"The dialogical thinking in the digital era.
Paradoxes of cybelculture" [1]

Domingo Sánchez-Mesa Martínez

Universidad Carlos III, Madrid

http://www.uc3m.es/

 

Digital era, virtual society, cyberculture... The reader may be wondering, What does all this have to do with Bakhtin? In my opinion it does have a great deal to do with his work. I will try to prove this along the analysis of certain worrying circumstances that are starting to characterize the so-called cyberculture precisely with the help of some interpretative principles Bakhtin developed in his texts. I also wish to corroborate my belief that it is necessary to confront his ideas and theoretical proposals with our most immediate reality. The knowledge of the philosophical context and the philological task of “fixing” some key meanings of Bakhtinian concepts is important insofar as it may improve a critical scene which may look too dropsical already. However, it is absurd to think this is the best and only tribute that can be paid to a thinker like Bakhtin. A more relevant task indeed would be to keep thinking about the human condition and the life of the meaning, and to do it with him, taking the dialogue he got involved in one step further. At the same time, it would be more rewarding and useful for a critique which intends to avoid one of the recurring faults of this cyberculture itself: narcissism. I believe it is possible to talk about a post-modern Bakhtin from a post-modern approach, maintaining all the critical potential of his ideas with the aim of opposing the diverse forms of the empire of the absolute present. I perceive this empire as one of the greater threats to the environment of dialogical conscience on the threshold of the new millennium.

Bakhtin was an almost pre-modern thinker in his literary preferences (classic literature, Rabelais, Dostoievski), and hardly referred to a means of communication besides printing or journalism. Nevertheless, he may still provide some interesting paths to envisage the phenomenon which better seems to define the subject of virtual society: communication. This happens at a moment when we are clearly noticing important changes in the relationship between technology and culture, from the paradigm of the mass media to the so-called digital era. Philosophers such as Habermas or Baudrillard, among others, have tried to broaden the explicative possibilities of critical theory following this perspective. What I call the dialogical mode of comprehension can help take these proposals one step further, as well as enhance our understanding of emerging modes of narrative representation on the level of literary discourse.

Cyberculture seems to confer reality not only to some of the most promising hopes but also to the darkest terrors of science fiction and the utopian thought of postmodernity. It can be recognized by its cult to an unprecedented technological development, as well as the proliferation of somewhat mystic discourses. Some believe that what lies latent in them is a technoelitist scatology of perfection, whereas others call it the freedom of  the flesh. This representation of reality is materially experienced by a society where machines, under the empire of electronic microprocessors, are increasingly invading the space of human activity. They eventually enter our bodies or become essential extensions of it. This originates the idea, which is so widespread in the latest essay writing on this issues, of the definitive arrival of a really cyborguesque culture. Many of the phenomena of cyberculture are much more a part of our everyday lives than we might think: the therapeutic application of prostheses and implants, the development of ever more subtle computer interfaces, the obsession to build one’s own body (plastic surgery, body building, cyberorganic tattoos), cyber-art (performances, electronic art), the proliferation and spectacular sophistication of cyber-leisure (including cybersex), the development of telework and the domestic applications of computers, the boom of virtual goods businesses (data, information, digitalized images, etc.). All these are phenomena, as we will see later, certainly related to the latest phase of international financial capitalism and the major media (TV channels, the film industry, telecommunications holdings, etc.).

Given the speed of this phenomenon of technologization and virtualization of advanced societies, we might roughly conclude that cyberculture is reaching that escape velocity pointed out by Mark Dery (1995) in both the philosophical and technological sense [2]. The North American context, keen on both utopia and catastrophic attitudes, is certainly a privileged breeding ground for this conscience of a post-historic culture full of promises of freedom at all levels. However, we are all potential victims of the perversion this escapism can lead to, as it eliminates one of the crucial factors in any act of understanding, that is to say, of communication, as described by Bakhtin/Voloshinov and so many other contemporary cultural critics. I am referring to the context, the space of negotiation and struggle for the meaning of texts (according to Bakhtin, this is what defines the human character after all).

I intend to challenge the dialogical mode of communication [3] in two different cases which will be considered symptoms of the ongoing cultural changes: On the one hand, I will look at a fictional text, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, a true reference point for narrative and cyberpunk art in general. On the other hand I shall study a phenomenon of education, a specific example of a virtual international community: Open Distance Learning [4] networks (distance learning using new technologies).

Before getting into the matter, it should be clarified that cyberculture must be understood as just one aspect, though a very representative one indeed, of the process of acceleration of the globalization trend in our planet as the millennium perishes. At a time which is clearly marked by mobility at all levels (human contingents, information, goods, capital, ideas), the young myth of the global village seems to materialize. At the same time, geopolitical deterritorialization is more and more widely felt. This feeling often entails violent contradictions. This growing homogenization and standardization of communicative styles within global culture (especially but not only through television) has a pendulum effect which is apparent in the reaction of what is vernacular: Local identities fear becoming victims of what they consider to be new forms of colonization or aggressions to their national identity.

This pendulum effect can still be explained through this struggle between the two major socioideological trends mentioned by Bakhtin in the process of aesthetic formation of cultures in history: centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin 1981). Bakhtin was fascinated by a moving world with cultural transfers and fertilizations, of interlinguistic and sociolinguistic cross-breeding. He found key historical explanations to the plurality of the contemporary world in moments of intense mobility (the Hellenistic period, the end of the Middle Ages, Humanism), in the  transitional moments and spaces of cultures, which are crystallized in the images of the heteroglossic discourse for a specific tradition of literary texts: carnivalized literature.

An essential aspect is missing in the brief description of cyberculture made above: the degree of mediation it imposes on the relationship between us and reality, even between our mind and our body. I would like to link this hypertrophy of cultural mediatization to the above mentioned idea of velocity. The immediateness and velocity of the live effect on TV, a mediator, an eye which sees everything and confers a real character to what it captures and broadcasts, and the possibilities of simulation opened by image digitalization, are erasing the notion of medium itself. They tend to naturalize its presence as an environment or a real communicative ecosystem. It is a fact that we are witnessing a change in our perception of reality and the process of communication itself. This velocity is not only due to technology. There are also many political and especially economic acceleration factors. The faster the circulation of goods, the greater the profits made. Up to a certain point, the change is also noticeable in our comprehension of collectivity and personal identity (including bodiness), and in our perception of time and especially space. The latter is increasingly made of time, mainly because of the speed in the transport of goods.

