Paradigm for pluralism: Mikhail Bakhtin and social work practice.

Irving, Allan ; Young, Tom

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This article explores the work of the literary and cultural theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin and acknowledges him as a new voice to social work. In a larger context the authors argue that his ideas can help the profession negotiate the tricky and unsettling transition from modernity to postmodernity. In particular the authors explore two of his key concepts--dialogue and carnival--and suggest that they offer creative and innovative ways to think about three enduring issues in social work practice: (1) empowerment and social justice, (2) the creation of knowledge for practice, and (3) diversity and difference. Overall Bakhtin's thoughts provide the profession with a paradigm for pluralism that the authors believe will add new credibility and strength to the profession and its practitioners.

Key words: dialogue; diversity; empowerment; social justice; knowledge; pluralism

Why should social work take an interest in the literary and cultural theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)? In a larger context we argue that his thought and, in particular, two of his key concepts--dialogue and carnival--can help the profession negotiate the tricky and unsettling transition from modernity to postmodernity. His wide popularity in many disciplines "owes something to the fact that modernism, with its hierarchical and universalizing impulses, was at base monologic, whereas the postmodern temperament finds something congenial in Bakhtin's insistence on noncoincidence, incompatibility, and otherness" (Emerson, 1997, p. 4). His work emphasizes inconclusiveness, deep indeterminacy, creativity, mutability, and instability as part of all human interaction. His fundamental concept of dialogue/dialogism, compels difference, uncertainty, playfulness, surprise, and open-endedness as necessary, positive, and productive aspects of the human condition (Sterritt, 1998). Described as the "patron saint of open dialogue" (Emerson, p. 43), Bakhtin proclaimed that thought "knows only conditional points" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 162).

The social work profession is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment of the 18th century and its modernist frames of reference. The Enlightenment attitude advanced the idea that there was a single code for knowing: scientific inquiry and empirical investigation. The notions of science, knowledge, and truth that flowed from the Enlightenment into modernity assumed an objective reality, the attainability of observer neutrality, and technical rationality which in combination have created the central paradigm of knowledge for social work: universal truth, foundations, essences. Modernity reverberated with the certainty that reality has deep structures that are knowable and can lead us to an appreciation of universal truth contained in essential categories that are often dichotomies: male--female, heterosexual--homosexual, therapist--client, teacher--taught, true--false.

With its origins in the artistic culture of spontaneity and improvisation of the 1950s an intellectual discourse, postmodernism, has been at work challenging and disrupting many of the certainties and dichotomies of modernity (Belgrad, 1998). Postmodernism celebrates multiplicity, diversity, contingency, fragmentation, and ruptures and accepts cheerfully that we live in perpetual incompleteness and permanent unresolve. Postmodernism promotes the notion of radical pluralism, many ways of knowing and many truths. Science is knocked off its pedestal as the one true way to truth and is simply seen as one of the many stories we tell about the self, the world, and reality.

A good example of postmodernism's overturning of the certainties and stable categories of modernity is contained in the work of postmodern feminist Judith Butler. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) she argued that the self and its gender are realized only as performances. Her antiessentialist critique says that the very category of gender is a "regulatory fiction" that functions to enforce compulsory heterosexuality (everyone is either male or female). The appearance of "naturalness" that goes along with heterosexual gender identity is nothing more than the effect of a repeated imitative performance. There is simply no essence of heterosexual masculinity or femininity that precedes our performance of those roles.

Although social work has been slow, even reluctant and resistant at times, to embrace the postmodern cultural surround, a considerable body of writing in social work from the perspective of postmodernism has been accumulating (Brown, 1994; Chambon & Irving, 1994; Gorman, 1993; Greene & Blundo, 1999; Leonard, 1997; McBeath & Webb, 1991; Murphy & Pardeck, 1998; Pardeck, Murphy, & Choi, 1994; Parton, 1994; Pozatek, 1994; Sands & Nuccio, 1992; Taylor, 1998; Weick & Saleebey, 1998). Within the broad postmodern framework, others have approached the rewriting of social work theory and practice from a social constructionist viewpoint (Dean & Fleck-Henderson, 1992; Goldstein, 1990; Greene, Jensen, & Jones, 1996; Hartman, 1991; Laird, 1993, 1995; Lee & Greene, 1999; Rodwell, 1998; Saleebey, 1992; Sands, 1996; Weick, 1993; Witkin, 1990, 1999a). In addition, the French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault has been the focus of two recent book-length interpretations for the field of social work (Chambon, Irving, & Ep stein, 1999; Margolin, 1997).

