Part 2: Heteroglossia (Bakhtin and model collapse: How to use AI with expressive writing without generating AI slop)

by Tom Johnson on Jan 30, 2026 comments
categories: ai • ai-book-club • writing

This post is part of a series. See Part 1: Introduction for the previous section.

• Part 2: Heteroglossia
• Deep dive into heteroglossia
• Next section

Part 2: Heteroglossia

In general, good writing is informed by what others have said on the subject. It’s rare that we have a lot to say about a subject that no one else has said anything about. Any genuine inquiry usually includes a research component.

In my college days, I remember reading Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian literary theorist writing in the 1930s, on the idea of “heteroglossia” in texts (later published in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays). What stuck with me was Bakhtin’s idea that weaving multiple voices into writing brought the prose to life. That’s about all I remember about Bakhtin and heteroglossia, so I had to dig back into the text and get a bit more detail. In doing so, I was floored to see how relevant and revelatory Bakhtin and heteroglossia is within the context of AI-generated content. Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination might be one of the elements that separates soulless AI-generated writing from soul-filled human-written content.

I’ll try my best to unpack Bakhtin. My critical theory skills are somewhat rusty and he’s a bit opaque, as most philosophers are. (They’re wrestling with deep, complex concepts.) Basically, Bakhtin grounds his ideas by contrasting two different forms of writing: the poem versus the novel.

In the poem, the poet adopts more of a “monologic” approach to the content, expressing a single point of view with a specific style. Bakhtin describes this mode as a “monologically sealed-off” world (296) where the poet seeks a “unitary” language, stripping the word of others’ intentions to create an “Edenic” world of pure meaning (331). In other words, it’s writing as if you are the sole person on earth and act as if you completely own all the words and their meaning.

In contrast, with the novel, the writer embraces a much more dialogic (conversational) approach. The novelist doesn’t have this same Edenic world of pure meaning but instead welcomes more of a social heteroglossia. In other words, novelists immerse themselves in a language landscape with multiple layers of professional, generic, and social dialects (288). Novelists jump into the minds and voices of characters and settings, engaging in conversations with the reader (such as imagining responses and responding in advance), inviting readers into interactive explorations of thought, and more.

In a novel, there are many different characters and points of view all bumping into each other. The narrator traverses these different languages or perspectives (as in a busy marketplace with lots of conversations going on), wrestling with otherness. The novelist doesn’t just show characters; they “ventriloquate” through “social languages” that carry their own specific worldviews (299). This multiplicity of languages (the heteroglossia, or mixture of tongues) gives rise to an energy and vivaciousness in the language that pulls readers in, engaging them.

Deep dive into heteroglossia

In this spirit, let’s give voice to Bakhtin for our own bit of heteroglossia here. Bakhtin starts by describing how the poet typically adopts a monologic (single-voiced) stylistic approach, one that seeks to maintain “a complete single-personed hegemony over his own language” (297). Bakhtin writes:

“Stylistics [traditional formal analysis] locks every stylistic phenomenon into the monologic context of a given self-sufficient and hermetic utterance, imprisoning it, as it were, in the dungeon of a single context; it is not able to exchange messages with other utterances; it is not able to realize its own stylistic implications in a relationship with them; it is obliged to exhaust itself in its own single hermetic context. … It is precisely this orientation toward unity that has compelled scholars to ignore all the verbal genres (quotidian, rhetoric, artistic-prose) that were the carriers of the decentralizing tendencies in the life of language, or that were in any case too fundamentally implicated in heteroglossia.” (274)

In other words, the monologic approach imprisons language within its own self, robbing it of the meaning that surfaces when put in context with other speech, in dialogue. Bakhtin argues that traditional linguistics fails because it views the listener as a “passive” recipient—a view that creates “sclerotic” and “flat” discourse. Bakhtin continues:

“… Therefore, insofar as the speaker operates with such a passive understanding, nothing new can be introduced into his discourse; there can be no new aspects in his discourse relating to concrete objects and emotional expressions. Indeed the purely negative demands, such as could only emerge from a passive understanding (for instance, a need for greater clarity, more persuasiveness, more vividness and so forth), leave the speaker in his own personal context, within his own boundaries; such negative demands are completely immanent in the speaker’s own discourse and do not go beyond his semantic or expressive self-sufficiency.” (281)

Without more dialogic engagement outside him or herself, the speaker has nothing new to introduce into his or her own discourse. Semantically, the speaker resides in his or her own world of meaning, without crossing over into other semantic worlds. There’s no tension or uncertainty in the language or meaning, no contextual energy.

