Voices of Chiapas

Abstract

Despite the difference in their national and cultural backgrounds, the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin1 and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas have much in common. Both respond to the betrayal ofthe promises of the revolutions in their countries.2 Both speak of society in terms of "voices" that are dialogically related to one another. Moreover, they are part of a growing tendency to value "hybridity" over "purity" as a way of characterizing cultural and other forms of identity.3 Even the greatest difference between Bakhtin and the Zapatistas-the Zapatistas' emphasis on political practice-serves to bind them together. In particular, the Zapatistas' political demands concerning human rights and the self determination of peoples help to make explicit political implications that lie dormant within Bakhtin's theoretical pronouncements. The affinities between Bakhtin and the Zapatistas can aid us in seeing that human societies are what I will call "multi-voiced bodies"-a view that captures the positive side of multiculturalism and holds that democracy is a form of life rather than just a set of electoral procedures. In order to clarify this view of society, I will enlarge upon Bakhtin's idea of "dialogized heteroglossia" and upon the notions of "voices" and "hybridity" that the Zapatistas refer to in their official communiques and political demands. We will see that the resulting view of society provides a compelling basis for adopting a political principle, "the interplay of equally audible voices." This principle captures important revisions in the traditional notions of human rights and the self determination of peoples that are promoted by some contemporary political theorists and entailed by the Zapatistas' political demands. It also clarifies the sense in which racist and similar exclusionary discourses or practices are politically illegitimate. "Dialogized Heteroglossia" and the Voices of Chiapas Bakhtin views language in terms that, with some additions, transform it into a creative interplay among socio-linguistic forces. According to Bakhtin, language is not the unitary, abstract representation of discourse that exists in grammar books or traditional linguistic theory (1981, 288);4 nor is it exclusively "national idioms" like French or Chinese. Rather, language consists of intersecting "social-linguistic points of view" (1981, 273) that he frequently calls "social languages" (1981, 288) or "languages of heteroglossia": At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. These "languages" of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying "languages." (Bakhtin 1981, 291; cf. 365) Bakhtin further says that each social language is "characterized by its own objects, meanings and values" (1981, 292; see also 382, 356) and involves "a particular point of view on the world and on oneself," that is, a reflexive and evaluative dimension (1984, 47). This dimension permits interlocutors to turn their language and themselves into objects of further comment within discourse and is due in part to the rich syntactical structure of language. In order to bring Bakhtin's description of language closer to the idea of a society composed of interacting forces, we must make two additions to it. First, social languages establish the identities of the subjects who articulate themy manner of addressing you, for example, clearly marks me as a member of the academic profession. Second, social languages include governmental, economic, artistic, and other institutional practices, that is, activities that are as much non-linguistic as they are linguistic. …