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M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski

Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:
Towards a Dialectics of Listening¹

In music, we can feel the resistance, the persistent presence of a possible consciousness, a lived-life consciousness, a consciousness incapable of being consummated from within itself, and it is only insofar as we feel it that we perceive the power, the axiological weight of music, and that we perceive every new step it takes as an act of overcoming and a victory. In feeling this possible cognitive-ethical tension or directedness, which is incapable of being consummated from within itself yet is mortal, we also feel the great privilege qua event of being another, of being situated outside the bounds of another possible consciousness; we feel our own gift-bestowing, resolving, and consummating possibility, our own aesthetically actualized formal power…

(Mikhail Bakhtin, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity")

Parce que le commentaire est insupportable, nous voyons que la musique nous force а l'йvaluation, nous impose la diffйrence…

(Roland Barthes, "La musique, la voix, la langue")

***

It seems that the theoretical impact of music on Mikhail M. Bakhtin² is as evident as the lack of scholarly attention the matter appears to have received, at least to my knowledge. Known but hardly explored at all is the fact, for instance, that the Bakhtin so-called "Circle", included several musicians.³

First and foremost, Valentin N. Voloshinov, probably more a music historian at heart than a philosopher of language and whose dream as a young man of becoming a concert pianist was frustrated because of a withered arm as the result of turbeculosis. Then, there was the pianist Maria Veniaminova Yudina with whom Bakhtin entertained a long friendship and correspondance which spanned more than fifty years, right from the time of their first meeting in Nevel, in 1918, until her death in 1970; it has been reported that she based some of her later interpretations on Bakhtin's conception of polyphony. There also was the musical critic Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky, thanks to whom we know at least the titles of the conferences Bakhtin gave in Vitebsk during the winter of 1920—
1921. Bakhtin taught music history and aesthetics at the Conservatory of Vitebsk during the same period, a fact that surely influenced his early writings. And let's also mention that, as a student at the University of Saint-Petersburgh, between 1914—1918, he attended the lectures of Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky who had published, among a host of other subjects, on musical polyphony.

A more particular case was Boris V. Asafiev, a reknowned music historian and theorist, as well as a composer and teacher. Although there is no record that Asafiev had been acquainted directly with Bakhtin's circle of friends and colleagues, he must be mentioned in the context of a discussion on Bakhtin and music. Asafiev was a founding member of the department of music, in 1920, at the new Institute of Art History in Petrograd, where he taught until 1925;⁴ this is the same Institute where Bakhtin lectured sporadically for a few years from 1924 on, at the department of literary studies. Asafiev earned his place in the history of musicology in the Soviet Union chiefly for his work on intonation, the subject of various essays and books. He considered intonation the basic musical sign and, evidently inspired by its equivalents in linguistics and literature, described it as the smallest component of musical language—today, it may have been called an "intoneme" (cf. Махлин и др. 1991: 37). Asafiev referred to the process of intoning or intonating as the overall developing forms of musical style, thus understanding music, in part together with Ernst Kurth and other philosophers, not a static but a dynamic and energetic phenomenon in constant evolution. With the advent of structuralism, Asafiev's essays struck the Western academic scene and music semioticians started to promote his interpretation of intonation as a kind of an all-comprehensive musical enunciation, relating his theories more concretely with contemporary Formalist views of the 1920s, with those of Yuri Tynianov, for instance, on poetry and literary history and, later on, with Yuri Lotman and the School of Tartu's writings on cultural theories.⁵ In 1976, two of his most important books, Musical Form as a Process and Intonation (originally published in the Thirties and Forties) were translated into German and English (cf. Tull 1976).

There is no doubt that many aspects of Asafiev's approach to music, especially his early analyses of musical structure, is concommittant with Formalist and proto-Structuralist interpretations of cultural artifacts.⁶ His later work, on the other hand, when he developed the idea that meaning in music is socially revealed by the intonating process,⁷ is much closer to a Bakhtinian line of thought and his use of the concept of intonation in language and literature. To the best of my knowledge, neither Asafiev nor Bakhtin mentioned the other in their respective writings, but it is hard

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to imagine that they didn't not know each other personally or at least met. Also true between Asafiev and Tynianov, this mutual unreckognition can be argued, if not, of course, fully explained, in terms of the political conjecture of the time. Mentioning or quoting Bakhtin who, after all, had been briefly arrested at the end of the Twenties and then sent into internal exile, would not exactly have served Asafiev's interests and brilliant career in the Thirties and Forties. And Bakhtin did not surface on the literary scene until the Sixties, with the publication of his revised study of Dostoevsky's fiction in 1963, fourteen years after Asafiev's death.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Asafiev's intonation theory, especially the way in which he formulates and develops it in his later works, hits hard in the face of anyone who has read Bakhtin [/Voloshinov] and whose major works had been written and mostly published by the end of the 1920s. Even before [Voloshinov's] articles published between 1926 and 1930, including Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, the first mentions of intonation as a particular axiological category of analysis in language (distinct from a linguistic perspective, of course) appear in Bakhtin's work as early as in the first essays written between approximately 1920 and 1924: Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity and Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art —both in which we find rare instances when he discussed music at all—as well as Toward a Philosophy of the Act:

… the word does not merely designate an object as a present-on-hand entity, but also expresses by its intonation* my valuative attitude toward the object (…). Everything that is actually experienced as something given and as something-yet-to-be-determined, is intonated, has an emotional-volitional tone, and enters into an effective relationship to me within the unity of the ongoing event encompassing us. An emotional-volitional tone is an inalienable moment of the actually performed act, even of the most abstract thought, insofar as I am actually thinking it, i.e., insofar as it is really actualized in Being, becomes a participant in the ongoing event.

A more detailed interdisciplinary comparison between Bakhtin's and Asafiev's uses of intonation and other aspects of their respective work, as well as the complicated relationships between intonation and the concept of polyphony, in Bakhtin's writings, all remain beyond the limits of this essay. In this present discussion, my point of departure is the amazing quantity of musical terms and notions that strew in various ways Bakhtin's texts, right down to his essay on human sciences written in 1974
shortly before his death and other posthumously published work.⁸

In the task of re-reading these texts within such a "musical" framework, I personally had but one single premise: concentrating on isolating those particular instances when I believed Bakhtin used these terms and concepts specifically in a musical sense, not from a literary/linguistic perspective or as mere associative metaphors. This premise, as a working premise of selection of textual material, however, rapidly collapsed: the specifically musical perspective appears to be, if perhaps not the exclusive one, certainly the uncontested overwhelmingly dominant one throughout his work. The most transparent illustration of this phenomenon, but also the most problematic from such an angle, is his borrowing of the term "polyphony":

The image of polyphony and counterpoint only points out those new problems which arise when a novel is constructed beyond the boundaries of ordinary monologic unity, just as in music new problems arose when the boundaries of a single voice were exceeded. But the material of music and of the novel are too dissimilar for there to be anything more between them than a graphic analogy, a simple metaphor. We are transforming this metaphor into the term "polyphonic novel", since we have not found a more appropriate label.

(Bakhtin 1984: 22)

The fact is that Bakhtin's own use of polyphony as both an analytical and axiological concept throughout his work is much more than the mere "graphic analogy" or "simple metaphor" he himself stressed Dostoevsky's novels to be with their musical counterpart (for a discussion, see Malcuzynski 1992). Hence a hypothesis: the sphere of music is conceivably one of the most significant aesthetic realities in Bakhtin's theoretical and conceptual thinking. In this sense, music is undoubtedly as central to his philosophy of poetics as carnival is to his conception of genre and the history of the novel.

Such an approach is, of course, rooted in Bakhtin's early insistence on the need to define (literary) aesthetics reciprocally with other domains, which he himself set out to do early on in his career. In The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art, he laments on "the absence of a systematic philosophical, general aesthetic orientation, the absence of a constant, methodically thought-through regard for other arts, for the unity of art—as a domain of unified human culture" (in 1990: 260). Also early on in his book on Dostoevsky (1984: 42), he remarks that from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics, "contrapuntal relationships in music are only a musical variety of the more broadly understood concept of dialogic relationships". When we relate this to the suggestion, at the

* An actually pronounced word cannot avoid being intonated, for intonation follows from the very fact of its being pronounced.

(Bakhtin 1993: 32-33)

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end of the book (270) of "a special polyphonic artistic thinking" making available those sides of "human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions", these two statements alone become compelling vantage points by which Bakhtin's work warrants—perhaps actually requires—to be more thoroughly examined "dialogically", in relation to music.

There are a thousand and one and many more ways to tackle with the problem. Perhaps we could begin with one of those rare instances when Bakhtin discusses music as such, arguing that musical form brings us beyond the limits of its acoustic sound, and certainly not towards an axiological void. And, in such terms, if musical content is by principle ethical, musical form, hence, is imbued with ethical tension. In other words, as Bakhtin himself concludes: "Contentless music as organized material would be nothing else but a physical stimulus for the psychophysiological state of pleasure" (cf. The Problem of Content…, in 1990: 266). On the basis of such an understanding of the musical phenomenon, it seems to me that ignoring the problem of music in Bakhtin would be equivalent to deny content to his own work—his text would be like a music devoid of content. The provocation, on my part, is of course unabashedly deliberate, so I'll try to be a little less radical and reformulate the problem in the form of a query: is it possible, in true intellectual integrity and honesty, to conceive a Bakhtinian poetics without the inscription of a musical discourse in his text?

