The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermas's Discourse Ethics

Garvey, T. Gregory, 1962Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 33, Number 4, 2000, pp. 370-390 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/par.2000.0027

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The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermass Discourse Ethics

T. Gregory Garvey

Jrgen Habermass and M. M. Bakhtins attitudes toward transparent or undistorted communication define almost antithetical approaches to the relationship between public discourse and autonomy. Habermas, both in his theory of communicative action and in his discourse ethics, assumes that transparent communication is possible and actually makes transparency a necessary condition for the legitimation of social norms. Yet, there is a sense in which the same kind of transparency that offers the possibility of rational and autonomous selfhood to Habermas signifies vulnerability and tyranny to Bakhtin. In contrast to Habermas, Bakhtin assumes that utterances can never be perfectly transparent because the words that comprise them always carry meanings that exceed the intentions of speakers. This excess semantic value inevitably distorts speakers intentions, even if only slightly. Bakhtins suspicion of transparency leads him to develop a model of autonomy that revolves around the individuals ability to resist the emergence of transparency. However, Bakhtin attributes a positive ethical value to certain kinds of opacity because it is in the differences and distortions that Bakhtin situates the process through which individuals construct autonomy. Thus, in a kind of communicative paradox, opacity and ambiguity play the same liberating role in Bakhtins thought that transparency and clarity play in Habermass. Given the amount of intellectual labor that has been invested in exploring the insights into communicative practice that Habermas and Bakhtin offer, it is surprising that commentary on the two has so rarely intersected. With the exception of one journal article and a short section of Michael Gardiner s The Dialogics of Critique (1992), connections between Habermas and Bakhtin have been made only incidentally and in passing.1 Despite the important differences about the value of verbal transparency and its relation to models of autonomy that I will explore in this essay,
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2000. Copyright 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 370

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Habermas and Bakhtin share common ground on at least four general issues. First, they agree that before equality can be established in the social realm, it must be modeled by establishing egalitarian communicative relationships. Second, both strive to understand communication, not by analyzing language, but by analyzing how selfhood and intersubjective relationships are structured and mediated by communicative action. They both analyze communication as a social institution not unlike a political system or a religious tradition. Third, both assert the special importance of dialogic realms wherein relationships of power are partly neutralized by being brought into the foreground. Fourth and finally, each understands his analysis of communicative relationships as a mode of social criticism that can help to define a more ethical world by demystifying some of the ways in which domination is embedded in acts of speech and communication. These similarities in the general goals of the two thinkers projects help to throw the different roles that Habermas and Bakhtin attribute to transparency into sharp relief. Most notably, Habermass relative confidence in the possibility of achieving transparency allows him to build his model of autonomy around ideas of discursive democracy, consensus, and the assumption that in certain circumstances speakers strive to achieve undistorted communication (Habermas 1984, 1: 9495, 28586). Bakhtin is less confident about the ability of speakers to achieve transparency, and thus he is more preoccupied with exploring the way that impulses toward consensus and transparency contribute to processes of ideological centralization that undermine autonomy.

Transparency and autonomy in Habermass discourse ethics

The idea of reason is at the very core of Habermasian thought, and reason in Habermass lexicon is not so much an inherent mental faculty, as it was for eighteenth-century social theorists such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, as it is the result of a process of public dialogue through which norms and values are mediated and rationalized.2 This distinction in the nature of reason begins to explain one of the key differences between Habermass and Bakhtins conflicting valuations of transparency. While Bakhtin has a fundamentally enlightenment understanding of reason, Habermas, by defining it as a product of public discourse, offers a postmodern concept of reason.

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The two core assumptions of Habermass theory of discourse ethics are (1) that argument structurally presupposes a principle of universalization that requires people to share an identical set of assumptions before they enter into practical discourse and, consequently, (2) that the norms that result from discourse can be considered valid only if they do (or could) meet with the approval of all affected by them (1990, 6566).3 As several commentators have noted, Habermass principle of universalization recontextualizes Immanuel Kants categorical imperative so that it functions not within the context of the philosophy of consciousness, but within the context of the philosophy of language.4 As such, Habermass reconstruction of the principle of universalization makes the process of discovering universally applicable norms public and intersubjective. Thomas McCarthy notes that the important change that Habermas makes to the Kantian mode of exploring moral questions through a process of individual reflection is that he shifts the locus of reason from a private realm of individual reflection to a public realm of interpersonal dialogue (1978, 35). As Habermas puts it, the redefined principle of universalization requires that [r]ather than [working in a Kantian mode and] ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm.5 The process of validating norms thus remains the vital function of reason, but Habermas reformulates it as a product of public debate rather than one of individual reflection. Although both the Kantian and the Habermasian forms of the principle of universalization are enacted through language, Habermass principle of universalization requires that norms be legitimated in the crucible of a pluralistic public sphere. Kants, though dialogic, is conducted through hypothetical conversation within an individual consciousness (1960). By moving the locus of the principle of universalization from an intrato an inter-subjective realm, Habermas brings the problem of semantic transparency into the foreground. In the kind of intersubjective norm-validating discourse that Habermas envisions, the meaning of terms must be clear to all participants in order for a consensus to be legitimate. Habermas demonstrates his consciousness of the danger that opacity poses to the viability of adapting the principle of universalization to the philosophy of language and compensates for the transparency it requires by defining discourse as a unique form of communication that makes very stringent demands on the motives of speakers. In an early book, Legitimation Crisis (1973), Habermas

