Chronotopes

Temporality in the experience of the Self and Others

Preoccupation with the nature of the Self and self-consciousness in relation to the Other was specific not only to Bakhtin’s concerns, but it was a problem that was hugely discussed by the 19th and early 20th centuries’ social scientists and philosophers (for reviews, see e.g. Marková, 1982, 2003, 2016; Todorov, 1998, pp. 116–118). Bakhtin’s concept of the Self was from the beginning framed in the context of time and space. Young Bakhtin was preoccupied with the double nature of the Self, constituted of two oppositional components: bifurcation and indivisibility. The bifurcated Self reveals itself through perception: observing the other person means that the individual moves simultaneously in two worlds: in his/her own and in that of the other person. Looking at the Other from the Self’s perspective, the Self can see what the Other person cannot not see. As Bakhtin states, the Self can see parts of the Other’s body that the Other does not see. In and through perception the Self is aware that he/she occupies ‘in a given set of circumstances this particular place at this particular time; all other human beings are situated outside me’ (Bakhtin, 1920–1923/1990, p. 23). However, this is only the first half of Bakhtin’s argument, which concerns the bifurcated Self, and it has been sometimes interpreted as ‘Bakhtin’s individualism’. The second half of his argument refers to the other feature of the Self, to indivisibility. While for perception individuals are bifurcated, ‘for cognition, “I and the other”, inasmuch as they are being thought, constitute a relationship that is relative and convertible’ (Bakhtin, 1920–1923/1990, p. 23, Bakhtin’s emphasis). There is no single I, but only the I in relation to Others and to the world. The I needs Others and the outside world in order to develop selfhood and self-consciousness. Thus Bakhtin (1920–1923/1990, p. 24), already in his earliest work arrives at the triangularity: I-for-myself, I-for-other and other-for-me. Within this relation the Self’s and the Other’s lived experience is unique and concrete, and Bakhtin conceives it as an aesthetic contemplation and ethical action. Throughout all his book on Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, written in the early 1920s, we repeatedly find references concerning the Self–Other interdependencies, such as, for example ‘we evaluate our exterior not for ourselves, but for others through others’ (Bakhtin, 1920–1923/1990, p. 33, Bakhtin’s emphasis). These evaluations take place within the author’s and the hero’s temporal and spatial relations. We suggest that these early ideas about the bifurcated and indivisible Self, and the I-Other-World interdependencies, pre-empt the manner in which Bakhtin later on conceives chronotopes, multivoicedness, double languages, ambivalence, open and hidden polemics, parody, irony and other concepts. All these double-edged concepts are filled with controversies and tension; they form integral elements of dialogical thinking in novels, and in life: ‘Such motifs as meeting/parting (separation), loss/acquisition, search/discovery, recognition/nonrecognition and so forth enter as constituent elements into plots’ in literature and by their very nature they are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1981b, p. 97). These double-edged concepts strongly feature in Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a) and perhaps even more in Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin, 1984b). In the latter, the contradictions between official and unofficial languages are shown, on the one hand, in their extreme separation from one another, and on the other hand, with the boundaries between them being removed; such movements between polarities are ridden with tension and clashes expressing different points of view and enabling diverse interpretations. These Bakhtin’s concepts presuppose that the Self employs them in the unique way with respect to relations with Others, to their conduct, time and location. It is in and through concrete and single cases that we acquire the sense of events, of precise things and of responsible actions, as well as of to whom actions are directed (Bakhtin, 1993).

Temporality of the Self and Other through dialogical thinking and language

Language and the search for meaning in communication are fundamental features of humans not only in literary products but, above all, in daily life. Bakhtin (1981b) concluded his essay on chronotopes by emphasising that humans give to all phenomena that they experience some kind of meaning, that is they ‘incorporate them not only into the sphere of spatial and temporal existence, but also into the semantic sphere’ (pp. 257–258). Meanings are part of our social experience and they

must take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible for us (a hieroglyph, a mathematical formula, a verbal or linguistic expression, a sketch, etc).Without such temporal-spatial expression, even abstract thought is impossible. Consequently, every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope. (Bakhtin, 1981b, p. 258, Bakhtin’s emphasis)

Second, how could we go beyond this claim to make chronotopic thinking relevant to dialogical generalisation? We suggest that chronotopic thinking is vital for generalisation in several ways: it defines epistemic and communicative genres, it generates dynamic concepts, it plays the fundamental role in transmission of genres and concepts over generations. All these suggestions will be discussed in this paper. We may note the etymological similarity between terms such as ‘generalisation’, ‘generic’, ‘genre’ and ‘generation’, which all refer to some common and socially shared experiences. These terms are frequently used in human and social sciences (language studies, communication, sociology, anthropology, etc.), but their meanings are vastly different from ‘statistical generalisation’.