The interrogation in itself presupposes all kinds of theoretical and methodological considerations that remain beyond the bounds of this essay. I shall therefore limit myself to presenting only a few basic premises: first, the sociocritical postulatum that inscites us to "listen to social discourse" ("l'йcoute du discours social") and study its inscription in the literary text.⁹ Second, I will assume, not demonstrate, that music is a specific aspect of (the artistic sphere of) social discourse, taken in a wide sense of the term, as a notion engaging the whole social body in its instituted system of representations (see for ex. Robert Fossaert 1983: 109—133). Thus, social discourse is not only made up of speech and written words—by extension printed linguistic material—but also of images and iconic materials, of rituals, of sounds and sonic phenomena of diverse nature, of mimics, gestures and body language in general and wherever pertinent. That is, as many different semiotic categories that must be identified and distinguished between themselves and in relation to their particular modalities of inscription in a given text.

Sociocriticism as a discipline—as defined by Claude Duchet (1971,
1979), for instance —attempts to grasp the immense problem of mediation by means of the text's coming into being as a concrete reality, what sociocritics have called a mise en texte or process of textualization. After all, in order to understand a text, we must first be able to recognize and identify different discourses in relation to each other, as well as the specific ideological practices these refer to in order to circumscribe their function in a text. This first principle points to a crucial difference between "intertextuality" and "interdiscursivity" and which I have myself tried to develop a few years ago in terms of the monitoring of the materialization of discourses in and by the text.¹⁰ And finally, where the object of sociocritical analysis is not to define the social status of literature (the self-authorized territory of sociology of literature) but rather, to circumscribe the status of the social within the text—its sociality—, I propose to concentrate herewith on the status of the musical within the Bakhtinian text and examine some aspects of its discursive function. I would like to stress, however, that my proposal is not a mere series of vague analogies, for instance, between "social" and "musical discourse", but is methodologically rooted in textual analysis from a sociocritical perspective. Music, in this sense, I repeat, is understood to be also a social discourse like any other (cf. Supiиiи 1988).

Evidently, the inscription of discursive material in a text is not a simple matter of thematization. Nor should it be understood as a kind of transposition of a (musical) language to another (literary) in the same terms as Bakhtin claims, and demonstrates, that even though the symbolic language of carnival,

cannot be translated in any full or adequate way into a verbal language, and much less into a language of abstract concepts, (…) it is amenable to a certain transposition into a language of artistic images that has something in common with its concretely sensuous nature; that is, it can be trasposed into the language of literature. We are calling this transposition of carnival into the language of literature the carnivalization of literature.

(Bakhtin 1984: 122)

Let's note that transposition in music designates the modification of tonal height within a composition or fragment, for example from the G key (sol) to that of F (fa) or vice-versa, without modifying any other of its constitutive parts. The matter of musical transposition should not be confused either with modulation which refers to a shift of the minor key to the major, or from the relative to the dominant—in Bakhtinian terms, one could understand "modulation" to be a kind of internal transposition.

At any rate, there is no process of "musicalization" of Bakhtin's text on the same ground as he describes the processes of carnivalization with

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respect to literature. Just as it should be emphasized that, in strict Bakhtinian terms, the label "polyphonical novel" is a generic notion specific to Dostoevsky's fiction and cannot be applied indiscriminately to define any novel in which polyphonic elements are present, the relationships between carnival and literature are described by Bakhtin as historically-bound artistic manifestations.¹¹ On the other hand, the systematic imbedding of Bakhtin's text with musical notions and concepts throughout his writings constitutes, at another level of analysis, a completely different set of relationships that are fundamentally arquitectonical to his poetics.

My theoretical point of departure is what Anthony Wall (1984) called "learning to listen" (apprendre а йcouter), title of an article on "the musical metaphors in Bakhtinian criticism" which, 15 years after its publication remains the first and single basic study available on the matter as a whole. Again here we should be wary of a possible confusion: A. Wall's proposition of such an apprenticeship of listening has nothing to do with "listening to Bakhtin" in a wider but also much less precise meaning, from the perspective of a vague, metaphoric association with the fact that Bakhtin used musical terms. One cannot transform the object of analysis (the Bakhtinian text) into a kind of "social discourse" and then use it as a pretext for any eclectic reading purposes. This points to a dangerous and slippery kind of rhetorical subterfuge that may perpetuate a classic syncretism or collapsing of enunciation, utterance (enunciated) and discourse all into one, single category, a problem still ever so present in contemporary theory and criticism.

Furthering A. Wall's proposal from a sociocritical perspective means, quite differently, emphazising these basic, textually internal distinctions and, from a methodological point of view, retrace the mediating path that runs from the text to its subjacent discursive practice. There is, of course, a theoretical presupposition to this, which is the following: if it is possible to understand discourse to be not necessarily "textual", because discourse forms part of the various choices and conditions of the realization of a given mise en texte, or textualization, conversely, the formulation that textual material could exist or come into existance without discursive properties is categorically unacceptable, at least if we do not want to betray Bakhtin completely: "слово" = word-discourse. The point is to bring to the surface what, from music, as discourse, functions as an ethico-aesthetic value within the Bakhtinian text, and how this axiological dimension makes his text a Poetics in the strongest meaning of the term.

There are several points that need to be stressed here. I use the term "poetics" in a double orientation of the notion: first, in an etymological
sense referring to the ancient conception of Poпкtikк, from poпen, meaning "to make" or "fabricate", by extension "to create"—as in Bakhtin's assertion, "Dostoevsky created the polyphonical novel". Let's be very precise and avoid misundertandings: it is not because Bakhtin privileges one aspect of literature, prose (and one genre over others, the novel), that his work can be reduced to a "prosaics" in the sense Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (1990) propose, in radical opposition to "poetics".¹² And second, by designating the overall aesthetical principles and properties that the writer (not only the poet) has at his/her disposal, with "poetics" we also refer to a theory of the production of art objects rather than to "finished products". In Bakhtinian terms, this implies a theory of artististic creation as an ethico-aesthetical event. By ethical event Bakhtin designates that which finds its aesthetical form in a given work. His own example is a poem by Pushkin, "Parting", which he uses in at least two different instances,¹³ where such elements as the city, remorse, the night, are all described by Bakhtin as ethico-aesthetical values.

My overall hypothesis is that the Bakhtinian poetization—a mise en poйtique in an analogy to mise en texte or textualization—is a theoretical activity that engages the aesthetic reality of certain aspects of musical discursivity as an ethical event, there where ethics is not the source of values but the way to relate to them. Once again, let's imagine Bakhtin's text without the notion of voice, without intonation and the various uses of tonality, without his discussion on rhythm or references to counterpoint, to polyphony…. In short, I reiterate here my initial query: is it possible to conceive a Bakhtinian poetics, as such an (textual) aesthetic reality, without an internal musically-grounded resonance?

Grasping this internal resonance means facing squarely his own notion of dialogism. In Bakhtin's view, "Dostoevsky was capable of representing someone's else's idea, preserving its full capacity to signify as an idea, while at the same time also preserving a distance, neither confirming the idea nor merging it with his own expressed ideology" (1984: 85). I suggest that, in a similar way, he himself grasps music as an other idea but without abstracting it from its own context, preserving all its musical significance while at the same time not merging or fusing it with the poetic/literary object of his own discourse. Bakhtin stresses that someone else's idea, an other idea, cannot be represented within the bounds of (authorial) monology, because the idea is then "either assimilated, or polemically repudiated, or ceases to be an idea" (1984: 85).

Now, if the aesthetical object of music is born at the threshold of acoustic sonorities or sonic resonance, the theoretical problem referring

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to the inscription of musical discourse then requires the recognition of certain processes of textualization, a specific mise en texte that is conceptually grounded in an aesthetics of signifying sonorities, a semiosis of sound that produces meaning—which is a proper, if succinct, definition of musical semiotics. And let's remember quickly that by aesthetics, Bakhtin understood a sociodynamic activity projected as an acknowledged and transformed reality; pivotal to this reality, precisely, is his theory of dialogism. More particular to this discussion is the axiological meeting (between the domain) of ethics and (the) art(istic sphere) where Bakhtin conceives his notion of "actually performed act or deed" (postupok; cf. 1993) and (aesthetically) posits in musical terms the dialogic orientation of this act's (ethical) reality. A short-term consequence is that such an understanding of ethics, both as an aesthetics and a theory of knowledge, makes dialogic positions emerge as the ethically-valued dimension of a polyphonical dialectics of culture. What remains to be fully articulated are the implications of marking the function and understanding—comprehending, Bakhtin would say—the meaning of such intercommunicational and aesthetically participating act(ivity).

The "dialogical" meeting of music and Bakhtin's poetics can be grasped more concretely from the perspective of an encounter between two cultures on equal basis, or two artistic manifestations that may not be completely foreign to each other but nonetheless are semiotically radically different. Such a meeting does not imply the fusion, or confusion of the two into one—even less the substitution or the reappropriation of one by the other. Bakthin underlines that "such a dialogic encounter does not result in merging or mixing. Each retains its own unity and open totality, bu they are mutually enriched" (Response to "Novy Mir", in 1986: 7).¹⁴ To grasp this trans-semiotic encounter requires a will to read exotopically from within the text and listen to the other discourse; it means actively circumscribing a particular, singular textual interdiscursivity (as distinct as this is from "intertextuality"). At the threshold of this axiological meeting we find a dialectics of listening by which "to listen" emerges as the inscribing act in itself ("поступок" ), the inscriptor. And since aesthetical analysis must not only transcribe ethical elements in one way or another but also understand its link to the theoretical as well as to meaning, within the unity of content (Bakhtin 1986: 53—54), then the whole problem consists in making the inscribing act "speak"—in "vocalizing" what is "silently" inscribed in the text—or, more exactly, it is a matter of conferring a voice to the inscriptor, of demutizing the act of listening.¹⁵

Let's examine this problem from the perspective of Bakhtin's own
discussion on silence and sound.

