Bakhtin and the future of rhetorical criticism: A response to Halasek and Bernard‐Donals

First, I'd like to offer a dialogic analysis of Halasek's and Bernard-Donals' utterances, but it may also be taken as a rhetorical or tendentious characterization of them. If we begin with the two points of reference provided by our session's title, "Bakhtin" and "Rhetorical Criticism," I think we can say that Halasek identifies herself as a rhetorical critic or theorist who belongs to a community of like-minded rhetorical critics and theorists, one that "brings together poststructuralist thought, social constructivism, and writing theory and pedagogy." For them Bakhtin's vilification of rhetoric is a problem and his alternative rhetorical tradition is an opportunity. Halasek can summarize the rhetoric Bakhtin attacks and distance herself from it as "a definition of rhetoric that is not ours" and she can appropriate as much more congenial to herself and her fellow rhetoricians the rhetorical tradition of oppositional genres and parodic discourse moves with which Bakhtin identifies the novel. She imagines Bakhtin's hostility to rhetoric as a consequence of his hostility to the official languages of "Russia during his lifetime" and imagines herself and her colleagues as also opposed to "a rhetoric of oppression" but apparently not confronted with a similar authoritarian political situation. Instead of identifying herself exclusively with a "parodic rhetoric" opposed to an official monologic "polemic rhetoric," she posits a "dialogic rhetoric" which can contemplate the tensions between polemic and parodic rhetorics in the professional and pedagogical tasks of textual and cultural analysis. Bakhtin offers her a better way of doing what rhetorical critics were already doing. Halasek welcomes Bakhtin's tension-filled genres and joyful relativity in a prose that is relatively free from tension and clear about where it stands. She can separate Bakhtin's vilification of rhetoric from his celebration of it, choose one side over the other, and even explain away Bakhtin's adherence to the side she rejects as a function of his particular historical situation. She is at home with the listeners she posits and brings them a Bakhtin they can use without having to change their minds about rhetoric or politics. Bemard-Donals, on the other hand, writes a tension-filled and ambivalent prose in the name of escaping from relativism and uncertainty. He is not at one with what he takes to be the community of contemporary rhetorical theory but sees it as "plagued" by the collapse of a distinction between science and rhetoric that he somehow wants to reassert He persists in a commitment to "theory" or science or dialectic or history that he believes rhetorical critics like Fish and Rorty have subsumed under "rhetoric," and he turns to Bakhtin not to assimilate him to the consensus in current rhetorical theory but to find a way out of the impasse of current rhetorical theory. The Bakhtin he needs for his purposes is not the celebrant of parody and joyful relativity but the theorist of the socially constituted subject who can provide rhetorical criticism with a scientific model for understanding "how subjects are formed in language." In effect, he wants to substitute Bakhtin's sociolinguistics of the subject for the psychology of the subject Plato calls for in the Phaedrus as the scientific foundation for a rhetoric that could then know, as he put it in his