The confluence of all these factors eventually make the boundaries between what is real and fictitious more blurred and easier to manipulate, mainly because of the immersion power the new media are developing and increasing. Even if we admit that virtualization is a reality-creating process which has accompanied man since much before computer culture (Lévy 1992), simulation is set to become a dominant symbolic medium of interchange. This is due to the perception people have of the non-fictional world, which is starting to be permanently mediatized by audio-visual communicative filters, images (from television to virtual reality systems) which tend to replace reality as warrants of truth. Cultures which are less developed technologically suffer the results of this situation as well, even if they do not experience the same mediatic space. With no contextual references, or the possibility to accede to them or understand them as necessary, those who control the media might gain a tremendous and terrible manipulation power world-wide. Let us just remember the empire of copies or artificial realities, which led the American pilots who raided Iraq in the Gulf War to compare the job done over the Iraqi people to the fascinating environment of war video games.

Globalization, deterritorialization, immediateness, extreme visuality, ubicuous mediation are some of the mottoes of an exodus culture, where the so-called Moebius effect is felt ever more clearly. This effect is that of reversibility between both faces of a process, between what is interior and exterior, private and public, global and local.

To sum up, communicating in virtual society entails something like leaving the now and then to occupy a space in a provisional and diffused way This is the feeling expressed by most internauts). In this space text, personality, voice and writing lose their character of being present to become nomadic, immaterial and actualizable entities. This territory is cyberspace,a virtual space in which the idea of space itself is crossed by that of time. It is a space made of speed, synchrony or communicative immediacy. It is no coincidence that the concept became popular through a novelist, the above mentioned William Gibson: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of mind, cluster and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...” (Gibson 1984: 67).

Some of the changes mentioned are the object of literary representation in an extremely important subgenre to understand cyberculture: the cyberpunk novel, a branch of science fiction narrative which, as most of the works of this kind, sets many of the contradictions, fears and hopes of the present world in a futuristic landscape.  Cyberpunk is a literary genre but also and above all a cultural phenomenon. As such, it is initially characterized by its marginality. Cyberpunk stories depict a power system which dominates the life of regular people mostly through technology. The subversive use of that technology by hackers, software smugglers or visionary cults introduces the punk aspect into a society in which the penetration of what is artificial into bodies and minds justifies the cyber character of the genre. The megaurbanistic stage, the dark and pessimistic tone and the moral ambiguity of the characters are a few of the complementary features which characterize this trend of literary creation. Its fictional world is clearly distopic and presents a series of characters who fight for a certain form of freedom in a society which is, in principle, highly controlled. 

2. Virtual subjects and communities. Identity and body in cyberculture

The vanishing of bodies. Flesh turned into word. Incorporeal minds flowing through networks to materialise into provisional graphic chains on the shiny screen of a computer... Communities of internauts, teleworkers, scholars and voyeurs. How far are we from that category of I for the other-the other for me of Bakhtinian architectonics? How far from the closeness of the body and language on one side, and the marketplace, the chronotope of the carnivalesque imaginary on the other? We know that the ideas of individual, otherness and community are inseparable in Bakhtinian philosophy. Bearing them in mind, let us examine the virtual communities which already exist around us and which may eventually become the backbone of cyberculture.

In principle, our idea of community immediately suggests a closeness or physical contact among its members. It also conveys human interaction and even dialogue. However, the experience of belonging to a community with no direct contact between its members is not entirely new. A clear example is the familiarity with which TV or radio address us as their audience, a group of people sharing the same images and stories through the set at  the same time. In virtual society people meet and communicate in new conditions, new environments and under new communicative rules, encountering other individuals they may never have met and will possibly never meet. Do language and body play the same role under these new communicative circumstances? Which psychological and physical mechanisms justify the feeling of belonging to a virtual community?

In the case of an Open Distance Learning (ODL) network, a number of individuals (students, tutors, teachers) are summoned to join a space for discussion on the basis of a shared interest in the contents of the course and a similar will to test the possibilities opened by telecommunications and computers for teaching and communication. The Internet provides a technological infrastructure where the subjects can have personal or collective contacts beyond current spatial and temporal limitations. The feeling shared by most Internet users that there is a space “in there” that one accesses when entering the discussion on a newsgroup or an IRC is added to the links set by imagination, sometimes beyond the physical contact we mentioned. After all, what really distinguishes certain communities from others is the way identification links work in the minds of people. In other words, the specific trait the way they imagine the community they belong to (Anderson 1983).

Bakhtin initially described the situation of aesthetic understanding of the other using hypothetical settings where there is contact, which is visual in principle (Bakhtin 1922-24; 1990). He says an excess of vision is the necessary condition to perceive and construct the other as a subject. This relationship works both ways. Outsideness is necessary for any act of aesthetic -that is, ethic- comprehension/ creation. Nevertheless, the key question here is finding what kind of extraposition is possible in cyberspace. Communication technologies progressively oriented towards user immersion into the virtual environment are not likely to promote dialogical encounters in the Bakhtinian sense. Those who oppose this critique compare the immersion into artificial reality achieved by virtual reality software to the traditional experience of reading fiction (Ryan 1994). However, it is easy to counter such an argument. First, virtual reality has a much greater power of immersion than a book, simply because of the multisensorial effect of the former. Second, such technology, still latent but with formidable possibilities, would reinforce a mode of symbolic interchange based on simulacrum. Yet, the literary characters who experience virtual realities in their perturbed or overexcited imagination (Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, Hamlet) are models for readers for whom the boundaries between reality and fiction, though always blurred, used to be much clearer than now. Don Quixote dies as Alonso Quijano; the order of what is real is restored, no matter how far imagination has gone in the mean time.

