Dialogical Self Theory (DST)

 © Stephen Bigger 1st October 2019

I have just positively reviewed a symposium of papers on moral and spiritual leadership in the series Studies in World Christianity and Interreligious Relations. 13 papers make up Moral and spiritual leadership in an age of plural moralities, edited by Hans Alma and Ina ter Avest. The papers stemmed from a conference for religious education and religious studies staff on Leadership in the light of Zigmunt Baumann’s ‘liquid modernity’. The review appears in print in the Journal of Beliefs and Values early in 2020 and online here. I present in this blog some introductory and additional material.

Its subject matter covers a range of topics, not all on leadership and spirituality. Spirituality seems to mean having relevant to a Christian theme, though 'inter-religious' has a broader reach including what is called 'worldview'. Its key themes link moral education with dialogic self theory. The history of dialogue drew on William James (1890), Martin Buber (1923, ET 1970) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1929, ET 1984). Dialogical Self Theory (DST) was the major research interest of the author of chapter 2, Hubert Hermans who co-edited two handbooks exploring it, in 2012 and 2018. DST, which is used in Psychoanalysis,  the self as relational (a continuous dialogue between ‘I’ and others) and dynamic (constantly modifying). It speaks of a variety of ‘I positions’, that is versions of ‘I’ in different circumstances. The ‘self’ is not an entity but a mix of different understandings and instincts, begun in earliest childhood before language. DST speaks of the ‘society of mind’ for this mix of ‘I positions’ which make up our inner dialogue. Inner voices are influenced by the past (things we have heard or read) and influence the future. Psychotherapy using DST patiently unravels conflicting thoughts/living contradictions.

James and Buber spoke of relationships, I and You / I and Thou. Relational morality and relational leadership provide the book’s starting point. Bakhtin contrasts dialogue with monologue, on which his critical theory is based. He wrote with a circle of friends in the 1920s but Stalin’s rule presented life-threatening dangers. Medvedev was shot by Stalin,Voloshinov died of TB, Bakhtin was exiled. Though it is widely assumed that Bakhtin was co-author, it may just have seemed safer for the named author to be dead.  The early works on language viewed language as social utterance to others expecting a response. This essay might be a monologue, its author, me, just arranging words. But the words are to an implied audience, you, who are able to comment in response. Moreover, my (the author’s) understandings are influenced by what I have experienced, learned, heard and read. This adds up to language being social and dialogic. Nevertheless it may be dressed up as a monologue (one person talking) and in a sense the all-knowing authorial voice in a story or novel operates as though a monologue.

Writing at this very dangerous time, Bakhtin used a study of literature as his next starting point. He hid his general philosophising within studies of Homer, Dostoevsky, and Rabelais. With Homer it was author and hero. He argued that Dostoevsky, using various narrators rather than an all-knowing narrator, is heteroglot (heteroglossia, various voices), not monologic (one voice). The Stalin era was essentially monologic, with everything defined and stipulated from above by one totalitarian person. His study of Rabalais described carnival, whose import I am not concerned with here.

Bakhtin was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, but needed to re-express his Christianity in secular ways.  Ruth Coates (1998) follows some threads in Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author, in what she says is a neglected field, stressing that Bakhtin was not a theologian so her analysis simply shows his influences. Indeed Bakhtin was always reticent about his personal history, silent on how God and conscience fits into his discussion. That he was arrested and exiled as a member of a religious discussion group is pertinent. It is his contribution to secular philosophy that is most commonly discussed. Maybe behind the emphasis on author and hero we can see God and humanity, humans written and controlled by an overseeing voice who knows the end from the beginning. Coates examines the following themes: the fall (sinfulness); salvation, incarnation, God, man (humankind), new birth, eternal life, hope, and love. Dialogue is between people. Humans are part of an eternal chain of dialogue so in a sense individuals live on through their slots of influence, their provocations and responses. This is secular eternal life/influence. The contrast between free will and predestination (lives controlled by higher forces) was always a theological conundrum.

Dialoguism declares that people are part of a never-ending chain of provocation and answerability so free will cannot exist. We and our ideas are fertilised by the dead (Bakhtin, 1984: 404). This vision is mystical (rather than pragmatic) and assumes a human world that is social rather than individual, and dynamic rather than static (Matusov and Marjanovic-Shane, 2017). On education they emphasis (p.71) that students/learners are active and not passive:

We think that the teacher’s pedagogical authorship has to be subordinated and to serve to the students’ own educational authorship. It is the students’ own diverse problematics, which is important and not the teacher’s one.

and

Holism in education is deadly and oppressive. Students are not idea-characters of the teacher’s polyphonic pedagogical authorship but rather are full-fledged authors of their own education, ideas, and life. Pedagogical responsibility and authorship of the teacher should be aimed at supporting the critical authorship of the students, as the students wish it, – ultimately education cannot be forced. (p.72)