Quietude and sound. The perception of sound (against the background of quietude). Quietude and sound (the absence of the word). The pause and the beginning of the word. The disturbance of quietude by sound is mechanical and physiological (as a condition of perception); the disturbance of silence by the word is personalistic and intelligible: it is an entirely different world. In quietude nothing makes a sound (or something does not make a sound); in silence nobody speaks (or somebody does not speak). Silence is possible only the human world (and only for a person). Of course, both quietude and silence are always relative.

The conditions of perceiving a sound, the conditions for understanding/ recognizing a sign, the conditions for intelligent understanding the word.

Silence—intelligible sound (a word)—and the pause constitute a special logosphere, a unified and continuous structure, an open (unfinalized) totality.

Understandin-recognition of repeated elements of speech (i.e., language) and intelligent undersntanding of the repeatable utterance. Each element of speech is perceived on two planes: on the plane of the repeatability of the language and on the plane of the unrepeatability of the utterance. Through the utterance, language joins the historical unreapeatability of unfinalized totality of the logosphere.

(Italics in the original text; From Notes in 1970—71, in 1986: 133—134)

"Тишина" —silence in the sense of lack of sound referring to peace, nature's quietude, absence of natural noises, etc.—; "звук"—sound; and "молчание" ("отсутствие слова")—muteness, absence of speech which Bakhtin immediately distinguishes from silence in the sense of "тишина" . Silence as a lack of noise is not a semiotic category, but silence as absence of speech belongs to the order of the signifying. Thus, "молчание" , muteness in the sense of taciturnity (which supposes that there is someone who does not speak, a silent human presence), there where there is a lack of speech/word-discourse—"отсутствие слова". Hence, in silence (lack of noise), there is no resonance; in taciturnity, no one speaks.¹⁶

Let's note however that the relationship between these two categories of silences is a dialectical one in the Bakhtinian meaning of the term; they fuse into one another. The person who does not speak in the second type of silence ("молчание" ) is the paradigmatic equivalent of "nothing" in the first type ("тишина" ), an abstract consciousness which does not exist except in terms of a reasonning that qualifies taciturnal silence as opposed to natural silence. Both utterances (йnoncйs) about silence do,

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of course, signify something but the only perceptible element is their mutual object: silence. There is nothing else to perceive, nothing more to recognize and understand.

This is the reason, in my mind at least, why Bakhtin introduces a third category of silence, the pause ("пауза"), which he himself does not define in any detail except within his typology of sounds. In Bakhtinian terms, together with "intelligible sound" (speech), the pause constitutes a special type of logosphere. Significantly, in the French version of this discussion on silent and sound, "intelligible sound" is translated as "son pensй" < "thought-out sound". In this particular context, within the realm of sounds "son pensй" is the exact correlation of muteness in the sense of "taciturnity" within the realm of silences—both are ideological phenomena.¹⁷ Hence, the pause must also be identified more precisely within Bakhtin's typology of silences and in relation to both natural silence ("тишина" ) and human silence ("молчание" )—in music, the English term for "pause" is rest, absence of actual sound. With respect to the former, the pause could equate to the physiological, "natural" phenomenon of breathing¹⁸ but, in relation to the latter, lack of speech in the sense of taciturnity, an ideological phenomenon, I identify the pause as absence of voice. But let's be a little more precise and remember Bakhtin's [/P.N. Medvedev 1978: 9—11] early warning about having to distinguish the characteristics of organized ideological material, that is, of ideological objects as opposed to (1) physical, natural bodies and (2) to the instruments of production, as well as (3) to consumer goods. In Bakhtin's/Medvedev's own words, whereas "naturalistic positivism" and "mechanical materialism" ignored differences of the first type, seeking mechanical laws at work everywhere, including in art, "utilitarian positivism" ignored that instruments of production do not express or reflect anything and lack any meaning.¹⁹ Neglecting to grasp differences of the third type, on the other hand, means to equate the work of art, an ideological phenomenon, to a product of individual consumption.

It is then a matter not only of distinguishing the repeatable or reproducible units of the object of discourse from those that are unique, but also of assuming the fact that discourse is not and never will be entirely and exclusively "one's own". It is very precisely in the sense that discourse is also the discourse of the other, that it actively participates, as other, to the non-reproductibility and uniqueness of my own utterance. Contrary to the aporia "I is an other" which pyschoanalysis, on the one hand, undetermined neo-liberalism on the other, re-intone, in the sense also of re-canonizing, and re-accentuate in their own way (cf. Discourse in the
Novel, in 1986: 417—422), I suggest that from a Bakhtinian perspective, I is not and never will be an O/other.²⁰ No one has better understood nor more clearly expressed the matter than the French linguist Jacqueline Authier-Revuz. In Bakhtin, she writes, "the other (interlocutor, discourse) is always `the other of an other' (interlocutor, discourse), there where it has been possible to say that there `is no other to the (unconscious) Other' " (my translation).²¹

When art is understood to be a matter of "making things talk", as Bakhtin remarks somewhere with respect to one of the functions of the novel, of all sounds, only the vocal one is situated at the threshold where the dialectical universe and the dialogical world actually meet concretely, textually. The voice is the semiotic factor that makes dialectics and dialogics unseparable in Bakhtin's poetics: if "without dialectics, there is no history" (Voloshinov 1981: 261), without dialogics, meaning remains amnesic, that is, anaxiological. Understood in these terms, Bakhtin confers unto the voice a crucial function, not from outside the enunciated word or text, but from within its enunciation as an event.

Hence, three types of silences that must be correlated with three types of deafness, a category that Bakhtin does not introduce at all. To the lack of sound in its most primeral state corresponds deafness as a physiological quality, absence of the physical faculty or sense of hearing; one simply does not perceive the acoustic vibrations of sound. To the lack of speech/word-discourse (taciturnity), the type of silence that is not the absolute noise vacuum, corresponds another type of deafness which I propose to define as an absence of listening—it is not enough to hear musical sounds, for example, in order to listen to music and assimilate it as such. In other words, this does not necessarily mean that we can't hear; we can very well not want or refuse to hear and yet be in full possession of our physiological capacity of hearing, similarly, we can very well hear everything perfectly and yet not listen.²² Within this second, double frame, the problem consists in restituting to the inscribing act of listening, its ethico-aesthetical tenure. Just as Bakhtin uses musical terminology precisely from the perspective of music and not in a rhetorical transposition to another, non-musical language, this restitution implies conferring to the act ("поступок" ) of listening its musical double-ear, that which corresponds to the semantic and communicative double structure of sound-time in music. This is the inscribing act which I believe is behind Bakhtin's definition and understanding of "слово" when he refers to the word-discourse as being doubly-oriented.

Thus, on the one hand, we hear and recognize the word-discourse

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening

Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1999, № 1
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Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1999, № 1

in that it is, as a linguistic utterance, an aesthetical reality; but to listen to the voice which internally orientes the word-discourse towards an other word, towards the discourse of the other, is an activity that belongs to the category of ethics and, of course, ideology. To identify the particular tone of this internal voice—musical discourse within Bakhtin poetics, his word/text—means penetrating the territory that boarders both what is "one's own" and what is not, the "other's". Because "what-is-mine" is illegitimate subjectivity when abstracted from the axiological weight of the I and the other (cf. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, in 1990: 114), it is only within the boundaries of this common territory that the tension,²³ which characterizes the relationships between I and the other, becomes tangible and these relationships are established and ethico-aesthetically valorized.

Banal in itself, the distinction between "hearing" and "listening" is nonetheless fundamental, for within a given enunciative instance, it enables us to establish the internal modalities of tension refering to evaluating the position of enunciation, not the enunciated or utterance alone. This process of evaluation is what Bakhtin/Voloshinov analyzes in his early works in terms of intonation and accentuation; that is, the axiological coloration of the verbal totality, the expressive timbre or tone of the word, the sonority of the voice or vocal resonance. And it is precisely this Bakhtinian understanding of intonation as the socially evaluative dimension of literary discourse that, in his later work, Asafiev appears to have transferred quite literally to musical discourse, when he describes music as "the art of intonated sense".²⁴

Now, when we examine a little closer such a dialectics of listening on the tripartite basis of silence, pause/rest, and sound, from within the perspective of the history of musical composition, another problem emerges: polyphony. To put it more exactly, circumscribing the function of the voice, as distinct as this sound-element is from that of speech/word-discourse, we can acually pretend to identify what Bakhtin, at least, understood to be, or is not yet or only looks like, polyphonical.²⁵ To illustrate this, I propose to look at the medieval technique of composition known as the "hocket": from the latinization of the French "hoquet" (>[h]oketus, [h]ochetus), the term relates to bump, knock, shock, hitch, hiccup and also refers, according to certain theories, to the Arabic "al-quat'", to cut. The hocket is a type of composition where two or more voices are strewn with silences or rests, in such a way that one voice becomes silent when another sings, and vice-versa (cf. Sanders 1974).

