Page:Relocating Bakhtin.pdf/23

Rh horribly individualist contemporary world, how can we posit our otherness and claim us to be co-beings to the non-obliging partner? When globalization has assumed the character of new orthodoxy, it refuses to accept any respondent other than subscribers to its worldview. Hence, Bakhtinian scheme of things seems to be completely irrelevant. One wonders as to how we can salvage ourselves with the help of Bakhtin. If his thoughts are context specific, how we can reinterpret his ideas in a thoroughly changed and decentred world? What then would be the nuances of answerability and addressivity which he has so emphatically put forward? Bakhtinian ontology and epistemology are basically participatory. If we venture to situate him in a dehumanized world, we have to reaffirm that inspite of blatant hegemonic aggressions, our world remains essentially human and it is participative to the extent that the aesthetic, social and philosophical activities required in comprehending it is indeed an acknowledgement of continuing dialogics of self and other.

 

Let us reread Bakhtin's Art and Answerability, where he states clearly: 'aesthetic activity collects the world scattered in meaning and condenses It into a finished and self-contained image. Aesthetic activity finds an emotional equivalent for what is transient in the world (for its past and present, for its present-on-hand-being), an emotional equivalent that gives life to this transient being and safeguards it; that is, it finds an axiological position from which the transient in the world acquires the axiological weight of an event, acquires validity and stable determinateness. The aesthetic act gives birth to being on a new axiological plane of the world; a new human being is born and a new axiological context—a new plane of thinking about the human world.' (1990: 191) 