Books about thinkers require a kind of unity that their thought may not
possess. This cautionary statement is especially applicable to Mikhail
Bakhtin, whose intellectual development displays a diversity of insights
that cannot be easily integrated or accurately described in terms of a
single overriding concern. Indeed, in a career spanning some sixty
years, he experienced both dramatic and gradual changes in his thinking,
returned to abandoned insights that he then developed in unexpected
ways, and worked through new ideas only loosely related to his earlier
concerns
Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin should have speculated on the relations
among received notions of biography, unity, innovation, and the creative
process. Unity--with respect not only to individuals but also to art,
culture, and the world generally--is usually understood as conformity to
an underlying structure or an overarching scheme. Bakhtin believed that
this idea of unity contradicts the possibility of true creativity. For
if everything conforms to a preexisting pattern, then genuine
development is reduced to mere discovery, to a mere uncovering of
something that, in a strong sense, is already there. And yet Bakhtin
accepted that some concept of unity was essential. Without it, the world
ceases to make sense and creativity again disappears, this time replaced
by the purely aleatory. There would again be no possibility of anything
meaningfully new. The grim truth of these two extremes was expressed
well by Borges: an inescapable labyrinth could consist of an infinite
number of turns or of no turns at all.
Bakhtin attempted to rethink the concept of unity in order to allow for
the possibility of genuine creativity. The goal, in his words, was a
"nonmonologic unity," in which real change (or "surprisingness") is an
essential component of the creative process. As it happens, such change
was characteristic of Bakhtin's own thought, which seems to have
developed by continually diverging from his initial intentions. Although
it would not necessarily follow that the development of Bakhtin's
thought corresponded to his ideas about unity and creativity, we believe
that in this case his ideas on nonmonologic unity are useful in
understanding his own thought--as well as that of other thinkers whose
careers are comparably varied and productive.