Now contrast this monologic speaker with a dialogic one. As soon as dialogic speakers engage in dialogue, they have to contend with other meanings and interpretations. They can’t blanket themselves from the larger semantic connections of their words, and this creates tension and friction to overcome. For the novelist, language is never “virginal” or “unuttered”; it’s always already “overpopulated” with the intentions of others. Bakhtin explains:

“Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.” (276)

When you venture forth into an alien/external context, you have to contend with meaning, just as I’m doing now by trying to interpret Bakhtin. I’ve used Bakhtin’s same words in my lexicon (alien, dispute, light, agitated, tension-filled, recoils), but now I’m forced to wrestle with their semantic meaning in ways that others, primarily Bakhtin, are using the words, parsing my meaning against Bakhtin’s meaning, who is likely parsing his meaning against other uses. This reflects Bakhtin’s core principle: “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker… appropriates the word” (293). Bakhtin continues:

“…In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system filled with specific objects and emotional expressions, and is indissolubly merged with the response, with a motivated agreement or disagreement. To some extent, primacy belongs to the response, as the activating principle: it creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and engaged understanding. Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other. (282)

Bakhtin says this dialogic engagement evokes a response; we interact like dueling banjos, one with another, in a dialectic, potentially upward spiral of exchanges that derives its energy from the juxtaposition, like two bodies of mass finding gravity from their proximity. Bakhtin continues expanding on the dialogic imagination:

“Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex inter-relationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on. Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social “languages” come to interact with one another. The speaker strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive [context-assimilating] background.” (282)

This intersection with the alien context, engaging in dialogue with another mind, is exciting. It’s producing energy and interest. The story starts to emerge, and points of friction are felt that inspire the speaker with new conflicts and frictions to address, or to absorb and expand on. In the novel, this intersection might take the form of a “hybrid construction”—an utterance that “belongs, by its grammatical… markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages’” (304). For example, a narrator impersonating another’s style with a sarcastic tone.

Can you see how the context with other languages and the dialogic imagination helps infuse writing with a sense of liveliness and meaning? Ultimately, Bakhtin says “Discourse lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context” (284). The meaning of language and meaningfulness of it are dependent on its larger context.

Bakhtin has a lot more to say on this subject, and he goes beyond my scope here. Basically, to write is to engage in this wrestling match with meaning. Meaning emerges, he says, in the space between our own use of the words and the context provided by others. He famously notes that “Discourse lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context” (284). When we write, we’re wrestling with the meaning others have imputed to these words, much the same way I’m wrestling with Bakhtin’s ideas and trying to formulate my own ideas about what he means but in a new context.

This element of heteroglossia often provides an engagement factor to content. As I’m writing right now, about the need for a variety of voices in a personal essay, I’m bumping up against Bakhtin and his ideas here, and in this wrestling with others, my writing is taking on a new sort of feeling: the sense of a mind thinking. I’m not just stating an idea as the monologic voice of a personless encyclopedia article. I’m working through other authors and perspectives, other terms and language, and trying to find my way to the goal I have through these other voices. Imagine me writing this same essay, but not referencing or navigating any external voices — the writing would fall flat. But with the external sources, I’m forced to navigate through them, to align or misalign with reasoning and judgment.

I think this sense of navigation through what Bakhtin calls a “dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents” (276) is what generates a mind in motion—a Montaignesque or Descartes-like sense of thinking and wrestling with those other ideas. This mind engaging with other perspectives creates a sense of soul. You can feel it. The voice isn’t monologic; it’s dialogic. Bakhtin warns that when a writer is “deaf” to this organic double-voicedness, the work becomes a “closet drama”—a lifeless imitation where the language feels as “awkward and absurd” as stage directions (327). In the same way, when you remove the diversity from language, you end up more often than not with slop.

The element of heteroglossia is precisely why Meghan O’Gieblyn’s prose comes to life in God, Human, Animal, Machine. O’Gieblyn freely brings in the first-person (the “I”) into her writing, but despite the few plot points in her book (going to a conference, addressing questions from the audience, etc.), her intellectual journey is where the true dialogism happens. She mingles with Aristotle, Neils Bohr, and Ray Kurzweil, providing her own commentary and analysis. In Bakhtinian terms, she’s orchestrating a “marketplace of ideas,” allowing her own intentions to be “refracted” at different angles depending on the “socio-ideologically alien” nature of the voices she invokes (300). I love the term “refracted” because it perfectly conveys the bending and wrangling of ideas required when you move through alien contexts.

I’m convinced that it’s the heteroglossia that gives O’Gieblyn’s text energy (along with many other personal essayists, who browse different authors and spaces in meandering ways). There’s no sense of O’Gieblyn’s content being machine written because the “social atmosphere” (277) of the words makes the facets of her arguments sparkle. In this post so far, I’m 1,000+ words into it and have only mentioned a few other voices. I could venture into Julia Kristeva on intertextuality, Tzvetan Todorov and narratology, Emmanuel Levinas and otherness, and more. But hopefully I’ve communicated my point already.

Just bringing in a multiplicity of voices and perspectives isn’t enough. Bakhtin says the novelist must organize these voices into a cohesive, harmonious way — “maintain[ing] the unity of his own creative personality and the unity … of his own style” (298). In interweaving quotes into my own essay, I’m afraid I haven’t done such a good job at maintaining my own creativity unity here, but the attempt is here. We want the reader to steer us through these ideas in a graceful, conversational, and fair way. In fact, in O’Gieblyn’s book, I wanted fewer external voices and more O’Gieblyn. Striking this balance between self and other is key for the writer to be a pleasing read.

Next section

Continue on to the next section, Part 3: From Bakhtin’s heteroglossia to AI model collapse.

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