How is meaning produced and interpreted? From the readings, it is not difficult to point out that there is a common thread and that is dialogue. The dialogue exists in daily activities and in personal experiences. It is a dialogue between an individual and a society or a culture or within oneself. It is through the dialogue that we produce meanings and interprete meanings.
In _Dialogic Imagination_ Mikhail Bakhtin points out the the nature of dialogue in the production and reappropriation of literature. Contrast to monologue, he proposes that meanings derive from dialogues (literary works/ authors/ readers). Similar discussions could be found in Lefebvre’s the production of space-- dialogue between individual and collective experiences and Bourdieu’s discussion on “habitus.” The ongoing process of shaping and reshaping makes the dialogues more and more complicated and in the same way, layers and layers of meanings intriguing. The production of meanings or the production of space or “habitus” is to dissect “daily life” and unveils how and why we are both the subject and the object in a dialogue. Most of the time we will utilize bodies to experience the dialogic process such as in Paul Christensen’s “Mac and Gravy.” We are aware that we are making history and on the other hand, we are the production of history. The body becomes a site of struggle be it cultue, class, gender or ideological. Therefore, I do think that the discussion on “reflexivity” and “reflection” proposed by Barbara Babcock is quite useful for it could be applied to personal experiences as well as the dialogue between individuals and the society. The dialogue is a way of constructing identity through gazing and being gazed; or as Lacan suggests, a mirror stage. It is also through the act of interpellation that we situate ourselves in the river of history and to look back in time (past experience) and predict future. However, as Elaine Lawless points out that the way or the position we take is resulted in different mode of interpellation; that is we have different lenses toward the same thing. So how do we distance ourselves to something while getting involved in? Or are we all equal in the dialogue?
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