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explains the motivations that will define the realm of discourse as his thought develops through the theory of communicative action to the theory of discourse ethics:
Discourse can be understood as that form of communication that is removed from contexts of experience and actions and whose structure assures us: that the bracketed validity claims of assertions, recommendations, or warnings are the exclusive object of discussion; that participants, themes and contributions are not restricted except with reference to the goal of testing the validity claims in question; that no force except that of the better argument is exercised; and that, as a result, all motives except that of the cooperative search for truth are excluded. (1078)

If these conditions obtain, and discourse produces consensus, the fact of the consensus marks the victory of reason over arbitrary social power or strategic action.6 As Habermas phrases it in a subsequent sentence, If under [the above] conditions a consensus about the recommendation to accept a norm arises . . . then this consensus expresses a rational will (108). This is so because nothing but the better argument has had the authority to silence or marginalize, and because the dialogue was motivated by a collective desire to test the validity of a proposed norm. Nonetheless, as these criteria imply, the realm of discourse creates transparency, not by making words transparent, but by displacing transparency from the word to the speaker. Practical discourse is legitimate only when the motives of participants are transparent. Thus, a condition of participation in practical discourse is that ones motives must be fully accessible to scrutiny and challenge by others. The ability to validate sincerity is itself a vital part of discourse. As Habermas originally phrases it, [A]ll motives except for the cooperative search for truth are excluded. McCarthy, in his explanation of Habermass construction of discourse, articulates the extent to which practical discourse requires the exposure of the self: To discourse are admitted only speakers who have, as actors, the same chance to employ representative speech acts, to express their attitudes, feelings, intentions, and so on that the participants can be truthful in their relations to themselves and can make their inner natures transparent to others (1978, 3067). McCarthy describes admission to discourse in terms of the ability to use words as direct reflections of self. It is also significant that McCarthy describes Habermasian discourse, not in terms of a public transparency of semantic meaning, but in terms of a public transparency of self. One must be able to make ones inner self transparent. Another important critic of Habermass construction of selfhood, Mark E. Warren, also emphasizes the importance of the public revelation of mo-

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tivation to Habermass theory. In his essay The Self in Discursive Democracy (1995), Warren writes that autonomy depends on public representations of imagination, and these require certain kinds of internal disciplines. . . . The autonomous self develops within an intersubjective fabric of reason giving through which selves are represented to others (174). The difference between the extreme transparency of a speakers inner nature that McCarthy describes and the development of the autonomous self that Warren describes is the difference between the exposure of the self in the mode of practical discourse and the exposure of the self in other, less rigorous, communicative circumstances. Still, the radical transparency that McCarthy attributes to the realm of discourse is implicit in Warrens definition of the context in which Habermasian autonomy develops. The individual achieves autonomy through the internal disciplines of reason giving by which the self is represented to others. The autonomous individual must have the discipline to expose personal and internal motivations during the necessary intervals when one must give reasons for certain behaviors and for the expression of certain interests. Warrens analysis of Habermass construction of selfhood is important to my effort to highlight the relationship between transparency and autonomy because he argues against understanding the Habermasian model of selfhood as one that is disempowered by processes of public mediation. Warren holds that the kind of self-revelation required by practical discourse actually increases individual autonomy. In Warrens words,
When one must explain oneself to others, Habermas holds, individuals come to understand why they feel as they do in justifying their needs and interests to others. In doing so, they may alter their need interpretations, finding that their previous need interpretations, often absorbed uncritically from their culture, were inappropriate and perhaps even a source of unhappiness to themselves. Or they may become more convinced of the rightness of their claims. In either case, however, discursive argument increases individual autonomy. (179)

Warren is right to the extent that self-understanding and thus autonomy will likely increase as personal motives and need interpretations that were absorbed uncritically from processes of socialization become revealed by practical discourse. But this mode of developing autonomy through public discussion of inner motives does not eliminate the need for transparent selfhood. On the contrary, it makes increasing ones autonomy contingent on increasing ones transparency through a process of public selfanalysis.

