The body and language: M. M. Bakhtin on ontogenetic development

James Wertsch has been influential in prompting a cultural turn in developmental psychology. Drawing upon the Russian philologist M. M. Bakhtin, Wertsch advocates a sociocultural approach involving the claim that agents’ development and action are mediated by social systems of signs and symbols. We seek to improve upon Wertsch’s understanding of agency by revisiting Bakhtin and the sociocultural quality of embodied action inherent in the phenomenology addressed in Bakhtin’s early work. In particular, this paper takes issue with the notion of mediation because it implies an approach to language that neglects the phenomenological immediacy of experience that is central to embodied action. This paper uses the early work of Bakhtin as a lens by which an idea that occurs in Bakhtin’s later work - speech genres - can be reinterpreted. Doing so enables us to propose how it is possible to have a sociocultural theory of individual ontogenetic development that includes the phenomenological immediacy of experience.