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

Ethics
T. Gregory Garvey
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Volume 33, Number 4, 2000, pp. 370-390 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/par.2000.0027
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Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2000. Copyright 2000 The Pennsylvania State
University, University Park, PA.
370
The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis of
Habermass Discourse Ethics
Jrgen Habermass and M. M. Bakhtins attitudes toward transparent or
undistorted communication define almost antithetical approaches to the
relationship between public discourse and autonomy. Habermas, both in
his theory of communicative action and in his discourse ethics, assumes
that transparent communication is possible and actually makes transpar-
ency a necessary condition for the legitimation of social norms. Yet, there
is a sense in which the same kind of transparency that offers the possibility
of rational and autonomous selfhood to Habermas signifies vulnerability
and tyranny to Bakhtin. In contrast to Habermas, Bakhtin assumes that
utterances 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 if
only slightly. Bakhtins suspicion of transparency leads him to develop a
model of autonomy that revolves around the individuals ability to resist
the emergence of transparency. However, Bakhtin attributes a positive ethi-
cal value to certain kinds of opacity because it is in the differences and
distortions that Bakhtin situates the process through which individuals con-
struct autonomy. Thus, in a kind of communicative paradox, opacity and
ambiguity play the same liberating role in Bakhtins thought that transpar-
ency and clarity play in Habermass.
Given the amount of intellectual labor that has been invested in explor-
ing the insights into communicative practice that Habermas and Bakhtin
offer, it is surprising that commentary on the two has so rarely intersected.
With the exception of one journal article and a short section of Michael
Gardiner s The Dialogics of Critique (1992), connections between
Habermas and Bakhtin have been made only incidentally and in passing.
1
Despite the important differences about the value of verbal transparency
and its relation to models of autonomy that I will explore in this essay,
T. Gregory Garvey
371
THE 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 social
realm, 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 both
analyze communication as a social institution not unlike a political system
or 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 his
analysis of communicative relationships as a mode of social criticism that
can help to define a more ethical world by demystifying some of the ways
in which domination is embedded in acts of speech and communication.
These similarities in the general goals of the two thinkers projects help
to throw the different roles that Habermas and Bakhtin attribute to trans-
parency into sharp relief. Most notably, Habermass relative confidence in
the possibility of achieving transparency allows him to build his model of
autonomy around ideas of discursive democracy, consensus, and the as-
sumption that in certain circumstances speakers strive to achieve undistorted
communication (Habermas 1984, 1: 9495, 28586). Bakhtin is less confi-
dent about the ability of speakers to achieve transparency, and thus he is
more preoccupied with exploring the way that impulses toward consensus
and transparency contribute to processes of ideological centralization that
undermine autonomy.
Transparency and autonomy in Habermass
discourse ethics
The idea of reason is at the very core of Habermasian thought, and reason
in Habermass lexicon is not so much an inherent mental faculty, as it was
for eighteenth-century social theorists such as John Locke and Jean Jacques
Rousseau, as it is the result of a process of public dialogue through which
norms and values are mediated and rationalized.
2
This distinction in the
nature of reason begins to explain one of the key differences between
Habermass and Bakhtins conflicting valuations of transparency. While
Bakhtin has a fundamentally enlightenment understanding of reason,
Habermas, by defining it as a product of public discourse, offers a
postmodern concept of reason.
372
T. GREGORY GARVEY
The two core assumptions of Habermass 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 they
enter into practical discourse and, consequently, (2) that the norms that
result from discourse can be considered valid only if they do (or could)
meet with the approval of all affected by them (1990, 6566).
3
As sev-
eral commentators have noted, Habermass principle of universalization
recontextualizes Immanuel Kants categorical imperative so that it func-
tions not within the context of the philosophy of consciousness, but within
the context of the philosophy of language.
4
As such, Habermass recon-
struction of the principle of universalization makes the process of discov-
ering universally applicable norms public and intersubjective. Thomas
McCarthy notes that the important change that Habermas makes to the
Kantian mode of exploring moral questions through a process of individual
reflection 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). As
Habermas puts it, the redefined principle of universalization requires that
[r]ather than [working in a Kantian mode and] ascribing as valid to all
others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my
maxim to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claim to univer-
sality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction
to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal
norm.
