Garvey_The Value of Opacity a Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermas's Discourse

The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermas's DiscourseEthics

T. Gregory Garvey

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 33, Number 4, 2000, pp. 370-390 (Article)

Published by Penn State University PressDOI: 10.1353/par.2000.0027

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Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2000. Copyright © 2000 The Pennsylvania StateUniversity, University Park, PA.

370

The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis ofHabermas’s Discourse Ethics

Jürgen Habermas’s and M. M. Bakhtin’s attitudes toward transparent orundistorted communication define almost antithetical approaches to therelationship between public discourse and autonomy. Habermas, both inhis theory of communicative action and in his discourse ethics, assumesthat transparent communication is possible and actually makes transpar-ency a necessary condition for the legitimation of social norms. Yet, thereis a sense in which the same kind of transparency that offers the possibilityof rational and autonomous selfhood to Habermas signifies vulnerabilityand tyranny to Bakhtin. In contrast to Habermas, Bakhtin assumes thatutterances can never be perfectly transparent because the words that com-prise them always carry meanings that exceed the intentions of speakers.This excess semantic value inevitably distorts speakers’ intentions, even ifonly slightly. Bakhtin’s suspicion of transparency leads him to develop amodel of autonomy that revolves around the individual’s ability to resistthe emergence of transparency. However, Bakhtin attributes a positive ethi-cal value to certain kinds of opacity because it is in the differences anddistortions that Bakhtin situates the process through which individuals con-struct autonomy. Thus, in a kind of communicative paradox, opacity andambiguity play the same liberating role in Bakhtin’s thought that transpar-ency and clarity play in Habermas’s.

Given the amount of intellectual labor that has been invested in explor-ing the insights into communicative practice that Habermas and Bakhtinoffer, it is surprising that commentary on the two has so rarely intersected.With the exception of one journal article and a short section of MichaelGardiner ’s The Dialogics of Critique (1992), connections betweenHabermas and Bakhtin have been made only incidentally and in passing.1

Despite the important differences about the value of verbal transparencyand its relation to models of autonomy that I will explore in this essay,

T. Gregory Garvey

371THE VALUE OF OPACITY

Habermas and Bakhtin share common ground on at least four general is-sues. First, they agree that before equality can be established in the socialrealm, it must be modeled by establishing egalitarian communicative rela-tionships. Second, both strive to understand communication, not by ana-lyzing language, but by analyzing how selfhood and intersubjective rela-tionships are structured and mediated by communicative action. They bothanalyze communication as a social institution not unlike a political systemor a religious tradition. Third, both assert the special importance of dia-logic realms wherein relationships of power are partly neutralized by be-ing brought into the foreground. Fourth and finally, each understands hisanalysis of communicative relationships as a mode of social criticism thatcan help to define a more ethical world by demystifying some of the waysin which domination is embedded in acts of speech and communication.

These similarities in the general goals of the two thinkers’ projects helpto throw the different roles that Habermas and Bakhtin attribute to trans-parency into sharp relief. Most notably, Habermas’s relative confidence inthe possibility of achieving transparency allows him to build his model ofautonomy around ideas of discursive democracy, consensus, and the as-sumption that in certain circumstances speakers strive to achieve undistortedcommunication (Habermas 1984, 1: 94–95, 285–86). Bakhtin is less confi-dent about the ability of speakers to achieve transparency, and thus he ismore preoccupied with exploring the way that impulses toward consensusand transparency contribute to processes of ideological centralization thatundermine autonomy.

Transparency and autonomy in Habermas’sdiscourse ethics

The idea of reason is at the very core of Habermasian thought, and reasonin Habermas’s lexicon is not so much an inherent mental faculty, as it wasfor eighteenth-century social theorists such as John Locke and Jean JacquesRousseau, as it is the result of a process of public dialogue through whichnorms and values are mediated and rationalized.2 This distinction in thenature of reason begins to explain one of the key differences betweenHabermas’s and Bakhtin’s conflicting valuations of transparency. WhileBakhtin has a fundamentally enlightenment understanding of reason,Habermas, by defining it as a product of public discourse, offers apostmodern concept of reason.

372 T. GREGORY GARVEY

The two core assumptions of Habermas’s theory of discourse ethics are(1) that argument structurally presupposes a “principle of universalization”that requires people to share an identical set of assumptions before theyenter into practical discourse and, consequently, (2) that the norms thatresult from discourse can be considered valid only if they do (or could)meet with the “approval” of “all affected” by them (1990, 65–66).3 As sev-eral commentators have noted, Habermas’s principle of universalizationrecontextualizes Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative so that it func-tions not within the context of the philosophy of consciousness, but withinthe context of the philosophy of language.4 As such, Habermas’s recon-struction of the principle of universalization makes the process of discov-ering universally applicable norms public and intersubjective. ThomasMcCarthy notes that the important change that Habermas makes to theKantian mode of exploring moral questions through a process of individualreflection is that he shifts the locus of reason from a private realm of indi-vidual reflection to a public realm of interpersonal dialogue (1978, 35). AsHabermas puts it, the redefined principle of universalization requires that“[r]ather than [working in a Kantian mode and] ascribing as valid to allothers any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit mymaxim to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claim to univer-sality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradictionto be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a “universalnorm.”5 The process of validating norms thus remains the vital function ofreason, but Habermas reformulates it as a product of public debate ratherthan one of individual reflection. Although both the Kantian and theHabermasian forms of the principle of universalization are enacted throughlanguage, Habermas’s principle of universalization requires that norms belegitimated in the crucible of a pluralistic public sphere. Kant’s, thoughdialogic, is conducted through hypothetical conversation within an indi-vidual consciousness (1960).