All these efforts may be seen as indications that many in the profession are moving toward a more radical departure from the modernist assumptions on which the profession has been based. In the transition from modernity to postmodernity the profession faces three key enduring issues that affect all levels of practice: (1) the pursuit of empowerment and social justice for the profession's clients; (2) the propensity within the profession for divisiveness over competing paradigms for practice and the generation of knowledge for practice; and (3) the continuing challenge of embracing diversity and difference as a norm. We believe that Bakhtin's thoughts offer innovative and imaginative ways to think about these issues. His ideas about the creative nature of dialogue and the fundamental importance of including many different voices in any given dialogue, as well as his views on the necessity of maintaining a playful and skeptical attitude that acknowledges the essential incompleteness of all knowledge (carnival), would serve the profession well at this stage in its evolution.

Bakhtin's dialogic of difference could help us gain an acceptance of the fundamental relativity of all we know, acquire a capacity to cheerfully laugh at ourselves and playfully mock (carnivalize) our most cherished ideas, and so generate a freedom to recognize and seize opportunities--what Bakhtin called "porous moments" in which we can create newer forms of the profession in practice ("events of being"). In this article we make the case that Bakhtin brings a new and resonating voice to social work. As social work takes an ever-deeper interest in a more culturally sensitive, collaborative, strengths-oriented, and empowering approach to practice Bakhtin's ideas seem ever more salient. Social work practice is not only about whether and how to intervene or about skills and techniques, but also about our entire attitude and stance toward the world, others, and human relations--a philosophy of life. It is in this realm that a reading of Bakhtin can quietly set about rearranging our perceptions, and this article s erves to contextualize social work practice from a Bakhtinian perspective. We introduce two central concepts in Bakhtin's work--dialogue and carnival--and explore their relevance and usefulness in sifting through the issues of empowerment and social justice, knowledge construction for practice, and the embrace of difference.

Sketch of Bakhtin's Life and Work

For those social workers dealing with messy situations as a regular feature of their everyday practice Bakhtin seems the ideal exemplar. Bakhtin thought the natural state of things was "mess." Against all thought that tends toward finality, closure, and systems, throughout his work he constantly invoked the term "unfinalizability," which captured his conviction that the world was not only a messy place but also always an open place. The word unfinalizability signifies a structure of values at the core of his thinking: innovation, astonishment, discovery, the genuinely new, openness, potentiality, freedom, and creativity--values that give us a more hopeful and expansive vision than the usual house of values that social workers dwell in (Morson & Emerson, 1990). For Bakhtin a region of pure summation and finality simply did not exist; it would be antithetical to the natural order. Social workers well might find Bakhtin's notion of an unfinalized world congenial as a place where everything, even the most degrade d and oppressive of circumstances, is open to change, a process that endlessly is giving birth to something new. He insisted "that human potential, even if unrealized, was always real" (Emerson, 1997, P. 37). Viewing the self, our relations with others, and history itself as unfinalizable allows creativity to flourish. Bakhtin lays before us inherent multiplicity and openness against the hard reifications of stability and closure--an endlessly subversive process of unfinalizability.

Unfinalizability needed to be located, Bakhtin suggested, in the prose, processes, and ambiguities of everyday life, in what he called the daily event of being (Morson & Emerson, 1990). An attitude of unfinalizability threaded through our practices can serve to bring us up against the fresh pulse of things and open us to others' realities.

Born in 1895 in Russia to a well-off family (a definite problem after the 1917 October revolution) Bakhtin, under Stalinist repression, was an obscure philosopher and literary theorist for much of his career. From the beginning he rejected the binary logic at the base of the Russian revolution, the Marxist-Leninist model. It did not fit with his feel for the open and the spontaneous. His first book was Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics (1929/1984a). It is devoted to the question of dialogism with Dostoyevsky being seen as the first novelist to juxtapose points of view that are never subordinated to a single or monological perspective. Dostoyevsky's characters are the carriers of different truths and different ethical positions. What Bakhtin is after in his Dostoyevsky book is to transcend monological thinking by introducing a multiplicity of perspectives that would overcome all forms of dogmatism.

