Ideas Shaping Practice: Philosophy of Home Economics/Human Sciences

Vol. 19, No. 1
ISSN: 1546-2676

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Sue L. T. McGregor

Kappa Omicron Nu FORUM, Vol. 19, No.1  
ISSN: 1546-2676. Editor: Lisa W. Booth. Official publication of Kappa Omicron Nu National Honor Society. Member, Association of College Honor Societies. Copyright © 2012. Kappa Omicron Nu FORUM is a refereed, semi-annual publication serving the profession of family and consumer sciences. The opinions expressed by the authors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of the society. Further information: Kappa Omicron Nu, PO Box 798, Okemos, MI 48805-0798. Telephone: (727) 940-2658 ext. 2003

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Can Home Economics Practice be Informed by Bakhtinian Themes?

Dr. Mary Gale Smith
2016

Abstract

Home Economics/Family and Consumer Science has been described as a field of practice where research and practice are inherently social practices conducted in human and social relationships. It is an action-oriented practice and therefore requires an action guiding philosophy, one that is attuned to the lived experience of everyday life in all its complexity. This paper explores Bakhtinian themes arising from the scholarship of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher who, throughout his life, examined the relationship between reason and lived experience. These themes include dialogism, the act (“Being-as-event”), answerability, and theoreticism.

Introduction: Setting the Context

As a home economics¹ educator, I have been strongly influenced by the writings of Marjorie M. Brown (1980, 1985, 1993) and the mission statement for home economics articulated by Brown and Paolucci (1979). I appreciated Brown’s philosophical acumen and the way she was able to encourage us to be free of unsound, poorly founded ideas of the profession. I modeled some of my early writing on her style using conceptual analysis and concept construction to articulate a global perspective in home economics education. Conceptualizing phenomena is a valuable first step in considering educational change but my concern is that it is an intellectual theoretical pursuit detached from practical action.

When it came to investigating the implementation of global home economics education, I turned to action research (Peterat & Smith, 2001). All types and forms of action research share a commitment to bringing the participants of the study into the process of educational inquiry. Action researchers share an ontological position that honours lived reality and involves participants and their actions in the creation of personal and social knowing and ways of being. These researchers also share the epistemological position that places importance on (a) experiential knowing that emerges through participation with others, and (b) the belief that people can learn to be self-reflexive about their world and their actions within it (Reason, 1994).

I was drawn to what might be called a post-structural view of action research (Carson, 1989) where action research is seen as a space between theory and practice for ethical reflection. This is based on the belief that the distinction between theory and practice exists in discourse, not in nature. Coulter (1993) expands this conception of action research, suggesting that the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian intellectual, could inform that space between, making each person answerable for his/her understanding of the world and for acting on that understanding. Bakhtin argues that the world of action becomes “impoverished in a perverse and highly dangerous way” when “meaning and responsibility are given over to the theoretical realm” (Morson & Emerson, 1989, p. 13).

About Bakhtin and his Philosophy

Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin lived in Russia from 1895 until 1975, during politically turbulent times. His ideas have risen from relative obscurity in the past couple of decades with the translation and reprinting of many of his manuscripts (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984a, 1984b, 1986, 1990, 1993). His work has been characterized along many lines: as a philosophical anthropology, as a distinct epistemology, as an axiology (Holquist, 1990), as between Marxism and phenomenology (Bernard-Donals, 1994), as speech-act theory and sociolinguistics, as Marxist and post-Marxist (Morson & Emerson, 1990; 2005), and as poststructuralism (Kristeva & Moi, 1986).

Bakhtin describes himself as “more of a philosopher, and as such have I remained to the present day. I am a philosopher, a thinker” (from Duvakin’s taped conversations cited in Holquist, 2002, p. 187). Bakhtin claims his analysis must be called "…philosophical mainly because of what it is not: it is not a linguistic, philological, literary or any other particular kind of analysis.… On the other hand… [it moves] in spheres that are liminal… on the borders of all the aforementioned disciplines at their junctures and point of intersections" (Bakhtin, in Estetika, as cited in Holquist, 2002, p. 14). This framing of his philosophy resonates with a description of philosophy provided by Pecorino (2000), who says philosophy is a quest after wisdom, an activity of thought. “What a philosopher provides is a body of philosophic thought NOT a philosophy” (Chapter 12).