5
The process of validating norms thus remains the vital function of
reason, but Habermas reformulates it as a product of public debate rather
than one of individual reflection. Although both the Kantian and the
Habermasian forms of the principle of universalization are enacted through
language, Habermass principle of universalization requires that norms be
legitimated in the crucible of a pluralistic public sphere. Kants, though
dialogic, 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-validating
discourse that Habermas envisions, the meaning of terms must be clear to
all participants in order for a consensus to be legitimate. Habermas dem-
onstrates his consciousness of the danger that opacity poses to the viability
of adapting the principle of universalization to the philosophy of language
and compensates for the transparency it requires by defining discourse as a
unique form of communication that makes very stringent demands on the
motives of speakers. In an early book, Legitimation Crisis (1973), Habermas
373
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
explains the motivations that will define the realm of discourse as his
thought develops through the theory of communicative action to the theory
of discourse ethics:
Discourse can be understood as that form of communication that is removed
from contexts of experience and actions and whose structure assures us: that
the bracketed validity claims of assertions, recommendations, or warnings
are the exclusive object of discussion; that participants, themes and contri-
butions are not restricted except with reference to the goal of testing the
validity claims in question; that no force except that of the better argument
is exercised; and that, as a result, all motives except that of the cooperative
search for truth are excluded. (1078)
If these conditions obtain, and discourse produces consensus, the fact of
the consensus marks the victory of reason over arbitrary social power or
strategic 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 authority
to silence or marginalize, and because the dialogue was motivated by a
collective 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 from
the 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 ones motives must be fully accessible to scrutiny and
challenge by others. The ability to validate sincerity is itself a vital part of
discourse. As Habermas originally phrases it, [A]ll motives except for the
cooperative search for truth are excluded. McCarthy, in his explanation of
Habermass construction of discourse, articulates the extent to which practical
discourse requires the exposure of the self: To discourse are admitted only
speakers who have, as actors, the same chance to employ representative speech
acts, 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 inner
natures transparent to others (1978, 3067).

McCarthy describes admission
to discourse in terms of the ability to use words as direct reflections of self. It
is also significant that McCarthy describes Habermasian discourse, not in terms
of a public transparency of semantic meaning, but in terms of a public trans-
parency of self. One must be able to make ones inner self transparent.
Another important critic of Habermass construction of selfhood, Mark
E. Warren, also emphasizes the importance of the public revelation of mo-
374
T. GREGORY GARVEY
tivation to Habermass 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 fabric
of reason giving through which selves are represented to others (174).
The difference between the extreme transparency of a speakers inner
nature that McCarthy describes and the development of the autonomous
self that Warren describes is the difference between the exposure of the
self in the mode of practical discourse and the exposure of the self in other,
less rigorous, communicative circumstances. Still, the radical transparency
that McCarthy attributes to the realm of discourse is implicit in Warrens
definition of the context in which Habermasian autonomy develops. The
individual achieves autonomy through the internal disciplines of rea-
son giving by which the self is represented to others. The autonomous
individual 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.
Warrens analysis of Habermass construction of selfhood is important
to my effort to highlight the relationship between transparency and au-
tonomy because he argues against understanding the Habermasian model
of selfhood as one that is disempowered by processes of public mediation.
Warren holds that the kind of self-revelation required by practical discourse
actually increases individual autonomy. In Warrens words,
When one must explain oneself to others, Habermas holds, individuals come
to understand why they feel as they do in justifying their needs and interests
to others. In doing so, they may alter their need interpretations, finding that
their previous need interpretations, often absorbed uncritically from their
culture, were inappropriate and perhaps even a source of unhappiness to
themselves. Or they may become more convinced of the rightness of their
claims. In either case, however, discursive argument increases individual
autonomy. (179)
Warren is right to the extent that self-understanding and thus autonomy
will likely increase as personal motives and need interpretations that were
absorbed uncritically from processes of socialization become revealed
by practical discourse. But this mode of developing autonomy through
public discussion of inner motives does not eliminate the need for trans-
parent selfhood. On the contrary, it makes increasing ones autonomy con-
tingent on increasing ones transparency through a process of public self-
analysis.
375
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
According to Habermass model, the process of rationalizing norms
through public discourse requires a parallel discursive rationalization of
the self. The transparency of motives required by practical discourse thus
produces a paradoxical form of autonomy. Self-control is enhanced by the
inner disciplines that enable one to justify his or her inner nature by
making it transparent to others. Perhaps, these inner disciplines can even
help us to shed elements of our culture that are sources of unhappiness but
that we nonetheless unwittingly reproduce. However, the legitimacy of the
discourse itself, as well as its ability to enhance our autonomy, depends on
our ability to make our most private motives accessible to the scrutiny of
other people.