What has been said above does not imply that Bakhtin based his idea of dialogic understanding on visuality, but rather on answerability, on the unique and active implication of each one of us in the event of being. A particular inclination to underline the spatial component of artistic perception, and the fact that Bakhtin’s endeavour was by that time still engaged in the field of aesthetics justify the terminology used. The discursive nature of Bakhtinian dialogism is widely known anyway. It can be found in the double voiceness of the written word, where the accent of the voices resound and it is possible to perceive the nuances and ideological intentions pulling meaning in different directions. Bakhtin teaches to listen rather than to see. This discursive dialogism which invites us to listen in literary and everyday utterances cannot be separated from the heteroglossic environment, that is, the sociolinguistic dialogism where these utterances are produced. The question of whether there is or not extraposition in the mode of communication emerging from cyberculture can be answered by examining if this mode has a space for history, context, awareness raising and reflection upon the materiality of the process of meaning production. The recurrent discourse of cyberculture fosters freedom from contextual constrictions imposed by the materiality of the body, freedom from author and authority, from presence and nature, freedom from history and its unjust inequalities, freedom, one must suppose, from responsibility itself...Listening is not very compatible with the speed and nonsense of its underlying noise.

Regarding the search for reference points in the culture of simulacrum, it is worth mentioning another key text of cyberculture: the film Blade Runner, one of the works of art which has better deconstructed the ambivalence of the cyborguesque simulacrum to blame the real “villain” of cyberculture, not the replicants but the trust in the technologically mediated look, which is represented in the film by the detective method based on the Voigt-Kampff test. The fusion of simulacrum and human in this inverse journey which leads Roy, the replicant and Deckard, the policeman to their final encounter is a responsible answer, embracing the experience and understanding of the other above the artificial nature of what is created by the technological and utilitarian reasoning of large multinational companies. Throughout the action of the story, the detective method of the police (blade-runners) causes crime as it institutionally tries to restore order, broken by the presence of replicants in the city. The copies, the replicants, Roy, who saves his pursuer’s life in the final sequences, turn out to be imbued with lessons of humanity based on experience, on their direct view of reality, which is authentic (Pérez Rasetti 1997). Thought and knowledge can and must harmonize with life, experience, with a shared responsibility, says Bakhtin in different ways. The point is not to place Bakhtin within the limits of the metaphysics of presence. Instead, we must extract a lesson from his ongoing insistence on personality, on the ethical-responsive implication of individuals in their communicative acts. Thus, we must distrust, as in Ridley Scott’s fable, the mediated look as a single reference point or a regulating principle of truth.

Going back to ODL international networks, if we propose the dialogical mode of communication as a philosophical principle (see note. 2) to guide communication in cyberculture, we will be better able to exploit the cultural heterogeneity of these networks. The way individuals identify or not with these virtual communities is closely related to the linguistic factor, or, more broadly, the communicative factor. I believe the new traits of the communicative environment (speed, flexibility, an appealing computer interface, etc.) and even its limitations, especially the loss of many important components of communication (gestures, intonation, rhythm) may help estrange these particular features, showing how they materialize in written verbal discourse. Verbal language bears almost all the weight in networked virtual international communication (this is presently the case for most users). The linguistic question in the net is therefore not only the struggle to overrule English as a dominant lingua franca but the need to understand that electronic discourse is also an area of ideological struggle which is intertwined with the worlds outside cyberspace.

2.1. The grotesque meets the cyborg

Our perception of belonging to a community is directly linked to the perception every individual has of him/herself. These two feelings depend on each other and none of them is the cause of the other. Our identity is built and perceived relative and in contrast with other subjects, not only or our own community and respecting the rules of coexistence. The question we are reflecting upon was previously raised by Jenaro Talens: what kind of social subject is emerging (1995), or, in other words, what kind of social subject is being sculpted by the postmodern ideology of the dematerialisation of the body.

Let us now reflect upon the role of the new communication technologies in the perception of our own bodies and the construction of social, cultural or sexual identities. As Katherine Hayles brilliantly suggests, a materialistic view of this question would lead us to establish the connections between a series of discourses that underlie the postmodern ideology which praises the liberating effects of cyberculture (Hayles 1992): 

The effect of combining these discourses and their material processes is the vanishing of the bodies. This phenomenon goes beyond psychological traumas or millenary terrors. It is about a new phase of production of capital, consumption and communication where “to solve the endemic capitalist problem of overproduction and underconsumption, production facilitates turn to just-in-time manufacturing; management uses more temporary and contract workers... and service industries specialize in events that are instantly consumable and infinitely repeatable, rather than products that accumulate and endure” (Hayles 1992:3). Yet, one of the tangible effects of the flexible accumulation of capital worldwide is the decreasing friction of materiality. In fact, the new perception of ourselves that computers produce in us (new habits and postures, eye and head motions, sensorial and intellectual skills) make us think everything is as immaterial as digital information, and leads us to forget the materiality of its production process.

Our bodies are territories where the mentioned discourses are inscribed. In this sense, the distinction made by Hayles proves very useful. She distinguishes between body and embodiment; between inscribing practices and incorporating practices. The body is thus a discursive construct which is always normative and relative to a set of regulating criteria. Embodiment, however, is always contextual, located in time and space (in a determined culture and physiology). According to Hayles, this body normalization can take place alongside someone’s experience of embodiment. These experiences acquire stability and structure through the regulating discourse, which they may also resist (i.e. the stress on vaginal orgasm during a great deal of the 20^th century, ranging from Freudian psychoanalysis to D.H. Lawrence novels, or a certain demonization of homosexual practices after the onset of AIDS, etc.). The conceptual distinction introduced by Hayles, along with the research of embodiment experiences by individuals throughout history, may be relevant to avoid reducing the body to mere information, to discourse.

The introduction of these concepts into our discussion about the body in cyberculture, with all its political implications, is due to the surprising closeness of these arguments with Bakhtin’s. He analyzed the function of the body in popular culture and the grotesque in the carnivalesque imagery of the work of François Rabelais (Bakhtin 1984). His discourse considers what Hayles calls embodiment practices as the key to explain the conflictive relationship between norm and practice concerning the body in the late Middle Ages and Humanism. Challenging the classical order and its canonical physiology, the grotesque body introduces not only hope but also the actual possibility to perform some liberating practices beyond those restrictions set on the body by serious genres. Thus, Hayles’ embodiment seems to meet the same role as utterance in Bakhtinian discourse theory, and as grotesque body in his cultural anthropology. Both proposals are controversial if compared to abstract discourses that regulate corporal experience.

