Discourse or dialogue? Habermas, the Bakhtin Circle, and the question of concrete utterances

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via the link below.This article argues that the Bakhtin Circle presents a more realistic theory of concrete dialogue than the theory of discourse elaborated by Habermas. The Bakhtin Circle places speech within the “concrete whole utterance” and by this phrase they mean that the study of everyday language should be analyzed through the mediations of historical social systems such as capitalism. These mediations are also characterized by a determinate set of contradictions—the capital-labor contradiction in capitalism, for example—that are reproduced in unique ways in more concrete forms of life (the state, education, religion, culture, and so on). Utterances always dialectically refract these processes and as such are internal concrete moments, or concrete social forms, of them. Moreover, new and unrepeatable dialogic events arise in these concrete social forms in order to overcome and understand the constant dialectical flux of social life. But this theory of dialogue is different from that expounded by Habermas, who tends to explore speech acts by reproducing a dualism between repeatable and universal “abstract” discursive processes (commonly known as the ideal speech situation) and empirical uses of discourse. These critical points against Habermas are developed by focusing on six main areas: sentences and utterances; the lifeworld and background language; active versus passive understandings of language; validity claims; obligation and relevance in language; and dialectical universalism

The concept of 'the everyday': ephemeral politics and the abundance of life

Against the background of a continuing interest in the everyday in international relations, this article asks what kind of analytics upon and within the world mobilises one through the concept of the everyday and what consequences this may have for thinking about politics. In particular, it explores a conception of the the everyday that foregrounds the abundance of human life and ephemeral temporalities. The abundance of life invites a densification of politics combined with an emphasis on displacing levels or scales by associative horizontal relations. The ephemeral introduces a conception of temporality that foregrounds the political significance of fleeting practices and the emergent nature of life. When applied to politics, this conception of the everyday performs politics as emergent, as possibilities that are not already defined by fixing what politics can possibly be. The order of politics is then understood as an immanently precarious succession of situations and practices in which lived political lives remain inherently aleatory, momentary and emergent rather than as an order of mastering the political. The concept of the everyday, thus draws attention to the immanent elusiveness and fragility of politics as it loses its ground, its referent