Bakhtin's work on Dostoyevsky can be viewed as "a great manifesto of pluralism" (Venclova, 1998, p. 29). The novel in Bakhtin's view of things was "the world's only freedom bearing literary form" (Emerson, 1997, p. 35). Both novels and people are fragmented, multiple, and open-ended, and if healthy they try to accomplish the same thing: "constant differentiation and a chance to defend their individual positions in a world that knows neither absolute authority nor fixed plots (Emerson, p. 109). Postmodern novelist Milan Kundera echoed these sentiments, referring to "the fascinating imaginative realm where no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be understood ... the wisdom of the novel" (quoted in Rorty, 1999, p. 20). Social work educators and academics would be well-served by reflecting on these ideas as they relate to one of three enduring issues facing the profession--the competition and often bitterness over competing paradigms for practice and knowledge generation. Bakhtin had a "love for var iations and for a diversity of terms for a single phenomenon," as well as a "multiplicity of focuses" (1986, p. 155). A Bakhtinian perspective in social work might encourage those of an empiricist bent as well as those of a more postmodern temper to recognize that no one owns the truth.

Bakhtin's book immediately drew the negative attention of the Soviet authorities. Spared prison camp and perhaps death for his ideas because of his connections, he was nevertheless exiled for five years to a remote part of the country. A consummate survivor, he became at the height of the Stalinist purges of the 1930s a teacher in a local pedagogical institute in the provincial city of Saransk where he continued his scholarly investigations.

In 1940 he submitted a thesis on Rabelais--Rabelais and His World--to the Gorky Institute in Moscow that was eventually accepted in 1951 for his PhD and published in 1965 (Bathkin, 1984b). In this work carnival and the "carnivalesque" received full treatment. As the second major Bakhtinian concept discussed in this article, carnival meant many things and could be seen as a feast of renewal, change, and becoming. It represented a temporary refusal of the official world and promised a better life of abundance and freedom.

After Stalin's death in 1953 the forces of repression gradually eased, and by the late 1950s Bakthin was hailed as a major world scholar; by the 1960s his books were either reprinted or published for the first time and were widely read. Lionized by circles of young admirers, he died in 1975, spending his last days in a two-bedroom apartment lying on a couch in endless dialogue with visitors who flowed in and out of his room. Described as "one who listens" Bakhtin was, by all accounts, eccentric--known, for example, as the owner of cats that were "mystical and untrustworthy." Stories about him have found their way into popular culture. The chain-smoking hero of the mid-1990s film Smoke repeats the account of how Bakhtin during the lean World War II years smoked away four-fifths of his only copy of a massive manuscript--using it for cigarette papers. He reigned "in a world of philosophical conversations carried out over endless tea and cigarettes in small rooms in the dead of night," a process that "destroyed the vertical dimension." He seemed to need few, if any, secure points of reference, only "a loving, horizontal 'I-Thou' axis" (Emerson, 1997, pp. 5, 56).

Over the past 20 years Bakhtin's influence has spread rapidly into many disciplines and fields of study. A recent book draws on Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and carnival to analyze the Beat writers as carnivalesque rebels against the stifling, bland, and homogenized tendencies of mainstream 1950s consumerist and conformist culture (Sterritt, 1998). Another, Bakhtin and the Human Sciences (Bell & Gardiner, 1998) gave new attention to him as a social thinker as well as a prominent literary theorist. He has even been invoked to analyze rock and roll (Nehring, 1999). Scholarly articles quoting Bakhtin number in the thousands and a measure of his enormous influence occurred in 1996 when the 1984 edition of Rabelais and his World was the second most cited work in the Humanities Citation Index.

We now explore the two basic Bakhtinian concepts of dialogue and carnival and their potential for helping us examine the issues of empowerment and social justice, knowledge building, and diversity.

