Tag Archives: Mikhail M. Bakhtin

Living Dialogic Threads

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it.

—Mikhail M. Bakhtin
in The Bakhtin Reader (1994, p. 76)

A bridge thrown between myself and another

[W]ord is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. … A word is a bridge thrown between myself and another. If one end of the bridge depends on me, then the other depends on my addressee. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.

—V.N. Voloshinov
in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986, p.86).