The first important thing for us to note in the following examples—
see the Annex—is that the hocket distinguishes very clearly the voices in relation to each other; because we identify different voices according to their own particular timbre and texture, in hearing these examples we would be able to perceive immediately which voice sings what and when, proceeding alternatively in a point/counterpoint-like technique. In other words, there are two or more distinct voices that articulate and prolongue each other on different registers, each recapturing the melodic thread at a determined moment of its development. I have tried to illustrate this linear scheme by reproducing each segments of the melody sung by a given voice (Ex. 2b and 3b). This is the next important thing to take into consideration: in each of these examples, there is but one, single dominant melody that is literally fragmented into various parts. A determined voice pauses, rests, falls silent, giving another voice the opportunity to make itself heard, which it does by picking up and resuming the melody where it had been interrupted, and so on and so forth in a successive and alternating pattern between two or a given set of voices. This technique of truncation is what medieval treaties generally designate as the hocket: according to Franco of Cologne (second half of 13^th century), one of the three authors who left us the earliest definitions of the technique, truncated music is actually synonymous with hocket: "A truncation is a sort of music sounded in a broken way by actual sounds and their omissions".²⁶ This is yet another important point that must be brought forth, especially when we know that, technically related to counterpoint, the hocket coincides historically with the beginnings of annotated polyphony.

But there is a hitch to all this: if counterpoint is defined as the combination of two or more melodies linked between themselves but independent of each other within a harmonic texture, as we have seen this is not what occurs exactly with the hocket. There are no different melodies in the plural, only one dominant melodic pattern which unfolds in a hiccuping fashion. From the perspective of the melody, its different parts are only "different" because they are sung alternatively by different voices or, to put it another way, the important factor, here, is not the actual melody but various voices. And if the hocket, as I understand it, is indeed a counterpuntal-like technique used in many medieval polyphonical works, it is not synonymous with polyphony at large—even though early polyphony, of course, was a strictly linear musical affair and yet radically different from homophony in that it no longer was "like-sounding", unison music, but "many-sounds" or "many-voices" music.²⁷

The point is the following: if, with the illustration of the hocket, we have an indication of one of the kinds of musical structures polypho

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening

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ny emerged from at its early stages of development, it is nonetheless quite literally a truncated, mutilated conceptual understanding of what polyphony means as a process. Polyphony does not mean fragmentation, nor collage. What is lacking, or has been truncated from it, is the tension that would characterize the articulation of different melodies within a given, single musical work, even in a strictly linear pattern. Let's make a small parenthesis and illustrate this point in the following way: certain ritual choruses in ancient Greece had a double structure, by which the two participating groups of a chorus would unleash against each other, giving way to free antagonistic acts that could go as far as reciprocal lapidation and which, in the following developing stages of this kind of representations, were to be transformed into invectives and, later on, antiphonic kinds of exchange. A.N. Veseloski (Веселовский 1906: 3 and 4) in particular—whom Bakhtin mentions a few times in his essays—stresses the old Greek term, amoiba, that is, the dynamics of the notion of "change" and which comes from ameiben (to "change", to "alternate", giving us amoeba in zoology), in describing that kind of alternance between voices and, at the same time, coins that of "амебейность" in Russian to designate the agonistic character of antiphonic choruses or choirs.²⁸ This antagonistic structure definitely relates to an existing internal tension that is lacking, I believe, in the musical hocket. But it still isn't dialogic in the strict meaning of the notion, certainly not in terms Bakhtin understood and developed it, amongst other things, by relating dialogic relations to the technique of counterpoint in musical composition and polyphony. And lest we also forget another detail, historically important, that the ancient Greeks did not know polyphony in music, "амебейность" designates a kind of pre-dialogic state of affairs in social relationships.²⁹

Let's see another aspect of the same problem in a different way. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1984: 223—224) in the middle of a lengthy discussion on the matter of Goliadkin's voices in The Double—there where, precisely, Bakhtin signals what he considers to be no longer homophony but not yet polyphony strictly speaking—, he inserts a fragment of An Accidental Family ("Подросток" ),³⁰ concerning Trishatov's project of an opera on a Faustic theme:

If I composed an opera, I'd choose Faust as my subject. I'm very fond of it. I go on creating the scene in the cathedral—just in my head, in my imagination, that's all. There's this Gothic cathedral, on the inside, and a choir siging a humn and then in comes Gretchen, and you know from what the choir's singing that it's the fifteenth century. Gretchen
sings a lament, a recitative, quiet but painful and heart-rending and the choir intones sombrely, sternly, dispassionately: "Dies irae, dies illa!"

And suddenly the voice of the devil is heard singing his song. He is invisible, only his song is heard, rising up together with the hymns, almost part of them but still quite different—somehow or other I've got to get this right. The song is a long one, it goes on and on—it must be a tenor voice, absolutely must! It beging quietly, softly, with the words: "Do you rememeber, Gretchen, how when you were still innocent, still a child, your prayers from the old prayer book?" But the singing will grow stronger, more passionate, more strident, rising to higher notes resonant with tears and unending, tireless lamentation and finally, despair as the voice declares: "There is no forgiveness, but all that is torn from her breast are cries—convulsive cries, you know, born of her tears—and the song of Satan goes on rising and penetrates ever deeper and more sharply into her soul and, rising still higher, suddelny ends with what is almost a shout: "All is over, you are accursed!"

Gretchen falls on her knees, clasping her hands before her. Then comes her prayer, something very short, a semi-recitative, but simple, unadorned, something in the highest degree medieval, four lines, that's all—Stradelli does it in a few notes—and on the last note she collapses in a faint! Great confusion. She is lifted up and they begin carrying her off and suddenly the choir thunders forth, in a kind of thunderclap of voices, inspired, triumphant, overwhelming, something like our own "Angels uplift our Lord on high!" and everything is shaken to its foundations and ends in a ecstatic, exultant, universal shout of "Hosannah!" that resounds, as it were, through the universe and she is carrid slowly off-stage as the curtain falls.

(Italics are Bakhtin's; Dostoevsky 1994: 462)

In this example, we can clearly distinguish three different voices: the choirs', that of Gretchen (perhaps already pregnant, if we remember the end of Goethe's Faust) and the song of the devil which suddenly irrupts from among the others. In this description, the devil progressively takes over Gretchen's consciousness: his own song slowly stiffles her voice, allowing her only a demi-recitatif and finally reduces her to silence; she faints. As far as the choirs are concerned, sombre and indifferent at the beginning of the scene, they recover in an exalted and conquering finale, entonating the devil's triumph and confirming his supremacy. But, if these different voices do interact to a certain extent, there is no dialogue between them except perhaps in a quasi-linear alternating pattern; they don't answer each other and nowhere is there any attempt to understand the drama taking place and which, barely finished, is already for

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening

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gotten. The only autonomous, independent consciousness is the devil's who takes posession of all the other voices, "mutizing" them; even the choirs, oblivious, howl buoyantly their own submission. The curtain falls.

Let's note that Bakhtin does not analyze this passage. Instead, he refers to a note (1984: 224 [cf.267, n.17]) and quotes another passage, this time from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus when the narrator describes "the memory of that pendemonium of laughter, of hellish merriment which, brief but horrible, forms the end of the first part of the Apocalypse", composed by the character-composer Adrian Leverkьhn,

… beginning with the chuckle of a single voice and rapidly gaining ground embracing choir and orchestra, frightfully swelling in rhythmic upheavals and contrary motions to a fortissimo tutti, an overwhelming, sardonically yelling, screeching, bawling, bleating, howling, piping, whynning salvo, the mocking, exulting laughter of the Pit. So much do I shudder at this episode in and for itself, and the way it stands out by reason of its position in the whole, this hurricane of hellish merriment, that I could hardly have brought myself to speak of it if it were not that here, precisely here, is revealed to me, in a way to make my heart stop beating, the proudest mystery of this music, which is a mystery of identity.

(Th. Mann 1996: 378)

This description, together with the following one, seemed to Bakhtin very close to the musical idea of Trishatov (Bakhtin's quotation in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics appear herewith in bold; italics are Bakhtin's):

For this hellish laughter at the end of the first part has its pendant in the truly extraordinary chorus of children which, accompanied by a chamber orchestra, opens the second part: a piece of cosmic music of the spheres, icily clear, glassily transparent, of brittle dissonances indeed, but withal of an—I would like to say—inacessibly unearthly and alien beauty of sound, filling the heart with longing without hope. And this piece, which has won, touched, and ravished even the reluctant, is in its musical essence, for him who has ears to hear and eyes to see, the devil's laughter all over again. Everywhere is Adrian Leverkьhn great in making unlike the like. One knows his way of modifying rhythmically a fugal subject in its first answer, in such a way that despite a strict preservation of its thematic essence it is a repetition no longer recognizable. So here—but nowhere else as here is the effect so profound, mysterious and great. Every word that turns into sound the idea of Beyond, of transformation in the mystical sense, and thus of change, transformation, transfiguration, is here exactly reproduced. The passages of horror
just before heard are given, indeed, to the indescribable children's chorus at quite a different pitch, and in changed orchestration and rhythm; but in the searing, susurrant tones of spheres and angels there is not one note which does not occur, with rigid correspondence, in the hellish laughter.

(Th. Mann, 1996: 378—379)

In fact, Th. Mann describes exactly what seems to be the problem with Trishatov's opera project in Dostoevsky's An Accidental Family; it appears as if Gretchen's song vanishes in the cacophony of the satanic laugh of the devil's song, transposed to the angelic tonality of a cherubin's final hymn. Now, in the absolute correspondence of this perfect inversion, where infernal music becomes celestial and angelic tones merge with hellish horror, faites vos jeux, rien ne va plus: the devil becomes God, where God was, perhaps always has been, Satan.

