Abstract

This question, the engine humming at the center of Bakhtin's vision, generating alien words like heteroglossy and polyphony, is one that rhetoricians do not ask. And our work is poorer for the silence. We make inquiries, sometimes very probing ones, into ethos, and occasionally we investigate some rhetor in great detail. But we take identity for granted. It is Plato or Socrates or Burke doing the speaking. we fail to notice is that these labels do not designate autonomous, univocal entities. They designate composites-collections of voices, some in harmony, some in conflict. Mikhail Bakhtin, then, has something to tell us: listen. Listen and you will hear a verbal carnival of such depth and diversity, of such extravagance and exuberance, that your ears will never be the same again. The most immediate consequence of this newfound affluence is that the traditional triangular paradigm of rhetorical events becomes lopsided. The speaker's corner becomes very heavy. But two questions, in parallel with Bakhtin's obsessive probe, present themselves-Who is listening? and What is being said? -and they find similarly multivocal answers. This additional plurality does not so much balance the triangle as burden it. That is, as soon as we start to listen more carefully, the paradigm proves hopelessly inadequate. It simplifies interactions to the point of insignificance, it undervalues or ignores essential elements, and it effects an artificial closure on an inherently openended process. Applying it to any rhetorical event, once we are fitted with our new ears, reveals this inadequacy, but, to keep things in the family, consider how the paradigm fares in an examination of multivalence in the Phaedrus.