Not only is the space of dialogue unfixed, but its temporal makeup remains out of joint as well. Key to the dialogue’s internal dynamic is temporal disjointedness, the fact that the fullness of dialogue can never be at once, but rather is contingent on before and after, on what is understood as passed and that which is to come. Dialogue forms on the sum of separate times as well as the sum of divided space (which is in fact very different from a single homogeneous space).
I find Georges Canguilhem’s thoughts on the constitution of the concept to be profoundly productive. “To work on a concept is to explore the variations in its extension and its intelligibility. It is to generalize it by including in it the traits of its exceptions. It is to export it outside its own domain, to use it as a model or conversely to look for a model for it, in short it is to give to it, bit by bit, through ordered transformation, the function of a form.”[1] When dealing with a concept, a rather elastic process ensues in which norms and exceptions matter almost equally. Far from a simple matter of mechanical application, to labor critically with concepts becomes materially susceptible to the passing of time, to the processes endured in time. Gradually, it adopts the function of a form. As Malabou argues in “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic,” the concept is plastic, malleable and more congenial to duration rather than origin or end.[2]The everyday in Ribeyro’s fiction adopts or adapts to the form that is the short story. In the everyday, that is, the form of the short story gains plasticity injected with new critical and creative force. It is in the everyday that is the form of the short story where techné and form meet to put forth a different figuration of realist temporality that is oriented neither to origin nor to the end.
According to Dmitri Nikulin in On Dialogue, “Dialogue is an ever renewable exchange that allows for an unfinalizable thematization of the personal other in the presence of the other person. Otherness of the person cannot be rejected, suspended, overcome, or sublated. This rigidity of the inexhaustible other of both the self and the other person opposes any attempts at its assimilation and reconciliation with that one sees as being the case. Because of this, dialogue does not have to be consensual. Moreover, insofar as dialogue is personal, i.e., allows for the unwrapping of the personal other, it thus implied vocal polyphonic interaction, and as such it presupposes a dramatic conflict, a dissensual diaphonia, which is opposed to a consensual symphonia” (211). In other words, dialogue is structurally diaphomous and polyphonous, and thus becomes enabled by dramatic conflict and dissent. Unfinalizable, the dialogue works as it goes its own unendedness.
Being positioned in a dialogue precedes any thought or wonderment about the dialogue. Speaking of the dialogue can only follow the indisputable recognition that people are in dialogue. The structure and phenomenology of the dialogue requires that a positionality toward (in) it be taken prior to any exercise of abstraction that seeks to deal with the (construed) objectivity/reality of the dialogue. Having spoken of positionality, one feels compelled to question the who of the positionality: who is in place to hold a dialogue? Can anyone indeed engage in a dialogue? And whoever that may be, the important point is who that one already is prior to the dialogue. Thus, it seems that being ought to precede dialogical dynamics. And it seems that the question of being when it comes to the dialogical context, which requires that the being positions itself (entering, remaining in and/or exiting the dialogue), the body is as crucial as the speech exchanged and shared in communication.
Dialogue is not merely about disembodied words, but about the actual presence of bodies that (inter)communicate such words. The body cannot be relegated to speech emanating from these bodies, because for dialogue to exist at all, bodies must frame it. Hence, positionality, far from being solely abstract for attesting to the primacy of the ideological or moral position of the speakers, alludes to the singularly physical presence of speaking bodies. “Being in dialogue is not a relation, because, as a relation, it would imply an utterly derivative “logical” character of the person as a dialogical partner to another who is determined y the primary logos of such relation. And yet, being in dialogue, dialogical being is not prior to dialogue: dialogue allows for the person to realize and disclose herself in her eidema within dialogue but not to construct herself, i.e., not to produce herself for the first time. Besides, dialogue involves a relation (multiple relations) to the other as an equal partner and an interlocutor as an inexhaustible personal eidema is involved which cannot be unfinalizably clarified otherwise than in dialogue but which itself also does not arise from dialogue. Dialogical being is thus not a relation in the dialogue, yet cannot be exemplified without or outside of the dialogue either” (italics from original, Dmitri Nikulin, 233).
Covering a different angle, in “Dialogical Characteristics of Philosophical Discourse,” Frederic Cossutta explores the inherently dialogic quality of philosophical discourse and thus makes the conceptual association that every attempt at reaching or formulating the truth must bear a dialogical structure for only dialogues can approximate truth; philosophy must be a dialogue that includes a plurality of rather many and rather different dialogues. The approximation of the truth happens less directly than as a result of uncovering what is not true, by exposing the gaps, crevices, and knots in what presents itself as continuous, smooth and uniform canvass of truth. As Cossutta describes, the dialogue stages a testing and questioning ground for genres that have historically nurtured a pretension to a monopoly of truth. Hence, dialogue offers truth in so far as it is allowed to prowl and raze that which crumbles and thus reveals itself as untruth. Based on the theory that “the dialogue form itself is, in the order of discourse, the analogue of the dialectical relationship of the One with itself. In effect, dialogue is the dialogue of the logos with itself, dialogue interior to the logos that is interior to the soul,” Cossutta advances that dialogue’s structure is transcendental.[1] Thus, the dialogue cannot be seen as techne or a rhetorical artifice.
The literary and philosophical tradition of the dialogue, the dialogic form of communication (that demands more than one voice), extends as far back as the history of ideas itself. For instance, the thoughts of Socrates have reached us in the form of dialogues from which the Socratic (dialogic) method of knowledge acquisition and imparting stems. The codices of the Mayan civilization also bear a dialogic component to them in that their narrative com es to a life of comprehension and dissemination once an interpreter reads and almost literarily fleshes out (incarnates in his or her own speech) the meaning of the drawing in them. The rich tradition of the dialogue (or conversation) seems too long and rich to be possibly exhausted here, a comprehensiveness that is not the aim of this project nonetheless. Politico-philosophically speaking, the dialogue holds another set of meanings and values, particularly when referring to the formation of the freely thinking individual privileged by the liberal and republican traditions.
Anyone who accepts the rules of, and engages in, dialogue is transformed by the relationship between the participants. In effect, in adhering to these rules, the participants share their ethical horizon and model themselves on the norms that follow from their adherence. In this sense, to engage in dialogue is not only to understand the Just and the Good, but also to become just and good. The implicit ethical norms that we just abstracted from the rules command the ethos and the actions of the participants (70).
“The setting of each dialogue can be reinterpreted as a repetition and reconfiguration of institutional forms within the theoretical space of Platonism. The exchanges between the participants in dialogue are deeply intertwined with relationships to their sensory and phenomenal selves and extricably linked to the social and political life of Athens” (71).
“Analytic and demonstrative activity are therefore permanently embedded in the communicative conditions that put in play the ethical norms that function as an a priori axiology of the dialogical process” (71-72).
[1] According to Cossutta the dialogue, in so far it is the “questioning dialogue, serves as a forensic tool in that “allows us to confront all of the mode of discourse that have pretensions to the truth: poetry, myth, rhetoric, and so on, so as to negate those pretensions: dialogue is above all a proving-ground for the truth of other forms of discourse.” In this section Cossutta quotes from the works of Monique Dixsaut’s Essence of Being a Philosopher. (52)
[1] Quoted in Catherine Malabou’s “The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic,” Hypatia, Vol. 15, N. 4, Fall 2000, 203.
Realism 