This reversability is quite close to what Bakhtin has identified as canonization or, more precisely in this particular case, what would be a re-canonization, that is, this "intense struggle [where] boundaries are drawn with new sharpness and simultaneously erased with new ease; [where] it is sometimes impossible to establish precisely where they have been erased or where certain of the warring parties have already crossed over into alien territory" (Discourse in the Novel, in 1981: 418). But Bakhtin is quick to underline a fundamental difference between canonization and another type of transformation, re-accentuation, a far more complicated process:

Within certain limits the process of re-accentuation is unavoidable, legitimate and even productive. But these limits may easily be crossed when a work is distant from us and when we begin to perceive it against a background completely foreign to it. Perceived in such a way, it may be subjected to a re-accentuation that radically distorts it.

(1981: 420)

In other words, the kind of altercation described by the violent confrontation of the alternating voices in the Greek choirs mentioned earlier, on the one hand and, on the other, the Faustian reversability of the couple god/devil, are not one and the same category. While the ancient Greek manifestation is historically pre-polyphonic (that is, its structure remains antiphonic), the Faustian reversability points to what concepts like polyphony can be made to appear conceptually, re-accentuated in certain contemporary contexts of interpretation (postmodern, for instance, or post-soviet reception) that have little or nothing to do with Bakhtin's own discursive conjuncture.

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening

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Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1999, № 1

Perhaps this last point should be made more emphatically: in his 1990 article "Тела террора", about the socialist realistic decorations of the walls in Moscow's metro stations and the problem of terror, Mikhail Ryklin introduces Yuri Mamleev's short-story The Rat ("Крыса")³¹ as an example of "pure esthetics transformed in pure autoelimination". Ryklin's own analysis of the metro stations images has been criticized as a theoretically dubious, a-historical (or transhistorical) manipulation of Bakthin's concepts of the carnivalesque.³² The delirious disquisitions of Mamleev's protagonist, on the other hand, about the world having been created not by God but a sadistic satanish Rat, nail in the problem of absolute reversability and its entropic consequences: perfect equilibrium in the total identification of the "high" and the "low", the Creator/the Rat, the good in relation to the bad. There are, of course, several Dostoevskyan examples of such un-differentiation between the main figures in Christian religion; in The Brother Karamazov, for instance, such ideas come to ideologically questioned, "threshold" characters in crisis—to Ivan Karamazov and his sequatious lacay, Smerdiakov, ilegitimate brother and parricide. In such a way that, in this case, this unresolved counterpoint cannot be attributed to the narrative voice nor the internal logic of the work. Rather, there is an unexpected twist with respect to responsability and whom is to blame: the major culprit turns out to be the one who knew and foresaw the assessination but who could not (or did not want to) prevent it.

Both texts, however—Rylkin's and Mamleev's—, especially read together, are also revealing examples of distorted re-accentuations discourse can be subjected to. At one point in The Rat, the narrator complains of actually being deafened by what he is being told; that is, of barely being able of putting his thoughts together in order to answer.³³ He is so utterly crushed by his interlocutor's words that, in the end, he cannot escape the effect of their impact (or doesn't want to?) and, as a result, is literally projected into the triumphant future of the protagonist's own satanic/"ratish" vision of the present. The point is that, beyond the fact that Ryklin indeed "deconstructs" Bakhtin from the perspective of his own concepts,³⁴ at another level of reading, The Rat illustrates how absolute "deconstruction", whether as an artistic technique or an analytical tool, always harbours the risk of transforming discourse into monologic affairs (in the lethal sense Bakhtin sometimes uses the notion), at best into mascarades or tragic parodies of what certain concepts—in this case, the carnivalesque and dialogics respectively—are all about.

It is in the context of the above discussion that we should understand quite clearly that the two distinct voices of Dostoevsky and Th.
Mann, in Bakhtin's example of the Faustian theme, strictly speaking do not constitute what Bakhtin himself understood by dialogics. One voice (Th. Mann) being the mirror of the other (Dostoevsky), here only superimpose each other and reciprocally reverberate their own image. Just as in the medieval hocket, these are voices who sing/enunciate one after the other two different fragments of one and the same melody/idea, though each one, of course, on a register that is his own. But, like in all reversibility, as in the thematization of the couple devil/god that Dostoevsky and Th. Mann reproduce, imitating the basic reversible principle, there is no dialogical relationship possible.

This is the reason why the "third" voice alongside Dostoevsky's and Th. Mann's, Bakhtin's voice here remains in effect silent. The function of the "third" in Bakhtin's tripartite dialogic system is that it does not participate actively in the dialogue of which it is nonetheless a part, but comprehends it. And this is precisely the point; here, there is no proper dialogic structure, nor is there one in the musical hocket; the "voice 3" in examples 2 and 3 does not take part in the melodic vocal exchange of the other two, it has no axiological function within the unit except to furnish it with a basic tonal support. What is missing from Bakhtin's example of Dostoevsky and Th. Mann for it to have a complete dialogic structure, is his own comprehensive voice.

A little further in his book on Dostoevsky (249—250), Bakhtin comes back to the problem with respect to Goliadkin's various voices. He warns that even though such an ideological "reconciliation and merging of voices even within the bounds of a single consciousness" is no longer a monological act, this "polyphony of reconciled voices" or polyphony of reconciliation³⁵ should not be confused with "a polyphony of battling and internally divided voices" dominant in Dostoevsky's novels.

Hence, the pause is an extremely important factor for the apprenticeship of listening. Both in the form of silence or rest of a given voice in the medieval hocket and of Bakhtin's "no-comment" with respect to his own example in Dostoevsky and Th. Mann, the pause breaks the rhythm of monovocal (melodic/discursive) flow and makes it possible to organize the simultaneous manifestation of different voices in a given instance. Hence, just listening to the pause means proclaiming and asserting victory over the dictatorship of monologism, the pathological condition of which is certainly not aphasia. Because there is undoubtedly a kind of habitus, characteristic of a certain deviance of metaphysical dialectics (and which reappears under different form in psychoanalysis), that points to the fact that the sound of our own voice, sometimes cacophonic noise,

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening

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can deafen us and, hence, cause amnesia.³⁶ Just as polyphony breaks away from homophony and opens up a completely different musical era in that it designates various voices singing different melodies within the unity of a given piece of music, the function of the pause is to interrupt the sound-flow of one, single dominant voice so as to enable other voices to manifest themselves.

Conceding a voice to the other is what is important here, but this is a fairly complicated matter. The Bakhtinian use of the notion of pause is not a simple break—and lest we mix categories, as we have seen, neither is it breathing—; it isn't either synonymous with taciturnity even though it may coincide with its silence. In this sense, the pause is a semiotic, significant instance of tension that makes the exotopic act of one's positioning with respect to oneself a creative, not a passive, act. And the creative act ("as an act that enriches the event of being"), according to Bakhtin, is by principle arhythmic or extrarhythmic. Bakhtin is not referring, of course, to rhythm as a compositional form (that is, as the organization of sonic material that is perceived, empirically, heard and recognized as such), but to architectonic rhythm which is emotionally oriented in its internal value of ambition and tension. This category of rhythm is closely linked to intonation, to the tone and valuative coloration that the subject's voice confers unto his word-discourse. But if rhythm is the axiological ordering of what is inwardly given, Bakhtin explains that rhythm is not expressive in the strict sense of the term: "that is, it does not express a lived experience, is not founded from within that experience; it is not an emotional-volitional reaction to an object and to meaning, but a reaction to that reaction. (…) Rhythm presupposes an `immanentization' of meaning to lived experience itself" (Author and Hero…, in 1990: 117). In the same way that my word-discourse comes to life and acquires meaning only in that it is oriented toward the other discourse, "my relationship to myself is incapable of being rhythmical; to find myself in rhythm is impossible. (…) Rhythm can only possess or sway me; in rhythm, as under narcosis, I am not conscious of myself" (1990: 120).

As a precondition to the extrapositioning act, the pause evidently does not refer to the empirical moment between silence and the irruption of one's own word, but to an enthymemic instance within discourse itself. The pause represents a crucial, extrarhythmical hyphen that projects I outside of itself toward the other; "in this outside position, I and the other find themselves in a relationship of absolute mutual contradiction that has the character of an event", but in the event of being, Bakhtin adds, "this mutual axiological contradiction cannot be annihilated" (1990;
128—129). (Re)cognizing this link is absolutely necessary for the act (again, postupok) of relating to the other and, hence, for I to come into being as subject, because it introduces a "third" along the ontological and communication chain: you. Without you, valorized by the pause, I remains cut off from the other, collapsed unto itself. You, of course, is always an implicit, silent category, but it is because of this implicit you that the pause invoques the emergence from silence and the beginning of the other word-discourse. In effect, you is my memory of the other and, as such, intervenes in a vital manner, even though tacitely, in a dialectics of listening. You is the vocal catalizer; it challenges the voice of the other to exist, potentially to manifest itself concretely, within discourse. As the inscribing topos of the category of the you, the pause marks an instance of ethical will, the "ought", which goes well beyond the ontological and enters the valuative socio-ideological sphere. To listen, in this sense, implies necessarily wanting to hear the other.³⁷ Thus, listening is above all a particular category of emotional-volitional act that participates in responsability—the "non-alibi in Being" (cf. 1993: 40 ss.):

An answerable³⁸ act or deed is precisely that act which is performed on the basis of an acknowledgment of my obligative (ought-to-be) uniqueness. It is this affirmation of my non-alibi in Being that constitutes the basis of my life being actually and compellently given as well as its being actually and compellently projected as something-yet-to-achieved. It is only my non-alibi in Being that transforms an empty possibility into an actual answerable act or deed (through an emotional.volitional referral to myself as the one who is active). This is the living fact of a primordial act or deed which produces for the first time the asnwerably performed act—produces its actual heaviness, compellentness; it is the foundation of my life as a deed-performing ["поступление" ], for to be in life, to be actually, is to act, is to be unindifferent toward the once-occurrent whole.