It has been suggested that Bakhtin can be, and has been, appropriated for just about anything (Young, 1985). I read him as a philosopher, a person on a quest for wisdom, with focus on the notion of ethical responsibility, one of his most recurrent concerns first outlined in an unfinished manuscript written in the 1920s and published in 1993 as Toward a Philosophy of the Act. He stresses the primacy of ethical choice at every moment of our lives. In this paper, I explore some of the sub-categories of his writings that have possibilities for informing home economics practice, a practice that also moves in liminal spheres between theory and practice, between public and private, between self and other, between objective and subjective, between what is and what might be. They are spaces of “Being” and “Becoming” that prompt disruption of binaries and the rush for certainty. Specifically, I give attention to four interrelated notions of Bakhtin’s thinking: dialogism, the act (Being-as-event), answerability, and theoreticism.

Dialogue and Dialogism

It is difficult and probably incorrect to assume that Bakhtin's work forms a single, unified philosophy but all of his work is informed by his view of language. A thread that runs through all of his writings is a concern for dialogue. Although Morson and Emerson (1989) suggest it was not a central category of his early thought, Holquist (2002) claims that dialogue was the “master key to the assumptions that guided Bakhtin’s work throughout his whole career” (p. 61). Because his writings center on dialogue, his work is often called a “Bakhtinian approach” or dialogism (although as Holquist (1990, 2002) points out, the latter was not a term that Bakhtin himself used).

Although Bakhtin’s use of dialogue varies slightly depending on the context, it is clear that he viewed dialogue as an ongoing social process of making meaning that occurs between people in real, everyday life experiences. “Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to hear, to respond, to agree, and so forth” (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 40). Dialogue and dialogic relationships are ontological. They are our way of being in the world. “To be, means to communicate dialogically” (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 252). For Bakhtin, dialogue was not a casual conversation; rather, it was a much broader phenomenon, a relationship between self and other. Bakhtin believed that dialogue was a matter of utterances and that listeners or readers shape the utterance. The meaning of an utterance is only achieved at the moment of its production.

At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 428)

This idea contrasts with structuralist thinking wherein utterances are thought to have meaning in and of themselves based on the meanings of the words in the utterance. Bakhtin proposes that meaning is made as result of active dialogic interaction in context and is specific to the speakers/writers/readers, and to the time and place. “In dialogue, we creatively assimilate others' voices with our own, making something new in terms of the uniqueness of our own perspectives and histories” (Allen, 1996, p. 145).

Dialogism is described as Bakhtin’s way to overcome monologism, where a person or group unilaterally forces order on experience, such as Bakhtin’s experiences in Stalinist Russia. Dialogical dialogue was taken up by Bakhtin as a term to challenge monological dialogue where one voice of authority speaks a truth that was developed without challenge or interplay. Monological ‘truth’ is constructed abstractly and systematically from the dominant perspective and is dissociated from the person articulating it and from the social relations in which the speaker is embedded. Bakhtinan dialogic truth acknowledges the sets of social relations between and among speakers and assumes it emerges from the multiple voices engaged with each other from different points of view (Klages, 2012).

In monologism, the ability to produce autonomous meaning is denied. This imposed order causes a society to close down and it appears there is little hope or opportunity for new ideas to surface. However, while the ruling stratum tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, other classes and individuals are inclined to subvert this monologic closure. Dialogism encourages people to speak back to authoritative discourses and celebrate dialogic diversity. It recognizes a multiplicity of points of view, sometimes referred to as multi-voiced or inter-textual with multiple truths. Dialogism always implies the simultaneous existence of manifold possibilities, a smaller number of values, and the need for choice (Holquist, 2002).

The ethics of dialogism, manifest in the Bakhtinian mode of communication, lie in the notion of no alibi, Bakhtin’s term for one’s acknowledgment of one’s unique place in the world. This could be considered Bakhtin’s ethical imperative (Zappen, 2000). “To be responsible for the site we occupy in the space of nature and the time of history is a mandate we cannot avoid—in the ongoing and open event of existence we have no alibi” (Holquist, 2002, p. 178). Because our participation in the world is unique and non-recurrent, shared by no other person, no one else can accept responsibility on our behalf. We cannot justify our action by recourse to abstractions. We cannot act as if there is an alibi for being. If we do, we are pretenders. A pretender, in Bakhtin’s vocabulary, is “someone who tries to live in no particular place at all or from a purely generalized, abstract place” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 19).

A Practical Orientation to Practice

Bakhtin (1993), in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, claims:

Any kind of practical orientation of my life within the theoretical world is impossible: it is impossible to live in it, impossible to perform answerable deeds. In that world I am unnecessary; I am essentially and fundamentally non-existent in it. … [The theoretical world] cannot provide any criteria for the life of practice, the life of the deed, for it is not the Being in which I live, and if it were the only Being, I would not exist. (p. 9)

Here we are introduced to three other interrelated themes in Bakhtin’s thinking: the act or deed, answerability, and theoreticism. An overview of these three plus dialogism are displayed in Figure 1.

