Bakhtin, Aristotle, and the Analysis of the "Act Deed"

...or won't you take a moment to peruse a portion of my latest academic epiphany?

Because my method of evaluation is qualitative or inductive, rather than quantitative or deductive, the study conceptualizes a new theory for this study based on classical theories of deliberative rhetoric in dialogue with Bakhtin’s theories of “architectonics of answerability” and “aesthetics.” Though this study analyzes Hemans’s work on the more broadly classical theories of kairos and deliberative methods of communication, Aristotle discusses deliberative oratory very specifically in On Rhetoric, and he uses the ideas of deliberative rhetoric as a means by which we might judge an author’s (or speaker’s) responsibility or answerability to the community to which he speaks. It is perhaps important to mention Aristotle here, if only as a means to discuss general classical theories of a specific rhetorical technique.

On the other hand, in his belief of anti-theory , Bakhtin “defined himself as anti-Aristotelian” . Nevertheless, in the unfinished, fragmented text Art and Answerability, Bakhtin does not remove himself completely from the classical discussion of what may be a collective human philosophy. For Bakhtin, the collective is made up of unique, individual utterances – individual ontologies or conceptions of the creative aesthetic, perceivable knowledge, or philosophical answerability. To be clear, as a self-professed Neo-Kantian, Bakhtin is most interested in situated knowledge – that is, “the kind of situated awareness individual human beings experience in the unique sites they occupy in the world at a particular time and in a particular space” (Holquist xxii).

It is this statement that cements, for many, proof of Bakhtin as anti-Aristotelian, as he situates himself as the proponent of individual discourses and awarenesses of the viability of aesthetic – in opposition to the aesthetic as judged by the community or as determined useful by ideas of communal knowledge. Indeed, unlike Aristotle, Bakhtin was less concerned with the final artifact of any creative process than he was the author’s unique “act-deed” that had created the artifact in the first place. Undeniably, Bakhtin was far more interested in any singular human act as aesthetic than he was the end result itself; I suggest that he was equally interested, albeit on a subjective and secondary level, with the whole of the individual’s existence, that which, Bakhtin asserts, created the individual’s complex inner and outer awareness – specifically, the architectonic whole of the discourse that shaped the author from the start.

If we are to believe that Bakhtin was interested in the “interrelationship of ‘I – the other’,” then we must embrace the idea that “I” can only exist as “other” if “others” exist, within this complex time and place, to which an individual might be juxtaposed as other. After all, in his own work, Bakhtin perhaps has been “othered” but only insofar as he was in deliberative dialogue with writers and philosophers of both his past and present. They, in essence, become the architectonic by which his own aesthetic would be praised and put to use.

Regardless, it is in the discussion of situated awareness that Bakhtin’s theory of architectonics finds its potency. It is in this way that, though he may be anti-Aristotelian, Bakhtin is not necessarily opposed to all ideas of classical rhetoric. And while Bakhtin discusses the concepts of “wholeness” and “points of view,” rather than purpose and audience, both Bakhtin and classical deliberative rhetoric are interested in how discourse meets, or alternately fails to meet, aesthetic expectations of what is “good or unworthy” or “advantageous or disadvantageous” in that utterance.

It is precisely because Bakhtin judges an aesthetic based on an individual’s situated knowledge, while classical rhetorical theories, in the most general sense, employ the ideas of social discourse and audience, that these often seemingly divergent philosophies might co-exist as a means by which we are able to judge both the inner and outer exigencies of Hemans’s work. Deliberative rhetoric allows a consideration of the whole of the art; Bakhtin provides a means to which we might analyze the “act-deed” or unique point-of-view that created the art. Together, these concepts provide a more objective method by which Hemans’s work may be studied, and yet, because Bakhtin allows us a method for discussion of the inner act, Hemans’s own unique perspective is never subjugated to the objective, and often sterile rhetorical view of the outer – that is, the final end product of the act-deed.

Thus we end our excerpt of Chapter 2... dum, dum, duuuuummmmm... thank you for caring, dear WWW...

DONNA