From this starting point, Hayles shows the limits of some of the most stimulating poststructuralist theories about the body, such as Foucault’s panoptimum theory. By focusing more on the effect of normalizing discourses on the individual conscience of the subject, Foucault at the same time discovers but also reproduces the dematerialization of the body, as he takes the discursive nature of the body for granted. Nevertheless, our bodies are encultured through practices. The consequences for the interests of a sexual theory of genre are obvious. Using the notion of embodiment or body utterance, Hayles recovers the importance of the context both in cognition and in human action after some technoescapist attempts to neglect it.

The bodyhas reached a prominent place in the debate over cyberculture. It has become another sign, if we use Bakhtin/Voloshinov’s terminology, which is pervaded by a myriad of ideological evaluations, which turn it into a real battlefield to debate over abortion, the treatment of aids, transplants and transfusions, surrogate mothers, euthanasia, genetic engineering, cloning, change of sex, plastic surgery, the trade of organs, semen, blood, etc. In his monograph on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin devoted many pages to a very special kind of “body”, which he called grotesque body following the tradition of aesthetic studies. The work and the culture of the times of the 16^th century French writer François Rabelais were the starting point. The aim of the global project was to trace the historic genealogy of a literary form, the poliphonic novel of his much admired Feodor Dostoievski, through a path in which literature, society, language and culture are organs of one complex discursive whole. It is still striking to see how Bakhtin’s life unfolded: he was the author of one of the most joyful and stimulating elegies of the body in the context of one of the most cruel crusades against it (the Stalinist repression). He wrote his doctoral thesis about Realism in Rabelais in forced exile in Kazakhstan (Kustenai), and suffered a painful osteomyelitis which caused his right leg to be amputated in 1938. His fixation on concepts such as “finalization”, “totality”, “architectonics” (which he used to define his initial aim for a primary and participating philosophy of being) might be closely related to the experience of the mobility of the boundaries of his own body. Far from simply following his biography, Peter Hitchcock historicizes the body of the Russian writer himself, just when some descriptions of the postmodern and cybernetic body use the grotesque being he himself theorized about (Hitchcock 1998). In a reading superimposed to the Derridian interpretation of Plato’s Pharmakon, Hitchcock ironically points out that the evil which was slowly corrupting Bakhtin saved him from sure death in the concentration camps of the Solovetsky islands.

After his leg was amputated in Savelovo, Bakhtin experienced his body differently, in a cyborguesque way. It was an experience of his own body halfway between material and fictional. He started to write his doctoral thesis on Rabelais then. The cyborg meets the grotesque (Hitchcock 1998). The possibility to reappropriate the popular contemporary figure of the cyborg as grotesque realism allows important corrections to be made to the discourse of the vanishing of the bodies and the technoscatology of many sectors of cyberculture. Indeed, the concept of cyborg raises some interesting epistemological possibilities thanks to its frontier-like character itself (at the same time, as Hitchcock reminds us, this makes it vulnerable to techno-deterministic appropriations), to challenge some of the truths which have been assumed in contemporary societies and are based on monological dualisms. We must not forget the importance of this challenge in the debate about social control over the new frontier between flesh and technology in the transnational phase of the history of capitalism (Hitchcock 1998:5). Donna Haraway expresses it clearly when depicting how the myth of the cyborg deals with transgressed borders, powerful fusions and dangerous possibilities that open minded people can explore as the part of a necessary political work (1995:6)

The most interesting aspect of the cyborg for us, more than representing the submission of corporeality versus technique, is the consequence of this concept for a politics of the body, that is, the resistance potential to corporate logic which produces the cyborg and wants to control it. The question should be, can we think about cybernetic development outside the absolute domination of capital or not? Once the specific trait that distinguishes what is human has been isolated (even in the most alarming cases of encounters between science and nature), cyberorganic imagination will probably become the real contradiction which erodes the techno-capitalistic aspirations of globality and eternity (Hitchcock 1998).

The cyborg is a construct of humans and machines, or the result of assembling several organs from different organisms. If we understand the concept as a sign, in the sense of a social struggle arena, as Voloshinov/Bakhtin does, we witness a struggle for its meaning in the different definitions of the term and the underlying ideologies:

But, what does this all have to do with the possible connection between the way Bakhtin felt his body, his reflection upon the imagery of the grotesque and its place within his genre poetics and his theory of culture? His notion of the grotesque has important consequences for a materialistic comprehension of the body within the social. Peter Hitchcock is right again when he suggests that, while overcoming the traditional dichotomy of theory vs. practice, Bakhtin might have been talking about cyborgs without knowing it... [5]

Haraway explained the heterogeneity of the cyborguesque body in terms of heteroglossia, whereas Bakhtin did not hesitate to associate body and language. Thus, in his essay on the chronotope (1937-38;1989) Bakhtin argues that contact between bodies and things is mainly achieved through their verbal neighbourness, through verbal association within a context (328). He explains that the positive, that is, the constructive aim of Rabelais is nothing but embodying the world, materializing it, granting bodiness, reality and materiality to word and meaning (322).

The grotesque body is a representation of the body in the process of becoming. What the body is has as much importance as what it is not or may become. Thus, the grotesque body has a coherent position in the critique of western ontology by Bakhtinian philosophy. The former was based on the description of the being as an event, as a frontier being. This event took place in the comprehension of the other and not the totality of the being but against his/her face, the specific invocation of our interlocutor. The same holds true for the grotesque body in its interaction with the world and other bodies.

In the book about Rabelais, the grotesque body is the one which exceeds its own limits, or does not reach them: deformity, gigantism, functions which expand the body or its fluids beyond their wrapping. Bakhtin interprets grotesque images in their positive and deep meaning, beyond their superficial meaning of satirical critique (looking for its origins and explaining its meaning). When he differentiates the grotesque from the classical and naturalist ways to describe the human body, Bakhtin identifies a particular conception of the whole body and its limits (Bakhtin 1987: 284). He declares the grotesque is interested in everything that seems to want to get out of the body, everything that leaves, makes it bloom, overflows the body, everything that tries to escape from it. This is how outgrowths and ramifications, that is, everything which, extends the body and links it to other bodies or the non-corporal world, acquire a particular value. (285). The bulging eyes, the open mouth, the huge nose are key parts of the grotesque in the body. Moreover, according to Bakhtin, “the grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming”. It is incomplete but “continually built, created, and builds and creates another body” (Bakhtin 1984: 317).