Dialogue/Dialogism

All Bakhtin's work is concerned with what he saw as the oppressive character of monologue, the monopolization of meaning, and the ruling out and suppressing of all competing voices. Here is his dim view of "monologism":

Monologism at its extreme denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a monologic approach...another person remains wholly and merely an object of consciousness, and not another consciousness. No response is expected from it that could change everything in the world of my consciousness. Monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality. Monologue pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the represented world and represented persons. (Bakhtin, 1984a, pp. 292-293)

It is Bakhtin's antipathy to monologue that was the driving force for the development of one of his most important contributions to our understanding, his theory of dialogue (or dialogism as he often called it). Bakhtin saw all of life as an ongoing, unfinalizable dialogue taking place at every moment of our quotidian existence:

The dialogic nature of consciousness. The dialogic nature of human life itself. The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium. (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 293)

Dialogue as Bakhtin developed the concept was more than just talk or two people exchanging words in a room. He suggested that the more a word is used in our speech, the more contexts it gathers and its meanings proliferate with each encounter. What he called utterances do not forget; they carry fragments from all our previous speech interactions as well as significance derived from the present context and forms of intonation. In this way all utterances are what Bakhtin called "double-voiced," bringing with them the voice of the past but spoken in the here and now into an ongoing dialogue. "Every word," Bakhtin wrote, "gives off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour. Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived its intense social life" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 262). For these reasons utterances resist unity and homogenization and closure, states that Bakhtin regarded as smelling "a bit of death. " Seen from this perspective dialogue becomes a model for the creative process. The healthy growth of our consciousness depends on its continual interaction with other voices, different personalities, and a diversity of woridviews (Emerson, 1997; Gergen, 1999). Dialogue is unfinalizable, there is no last word, no one interpretation, no single code or one worldview, and no final truths.

For Bakhtin we are born into meaning through dialogue, we are created as selves in dialogue:

Dialogue is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but becomes for the first time that which he is--not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. [italics added] (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 252)

Dialogue, Empowerment, and Social Justice

The profession's commitment to empowering those it serves, grounded in the value of self-determination, seems very compatible with Bakhtin's dialogic perspective. For clients, participating in a dialogue with workers can be both empowering and self-determining and certainly influenced by how the worker listens and responds. Dialogue in the Bakhtinian sense always carries with it the possibility of change, of forward movement; dialogue provides options, in itself an empowering notion. We are always hoping that we will be heard and that the person who hears will care enough to answer back. Empowerment and an ethic of care come together here for Bakhtin: "As long as we are alive, we have no right to pull out on another person who addresses us in need--and no right to be left alone" (Emerson, 1997, p. 159). Acknowledging the primacy of the other was at the center of Bakhtin's universe. "Every word is directed toward an answer," he wrote, "and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anti cipates. ... Understanding comes to fruition only in response. Understanding and response are merged and mutually condition each other" (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 280, 282). Seeing the self and the other through this lens can direct social workers toward a relational and empowering ethic of care.

Crucial to empowerment through dialogue is the development of a finely tuned sense of listening. An ethical implication of Bakhtinian dialogue is listening, because there are few clearer ways to express disrespect for and to disempower the other than by not listening. Not listening conveys an implicit negative valuation of both the message and its speaker. When we do not listen we reject claims on us, we sever communication and disempower, and ultimately eliminate the other from our view (Morris, 1998). Listening is an ethical act, and picking up on Bakhtin's theme, Frank (1995) wrote, "one of our most difficult duties as human beings is to listen to the voices of those who suffer" (p. 25).

The theme of listening is at the core of the postmodern therapist Harlene Anderson's (1997) notion of therapy as dialogical conversation, an idea derived from Bakhtin. Dialogical conversation as therapy is for Anderson a process of shared inquiry, in itself an empowering notion. Dialogical conversation is a generative process where new meanings and different ways of understanding emerge and are mutually constructed: "the coordinated action of continually responding to and interacting with; of exchanging and discussing ideas, opinions, biases, memories, observations, feelings, and emotions." Dialogical conversation as therapy is a mode of being "in there together where the talking is with each other rather than to each other" (p. 112). Contributing to the sense of empowerment for clients is the opening of dialogical space--spaces of possibility, shared inquiry, and respectful and responsive listening--where dialogical conversation can emerge and flourish.

In community work a connection has been drawn between Bakhtinian dialogism and participatory action research (PAR) (Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 1998). PAR is premised on dialogic communication and the privileging of popular knowledge and cultural diversity; and throughout his work Bakhtin certainly defended this mapping of the discursive territory of difference. Dialogism lies at the heart of PAR with its concerns for social justice, lifting of oppression, its egalitarian ethos, and goal of improving community life. Linking dialogism with PAR is another way of empowering both individuals and communities locked in oppressive circumstances through a process of consciousness raising, transformation, and social change.