By moving the locus of the principle of universalization from an intra-to an inter-subjective realm, Habermas brings the problem of semantic trans-parency into the foreground. In the kind of intersubjective norm-validatingdiscourse that Habermas envisions, the meaning of terms must be clear toall participants in order for a consensus to be legitimate. Habermas dem-onstrates his consciousness of the danger that opacity poses to the viabilityof adapting the principle of universalization to the philosophy of languageand compensates for the transparency it requires by defining discourse as aunique form of communication that makes very stringent demands on themotives of speakers. In an early book, Legitimation Crisis (1973), Habermas


explains the motivations that will define the realm of discourse as histhought develops through the theory of communicative action to the theoryof discourse ethics:

Discourse can be understood as that form of communication that is removedfrom contexts of experience and actions and whose structure assures us: thatthe bracketed validity claims of assertions, recommendations, or warningsare the exclusive object of discussion; that participants, themes and contri-butions are not restricted except with reference to the goal of testing thevalidity claims in question; that no force except that of the better argumentis exercised; and that, as a result, all motives except that of the cooperativesearch for truth are excluded. (107–8)

If these conditions obtain, and discourse produces consensus, the fact ofthe consensus marks the victory of reason over arbitrary social power orstrategic action.6 As Habermas phrases it in a subsequent sentence, “If un-der [the above] conditions a consensus about the recommendation to ac-cept a norm arises . . . then this consensus expresses a ‘rational will’” (108).This is so because nothing but the “better argument” has had the authorityto silence or marginalize, and because the dialogue was motivated by acollective desire to test the validity of a proposed norm.

Nonetheless, as these criteria imply, the realm of discourse creates trans-parency, not by making words transparent, but by displacing transparency fromthe word to the speaker. Practical discourse is legitimate only when the mo-tives of participants are transparent. Thus, a condition of participation in prac-tical discourse is that one’s motives must be fully accessible to scrutiny andchallenge by others. The ability to validate sincerity is itself a vital part ofdiscourse. As Habermas originally phrases it, “[A]ll motives except for thecooperative search for truth are excluded.” McCarthy, in his explanation ofHabermas’s construction of discourse, articulates the extent to which practicaldiscourse requires the exposure of the self: “To discourse are admitted onlyspeakers who have, as actors, the same chance to employ representative speechacts, to express their attitudes, feelings, intentions, and so on that the partici-pants can be truthful in their relations to themselves and can make their ‘innernatures’ transparent to others” (1978, 306–7). McCarthy describes “admission”to discourse in terms of the ability to use words as direct reflections of self. Itis also significant that McCarthy describes Habermasian discourse, not in termsof a public transparency of semantic meaning, but in terms of a public trans-parency of self. One must be able to make one’s “inner self” transparent.

Another important critic of Habermas’s construction of selfhood, MarkE. Warren, also emphasizes the importance of the public revelation of mo-


tivation to Habermas’s theory. In his essay “The Self in Discursive De-mocracy” (1995), Warren writes that “autonomy depends on public repre-sentations of imagination, and these require certain kinds of internal disci-plines. . . . The autonomous self develops within an intersubjective fabricof reason giving through which selves are represented to others” (174).The difference between the extreme transparency of a speaker’s “innernature” that McCarthy describes and the development of the “autonomousself” that Warren describes is the difference between the exposure of theself in the mode of practical discourse and the exposure of the self in other,less rigorous, communicative circumstances. Still, the radical transparencythat McCarthy attributes to the realm of discourse is implicit in Warren’sdefinition of the context in which Habermasian autonomy develops. Theindividual achieves autonomy through the “internal disciplines” of “rea-son giving” by which the self is represented to others. The autonomousindividual must have the discipline to expose personal and internal moti-vations during the necessary intervals when one must give reasons for cer-tain behaviors and for the expression of certain interests.

Warren’s analysis of Habermas’s construction of selfhood is importantto my effort to highlight the relationship between transparency and au-tonomy because he argues against understanding the Habermasian modelof selfhood as one that is disempowered by processes of public mediation.Warren holds that the kind of self-revelation required by practical discourseactually “increases individual autonomy.” In Warren’s words,

When one must explain oneself to others, Habermas holds, individuals cometo understand why they feel as they do in justifying their needs and intereststo others. In doing so, they may alter their need interpretations, finding thattheir previous need interpretations, often absorbed uncritically from theirculture, were inappropriate and perhaps even a source of unhappiness tothemselves. Or they may become more convinced of the rightness of theirclaims. In either case, however, discursive argument increases individualautonomy. (179)

Warren is right to the extent that self-understanding and thus autonomywill likely increase as personal motives and “need interpretations” that were“absorbed uncritically” from processes of socialization become revealedby practical discourse. But this mode of developing autonomy throughpublic discussion of inner motives does not eliminate the need for trans-parent selfhood. On the contrary, it makes increasing one’s autonomy con-tingent on increasing one’s transparency through a process of public self-analysis.


According to Habermas’s model, the process of rationalizing normsthrough public discourse requires a parallel discursive rationalization ofthe self. The transparency of motives required by practical discourse thusproduces a paradoxical form of autonomy. Self-control is enhanced by the“inner disciplines” that enable one to justify his or her “inner nature” bymaking it transparent to others. Perhaps, these inner disciplines can evenhelp us to shed elements of our culture that are sources of unhappiness butthat we nonetheless unwittingly reproduce. However, the legitimacy of thediscourse itself, as well as its ability to enhance our autonomy, depends onour ability to make our most private motives accessible to the scrutiny ofother people.