The grotesque therefore has to do with overcoming the borders between bodies and their isolation in capsules. In cyberculture bodies are connected to machines, and to each other, but in a way that makes them increasingly isolated entities. Their contact is virtual. The cyborg breaks the borders between the body and everything else. Even if it is often not in the regenerating and ambivalent meaning of the carnivalesque grotesque (let us consider the David Cronenberg’s interesting reflection in Crash), there is no reason why it should not (Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner).

As Hitchcock argues, it is interesting to see that Bakhtin mentions disease among the main events that affect the grotesque body, that is, the acts of the body drama [6]. Indeed; disease cannot be initially considered as an element or a part of the grotesque body, though it increases the death-birth regenerating principle of of carnivalesque logic. The beginning and the end of life are inseparably intertwined...Hence the fascination exerted on Bakhtin by the Hippocratic Anthology (Rabelais’ main source), where disease and death are next to life in a single continuum. Embodiment, that is, the specific subjective experience of imperfections and pain, is the condition of the grotesque body, according to Hitchcock (1998). In principle, these are the terms to describe Case’s experience of his own bodiness in Neuromancer, but they are far from the regenerating effect and the humanistic optimism of carnivalesque laughter.

Case is a character who is as empty as his name, some sort of a puppet in the hands of the AI called Wintermute. The perverse Riviera hardly finds physical traits to parody him. His relationship with the environment appears to be the trait of the imaginary times of the novel: almost total alienation from nature [7]. His human relationships are poor and equally empty. He is not linked to anybody, and his Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7 deck is his greatest object of affection. What is more, the happy ending does not reunite him with Molly the mercenary, his natural companion during the adventure, but with the ghost of his dead girlfriend (Linda Lee) again in cyberspace. We can only “watch” Case when he is connected via simstim with Molly’s vision and sees himself, pale, just before the last attack against the security system of the Ashpools:

"And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat.

He was looking at himself "  (Gibson 1984:301).

Besides electronic connection, the other time Case is inside Molly, during sexual intercourse, is nevertheless described with sensations of cyberspace. The shiny parallel universe colors the experience of the flesh:

"[...] As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips." (p. 45)

The finished, isolated and closed body is ignored because it is grotesque. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque image shows not only the external but also the internal physiognomy of the body: blood, bowels, heart and other organs (1987: 286). In a curious and new coincidence between the grotesque and an obsession for the proper reversibility of the postmodern body, the skin opens to reveal a hybrid internal structure between muscles and nerves and electronic circuits.

The ultimate fantasies of a body which is perfected and freed from the painful limitations of what is human thanks to technology uphold the Cartesian conception of the body as an entity divided into an immaterial part, which ultimately rules over the set and another material and corruptible part, the body. It is easy to imagine the transfer made by this technological scatology representing the brain as a computer. The politics of the grotesque body, within cyborguesque imagery itself, can be projected on this end of the millenium reality so as to critically question the perversions of the disciplinary and official discourses of the Europe of François Rabelais: the ideology of the perfection of the body (one of the causes of the contemporary neurosis of thousands of people, though only in those parts of the world where this can be a problem), of the isolation of individual bodies as closed units; the cult to the ruling superiority of the head of the new canon of cyberculture: the brain and its electronic extension; the joyful falsification of sex in the territory of cyberspace under excuses sometimes as deforming as the pleasures of the virtual carnival and the safety of a sex which is threatened by plagues, etc. As Paul Virilio argues (1997), today, more than ever, it is necessary to find contact again. Today, more than ever, it is essential to rematerialize the body and the world, to oppose the isolation where the advertising dynamic of the mass media culture leads us. Under the empire of velocity we experiment the shrinking of the earth in our mental representation, which may lead to the loss of our own body. Virilio believes that nobody can have an individual body without an individual world, an individual situation. Being is being present here and now. Telepresence delocalises the situation, the body (1997: 46). The whole problem of virtual reality also threatens to cause the loss of the other. The real city, the real social space for Virilio, as it was for Bakhtin, is in danger with virtual space-time. The city, the public space of the marketplace, is the place of the social body, though, according to Virilio, the fact of being closer to someone who is far than to a person next to you implies the political dissolution of the human species. He believes the loss of one’s own body entails the loss of the other’s body to benefit some sort of ghost of someone who is far away, in the virtual space of Internet or on television, which he calls a skylight (48).

Ironically, we may not be very far from the critical inversion of Nietzsche who asked us to love strangers as we loved ourselves. In the values of Bakhtinian architectonics this motto is acceptable because of the broad concept of the history of meaning suggested by great time, but never if it means sacrificing love for our neighbors. Moreover, Bakhtin thought about the stranger more in historical terms than in terms of synchrony in time. Of course, he could not think in the terms new media use to allow us to relate to the world today: ubiquity, instant and immediate character, total vision... Paul Virilio wonders what this has to do with democracy.

The increasingly obvious divorce between minds and bodies suggest we face nothing but another strong revitalisation of metaphysics, this time under the form of a technological scatology. Earlier on we referred to the new mysticism of the technopagans, an ideology of the antiphysis which tends to place a whole set of supernatural entities in cyberspace which turn it into the space of the sacred. The electronic adventures of Gibson’s novels confirm this assertion. In Neuromancer, the title itself is already evokes the figure of the necromancer, who brings the dead back to life. Case, a hacker who is connected to the matrix, to cyberspace, tries to recover control over his body and freedom to ride across cyberspace. He connects neuronally through his computer and is guided by a digitalised conscience, which is nothing but the virtual reconstruction of Dixie Flatline, the old cowboy who was the example of one of the myths of the most radical post-humanism, the final victory over death... Artificial intelligences (extremely advanced programs, giant constructs of artificial personality, which acquire autonomy in networks and outside them) work as authentic deus ex- machinas in the life of human characters and events in Neuromancer. In his later novels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa overdrived, they become the loa, some sort of a pantheon of voodoo divinities. When Case finally finds Neuromancer, the latter, under the appearance of an enigmatic child, tells him he was wrong, because living there is living. There is no difference (Gibson 1984: 303). Ghosts exist in cyberspace.