This parallel process of rationalizing self and socially binding norms
through intersubjective self-revelation bridges the gap between individual
interests and the needs of the community. As Habermas explains the prin-
ciple of universalization in Discourse Ethics, he points out that nothing
better prevents others from perspectivally distorting ones own interests than
actual participation. It is in this pragmatic sense that the individual is the last
court of appeal for judging what is in his best interest. On the other hand, the
descriptive terms in which each individual perceives his interests must be
open to criticism by others (1990, 67). When Habermas points to the dual
necessity of permitting open access to practical discourse and the necessity
of debating the specific descriptive terms in which people represent their
interests 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 and
wants are interpreted in the light of cultural values. Since cultural values are
always components of intersubjectively shared traditions, the revision of the
values used to interpret needs and wants cannot be a matter for individuals to
handle monologically (6768). Such revision of values involves a process
of mediating between ones own and other peoples understanding of ones
interests. The materials of this process are the descriptive terms through which
the interests of individuals are represented.
To follow Habermass logic, as communities discuss the meanings of
descriptive terms, the terms become more and more transparent and group
identity becomes more and more cohesive, though not necessarily more
homogeneous. Cohesiveness and heterogeneity are not contradictory be-
cause what is important is not that things become the same, but that the
individuals genuine interests are honestly represented and recognized in
the public realm. Transparency in the descriptive terms of self-representa-
376
T. GREGORY GARVEY
tion is a necessary condition for the establishment of a legitimate consen-
sus about norms because opacity blurs the meaning of terms and thereby
withholds aspects of them from criticism by others. Further, any conscious
effort on the part of a discussant to withhold meaning violates the principle
that the motives of participants be transparent. Consciously opaque utter-
anceshidden agendastaint practical discourse by introducing strategic
action into it. Thus, the viability of practical discourse as a method of ra-
tionalizing the norms of a community that can permit autonomy is also
contingent on the ability of individuals to achieve transparency.
In two respects, then, transparency underpins Habermass construction
of autonomy. First, by moving the locus of reason from a private, psycho-
logical realm to a realm of public discourse, Habermas raises the relevance
of 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, transparency
is an issue at the points at which the universality of the procedure of dis-
course ethics intersects with the contextuality of individual consciousnesses
and communities. Like individuals, groups must seek self-clarification
through processes of public dialogue. These two applications of the idea of
transparency underscore Habermass tendency to work from the public to
the private level.
7
In Habermass world, privacy is always fragile and con-
tingent because everything is negotiated and rationalized through public
discourse. The private realm of individual consciousness is not a place that
is exempt from the public; rather, it is a subcategory of it. Habermas im-
plicitly makes the discomforting case that private realms are comprised
either of places that the public has not noticed or of places that public
discourse has chosen to designate off limits through the special status of
private.
Opacity and autonomy in Bakhtins
communication theory
There are also two ways in which transparency is important to Bakhtins
construction of autonomy. First, even though Bakhtin occasionally implies
the theoretical possibility of achieving the kind of transparency that under-
pins Habermasian practical discourse, he more often takes the position that
the multiplicity of meanings that are embedded in words will inevitably
377
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
make meaning opaque. Second, Bakhtin associates transparency with the
power that social interests can bring to bear on discourse. Like Habermas,
Bakhtin sees transparency as a social construct rather than as a quality of
language. Unlike Habermas, Bakhtin does not believe that transparency can
be politically neutral. From a Bakhtinian perspective, it is arguable that the
conditions necessary for a legitimate Habermasian practical discourse to occur
are impossible to achieve because the kind of bracketing that Habermas uses
to screen out relationships of domination would largely empty descriptive
terms of meaning. Even though Habermas understands bracketing as an
effort to ensure undistorted communication, it is also an effort to control
signification. Thus, while Habermas explicitly describes bracketing proce-
dures as methods of screening forms of domination out of the process of
discourse, Bakhtin implicitly describes them as methods of drawing the se-
mantic boundaries around words ever more narrow. From Bakhtins point of
view, Habermass 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 historicizes
Bakhtins suspicion of the type of formalism that characterizes Habermasian
discourse 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. A
force that could give us a seemly image would most likely know only one
way to welcome an approaching idea, consciousness, or historical world view;
here you come again, stay as you are, you are what you always were, its all
over. (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 emphasize
that Habermass theory implies neither a unitary historical world view nor
the end of a process of semantic development, the procedure of practical
discourse 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 be
anything other than the result of force or ideological pressure motivates
him to construct a model of autonomy that seeks simultaneously to retain
the ambiguity of the word and to couple it with a confidence in the
individuals ability to render the dialogic structure of discourse transpar-
ent. In Bakhtins eyes, semantic opacity is inherent in the word and thus a
378
T. GREGORY GARVEY
forced transparency signifies an exertion of power that threatens autonomy.
