I wrote a paper for one of my Master’s classes a couple of weeks ago, integrating what I’d absorbed from two textbooks into pages of my actual life. Shortly after I got it back from my professor, a friend and I were discussing this very blog, which led to a discussion of philosophizing in general. He lamented how lately, he’s seen an awfully lot of writing overwrought with words at the expense of actual ideas. This guy is an intellectual himself, a prolific writer and thinker, so his comment gave me pause.
As I’ve read for this particular graduate Communication class, I’ve worried more than once that some in my degree program seem to overstate the obvious. I love taking a fragment of seemingly mundane human interaction, analyzing its details and its place in our lives to parse from it a deeper understanding of our connectedness, yet I can’t shake the underlying fear that many would meet our research with a big, “So what?”
I thought I’d share some thoughts from this particular paper here, and ask for the feedback of the ‘blog’s readership. Based on responses I’ve received to previous pieces and the responses I’ve read here to the writing of others, I believe this audience falls toward the thinking end of the spectrum. There. I’ve laid out a blanket compliment. Be nice when you pick me apart, then, please??
Here goes:
Drama unfolds around us continually, though the mundane events of daily life often blur into methodical sameness until boredom becomes the norm. The drama goes unnoticed; only when an exception jolts us awake do we take notice of the richness, the texture, the complexity of all that which is life, the human interactions swirling and bending, enveloping us as minute events create our world.
Mikhail Bakhtin believed in the importance of the minutiae. His complex views of human interaction, as chronicled by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in Mikhail Bakhtin, The Creation of a Prosaics, boiled human interaction down to the details. He did so in his fight to hold the novel up as a viable art form; through his career as a teacher and philosopher in Russia, Bakhtin fought for it the status previously reserved only for poetry. He marveled at how novels created conversations with the readers and by doing so, advanced our human connectedness.
Prosaics are the antithesis, as it were, of poetics. One might define poetics as the big moments, the artful compilation of emotion into a large event in life, a planned celebration, perhaps. Prosaics, instead, happen around us all the time, and each interaction weaves into the next to define our constantly shifting identities and world. This constant shifting gives way to the concept of unfinalizability in Bakhtin’s work. We are never finalized in this messy, open world, and for Bakhtin, this is imperative to life and freedom. Unfinalizability invokes potential, innovation, surprise and a rich creativity. Every utterance moves us to a new place in thought, perched closer to the next “aha” moment that will take us racing joyfully in a new direction. Our trick, I believe Bakhtin tells us, is to remain open to the possibilities, to live our lives in a state of heightened awareness of the rich nuances all around us instead of giving in to some perceived monotony. He tells us there is no sameness, but we have to pay attention. He asks us, in a way, to embrace awe, just as Einstein did.
Another concept in Bakhtin’s work is his definition of a “superaddressee” in conversation. He posits that each of us, when we communicate, has an imagined audience beyond the actual person or group to whom we are speaking. This “superaddressee” is the imagined perfect audience, that one who would understand most fully and justly what we are trying to say, or the one whose opinion matters most. Each of us uses one, according to Bakhtin, and they invoke the hope of being perfectly understood and appreciated. Some consider this “superaddressee” an internal voice, a separate version of self. Others describe it in ideological terms, calling it God or absolute truth, but Bakhtin did not define it as such, and his biographers caution against containing it in any one box.
I pondered a class discussion in which we discussed empathy and our obvious inability to experience each and every human alternative existence. I began to wonder how the understanding and acknowledgement of the “superaddressee” concept, if combined with the purposeful creation of a “superother” in our minds, might further positive relations between differing cultures and races. One class member lamented not our inability to fully walk in the shoes of another, but that our culture seems to toss us a proverbial double-edged sword. We are told we can never understand the other’s point of view because we’d have to live it to really grasp it in full. We are expected, simultaneously though, to understand divergent points of view, cultures other than our own, and perspectives we do not share, all in the name of diversity, education and tolerance.
While I personally despise that particular word in this case–tolerance–I hope we come to a point in human history where we embrace and celebrate diversity rather than merely tolerate those different from ourselves – I do see that cultural expectations play out regularly. The end result is often a feeling of failure on the part of those who have tried to understand, only to be told that no, they simply cannot understand after all.
