The dialogism principle of M. M. Bakhtin as a methodological basis for studying social and cultural identity

The paper attempts to present some ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin as a basis for social and philosophic comprehension of social and cultural identity. The identity is understood as a necessary structure of consciousness that arises through the act of self-identification with some value-complexes and determines the orientation of human behavior. The emphasis is made on the Bakhtin's concept of "border", since the border as an expression of difference plays the role of underlying mechanism of identification processes. The author considers the model of fundamentally incomplete identity as a correlate of Bakhtin's dialogism principle and shows that identification always develops in dialogical space. The author notes and analyses some contradictions related to this model, namely the contradiction between the dynamic nature of dialogic identity and static character of social and cultural identities, individual unwillingness to change them. The "my own Self" concept is also taken into consideration, being interpreted not as a substantial core of personality, but as one of the dynamic ideas that can change its content over time. The paper also provides the typology of identity utterances and draws attention to the fact that identification reveals itself as a fight in field of heteroglossia.