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According to Habermass model, the process of rationalizing norms through public discourse requires a parallel discursive rationalization of the self. The transparency of motives required by practical discourse thus produces a paradoxical form of autonomy. Self-control is enhanced by the inner disciplines that enable one to justify his or her inner nature by making it transparent to others. Perhaps, these inner disciplines can even help us to shed elements of our culture that are sources of unhappiness but that we nonetheless unwittingly reproduce. However, the legitimacy of the discourse itself, as well as its ability to enhance our autonomy, depends on our ability to make our most private motives accessible to the scrutiny of other people. This parallel process of rationalizing self and socially binding norms through intersubjective self-revelation bridges the gap between individual interests and the needs of the community. As Habermas explains the principle of universalization in Discourse Ethics, he points out that nothing better prevents others from perspectivally distorting ones own interests than actual participation. It is in this pragmatic sense that the individual is the last court of appeal for judging what is in his best interest. On the other hand, the descriptive terms in which each individual perceives his interests must be open to criticism by others (1990, 67). When Habermas points to the dual necessity of permitting open access to practical discourse and the necessity of debating the specific descriptive terms in which people represent their interests in public, he approaches the question of transparency with the intention of making the terms of self-interest transparent. Negotiating the meaning of descriptive terms that define both individual identity and group identity, Habermas holds, must be conducted dialogically because needs and wants are interpreted in the light of cultural values. Since cultural values are always components of intersubjectively shared traditions, the revision of the values used to interpret needs and wants cannot be a matter for individuals to handle monologically (6768). Such revision of values involves a process of mediating between ones own and other peoples understanding of ones interests. The materials of this process are the descriptive terms through which the interests of individuals are represented. To follow Habermass logic, as communities discuss the meanings of descriptive terms, the terms become more and more transparent and group identity becomes more and more cohesive, though not necessarily more homogeneous. Cohesiveness and heterogeneity are not contradictory because what is important is not that things become the same, but that the individuals genuine interests are honestly represented and recognized in the public realm. Transparency in the descriptive terms of self-representa-

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tion is a necessary condition for the establishment of a legitimate consensus about norms because opacity blurs the meaning of terms and thereby withholds aspects of them from criticism by others. Further, any conscious effort on the part of a discussant to withhold meaning violates the principle that the motives of participants be transparent. Consciously opaque utteranceshidden agendastaint practical discourse by introducing strategic action into it. Thus, the viability of practical discourse as a method of rationalizing the norms of a community that can permit autonomy is also contingent on the ability of individuals to achieve transparency. In two respects, then, transparency underpins Habermass construction of autonomy. First, by moving the locus of reason from a private, psychological realm to a realm of public discourse, Habermas raises the relevance of communicative transparency because this transition makes rationalization contingent on intersubjective communication. But in doing so, Habermas displaces transparency on the level of the sign onto a transparency of the motives of the participants in discourse. Second, transparency is an issue at the points at which the universality of the procedure of discourse ethics intersects with the contextuality of individual consciousnesses and communities. Like individuals, groups must seek self-clarification through processes of public dialogue. These two applications of the idea of transparency underscore Habermass tendency to work from the public to the private level.7 In Habermass world, privacy is always fragile and contingent because everything is negotiated and rationalized through public discourse. The private realm of individual consciousness is not a place that is exempt from the public; rather, it is a subcategory of it. Habermas implicitly makes the discomforting case that private realms are comprised either of places that the public has not noticed or of places that public discourse has chosen to designate off limits through the special status of private.

Opacity and autonomy in Bakhtins communication theory

There are also two ways in which transparency is important to Bakhtins construction of autonomy. First, even though Bakhtin occasionally implies the theoretical possibility of achieving the kind of transparency that underpins Habermasian practical discourse, he more often takes the position that the multiplicity of meanings that are embedded in words will inevitably

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make meaning opaque. Second, Bakhtin associates transparency with the power that social interests can bring to bear on discourse. Like Habermas, Bakhtin sees transparency as a social construct rather than as a quality of language. Unlike Habermas, Bakhtin does not believe that transparency can be politically neutral. From a Bakhtinian perspective, it is arguable that the conditions necessary for a legitimate Habermasian practical discourse to occur are impossible to achieve because the kind of bracketing that Habermas uses to screen out relationships of domination would largely empty descriptive terms of meaning. Even though Habermas understands bracketing as an effort to ensure undistorted communication, it is also an effort to control signification. Thus, while Habermas explicitly describes bracketing procedures as methods of screening forms of domination out of the process of discourse, Bakhtin implicitly describes them as methods of drawing the semantic boundaries around words ever more narrow. From Bakhtins point of view, Habermass bracketing comes closer to representing a vehicle of domination than it does to representing a mode of liberation. In an irresistible couple of sentences, Caryl Emerson historicizes Bakhtins suspicion of the type of formalism that characterizes Habermasian discourse ethics:
During those rigidly Stalinist years, so saturated with approved prototypes, Bakhtin seems to have feared the potential tyranny of perfect form, the immutability and uninterruptibility of any icon that was too fixed in place. A force that could give us a seemly image would most likely know only one way to welcome an approaching idea, consciousness, or historical world view; here you come again, stay as you are, you are what you always were, its all over. (1994, 212)

What is over is what Bakhtin calls the process of historical becoming in which the word is constantly engaged. This process ends when the perfection of form permits transparency. While it is important to emphasize that Habermass theory implies neither a unitary historical world view nor the end of a process of semantic development, the procedure of practical discourse does represent exactly the kind of universalized and seemly image of which Bakhtin is deeply suspicious. For Bakhtin, a hard-nosed rejection of the idea that transparency can be anything other than the result of force or ideological pressure motivates him to construct a model of autonomy that seeks simultaneously to retain the ambiguity of the word and to couple it with a confidence in the individuals ability to render the dialogic structure of discourse transparent. In Bakhtins eyes, semantic opacity is inherent in the word and thus a

