International Relations as Emergent Bakhtinian Dialogue
Among the many points of reference that the field of international relations shares with political science is a focus on the point of decision. The process of airing different points of view is seen as a prelude to decision. What happens after the decision is taken is treated as implementation of, or protest against, that decision, or as a prelude to a new decision. Given such a framing, dialogue tends to be treated teleologically as an instrument for reaching decision. The terms that are supposed to incite the scholarly exchange in this forum, dialogue and synthesis, point in the same direction. Dialogue is supposed to lead to synthesis and is validated by dint of this causal chain.

The philosopher of dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin, is very much against such a reading. From his earliest writings in prerevolutionary Russia through his last unfinished manuscript in the mid-1970s, he evolved a view of dialogue as a human condition, as an ethical imperative, and even as a prerequisite for thinking. Consider what Bakhtin (1984:87–88) says when he writes:

the idea lives not in one person's isolated individual consciousness; if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others . Human thought becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else's voice, that is, in someone else's consciousness expressed in discourse.

Such a view of dialogue—or, to proceed from the two to the many, heterologue—points to a rather different conceptualization of politics and the social than the decision-focused one described …