I have been thinking a bit about Bakhtin’s concepts of excess of sight and the non-alibi of being as outlined in Jeff King’s talk that I posted about last Saturday. It has already had an impact on the way that I have been talking to students since Monday as we feel our way through the various constructs that lead them to Qualified Teacher Status.
It has certainly impacted my language, and as I am also re-reading at the moment Peter H Johnston’s pair of wonderful small books, Choice Words and Opening Minds, I am thinking constantly about the way we shape language to enable children to develop agency in writing, thinking and in the choices they make. Johnston’s fundamental thesis, I guess, if you could trace it, is that the choices we make and the care we take with language, as teachers, releases children into making the range of choices they need to become fully literate. The same goes for teaching students.
I find myself agreeing again with Jeff King when he says that our feedback mechanisms currently ‘do not meet the criteria of the architectonic self and cannot be considered a relational practice.’
To recap, what Bakhtin calls the ‘architectonic self’ consists of three aspects, the I-for-myself, the other-for-me and the I-for-the-other. The first one relates to the non-alibi of being, whilst the second two relate to the idea of excess of sight, that ability that enables others to see us differently (and more fully?) than we can ourselves. The non-alibi self (the I-for-myself) is that which assumes the autonomy and responsibility for reacting and responding to others’ excess of sight. The terminology is unfortunate: I don’t think that Bakhtin saw the I-for-myself as something necessarily selfish. It is better considered a guarantor, should we choose to activate it, that allows us to make decisions about others’ perspectives on us.
There is a lot of half-helpful cod psychology (LinkedIn positively oozes the stuff) that we must ‘be our own person,’ not ‘subject to others’ judgements’ of our worth or actions. Somehow, if we are put upon by others’expectations, it must be their issue, not ours. It may just be, according to Bakhtin, that they have excess of sight we can not see yet. So, can we just live with the view of ourselves that we assume?
Well, yes and no. Hopefully the rest of this post will explain what I mean by that.
Listening on Sunday morning to Stephen Palmer, the rector at St Aldates in Oxford, teaching on the action and purpose of the Holy Spirit, gave a sudden twist to Bakhtin’s typology. I don’t usually expect sermons to impact on my ontological understanding on a slow Sunday morning (though, on reflection, they should and I wish that they would more often), but Stephen’s exposition of this passage in John 14, so close to my thinking about Bakhtin, raises some challenging understanding of what exactly is going on inside us:
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them……anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them (John 14: 16-23)
We now, as Christian people, are indwelt not just my Jesus, but also by his father and by the Holy Spirit.
This raises the possibility of a whole load of different aspects to our selfhood, beyond that imagined or described by Bakhtin (perhaps here standing as a representative of ‘the world [that] cannot see him’): for instance, there is now the I-for-Jesus (and conversely the Jesus-for-me), and the Jesus-for-others (acting through me), as well as, intriguingly and separately, I-for-the-Spirit, the-Spirit-for-me and the-Spirit-for-others. The intertwining and perichoresis that this hints at is complex: the whole concept of God the Father, Son and Spirit working out their dance within my life, seeking to live my life with and through me – this is alarming to most Christians, or at least it should be, but this challenging passage in John 14 has been in the bible for a long time and really the Christian church should have figured it out by now.
The Holy Spirit certainly is blessed with (suffers from?) excess of sight. His ability to discern soul and spirit within us, as the writer to the Hebrews has it, and his understanding of our whole (architectonic) self – these beg the question as to whether his presence is that of a visitor in the attic, tiptoeing past us on the stairs as he seeks to impact our world, or a clean-sweeping, redecorating home-owner, taking full possession, enabling us, through the suffering and joy that that entails, to take our place as a living stone in the body of Christ (1 Peter 2), or part of the lamp set upon a lampstand and city on a hill (Matthew 5)
John clearly describes the homecoming of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit within us as the latter. Our architectonic selves are reoriented so completely as to be both examples and agents of transformation.
The implications of this, especially in community (and Bakhtin was clear that the architectonic self functioned fully only in community) raise some fascinating possibilities, allowing the prophetic and missional lives of any Christian community or church to offer, humbly, the excess of sight into our communities that we need. It opens up, for instance, the possibility of the exercise of the gifts of the Holy Spirit both within and beyond churches (I have always enjoyed Paul S Williams’ teaching that the gifts of the Spirit are given for practice in the church but actual use beyond it), making sense of the purpose and power of prophecy, word of knowledge and healing within a congregation. It brings a dynamic to the humble offer to another of allowing that excess of sight in a way that makes complete sense of ‘mutual submission’ – and teaches our non-alibi self to be humble about the possibility that a) others can see us more clearly than we can ourselves and b) therefore we ought to find a way of allowing ourselves to be discipled within that excess of sight.
Areas of vocation and ministry, the nature of Christian community and service, the way we relate to the world – all of these are enriched by thinking about the internal relationships between our architectonic self and the indwelling Godhead. Dallas Willard’s dictum about the Christian life being our lives as if Jesus was living them suddenly has new impetus as we allow Him to govern the different aspects of our self.
There is much more to explore in this, and you will easily think of other areas of communal and personal discipleship that can be reimagined using Bakhtin’s helpful schema. What it does for many Christians brought up to think of the action of the Spirit as being for us as individuals, is to map out new ways of seeing his work as first of all communal, with ourselves as those Spirit-inspired agents of transformation.