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forced transparency signifies an exertion of power that threatens autonomy. However, heteroglossia has a structure that reflects the relationships of power among different social interests. Making these relationships transparent does not mark an effort to control meaning. Rather, it marks an effort to understand the dialogic strands against which each utterance brushes. Bakhtins model of autonomy revolves around the project, not of constructing transparent descriptive terms that permits a fully conscious person to dovetail self and society, but of constructing a sophisticated sense of how the individuals voice functions amid heteroglossia. Like V. N. Volosinov, Bakhtin grounds the ideological sign in historical struggles among economic classes and other social groups.8 In this respect, the word always has a history that carries more than the intent of a speaker. Bakhtin often uses the metaphor of partial or incomplete ownership to describe speakers inability to use words as seamless expressions of intent. As he puts it in Discourse in the Novel, the word is always half someone elses. It becomes ones own only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. As he describes the process of making words ones own, Bakhtin uses rhetoric inflected with images of power, such as appropriation and seizure. He remarks that some words stubbornly resist recontextualization. When one uses some words, Bakhtin claims, it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker (1981, 29394). In fact, this is exactly what Bakhtin does when he seeks to explain the concept of ones own words as a practical rather than a theoretical phenomenon. In effect, as Bakhtin describes the act of appropriation that assimilating words into a personal discourse requires, he strives to assimilate the concept of true personal ownership of a word into his own discourse. It is as though the concept of ones own words, which seems so reasonable, but which is so foreign to the trajectory of Bakhtins thought, puts itself in quotation marks as he tries to claim it for the autonomous speaker. In his late essay Problem of the Text, Bakhtin returns to this theme and describes the quest for transparency in terms of the quest for a language through which one can achieve a perfect expression of intent with no surplus meaning: Quests for my own words are in fact quests for a word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself; this is a striving to depart from ones own words with which nothing essential can be said. I myself can only be a character and not the primary author. The authors quests for his own words are basically quests for genre and style, quests for an authorial position (1986, 149). This quotation does much to define

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Bakhtins attitude toward the relationship between transparency and autonomy. Authors need words that express their intentions; however, in that these words are embedded in a history that transcends the speakers intentions, the words necessarily represent more than the author intends. In this larger context, the author is a kind of character, who is contained within and defined by the communicative structure over which he or she has only limited control. The search for ones own words is a search for the ability to transcend this context and to gain one where the speaker has full semantic control and can speak words that are not shared. On a theoretical level, then, by Bakhtins logic, transparency and autonomy are identical. Ones own words would be a perfect expression of self liberated from the history of language. Ironically, though, these words would be deracinated from any shared historical context and would thus be meaningless to anyone other than the speaker. In practical terms, the effort to discover ones own words can at best permit the discovery of a mediatory position, a style or a point of view. Nonetheless, Bakhtin presents this situation not with the tone of one who is describing a kind of tragic fall into the history of language, but with the tone of one explaining a value-neutral fact of life. Indeed, he even implies that ones own words can never express anything essential and thus actually have a lesser communicative value than the historically inflected word. One implication for autonomy of the necessary opacity of the utterance is that its surplus meaning functions partially to hide the self. Although on a purely theoretical level transparency and autonomy are coequal in Bakhtins thought, in practical terms transparency is much more closely associated with tyranny, and Bakhtin is much more interested in ways of using language to destabilize and subvert institutions that work to undermine autonomy. Bakhtins metaphor of a unitary language situates his concept of the verbal ownership of words within a larger social context, and this is where the threat that transparency poses to autonomy is most apparent. Just as an individual can claim to own a word when he or she can purge it of meaning beyond his or her intent, a social class or group owns a language when it has the power to purge meanings that do not reflect its ideological interests. Bakhtin comes closest to describing the relationship between unitary language and transparency when he explains that, when talking about unitary language,
we are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understand-

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ing in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization. (1981, 271)

Bakhtins suspicion of the kind of language that assures a maximum of mutual understanding exemplifies the difference between his own and Habermass understanding of the relationship of stable meanings to autonomy. Bakhtins decision to emphasize the word maximum underscores his sense that the forces motivating maximum understanding are the same forces that result in ideological hegemony and political tyranny. This same maximum would connote an ideal speech situation to Habermas. In discussing the goal of transparency in what he calls poetic style, Bakhtin directly underscores this connection between the effort to establish linguistic transparency and the effort to establish authoritarian politics: Within the limits of poetic style, direct unconditional intentionality, language at its full weight and the objective display of language . . . are all simultaneous. . . . The language of poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic limit, often become authoritarian, dogmatic, and conservative (1981, 28687). Transparency must be forced on the sign by arbitrary social power. This is so partly because the consensus that validates transparency, for Bakhtin, is more likely to mark the ascendance of the centripetal over centrifugal forces of language than it is to signify the victory of reason over power (272). The motion toward semantic centralization that Bakhtin metaphorizes as the centripetal force of language does not represent the grounding of validity claims as it does for Habermas; rather, it represents the ideological control of signification. In this respect, the impulse to achieve transparency has radically different implications for Habermas than it does for Bakhtin. On the one hand, Habermas understands transparency in ideologically neutral terms. It is a prerequisite for undistorted communication, and, as such, it is a means to the end of mutual understanding. On the other hand, Bakhtin never dissociates transparency from the material or ideological interests of a speaker. Transparency is inseparable from the forces that purge unintended, and thus subversive, meanings. In Habermass lexicon, when a word becomes transparent, it belongs to everyone. In Bakhtins lexicon, when a word becomes transparent, it becomes the property of a single social interest. Thus, the effort to achieve a rational consensus through undistorted communication would strike Bakhtin as a move in the direction of ideological hegemony.

