The Value of Opacity: A Bakhtinian Analysis of Habermas's Discourse Ethics

Jürgen Habermas's and M. M. Bakhtin's attitudes toward transparent or undistorted communication define almost antithetical approaches to the relationship between public discourse and autonomy. Habermas, both in his theory of communicative action and in his discourse ethics, assumes that transparent communication is possible and actually makes transparency a necessary condition for the legitimation of social norms. Yet, there is a sense in which the same kind of transparency that offers the possibility of rational and autonomous selfhood to Habermas signifies vulnerability and tyranny to Bakhtin. In contrast to Habermas, Bakhtin assumes that utterances can never be perfectly transparent because the words that comprise them always carry meanings that exceed the intentions of speakers. This excess semantic value inevitably distorts speakers' intentions, even if only slightly. Bakhtin's suspicion of transparency leads him to develop a model of autonomy that revolves around the individual's ability to resist the emergence of transparency. However, Bakhtin attributes a positive ethical value to certain kinds of opacity because it is in the differences and distortions that Bakhtin situates the process through which individuals construct autonomy. Thus, in a kind of communicative paradox, opacity and ambiguity play the same liberating role in Bakhtin's thought that transparency and clarity play in Habermas's.

Given the amount of intellectual labor that has been invested in exploring the insights into communicative practice that Habermas and Bakhtin offer, it is surprising that commentary on the two has so rarely intersected. With the exception of one journal article and a short section of Michael Gardiner's The Dialogics of Critique (1992), connections between Habermas and Bakhtin have been made only incidentally and in passing. ¹ Despite the important differences about the value of verbal transparency and its relation to models of autonomy that I will explore in this essay, Habermas and Bakhtin share common ground on at least four general issues. First, they agree that before equality can be established in the social realm, it must be modeled by establishing egalitarian communicative relationships. Second, both strive to understand communication, not by analyzing language, but by analyzing how selfhood and intersubjective relationships are structured and mediated by communicative action. They both analyze communication as a social institution not unlike a political system or a religious tradition. Third, both assert the special importance of dialogic realms wherein relationships of power are partly neutralized by being brought into the foreground. Fourth and finally, each understands his analysis of communicative relationships as a mode of social criticism that can help to define a more ethical world by demystifying some of the ways in which domination is embedded in acts of speech and communication.

These similarities in the general goals of the two thinkers' projects help to throw the different roles that Habermas and Bakhtin attribute to transparency into sharp relief. Most notably, Habermas's relative confidence in the possibility of achieving transparency allows him to build his model of autonomy around ideas of discursive democracy, consensus, and the assumption that in certain circumstances speakers strive to achieve undistorted communication (Habermas 1984, 1: 94-95, 285-86). Bakhtin is less confident about the ability of speakers to achieve transparency, and thus he is more preoccupied with exploring the way that impulses toward consensus and transparency contribute to processes of ideological centralization that undermine autonomy.

Transparency and autonomy in Habermas's discourse ethics

The idea of reason is at the very core of Habermasian thought, and reason in Habermas's lexicon is not so much an inherent mental faculty, as it was for eighteenth-century social theorists such as John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, as it is the result of a process of public dialogue through which norms and values are mediated and rationalized. ² This distinction in the nature of reason begins to explain one of the key differences between Habermas's and Bakhtin's conflicting valuations of transparency. While...