This parallel process of rationalizing self and socially binding normsthrough intersubjective self-revelation bridges the gap between individualinterests and the needs of the community. As Habermas explains the prin-ciple of universalization in “Discourse Ethics,” he points out that “nothingbetter prevents others from perspectivally distorting one’s own interests thanactual participation. It is in this pragmatic sense that the individual is the lastcourt of appeal for judging what is in his best interest. On the other hand, thedescriptive terms in which each individual perceives his interests must beopen to criticism by others” (1990, 67). When Habermas points to the dualnecessity of permitting open access to practical discourse and the necessityof debating the specific “descriptive terms” in which people represent theirinterests in public, he approaches the question of transparency with the in-tention of making the terms of self-interest transparent. Negotiating the mean-ing of descriptive terms that define both individual identity and group iden-tity, Habermas holds, must be conducted dialogically because “needs andwants are interpreted in the light of cultural values. Since cultural values arealways components of intersubjectively shared traditions, the revision of thevalues used to interpret needs and wants cannot be a matter for individuals tohandle monologically” (67–68). Such revision of values involves a processof mediating between one’s own and other people’s understanding of one’sinterests. The materials of this process are the descriptive terms through whichthe interests of individuals are represented.

To follow Habermas’s logic, as communities discuss the meanings ofdescriptive terms, the terms become more and more transparent and groupidentity becomes more and more cohesive, though not necessarily morehomogeneous. Cohesiveness and heterogeneity are not contradictory be-cause what is important is not that things become the same, but that theindividual’s genuine interests are honestly represented and recognized inthe public realm. Transparency in the descriptive terms of self-representa-


tion is a necessary condition for the establishment of a legitimate consen-sus about norms because opacity blurs the meaning of terms and therebywithholds aspects of them from criticism by others. Further, any consciouseffort on the part of a discussant to withhold meaning violates the principlethat the motives of participants be transparent. Consciously opaque utter-ances—hidden agendas—taint practical discourse by introducing strategicaction into it. Thus, the viability of practical discourse as a method of ra-tionalizing the norms of a community that can permit autonomy is alsocontingent on the ability of individuals to achieve transparency.

In two respects, then, transparency underpins Habermas’s constructionof autonomy. First, by moving the locus of reason from a private, psycho-logical realm to a realm of public discourse, Habermas raises the relevanceof communicative transparency because this transition makes rationaliza-tion contingent on intersubjective communication. But in doing so,Habermas displaces transparency on the level of the sign onto a transpar-ency of the motives of the participants in discourse. Second, transparencyis an issue at the points at which the universality of the procedure of dis-course ethics intersects with the contextuality of individual consciousnessesand communities. Like individuals, groups must seek “self-clarification”through processes of public dialogue. These two applications of the idea oftransparency underscore Habermas’s tendency to work from the public tothe private level.7 In Habermas’s world, privacy is always fragile and con-tingent because everything is negotiated and rationalized through publicdiscourse. The private realm of individual consciousness is not a place thatis exempt from the public; rather, it is a subcategory of it. Habermas im-plicitly makes the discomforting case that private realms are comprisedeither of places that the public has not noticed or of places that publicdiscourse has chosen to designate off limits through the special status of“private.”

Opacity and autonomy in Bakhtin’scommunication theory

There are also two ways in which transparency is important to Bakhtin’sconstruction of autonomy. First, even though Bakhtin occasionally impliesthe theoretical possibility of achieving the kind of transparency that under-pins Habermasian practical discourse, he more often takes the position thatthe multiplicity of meanings that are embedded in words will inevitably


make meaning opaque. Second, Bakhtin associates transparency with thepower that social interests can bring to bear on discourse. Like Habermas,Bakhtin sees transparency as a social construct rather than as a quality oflanguage. Unlike Habermas, Bakhtin does not believe that transparency canbe politically neutral. From a Bakhtinian perspective, it is arguable that theconditions necessary for a legitimate Habermasian practical discourse to occurare impossible to achieve because the kind of bracketing that Habermas usesto screen out relationships of domination would largely empty “descriptiveterms” of meaning. Even though Habermas understands bracketing as aneffort to ensure undistorted communication, it is also an effort to controlsignification. Thus, while Habermas explicitly describes bracketing proce-dures as methods of screening forms of domination out of the process ofdiscourse, Bakhtin implicitly describes them as methods of drawing the se-mantic boundaries around words ever more narrow. From Bakhtin’s point ofview, Habermas’s bracketing comes closer to representing a vehicle of domi-nation than it does to representing a mode of liberation.

In an irresistible couple of sentences, Caryl Emerson historicizesBakhtin’s suspicion of the type of formalism that characterizes Habermasiandiscourse ethics:

During those rigidly Stalinist years, so saturated with approved prototypes,Bakhtin seems to have feared the potential tyranny of perfect form, the im-mutability and uninterruptibility of any icon that was too fixed in place. Aforce that could give us a seemly image would most likely know only oneway to welcome an approaching idea, consciousness, or historical world view;here you come again, stay as you are, you are what you always were, it’s allover. (1994, 212)

What is “over” is what Bakhtin calls “the process of historical becoming”in which the word is constantly engaged. This process ends when the per-fection of form permits transparency. While it is important to emphasizethat Habermas’s theory implies neither a unitary historical world view northe end of a process of semantic development, the procedure of practicaldiscourse does represent exactly the kind of universalized and “seemly”image of which Bakhtin is deeply suspicious.

For Bakhtin, a hard-nosed rejection of the idea that transparency can beanything other than the result of force or ideological pressure motivateshim to construct a model of autonomy that seeks simultaneously to retainthe ambiguity of the word and to couple it with a confidence in theindividual’s ability to render the dialogic structure of discourse transpar-ent. In Bakhtin’s eyes, semantic opacity is inherent in the word and thus a


forced transparency signifies an exertion of power that threatens autonomy.However, heteroglossia has a structure that reflects the relationships ofpower among different social interests. Making these relationships trans-parent does not mark an effort to control meaning. Rather, it marks an ef-fort to understand the dialogic “strands” against which each utterancebrushes. Bakhtin’s model of autonomy revolves around the project, not ofconstructing transparent “descriptive terms” that permits a fully consciousperson to dovetail self and society, but of constructing a sophisticated senseof how the individual’s voice functions amid heteroglossia.

Like V. N. Volosinov, Bakhtin grounds the “ideological sign” in histori-cal struggles among economic classes and other social groups.8 In this re-spect, the word always has a history that carries more than the intent of aspeaker. Bakhtin often uses the metaphor of partial or incomplete owner-ship to describe speakers’ inability to use words as seamless expressions ofintent. As he puts it in “Discourse in the Novel,” the word is always “halfsomeone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates itwith his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word,adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.” As he describesthe process of making words one’s own, Bakhtin uses rhetoric inflectedwith images of power, such as “appropriation” and “seizure.” He remarksthat “some words stubbornly resist” recontextualization. When one usessome words, Bakhtin claims, “it is as if they put themselves in quotationmarks against the will of the speaker” (1981, 293–94). In fact, this is ex-actly what Bakhtin does when he seeks to explain the concept of one’s ownwords as a practical rather than a theoretical phenomenon. In effect, asBakhtin describes the act of appropriation that “assimilating” words into apersonal discourse requires, he strives to assimilate the concept of truepersonal “ownership” of a word into his own discourse. It is as though theconcept of “one’s own words,” which seems so reasonable, but which is soforeign to the trajectory of Bakhtin’s thought, puts itself in quotation marksas he tries to claim it for the autonomous speaker.

In his late essay “Problem of the Text,” Bakhtin returns to this themeand describes the quest for transparency in terms of the quest for a lan-guage through which one can achieve a perfect expression of intent withno surplus meaning: “Quests for my own words are in fact quests for aword that is not my own, a word that is more than myself; this is a strivingto depart from one’s own words with which nothing essential can be said. Imyself can only be a character and not the primary author. The author’squests for his own words are basically quests for genre and style, questsfor an authorial position” (1986, 149). This quotation does much to define


Bakhtin’s attitude toward the relationship between transparency and au-tonomy. Authors need words that express their intentions; however, in thatthese words are embedded in a history that transcends the speaker’s inten-tions, the words necessarily represent more than the author intends. In thislarger context, the author is a kind of “character,” who is contained withinand defined by the communicative structure over which he or she has onlylimited control. The search for one’s “own” words is a search for the abil-ity to transcend this context and to gain one where the speaker has fullsemantic control and can speak words that are not “shared.” On a theoreti-cal level, then, by Bakhtin’s logic, transparency and autonomy are identi-cal. One’s “own” words would be a perfect expression of self liberatedfrom the history of language. Ironically, though, these words would bederacinated from any shared historical context and would thus be mean-ingless to anyone other than the speaker.

In practical terms, the effort to discover one’s own words can at bestpermit the discovery of a mediatory position, a style or a point of view.Nonetheless, Bakhtin presents this situation not with the tone of one whois describing a kind of tragic fall into the history of language, but with thetone of one explaining a value-neutral fact of life. Indeed, he even impliesthat one’s own words can never express anything essential and thus actu-ally have a lesser communicative value than the historically inflected word.

One implication for autonomy of the necessary opacity of the utteranceis that its surplus meaning functions partially to hide the self. Although ona purely theoretical level transparency and autonomy are coequal inBakhtin’s thought, in practical terms transparency is much more closelyassociated with tyranny, and Bakhtin is much more interested in ways ofusing language to destabilize and subvert institutions that work to under-mine autonomy. Bakhtin’s metaphor of a “unitary” language situates hisconcept of the verbal ownership of words within a larger social context,and this is where the threat that transparency poses to autonomy is mostapparent. Just as an individual can claim to “own” a word when he or shecan purge it of meaning beyond his or her intent, a social class or group“owns” a language when it has the power to purge meanings that do notreflect its ideological interests.

Bakhtin comes closest to describing the relationship between unitarylanguage and transparency when he explains that, when talking about uni-tary language,

we are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories,but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a worldview, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understand-


ing in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expres-sion to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unificationand centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes ofsociopolitical and cultural centralization. (1981, 271)

Bakhtin’s suspicion of the kind of language that assures a “maximum ofmutual understanding” exemplifies the difference between his own andHabermas’s understanding of the relationship of stable meanings to au-tonomy. Bakhtin’s decision to emphasize the word maximum underscoreshis sense that the forces motivating maximum understanding are the sameforces that result in ideological hegemony and political tyranny. This samemaximum would connote an ideal speech situation to Habermas.

In discussing the goal of transparency in what he calls “poetic style,”Bakhtin directly underscores this connection between the effort to estab-lish linguistic transparency and the effort to establish authoritarian poli-tics: “Within the limits of poetic style, direct unconditional intentionality,language at its full weight and the objective display of language . . . are allsimultaneous. . . . The language of poetic genres, when they approach theirstylistic limit, often become authoritarian, dogmatic, and conservative”(1981, 286–87). Transparency must be forced on the sign by arbitrary so-cial power. This is so partly because the consensus that validates transpar-ency, for Bakhtin, is more likely to mark the ascendance of the centripetalover centrifugal forces of language than it is to signify the victory of rea-son over power (272). The motion toward semantic centralization thatBakhtin metaphorizes as the “centripetal” force of language does not rep-resent the grounding of validity claims as it does for Habermas; rather, itrepresents the ideological control of signification.

