability in determining these forms (this static quality is characteristic of scientific syntax in general). However, the true object of research should be the mutual dynamic relation of these two magnitudes – the reported «someone else's») and the reporting («author's») speech. Because they really exist, live and take shape only in this mutual relation, and not independently, by themselves” (Bakhtin 1980: 132).
The event of spoken communication between Me and You is a process taking place in a living, open and unfinished context and in itself implies the active role of «the other». The utterance is not determined by the sender of the message, but it is the recipient that gives the final meanings to the words. This meaning is, of course, always subjective, but once appropriated it has entirely real consequences.
Bakhtin did not just open up new horizons for modern communication theories, but also, through his concept of speech utterance, left as his legacy a methodological tool for studying cyberspace discourse, recognizing the sensibility of the new age long before the new ICTs began to conquer the social morphology. Talking computers can be friendly users of Saussure's linguistics, but they will never be able to grasp Bakhtin's speech theory. Technology, no matter how sophisticated, cannot save the troubled world. This remains the essential task of the human agency, which implies respect of others, placed before the individual’s own selfish interests. However, in times when man tends to destroy countless life forms, this can hardly be achieved without radically different mental models (Mraović, 2004). Bakhtin's theory of speech as social praxis provides a tool for constructing new mental models, the realization of which relies on the assumption of the organizing culture.
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