Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may
not possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to
Mikhail Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a
diversity of insights that cannot be easily integrated or
accurately described in terms of a single overriding concern.
Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty years, he experienced both
dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking, returned to abandoned
insights that he then developed in unexpected ways, and worked
through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier concerns
Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the
relations among received notions of biography, unity, innovation,
and the creative process. Unity-with respect not only to
individuals but also to art, culture, and the world generally-is
usually understood as conformity to an underlying structure or an
overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that this idea of unity
contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For if everything
conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine development is
reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of something that,
in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin accepted that
some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world ceases
to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced
by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of
anything meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was
expressed well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of
an infinite number of turns or of no turns at all. Bakhtin
attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for the
possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a
"nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is
an essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such
change was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to
have developed by continually diverging from his initial
intentions. Although it would not necessarily follow that the
development of Bakhtin's thought corresponded to his ideas about
unity and creativity, we believe that in this case his ideas on
nonmonologic unity are useful in understanding his own thought-as
well as that of other thinkers whose careers are comparably varied
and productive.
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