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Bakhtin historicizes this struggle between unitary language and heteroglossia by situating it in a long, ongoing contest between poetic and novelistic discourse:
Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval church, of the one language of truth, the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, the abstract grammatical universalism of Leibniz (the idea of a universal grammar), Humboldts insistence on the concreteall these, whatever their differences in nuance, give expression to the same centripetal forces in sociolinguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same project of centralizing and unifying the European languages. The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of language, their enslavement. (1981, 271)

But, Bakhtin asserts, as his narrative turns away from the sites where ideology forces transparency and begins to describe the liberation of heteroglossia, the centripetal force of the life of language, embodied in a unitary language, operate in the midst of heteroglossia (271). Transparency implies a universalized and unitary meaning such that there can be only one speaker, or, at most, many people speaking from an identical ideological perspective. But the forces that lead in this direction must struggle against the ever-present forces of heteroglossia that work to make the language opaque. Habermas would certainly agree that the realm of discourse is a social construct that exists within a heteroglot verbal universe. But he would also assert that it is formally possible to bracket relationships of domination. The issue of the formal bracketing of domination marks the widest gap between Bakhtins and Habermass lines of thought in this regard. Bakhtins suspicion of transparency is underpinned by a profound distrust of the type of systematized big-picture model of communication that Habermas creates. Instead, Bakhtin relies on the individuals ability to respond honestly, consciously, and appropriately to the specific circumstances of his or her intersubjective relationships. The emphasis Bakhtin places on the individuals ability to understand the discursive architecture of his or her world marks a key difference between his and Habermass construction of reason. Though Bakhtin rarely discusses reason explicitly, he sees autonomy less as a product of public discourse, than as a kind of skill that the individual develops by gaining greater and greater understanding of the structure of heteroglossia. In Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin indicates the trajectory that the development of this kind of understanding might take in the life of an actual person. As a means of illustrating a turning point in the development

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of an individuals autonomy, Bakhtin describes an illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable world. This peasant, nevertheless lived in several language systems simultaneously; he prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried to speak yet a fourth language. However, at this point, the peasant is unaware of the different ideological positions that the languages represent and of the role that they play in structuring his life. As Bakhtin puts it, [T]hese languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic consciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to the other without thinking, automatically. But when the peasant becomes able to regard one language . . . through the eyes of another language everything changes:
As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one anotherthen the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing ones orientation among them began. (1981, 296)

This awakening in the consciousness of the peasant marks a kind of empowerment, but one that is very different from that granted by the bracketing and testing procedures of Habermasian practical discourse. The peasant is empowered with a new kind of reason because his new awareness of heteroglossia impels him to situate himself in relation to the various interests that control his world. Having recognized that this structure of multiple and internally variegated languages defines a geography of power, the peasant is now able consciously to choose his orientation to different contexts. A kind of Newtonian transformation has occurred and a set of laws that were once opaque to the peasant has now become transparent. However, this does not imply a consequent transparency of self on the part of the peasant. On the contrary, it actually enables the peasant to mask him- or herself in different discourses. The peasant can now carnivalize and subvert authority, adopt the tones of authority when he wants to exert domination, or use discourses out of context to create ironic distance, and so on. Although she cannot escape the ideological dimension of discourse, she can, indeed, must, use her newly gained knowledge in an ideologically inflected way, either cynically or sincerely.

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The autonomy that conscious awareness of heteroglossia creates comes not from the ability to negotiate interests in a power-neutral environment, but from the ability to situate ones self within the system of discourses through which one moves. Bakhtin exemplifies this process by explaining how the most skilled authors move from discursive location to discursive location as a method of demonstrating their autonomy within the structure of heteroglossia: The author utilizes now one language, now another, in order to avoid giving himself up wholly to either of them; he makes use of this verbal give-and-take, this dialogue of languages at every point in his work, in order that he himself might remain as it were neutral with regard to language, a third party in a quarrel between two people (1981, 314). Maintaining this third-party neutrality permits the author not only to serve as an honest broker among discourses, but also to remain outside and above the ideological boundaries of any single discourse. Late in the same essay, Bakhtin reformulates a classic definition of the novelthe novel must be a full and comprehensive reflection of its erato refocus it on the structure of discourse: The imperative should be formulated differently: the novel must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all the eras languages that have any claim to being significant; the novel must be a microcosm of heteroglossia (411). Ultimately, Bakhtinian autonomy is represented by the ability to achieve this end. Its defining characteristic is the ability to think and act not just novelistically, but like a novelist, as a skilled manipulator of heteroglossia.9 Autonomy, for Bakhtin, takes this form partly because the combination of ideologically forced transparency with the two forces that most contribute to opacityhistoricity and the multiplicity of discourseswork both for and against autonomy. By Bakhtins logic, autonomy cannot be wrested from the word itself through a struggle between meaning and intention, but can be achieved by making the architecture of heteroglossia transparent and gaining the ability to situate opaque discourses as an auditor and to control them as a speaker.