While in social psychology, the focus on language, its semantic and grammatical features has been traditionally quite minimal, for some linguists and communication specialists, human subjectivity and its temporality constitutes the very nature of language and its use. According to Benveniste’s (1958/1971) structuralist perspective, temporality is built into the formal structure of language, and it provides the possibility for human subjectivity. It is the personal pronoun ‘I’ that forms the first step in bringing out subjectivity, which is possible only through ‘You’. The ‘I’ determines that ‘I am the speaker’, and through the use of other pronouns, adverbs and adjectives, the ‘I’ organises special and temporal relationships around him-/herself by using words such as ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, etc. These basic temporal relations make sense only because the ‘I’ speaks to ‘You’, and this provides ‘the conditions of intersubjectivity, which alone makes linguistic communication possible’ (Benveniste,1958/1971, p. 230).

Similar ideas were developed by the social psychologist Ragnar Rommetveit (1974) who, too, defined the dialogue within temporal dimensions, such as the here-and-now, before and afterwards, there, and so on, referring to them as the spatial–temporal–interpersonal coordinates of the act of speech. Rommetveit goes beyond Benveniste’s position by defining the coordinates of the Self–Other in terms of real time and real location in the temporarily shared social world. These coordinates are mutually interdependent and cannot be meaningfully broken into separate components. They are components of an open-ended whole in the act of communication (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

The spatial–temporal–interpersonal coordinates of the act of speech.Source: From Rommetveit (1974, p. 36).

More recently, temporality built into the structure of language and dialogue has been a subject of intensive exploration by interactionist linguists (Linell, 2009, 2016). These very important linguistic and interactionist findings, which show that temporality is built into the structure of language and conversation, provide extensive potentialities for exploring them in chronotopic approaches. These, as already emphasised, go far beyond the time–space relations, whether in language or in any kind of human interaction.

Chronotope and genre

While philosophy deals with abstract and universal concepts, artistic creations are designed as original and unique pieces. This is why Bakhtin (1920–1923/1990) argued that literary creations, and novels specifically, elucidate ethical issues and moral actions far better than philosophy. Ethics and morality are features of the single Self and cannot be understood as static and universal phenomena. Single cases in novels are concerned with the life of concrete human beings and with their actions. Humans are ethical in sense that they evaluate their own and others’ actions, and take and avoid responsibility.

Although Bakhtin’s conviction that human actions in daily life, aesthetics and artistic products must be understood in terms of temporality was apparent in his writings in 1920s, he developed the concept of chronotope only in the 1930s. While the chronotope literally means time–space, i.e. an indivisible unit serving as an analytical tool for the study of dynamic processes in literature, Bakhtin (1981a, 1981b) conceives the chronotope broadly (e.g. Bemong et al., 2010; Steinby, 2013).

In this article, in building on Bakhtin’s ideas, we shall define the chronotope as follows. The chronotope

is an epistemological and ethical organising principle of human activities

In his analysis of literature, Bakhtin strongly connected chronotopes with genres. Chronotopes have intrinsic generative significance (Bakhtin, 1981b, pp. 84–85). It is due to the generative nature of chronotopes that the image of a human being is chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1981b). In totally embracing human nature, chronotopes generate specific genres. By genres Bakhtin meant conventionalised styles of acting and communicating, whether through talking, writing, painting and making music, film, and so on. A genre is recognised as a style of communicating belonging to a particular social group or subgroup, community or a historical period. It is due to the conventionalised nature of genres that we recognise Renaissance paintings from modern paintings, Mozart’s music from that of Wagner and Dante’s writings from novels of Jane Austen. In a novel, a dominant genre becomes the epistemology of a hero as he/she thinks and acts in a specific time and location. Indeed, it is the chronotope that ‘defines genre and generic distinctions’ in novels (Bakhtin, 1981b, pp. 84–85). Literary genres transform in and through societal changes in history, politics and culture (Bakhtin, 1979/1986a, 1979/1986b; Marková et al., 2020).