Dialogical Self Theory (DST) covers inner and outer dialogue, but its use in psychoanalysis emphasises the inner, where our sense of self is multi-voiced (polyvocal) built up of provocations (things we have heard or read) and answers/responses by ourselves and others. These produce what DST calls ‘I positions’ which mingle in our minds to produce ‘a society of mind’. Thus our ‘self’ is viewed as a community in dialogue, maybe a peaceful discussion, maybe a cacophony. I am taking some points from Hermans and Gieser’s Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory (2012). DST is described as a bridging theory, bringing together a range of other insights and disciplines, “theories, research traditions and practices” (2012:1). In this period promoting the rights and ambitions of the individual, relational and dialogical agendas place the individual in community. The self, ’I’ is part of a social chain,working together for the common good. The whole is “a dynamic multiplicity of I positions” as the ‘I’ makes social connections. These positions vary temporally (over time) and spatially (across contexts), even changing dynamically as a consequence. Some I positions are dominant, 'promoter positions'. There are 'taboo positions' also (p.93). I positions might fixate into multiple personalities. The self in the real world is involved with people and events; but also DST views similar dialogues happening in the head, which is where the link to psychotherapy comes in, to work out how different experiences, relationships and ideas interact in our heads. We position ourselves in particular ways and even re-position ourselves in the light of new insights. Some DST research favours complex questionnaires (e.g. the personal position repertoire), tending to be positivist; others use broad qualitative interviews and even psychodrama.

The overall conclusions were that leaders need to be relational, encouraging dialogue and able to respond to unexpected circumstances. The same is true of all personal relationships. Leaders can be autocratic and, in DST terms, monologic, i.e the leader sets the agenda without discussion. Their followers are expected to be obedient without owning the reasons for their compliance. DST has an interest in education too, the contrast between monologue and dialogue being particularly appropriate. Teacher monologue can come as talk, worksheet of textbook. Dialogic pedagogy has high regard for relationship and discussion, with an emphasis on teachers and their students being co-learners.


Sean Warren and I (2017) contrasted relational pedagogy with authoritarian monologic teaching based on almost a decade of discussions around his PhD. He promoted discussion and thinking skills based on adult to adult relationships as opposed to what he had identified in his own previous overbearing parent to rebellious child strategies that he inherited from his own schooling. He chose the title Living Contradiction  to emphasise his inner unhappiness with both his pedagogical inheritance and current demands for authoritarian policies. There is a better way.

This volume focussed on religion and spirituality, also called more neutrally as 'world view'. Dialogue should mean open ended discussion but appears in the book as combative, as though people of fixed views could not agree. This is true to some extent as people believing that their faith is the only truth would find it hard to discuss with people of other faiths. My experience of the Religious Education Council showed that there were tensions. In inter-religious contexts, dialogue is normally between people of fixed mindsets, with little if any openness. This is not a criticism but an observation. The nature of religion is baseless ideological certainty, a conservative monologue, with no dialogue except in silos. Inter-religious 'dialogue' is entered into with the hope of changing minds so is not dialogue in Bakhtin's sense. It is in a sense adversarial, seeking both to persuade and diminish. Maybe belligerently so. To  be fair, each side may try to find some common ground, via ethics maybe, but that self-selects people who value that, cutting out extremists who are beyond compromise.

I am an atheist who studies religion and speaks without belligerence to faith members and with respect. I make it clear that I am not trying to change minds and am not seeking to be converted. That can sometimes lead to dialogue. There are other positions that impede dialogue, such as misogyny, racism, disrespect for others, assumptions of superiority and so on. Here an interchange might involve a protest, a calling out, an alternative point of view. It may not rank highly in the chain of utterances since the difference of opinion is likely to be unresolvable.  Twitter is full of such dialogue cul de sacs.