Bakhtin, transparency, and the ideal speech situation

As closely as Bakhtin connects transparency with ideological hegemony and thus sees in opacity a realm of autonomy for the self, he also asserts the theoretical presence of the level of transparency that Habermas seeks to imagine through practical discourse. In The Problem of the Text, Bakhtin briefly describes a figure who embodies the spirit of Habermass

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discourse ethics: [E]ach dialogue takes place as if against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all participants in the dialogue. Bakhtin calls this third party a superaddressee, who holds forth the possibility of ideally true responsive understanding to a speakers utterance. Further, using a rhetoric of presupposition that is very similar to that which Habermas uses to describe the ideal speech situation, Bakhtin claims that the author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed (1986, 126). Bakhtin does not develop this idea especially thoroughly, but he articulates it clearly enough to glean a reasonable sense of his meaning. Ideally true and absolutely just could mean significantly different things. The first phrase could refer to an understanding that perfectly comprehends the semantic idea of an utterance, a sort of access to a platonic realm in which signifier and signified are merged, a comprehension of the true idea that a speaker is trying to express. This phrase could also mean, however, the same thing that absolutely just probably means: a perfect comprehension of the intentions of the speaker, a rendering of the word absolutely transparent so that it achieves a perfect expression of intention and thus does absolute justice to the will of the speaker. Hence ideally true might be described as the comprehension that would result if the speaker could express him- or herself perfectly. The superaddressee marks a form of undistorted communication, but a form that is contextualized rather than universalized, as it is in Habermass model. Bakhtin describes the historicity of the superaddressee this way: In various ages and with various understandings of the world, the superaddressee . . . assume[s] various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth) (1986, 126). Michael Holquist glosses this list by describing its members as the ideal audiences for people who feel out of sync with their time: [P]oets who feel misunderstood in their lifetime, martyrs for lost political causes, quite ordinary people caught in lives of quiet desperationall have been correct to hope that outside the tyranny of the present there is a possible addressee who will understand them (1990, 38). Frank Farmer offers a somewhat more subtle analysis that divides the elements of Bakhtins list into foundationalist and antifoundationalist groups. 10 However, regardless of whether the superaddressee is construed as a historical or a neo-Kantian auditor, it represents a form of undistorted communication that is very similar to that which prevails in Habermass ideal speech situation. The continuity between Bakhtins desire to imagine undistorted communication and Habermass ideal speech situation actually goes considerably far-

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ther than just the sketch of the superaddressee. Bakhtin describes the characteristics that he considers necessary for absolutely just responsive understanding to occur. As Bakhtin introduces the superaddressee, he asserts that every utterance makes a claim to justice, sincerity, beauty, and truthfulness (a model utterance), and so forth and provides an illustrative example of the communicative hurdles that the superaddressee is able to overcome: An analysis of the simplest everyday dialogue (What time is it?Seven oclock). The more or less complex situation of the question. One must look at the clock. The answer can be true or false, it can be significant, and so forth. In which time zone? The same question asked in outer space, and so forth 1986, 123, 120). These questions lead Bakhtin to develop a set of validity claims that are very similar to those that Habermas develops in the theory of communicative action: comprehensibility, truth, contextual rightness, and sincerity (Habermas 1979, 3). Like Habermas, Bakhtin explicitly identifies sincerity and factual truth as criteria of undistorted communication. Further, in asking questions such as In which time zone? and The same question asked in outer space? of the everyday utterance, Bakhtin is asking about the contextual rightness of the statement. Thus, Bakhtin asserts three out of the four validity claims that Habermas makes indispensable to his theory of communicative action. That Bakhtin articulates, especially in a late essay, a level of communication that is similar to Habermass ideal speech situation adds an important dimension to his theory of communication. Without an image of undistorted communication to counterbalance his analysis of ideology-saturated discourse, Bakhtinian autonomy is liberatory, but it is also reactive and marked by a constant struggle to maintain freedom in a world characterized by discursive cunning and infinite subtle forms of rhetorical coercion. Without a progressive image of transparency, of a context in which communication can transcend coercion, Bakhtinian communication would function only within the boundaries of strategic action. In combination with the form of autonomy offered by understanding the ideological structure of heteroglossia, the superaddressee implies a window through which Bakhtin can imagine communication that is both undistorted semantically and uncoercive ideologically. With significant qualifiers, Habermass and Bakhtins different attitudes toward transparency ultimately relate more to their differing sense of the conditions of possibility and of the relationship of transparency to domination than to the inherent value of the idea. Both recognize the theoretical connection between communicative transparency and the ethical value of sincerity. As a means of underscoring the different roles that context plays in defining Habermass and Bakhtins valuations of transparency as a condition of autonomy, I want in closing to remark on the relationships of Bakhtinian and Habermasian communication theories to Stalinist and National Social-