Dialogue and Knowledge Construction for Practice

Bakhtin observed that all of life is dialogical and maintained that knowledge resides in the everchanging contexts of dialogue. He suggested two ways of thinking about the concept of truth: the "truth-miracle" which was always unexpected and unprepared for; and what he regarded as the debased category of "truth as force" or "totalitarian truth." In Bakhtin's distinctive vision, truth and force were not compatible; therefore truth could never be viewed in a conquering capacity. If present at all, truth would be unassuming and wear humble clothes (Emerson, 1997). For Bakhtin, who was concerned that "we are suffocating in the captivity of narrow and homogenous interpretations," the dialogical process opens up quite different assumptions about the creation and meaning of truth and knowledge (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 140). All genuine knowledge and human enablement only really begins when my "I" encounters and engages with another "I" and then "returns to its own place,'' now both more modest and strengthened (Emerson, 1 997, p. 26). "Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person," Bakhtin wrote, "it is born between people collectively searching for truth in the process of their dialogic interaction" (Bakhtin, 1984a,p. 110).

This brings us to Bakhtin's all-important distinction between "explanation" and "understanding," well worth considering in the context of how knowledge is generated and constructed in social work. Explanation in Bakhtin's universe is monologic and premised on the assumption that we come to know something first through empirical investigation and then proceed to explain our findings to others. Explanation is abstract and quite independent of its addressee, because only one active subject is involved. But this is not understanding, Bakhtin insists, for authentic understanding is always dialogic: Understanding occurs where there is an exchange, a response, an answer back, perhaps even resistance.

Truth and knowledge are relational and are continually being constructed and created in our ongoing, unfinalizable dialogues with one another-the truth is made not found. Bakhtin was not troubled by the absence of certainty and, in fact, he saw the world's unpredictability as a cause for celebration. Rather than desiring incontrovertible empirical knowledge, Bakhtin encouraged us to cast about restlessly, always listening for the next, another voice. Buffetted by postmodernist challenges to its cherished methods of empiricism and positivism, social work may well be able to find a compatible alternative in the way it thinks about knowledge in Bakhtin's key concept of dialogism and the view that knowledge and the multiple truths of life are relational rather than representational.

Dialogue and Diversity

As long as there is life there is always a potential "diverse other" in dialogue whereby we maintain through difference the process of creating who we are and what we know. Just as identity was one of the defining ideas of modernity, difference is a key word of postmodernity. One way of looking at it is to view differentiation and diversity not as just distinctness and separateness but as a special way of being connected to others. For Bakhtin the open-ended dialogic of difference promotes strongly the notion that a multiplicity of differences is without end, establishing dialogue not as a means but as an end in itself-diversity itself as the desired end.

Because each dialogue is unique and context specific, the importance for Bakhtin of what he called "polyphony" (many diverse voices, languages) is that it preserves difference in self-other relations. In Bakhtin's view, without an ongoing dialogue with different others, self cannot continually be created and come into being. His notion of polyphony (a term taken from music) always consisted of a variety of contesting voices from various cultural and ideological positions engaging equally and freely in dialogue. The multiple perspectives represented by polyphony precluded the dominance of any one particular point of view. If, for example, we were to make our social policy practice one of encouraging policymakers to engage fully in dialogue with listening and responsiveness as essential ingredients, we could have a much greater appreciation for the interior lives, difference, diversity, and experiences of other people and be able to imagine their lives in all their difference--to see the other as fully human. Social policy could then grow out of these human encounters rather than be imposed from some ideological perspective usually detached from the reality of everyday lives.

Because Bakhtinian polyphony emphasizes process through dialogic relationships rather than any closure or finalization, it has a creative element to it, one that often opens into astonishment. Dialogic and difference are unfinalizable, there is no last word, no one interpretation, no single harmonious worldview, and no final truths. Rather, value of any significance and importance is produced in the "middle space" of human exchanges characterized by subtlety and negotiation (Emerson, 1997). Bakhtin was always seeking such "porous moments" and zones of ambiguity in these exchanges (Yol Jung, 1998). This set of ideas seems especially germane to social work as it seeks to theorize diversity in practice.