In conclusion, while the image of a human being is chronotopic in the most general sense (thinking, language and communication, actions), within different chronotopes we discern different genres, i.e. styles of thinking, communicating and acting that are shared and understood by relevant social communities. The genre is based on accumulated social knowledge, on accepted routines and the established forms of communicating and yet, all these capacities are open to changes and generate further possibilities for sense-making and actions.

In view of the fact that chronotopes and genres are analytical tools in the study of arts, literature and language studies, how can we justify our attempt to re-conceptualise chronotopes and genres in the analysis of dialogical phenomena in daily life? Moreover why can we claim that they play the fundamental role in the advancement and generalising (resituating) knowledge in dialogical single case studies?

The chronotope of routines and changes

Inspired by the French philosopher Bergson (1889/2001), who argued for a ‘human’ conception of time against the perspective that reduces time to space, Middleton and his colleagues have been exploring over a number of years the indeterminacy of time and space, and uncertainties of events, taking place in an intensive neonatal care unit (e.g. Brown & Middleton, 2005; Middleton, 1997; Middleton & Brown, 2005; Middleton & Curnock, 1995). In exploring routines and changes in the practices of an intensive care neonatal unit, Brown and Middleton (2005) focused on the collaboration of a multidisciplinary team of medical and health professionals, parents and the technicians operating medical machinery. The authors show that the Self–Other interdependencies between these participants contain both continuities and discontinuities, traditions and novelties, and static and dynamic relations. These oppositional interdependencies are often ambiguous, and they constantly adapt to new situations; under no circumstances could they be understood in terms of a linear progression of time as it passes on clocks. High commitment and co-operation among all participants was essential for maintaining the order in management of routines, as well as for achieving the baby’s wellbeing. The participants continuously questioned the correctness of these routines and of their possible changes. As the authors commented, the health of the baby was dependent on balancing the verge between realities and potential realities, because the boundaries of the unit were constantly changing and often were ambiguous with respect to who belonged to the practices of the unit. Despite this obscurity, it was possible to discern ‘the production of stabilities in practice’ in face of ‘ambiguity and uncertainty’ of the situation. Knowledge and actions were constantly adapting to the changing situation ‘in the spaces between multiple sets of constraints’ (Brown & Middleton, 2005, p. 698). Routine meetings addressed the radical uncertainties as the authors showed in dialogues between senior and junior staff. The individual child often required a specialised treatment and it was through discussions concerning the relation between routines and the implementation of changes in the neonatal care that new forms of coordination of practices took place.

Several kinds of ethical relations could be observed in this study: in discourses between senior and junior doctors (e.g. junior doctors questioned the medical treatment of the baby), between staff and parents (e.g. offers of counselling), between pathologists and consultants, and so on. Some of these discourses used only specialised terminology, in which ethical concerns became ambiguous as the child’s status turned to be uncertain. This meant that the child’s status could range from that of a biological object or a previable foetus (i.e. not mature enough to survive outside uterus) on the one hand, to that of a human being to be cared for, on the other hand. Uncertainties with respect to the child’s status, ethical issues, staff’s and parents’ responsibilities, as well as to the kind of required medical treatment were continuously involved. They were reflected in speech genres and in their shifts appropriate to the problem in question. In the following example the senior and junior doctor discussed uncertainties in the unit due to multiple sets of constraints in the practice with respect to the baby’s post-natal care. The junior doctor questioned the existing routines, which he considered inefficient, because they required the paediatrician, rather than the obstetrician, to sign the prescription to administer the baby vitamin K:

Junior doctor: why can’t the obstetricians - I mean?

While the main chronotope is concerned with routines and changes, we can suggest that this conversation is part of a subsidiary or minor chronotope which concerns the distribution of responsibilities among different medical professionals. The baby’s welfare is dependent on the professionals taking the appropriate kind of responsibility. ‘The virtual baby’ in this subsidiary chronotope is conceived as a human being and the others (professional, parents) have ethical obligations towards him/her. This obligation determines the kind of speech genre in the above extract. The junior doctor argues and provides the reason as to why should an obstetrician, who has a greater routine contact with babies and mothers (‘but they’re doing more to see every mother routinely without bias’), rather than a paediatrician, be in charge for administering vitamin K.

