Reaction Formation: Dialogism, Ideology, and Capitalist Culture
Bakhtin and Voloshinov argued that dialogue is the intersubjective basis of consciousness, and of the creativity which makes historical changes in consciousness possible. The multiple dialogical relationships give every subject, who has developed through internalising them, the potential to distance him or herself from them. Consciousness is therefore an "unfinalised" process, always open to a possible future which would not merely reiterate the past. But this book explores its corollary: The relative openness is a field of conflict where rival discourses struggle for hegemony, by subordinating or eliminating their rivals. That is how the unconscious is created out of socio-historical conflicts. Hegemony is always incomplete, because there is always the possibility of a return of its repressed rivals in new combinations.
Jonathan Hall, B.Phil. Oxon, is a Research Fellow at the Bakhtin Centre, Sheffield University. He is the author of Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation State (AUP 1995), and he has written extensively on the work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov.