Negotiating the inhuman: Bakhtin, materiality and the instrumentalization of climate change

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness

Inventing Mythologies: the construction of complex cross cultural identities

There is a tendency in academic literature concerning children from diverse social and linguistic background to concentrate on failure within the school system. It is only in recent years that this is beginning to change. In this article the author argues that if we are to motivate children towards success we need to have a clear picture of the kinds of cultural and linguistic understandings they are bringing into schools. Central to this is how they perceive themselves in terms of identity. Much has been written about this area. However, little of it has been empirical or systematic and that which is empirical has been from a positivistic viewpoint. In this article the author describes a non-positivistic analysis of the life stories of several academically successful people and analyses them systematically to demonstrate how they now ‘story’ their identities

Vygotskian dialectics and Bakhtinian dialogics: Consciousness between the authoritative and the carnivalesque

This article proposes a way of understanding consciousness in both dialectical and dialogical terms. More particularly, Vygotsky (1978, 1934/1986) argues that consciousness involves a number of dialectical progressions (e.g., from primitive to cultural knowing, from basic to expert knowing). These dialectics involve a dynamic reorganization of the subcomponents of consciousness (e.g., memory, attention, perception) along a developmental continuum. Bakhtin (1975/1981, 1929/1984a), on the other hand, draws attention to the dialogical within consciousness; specifically the ideology and values that imbue consciousness as a type of knowing. This presents us with a more "vertical" continuum between "authoritative knowing" (knowledge tied to a figure of authority) and "carnivalistic knowing" (knowledge that subverts and de-crowns our taken-for-granted assumptions). I examine the dynamics between these ways of knowing in terms of both the development and the operation of consciousness. I argue that while there are substantial differences between these frameworks, they also mutually enrich each other. In particular, I argue that Bakhtin's dialogics draw attention to the presence of a sensing self within consciousness while Vygotsky's dialectical method can help make sense of a transformation of carnival and authority from an interpersonal to an intrapersonal relationship