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ist societies. It would be misleading to end this essay by asserting that Bakhtins long career culminates with the image of progressive transparency that is offered by the superaddressee, and thus that he is ultimately brought around to a belief in the possible separation of transparency and social power. In Problem of the Text, the superaddressee inhabits Bakhtins imagination alongside its own nightmarish opposite. Immediately after noting that all dialogue takes place as if against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party, Bakhtin includes the following parenthetical comment: (Cf. the understanding of the Fascist torture chamber or hell in Thomas Mann as absolute lack of being heard, as the absolute absence of a third party) (1986, 126). Just as the superaddressee hovers invisibly present above the system of communication and holds out the possibility of the kind of liberatory transparency that Habermas attributes to the ideal speech situation, Bakhtin sees a figure who skulks invisibly below the system of communication and achieves transparency through torture. Even as he describes his model of a perfect communicative partner, Bakhtin reminds himself of the superaddressees mirror image in the state police. Thus, even when he is describing a perfect auditor and respondent, Bakhtin remains attuned to the permutations of power that are embedded in the contexts in which communication occurs. His parenthetical inclusion of this image of the absolute absence of a third party says much about the degree to which he can imagine language sustaining liberty from forces of ideological control and centralization. In relation to the suspicion with which Bakhtin approaches the idealization of form, it may be symbolic that he alludes to an unreachable outer space when he is analyzing ideal communicative relationships and to the more immanent reality of Stalinist torture chambers when he is describing the connection between communication and domination. In this way, Bakhtins reservations about the ethical value of transparency defines an important counterpart to Habermass desire to ground communication in a procedure that seeks transparent understanding. Bakhtins superaddressee definitely represents a utopian impulse, but his construction of autonomy is most consistently focused on the project of fending off forces of ideological domination that ask one to internalize an arbitrary and alien voice of authority. Partly in reaction to the tyranny under which he lived, Bakhtin argues that we can have too much reason, especially if the force of the better argument makes the meaning of descriptive terms transparent and creates a monovocal voice of authority that the individual has no choice but to accept. From Bakhtins point of view, such a transparent self is not rational or autonomous, but the exact opposite. It is the embodiment of a unitary language.

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To Bakhtin, opacity protects the self as well as the word and thus has a kind of ethical value that it does not have for Habermas. Equally, as Habermass position in the Historians Debate and his response to Heideggers involvement in National Socialism make clear, a pluralist dialogue that compels transparency is part of Habermass remedy to the kind of radical cultural chauvinism and nationalist mystification that enabled the Nazis to gain control of Germany (Wolin 1989a, 1989b; Habermas 1992; Pensky 1995). The revelation of Nazi atrocities that Habermas experienced after World War II is an important context in directing his ethical theory both toward a principle of universalization that necessarily transcends national identity and on his effort to define big-picture paradigmatic systems. Unlike Bakhtin, who defined what is almost a guerrilla theory of autonomy, one where freedom is partly contingent on the presence of semantic shadows, Habermas defines a theory that hinges on the ability of the undistorted light of reason to talk its way into the deepest recesses of the social body. The form of these two critics images of autonomy can be partly explained by the fact that Bakhtin spent his entire life under the surveillance of a totalitarian state while Habermas came to maturity in a society that was reinventing itself after a totalitarian state had been defeated in war. Working in the context of a society that was reconstructing has given Habermas motives to see his work in the broadest terms, both within the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory and as a full-blown ethical alternative to the theories of the immediate past. But on a somewhat more subtle level, Habermass emphasis on a principle of universalization and on egalitarian and pluralistic public discourse marks a response to the racial and ethnic prejudice of nazism. The structure of discourse ethics works against, even denies, the possibility of self-reinforcing fictions of superiority that are indispensable to nationalist discourses. Despite the transparency that it produces as a by-product, the unforced force of discourse ethics is itself a response to the horrors of National Socialism and the Holocaust. As theories of philosophers working in different intellectual traditions and under different political circumstances, Habermass model of discursive democracy and Bakhtins articulation of the value of opacity both respond to specific forms of totalitarian politics by offering models of rhetorical humanism. In one sense, the difference between the conclusions that the two reach regarding transparency lies in their different personal experiences of the relationship between autonomy and domination. But, in a more general sense, bringing Habermas and Bakhtin together articulates the simultaneously clarifying and threatening effects that transparency implies in ethically motivated public discourse. I suspect that Habermas and Bakhtin would agree that there are few threats in making the motives and intentions