However, heteroglossia has a structure that reflects the relationships of
power 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 utterance
brushes. Bakhtins model of autonomy revolves around the project, not of
constructing transparent descriptive terms that permits a fully conscious
person to dovetail self and society, but of constructing a sophisticated sense
of how the individuals 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 a
speaker. Bakhtin often uses the metaphor of partial or incomplete owner-
ship to describe speakers inability to use words as seamless expressions of
intent. As he puts it in Discourse in the Novel, the word is always half
someone elses. It becomes ones own only when the speaker populates it
with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word,
adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. As he describes
the process of making words ones own, Bakhtin uses rhetoric inflected
with images of power, such as appropriation and seizure. He remarks
that some words stubbornly resist recontextualization. When one uses
some words, Bakhtin claims, it is as if they put themselves in quotation
marks against the will of the speaker (1981, 29394). In fact, this is ex-
actly what Bakhtin does when he seeks to explain the concept of ones own
words as a practical rather than a theoretical phenomenon. In effect, as
Bakhtin describes the act of appropriation that assimilating words into a
personal discourse requires, he strives to assimilate the concept of true
personal ownership of a word into his own discourse. It is as though the
concept of ones own words, which seems so reasonable, but which is so
foreign to the trajectory of Bakhtins thought, puts itself in quotation marks
as he tries to claim it for the autonomous speaker.
In his late essay Problem of the Text, Bakhtin returns to this theme
and describes the quest for transparency in terms of the quest for a lan-
guage through which one can achieve a perfect expression of intent with
no surplus meaning: Quests for my own words are in fact quests for a
word that is not my own, a word that is more than myself; this is a striving
to depart from ones own words with which nothing essential can be said. I
myself can only be a character and not the primary author. The authors
quests for his own words are basically quests for genre and style, quests
for an authorial position (1986, 149). This quotation does much to define
379
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
Bakhtins attitude toward the relationship between transparency and au-
tonomy. Authors need words that express their intentions; however, in that
these words are embedded in a history that transcends the speakers inten-
tions, the words necessarily represent more than the author intends. In this
larger context, the author is a kind of character, who is contained within
and defined by the communicative structure over which he or she has only
limited control. The search for ones own words is a search for the abil-
ity to transcend this context and to gain one where the speaker has full
semantic control and can speak words that are not shared. On a theoreti-
cal level, then, by Bakhtins logic, transparency and autonomy are identi-
cal. Ones own words would be a perfect expression of self liberated
from the history of language. Ironically, though, these words would be
deracinated from any shared historical context and would thus be mean-
ingless to anyone other than the speaker.
In practical terms, the effort to discover ones own words can at best
permit the discovery of a mediatory position, a style or a point of view.
Nonetheless, Bakhtin presents this situation not with the tone of one who
is describing a kind of tragic fall into the history of language, but with the
tone of one explaining a value-neutral fact of life. Indeed, he even implies
that ones 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 utterance
is that its surplus meaning functions partially to hide the self. Although on
a purely theoretical level transparency and autonomy are coequal in
Bakhtins thought, in practical terms transparency is much more closely
associated with tyranny, and Bakhtin is much more interested in ways of
using language to destabilize and subvert institutions that work to under-
mine autonomy. Bakhtins metaphor of a unitary language situates his
concept of the verbal ownership of words within a larger social context,
and this is where the threat that transparency poses to autonomy is most
apparent. Just as an individual can claim to own a word when he or she
can 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 not
reflect its ideological interests.