	Rather than a casual conversation, dialogue is an on-going social process of meaning making, which occurs among people in real, everyday life experiences. Dialogism respects context, and holds that everyone's participation iin the world is unique because everyone holds a unique place in the world. People are responsible for the site they occupy in nature and in time, and this responsibility cannot be ascribed to others (i.e. no alibi or pretending).
	People perform acts or deeds with their wole life, and every particular act and lived experience is a constituent moment of their life (i.e. part of their whole life). Acts are unique to the circumstances (context) and an integral part of the ongoing process of Being (each act is unique). The emphasis is not on the results of the act, but on the process of creating and authoring the act (deed, event); people are answerable for the act.
	People are answerable for the act rather than responsible for the act; they are engaged in answering (being attuned to the other). In deciding how to speak and respond to others, people are morally answerable for their acts (thinking, speaking, evaluating, deciding); they enter an ethical relationship, which is grounded in the particular act and context. The moral answerability of an act is lost when people detach themselves from the unity inherent in the act (the wholeness). People are interconnected with others and need to remain present in the moment when they engage in the answerable act.
	Rather than focusing on abstract acts, Bakhtin focuses on living acts performed in the real world. Rather than describing the world produced by the act, Bakhtinism describes the world in which the act is actually performed and becomes answerably aware of itself (the process of becoming). Everyday social life and our unique actions are rich and complex; therefore, we need to account for the eventness of the event (the answerable act) rather than separate the act from the world. The ethics of the act must embrace the immediacy of experience (rather than be distanced from the self). Human behavior is explained by the eventness and its becoming, rather than a system of abstract forms (Kantian ethics).

Figure 1. An Overview of Four Bakhtinian Concepts

For Bakhtin (1993), the act is a deed that is performed throughout life. “I act, i.e., perform acts, with my whole life and every particular act and lived-experience is a constituent moment of my life” (p. 3). His focus is on the unique placement of each individual human being, emphasizing the need of each to act. The content and sense of the act occur in the lived experience of that act and in the entirety of its circumstances; therefore, acts are unique to those circumstances and are thus an integral part of the ongoing process of Being.

Bakhtin proposes that “an act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two-faced Janus.… It looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture² and at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life” (p. 2). It is only in that “once-current event of Being in the process of actualization” (p. 2) that the act can “acquire a single unitary plane and be able to reflect itself in both directions” (p. 2). This Being-in-process must “must acquire the unity of two-sided answerability—both for its contents (special answerability) and for its Being (moral answerability)” (Bakhtin, 1993, pp. 2-3). The emphasis is not on what the action results in, the end product of action, but rather on the ethical deed in its making, as an act in the process of creating or authoring an event that can be called a deed, whether the deed be a physical action, a thought, an utterance, or a written text (Clark & Holquist, 1984).

The notion of answerability is key to the act. The term “answerability” instead of “responsibility” was chosen by the translator of Toward a Philosophy of the Act in order to foreground the root sense of the term—answering. Bakhtin (1993) emphasizes that in deciding how to speak and respond to others, we are morally answerable to them for our acts of thinking, speaking, evaluating, and deciding—an ethical relationship, grounded in the particular. This moral answerability is lost when

we detach a judgment from the unity constituted by the historically actual act/deed of its actualization and assign it to some theoretical unity, there is no way of getting out from within its content/sense aspect and into the ought and the actual once-occurrent event of Being… we are simply no longer present in it as individually and answerably active human beings. (Bakhtin, 1993, p.7)

Bakhtin’s intention was not to construct a logically unified system of values, but rather a concrete and value-governed architectonic (classification of knowledge) of actually experiencing the world centered on an individual interconnected with others. Locating the “ought” in the heart and mind of a human being is contrary to absolutized theoretical ethics. Answerability is the Self being attuned to the Other.

Bakhtin’s scholarship is a criticism of Kant’s theory of ethics, which Bakhtin contends is highly abstract and theoretical, thus lacking the immediacy of experience. It is a critique of theoreticism—the explanation of human behavior in terms of an abstract system of norms. The theoretical world is presented as opposed to/separated from the answerable act. He describes this as a “fatal theoreticism (the abstracting from my unique self)” and claims the “formal ethics of Kant and the Kantians… provide no approach to a living act performed in the real world” (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 27). Transferring the act-event to the world of theory eliminates the eventness and its becoming. It thinks away "the eventness" of events and leads to an under-appreciation of the richness of daily life and particular actions. Bakhtin argues for a rich understanding of the complex forms of everyday social life that “attempts to describe not the world produced by that act, but the world in which that act becomes answerably aware of itself and is actually performed” (1993, p. 31).

