Contrasting Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to consciousness

Abstract

Matusov (2011) sustains that Vygotsky and Bakhtin represent irreconcilable theoretical approaches. In his view, Vygotsky’s model is monologic and universalist, while Bakhtin’s is dialogic and pluralist. Although the two authors differ importantly, one cannot speak of irreconcilability for two main reasons. First, Vygotsky’s approach is much more multifaceted and even contradictory than usually thought. In fact, his concept of sense echoes the Romanticist claim that experience exceeds the limits of language. Second, a dialogical conception of mind is not outside the reach of Hegelian tradition, which, in Matusov interpretation, is where Vygotsky’s approach comes from. I emphasize that Bakhtin’s unit of analysis is the voice—a concept more sociologic than psychological. “Voice” is insensitive to selfhood and should not be taken as synonymous of “person.” Notwithstanding, Vygotsky and Bakhtin share beliefs with respect to the social constitution of the mind that allow including them in the same research program.

Keywords

Bakhtin Romanticism sense sociogenesis voice Vygotsky

In a recent article, Eugene Matusov (2011) has offered a comparative analysis between Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s approaches to consciousness. In brief, his thesis is that the two authors, far from being proponents of the very same idea, are rather promoters of different conceptions of subjectivity. What makes this thesis particularly interesting is that it patently contradicts the standard perception of these authors in Western Cultural Psychology. According to Matusov, Vygotsky and Bakhtin developed the same idea—roughly, that individual consciousness is a social product, although through different arguments. However, for Matusov, Vygotsky developed a diachronic, monologic, and activity-based approach, which contrasts with Bakhtin’s synchronic, dialogic, and discourse-based conception. According to Matusov, the sociality of human consciousness in Vygotsky’s model is merely instrumental: it is constitutive of human thought so long as the child develops; in the formally educated adult the role of the social has been internalized, so that the other’s presence is strictly unnecessary to her consciousness. This belief would entail potential dangers in practical domains, for example, to legitimatize the vision of children as objects of pedagogical practices rather than conscious beings with rights equal to those of educated adults. The sociality of consciousness is in Bakhtin’s account, according to Matusov, “ontological,” since the plurality of external voices is constitutive of individual consciousness throughout the life of a person. Pedagogically also, Bakhtin’s position would encourage a pluralistic education, where the different voices of children’s consciousness are heard, valued and promoted. “From Vygotsky’s perspective, Bakhtin’s dialogic approach is anti-developmental: Bakhtin starts with analysis of the communication of adults, where human ontogenetic development is already accomplished. From Bakhtin’s perspective, Vygotsky’s instrumental approach is monologic and inhumane” (Matusov, 2011, p. 104). Taking these differences into account, Matusov concludes: “Vygotsky’s and Bakhtin’s conceptualizations are not only different but also irreconcilable” (Matusov, 2011, p. 100).

In the present review, I endorse Matusov’s thesis, except in its intensity. The two authors are in fact different in many ways. As Matusov explains, their conceptions of sociality and selfhood are so dissimilar that they potentially can lead to distinct practical applications—e.g., in educational settings. However, I doubt that we can speak in this respect of irreconcilability for two main reasons. First, Vygotsky’s approach is much more multifaceted than we usually think. In Vygotsky’s prolific work one can easily find different statements about the very same issue, such that some statements are even contradictory. Therefore, in order to define Vygotsky’s position as instrumental, monologic and (potentially) inhumane, his approach has to be conceived of as complete and coherent, ignoring the many open-ended aspects of his theory. Second, a dialogical conception of mind is not outside the reach of Hegelian tradition, which, in Matusov interpretation, is where Vygotsky’s approach comes from. Thus, the humane and pluralistic dimension of human beings that Matusov misses in Vygotsky’s writings could also be absent in Bakhtin’s texts. In what follows, I develop these two arguments. Finally, I argue that, in spite of their differences, it is still appropriate to consider Vygotsky and Bakhtin as part of a common research program.