Carnival

The concept of carnival in Bakhtin's work means at a literal level all those popular festive celebrations of folk culture and merriment from Roman saturnalias to current Mardis Gras celebrations that take place in New Orleans, for example, at the end of every winter. On another, more metaphorical level carnival is Bakhtin's term for whatever represents "an alternative 'social space' of freedom, abundance, and equality, expressing a utopian promise of plenitude and redemption" (Gardiner, 1993, p. 767). Everything that was completed, fixed, determined, and too narrowly defined was for Bakhtin dogmatic and repressive; on the other hand, the carnival sense of the world is one in which the highest values are openness and incompletion. It involves a mockery of all serious, closed attitudes about the world and an inversion of top and bottom in any given structure, a "discrowning," which symbolically marks the unstable and temporary nature of any hierarchy (Morson & Emerson, 1990). Among the complex meanings of carni valization is "a peculiar sort of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things." It is Bakhtin's contention that by making relative "all that was externally stable, set and ready-made," carnivalization through change and renewal opens to us the possibility of entering "into the deepest layers ... of human relationships" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 166).

Carnival is a sustained protest against the monologic misrule of officialdom and it means to transgress and transform canonical orders of truth, rupture established hegemonies, and overturn oppressive structures of society. Carnival is a nonviolent form of social transformation as it breaks and reverses established orders of power. For carnival is the playful humor of difference, and the celebration of dialogue and community (Bell & Gardiner, 1998; Clark & Holquist, 1984).

Carnival, Empowerment, and Social Justice

One importance of carnival for social work is that it can, as an expansive set of images, change our relationship to the world. Emerson (1997) suggested that carnival is the "name given to that moment of enablement--inevitably transitory--during which the self feels itself to be an agent in the world, that moment when a human being no longer feels helpless" (p. 103). As Bakhtin maintains in Rabelais and his World this enabling moment is the "victory of laughter": "a victory ... most of all over the oppression and guilt related to all that is consecrated and forbidden ... laughter is not an external but an interior form of truth" (Bakhtin, 1984b, pp. 90-91, 94).

In an editorial in this journal Witkin (1999b) made a compelling case for "taking humor seriously" in social work practice. Humor and laughter, he argued, provides an opportunity for vulnerable and marginalized groups to criticize oppressive social arrangements. As a discourse, humor also allows for multiple realities, paradox, and inconsistency--all notions that Bakhtin favored. Laughter and hope are critical ingredients in social work practice, for as Bakhtin observed, "laughter belongs ... to the culture of the weekday" (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 135).

Bakhtin (1984a) was acutely sensitive to the potential for domination in abstract reason, and throughout his work he favored the marginal, the contingent, and the unofficial. Carnival held the promise of more just and equitable relations of power, for what is suspended during carnival, Bakhtin suggested, "is hierarchical structure and all forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it--that is everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including age)" (p. 123). Distance and isolation are eliminated and the kind of familiar contact among people that occurs during carnival can lead to mass actions for social justice. "Carnival is the place for working out," wrote Bakhtin, "a new mode of interrelationship between individuals counterposed to the all powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life" (p. 123). Carnival flattens social hierarchy, creates greater equality, and most important forges a greater sense of communit y by bringing together what was formerly disunified and distanced from one another. The carnival sense of the world is one in which "a free and familiar attitude spreads over everything: over all values, thoughts, phenomena, and things. All things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid" (Bakhtin 1984a, p. 123). Carnival is the great leveler since everyone gets an opportunity to dress up and come to the party. Carnival is the ultimate form of empowerment.

In a famous passage Bakhtin wrote, "Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act ... its participants live in it ... it is life turned inside out, the reverse side of the world" (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 122). This quote brings together carnival, social action, and social justice in an example from the social protest theatre of Luis Valdez's El Teatro Campesino, the farm workers' theatre that developed in support of the long and grueling grape pickers' strike of the 1960s. Plays were actually performed in the fields and in one protest play, Quinta Temporada (Fifth Season), the title refers to the coming season of social justice for the farm workers. The play points beyond the regularly established seasons within which the farm workers live out their lives. The putting forth in the play of the idea of a season of social justice, a season that "exists as a socially constructed ideal outside of as well as inside the realm of traditional seasons ... creates space, agency, and initiative for the farm workers in their struggle against unjust social and economic conditions" (Elam, 1997, p. 92). This play as well as others performed by the group encouraged and created a carnivalesque atmosphere of celebration involving music and much audience participation that broke down the separation between performers and spectators. Elam (1997), in his book analyzing the protest theatre of Luis Valdez, suggested that the performances of El Teatro Campesino taking place in the fields, the actual workplace, "interrupted and challenged the norms and regulations of the workday" (p. 80) and were a fine example of Bakhtin's notion of carnival. Performances of this kind represent the carnival practice that Bakhtin extolled, a threshold point where empowerment, change, renewal, and social justice are in the ascendant.

