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

Figures of Creation in Alasdair Gray's Prometheus

International audienceAlasdair Gray: Ink for Worlds offers fresh perspectives on Alasdair Gray's literary and pictorial works, with contributions by established critics including Alan Riach, Kirsten Stirling, Liliane Louvel, Gray's biographer Rodge Glass, Sorcha Dallas (Alasdair Gray Foundation), Scott Hames, and Alasdair Gray himself. From Lanark to his most recent publications and even forthcoming ones, Alasdair Gray's literary and pictorial works display a continuously renewed energy that is approached from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, among which are literary studies, fine art, word and image studies, architecture and media studies.The chapters gathered herein demonstrate how Alasdair Gray's 'imagined objects' have long turned to three-dimensional, perfectly functional (or, when necessary, perfectly dysfunctional) worlds in their own right that can equally shape and disrupt the literary, political and social environment out of which they arose