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of government policies transparent. But when we move one level closer to the self and ask ourselves if they would agree that there is little threat in making the motives and intentions of informal social norms transparent, the issue is likely to get cloudier. Finally, when we ask if the advantages of making the self transparenteven in a dialogue that is sincerely oriented toward mutual understandingcounterbalance the impact that transparency has on the nature of the autonomy, the issue is likely to become completely vexed. From a Habermasian perspective, we are left with the question: Is consensus compatible with opacity? From a Bakhtinian perspective, we are left with an equally difficult question: Is autonomy compatible with transparency? Department of English State University of New York, Brockport Notes
1. As is the case in Gardiners book, Habermas occasionally comes up in texts that primarily focus on Bakhtin, but Bakhtin virtually never comes up in texts that are focused on Habermas. LaCapra makes a distant connection between the two in Rethinking Intellectual History (1983). Gardiner discusses the two in relation to Hans-Georg Gadamers philosophical hermeneutics in The Dialogics of Critique (1992). Most recently, Habermas and Bakhtin have been analyzed comparatively in an effort to identify some of the problems that have to be overcome in multicultural ethical theory (see Nielsen 1995). 2. See part 2 of Discourse Ethics, in which Habermas makes the case for understanding philosophical ethics in terms of a special theory of argumentation in which actors are oriented to validity claims (1990, 44; 1990, 1113, 5776; 1993, 117). 3. Habermas has been criticized from a variety of perspectives for his universalistic approach. Among the most salient of these critics are Warnke, Moon, and Benhabib. Warnke and Benhabib are both skeptical of the extent to which the procedure that Habermas defines can resolve conflicts between people with fundamentally different values. Warnke, asks, for example, If we cannot debate the legitimacy of our norms without engaging the question of our values, how can we settle questions of the legitimacy of norms? (1995, 255). Benhabib argues that Habermass model is based on an implicitly masculine form of autonomy. In place of discourse ethics, Benhabib proposes a model of interactive universalism that is based on the necessity of approaching every moral person as a unique individual, with a certain life history rather than as an abstractly equal subject (1986, 10). Moon challenges the ability of the discourse ethic on the same grounds as Warnke, that it is unlikely that even the most dispassionate reason can justify norms universally in a world that is already characterized by multiple life forms. As he puts it, There are, then, reasons to believe that some norms could be validated through discourse, but it is far from obvious that they would be sufficient to settle the conflicts that arise in a pluralist world (1995, 152). 4. White draws out this transition clearly in The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas (1988, 4850). Also see Outhwaites Habermas (1994, 55ff.). Outhwaite emphasizes the transition from abstract universalizability in Kant to normative consensus in Habermas. Taylor explains the transition of Kantian monologism to Habermasian dialogism in Language and Society (1991, 31). Benhabib underscores the extent to which Habermass reconstruction of the categorical imperative participates in a tradition of defining reason in terms that are implicitly masculine, or, at least, which sublimate difference to universalized constructs (1995, 19).

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5. In an interesting intertextual moment, Habermas quotes McCarthys explanation of the Habermasian formulation of the principle of universalization (Habermas 1990, 67; McCarthy 1978, 326). 6. I am using strategic action in the same way that McCarthy uses it, to define a mode in which an individual distorts communication for the strategic maximizing of the individuals own pleasure or advantage (1978, 23). I primarily want to distinguish it from action oriented toward mutual understanding. The ability to probe and test the motives of participants in practical discourse is a test against strategic action. For a fuller description of the way Habermas describes modes of action, including strategic action, see his Communication and the Evolution of Society (1979, 117). 7. Benhabib most compellingly makes the case for understanding the priority Habermas gives to the public realm. As she puts it in an essay examining models of the public sphere, [T]he discourse model of public dialogue undermines the substantive distinctions between justice and the good life, public matters of norms as opposed to private matters of values, public interests versus private needs. If the agenda of the conversation is radically open, if participants can bring any and all matters under critical scrutiny and reflexive questioning, then there is no way to predefine the nature of the issues discussed as being ones of justice or of the good life prior to the conversation. Equally, nothing, by the nature of the discourse, is outside of the purview of the public realm (1992, 37). 8. Though none of the books published under Bakhtins name are as explicit as Volosinovs Marxism and the Philosophy of Language in asserting that the sign becomes an arena of the class struggle (1986, 23), especially in Rabellais and His World (1994), Bakhtin treats the sign and discourse as sites where property-owning classes seek to centralize meaning as a method of centralizing power and laboring classes seek to diffuse meaning as a method of expressing autonomy. 9. Morson (1981) analyzes Tolstoys effort to transcend this dialogic mode of gaining control of heteroglossia by incorporating nondialogic absolute language into his discourse. The argument that Morson makes exemplifies the problem that Bakhtin finds in authors seeking to adopt approved discourses. 10. Farmer argues, Bakhtins catalogue of possible superaddressees appears, on balance, to be indifferent to the issue of foundational truth. While absolute truth, God, science, and human conscience all seem to fit easily into a foundational paradigm, other superaddressees, such as the people, or the court of history, may just as easily be interpreted as constructionalist or antifoundational (1994, 214). Farmer situates the superaddressee within the theory/pragmatism debate by arguing that the superaddressee may be read as Bakhtins attempt to demonstrate the monologic tendencies of both theoreticism and pragmatism, to reveal how it is that, while we may be wise to rid ourselves of theory, life without a sense of theory would be profoundly diminished, if not unsayable (219). Farmer holds that the superaddressee contextualizes the formalism of theoretical constructs such as Habermass discourse ethics.

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