http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/bakhtin/chap2c.

html After the Rabelais dissertation was rejected, Bakhtin continued teaching in Saransk, where he began work on one of the most important essays of his career, a fuller examination of his earlier concept of the utterance. This essay, "The Problem of Speech Genres," was not published in the Soviet Union until 1979, well after his revived status as a noted thinker, and was later translated into English in a collection entitled Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Written between 1952 and 1953, "The Problem of Speech Genres" is one of Bakhtin's most succinct arguments against Saussurean linguistics, a subject first touched upon in The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. But unlike the Dostoevsky book, "Speech Genres" gives us an in-depth description of metalinguistics, which depends on what Bakhtin felt was the smallest linguistic unit of contextual meaning within an everyday situation of speech -- the utterance. For Bakhtin, the utterance is: a unit of speech communication . . .d etermined by a change of speaking subjects, that is, a change of speakers. Any utterance -- from a short (single-word) rejoinder in everyday dialogue to the large novel or scientific treatise -- has, so to speak, an absolute beginning and an absolute end: its beginning is preceded by the utterances of others, and its end is followed by the responsive utterances of others . . . . The speaker ends his utterance in order to relinquish the floor to the other or to make room for the other's active responsive understanding. (71) By comparing this concept of the utterance to those units of speech defined by traditional linguistics -- sentences, phrases, words, and phonemes -- Bakhtin demonstrates the strikingly narrow limitations of prevailing linguistics in analyzing the contextual environment of speech and language. For Bakhtin, the isolated sentence lacks "semantic fullness of value; and it has no capacity to determine directly the responsive position of the other speaker, that is, it cannot evoke a response" (74). Utterances are characterized by a change of speakers in a "specific finalization" determined by three aspects of a whole utterance: semantic exhaustion of the theme; the speaker's plan or speech will; and generic, compositional forms of finalization (76-77). What Bakhtin means by these three characteristics of the utterance is fairly simple. First of all, an utterance's "relative finalization" is determined by "specific authorial intent" (77). That is, an utterance reaches its end when a speaker intends it to, when the impulse of speech has momentarily exhausted itself and either explicitly or tacitly asks for response from the listener. Closely linked to this intent is the listener's perception of the speaker's speech plan: [W]e embrace, understand, and sense the speaker's speech plan or speech will, which determines the entire utterance, its length and boundaries. We imagine to ourselves what the speaker wishes to say. And we also use this speech plan, this speech will (as we understand it), to measure the finalization of the utterance. (77) Most importantly for Bakhtin, though, is how the utterance's finalization is often determined by our choice of a particular speech genre, genres which are relatively stable but of which we are often unconscious. As Bakhtin states, we acquire language "from concrete utterances that we hear and that we ourselves reproduce in live speech communication with people around us" (79). Through these socially acquired speech genres, a listener is able to anticipate the length and compositional structure of another's speech from its very first words, thereby forming a sense of the whole expression, "which is only later differentiated during the speech process" (79).

Bakhtin feels that if we had not tacitly integrated these genres into our consciousness throughout our lives and instead had to "construct each utterance at will for the first time, speech communication would be almost impossible" (79). Bakhtin's theory of utterance counters the prevailing linguistics of his time by denying that utterances (parole) are "completely free combination[s] of forms of language" and therefore "purely individual acts," while the system of language (langue) is a social phenomenon (81). For Bakhtin, both Saussurean terms are socially derived, and in his view, most linguists of his day saw in the utterance "only an individual combination of purely linguistic (lexical and grammatical) forms . . ." (81). The conscious or unconscious choice of an individual speech genre, according to Bakhtin, is determined by both the speaker's semantic plan and by his emotional evaluation of the utterance's semantic content; this is one area of speech that most linguistic systems fail to address: Can the expressive aspect of speech be regarded as phenomenon of language as a system? Can one speak of the expressive aspect of language units, that is, words and sentences? The answer to these questions must be a categorical "no." Language as a system has, of course, a rich arsenal of language tools -- lexical, morphological, and syntactic -- for expressing the speaker's emotionally evaluative position, but all these tools as language tools are absolutely neutral with respect to any particular real evaluation. (84) One means of relaying the expressive aspect of language is intonation, which is present in oral speech, but does not exist in the system of language itself: "Both the word and sentence as language units are devoid of expressive intonation" (85). Instead, expressive intonation is present only in the utterance as a whole, though individual words and sentences can be entire utterances if they elicit a listener's active response. As expressed so far, it may appear that Bakhtin's utterance is merely composed of language units defined in traditional linguistics; however, Bakhtin believes that when we form expressive utterances, "we by no means always take them from the system of language in their neutral, dictionary form," but instead appropriate them from other utterances we have heard in our individual experience of language (87). Bakhtin's theory of the utterance is highly dependent, as are his other theories of language, on the dialogic nature of the word; in our use of language, the word exists on three different levels: 1) as a neutral, language system word belonging to no one; 2) as a word present in the utterance of others; and 3) as a word of the individual, used in a particular situation with a particular speech plan (88). But regardless of how words are used, the utterance "is filled with dialogic overtones," which Bakhtin felt must be taken into account in any linguistic analysis (92). While the utterance is a dialogic "link in the chain of speech communication, and...cannot be broken off from the preceding links that determine it," Bakhtin also felt the utterance was tied to subsequent links in this never-ending chain through what he calls "addressivity," which is essentially the same as audience analysis, but with a greater emphasis on active listener response in shaping the utterance (94-95). The addressee's influence on a particular utterance varies from speech genre to speech genre, but within each utterance there exists this responsive impact of the addressee. In fact, addressivity is another feature that distinguishes the utterance from language units, which "belong to nobody and are addressed to nobody" and are "devoid of any kind of relation to the other's utterance, the other's word" (99). Though individual words can be directed toward someone, Bakhtin felt they then become completed utterances consisting "of one word or one sentence, and addressivity is inherent not in the unit of language, but in the utterance" (99).