In this respect, the impulse to achieve transparency has radically differ-ent implications for Habermas than it does for Bakhtin. On the one hand,Habermas understands transparency in ideologically neutral terms. It is aprerequisite for undistorted communication, and, as such, it is a means tothe end of mutual understanding. On the other hand, Bakhtin never disso-ciates transparency from the material or ideological interests of a speaker.Transparency is inseparable from the forces that purge unintended, andthus subversive, meanings. In Habermas’s lexicon, when a word becomestransparent, it belongs to everyone. In Bakhtin’s lexicon, when a word be-comes transparent, it becomes the property of a single social interest. Thus,the effort to achieve a “rational consensus” through “undistorted” commu-nication would strike Bakhtin as a move in the direction of ideologicalhegemony.


Bakhtin historicizes this struggle between unitary language andheteroglossia by situating it in a long, ongoing contest between poetic andnovelistic discourse:

Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medievalchurch, of “the one language of truth,” the Cartesian poetics of neoclassi-cism, the abstract grammatical universalism of Leibniz (the idea of a “uni-versal grammar”), Humboldt’s insistence on the concrete—all these, what-ever their differences in nuance, give expression to the same centripetal forcesin sociolinguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same projectof centralizing and unifying the European languages. The victory of onereigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of language, theirenslavement. (1981, 271)

“But,” Bakhtin asserts, as his narrative turns away from the sites where ide-ology forces transparency and begins to describe the liberation of heteroglo-ssia, “the centripetal force of the life of language, embodied in a ‘unitarylanguage,’ operate in the midst of heteroglossia” (271). Transparency im-plies a universalized and unitary meaning such that there can be only onespeaker, or, at most, many people speaking from an identical ideologicalperspective. But the forces that lead in this direction must struggle againstthe ever-present forces of heteroglossia that work to make the languageopaque. Habermas would certainly agree that the realm of discourse is asocial construct that exists within a heteroglot verbal universe. But he wouldalso assert that it is formally possible to bracket relationships of domination.The issue of the formal bracketing of domination marks the widest gap be-tween Bakhtin’s and Habermas’s lines of thought in this regard.

Bakhtin’s suspicion of transparency is underpinned by a profound dis-trust of the type of systematized big-picture model of communication thatHabermas creates. Instead, Bakhtin relies on the individual’s ability to re-spond honestly, consciously, and appropriately to the specific circumstancesof his or her intersubjective relationships. The emphasis Bakhtin places onthe individual’s ability to understand the discursive architecture of his orher world marks a key difference between his and Habermas’s construc-tion of reason. Though Bakhtin rarely discusses reason explicitly, he seesautonomy less as a product of public discourse, than as a kind of skill thatthe individual develops by gaining greater and greater understanding ofthe structure of heteroglossia.

In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin indicates the trajectory that thedevelopment of this kind of understanding might take in the life of an ac-tual person. As a means of illustrating a turning point in the development


of an individual’s autonomy, Bakhtin describes “an illiterate peasant, milesaway from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and forhim unshakable world.” This peasant, “nevertheless lived in several lan-guage systems” simultaneously; “he prayed to God in one language (ChurchSlavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third and, whenhe began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, hetried to speak yet a fourth language.” However, at this point, the peasant isunaware of the different ideological positions that the languages representand of the role that they play in structuring his life. As Bakhtin puts it,“[T]hese languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic con-sciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to the other without think-ing, automatically.” But when the peasant becomes “able to regard onelanguage . . . through the eyes of another language” everything changes:

As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the con-sciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were notonly various different languages but even internally variegated languages,that the ideological approaches to the world that were indissolubly connectedwith these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live inpeace and quiet with one another—then the inviolability and predeterminedquality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of activelychoosing one’s orientation among them began. (1981, 296)

This awakening in the consciousness of the peasant marks a kind of em-powerment, but one that is very different from that granted by the bracket-ing and testing procedures of Habermasian practical discourse.

The peasant is empowered with a new kind of reason because his newawareness of heteroglossia impels him to situate himself in relation to thevarious interests that control his world. Having recognized that this struc-ture of multiple and internally variegated languages defines a geographyof power, the peasant is now able consciously to choose his “orientation”to different contexts. A kind of Newtonian transformation has occurredand a set of laws that were once opaque to the peasant has now becometransparent. However, this does not imply a consequent transparency ofself on the part of the peasant. On the contrary, it actually enables the peas-ant to mask him- or herself in different discourses. The peasant can nowcarnivalize and subvert authority, adopt the tones of authority when he wantsto exert domination, or use discourses out of context to create ironic dis-tance, and so on. Although she cannot escape the ideological dimension ofdiscourse, she can, indeed, must, use her newly gained knowledge in anideologically inflected way, either cynically or sincerely.


The autonomy that conscious awareness of heteroglossia creates comesnot from the ability to negotiate interests in a power-neutral environment,but from the ability to situate one’s self within the system of discoursesthrough which one moves. Bakhtin exemplifies this process by explaininghow the most skilled authors move from discursive location to discursivelocation as a method of demonstrating their autonomy within the structureof heteroglossia: “The author utilizes now one language, now another, inorder to avoid giving himself up wholly to either of them; he makes use ofthis verbal give-and-take, this dialogue of languages at every point in hiswork, in order that he himself might remain as it were neutral with regardto language, a third party in a quarrel between two people” (1981, 314).Maintaining this third-party neutrality permits the author not only to serveas an honest broker among discourses, but also to remain outside and abovethe ideological boundaries of any single discourse. Late in the same essay,Bakhtin reformulates a classic definition of the novel—“the novel must be afull and comprehensive reflection of its era”—to refocus it on the structureof discourse: “The imperative should be formulated differently: the novelmust represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all theera’s languages that have any claim to being significant; the novel must be amicrocosm of heteroglossia” (411). Ultimately, Bakhtinian autonomy is rep-resented by the ability to achieve this end. Its defining characteristic is theability to think and act not just novelistically, but like a novelist, as a skilledmanipulator of heteroglossia.9 Autonomy, for Bakhtin, takes this form partlybecause the combination of ideologically forced transparency with the twoforces that most contribute to opacity—historicity and the multiplicity ofdiscourses—work both for and against autonomy. By Bakhtin’s logic, au-tonomy cannot be wrested from the word itself through a struggle betweenmeaning and intention, but can be achieved by making the architecture ofheteroglossia transparent and gaining the ability to situate opaque discoursesas an auditor and to control them as a speaker.