Bakhtin comes closest to describing the relationship between unitary
language 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 world
view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understand-
380
T. GREGORY GARVEY
ing in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expres-
sion to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification
and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of
sociopolitical and cultural centralization. (1981, 271)
Bakhtins suspicion of the kind of language that assures a maximum of
mutual understanding exemplifies the difference between his own and
Habermass understanding of the relationship of stable meanings to au-
tonomy. Bakhtins decision to emphasize the word maximum underscores
his sense that the forces motivating maximum understanding are the same
forces that result in ideological hegemony and political tyranny. This same
maximum 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 all
simultaneous. . . . The language of poetic genres, when they approach their
stylistic limit, often become authoritarian, dogmatic, and conservative
(1981, 28687). 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 centripetal
over centrifugal forces of language than it is to signify the victory of rea-
son over power (272). The motion toward semantic centralization that
Bakhtin metaphorizes as the centripetal force of language does not rep-
resent the grounding of validity claims as it does for Habermas; rather, it
represents 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 a
prerequisite for undistorted communication, and, as such, it is a means to
the 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, and
thus subversive, meanings. In Habermass lexicon, when a word becomes
transparent, it belongs to everyone. In Bakhtins 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 ideological
hegemony.
381
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
Bakhtin historicizes this struggle between unitary language and
heteroglossia by situating it in a long, ongoing contest between poetic and
novelistic discourse:
Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval
church, 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), Humboldts insistence on the concreteall these, what-
ever their differences in nuance, give expression to the same centripetal forces
in sociolinguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same project
of centralizing and unifying the European languages. The victory of one
reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of language, their
enslavement. (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 unitary
language, operate in the midst of heteroglossia (271). Transparency im-
plies a universalized and unitary meaning such that there can be only one
speaker, or, at most, many people speaking from an identical ideological
perspective. But the forces that lead in this direction must struggle against
the ever-present forces of heteroglossia that work to make the language
opaque. Habermas would certainly agree that the realm of discourse is a
social construct that exists within a heteroglot verbal universe. But he would
also 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 Bakhtins and Habermass lines of thought in this regard.
Bakhtins suspicion of transparency is underpinned by a profound dis-
trust of the type of systematized big-picture model of communication that
Habermas creates. Instead, Bakhtin relies on the individuals ability to re-
spond honestly, consciously, and appropriately to the specific circumstances
of his or her intersubjective relationships. The emphasis Bakhtin places on
the individuals ability to understand the discursive architecture of his or
her world marks a key difference between his and Habermass construc-
tion of reason. Though Bakhtin rarely discusses reason explicitly, he sees
autonomy less as a product of public discourse, than as a kind of skill that
the individual develops by gaining greater and greater understanding of
the structure of heteroglossia.
In Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin indicates the trajectory that the
development 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
382
T. GREGORY GARVEY
of an individuals autonomy, Bakhtin describes an illiterate peasant, miles
away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for
him unshakable world. This peasant, nevertheless lived in several lan-
guage systems simultaneously; he prayed to God in one language (Church
Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third and, when
he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he
tried to speak yet a fourth language. However, at this point, the peasant is
unaware of the different ideological positions that the languages represent
and 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 one
language . . . 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 not
only various different languages but even internally variegated languages,
that the ideological approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected
with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in
peace and quiet with one anotherthen the inviolability and predetermined
quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively
choosing ones 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 new
awareness of heteroglossia impels him to situate himself in relation to the
various interests that control his world. Having recognized that this struc-
ture of multiple and internally variegated languages defines a geography
of power, the peasant is now able consciously to choose his orientation
to different contexts. A kind of Newtonian transformation has occurred
and a set of laws that were once opaque to the peasant has now become
transparent. However, this does not imply a consequent transparency of
self 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 now
carnivalize and subvert authority, adopt the tones of authority when he wants
to exert domination, or use discourses out of context to create ironic dis-
tance, and so on. Although she cannot escape the ideological dimension of
discourse, she can, indeed, must, use her newly gained knowledge in an
ideologically inflected way, either cynically or sincerely.
383
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
The autonomy that conscious awareness of heteroglossia creates comes
not from the ability to negotiate interests in a power-neutral environment,
but from the ability to situate ones self within the system of discourses
through which one moves. Bakhtin exemplifies this process by explaining
how the most skilled authors move from discursive location to discursive
location as a method of demonstrating their autonomy within the structure
of heteroglossia: The author utilizes now one language, now another, in
order to avoid giving himself up wholly to either of them; he makes use of
this verbal give-and-take, this dialogue of languages at every point in his
work, in order that he himself might remain as it were neutral with regard
to language, a third party in a quarrel between two people (1981, 314).