As mentioned earlier, Bakhtin's criticisms of Saussurean linguistics were based on incomplete interpretations of the Swiss linguist's views. And at the time he wrote this essay, Bakhtin could not have foreseen the great strides made in modern linguistics by someone like Noam Chomsky, whose concepts of linguistic "competence" and "performance" have deepened our understanding of language. What Bakhtin seems to be arguing against here are the limited Russian interpretations of Saussure's works, and not linguistics in any modern sense of the word. After Stalin's death in 1953, thousands of political prisoners were released from jail, and many of those in exile were rehabilitated (Clark and Holquist 329). However, Bakhtin's situation remained virtually unchanged, though he did receive promotion at the university in Saransk. Bakhtin's earlier works, however, eventually began to receive belated recognition. Noted linguist Roman Jakobson, for example, spoke on numerous occasions about Bakhtin as well as psychologist Lev Vygotsky, whose works had also been all but forgotten (Clark and Holquist 331-32). Through these influences, graduate students at various Soviet universities began to rediscover the Dostoevsky book. Among them was Vadim Kozhinov, who was surprised Bakhtin had survived the Stalinist purges and urged him to revise both the Dostoevsky book and the Rabelais dissertation with an eye toward publication. After encountering initial resistance, Kozhinov was eventually able to persuade Soviet authorities to publish both books (Clark and Holquist 333- 35). Yet as Bakhtin's star began to rise in the Soviet Union, his health began to decline dramatically, as did that of his wife, who suffered heart problems. In addition to his continually worsening osteomyelitis, Bakhtin also contracted acute emphysema caused by his years of heavy smoking. Concerned that the couple were unable to care for themselves, friends arranged to have them moved to Moscow, where they relied on state pensions and free medical services. Yet Bakhtin continued to work at his desk, writing in the 1970s, for example, a conclusion to his earlier essay on the chronotope and scribbling extensively in his notebooks. These later notebook entries are interesting because Bakhtin seemed to be returning to themes in his earliest essays. The writings are fragmented and stilted, as most notebooks are, but show a mind still clearly ambitious even as his health declined. In the last notebook entry before his death, Bakhtin concluded with this statement about the dialogic nature of language: "There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future)" (Speech Genres 170). It is this "boundless dialogic context" that allows us to escape the prison house of language that so many poststructuralist thinkers have erected for us during the past two decades. [4] According to Bakhtin, our individual acts of language are tied indissolubly to all previous and future acts of language in the never-ending act of dialogue with others. Language on a personal level is acquired from this stream of language, and during the course of our lives, we return to this stream again and again, giving back what we have taken from it. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, this social view of language opposes both the rationalist tradition of Western philosophy and the extreme linguistic skepticism of recent poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida. Bakhtin died on the morning of March 7, 1975, from complications of emphysema and was attended only by a night nurse, who noted his final words as being, "I go to thee" (Clark and Holquist 343). At a memorial service later that year in Moscow, a number of intellectuals

gathered to read his works and discuss the impact of his career. Among those speaking was Shakespeare scholar L.E. Pinsky, who warned against any single, authoritative interpretation of Bakhtin's works (Clark and Holquist 344). We would do well to remember Pinsky's remarks when examining Bakhtin's influence in critical and rhetorical theory.