Carnival and Knowledge Construction for Practice

Much of Bakhtin's life project was committed to a critical examination of modern rationality; accordingly, implicated in his work is a summons to challenge our received notions of the Enlightenment view of reason. In social work research and knowledge building a too strict adherence to Enlightenment empiricism prevents us, as Bakhtin would surely say, from "conceptualizing the immanent dynamism and open-endedness of the world" (Gardiner, 1993, p. 788). In Rabelais and his World Bakhtin suggested that the Enlighteners' mechanistic view of the world and craving for certainty had the effect of impoverishing the world and rendered impossible an understanding of the culture of ambivalence and "ambivalent festive laughter" that he preferred (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 118).

Carnival laughter has, Bakhtin believed, "a deep philosophical meaning, it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world ... it is a peculiar point of view relative to the world; the world is seen anew ... certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter" (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 66). It is Bakhtin's contention that the creation of new knowledge "even in the field of science, [is] always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way. The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit ... frees human consciousness, thought and imagination for new potentialities" (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 49). "Bakhtin believed," Emerson (1997) maintained, "that we could often 'true up' our vision more honestly by laughter than by seeing" (p. 196). Laughter is a "detaching, humbling, individuating force" that helps us to modestly situate ourselves in relation to others and hence it promotes and encourages dialogism, itself a prerequisite for Bakhtin in the creation of knowledge. His favorite phrase was "cheerful laughter" by which he meant that the best sorts of laughter are cheerful "because cheerfulness is a prerequisite for openess and an unencumbered mind" (Emerson, 1997, p. 196). Bakhtin was convinced that "laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fear and intimidation, from the single meaning." Laughter restores an "ambivalent wholeness," pointing to the contingency and social construction of all knowledge (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 123).

Carnival and Diversity

Carnival is a joyous celebration of the other, as it embraces diversity and eschews marginalization and prevents the subjugation of difference. For social work, attentive to difference and diversity, the idea of carnival can carry a lot of explanatory freight--particularly when combined with Bakhtin's notion of unfinalizability--for "Bakhtin's dialogics of difference finds no final foreclosure" and opens into the liberating and humanizing thought that a multiplicity of differences finds no ending (Bell & Gardiner, 1998, p. 108). Through carnival Bakhtin's vision extends to a vast pluralism, a heterotopia that exalts the primacy of the singular other over the self in all relationships, an exalting that banishes racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Conclusion

Bakhtin, optimist and paragon of pluralism, assured us that "the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future" (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 166). In our profession for which openness, dialogue, and multiple perspectives are values worth promoting, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin provides a paradigm of pluralism. As social work struggles with the dissonance accompanying the transition from modernity to postmodernity and continues to wrestle with our three themes of empowerment and social justice, the construction of knowledge, and diversity, it is our view that Bakhtin's two central concepts of dialogue and carnival can help us in the ongoing search for a fundamental reinterpretation of our field.

Bakhtin's carnival logic can help us understand the problems associated with modernity's atrophied rationality and its assertions of a definite knowledge (monologism in Bakhtin's terms) and instead place our emphasis on the interconnectedness of the human world, the need for new ways of being, relationality, and otherness. Throughout the shifting registers of Bakhtin's thought dialogism emerges rejecting the Enlightenment bias toward synthesis, order, and progress by suggesting that the dialogical self "knows itself through the responses of real, imagined, historical and generalized others" (de Peuter, 1998, p. 39). We are immersed in conversational, dialogic communities, and the multivoicedness that emerges with its fragments, multiplicity, and discontinuity articulates with the cultural surround of our postmodern world. Perhaps the key message of Bakhtin is that we continually come into being in relation to each other and that we live in worlds and communities, however fleeting, of our own dialogic making.

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