Bakhtin, transparency, and the ideal speech situation

As closely as Bakhtin connects transparency with ideological hegemonyand thus sees in opacity a realm of autonomy for the self, he also assertsthe theoretical presence of the level of transparency that Habermas seeksto imagine through practical discourse. In “The Problem of the Text,”Bakhtin briefly describes a figure who embodies the spirit of Habermas’s


discourse ethics: “[E]ach dialogue takes place as if against the background ofthe responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who standsabove all participants in the dialogue.” Bakhtin calls this “third party” a“superaddressee,” who holds forth the possibility of “ideally true responsiveunderstanding” to a speaker’s utterance. Further, using a rhetoric of presuppo-sition that is very similar to that which Habermas uses to describe the idealspeech situation, Bakhtin claims that “the author of the utterance, with a greateror lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose abso-lutely just responsive understanding is presumed” (1986, 126). Bakhtin doesnot develop this idea especially thoroughly, but he articulates it clearly enoughto glean a reasonable sense of his meaning. “Ideally true” and “absolutelyjust” could mean significantly different things. The first phrase could refer toan understanding that perfectly comprehends the semantic idea of an utter-ance, a sort of access to a platonic realm in which signifier and signified aremerged, a comprehension of the true idea that a speaker is trying to express.This phrase could also mean, however, the same thing that “absolutely just”probably means: a perfect comprehension of the intentions of the speaker, arendering of the word absolutely transparent so that it achieves a perfect ex-pression of intention and thus does absolute justice to the will of the speaker.Hence “ideally true” might be described as the comprehension that would re-sult if the speaker could express him- or herself perfectly.

The superaddressee marks a form of undistorted communication, but aform that is contextualized rather than universalized, as it is in Habermas’smodel. Bakhtin describes the historicity of the superaddressee this way:“In various ages and with various understandings of the world, thesuperaddressee . . . assume[s] various ideological expressions (God, abso-lute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, thecourt of history, science, and so forth)” (1986, 126). Michael Holquistglosses this list by describing its members as the ideal audiences for peoplewho feel out of sync with their time: “[P]oets who feel misunderstood intheir lifetime, martyrs for lost political causes, quite ordinary people caughtin lives of quiet desperation—all have been correct to hope that outside thetyranny of the present there is a possible addressee who will understandthem” (1990, 38). Frank Farmer offers a somewhat more subtle analysisthat divides the elements of Bakhtin’s list into foundationalist andantifoundationalist groups.10 However, regardless of whether thesuperaddressee is construed as a historical or a neo-Kantian auditor, it rep-resents a form of undistorted communication that is very similar to thatwhich prevails in Habermas’s ideal speech situation.

The continuity between Bakhtin’s desire to imagine undistorted communi-cation and Habermas’s ideal speech situation actually goes considerably far-


ther than just the sketch of the superaddressee. Bakhtin describes the charac-teristics that he considers necessary for “absolutely just responsive understand-ing” to occur. As Bakhtin introduces the superaddressee, he asserts that “everyutterance makes a claim to justice, sincerity, beauty, and truthfulness (a modelutterance), and so forth” and provides an illustrative example of the communi-cative hurdles that the superaddressee is able to overcome: “An analysis of thesimplest everyday dialogue (‘What time is it?’—‘Seven o’clock’). The moreor less complex situation of the question. One must look at the clock. Theanswer can be true or false, it can be significant, and so forth. In which timezone? The same question asked in outer space, and so forth” 1986, 123, 120).These questions lead Bakhtin to develop a set of “validity claims” that arevery similar to those that Habermas develops in the theory of communicativeaction: comprehensibility, truth, contextual rightness, and sincerity (Habermas1979, 3). Like Habermas, Bakhtin explicitly identifies sincerity and factualtruth as criteria of undistorted communication. Further, in asking questionssuch as “In which time zone?” and “The same question asked in outer space?”of the everyday utterance, Bakhtin is asking about the contextual rightness ofthe statement. Thus, Bakhtin asserts three out of the four validity claims thatHabermas makes indispensable to his theory of communicative action.

That Bakhtin articulates, especially in a late essay, a level of communica-tion that is similar to Habermas’s ideal speech situation adds an importantdimension to his theory of communication. Without an image of undistortedcommunication to counterbalance his analysis of ideology-saturated discourse,Bakhtinian autonomy is liberatory, but it is also reactive and marked by a con-stant struggle to maintain freedom in a world characterized by discursive cun-ning and infinite subtle forms of rhetorical coercion. Without a progressiveimage of transparency, of a context in which communication can transcendcoercion, Bakhtinian communication would function only within the bound-aries of strategic action. In combination with the form of autonomy offered byunderstanding the ideological structure of heteroglossia, the superaddresseeimplies a window through which Bakhtin can imagine communication that isboth undistorted semantically and uncoercive ideologically. With significantqualifiers, Habermas’s and Bakhtin’s different attitudes toward transparencyultimately relate more to their differing sense of the conditions of possibilityand of the relationship of transparency to domination than to the inherent valueof the idea. Both recognize the theoretical connection between communicativetransparency and the ethical value of sincerity.

