Muishond

The Bakhtin Circle’s ‘dialogism’ and Bruno Latour’s conceptual character ‘the ethnographer’ provide suitable tools to analyse the relation between literary language and techno-scientific language. They enable us to see this relation – a relation which, taken in itself, is readily construed as a binary opposition between fiction and fact – as one relation among many, albeit a very special one, in a dynamic web of relations between all kinds of languages.From the Bakhtin Circle’s perspective, we look at literary language, particularly the novel’s ‘internally dialogized’ system of languages, as a representation of diverse and irreducible languages, an imagination of various semantic and value systems. From the ethnographer’s point of view, we describe the objectivity of techno-scientific language, contrasting it with the administration of justice, the autonomy of political speech, the message of religious talk: in short, contrasting it with the values and claims to truth of all sorts of languages, irreducible to the value and meaning of techno-scientific language. We do not diametrically oppose literary language to techno-scientific language, but develop the problem of the relation between different movements of language, in a space where diverse languages cross each other in various ways.

Dissertation: http://hdl.handle.net/11370/65446754-a021-4491-8e84-69c9d255a138