To affirm definitively the fact of my unique and irreplaceable participation in Being is to enter Being precisely where it does not coincide with itself: to enter the ongoing event of Being.

(Bakhtin 1993: 42)

The non-alibi in Being, to be un-indifferent, means that, in any discursive instance, even though the subject will never completely master or control his/her discourse, he/she always takes position. Of course, there will always be those who shall panick at the slightest insinuation that there can be such a phenomenon called "contradiction", but when this is not even a paradox, like herewith, the fact remains that there is no comprehension, in the Bakhtinian meaning of the term, without value-judgement.

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M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening

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Over and over again he repeats this throughout his writings; the two operations are inseparable; they exercise themselves simultaneously and constitute one total act.

This brings us back to the "third"; in Bakhtinian terms, the "third" does not in effect participate in the dialogue at the level of the linguistic chain, but his responsibility is to understand, comprehend, the discursive instance itself as a constitutive whole. However, "no one can assume a position toward the I and the other that is neutral" (Author and Hero…, in 1990: 129). In such a way that this "third" is not an objectified, neutral observator who contemplates the world from his armchair, cross-legged and absent-mindedly sipping a drink, indifferent to the rumour around him.³⁹ The "third" does not absorb passively what he hears, rather he listens to the variously different positions of enunciations, actively coparticipating, that is, creatively, in a polyphonic instance. In other words, comprehension is never neutral; in fact, to comprehend means resisting any attempt of neutralization or at being neutralized. Without resistance—without the tension activated by the silence of the pause—, there is no comprehension of a given enunciative situation, no listening, no monitoring of discourses, only a kind of interpretative disengaged imperative that lends a vague and often confused palimpsestic ear to the polysemical eventualities of the (textual) utterance alone.

This last part of my discussion brings us to the problem of musical sounds and their perception, which also has a kind of dual structure: sound is characterized by its intensity, height and timbre or tone color, linked to the physical aspects of acoustic vibrations, that is, the level, the frequency and the spectrum (or range). Now, when two or more sounds with neighbouring frequencies coexist or are articulated, when two notes are played, hence, heard simultaneously, they produce a series of other sounds that musical acousticians call "resultant" or "combination tones" and which are defined by the combination of frequencies of the acoustic vibration produced by the original interval or multiple sound.⁴⁰

A first category of combination or resultant tones is the "additional sound", identified by the number of frequencies corresponding to the sum of the number of frequencies of the original composing sounds. In general, these additional sounds are practically inaudible and it is because they are very weak that they have no or very little musical influence. It is a category of resultant tones which is inoperable with respect to a conceptual understanding of polyphony, precisely because polyphony cannot be reduced to the mere sum of a certain number of coexisting voices, whathever their articulating modalities may be, strictly linear or also vertical.⁴¹ Po
lyphony is an interactive and participating dynamics composed of an ensemble of various distinct voices which, each projecting as many different musical (and, like for Gustav Mahler for instance, non-musical) sounds—that is horizons or discourses—,⁴² simultaneously produce their own melodies articulated on various registers, within a harmonic structure. From a conceptual perspective, the inaudibility of the additional sound would imply a refusal to hear what made Bakhtin say, as I quoted earlier on, that, from the point of view of the philosophy of aesthetics, counterpuntal relationships in music—that is, the foundations of polyphonical composition, its axiology, its architectonic—are musical variants of the broader concept of dialogical relations. For Bakhtin, there is no polyphony without dialogic relationships, just in the same way as, from the perspective of the history of musical composition, counterpuntal techniques first allowed to break away from monody and then, later, go beyond the principle of simple vocal alternance and develop polyphony itself.

The additional sound seems to indicate, within Bakhtin's tripartite conception of dialogics, a blind-spot in the "third" or, more exactly, a kind of "deaf-spot" in the dialectics of listening, which is equivalent to saying, at another level of analysis, neutralization. It would mean cancelling out the you in the ontological and communicational chain between I and the other, or the pause within Bakhtin's typology of sounds and silences and, consequently, getting rid of the voice as a distinct category of analysis. This process of cancelling out or neutralization makes the additional sound, in this conceptual sense, quite lethal. As a point of comparison, let's remember the tritone (< lat. tritonus) which caused so much problems to Medieval music theoreticians. Also called "the devil in music"—"diabolus in musica"—by Hucbald,⁴³ the tritone is a unique phenomenon within the heptatonic scale of the temperate system. When a chromatic semi-tone is added to the exact fourth, we obtain an augmented fourth made out of three whole tones; this interval has the particularity of dividing the octave into two equal parts, appearing only once on the heptatonic scale (F-B [fa-si]). Thus, it is also the only interval which, when reversed (diminished fifth, B-F [si-fa]), is equal to itself, both spatially and axiologically speaking. Music theoreticians emphasize that these two characteristics, exclusivity and reversability, together with its tense and explosive sonority, essentially dissonant to the ear, give the tritone an absolutely exceptional position among all other intervals.

Lack of space makes it impossible here to examine further the tritone in connection with my discussion. Let's only point out that it has an interesting history in Western musical theory of composition and perfor

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mance: first mentioned in musical treates as early as the 9^th or 10^th century, the tritone is closely associated with the beginnings of polyphony and the developments of the counterpoint. It is precisely in connection with the latter, in the 13^th century, that the use of the tritone became severely limited, in theory at least, when not actually prohibited until the Renaissance. The tritone was "not to be heard". In fact, the tritone did indeed introduce a new sonic consciousness in Western music, the semi-tone, the smallest interval in its musical scale, hence destroying old intonational habits based on the whole tone (ref. Ars antigua), especially those established and defended by the church. The interval of the tritone as such, however, bears well its name of "diabolus in musica": when we relate conceptually its particularity of absolute reversability to the problem of (re-)canonization and re-accentuations, the process of interchanging and identifying radically different opposites—such as we have seen with the couple god/devil in the Faustian theme or Mamleev's The Rat—makes the danger of neutralization and cancelling-out tangible.⁴⁴ In other words, the absolute contrary or inside-out of the kind of fabric that is weaved into "making unlike the like" (in reference to Adrian Leverkьhn in Th. Mann's Doctor Faustus) can also be the dubious art of making to look or sound alike what is definitely and categorically different.

But besides the additional sound, there is another category of resultant or combination tone, called in English "difference tone". I prefer to use the French term "son diffйrentiel" or "differential sound", for reasons, I hope, will become clearer in a moment. The differential sound is identified by the number of frequencies that correspond to the difference of the number of frequencies of the original multiple sound.⁴⁵ Let's emphasize that this differential sound is hence the product not of the sum, but of the interactions between given sounds understood from the perspective of their differences. We should therefore refrain from confusing the differential sound with the echo. The echo is a kind of sonic, boomerang-type effect that reproduces and reverberates or throws back, in a slightly thwarted way and differed in time, the original given, prerecorded sound. In this sense, the principles of the musical canon and, then, of the art of the fugue, certainly have something that conceptually derives from the echo. The differential sound can be associated even less with ventriloquism, a kind of anthropofagy (of whatever order, metaphysical, psychoanalytical, authorial…), or vocal cannibalism, the discursive effect of which is to regurgitate what has just been devoured. Let's be quite precise: the dialogue—so-called "dialogue"—between a ventriloquist and his puppet is nothing else than a (false) psychotic entertainment; the puppet
does not have access nor the right to direct speech, and it never will be anything more that the object of the ventriloquist's word-discourse immediately substituted for itself, precisely because it is mute, because it doesn't have a voice of its own, and never will.⁴⁶

In short: distiguishing between categories of acoustic resonance means, at another level of analysis, knowing why one wants to hear what and decide, choose to listen to. From this perspective, the differential sound is much more than a purely mecanical acoustic phenomenon of rebounding sound; within a dialectics of listening, it then is a matter of conferring value unto sonic resonance. But neither is the differential sound a simple dialectical effect, that is, a (con)fusion of composing sounds, because it is, in itself, neither their sum nor the sum of their differences. Very precisely, the "differential" category of this sound is what enables us to distinguish sounds in relation to each other, one voice in relation to another, and, especially, to identify what Bakhtin calls, as early as in his Philosophy of the act, the "emotional-volitional thinking that intonates" (1993: 34). On a separate note, it should be remembered that in the second half of the Nineteenth century, musical theory discovered that the differential sound, together with the sounds of the original given interval, produced in turn new differential sounds which themselves produced others, and so on. These various differential sounds can be infinitely calculated, in theory at least—we are very close, here, to the Bakhtinian concept of "Great Time". In practice, only a given number of these sounds can be discerned, up to a maximum of eight for a given interval. In other words, Bakhtin's "great (social) dialogue" is comprehensible, and has meaning, as a notion, only from within an identified space-time, tangible to perception—what he himself, of course, referred to as the chronotope. The so-called concensus between "universals" or universal concensus, which really amounts to saying the same thing in a seemingly different way, is a suspicious concept that remains outside Bakhtin's fundamental philosophical thinking right from his earliest writings.

There where the sonic reality of the differential sound depends on the characteristics of the original producing sounds, its specificity, its uniqueness—in short, it's identity—is grounded in the very fact that it is neither their repetition nor their imitation neither, of course, their mere "difference" or opposites.⁴⁷ At the level of a semiosis of sound—sound producing meaning and not only signifying something—, with Bakhtin the rhetorics of mimesis died at least twice, if not three times: there is such a thing that can be called a differential prerogative that requires not only to be heard but also listened to, in order to comprehend it and make its si

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lent multivocity talk.