Vygotsky’s Polyphony

Vygotsky turned to psychological topics from literary analysis about ten years before his early death (Valsiner & Van der Veer, 2000). All his psychological writings were also developed in a relatively short period. Vygotsky did not have the chance to recapitulate his ideas in a complete and single theory—this is a major difference with Piaget and Bakhtin. Perhaps because of the variety of topics, it is not unusual to find distinct (and even contradictory) approaches in Vygotsky to the same question. I will discuss two eminent examples.

A clear example is his peculiar use of the structuralist concept of sign. On the one hand, he defends and promotes the use of Saussure’s concept of sign, i.e., as an indissoluble association between an image-sound and a concept. On the other hand, his examples of the use of this sign are usually contextualized, involving the tacit participation of a third component (typically a social Other) that shows in which sense the significant means what it means. The contextualization of sign meaning assumes a contingent relation between significant and signified—which contravenes Saussurean assumptions, such as the separation of langue and speech and the indissolubility of the dyadic unit significant/signified. Thus, Vygotsky’s idiosyncratic use of the structuralist concept of sign is consistent with a triadic concept of sign—such as Peirce’s (see Cornejo, 2010) rather than a dyadic one such as Saussure’s. Most of Vygotsky’s examples of language learning are in fact inconsistent with a dyadic conception of sign. To give account of the contextual variability of human understanding by means of an acontextual unity between form and meaning, Vygotsky had to introduce ad hoc mutations of the original definition. For example, he sustained that in humorous or playful situations, children temporarily “suspend” or “bracket” the obligatory and literal meaning associated with a word. If Vygotsky himself tried to convince us that adult thought could not be wordless, his analysis of playing suggests that children construct a new meaning from scratch from the momentary suspension of the principle “no thought without words.” This is certainly an anomaly within the Vygotskyan model. It is forced by a concept of sign, which evidently was not developed to tackle language use situations, but rather to describe objective generalities of language as a metaphysical entity abstracted from its users. Consequently, to classify Vygotsky as a structuralist would be as equivocal as affirming that he is purely a materialist.

A second and related example of variation in Vygotsky’s writings is his treatment of the relation of word meaning and speaker’s meaning. He extensively argues that the latter is a product of verbal thinking, i.e., of the internalization of the former. However, he suggests, not infrequently, that there is such a thing as wild thinking striving for expression—and sometimes in contradiction with socially formed verbal thinking. Let us examine this apparent inconsistency.

First, it is important to remember that, for Vygotsky, the minimal unit of analysis in psychology is the word meaning. This would be the minimal unit retaining the properties of the whole:

Psychology, which aims at a study of complex holistic systems, must replace the method of analysis into elements with the method of analysis into units. What is the unit of verbal thought that is further unanalyzable and yet retains the properties of the whole? We believe that such a unit can be found in the internal aspect of the word, in the word meaning. (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 5)

What makes the word meaning a psychologically plausible unit is that (1) it is meaningful for the speaker or hearer; and (2) it is a social construction. The first condition is self-evident: we know that a word has meaning because we understand it. The second condition, however, requires explanation. Meaning, he wrote, “[ … ] is an inalienable part of the word as such, and thus it belongs in the realm of language as much as in the realm of thought” (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 6). The statement “word meaning belongs in the realm of language” has to be understood in the Saussurean spirit. The claim establishes that word meaning belongs in the langue—not in the speech. For Saussure, langue is the supraindividual system, which is independent of whether individuals use it (and how they use it). The langue is also to be strictly distinguished from the real communicative situation where language is used—what he calls speech. Crucially, for Saussure, the linguistic sign is grounded in the supraindividual langue, not in particular uses (see Cornejo, 2004). Vygotsky, in turn, sees this abstract unit as representative of a social convention; word meaning is social, not an individual ephemeral construal. Therefore it warrants the objectivity that a materialist account of mind is searching for.