We might also wonder about the meaning of the modern taste for the disintegration or dissection of bodies, or at least its contemplation in horror or gore films or simply in the most digestible thrillers about psychopaths (The Silence of the Lambs; Seven; American Psycho, etc). A different meaning underlies the detailed descriptions and body fragmentation of Rabelais’ Gargantua. There, blows and battles showed the scientific interest for an anatomy brought to the forefront by a modern writer who aims at putting an end to both the superstition about the blemishes of the body and the recklessness that his contemporaries had fallen into due to the lack of a morale of the body. The question immediately springs: Does the current obsession with this violent fragmentation have the same meaning as in Rabelais? Is there a positive project behind it? The answer must be no, and has to do with the degradation of the grotesque into its negative aspects, the loss of its ambivalence and regenerating potential.

Today, the images of the grotesque convey the horror of the body rather than its celebration. This horror involves the transformation of sex from maximum source of pleasure to potential source of horrible destruction. They also evoke our own cultural trauma of atrophy because of the progressive loss of our cognitive and physical skills as we increasingly rely on technology. But this horror also has to do with expelling death from our lives, that is, again, with the loss of the ambivalence of the grotesque body. The grotesque body of the cyborg is designed to last. The medieval and modern grotesque body revealed the artificial character of institutional discourses. It was finite and believed in its regeneration within a collective meaning of existence. It was collective in the social and natural meaning of connection with nature. Setting the limits and the concept of the body was contested by the excess of that corporal hyperbole, namely the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel. The excellence of the higher physiological functions was continuously brought down by their “low” counterparts. Moreover, the infinite perfectibility of the cyborguesque body is equally contested by the grotesque body. Deformity is its business card.

The subordination of what is physical, and “real” by extension, to what takes place in the matrix or cyberspace is central in the development of the plot of Neuromancer. Gibson presents us a future in which genetic manipulation and surgery can significantly reconstruct or improve any body (as happens with Molly or Riviera) to the point of extending life (the smuggler Julius Deanne), transplanting any organ (Case) or even designing physical appearance almost at will (The Modern Panthers). Case’s fall out of grace is described as a kind or curse. He is sentenced to the prison of his own flesh. The syntactic structure of the novel itself seems to underline this separation between mind and body, and between cyberspace and reality. Every time Case gets connected, Gibson starts a new paragraph. Finally, artificial intelligences seem to work like the separate lobes of a large brain, whereas humans are the bodies A.I.s need to perform the actions that will lead them to a full autonomy.

According to Bakhtin, Rabelais is a consequent materialist who focuses his materialism on the body. Surprisingly, the Russian critic argues that Rabelais, by dignifying the corporal materiality of man, is tracing his deification (i.e. the praise of Pantagruelion Book II, Chapter LI, in Bakhtin,1987: 331). According to him, technical inventions allow connection and contact among all humans. Humanity in material and effective contact...will be able to rule over time. However, the immortality of the breeding body occurs beyond the individual biological body. It is the grotesque as a historic and progressive body of humanity, in its collective sense, which can provide something useful for cyberorganic critique. The critical potential of the ambivalence of the grotesque is equally questioned when the logic of the biogenetic reproduction is challenged as duplication cloning or perfect and total duplicity. The duplication of the grotesque body is always difference, disjunction (Hitchcock 1998).

At this point, it is worth remembering that the Bakhtinian celebration of both the collective memory associated to the carnivalesque cosmovision and the social-popular body symbolized in the grotesque does not entail a destruction of the individual body. The dialogical relationship that links the social and the individual is not solved in a simplistic way in favor of either pole. This idea of individuality is different from that of the autonomous and unitary subject of Cartesian rationalism. It is probably non identifiable with that of democratic liberalism, or with the official Marxist sociological doctrines which would make millions of individual bodies disappear for the sake of the brilliant collective body [8].

After all, maybe Bakhtin, who joked comparing himself to Sir Ciapaletto, the apocryphal saint of Boccaccio’s story, and who cited the popular tradition of the cult of relics as one of the main sources of grotesque imagery, would smile willingly if the prosthesis he used and never managed to adapt to were found and added to the gallery of stories and testimonies that make up his own hagiography. He certainly experienced the so-called ghost limb, and lived in pain for a great part of his life. All that, added to the circumstances we know he worked in, make the Rabelais book even more impressive. It is probably his most arguable book, but it is still full of suggestions for a contemporary cultural critique.

3. Bakhtin in the net. Hypertextuality and dialogism [9]

The proponents of the hypertextual revolution consider this new text type, the tree-like electronic text or hypertext, to be a common space shared through broad intertwined networks. According to them this situation was prefigured by the following poststructuralist critics: Barthes and his notions of lexia or the death of the author; Foucault and his idea of the text as an node which is interconnected with many others through a network of cross-references; Derrida and his insistence on the irrelevance of the hors-texte and on dissemination, and Bakhtin himself and his ideas on dialogism, intertextuality and textual poliphony. Intertextuality (a feature of all texts that hypertext simply makes more explicit), the diversity of voices and decentering are the pillars of G Landow’s comparison between hypertext and poststructuralist theory (1992). He argues that all these critics have been struggling to overcome the limitations of the written book as a cultural artefact and played the role of prophets of a new textuality whose advantages he enthusiastically defends. Landow is certain that hypertext is set to reconfigure both literary creation and literary consumption and education [10]. Whether we share such enthusiasm or not, it is obvious that the theoretical base of this support for hypertextuality is certainly weak and the assimilation of Bakhtinian ideas about poliphony in Dostoievski’s novels is somehow deforming.

First of all, hypertext, as a tree-like and electronic text which is easy to manipulate, would not exist without a hypertextual, that is a multisequential, conception of writing which is not only a consequence of computers and informatics. Hypertext does not appear all of a sudden as a consequence of technique. It does because there are certain epistemological conditions that make the use of computer technology possible to create what we have decided to call hypertext at a certain point. In other words, without post-structuralism, hypertext would not have been possible.

Moreover, besides this more historical view of hypertext, we should consider the literature labeled as pre-hypertextual, be it modern or postmodern, as the result of some contemporary conceptual or aesthetic changes instead of rewriting teleologically, that is, retrospectively, the history of a series of literary developments and experiments whose culmination is represented by hypertextual literature. Multiperspectivism, heterogeneity, fragmentation, polyphony, metarreflection and collage are all characteristics or artistic practices floating in the air of the 20^th century.

