ABSTRACT
Dialogism is unthinkable outside its relation to language. But that relation is complex. It is, not surprisingly, a dialogic relation, and before going any further it will be useful to consider what that means. Bakhtin is not the first, and far from the only, thinker to ponder the potential importance of dialogue in human interaction. In everyday usage, dialogue is a synonym for conversation; the word suggests two people talking to each other. This general sense of the word can obscure its special significance in the thought of Bakhtin. Speaking and exchange are aspects of dialogue that play an important role in both usages. But what gives dialogue its central place in dialogism is precisely the kind of relation conversations manifest, the conditions that must be met if any exchange between different speakers is to occur at all. That relation is most economically defined as one in which differences-while still remaining different-serve as the building blocks of simultaneity. In a conversation, both speakers are different from each other and the utterance each makes is always different from the other’s (even when one appears to repeat the “same” word as the other); and yet all these differences-and many more-are held together in the relation of dialogue.