He realized that a properly Marxist theory of consciousness ought to explain not only verbal thinking, but rather that all mental phenomena must be traced back to social materiality. As a matter of fact, explaining human thought by means of language is not really a new idea in modern science. By subscribing to the motto “no thought without word,” Vygotsky was in fact following an idea of German romanticism. More than a century ago, Hammann, Herder, and, later on, Humboldt, argued that ideas and words are one, and that human thought necessarily involves symbols (Berlin, 1976; Humboldt, 1836/1999)¹. What is really new in Vygotsky’s approach is his attempt to base the very subjectivity of the person on social language:

Therefore, thinking and speech are the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. If language is as ancient as consciousness itself, if language is consciousness that exists in practice for other people and therefore for myself, then it is not only the development of thought but the development of consciousness as a whole that is connected with the development of the word … In consciousness, the word is what—in Feuerbach’s words—is absolutely impossible for one person but possible for two. The word is the most direct manifestation of the historical nature of human consciousness. (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 256)

The Vygotskyan motto is rather “no consciousness without language”. By means of the structuralist conception of sign, Vygotsky upgrades the word to a sort of quasi-living entity capable of germinating selfhood in individuals. More than a tool, the word is a “microcosm of consciousness, related to consciousness as a living cell is related to an organism, as an atom is related to the cosmos” (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 256). Thus an extra-mental entity functions as a spiritual seed that ultimately gives form to the human mind.

It is important to note, however, that Vygotsky assumes that the main aim of psychological science is the study of “complex holistic systems” (see the quote above). This assumption links Vygotsky to the German Gestalt- and Ganzheitspsychologie traditions (see Diriwächter & Valsiner, 2008; Valsiner & Van der Veer, 2000). This linkage runs throughout Vygotsky’s texts. In spite of his criticism against these schools because of their supposed idealism, there still remains a basal affinity between Vygotsky and the German tradition of wholeness. Unavoidably, this produces a tension in a model whose goal is to develop a materialist account of mind. In his book Thought and Language, the tension increases until the last chapter, where it is made explicit by means of the distinction between meaning and sense. After we were convinced that the speaker’s meaning is a product of objective word meanings, Vygotsky reopens the suspicion of free-floating subjectivity:

The sense of a word, according to him [Frederic Paulhan], is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole, which has several zones of unequal stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of sense, the most stable and precise zone. A word acquires its sense from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense. Meaning remains stable throughout the changes of sense. The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, no more than a potentiality that finds diversified realization in speech. (Vygotsky, 1934/1986, p. 244ff)

If Vygotsky argued that language generates the possibility of thinking in the individual, this quote offers glimpses into a sort of more authentic mode of thinking, grounded deeply in a still undomesticated part of human subjectivity. The sense is a dynamic, fluid, complex and unstable wholeness. It is, in brief, the phenomenologically experienced meaning, in contrast to the abstract, clear-cut and literal meaning of scientific linguistics. Vygotsky argued first that it is exactly this subjectivity that is a product of internalized social meanings. In this chapter, he renounces his Marxist project by bringing Saussure’s sign into life: the dictionary meaning is just a small part of the complex and ever evolving consciousness. The temporality, vividness and dynamicity of human consciousness come into focus, rendering static concepts useless. By putting the socially determined meaning within the conscious experience, Vygotsky is subordinating objective meaning to subjective meaning. That is, he is doing exactly the reverse of what he proposed previously.

This is not the place to evaluate this attempt of bringing together objective and subjective meanings. The example is clear enough to assess how polyphonic Vygotsky’s texts are. Matusov (2011) emphasizes the Hegelian roots of Vygostky’s position. Social interactions are instrumental for the formation of an (Western) intellectual, who in the ideal case, does not need others to satisfy her/his goals: “A fully developed person has high-level self-control, self-determination, and independence [ … ] People need each other because they by themselves are defective, limited, and incomplete with regard to accomplishing their goals” (Matusov, 2011, p. 102ff). According to this interpretation of Vygotsky’s theory, human development would be the permanent ascension to the Absolute Spirit via the internalization of social relations.

In fact, there are many ideas in Vygotsky’s writings that support Matusov’s observation. Particularly noteworthy is Vygotsky’s idealized view of science and scientific language and his deep ethnocentric beliefs concerning non-literate peoples. However, these aspects should not obscure nuances and even contradictions in Vygotsky. What I have briefly discussed should be enough to consider that, besides the Hegelian Vygotsky—or perhaps, behind him—there is a romanticist Vygotsky, to whom the label of Hegelian is not fair. This subjacent Vygotsky is more interested in describing what there is in the ever-dynamic conscious experience, rather than in imposing abstractions to it. He is interested in describing wild thinking; not in domesticating it with scientific language.

