Dialogic creativity

Volosinov (2000) argues that words exist “in a chain of ideological creativity” (p.11). This means that a word’s meaning can never be fixed but is always dependent on its “new contextual meaning” (p.77). Creativity lies not in the word itself but in the meaning activated in the context of a particular utterance. If we take creativity, at a very simple level, to be the process by which new meaning is brought into being, then every utterance involves creativity, for no utterance can exactly mirror what has gone before. Contextual particulars, no matter how small, must be different. All utterances must also be met with a response (uttered in a social vacuum they are devoid of any meaning at all). This involves comprehending what has been said or written with recourse to one’s existing linguistic resources, so that “understanding strives to match the speaker’s words with a counter word” (p.102).

Language as constituted by Volosinov is a dynamic medium, generating meaning at the same time as it carries it. In a sense creativity just happens because any given utterance cannot but be contextually different from what has gone before; so meaning can never be fixed. However, this would be to misread Volosinov’s understanding of how words come to be filled with meaning. Creativity might exist in the infinite number of inflections that can be given to a word, but those inflections are themselves determined by the social conditions in which the words are forged. Seen like this, language becomes “an arena of class struggle” (p.23) in which “a word in the mouth of a particular individual person is a product of the living interaction of social forces” (p.26). The word “struggle” here is an important one to consider in the context of the English classroom. It suggests that language is a site of

34 contestation, with linguistic creativity not simply happening but self-consciously brought into being through its agentive manipulation within particular contexts. If students can develop an understanding of how language is formed then they might be able to exploit its creativity for particular effect. “Understanding one’s own language,” Volosinov writes, “is focused not on identifying identical elements of speech but on understanding their new, contextual meaning” (77). It is an understanding drawn on by exponents of recreative or transformative writing, who propose ways of working in the English classroom that recognise language as a material resource, with creativity coming from using it in new contexts for particular effect (Pope, 2005; Goldsmith, 2011; McCallum, 2012).

Bakhtin (2006) constructs language as, paradoxically, rule-bound yet endlessly creative. He postulates that it is “as diverse as human activity itself” (2006: p.60) so that “each separate utterance is individual, of course”; but that each utterance occurs within relatively stable spheres, or “speech genres”. Speech genres, themselves, he argues, are so heterogeneous that they resist easy study (p.61): any attempt at analysis needs to take into account genres as diverse as “the single-word everyday rejoinder and the multivolume novel”, or “the military command that is standardised even in its intonation and the profoundly individualised lyrical work”. His solution is to develop a theory about how genres are formed. At the heart of this is the idea of dialogue, that all language is social and only takes on meaning in human interaction. Dialogue is constructed at the level of utterance rather than word or sentence, a construction that allows context to become paramount in any understanding of how meaning is transmitted and developed. Speech genres, then, organise speech “in almost the same way as grammatical (syntactical) forms do” (p.78) so that mutual understanding is possible. “Without them,” Bakhtin wrote, “communication would be almost impossible”.

35 An individual cannot create a speech genre: the process is historical and to learn a speech genre is to be immersed in its use. Linguistic creativity only becomes possible once a genre is “fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely” (p.80). This has important implications for teaching, both in terms of the types of language to which students are exposed and how they are encouraged to play with it. Bakhtin argues that “conditions for reflecting individuality in language” (p.63) vary from genre to genre. So “the most conducive genres are those of artistic literature” because “here the individual style enters directly into the very task of the utterance”. In contrast, other genres, such as “many kinds of business documents, military commands, verbal signals in industry, and so on” require “standard forms”. Some genres, then, are more creative than others. While postmodernism might subsequently challenge this – for example, the fiction of George Saunders (2001) plays with the genre of the business document for literary effect – Bakhtin’s work provides us with an argument for a strong focus on creative writing and studying literature in the classroom: for here are genres that demand creativity and experimentation as part of their formation, stretching and teaching about the boundaries and possibilities of language. It also encourages us to see that students can arrive in classrooms already with “a repertoire of oral (and written) speech genres at their disposal” (p.78), particularly at secondary level. This means that teachers can confidently allow students to explore material through talk in order to generate new forms of knowledge around it (Wells, 1986; Mercer, 1995; Mercer & Hodgkinson, 2007; Alexander, 2008; Littleton and Mercer, 2013). Simultaneously, however, they need to recognise that students will still “often feel quite helpless in certain spheres of communication … because they do not have a practical command of the generic forms used in the given spheres” (p.80). So they also need to provide students with opportunities to learn about the linguistic conventions of a range of different genres in order to show competence in particular fields, something picked up by contemporary writers interested in exploring the

36 tension between linguistic creativity and constraint according to contexts of use and socialisation: such as Blommaert’s work on “indexicality” (2010), Carter’s on the relationship between spoken and literary language (2004) and Mercer’s on language as a “social mode of thinking” (1995).