Page:Relocating Bakhtin.pdf/29

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READING BAKHTIN
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interpret the implicit emphasis on the dialogics of action, movement, energy and performance in a community. As dialogism celebrates alterity, the quest for meaning in communal existence becomes a coherent performance. We understand that our achievement of meaning is entirely dependent on the cultivation of relationship between self and others. This is the architectonics of human existence reflected in social and philosophical thoughts whose parallels are found in various domains of human creativity reflected in the construction of texts or discourses. Likewise individual self is also constructed through interactive performances. That is why the process of communication in the life-world is never imposed but a spontaneous presence. Bakhtin says with conviction that dialogue is everywhere—always renewable and never finalizable. The reciprocal interdependence of the addresser and addressee is always discernible in all discourses of human life and language. Bakhtin loves to speak about utterances which is always performance and hence utterances occur not only in words or texts but also in thoughts and deeds.

Therefore, even in our uniquely different socio-historical perspective, Bakhtinian concepts promise a rich harvest. We are only to prepare ourselves for reinterpreting the apparent differences as manifestations of dialogic simultaneities. We are to carefully build up new sets of questionnaire for the socio-cultural milieu. This has to be initiated on several planes to examine whether through continuous performances of manifold actions, we have been able to celebrate alterity or failed to establish our authorship. In the contemporary times it is very difficult for both an individual and a community to effectively counter all-pervading decentredness and feel the urgency to devote the entire life to dialogism. In Bakhtinian thoughts, life is unique site for constant renewal of manifold struggles since meaning is achieved only through struggles of various kinds. Both the individual and the community has to prepare for