Bakhtin’s Hegelianism

In his article, Matusov (2011) contrasts Vygotsky’s approach to Bakhtin’s concerning inner speech. While in Matusov’s view Vygotsky sustains a monological conception, Bakhtin promotes a dialogical one. Understood dialogically, consciousness emerges in the permanent gap between voices; every position in the inner speech of a person is an answer to the previous voice as the motive for a new position. There is no way to fill such a gap: its presence is precisely the source of the dynamicity of consciousness. For Bakhtin, thinking is ontologically dialogical; for Vygotsky, in Matusov’s interpretation, thinking is instrumentally dialogical. This means that people get involved in dialogical encounters mainly because they fail by accomplishing their goals. In this line, people need the other solely to master the self-control of their own inner speech for problem-solving.

In addition, Matusov (2011) extracts differing pedagogical consequences of both approaches. On the one hand, in Vygotsky’s approach, children “are seen as objects of pedagogical actions of educated adults and objects of psychological research by developmental psychologists, rather than being conscious and having equal rights.” (Matusov, 2011, p. 104). In contrast, Bakhtin’s conception promotes the students’ engagement “in historically valuable discourses, to become familiar with historically, culturally, and socially important voices, to learn how to address these voices, and to develop responsible replies to them without an expectation of an agreement or an emerging consensus” (Matusov, 2011, p. 105).

In the previous section I gave arguments why the conclusions from Vygotsky are biased: they overemphasize Vygotsky’s compromise with the modernist program represented by (idealized) scientific language, and at the same time they underestimate the deep tacit compromise of Vygotsky with the expressive dimension of human experience. Concerning the conclusions extracted from Bakthin, not all of them are directly derivable from Bakhtin’s writings. Notwithstanding, I am sympathetic with Matusov’s equalitarian spirit, it is important to distinguish Bakhtin’s interpretations from Matusov’s.

To begin with, observe that Matusov speaks about dialogic orientation among participants, while Bakhtin proposes the dialogue among voices. I don’t think the two terms are really interchangeable without further ado. The reason is that Bakhtin’s theory is not about persons; it is about the development of ideas. Regarding that this development cannot take place outside the materiality of language, the ideas are embodied in a material human voice. Such embodiment of the idea includes many material aspects of the voice beyond the dictionary meaning of the words being used: from the socio-cultural and ideological to the values concerning the theme of the conversation—incarnating these in accentuation and intonation. In other words, ideas are voice-ideas:

He [Dostoevsky] foresaw new linkages of ideas, the emergence of new voice-ideas and changes in the arrangement of all the voice-ideas [emphasis added] in the worldwide dialogue. And thus the Russian, and worldwide, dialogue that resounds in Dostoevsky’s novels with voice-ideas already living and just being born, voice-ideas open-ended and fraught with new possibilities, continues to draw into its lofty and tragic game the minds and voices of Dostoevsky’s readers, up to the present day … ” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 91)

Similar to Lotman’s semiosphere (2005) and Peirce’s unlimited semiosis (see Eco, 1976), Bakhtin is trying to capture the socio-semiotic concatenation of ideas materialized in words and signs—in his case, in living voices. This kind of semiosis exceeds by far the limits of the individual mind or consciousness. The voice-ideas happen to live in dialogical interchanges—including the inner speech of human consciousness. Dialogue, according to Bakhtin, draw into the minds of persons. Therefore, a “voice” does not correspond to a “person.” Voices are the embodiment of socially available ideas, something quite different from the beings we call people: “As such, they [all the languages of heteroglossia] encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness of real people—first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people who write novels” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 292).