In another situation the professionals discuss the baby’s body as a biological object or as a previable foetus:

Pathologist: so I think that that this child was probably previable

…

Consultant: and I am sure you are right I am sure you are right it was probably previable then the course of survival at 24 weeks then the brain just couldn’t stand the intensive care needed for the lungs could it?

Another subsidiary chronotope in this study involved relations between the parents, the baby and professionals when the question arose whether the baby should be moved from a high-dependency unit into a low-dependency unit, or from hospital to home care. Such decisions involved not only the change of space and time, but also the change of responsibilities, in this case, from professional to parental responsibility. Correspondingly, the status of the baby and the ethical involvements changed: no longer was the unit concerned with a bundle of biological functions, but with the social care for a human being. The care at home is more fluid, and is established in and through personal contact rather than through technologies and through the medical and biological expertise. All this ‘involves crossing a boundary between “social topologies”’ (Brown & Middleton, 2005, p. 709).

In conclusion, the authors’ questions in this study were focused on routines and changes in the intensive neonatal unit, where various kinds of uncertainties were due to a number of factors: tensions between routines and changes, questions about different kinds of responsibilities of professionals, the medical and social status of the baby, and discursive mediation of meanings, among other issues. These questions provided a rich spectrum of responses and insights into the relations among the phenomena in question.

In contrast to the abstracted example from Brown and Middleton, this special issue involves studies that could be re-interpreted in terms of chronotopes of routines and changes. Pernille Hviid (2020) provides a very detailed account of the situated dialogical case study in the Danish child day-care, which she presents as a struggle between the established routine ontology and epistemology, and the newly proposed processual ontology and epistemology. As she shows, uncertainty, a strong ambivalence and a lack of confidence are inescapable features of this open process of change. Part of these problems were due to the difficulty to synchronise the staff’s and children’s perspectives in dialogues. For example, the Centre leader saw that ‘We cannot do it this way any longer; we have to do it in a new way’, but the gap between the established way of communication and the envisaged ‘new way’, which yet had to be invented, was too big to overcome and it caused a deep frustration for the involved staff. In Hviid’s study, uncertainty became a collective challenge to realise the potentials of change that would lead to novel day-care practices.

Following her processual epistemology without failing, Hviid (2020) applies processual methodology to her empirical research. It is apparent in her study again and again that the considerable obstruction to changing the static epistemology into processual epistemology was the staff’s difficulty to modify their communicative style. The ‘new way’ was imagined but hard to put into practice. The internalised communicative genre based on the established presuppositions, such as ‘I am a professional, therefore, I know better’; or ‘I am an adult, therefore I know better than a child’ placed child into the position of I-It (Buber,1923/1962). In a very different kind of study, Clare Coultas (2020) too, shows the lack of communicative synchrony between the ethical intentions of monitoring and evaluations of international development programmes and the perspectives of people at whom those programmes were directed. As Coultas makes it clear, the I-You relations in these programmes were substituted by I-It relations degrading Others to Objects.

Perhaps one can already visualise some possibilities of resituating knowledge in these studies to other single case studies in which the main chronotopic thinking is dominated by struggles between routines and changes. In the discussed studies, we could observe similar kinds of uncertainties expressing strong emotional affects, and vigorous fights between the established routines and the images of novel approaches. These dialogical single case studies are far away from the so-called scientific studies pretending neutrality of information and of separate categories of cognition and emotion respectfully measured by the in-advance constructed measures and questionnaires. Instead, in real-life situations, in which life and death, dignity and ignominy are at stake, decisions are made in and through ethical concerns, whether for good or bad. In such situations, the intensity of beliefs and feelings is expressed directly through language and action, in which they obtain, in diverse studies, new values and meanings. In view of these findings, we suggest that while dialogical features and concepts are resituated or generalised in other studies of routines and changes, they obtain new meanings and intensity depending on the problem in question.