How Could Bakhtin Inform Home Economics Practice?

We face a significant challenge to contemporary home economics practice when it is consistently located within authoritative, monologic discourse and theoreticism. Some scholars have taken up Bakhtinian themes in other fields. Geographers Holloway and Kneal (2000) suggest that “if we can accept dialogism as a method, we can begin to think about strategies for writing and doing geography [differently]” (p. 84). Cunliffe, Helin, and Luhman (2014) advocate using Baktinian themes in business, management, and organizational theory as these themes offer a “distinct way to understand and represent sociality—a view of sociality that emphasizes the ‘living’ character of once-occurring events” (Section 21.3, para. 1). Cresswell and Hawn (2012) explore Bakhtin’s work as a way to make “phenomenologically immediate experience… more visible for research” (5. Conclusion, para. 1). White (2009) reflects on educational contexts and argues that in taking “a Bakhtinian approach to dialogue, the point is not to reach necessary consensus but, through aesthetic effort, to increase opportunities for appreciation of another and the differences they offer to the educational landscape” (p. 15). These are but a few examples that could inspire home economists.

Dialogic Inquiry Could Complement Dialectic Inquiry

Brown (1985) describes her mode of inquiry as dialectic inquiry following the logic of argumentative reasoning:

Rational inquiry begins when we meet ideas, beliefs, norms, or phenomena that appear to be contradictory or that conflict with our own expectations. Rationality seeks to resolve these differences not merely to have agreement but to develop a concept, belief, or norm grounded with validity of reasons. We start with the assumption that, among rational persons, differences in view can be removed when we seek rational agreement. To resolve differences, we must first comprehend them; then, through argumentative discourse, we seek agreement on the basis of rationally compelling argument. Comprehension and argumentation involve concepts and reason. Therefore to clarify the nature of the task, it is appropriate to give attention to (1) the process of conceptualization and (2) reason as critical reflection and to relate (1) and (2) to the specific purpose of the… inquiry. (Brown, 1985, p. 71)

As an adjective, dialectical means argumentative, in that two things have been selected that are contradictory, and are thoroughly discussed. Indeed, dialectic is Latin dialectica for the art of philosophical discussion or discourse. Dialectic was originally synonymous with logic. However, modern philosophy (refined by Kant, then by Hegel) eventually made it mean the "process of resolving or merging contradictions in character" (Harper, 2015). Bakhtin (1993) argues that modern philosophy is “permeated by the prejudice of rationalism” (p. 29). "Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, [then] cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that's how you get dialectics" (Bakhtin, 1986, p.147).

“Actual act performing thinking is an emotional-volitional thinking” (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 34). “Participative (unindifferent) thinking” (Bakhtin, 1991, p. 44) is posited in opposition to the theoretical thinking of dialectics. The latter deals with the explicit meaning of statements, and tends to lead to closure and resolution, whereas dialogic processes often do not lead to closure and remain unresolved. A dialogic exchange can be less competitive, and more suitable for facilitating cooperation. The main differences between these two approaches are summarized in Table 1 (extrapolated from White, 2011; Wegerif, 2006, 2008).

Brown’s (1985) work is not dialogic. This is not a criticism—it is just a fact. Her style of logical argumentation is simply quite different from Bakhtin’s dialogism. This does not mean dialectics is not necessary. On the contrary, developing a conception (i.e., using a process of conceptual analysis) makes a valuable contribution to home economics. But it is theoretic and could be monologic in that it seeks a definitive rational solution, resolution, or compromise. This paper suggests that home economists consider other ideas to shape practice, and dialogic inquiry could offer ideas that assist with our daily practice and everyday life.

Table 1. Comparing Dialectic and Dialogic Inquiry.

I hear resonances of Bakhtin’s dialogic thought in Jaggar's writing (1993, 1994a, 1994b). She questions practical reasoning (the anchor of Brown and Paolucci's 1979 recommended approach for home economics), noting that much of moral philosophy, particularly that which forms the foundation of practical reasoning, is grounded in contractualist approaches, which show that under certain ideal conditions, rational persons would freely agree to them. Jaggar contends that this hypothetical consensus does not work with controversial issues and that it is culturally- and gender-biased. She advocates for what she calls feminist practical dialogue.

