What Would Bakhtin Do? - Michael Holquist - Multilingual, 2.0?
Channel: UA German Department
Date: 2012-09-10

I will argue that monolingualism has no ontological status in itself, but rather is an illusion of unity resulting from ignorance or religious credibility.   In making the argument, I will begin with Bakhtin's metalinguistics, where the emphasis is on jerry rigging that goes on in the gap between individuals in dialog with themselves or others.  The foundational principle of dialogism is that nothing exists in itself. The resulting hegemony of the sharing/difference pattern that makes relation the key to understanding the world and other people insures that claims (at least of the sort that are usually made) for a single language will be tenable only at the deepest level of confessional belief or highest level of intellectual abstraction. 

The naive belief of so-called 'lost tribes' that their language is the only one, the historical search for an adamic language that existed before Babel, various claims for the superiority of a particular 'national' language', the Islamic belief the Koran exists only in Arabic, are all based on a prior conviction that humans are capable of an immaculate oneness.

I will reference some of the work done across a number of fields---psychology (Paul Bloom, Daniel Kahneman), in biology (Robert Pollack), Reading Science (Stanislas Dehaene), cryptography and information theory (Claude Shannon, Alan Turing), political history (Ernest Gellner), and, of course, linguistics (Kenneth Pike, Noam Chomsky, Mark Baker)---all of which demonstrates that oneness is a conceptual phantasm.
Which of the symposium questions/prompts does the presentation address?