But let us now focus on the hypertextual reading of Bakhtin’s above mentioned ideas. George Landow compares the experience of reading hypertext to Bakhtin’s theses about polyphonic novels. According to Landow, Bakhtin described Dostoievski’s novels as if they were hypertextual fictions where the individual voices assume the form of lexiae (1992: 23). “Hypertext prevents from the tyranny of a single authoritarian voice”, adds Landow. As any careful reader of Bakhtin knows well, polyphony is a narrative category that involves the way the narrator’s voice relates to, is introduced in or penetrated by the voices, and thus the intentions, of the characters. Authorship is not in danger in Bakhtin. What we do see in his theory on the novel and the pages he devotes to poetry, is that there is a particular form of authorship praised among the others. Polyphony is a metaphor used by Bakhtin to stress the will of writers who, like Dostoievski, are ready to understand the truth locked in the utterances of others, of the characters thanks to the introduction of the plurality of the social languages in which the multiplicity of consciences are incorporated. It is impossible to write a polyphonic novel without a narrative framework, a voice which provides a dialogical environment, a space to organize the plurality of voices. Besides, polyphony does not have anything to do with the combinatory potential of textual fragments or lexiae, which is the new feature of hypertext, with its different possible meanings. Also in relation to Bakhtinian poetics, the Brazilian Arlindo Machado (1997) suggests that hypertext exposes the network of dialogical relations which underlie any work of textual writing. It does so as if it were the x-ray of a painting, underlining the principle of the classical labyrinth as the epistemological model which could be the basis of the new hypertext.

It is obvious that hypertext allows the reader to choose the way to organize his reading depending on his interests. It even allows him to manipulate the text (adding notes and comments, modifying its presentation), but this does not imply the distance between author and readers completely disappears. Moreover, this interactivity of electronic texts is not as revolutionary as it seems. In oral literature, texts are told or sung to people, thus entering a stream of popular variations and reinterpretations. The Spanish writer Arcipreste de Hita himself, author of one of the best works of European carnivalesque literature, El Libro de Buen Amor, explains that the rhymes offered there are to be used by those who can sing-rhyme properly (“a quien bien trobar supiere”). This oral character as well as the chance for the reader to become in co-responsible for the text creation are features praised by the theoreticians of hypertext. However, they existed much before the digital era. Nowadays, the predicament of image in cyberculture entails a reinforcement of the oral word versus the written word, which becomes even more colloquial in the greater simultaneity of electronic communication. This, added to the greater mobility of literary and cultural agents, can partly explain notorious facts such as the Nobel Price for Literature awarded to Dario Fo, a kind of minstrel of the information era...

In more recent times we find artistic manifestations based on the principle of multisequentiality or fragmentation as well: Calder’s mobiles; the new theater practiced by the Living Theatre and its many heirs; the master filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague and the writers of the Nouveau Roman; Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela or the experiments of the Group Oulipo, where Raymond Queneau (Cent Mille Milliards de Poêmes), George Perec (La vie, mode d’emploi) or Italo Calvino’s hyper-novels (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggatore: Il castello dei destini crociati) explored the limits of potential literature, following the path set by the master Jorge Luis Borges and his fascinating collection of tales, Ficciones (The Garden of Forking Paths).

Another feature highlighted as innovative of the electronic text is its non-linearity compared to the sequential development of canonical literature. As Espen Aarseth argues, the semantic ambivalence of classic texts and the interdiscursive nature of lineal reading must not be confused with the multiplicity or expressive variability of the cybertext (which depends on its paraverbal dimension). What we may call ergodic reading [11] does not correspond to the traditional reading process (Aarseth 1997). However, it is also advisable to remember a long tradition of narrative experiments which have challenged the normative character both of linearity and causality in the literary writing associated to books. We can even clearly distinguish an anti-narrative tradition in contemporary literature (Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, the theatre of the absurd etc.). Therefore, a novel such Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1987), which is understood to be one of the canonical referents of hypertextual novel, does not introduce a radical epistemological change in textual theory (Aarseth 1994). Multisequentiality, simultaneity, inconclusiveness, non-linearity, interactivity..., are all features of a hypertextual fiction. They can all be found to different degrees in printed texts. Appart from the support itself, what distinguishes cybertextual literature is its character of a game, with the degree of intervention and risk it implies.

Despite the skepticism raised by this reading of Bakhtinian polyphony, the appearance of this new mode of writing helps us revise certain concepts which have been taken for granted in literary theory. Electronic literature exists. There are interesting experiences which broaden the concept of what is literary beyond printed written texts [12]. Once again we enter the debate about literary canon. The new electronic art does not have a canonical recognition in academic circles yet, though virtual poetry and other manifestations of electronic art are starting to find their place in museums and international exhibitions (i.e. the Museum of Visual Arts and the Digital Salon of New York). We know that broad sectors of literary theory are still reluctant to deal with the increasingly obvious relationship between technology and culture. As we said, this must change if we want this kind of knowledge to have something to say within cyberculture, or at least from its margins.

4. The chronotope of cyberculture. The dialogical mode of communication

There must be few concepts which have become more banal in their application or development than the Bakhtinian chronotope. The attractiveness of this concept may lie in its heuristic potential to combine a historical and a semiotical approach to explain the phenomenon of literary narrative representation. Indeed, in his text about chronotope, the Russian thinker does not consider mimesis to be the explanatory principle of literary creation (Bakhtin 1937-38; 1981), though he faces the capacity of the novel to assimilate historic reality through chronotopes. Once more, a lot of the potential of Bakhtinian theoretical categories lies in their dialogical nature. In this case it is not only an aesthetic category (implied in the figurative dimension of literature and its generic variety) but also a social-historical and even a linguistic one. Our experience is chronotopical and language itself is full of images built in time and space.