Since the book reviewed was by scholars of religious studies/education, I have other pertinent observations. I am reading Bakhtin and genre theory in biblical studies (ed.R Boer) which, even though the Bakhtin content is superficial, points to further lines of inquiry and the papers are interesting. Some writers had worked with genre before so a Bakhtin dimension added little. Some used dialogue loosely so genres in dialogue was little different from intertextuality. I don't intend to review the book here, but instead apply some thoughts to Biblical Studies. Bakhtin was a Christian in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Involvement with a Christian group may have been one of the factors in his exile.It became clear that theology had to be expunged from his writings for safety's sake. Ruth Coates (1998) traced some Christian attitudes through his writings. These include incarnation, the fall, love, Christ, sin, salvation, and transcendence. Are there parallels between the author and the hero and God and people, God and the author each holding power over his creation? In general, Bakhtin emphasises polyvocal authorship with many voices in evidence with corresponding ambiguity and conflicting voices. The important starting point is that the Bible is not monologic. There are many voices behind and within its many books. There is an attempt to claim authority by representing texts as divine words, which is of course a fiction. There are persuasive attempts to justify myths about origins and land claims. The reader has to learn to recognize these voices and their political. They are mainly male voices. Female voices have been muted, as recognized by Cheryl Exum in Fragmented Women. As with Homer, there are issues about which an epic narrative had an oral prehistory -  or not. And there are certainly issues about whether heroes are exemplars to follow or to avoid. So the Bible interpreter could get rich rewards from a study of Bakhtin, as Robert Polzin did in his study of the Deuteronomic History (Polzin 1980, 1989, 1993). Inspired by Bakhtin's study of Dostoevsky, he attempted to approach Old Testament narratives in the same way, as literature written by authors with artistic talent. As more Bakhtin works were published in the 1980s (some listed below), Polzin was able to deepen his analysis, though the readers will need to examine the footnotes carefully. Afar as I can tell, volume 4 on Kings was never completed. Polzin's voice can be heard in dialogue with the authors and editor of Boer's collection.  This is how dialogism works as an agenda is carried through to the new generation. He had remarked that we do not impose Bakhtin on a text but all the text to speak for itself through the lens suggested by Bakhtin. So what are the  points of view of the narrator, the author, later editors, translators, characters in the story? Similar narrative analysis was being carried out by Robert Alter, soon to produce The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981).These approaches make no assumptions as to whether the genre was fiction, or historical fiction/faction. Rather they uncover the artistry. This also uncovers the different voices contributing to the whole which might once have been blamed on editors and redactors. Bakhtin called this polyvocal and the existence of conflicting voices heteroglossia. Polzin defends the shift from historical (diachronic, 'across time) to literary (synchronic, 'viewed from a specific time') in the opening chapter of Moses and the Deuteronomist (1980).

In summary, Polzin's work emphasises that the Bible narrative is not a monologue but a collection of many voices. The authoritative (persuasive) voice may be that of the author but the narrator also has a dominance which might conflict. Thus the death of Saul is narrated as suicide but later claimed by an Amalekite boy who is killed for his claim. Who is right? and where does the propaganda lay? The conjunction may have been designed to place uncertainty in the ancient readers' minds. 'real thematic finalization is impossible' (Medvedev/Bakhtin 1928) as it has a prehistory and a posthistory. The first step is its setting in real time and real place, termed in Bakhtin studies as chronotope. Hence my interest, and Polzin's, in who authored the biblical narratives, at what time, with what artistry and for what purpose.

References

1. Alter,Robert. 1981. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books.
2. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. 
3. Bakhtin, M.M.  1984. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Translated and edited by C. Emerson. Minneapolis,MN: University of Minnesota Press.
4. Bakhtin, M. M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated and edited by V. W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. 
5. Bakhtin, M. M. 1990. Art and Answerability. Edited by M. Holquist and V. Liapunov. Translated by V. Liapunov and K. Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press. [written 1919–1924, published 1974-1979]. 
6. Bakhtin, M. M. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by V. Liapunov and M. Holquist. Translated by V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press.
7. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. 
8. Bigger, S. F. 2009. “Victor Turner, Liminality, and Cultural Performance.” Review Article of Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, edited by Graham St. John. Journal of Beliefs & Values 30 (2): 209–212. doi:10.1080/13617670903175238. 
9. BoerR. (ed.). 2007. Bakhtin and gender theory in biblical studies. Atlanta:Society of Biblical Literature, Semeia Studies 63.
10. Buber, M. 1923. Ich und Du; also in 1954 Die Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip (Ich und Du, Zwiesprache, Die Frage an den Einzelnen, Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen). ET with introduction and notes by Walter Kaufmann, I and Thou 1970.
11. Carens, J. H. 2000. Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
12. Coates Ruth 1998. Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
13. Connolly, W. E. 2011. A World of Becoming. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 
14. Exum, J.Cheryl. 2016 Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub) Versionsof Biblical Narratives, 2nd edition.London/New York: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark.
15. Hermans, H. J. M., and T. Gieser. 2012. Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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19. Konopka, A., H. J. M. Hermans, and M. M. Gonçalves. 2018. Handbook of Dialogical Self Theory and Psychotherapy. Abingdon: Routledge. 
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21. Matusov, Eugene & Marjanovic-Shane, Ana. 2017. Bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education.  Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal  Vol. 5.
22. Medvedev, P.N.  (=M.M. Bakhtin). 1928. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans A, Wehrie, Baltimore:Johns Hopkins.1978
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