Bakhtin Said What?

Bakthtin said it and I agree: Language cannot be held down. Language has a greater means of understanding than either of us care to acknowledge; it has so much more power than we give it. Language has no base or limit and takes on any shape it wants. It can take several forms and mean everything and anything to every single person of the 6, 799, 929, 555 population who inhabit our great planet (http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/popclockworld.html). I don't mean to put words into Bakhtin's mouth, but my interpretation is that he believed language cannot be connected to anything tangible because it is far too great to be anything. Perhaps that is a little too general to comprehend just what is intended, but really that language means whatever the beholder wants it to be.

Though language can be interpreted in various ways, it does not always mean that it should be or that everyone can understand it as such. To exemplify this, Bakhtin uses a peasant who cannot coordinate his understanding to that of an upper social class' intellectual/academic training. Can a peasant understand what a scholars spend years researching and studying in one discussion? What does it take to have a "common" person understand the language that people who are in a higher intellectual ladder use? Does uncomprehending mean that a "peasant" cannot learn? If so, what does it take?

The peasant can learn language and will learn. Sure it takes greater means and far more work, but it happens. The peasant can learn through the interaction with alternative resources such as written words(book, magazines, newspapers), television, and the internet. The peasant finds it difficult to comprehend language as a person who is formally taught in an institution of learning to analyze and make meaning; the peasant must settle to learn language through alternate outlets of communication.

Bahktin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.