To listen, hence, is what makes comprehension active, because the important thing in this act, Bakhtin says, "it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture" (Response to a Question from "Novy Mir", in 1986: 7). But we ought to listen to what must be understood by this: comprehension or "understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other" (Discourse in the Novel, in 1990: 282). Thus, in a certain way, wanting to hear the other implies listening to what is not heard, because not uttered or enunciated as such: "you are, you exist". And this act of listening means conceding ethical tonality to the enthymeme (of course, always silent) that orientes me towards an other and confers unto that other a fundamental liberty, that which enables it to say, "I am, I exist". And even though the other may not manifest itself concretely, may not "materialize" discourse in terms of speech, word, or text,⁴⁸ everything, and everyone, in the pause, silently resounds with this dialogic tension with the other.

Listening is the inscribing, hence, creative act, which, in a Bakhtinian perspective, means that comprehension is already pregnant with the other, already dialogical. De facto, you demutizes my listening and legitimizes ethically my voice; I can, then—and only then—, answer to the other in a fully responsible,⁴⁹ emotional-volitionally performative act of comprehension: "I, too, exist" (Bakhtin 1993: 40).

ANNEX

2)

Fragment of a motet of late 13^h — century

Linear representation of the melody — two upper voices

2b)

3b)
1)

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¹ This essay is a revised and expanded version of two lectures: a paper read at the Eighth International Bakhtin Conference, in Calgary (July 1997) and a lecture at the Bakhtin Centre of the University of Sheffield (December 1997). Some aspects were also used in a third paper, presented at the 1^st International Conference on Rhetoric in Mexico (April 1998). The subject of music and Bakhtin is one of many aspects of a long term research project in progress, "The Invention of Bakhtin", in part realized jointly with Tatiana Bubnova (Universidad Nacional Autуnoma de Mйxico). I am grateful to the [Polish] Committee on Scientific Research (Komitet Badaс Naukowych) for a grant.

² All references to Bakhtin, in the text of this essay and in the included bibliography, respect the spelling of his name in the language of the translation quoted (Bajtнn in Spanish, Bakhtin in English and Bakhtine in French). The same rule applies to Voloshinov, sometimes spelled Vološinov.

³ For more details, see Clark/Holquist 1984, Конкин 1984, Кузнецов 1993, Михеева 1988.

⁴ In 1925, Asafiev was posted at the Petrograd (then Leningrad) Conservatory until the 1940s, when he was nominated professor at the Moscow Conservatory and there spent the last years of his life (he died in 1949). For more biographical details, see Boris Schwarz 1981.

⁵ See Joseph Kon's "Asaf'ev and Tynianov: On Some Analogies Between Musicology and the Study of Literature" and Jaroslav Jiranek's "Intonation as a Specific Form of Musical Semiosis" (both in Tarasti 1995: 142—153 and 157—187), as well as Tarasti 1982 and 1996. Curiously enough, there seems to be no comparative study with Wladimir Propp nor with Claude Lйvi-Strauss' structural anthropology, more particularly on the structure of myths and the "mytheme", which would seem a rather obvious choice.

⁶ See, for example, an early essay written in 1925—1926, "The Basis of Russian Musical Intonation" and published for the first time in Musical Form as a Process (cf. "Supplement 2", "Bases of Musical Intonation", Book I; in vol. II, Tull 1976: 536—564).

⁷ "Musical form as a socially determined phenomenon is perceived, first of all, as a form (i.e., a condition, a method, and a means) for revealing music socially in the process of its intoning", is Asafiev's opening statement in the "[Author's] Introduction [(Asaf'ev]", Book I, Musical Form as a Process (cf. in vol. II, Tull 1976: 184).

⁸ I am of course talking about Bakhtin's known published works up to this date; whatever material remains still shelved in his archives is, of course, anybody's guess, except for those who have the rare privilege of being allowed to consult them.

⁹ Cf. Robin/Angenot 1985; Malcuzynski 1990 and 1992. I shall not discuss here the fact that, as a notion, "social discourse" is a problematic one, which accounts for a certain careering on the part of literary theory with respect to Bakhtin's understanding of "social dialogue". This in part explains the mistrust of some critics regarding the Bakhtinian use of polyphony, from which the very notion of "social discourse", at least its sociocritical theorization, was based in the first place (see infra, note #11). From a feminist theoretical perspective, for instance, the notion presents extremely serious problems: "social discourse" is, essentially, "patriarchal discourse" (cf. Malcuzynski 1997—1998 and 1998a).

¹⁰ By monitoring, I understand a methodological device which prolongs and theorizes Bakhtin's notion of "threshold"; to monitor discourses means circumscribing the subject's inventive and critical modalities

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within a problematics of mediation at the level of textualization, relating in particular to the crisis (both ontological and communicational) the subject goes through in order to articulate and project his/her discourse. Monitoring is based the work of discursive memory, not forgetfullness ("oubli" in French).

¹¹ I'm afraid I do not share Caryl Emerson's enthusiasm in revising carnival as a transhistorical analytical category nor believe in her suggestion that Bakhtin's utopianism needs to be "sobered down" in such a way, as she argues in her latest book (Emerson 1998). In fact, originally spurred in a very mistaken direction by Wayne Booth in his (in)famous 1982 essay, a distinct trend of feminist critical theory has capitalized on such "transhistorical" views of carnival for a number of years now, with not very fortunate results. A significant parallel should be drawn between such a-historical or "transhistorical" proposed uses of carnival and some contemporary interpretations of Bakhtin's conceptual understanding of polyphony. From the contemporary angle of an "absolute" potential, polyphony may indeed appear as a form of its own (un)reason, a perpetually differed virtuality that cannot be grasped except in terms of its opposition to being enunciated. As mentioned earlier, this curious interpretation accounts for the mistrust many critics have for the notion of polyphony—"too utopic" for some, "too voluntarist" for others (see supra, note #9).

¹² See Anthony Wall's and Clive Thomson's critiques (1991 and 1993) of Morson/Emerson's thesis and the fascinating exchange between them (Morson/Emerson 1994 and Wall/Thomson 1994). On her part, Tatiana Bubnova (1997) defends autoritarianism in poetry in convincing Bakhtinian terms and condemns the notion of "prosaics" which she defines in the following way: "… une notion [qui] implique une prise de conscience idйologiquement forte qui impose а Bakhtine une vision de la rйalitй dйpurйe de tout conflit politique ou idйologique. (…) La prosaпque est une thйorie de la vie quotidienne bourgeoise, expurgйe de la lutte, de l'hйroпsme, de l'utopisme social et de la rйdemption, mais surtout йpurйe de contradictions et d'inйgalitйs. Il s'agit d'une notion qui se veut dйsidйologisйe, mais qui s'appuie intrinsиquement sur l'idйologie nйo-libйrale".

¹³ See Bakhtin 1993: 65 ss. and the fragment, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity", published by S.G. Bocharov in 1986 but ommited from the article baring the same title in the 1979 Moscow version and from all other subsequent translations. There are, however, two Spanish translations of this fragment, one by Desiderio Navarro (cf. Bajtнn 1994) and another by Tatiana Bubnova (cf. Bajtнn 1997: 82—105).

¹⁴ As an illustration of such a dialogic meeting of two or more cultures, see Malcuzynski (1998b) for a brief example taken from Medieval lyrics, more specifically the muwaššaha and its kharja, a hybrid poetic form cultivated in Al-andalus, the region of the Iberian Peninsula under Moorish rule, between the 9^th/10^th and 13^th centuries. I am currently working on a detailed analysis of this kind of lyrics from a Bakhtinian perspective.

¹⁵ "Dйmutisation" in French refers to the first step in teaching deaf-mutes. On another note, let's mention the fact that we are quite far from Roland Barthes' (1982: 217—230) definition of listening, "I listen also means: `listen to me'" ("`j'йcoute' veut dire aussi `йcoute-moi'"). And where he understands freedom of listening to be as necessary as freedom of speech ("la libertй d'йcoute est aussi nйcessaire que la libertй de parole"), Bakhtin's perspective is that listening is a mandatory precondition for speech to become free.

¹⁶ I am grateful to Tatiana Bubnova for explaining her slightly different translation of the same passage in Spanish (cf. Bajtнn 1990: 355—356). See our joint article (Bubnova/Malcuzynski 1997) as well as my essay (1996) for some comments related to problem of translations.

¹⁷ The French translator's use of the term "son pensй" for "speech/word" (Bakhtine 1984: 353) seems to be in direct opposition to "l'impensй", which designates a kind of Freudian lapsus. The whole matter refers again to a serious problem in translations of Bakhtin's texts, translations which must themselves be recontextualized—in this particular case, within the neo-Formalist and psychoanalytically-oriented Lacanian conjuncture dominant in French linguistics and literary theory and criticism from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

¹⁸ Roland Barthes remarked (1982: 240): "Le poumon, organe stupide (le mou des chats!), se gonfle mais ne bande pas: c'est dans le gosier, lieu oщ le mйtal phonique se durcit et se dйcoupe, c'est dans le masque que la signifiance йclate, fait surgir, non l'вme, mais la jouissance".

¹⁹ See also The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences (in Bakhtin 1986: 103—131).

²⁰ I have attempted to develop this problem from the perspective of a feminist sociocritical theory (cf. Malcuzynski 1998a).