Distinguishing between persons and voices is not merely an academic exercise of conceptual precision; the differentiation helps to clarify the very unit of analysis in Bakhtin’s theory. If the person is defined as the entity that interacts dialogically—including the interaction with herself—ontological commitments concerning agency and selfhood are assumed. By contrast, when the voice displays the role of basic unit of analysis, personal agency and subjective selfhood are dispensable—if not simply epiphenomena. Such commitments manifest themselves in the scientific language used. In the first case a “personal grammar” prevails (Brinkmann, 2010; Gaete & Cornejo, 2011; Harré, 2002). In the case of “voice,” we use an agentive grammar, but we characteristically omit selfhood. To be sure, this kind of language is not properly a “molecular grammar” (Harré, 2002), but rather a grammar pointing to a “molar level” (Groeben, 1986), since we are constantly referring to a meaningful dimension. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin wrote that voices-ideas have meaning, that they are living expressions of themes, and that they can be drawn into human minds. What kind of language (or grammar) is this?

We have to remind ourselves that Bakhtin’s point of view is literary. By assuming that individual consciousness is dialogically formed, Bakhtin extrapolates the properties of the dialogue in the novel to the inner speech of persons. He perceived that Dostoevsky produced not only a perspicuous and highly sensitive description of inter-human dialogue, but also unknowingly offered a subtle model of human consciousness. Due to this transposition, we owe Bakhtin fine insights about the nuances of inner speech. Just to mention the most visible ones, we discover through this that every inner language usage entails the adoption of a position to a previous (internal) interpellation; that verbal thinking is not the neutral manipulation of static information units, but rather the creation of living utterances; that every utterances shows a myriad of meaning aspects depending on the voices that resound in it; that in human conscious experience many voices permanently coexist; that not all of the voices of inner speech are logically consistent. Like the characters of the Dostoevky’s novels, who deploy their personal features by way of encountering others and entering into dialogues with them, the inner speech of persons involves a multiplicity of social voices. Each voice addresses the other, requesting with this position another answer, and so on in an endless process.

It is important to note that Bakhtin does not directly address consciousness, but rather voices in the consciousness. His analysis may well be attuned to describing the tensions and subtleties of the multi-aspectual and dynamic nature of inner speech—in which alien voices undeniably play a role. But it is less adequate when we ask how language is lived from the perspective of the thinking person. Consciousness is not synonymous of language—either monological or dialogical. Dialogism may be an essential dimension of it, but it is not the unique dimension. Nor is consciousness the same as a collection of voices. Then consciousness is purely linguistic or dialogic only when you are observing it from the outside. Bakhtin’s concept of voice is a description from a viewpoint external to my own; it is a portrayal of my voice, not my voice. At this point we arrive to the general conclusion that Bakhtin creates a sociological theory of consciousness, not a psychological one:

In Dostoevsky, consciousness never gravitates toward itself but is always found in intense relationship with another consciousness. Every experience, every thought of a character is internally dialogic, adorned with polemic, filled with struggle [ … ] It could be said that Dostoevsky offers, in artistic form, something like a sociology of consciousness [emphasis added] … Every thought of Dostoevsky’s heroes (the Underground Man, Raskolnikov, Ivan, and others) senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinished dialogue. Such thought is not impelled toward a well-rounded, finalized systematically monologic whole. It lives a tense life on the borders of someone else’s thought, someone else’s consciousness. (Bakhtin, 1984, 32)

Bakhtin unquestionably describes a consciousness full of meaning. The critical point is, however, that this is not a felt consciousness, as it is experienced from the first person perspective. He adopts a sort of third-person perspective with respect to meaningful constructions that characterize a variety of hermeneutic approaches. It may be the case that the internal dialogue is composed of concatenated interactions “filled with struggle.” But from this description it does not follow that the person lives an internal struggle as such. If a person is in fact adopting this or that voice, usually she does not experience this social voice as an alien entity. Here we perceive the limits of a hermeneutic approach to consciousness: even if the dialogic interpretation of inner speech is right, we are blind to the most important dimension of consciousness, namely the experiencing. The facts that people experience the world in a meaningful way, with vividness and apodicticity, cannot be adequately approached from the sociology of consciousness. The proper ipseity—the sense that I am myself over time—simply does not have place in a model where the expressive source is not situated in the conscious person.

