The Dialogics of Conversation: Power, Control, Vulnerability

Abstract

This essay takes up three quite different discourses—Mikhail Bakhtin's work on speech communication and speech genres; Friedrich Nietzsche's thinking on genealogical philosophy and the will to power; and Gregory Bateson's work on the cybernetics of mind and nature—in order to theorize the conditions of discursive possibility for transitioning from dialectic to dialogic conversation. Missing in both Bakhtin's and Bateson's very different projects, however, are adequate theorizations of power. To address (the will to) power in ways that distinguish it from (the will to) control are Nietzsche's thoughts on genealogical philosophy, the will to power, relations of force, the eternal return, and the being of becoming, each of which speak to power in necessarily different ways. With those distinctions made, I specify several correspondences between speech genres and cybernetic minds as a theoretical context for Nietzsche's thinking. Given those correspondences, discursive formations can be theorized as self-organizing systems. Such systems incorporealize selves as dialogic subjectivities, and such selves are always already unfinalizable and an open totality. Dialogics can now be theorized as the praxis of mediating competing and contradictory discourses. The point of this theoretical work is to specify conversation practices that effect movement between dialectic and dialogic genres of speech communication. By way of extending these lines of thinking, I sketch some theoretical ideas for a dialogics of conversation.