²¹ The full quotation in French is the following: "…l'autre de Bakhtine, celui des autres discours, du sens construit, si contradictoirement que ce soit, en discours, avec des mots `chargйs d'histoire'; l'autre de l'inconscient, de l'imprйvu du sens, d'un sens `dйconstruit' dans le fonctionnement autonome du signifiant, qui ouvre dans le discours une aut

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re hйtйrogйnйitй — d'une autre nature — que celle qui structure le champ du discours pour Bakhtine, est absent de l'horizon de celui-ci" (Authier-Revuz 1982: 119).

²² I am not talking about specific psychopathological problems: my argument here has nothing to do with what is described as verbal or musical deafness, that is, an aphasic disturbance which does not induce deafness as such but, because of an accident or a physiological lesion of the brain, makes the patient incapable of recognizing oral language or musical sounds.

²³ Etymologically and axiologically, the musical term, "tone" comes from "tension".

²⁴ In Book II, Intonation (in vol. III, Tull 1976: 904). In another direction, which brings us to Social Realism, see Brown's 1974 study of "intonazia" and "musical imagery" where, curiously, there isn't any reference to Asafiev's work.

²⁵ Here, I use the adjective "polyphonical" as a conceptual process, not a fixed structure, musical or other, as in the paradigmatic opposition "polyphony/homophony", for instance.

²⁶ In Ars cantus mensurabilis (ca. 1260), as quoted in Strunk 1981: 157.

²⁷ Interestingly enough, together with other techniques used in polyphony, the hocket was prohibited by Pope John XXII (1316—1334) in his papal bull, De vita et honestate clericorum (Book 3, chapter 1 of Extravagantes communes, 1324—1325): "…certain exponents of a new school [Ars nova], who think only of the laws of measured times, are composing new melodies of their own creation with a new system of notes, and these they prefer to the ancient, traditional music; the melodies of the Church are sung in semibreves and minimas and with gracenotes of repercussion. By some, their melodies are broken up by hocheti or robbed of their virility by discanti (two parts), tripla (three parts), motectus, with a dangerous element produced by certain parts sung on texts in the vernacular…" (quoted in Hayburn 1979: 20—21; see also Stichweh 1987).

²⁸ See also Флоренская 1986: 49 and Фрейденберг 1997: 18—19 and 124—127. I am indebted to Tatiana Bubnova for bringing these sources to my attention.

²⁹ Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist (1984: 66) have a "positivistically" Darwinian reference to the biological amoeba in connection with Bakhtin's I/other. Their interpretation appears to ignore both the meaning of the ancient Greek terms of amoib_ and amoiben, as well as Bakhtin's own reference to Veselovski. More serious, however, is the fact that they seem to have missed out completely on Medvedev's anticipated warning, mentioned earlier (see Bubnova/Malcuzynski 1997: 268—
270 for a brief discussion).

³⁰ In other languages translated as "The Adolescent", the first English translation bore the title "The Raw Youth".

³¹ I am using Tatiana Bubnova's Spanish translations of both these texts (ref. Acta Poйtica 1997—1998): M. Ryklin's "Los cuerpos del terror (hacia una lуgica de la violencia)" (117—140), originally published in "Бахтинский сборник _ I" [Москва, 1990] and "La Rata" (141—149), which appeared with the English title, "A Living Death" (ref. Mamleev 1986: 143—149).

³² From this perspective, Ryklin's discussion becomes an efficient, if lethal example of what C. Emerson suggests by "sobering down" Bakhtin's utopianism (see supra, note #11).

³³ T. Bubnova's translation of the Russian "oglushen" is especially significant: she uses the adjective "ensordecido", from the verb "ensordecer" which in Spanish has a dual meaning, to deafen and to cause muteness.

³⁴ See Tatiana Bubnova's comments in her "Introducciуn" to the volume of Acta Poйtica: 16—18.

³⁵ I borrow from the French translation, "polyphonie de rйconciliation".

³⁶ Worth remembering is the philosopher's joke about dialectics, Hegelian dialectics of course: the thesis ignores that it will be cancelled by the antithesis, and the foolish synthesis does not know or doesn't (want to) remember what of itself has been cancelled.

³⁷ Just as the inscription of discourse and the irruption of the (linguistic) word (from silence) are two distinct phenomena but constitute one simultaneous ethico-aesthetical act in Bakhtinian terms, the act of listening is unseparable from the will to hear (the other). In a curious argument Augusto Ponzio (1995: 32—34) recently wrenched apart this double constitutive unit and re-established conventional, paradigmatic oppositions, between "listening (escuchar) // dialogism" and "wanting to hear (querer oнr) // monologism". Such a misleading interpretation is in part due to the fact that, in this same article, A. Ponzio (28) quotes a second-hand translation in Spanish of the Italian version of Bakthin's discussion of silence and sound, where the Italian translator transformed the phrase, "the pause and the beginning of the word" into "the pause is the beginning of the word" (my emphases).

³⁸ The Russian term "otvetstvennost'" undoubtedly has many affinities with its English translation "answerability" (for example, the second part of the English title of Bakhtin's earliest known article [1919], Art and Answerability translated in Spanish, for instance, as "responsability", in

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Tatiana Bubnova's translation, Arte y responsabilidad (cf. Bajtнn 1982: 11—12). Nonetheless, these affinities cease to be logical from a semantic point of view: besides other reasons for asserting such a misconception, the connotations of "to answer to" or "be dependent on" conveyed in English are tendenciously inaccurate with respect to Bakhtin's use of "ответствен ность" in contexts that clearly suggest "correspondence with" or "inclination to", as well as (ethical, aesthetical, ontological, even moral) "responsability" in the strictest sense of the term. Moreoever, Bakhtin uses "поступок" , "ответственный поступок " as well as "этический акт" all with the same meaning—for instance, "этический акт" appears in the "The Problem of Content… and other texts, in opposition to the esthetical and the pragmatico-cognitive. In order to bring forth these nuances in her Spanish versions of Bakhtin's texts, Tatiana Bubnova translates "поступок " as "act" alone ("acto") or "ethical act" ("acto йtico") and "ответственный поступок " as "responsible act" ("acto responsable"). In the particular instance of the quote above, from Towards a Philosophy of the Act, T. Bubnova translates the first words, "answerable act or deed", as "responsible demeanour" ("proceder responsable") See her lucid explanations in the "Prefacion de la traductora", in Bajtнn 1997: xiii—xx, as well as in Bubnova 1996.

³⁹ In various of his work, Bakhtin distinguishes quite clearly his category of the "third" from the rhetorical, disengaged kind of "third".

⁴⁰ Combination or resultant tones should not be confused with "overtones" or harmonic sounds which are perceived when the fundamental sound is given or executed alone. The number of frequencies of the overtones are entire multiples of the number of frequencies of the fundamental sound, but overtones are never identical to the sounds of the template scale; nearly all of them belong the natural scale.

⁴¹ On the multilateral characteristics of polyphony, among other studies see Pousseur 1972 and Siron 1993.

⁴² Cf. Malcuzynski 1992: 183, as well as 288—300. See also the special issue, "Polyphonies", of the journal Cahiers de musique traditionnelle 1993.

⁴³ Hucbald (840—930/31), music theoretician and hagiographer.

⁴⁴ Significantly, the tritone has been termed a neutral "sonance" (cf. Krueger 1906) and a perfecta disonancia.

⁴⁵ There is yet another category of resultant or combination tones: if the difference or differential tone is produced by loud sounds, in the case of weak ones we then perceive another kind of sound of more obscure acoustical origin, called "residual tone".

⁴⁶ Bakhtinian categories referring to various aspects of the phenomenon of refraction cannot be associated nor confused with the echo, ventriloquism, boomerang, and the likes (as in, for instance, Holquist/Hawkes 1990 or Zavala 1995 and 1997). Moreover, as far as the so-called boomerang-effect is concerned, the concept itself is misconceived: anyone who has ever toyed and thrown a boomerang will have experienced the fact that, sometimes, it simply doesn't come back. In fact, the authentic boomerang, the one not made for tourists, is a hunting device, designed precisely not to "come back" but to curl around the target, the feet or paws of an animal, for instance, in order to trap it.

⁴⁷ I first suggested to distinguish between the notion of "difference" from that of "differential" in 1989 and briefly discussed the problem in various other studies (for ex. 1992, 1997—1998) though not from a music theory point of view. Elsewhere, I have also applied this distinction to feminist sociocritical theory (1998a).

⁴⁸ Let's remember Voloshinov's (1976) example of two man sitting in a room: the first one says "H'm". The second doesn't answer.

⁴⁹ See supra, note #38.

Методологически базирующаяся на социокритическом подходе, эта статья анализирует вписывание музыкального дискурса в бахтинские тексты, отстаивая мысль о том, что понимание и использование Бахтиным музыкальных терминов и концепций составляет особый тип «архитектонических» отношений, фундаментальных для его философии поэтики. Для статьи принципиально важна аксиологическая «встреча» между областями этики и искусства, где Бахтин замысливает свое понятие «действитель ного ответственного поступка» и эстетически устанавливает диалогическую ориентацию этической реальности данного поступка. На пороге этого аксиологического перекрестка мы обнаруживаем «диалектику слышания», в контексте которой этическое понятие «слышать» не равно физиологическому и физическому «слушать» (или «обладать слухом»). После сопоставления категорий «тишины», «молчания» и «паузы» автор статьи показывает значимость последнего из них, приводя ряд музыкальных и литературных примеров и демонстрируя роль «паузы» как условия и катализатора полифонии: без нее не может быть прерван доминирующий голос и проявлен голос «другого» (или «других»).

Warsaw

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M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski
Musical Theory and Mikhail Bakhtin:Towards a Dialectics of Listening