Bildungsroman

In chronotopes of a bildungsroman (Bakhtin,1979/1986a) too, we can identify diverse streams or arrangements in different scales of time–space dynamics. By definition, a bildungsroman involves sociogenesis as its strongest trend, although ontogenesis and microgenesis, depending on the kind of a dialogical single case study, also play their roles and stimulate specific genres. Consider some examples, once again abstracted from single case studies and from their full contexts:

Rom Harré’s positioning theory

While the point of departure of the above single case studies was an empirical investigation, in this section we shall refer to Rom Harré’s (2012; Harré, Moghaddam, Pilkerton Cairnie, Rothbart and Sabat, 2009) positioning theory, in which the idea of ‘bildung’ is implicit. Harré explores the interdependence between the Self and Other (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003) in language, communication and action. Harré’s positioning theory basically refers to the recognition of morality in terms of rights and duties as a guiding epistemological principle in daily activities. His presuppositions are derived from the speech act theory, which emphasises the ways in which humans express promises, duties, obligations and rights.

In developing his model, Harré (1983) started with the dimensions public–private and collective–individual. He defined four quadrants, the content of which, during the personal development of professional identity, transforms from one form into another. Identity, therefore, is not a fixed phenomenon, but its development is the product of the changing interdependence between the Self and Others. In this culturally based project, Others may confirm or disconfirm the Self’s transformation. For example, Harré refers to Japanese culture, in which the role of Others in the process of identity formation is very important. The Japanese pay much more attention to the Self’s evaluation by Others than do the British or the Australians. Harré’s identity project aims to show how the individual strives for uniqueness and subjectivity, and for social recognition (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Rom Harré’s personal identity project.

The first stage of this process starts with the individual’s ‘appropriation’ of socially and culturally accepted legitimised identities (the bottom right quadrant). In the second stage the individual makes sense of these identities. These identities are legitimised by the educational authorities, but the individual transforms them into personalised understandings through his/her experience. The third stage is ‘publication’, that is making these transformed personal identities public and available to Others; the individual expresses them explicitly. Finally, if these new identities are accepted by the public (whatever ‘the public’ may mean), they become part of the conventionalised and generally recognised moral order.

During this process, individuals may experience tension and conflict as their responsibilities may be split between loyalties to different kind of Others, e.g. to the institution, students, personal matters and to their own conscience. For example, the individual may feel obliged to carry out a task as part of his/her duty, but it clashes with his/her personal convictions. Such clashes of responsibilities could be both real and imagined. Imagination and reflexivity are constructive parts of the process of ‘bildung’.

We may suggest that this model involves all time–space scales. The process of identity formation may be considered as an ontogenesis. Simultaneously, the changing relation between the individual and institutions has the character of sociogenesis. Institutions function in specific cultures and historical events, and these impose demands on activities and on ascriptions of moral beliefs. Finally, changes in each individual are likely to be due to microgenesis as the individual attains experience in concrete situations. Everyday episodes develop into unique story-lines in which the distribution of rights and duties is specific to situational demands.

Positioning theory is concerned not only with assignments of rights and duties to act but also with ‘epistemic positioning’, that is with the ways in which knowledge, beliefs and ignorance are distributed and contested. These are issues which, as Harré (2012) observes, have hardly ever been explored despite their far reaching societal implications. They raise questions as to who has rights and access to knowledge, why certain kinds of knowledge are concealed, how ignorance is imposed through false beliefs, and so on.

Further exploration of ‘epistemic positioning’ is likely to bring up questions about ‘epistemic trust’ and ‘epistemic responsibility’ (Marková, 2016) as well as questions about the manipulation of knowledge and beliefs for political purposes, whether in totalitarian regimes or in modern democracies.

Harré’s ideas (Davies & Harré, 1990; Harré, 1983; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) on personal being have been particularly influential in education in different parts of the world. Harré’s followers attempted to understand the transition from being a student to becoming a teacher. Among Harré’s followers, Fawns, Jaques, Redman, Sadler and Rodrigues (2005) argued for a return to the teacher as a person and the authors suggest that proper conversational settings contribute to the development of opportunities for the formation of personal identity. Specifically, the authors asked questions about the transition from being a listening, quiet and a self-absorbing individual in relation to a specific subject matter, to becoming a competent teacher who copes simultaneously with the many dimensions of teaching experience in class and with its contingencies.

In this process the student obtains the sense of professional purpose of social identity, or in terms of this article, we could refer here to a process of ‘bildung’.