She has constructed this notion of feminist practical dialogue from various accounts of women's grassroots activist organizations. It is characterized as: (a) beginning with people talking about their own lives, re-evaluating these narratives through collective reflection and revision; (b) including different perspectives especially those usually excluded; (c) taking place between people involving listening and hearing; and, (d) using a nurturant rather than adversarial style of discourse (Jagger, 1993, 1994a, 1994b). She emphasizes that there are no neutral frameworks or universal schemes of reason upon which to evaluate rational arguments; rather, they are socially constructed rules and standards and as such represent and embody social relations.

The questions of home economics (such as what ought to be done about poverty, food security, peace and security in families, homelessness, the exploitation of women and children, health, well-being, and sustainability) are likely to defy single unitary solutions. These problems affect different individuals and groups in different ways, and common agreement on what action to take is unlikely. Bakhtin draws attention to different ways of thinking about our relationship with our world and with the individuals and families of our work, and to the way we make sense of, interpret, and write about lived experience. These issues cannot be captured by abstract theories. For Bakhtin, “moral ‘oughtness’ is not a matter of a few important moments, nor it is a matter of big decisions; [rather] it is a constant fact of the most prosaic moments of life” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 17).

If we accept dialogism as a methodology to inform practice (in addition to other forms of inquiry, such as Brown's dialectic inquiry), it opens possibilities for understanding and doing home economics differently. Our practice is generally context-oriented and therefore requires an awareness of the substance of the dialogue as it takes place and develops. We could consider ways to engage in an open, ongoing discussion of practice among all affected by that practice. No one would be privileged and the norms for the dialogue would be decided among participants (Coulter, 1993). Ethics would be understood, and practiced, as a communicative, discursive recognition of real others, not just a matter of abstract principles or rules concerned with the procedural recognition of a generalized other (Levin, 1989).

In my own practice as a home economics teacher educator and supervisor of student teachers, I have attempted to use dialogic processes (Smith, 2001, 1996). I used aspects of dialogic supervision outlined by Waite (1995) based on Bakhtin. The dialogic supervisor becomes a witness to a teaching episode in order to enter into a dialogue with the teacher. The focus is less on “vision” and observable behaviours and more on “listening” and language. Dialogic supervision is employed for reflection and growth and not for monitoring for control. Participants are free to question anyone’s assumptions. In my work with teachers on various curriculum development projects, I have used collaborative action research where the emphasis is on working “with” and power “with” (Kreisburg, 1992) rather than power “over” and imposition of theoretical perspectives. As Burbules (1993) says, "We are drawn to dialogical approaches not because they are methods guaranteed to succeed, but fundamentally because we are drawn to the spirit of equality, mutuality, and cooperation that animates them" (p. 143).

Coming from a background of positivism, technocratic rationalism, and instrumentalism, I can say that adopting dialogic processes is not easy. I have found that it is difficult to untangle myself from the cultural frameworks, reference points, and discourses that have shaped me. It is not that I want to reject them outright, I just want to decenter them and their dominance, and be open to other possibilities as a home economics practitioner.

Bakhtinian themes could stimulate new thinking around how to write about lived experience with more novelistic approaches to research reports. The latter would recognize that (a) people's responses are conditional, (b) human circumstances are irreducible and contingent, and (c) context and condition mean there is no univocal or monologic text. Where truths are incomplete, unfinalizable, and valid for a particular context, generalizations to other situations and other contexts are tentative and provisional.

And unlike other philosophies that opposed radical individuality in the name of the greater primacy of socially organized groups, Bakhtin's philosophy never undercuts the dignity of persons. In fact, dialogism liberates precisely because we are all necessarily involved in the making of meaning. Insofar as we are all involved in the architectonics of answerability for ourselves and thus for each other, we are all authors, creators of whatever order and sense our world can have. (Clark & Holquist, 1984, p. 348)

I have barely scratched the surface of the depths of Bakhtinian themes that have possibilities for informing home economics practice. In the Baktinian sense, there is no last word and nothing is finalizable. My hope is that these utterances will provoke others to engage with Bakhtin’s ideas and to explore the themes presented here and other themes in his writings, such as participative thinking, thinking veridically, heteroglossia, chronotope (time-space in which language is located), carnivalesque, polyphony, prosaics, and unfinalizability.

References

ENDNOTE

1. I use the descriptor Home Economics because it is still commonly used where I practice. It is also known as Family and Consumer Science, Human Ecology, Family Studies, Home Science, and so on in other jurisdictions.

2. Bakhtin refers to the theoretical and theorized world as the “world of culture”

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