When dialogue is not saying what you mean

What is it about?

Dialogicity is not dialogue. It is a structure of discourse. Discourse is another word for "meaning". Although we speak and say things we mean all the time, we are not aware that we are doing this within certain laws which have been theorised ever since the Ancients. Aesthetics has to do with these laws because meaning is something that comes out of feelings and thought. Bakhtin coined the term dialogicity to indicate that there are no neutral words in any language, that all words are loaded with meanings and that when words are put together in a text, they form a dialogic structure of allusion and intertextual echoes.If dialogicity is not dialogue, then it is more than just a physical phenomenon that can be observed in everyday life without analysis. In the paper, dialogicity is shifted to a figurative level of meaning, where it is not a process of talking, of question and answer between two or more people, but an impersonal process of creating the world though language. This process of creation is "metaphysical" because the end-product of this process cannot be seen and touched, it can only be felt and heard or seen with the 'mind's eye". This mind;s eye - our imagination - is also referred to as "the gaze" - borrowing a concept from psychoanalytic theory. We construct the world virtually, by means of language which is a tool for meaning creation.

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Why is it important?

It is important to see analogies between concepts used by different thinkers and in different theories which describe the same process or phenomenon. To find an analogy between Bakhtin's concept of dialogicity and Lacan's concept of "the gaze" is to show how universal this idea is: namely, that the world does not pre-exist meaning or language, that the world we live in, despite its concrete aspects, unfolds for us in a virtual time and space. Virtual does not imply unreal. Virtual is THE reality of the human condition.

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