As a means of underscoring the different roles that context plays in de-fining Habermas’s and Bakhtin’s valuations of transparency as a conditionof autonomy, I want in closing to remark on the relationships of Bakhtinianand Habermasian communication theories to Stalinist and National Social-


ist societies. It would be misleading to end this essay by asserting thatBakhtin’s long career culminates with the image of progressive transpar-ency that is offered by the superaddressee, and thus that he is ultimatelybrought around to a belief in the possible separation of transparency andsocial power. In “Problem of the Text,” the superaddressee inhabitsBakhtin’s imagination alongside its own nightmarish opposite. Immedi-ately after noting that all dialogue takes place “as if against the backgroundof the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party,” Bakhtinincludes the following parenthetical comment: “(Cf. the understanding ofthe Fascist torture chamber or hell in Thomas Mann as absolute lack ofbeing heard, as the absolute absence of a third party)” (1986, 126). Just asthe superaddressee hovers “invisibly present” above the system of com-munication and holds out the possibility of the kind of liberatory transpar-ency that Habermas attributes to the ideal speech situation, Bakhtin sees afigure who skulks invisibly below the system of communication andachieves transparency through torture. Even as he describes his model of aperfect communicative partner, Bakhtin reminds himself of thesuperaddressee’s mirror image in the state police.

Thus, even when he is describing a perfect auditor and respondent,Bakhtin remains attuned to the permutations of power that are embeddedin the contexts in which communication occurs. His parenthetical inclu-sion of this image of the “absolute absence of a third party” says muchabout the degree to which he can imagine language sustaining liberty fromforces of ideological control and centralization. In relation to the suspicionwith which Bakhtin approaches the idealization of form, it may be sym-bolic that he alludes to an unreachable “outer space” when he is analyzingideal communicative relationships and to the more immanent reality ofStalinist torture chambers when he is describing the connection betweencommunication and domination. In this way, Bakhtin’s reservations aboutthe ethical value of transparency defines an important counterpart toHabermas’s desire to ground communication in a procedure that seeks trans-parent understanding. Bakhtin’s superaddressee definitely represents a uto-pian impulse, but his construction of autonomy is most consistently fo-cused on the project of fending off forces of ideological domination thatask one to internalize an arbitrary and alien voice of authority. Partly inreaction to the tyranny under which he lived, Bakhtin argues that we canhave too much reason, especially if the force of the better argument makesthe meaning of “descriptive terms” transparent and creates a monovocalvoice of authority that the individual has no choice but to accept. FromBakhtin’s point of view, such a transparent self is not rational or autono-mous, but the exact opposite. It is the embodiment of a unitary language.


To Bakhtin, opacity protects the self as well as the word and thus has akind of ethical value that it does not have for Habermas.

Equally, as Habermas’s position in the Historians’ Debate and his responseto Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism make clear, a pluralistdialogue that compels transparency is part of Habermas’s remedy to the kindof radical cultural chauvinism and nationalist mystification that enabled theNazis to gain control of Germany (Wolin 1989a, 1989b; Habermas 1992;Pensky 1995). The revelation of Nazi atrocities that Habermas experiencedafter World War II is an important context in directing his ethical theory bothtoward a principle of universalization that necessarily transcends nationalidentity and on his effort to define big-picture paradigmatic systems. UnlikeBakhtin, who defined what is almost a guerrilla theory of autonomy, onewhere freedom is partly contingent on the presence of semantic shadows,Habermas defines a theory that hinges on the ability of the undistorted lightof reason to talk its way into the deepest recesses of the social body. Theform of these two critics’ images of autonomy can be partly explained by thefact that Bakhtin spent his entire life under the surveillance of a totalitarianstate while Habermas came to maturity in a society that was reinventingitself after a totalitarian state had been defeated in war. Working in the con-text of a society that was reconstructing has given Habermas motives to seehis work in the broadest terms, both within the tradition of Frankfurt Schoolcritical theory and as a full-blown ethical alternative to the theories of theimmediate past. But on a somewhat more subtle level, Habermas’s emphasison a principle of universalization and on egalitarian and pluralistic publicdiscourse marks a response to the racial and ethnic prejudice of nazism. Thestructure of discourse ethics works against, even denies, the possibility ofself-reinforcing fictions of superiority that are indispensable to nationalistdiscourses. Despite the transparency that it produces as a by-product, the“unforced force” of discourse ethics is itself a response to the horrors ofNational Socialism and the Holocaust.

As theories of philosophers working in different intellectual traditionsand under different political circumstances, Habermas’s model of discur-sive democracy and Bakhtin’s articulation of the value of opacity both re-spond to specific forms of totalitarian politics by offering models of rhe-torical humanism. In one sense, the difference between the conclusions thatthe two reach regarding transparency lies in their different personal experi-ences of the relationship between autonomy and domination. But, in a moregeneral sense, bringing Habermas and Bakhtin together articulates the si-multaneously clarifying and threatening effects that transparency implies inethically motivated public discourse. I suspect that Habermas and Bakhtinwould agree that there are few threats in making the motives and intentions


of government policies transparent. But when we move one level closer tothe self and ask ourselves if they would agree that there is little threat inmaking the motives and intentions of informal social norms transparent, theissue is likely to get cloudier. Finally, when we ask if the advantages of mak-ing the self transparent—even in a dialogue that is sincerely oriented towardmutual understanding—counterbalance the impact that transparency has onthe nature of the autonomy, the issue is likely to become completely vexed.From a Habermasian perspective, we are left with the question: Is consensuscompatible with opacity? From a Bakhtinian perspective, we are left with anequally difficult question: Is autonomy compatible with transparency?