In another book, M. K. Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea, I discovered the history of oratory in the African American culture. I’d not looked at it from the perspective of slavery before, at least not the direct, pragmatic effects of slavery in terms of reading and writing. Of course, if reading and written communication are outlawed, orature becomes imperative; as important, perhaps, as in the primary oral cultures most of us can barely imagine. The importance of being able to verbally transmit messages, share and arouse emotion and maintain history became paramount, and as a people whose every right had been stripped away, keeping what little they had mattered perhaps more than anyone else can understand.
Never before had I considered that such a reason existed behind the tendency of preachers emerging as leaders in the black community. I’d noticed that trend, yes. Thought it . . . interesting? Yes. But never had I understood it. Worse, I’ve heard racist theories allude, in general, to a “flock” mentality within the African American culture, as if they have been sheep being led by dynamic speakers who may or may not possess the intelligence to lead. I find myself ashamed that I did not understand Asante’s explanation at those moments so that I might have spoken up and corrected such a ridiculous misconception, perpetrated by an uneducated someone to those unwilling or unable to see the others as deserving more respect.
Throughout Asante’s book, I found myself over and over feeling shame. I felt shame at my lack of knowledge of the complexity of this culture, and I felt burning shame that any people, my people, ever believed that owning another person was acceptable. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be part of a group of people taken against our will to a place we’d likely never have come on our own, stripped of our families and possessions and all vestiges of our ways of life and been forced to live at the whims of another group whose lives made little sense to us. And then to have our descendants told over and over that they should be grateful for what hard-fought freedoms they have and to stop whining about the injustices that remain. I truly cannot fathom what that would be like. I cannot fathom how I would feel as an African American today, but I surely have a greater understanding of why the general population’s desire to put slavery behind us, to move on and forget about it, is not met with equal enthusiasm by those whose relatives were enslaved and whose histories were lost because of the greed and undeniable cruelty of others.
These thoughts led me back to Bakhtin’s “superaddressee” concept. When I say, for instance, that I hold no racist feelings and I would very much like for all Americans to admire, learn about and respect each other’s cultures, my “superaddressee” really believes me, nodding vigorously and then asking the unspoken, “So, can we get on with it already?” I have to stop and consider how my black neighbor’s “superaddressee” might reply if my neighbor were to respond to me, “but it’s so much more complicated than that! And until racism, which is the looming vestige of slavery, is gone, we have to keep fighting oppression.” I imagine that his “superaddressee” would be shaking his head in sympathy, commiserating that the white woman next door really doesn’t get it. I can only hope, though, that the neighbor and his “superaddressee” can at least feel my good intentions, however feeble they might seem. Perhaps, I think, the next time racism is discussed in his private circle of African American friends, my presence might fly by, a small blip on his radar. And next time I am discussing race with friends who all happen to be white, I feel certain he will appear on mine.
I wondered about this concept as I drove around town over the weekend, watching people gather in various places, looking at the racial make-up of groups I passed and wondering what they were talking about and what perspectives they held. I wondered about it more as I watched the beautifully diverse student body tumble out the doors of my daughters’ school at the end of the day, seemingly oblivious to the color of each others’ skin, much more concerned about who was racing where and who had the balls and was it warm enough for soccer?! I hoped, as the ideas of Bakhtin and Asante floated around the back of my mind, that perhaps because these children are growing up against a backdrop of widely variegated skin colors and tones, that they would somehow internalize an acceptance of otherness that we, as a whole culture, haven’t yet mastered. As they grow up believing in their own power to create change, maybe they will find that hope and potential in Bakhtin’s idea of unfinalizability, and create a harmonious reality such as the world has not yet seen.
A mother can hope, right? As for me, I will embrace the concept of a “superother” who shall sit on the opposite shoulder of my “superaddressee” and remind me that no, I do not know everything. It will question when my superaddressee nods in complete agreement, and squint with confusion when my superaddressee smiles with full understanding. It will push me to learn more about the past and the stories that fuel every utterance I hear, so that I don’t just hear it, but I feel its fullness, its depth and the pulse of all the life that has carried it to now.
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