Maintaining this third-party neutrality permits the author not only to serve
as an honest broker among discourses, but also to remain outside and above
the ideological boundaries of any single discourse. Late in the same essay,
Bakhtin reformulates a classic definition of the novelthe novel must be a
full and comprehensive reflection of its erato refocus it on the structure
of discourse: The imperative should be formulated differently: the novel
must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all the
eras languages that have any claim to being significant; the novel must be a
microcosm of heteroglossia (411). Ultimately, Bakhtinian autonomy is rep-
resented by the ability to achieve this end. Its defining characteristic is the
ability to think and act not just novelistically, but like a novelist, as a skilled
manipulator of heteroglossia.
9
Autonomy, for Bakhtin, takes this form partly
because the combination of ideologically forced transparency with the two
forces that most contribute to opacityhistoricity and the multiplicity of
discourseswork both for and against autonomy. By Bakhtins logic, au-
tonomy cannot be wrested from the word itself through a struggle between
meaning and intention, but can be achieved by making the architecture of
heteroglossia transparent and gaining the ability to situate opaque discourses
as an auditor and to control them as a speaker.
Bakhtin, transparency, and the ideal speech situation
As closely as Bakhtin connects transparency with ideological hegemony
and thus sees in opacity a realm of autonomy for the self, he also asserts
the theoretical presence of the level of transparency that Habermas seeks
to imagine through practical discourse. In The Problem of the Text,
Bakhtin briefly describes a figure who embodies the spirit of Habermass
384
T. GREGORY GARVEY
discourse ethics: [E]ach dialogue takes place as if against the background of
the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands
above all participants in the dialogue. Bakhtin calls this third party a
superaddressee, who holds forth the possibility of ideally true responsive
understanding to a speakers utterance. Further, using a rhetoric of presuppo-
sition that is very similar to that which Habermas uses to describe the ideal
speech situation, Bakhtin claims that the author of the utterance, with a greater
or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose abso-
lutely just responsive understanding is presumed (1986, 126). Bakhtin does
not develop this idea especially thoroughly, but he articulates it clearly enough
to glean a reasonable sense of his meaning. Ideally true and absolutely
just could mean significantly different things. The first phrase could refer to
an understanding that perfectly comprehends the semantic idea of an utter-
ance, a sort of access to a platonic realm in which signifier and signified are
merged, 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, a
rendering 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 a
form that is contextualized rather than universalized, as it is in Habermass
model. Bakhtin describes the historicity of the superaddressee this way:
In various ages and with various understandings of the world, the
superaddressee . . . assume[s] various ideological expressions (God, abso-
lute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the
court of history, science, and so forth) (1986, 126). Michael Holquist
glosses this list by describing its members as the ideal audiences for people
who feel out of sync with their time: [P]oets who feel misunderstood in
their lifetime, martyrs for lost political causes, quite ordinary people caught
in lives of quiet desperationall have been correct to hope that outside the
tyranny of the present there is a possible addressee who will understand
them (1990, 38). Frank Farmer offers a somewhat more subtle analysis
that divides the elements of Bakhtins list into foundationalist and
antifoundationalist groups.
10
However, regardless of whether the
superaddressee is construed as a historical or a neo-Kantian auditor, it rep-
resents a form of undistorted communication that is very similar to that
which prevails in Habermass ideal speech situation.
The continuity between Bakhtins desire to imagine undistorted communi-
cation and Habermass ideal speech situation actually goes considerably far-
385
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
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 every
utterance makes a claim to justice, sincerity, beauty, and truthfulness (a model
utterance), and so forth and provides an illustrative example of the communi-
cative hurdles that the superaddressee is able to overcome: An analysis of the
simplest everyday dialogue (What time is it?Seven oclock). The more
or less complex situation of the question. One must look at the clock. The
answer can be true or false, it can be significant, and so forth. In which time
zone? 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 are
very similar to those that Habermas develops in the theory of communicative
action: comprehensibility, truth, contextual rightness, and sincerity (Habermas
1979, 3). Like Habermas, Bakhtin explicitly identifies sincerity and factual
truth as criteria of undistorted communication. Further, in asking questions
such as In which time zone? and The same question asked in outer space?
of the everyday utterance, Bakhtin is asking about the contextual rightness of
the statement. Thus, Bakhtin asserts three out of the four validity claims that
Habermas 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 Habermass ideal speech situation adds an important
dimension to his theory of communication. Without an image of undistorted
communication 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 progressive
image of transparency, of a context in which communication can transcend
coercion, Bakhtinian communication would function only within the bound-
aries of strategic action. In combination with the form of autonomy offered by
understanding the ideological structure of heteroglossia, the superaddressee
implies a window through which Bakhtin can imagine communication that is
both undistorted semantically and uncoercive ideologically. With significant
qualifiers, Habermass and Bakhtins different attitudes toward transparency
ultimately relate more to their differing sense of the conditions of possibility
and of the relationship of transparency to domination than to the inherent value
of the idea. Both recognize the theoretical connection between communicative
transparency and the ethical value of sincerity.