Department of EnglishState University of New York, Brockport

Notes1. As is the case in Gardiner’s book, Habermas occasionally comes up in texts that

primarily focus on Bakhtin, but Bakhtin virtually never comes up in texts that are focused onHabermas. LaCapra makes a distant connection between the two in Rethinking IntellectualHistory (1983). Gardiner discusses the two in relation to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophicalhermeneutics in The Dialogics of Critique (1992). Most recently, Habermas and Bakhtinhave been analyzed comparatively in an effort to identify some of the problems that have tobe overcome in multicultural ethical theory (see Nielsen 1995).

2. See part 2 of “Discourse Ethics,” in which Habermas makes the case for understand-ing philosophical ethics in terms of “a special theory of argumentation” in which “actors areoriented to validity claims” (1990, 44; 1990, 11–13, 57–76; 1993, 1–17).

3. Habermas has been criticized from a variety of perspectives for his universalisticapproach. Among the most salient of these critics are Warnke, Moon, and Benhabib. Warnkeand Benhabib are both skeptical of the extent to which the procedure that Habermas definescan resolve conflicts between people with fundamentally different values. Warnke, asks, forexample, “If we cannot debate the legitimacy of our norms without engaging the question ofour values, how can we settle questions of the legitimacy of norms?” (1995, 255). Benhabibargues that Habermas’s model is based on an implicitly masculine form of autonomy. Inplace of discourse ethics, Benhabib proposes a model of interactive universalism that isbased on the necessity of approaching “every moral person as a unique individual, with acertain life history” rather than as an abstractly equal subject (1986, 10). Moon challengesthe ability of the discourse ethic on the same grounds as Warnke, that it is unlikely that eventhe most dispassionate reason can justify norms universally in a world that is already char-acterized by multiple life forms. As he puts it, “There are, then, reasons to believe that somenorms could be validated through discourse, but it is far from obvious that they would besufficient to settle the conflicts that arise in a pluralist world” (1995, 152).

4. White draws out this transition clearly in The Recent Work of Jurgen Habermas (1988,48–50). Also see Outhwaite’s Habermas (1994, 55ff.). Outhwaite emphasizes the transitionfrom “abstract universalizability” in Kant to “normative consensus” in Habermas. Taylor ex-plains the transition of Kantian monologism to Habermasian dialogism in “Language and So-ciety” (1991, 31). Benhabib underscores the extent to which Habermas’s reconstruction of thecategorical imperative participates in a tradition of defining reason in terms that are implicitlymasculine, or, at least, which sublimate difference to universalized constructs (1995, 19).


5. In an interesting intertextual moment, Habermas quotes McCarthy’s explanation ofthe Habermasian formulation of the principle of universalization (Habermas 1990, 67;McCarthy 1978, 326).

6. I am using strategic action in the same way that McCarthy uses it, to define a modein which an individual distorts communication “for the strategic maximizing of theindividual’s own pleasure or advantage” (1978, 23). I primarily want to distinguish it fromaction oriented toward mutual understanding. The ability to probe and test the motives ofparticipants in practical discourse is a test against strategic action. For a fuller description ofthe way Habermas describes modes of action, including strategic action, see his Communi-cation and the Evolution of Society (1979, 117).

7. Benhabib most compellingly makes the case for understanding the priority Habermasgives to the public realm. As she puts it in an essay examining models of the public sphere,“[T]he discourse model of public dialogue undermines the substantive distinctions betweenjustice and the good life, public matters of norms as opposed to private matters of values,public interests versus private needs. If the agenda of the conversation is radically open, ifparticipants can bring any and all matters under critical scrutiny and reflexive questioning,then there is no way to predefine the nature of the issues discussed as being ones of justiceor of the good life prior to the conversation.” Equally, nothing, by the nature of the dis-course, is outside of the purview of the public realm (1992, 37).

8. Though none of the books published under Bakhtin’s name are as explicit asVolosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language in asserting that the “sign becomes anarena of the class struggle” (1986, 23), especially in Rabellais and His World (1994), Bakhtintreats the sign and discourse as sites where property-owning classes seek to centralize mean-ing as a method of centralizing power and laboring classes seek to diffuse meaning as amethod of expressing autonomy.

9. Morson (1981) analyzes Tolstoy’s effort to transcend this dialogic mode of gainingcontrol of heteroglossia by incorporating nondialogic “absolute language” into his discourse.The argument that Morson makes exemplifies the problem that Bakhtin finds in authorsseeking to adopt approved discourses.

10. Farmer argues, “Bakhtin’s catalogue of possible superaddressees appears, on bal-ance, to be indifferent to the issue of foundational truth. While ‘absolute truth,’ ‘God,’ ‘sci-ence,’ and ‘human conscience’ all seem to fit easily into a foundational paradigm, othersuperaddressees, such as ‘the people,’ or the ‘court of history,’ may just as easily be inter-preted as constructionalist or antifoundational” (1994, 214). Farmer situates thesuperaddressee within the theory/pragmatism debate by arguing that “the superaddresseemay be read as Bakhtin’s attempt to demonstrate the monologic tendencies of boththeoreticism and pragmatism, to reveal how it is that, while we may be wise to rid ourselvesof theory, life without a sense of theory would be profoundly diminished, if not unsayable”(219). Farmer holds that the superaddressee contextualizes the formalism of theoretical con-structs such as Habermas’s discourse ethics.

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Garvey_The Value of Opacity a Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermas's Discourse

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