In the above mentioned essay, Bakhtin defines the chronotope of the Chivalresque novel as a miraculous world in the adventure time. In other words, it is a fragmented unfolding of time directly linked to the construction of the hero, whose adventures take place in different settings where there is space for the wonderful to happen. Later, the gothic novel enlightens the chronotope of the castle, a place full of relics of the past (arms, portraits of ancestors, signs of the continuity of heritage through generations). This set is built and permeated by legends and tradition, where the past is resuscitated on every corner. We can consider that Gibson’s novel borrows many elements from these types of chronotopical representation. He does so following a recurrent postmodern trend in reaccentuating some discoursive genres of the past. In the novel there is a continuous intervention of what is beautiful, of unexplained facts, trajectories or objects. This indetermination helps underline the imprecision of the boundaries between what is real and fictitious and settle the reality of cyberspace (Alkon 1992). An example of this vagueness is the part where the digital construct of McRoy Pauley’s personality (Dixie Flatline) answers Case’s question inquiring what kind of sensations or feelings he has; strangely, the old informatic cowboy’s explanation includes the experience of the ghost limb we referred to earlier regarding Bakhtin’s body:

-“I am dead , Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one¨.
-` How’s it feel?´
-`It doesn’ t´.
-`Bother you?´
-`What bothers me is, nothin´does.´
-`How’s that?´
-`Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, this thumb was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later he’s tossin’ all night. Elroy, I said, what’s eatin’ you? Goddam thumb’s itchin’´, he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it’s the other goddam thumb.´ When the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine. `Do me a favor boy.´
- `What’s that Dix?´
-`This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.” (Gibson 1984: 132)            

As for the chronotope of the gothic novel, I think the Straylight villa, the setting of the final action of the novel, sums up the atmosphere of the castle in decadence very well. In this case it is the residence of the Tessier-Ashpoole clan, an enigmatic labyrinth place where the last heir to the lineage decays into madness. Of course, the novel also has elements from the detective story, of the American hard-boiled kind. They range from the investigation of the protagonist’s strange mission to some of his anti-heroic traits and the sordid social relations between the characters, the employers and the employees, which are powerful and marginal respectively.

However, the city turns out to be the privileged set of the action. The cyberpunk vision of the city of the future is not very flattering. The natural world is practically nonexistent . The events take place in a manufactured set which is therefore deprived of any natural law; all except one: don’t get caught... Human beings are almost presented like abstractions. Recalling once again the terms in which Bakhtinian architectonics is explained, an abstraction cannot claim any predicament before the conscience of the other. The crucial element which includes cyberpunk narrative in the long tradition of negative visions about the future of the city is its description as a large network. Cyberspace is the dimension where everything that really matters is contained and really happens: data about individuals, information structures of large corporations, and what is more important, alternative electronic realities. This is the true set for the postmodern actor who, connected to the net, tries to alter the structure of reality manipulating data, pure information, pure virtual nature. Meanwhile, the external city decays becoming increasingly irrelevant. The most important businesses and survival itself depend less and less on what is happening in the streets, in the markets, in meeting points.

The literary representation of the double chronotope, the futurist megalopolis/cyberspace, is logically related to the problem of the status of the fictitious in the novel: what is real, what is fictitious or artificial and what sense it makes point to distinguish between both dimensions. As we move forward in our reading, we realize that the most relevant crossroads of the plot are always played in the matrix, that cyberspace is more decisive almost in any aspect. For instance, in the part where he tells us about the BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis), the size of the city is perceived as if it were a microcircuit panel:

“Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and  Atlanta born solid white. The they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core to Atlanta ...” (Gibson 1984: 59).

The city is another field of data. Its difference from the matrix is that the latter is cleaner. It is striking to see the almost obsessive presence of trade marks as components of the urban landscape. The logos of major companies fill the lexicon of the novel, in an attempt to make the story sound more truthful.

The overlapping and occasional confrontation between the two main chronotopes of the novel, the city and cyberspace, concentrates the utopian potential of the novel. The immersion in the virtual reality of cyberspace, the broader problem of the postmodern simulacrum, may find an answer in Bakhtin. He defined all utterances, including the artistic representation of the world, as the result of the union between what is given and what is created (Bakhtin 1959-61; 1986). The electronic simulacrum is what is created. It is the reproduction of fragments of reality previously reduced to binary codes, to information. If it invades all the territory of what is given, we can end up in a relationship of inwardness where the literary and aesthetic creation cannot meet outsideness, one of the premises of true comprehension.

5. Conclusion

Neuromancer offers us what we may call a case of mitigated internal dialogism. The novel, though supported indeed by a plot of minor importance, does not develop divided and intensely dialogical minds. It tries to reflect the confusion of the two faces of a future reality discursively. It is based on a mixture of pulp elements and a style full of information and synchronicity, expressing the inherent dilemmas of society at the end of the millennium. Though the relationship between humans and computers acquires major importance in the plot, Neuromancer is not as much about technology or science as about the future. It follows the tradition of the genre of utopia, projecting upon it the contradictions and the widespread lack of answerability of the present (total lack of environmental awareness, corruption and widespread crime, near total power of large corporations, drug abuse, etc.). In short, the novel, imbued with an ironic antihumanism, explores the heterogeneous margins of our culture, emerging  cyberculture.

Which is then the chronotope of cyberpunk narrative? Which is the chronotope of those who are ready to flee from the traps of cyberculture? From a dialogical cultural critique, it might be called the chronotope of the virtual traveler struggling in the time of the absolute present. We are travelers in a synchronic and virtual territory and we try to escape from the realm of rhetoric over meaning hoping not to end up trapped in the faded rumor of the brilliant, immediately fungible signs.

Speed, transparence, ubiquity, immediateness, connectivity, information... need not erase outsideness, alterity, detention and the time of reading, poetry, comprehensive communication, dialogue... It is true that Bakhtin does not provide a systematic methodology to criticize cultural texts. His ideas appear among concerns which all revolve around the hinge between thought and life. There are no systematic descriptions in his work. Nevertheless, there is a list of principles which are certainly not original in contemporary philosophy, but offer a rich combination which can prove very useful to create certain antidotes against the craze for speed and the totalizing semiosis of simulacrum.

The pillars of the philosophical architectonics we can apply to our environment may be uttered as follows: resisting the escape velocity in the processes of cognition and comprehension, the deep and lasting dialogue with the texts, the idea of great time; barely outlined in Bakhtin’s texts but essential, the idea of “I for the other- the other for me” as well as the model of dialogical comprehension (dialogical inclusion+ outsideness+ answerability). The grotesque body meets the cyborg, and in that displacement of the profitability logic that shapes the imaginary of post-capitalist globality, we find cracks and thresholds where we can practice strategies of delay, of real knowledge of our objects of study, of a truly comprehensive encounter with our neighbours, and, of course, with strangers.

 

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[1] Originally issued at Bakhtin and Narrative Representation. Carolyn Ayers (ed.), special number of Dialogism. An International  Journal of Bakhtin Studies; n. 3, 1999, p. 104-131.