The Ideal Reader, The Hypertext Reader

". . . consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien disparate discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself; the process of distinguishing between one's own an another's discourse, between one's own and another's thought. . . what first occurs is a separation between internally persuasive discourse and authoritarian enforced discourse, along with a rejection of those congeries of discourses that do not matter to us, that do not touch us."

"Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean." --The Dialogic Imagination 345-46

Once again, Bahktin confronts us with this notion that the self contains intermingling ideologies, assimilated from the external cultural sphere. In other words, the individual consciousness is saturated by heteroglossia, or a myriad of existing worldviews extracted from larger society. How then, can individual ideologies be created? What becomes of free and unique thought from here? Bahktin would say not to fret: the answer lies in "internally persuasive discourse." People eventually begin to single out which of their inner discourses they most closely identify with. This discourse will then be christened that person's "own" belief system. But the internally persuasive discourse truly does not become personal property until it is put into practice. Such a discourse will unavoidably meet new contexts, unexpected conditions, and arguments from conflicting discourses. Exactly like the utterance, internal discourse is subject to heterglot environments, which have a critical function that subsequently inflects the internal discourse's prior structure. Apparently, it is heteroglossia that allows internal discourse to assume a self-reflexive consciousness and basically be honed to the specific needs of the individual persuaded by it. As long as the person identifies with their personal discourse, their ideology is bound to be reconfigured by questions and challenges it encounters in the future. Since we all create and encounter different contexts, ideology can be individuated. Once someone has taken in an ideology and asserted it as her own, she can then begin to personalize it by applying it to new life situations.


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