Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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Not for onward distribution. Using Bakhtin 315
to in support of the claim that cognition occurs within dialogues in which all utterances
are spoken by someone and have a specific addressee, an idea which may
carry with it the implication that there is no general cognition but only specific
cognition. Bakhtin was certainly concerned to bring our understanding of cognition
back from the abstract heights of dialectic argument down to the concreteness of
dialogues between personalities but it is interesting that for Bakhtin dialogic was
also about escaping from what he referred to dismissively as ‘the narrow space of
small time’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 167). He writes that:
In order to understand it is immensely important for the person who understands
to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding
– in time, in space, in culture.
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7)
Utterances in a dialogue, he pointed out, are never only directed at a specific
addressee but also at a superaddressee, the ideal of a third party to the dialogue
who has a capacity to understand what is really meant by the utterance even when
the specific addressee cannot understand it due perhaps to his or her limitations
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 126). The superaddressee evokes for some the idea of God as
someone who understands everything but is also similar to the ideal of an unsituated
universal perspective aspired to by science and often referred to as a ‘God’s eye
point of view on the world’. This ideal of an unsituated perspective is understood
by Bakhtin as a projection out of situated dialogues since meaning, for Bakhtin,
is always a product of an interaction of perspectives.
However, if the ideal of unsituatedness is a product of dialogue, then so is the
equal and opposite ideal of situatedness. In fact these two ideals are interdependent.
The extent that one thinks that one can accurately specify the key features of a situation
is the extent that one thinks that one has a comprehensive overview or map.
From a more dialogic perspective one cannot know one’s situation except through
taking the perspective of another in a dialogue and since that dialogue is openended
the salient features of one’s situation are always open to interpretation.
Bakhtin dismisses the superficial understanding of dialogue as the opposite of
monologue (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 117). In doing this he distinguishes the living
internal reality of dialogue from any external empirical account of a dialogue.
This is important because while viewed from the outside other people’s dialogues
appear as situated in time and space, our own dialogues on the inside appear
unsituated and open to infinite potential. He turned this double nature of dialogue
into a joke, writing, ‘the ancient Greeks did not know the main thing about
themselves, that they were ancient Greeks’ (1986, p. 6). It can be argued that
the essence of Bakhtin’s account of dialogic is the holding of two irreducibly different
perspectives together at once in creative tension (Wegerif, 2007, p. 28).
For Bakhtin meaning is a product of dialogues. Things do not simply mean on
their own but only in the context of a dialogue in which they mean something
for someone as an answer to a question. Any idea we have of the nature of our