As a means of underscoring the different roles that context plays in de-
fining Habermass and Bakhtins valuations of transparency as a condition
of autonomy, I want in closing to remark on the relationships of Bakhtinian
and Habermasian communication theories to Stalinist and National Social-
386
T. GREGORY GARVEY
ist societies. It would be misleading to end this essay by asserting that
Bakhtins long career culminates with the image of progressive transpar-
ency that is offered by the superaddressee, and thus that he is ultimately
brought around to a belief in the possible separation of transparency and
social power. In Problem of the Text, the superaddressee inhabits
Bakhtins imagination alongside its own nightmarish opposite. Immedi-
ately after noting that all dialogue takes place as if against the background
of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party, Bakhtin
includes the following parenthetical comment: (Cf. the understanding of
the Fascist torture chamber or hell in Thomas Mann as absolute lack of
being heard, as the absolute absence of a third party) (1986, 126). Just as
the 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 a
figure who skulks invisibly below the system of communication and
achieves transparency through torture. Even as he describes his model of a
perfect communi cat i ve part ner, Bakht i n remi nds hi msel f of t he
superaddressees 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 embedded
in the contexts in which communication occurs. His parenthetical inclu-
sion of this image of the absolute absence of a third party says much
about the degree to which he can imagine language sustaining liberty from
forces of ideological control and centralization. In relation to the suspicion
with which Bakhtin approaches the idealization of form, it may be sym-
bolic that he alludes to an unreachable outer space when he is analyzing
ideal communicative relationships and to the more immanent reality of
Stalinist torture chambers when he is describing the connection between
communication and domination. In this way, Bakhtins reservations about
the ethical value of transparency defines an important counterpart to
Habermass desire to ground communication in a procedure that seeks trans-
parent understanding. Bakhtins 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 that
ask one to internalize an arbitrary and alien voice of authority. Partly in
reaction to the tyranny under which he lived, Bakhtin argues that we can
have too much reason, especially if the force of the better argument makes
the meaning of descriptive terms transparent and creates a monovocal
voice of authority that the individual has no choice but to accept. From
Bakhtins 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.
387
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
To Bakhtin, opacity protects the self as well as the word and thus has a
kind of ethical value that it does not have for Habermas.
Equally, as Habermass position in the Historians Debate and his response
to Heideggers involvement in National Socialism make clear, a pluralist
dialogue that compels transparency is part of Habermass remedy to the kind
of radical cultural chauvinism and nationalist mystification that enabled the
Nazis to gain control of Germany (Wolin 1989a, 1989b; Habermas 1992;
Pensky 1995). The revelation of Nazi atrocities that Habermas experienced
after World War II is an important context in directing his ethical theory both
toward a principle of universalization that necessarily transcends national
identity and on his effort to define big-picture paradigmatic systems. Unlike
Bakhtin, who defined what is almost a guerrilla theory of autonomy, one
where freedom is partly contingent on the presence of semantic shadows,
Habermas defines a theory that hinges on the ability of the undistorted light
of reason to talk its way into the deepest recesses of the social body. The
form of these two critics images of autonomy can be partly explained by the
fact that Bakhtin spent his entire life under the surveillance of a totalitarian
state while Habermas came to maturity in a society that was reinventing
itself 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 see
his work in the broadest terms, both within the tradition of Frankfurt School
critical theory and as a full-blown ethical alternative to the theories of the
immediate past. But on a somewhat more subtle level, Habermass emphasis
on a principle of universalization and on egalitarian and pluralistic public
discourse marks a response to the racial and ethnic prejudice of nazism. The
structure of discourse ethics works against, even denies, the possibility of
self-reinforcing fictions of superiority that are indispensable to nationalist
discourses. Despite the transparency that it produces as a by-product, the
unforced force of discourse ethics is itself a response to the horrors of
National Socialism and the Holocaust.