Some may say that this criticism does not apply since Bakhtin never affirmed what persons should feel when a dialogue of voices takes place in their consciousness. This disclaimer, however, expresses the same void. The very connection between the social, external voice and the self is what is conspicuously absent in Bakhtin’s model. Vygotsky filled this void with his concept of “internalization.” For him, internalized social relations configure tools for the ulterior subjectivity. Signs are also social in origin, but became part of the self. The social language becomes my language, allowing my own expressiveness. Bakhtin’s theory lacks an equivalent concept to bridge the social voices with personal selfhood. In his model, this question does not even exist, precisely because selfhood is not the kind of dimension that can be inquired about in discursive or sociological terms.

The ultimate interest of Bakhtin does not lie in the production of a differentiated and precise theory of human consciousness, but rather in the infinite struggle of voices and counter-voices that constitute individual consciousness. This very dynamics is a higher unity:

These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types [ … ] is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel [ … ] Such a combining of languages and styles into a higher unity [emphasis added] is unknown to traditional stylistics; it has no method for approaching the distinctive social dialogue among languages that is present in the novel. Thus stylistic analysis is not oriented toward the novel as a whole, but only toward one or another of its subordinated stylistic unities. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 263)

This higher unity of the novel is in fact the subject matter of Bakhtin’s theory. It very much resembles Durkheim’s description of the collective mind as “the highest form of the psychic life” (1915/1976, p. 444). Knowingly, Durkheim argued for the explanation of social phenomena through collective representations, steadfastly opposing explanations appealing to the psychological properties of individuals. Bakhtin’s higher unity follows the same vein, although there are of course major differences. Bakhtin’s unit is not a representation, not an immaterial idea. Besides, contrasted with Durkheim’s static social representations, Bakhtin’s dialogue is dynamic and permanently evolving—in fact, evolving dialectically. They are however akin in two ways: they are meaningful and they exist beyond the individual mind.

Conclusions

Vygotsky and Bakhtin manifest in fact significant differences. They do not differ, however, because the one is monologic and scientificist, while the other is dialogic and pluralistic. They differ in how much freedom they admit the person has. Vygotsky’s argumentation, though with contradictions, conceives a socially formed subject seeking expression. The inner and personal sense has primacy over the meaning: the social meaning is only one of the zones of sense. In the case of Bakhtin, there is no such freedom, since there is no zone of sense exceeding the limits of the social voices. It is not the person who is impelled to express herself; it is the voice itself.

Behind the personal freedom issue lays the conception of expressive capacities of language. In both cases, language is material and public and it determines—it forms, in a radical way, human subjectivity. But in Vygotsky—at least in some of his texts—there is a vision of language as a tool for expressiveness. Such a function, nonetheless, can never be completely achieved because the core of expressiveness is precisely the “dynamic, fluid, complex whole” of experience. Here, linguistic tools are “stones in the edifice of sense,” “potentialities” of real speech. As argued above, this sensitivity situates Vygotsky right in the phenomenological spirit, where language “lives for and by this constant aspiration to say the inexpressible, to capture the elusive” (De Leo, 2009, p. 180). Conversely, in Bakhtin the inexpressible cannot exist since every idea is a voice-idea. What is thinkable has to be linguistically constituted. As a dialogue deploys appealing new voices to get involved in it, it is by definition an unfinished process. Transposing this feature to the person, the unfinalizability of the individual self follows. But note again that it is the dialogue that strives for its completion, not the person. There is no such a thing as a personal Self attempting to reach a complete and definitive position.

Finally, we have to ponder these obvious differences considering the major theoretical context. In this respect, I think Vygotsky and Bakhtin share important claims, such that they can be considered as part of the same research program. Although one is more psychologist and the other more sociologist, they have common beliefs with respect to the social constitution of the mind, the objective nature of language, and the materiality of ideas by means of the latter. These commonalities frame them as part of the same intellectual program strongly interested in the dimension of meaning of human life and, at the same time, with a disciplined intolerance to expressions of psychic life which cannot be explained in social/narrative terms.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Carlos Cornejo is Associate Professor in Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He teaches history of psychology, psychology of language and philosophy of psychology. His research interests include theoretical and empirical aspects of meaning construction, figurative language and pragmatism in psychology.

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