As theories of philosophers working in different intellectual traditions
and under different political circumstances, Habermass model of discur-
sive democracy and Bakhtins 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 that
the two reach regarding transparency lies in their different personal experi-
ences of the relationship between autonomy and domination. But, in a more
general sense, bringing Habermas and Bakhtin together articulates the si-
multaneously clarifying and threatening effects that transparency implies in
ethically motivated public discourse. I suspect that Habermas and Bakhtin
would agree that there are few threats in making the motives and intentions
388
T. GREGORY GARVEY
of government policies transparent. But when we move one level closer to
the self and ask ourselves if they would agree that there is little threat in
making the motives and intentions of informal social norms transparent, the
issue is likely to get cloudier. Finally, when we ask if the advantages of mak-
ing the self transparenteven in a dialogue that is sincerely oriented toward
mutual understandingcounterbalance the impact that transparency has on
the nature of the autonomy, the issue is likely to become completely vexed.
From a Habermasian perspective, we are left with the question: Is consensus
compatible with opacity? From a Bakhtinian perspective, we are left with an
equally difficult question: Is autonomy compatible with transparency?
Department of English
State University of New York, Brockport
Notes
1. As is the case in Gardiners book, Habermas occasionally comes up in texts that
primarily focus on Bakhtin, but Bakhtin virtually never comes up in texts that are focused on
Habermas. LaCapra makes a distant connection between the two in Rethinking Intellectual
History (1983). Gardiner discusses the two in relation to Hans-Georg Gadamers philosophical
hermeneutics in The Dialogics of Critique (1992). Most recently, Habermas and Bakhtin
have been analyzed comparatively in an effort to identify some of the problems that have to
be 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 are
oriented to validity claims (1990, 44; 1990, 1113, 5776; 1993, 117).
3. Habermas has been criticized from a variety of perspectives for his universalistic
approach. Among the most salient of these critics are Warnke, Moon, and Benhabib. Warnke
and Benhabib are both skeptical of the extent to which the procedure that Habermas defines
can resolve conflicts between people with fundamentally different values. Warnke, asks, for
example, If we cannot debate the legitimacy of our norms without engaging the question of
our values, how can we settle questions of the legitimacy of norms? (1995, 255). Benhabib
argues that Habermass model is based on an implicitly masculine form of autonomy. In
place of discourse ethics, Benhabib proposes a model of interactive universalism that is
based on the necessity of approaching every moral person as a unique individual, with a
certain life history rather than as an abstractly equal subject (1986, 10). Moon challenges
the ability of the discourse ethic on the same grounds as Warnke, that it is unlikely that even
the 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 some
norms could be validated through discourse, but it is far from obvious that they would be
sufficient 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,
4850). Also see Outhwaites Habermas (1994, 55ff.). Outhwaite emphasizes the transition
from 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 Habermass reconstruction of the
categorical imperative participates in a tradition of defining reason in terms that are implicitly
masculine, or, at least, which sublimate difference to universalized constructs (1995, 19).
389
THE VALUE OF OPACITY
5. In an interesting intertextual moment, Habermas quotes McCarthys explanation of
the 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 mode
in which an individual distorts communication for the strategic maximizing of the
individuals own pleasure or advantage (1978, 23). I primarily want to distinguish it from
action oriented toward mutual understanding. The ability to probe and test the motives of
participants in practical discourse is a test against strategic action. For a fuller description of
the 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 Habermas
gives 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 between
justice 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, if
participants 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 justice
or 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 Bakhtins name are as explicit as
Volosinovs Marxism and the Philosophy of Language in asserting that the sign becomes an
arena of the class struggle (1986, 23), especially in Rabellais and His World (1994), Bakhtin
treats 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 a
method of expressing autonomy.
9. Morson (1981) analyzes Tolstoys effort to transcend this dialogic mode of gaining
control of heteroglossia by incorporating nondialogic absolute language into his discourse.
The argument that Morson makes exemplifies the problem that Bakhtin finds in authors
seeking to adopt approved discourses.
10. Farmer argues, Bakhtins 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, other
superaddressees, such as the people, or the court of history, may just as easily be inter-
preted as constructionalist or antifoundational (1994, 214). Farmer situates the
superaddressee within the theory/pragmatism debate by arguing that the superaddressee
may be read as Bakhtins attempt to demonstrate the monologic tendencies of both
theoreticism and pragmatism, to reveal how it is that, while we may be wise to rid ourselves
of 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 Habermass discourse ethics.
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