e. Vigilancia de virus respiratorios durante 2014

While Michel de Certeau’s notion of the everyday as a sphere of creative inventiveness and tactical resistance together with Chris Marker’s photographic practice provide an overall methodological orientation for this work, my actual analytical method when it comes down to working with textual and visual sources is based on the theories developed by a prominent Russian literary scholar, philosopher, and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin and, in particular, his concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism. In his well- known essay, “Slovo v Romane” (“Discourse in the Novel”), Bakhtin defines heteroglossia, or raznorechie in Russian, as a hybrid construction that mixes two or more statements belonging to different linguistic styles. These different “languages,” as he calls them, with their respective worldviews, are usually combined seamlessly within the novel without any formal boundaries separating them. These invisible dividing lines run through a syntactic whole (usually within the same sentence) so that the same word can belong to different “languages” at the same time, enabling an internal dialogic relationship between various parts of this kind of hybrid linguistic construction.22

Essentially, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia recognizes the multiplicity of voices within a tightly woven fabric of articulations, which defines the novel. What is truly groundbreaking about his idea of semantic polyphony is that it goes beyond simply identifying the distinct voices of the author and various characters to highlight the much more complex hybridity contained within the same enunciating subject. In other words, voices initially belonging to different originating subjects become commonly separated

22 _{M.M. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane” in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, t. 3: Teoriia romana (1930-1966}

gg.) [Collected works in 7 volumes, vol. 3: Theory of the novel] (Moskva: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur,

from their sources and intermingled with other voices, thus blurring the distinction between what comes from within and what comes from without. This constant process of assimilation of foreign voices into the master voice of the novel identified with the author is at the heart of writing. The final meta-text, then, becomes a palimpsest of all the bits and pieces of primary sources, so to speak, which go into its construction. The traces of heterogeneity are never, however, completely effaced, surviving in the stylistic, grammatical, and lexical variation, which marks the meta-text.

The original Russian word raznorechie also captures another important nuance which is lost in the English translation of the term as heterglossia. Raznorechie is a compound lexical unit made up of two separate words – razniy (“different, other”) and rech’ (“speech”). The latter is a cognate of the words ruchei and reka, Russian for “stream” and “river,” respectively. Both rech’ and its two cognates point to the flowing quality of both human speech and water. Just like water can dissolve most other substances or, at least, incorporate them into itself, so does human speech have the capacity to weave various disparate articulations, affects, and intents into a single fluid unity. While we cannot always determine accurately what other elements may be admixed to the water without running its sample through a chemical analysis test, we can usually tell something about its taste, smell, color, temperature, and overall quality without recourse to sophisticated technical measurements.

This understanding of Bakhtin’s original concept has informed my own approach to both textual and visual sources that I use in my work. Paying close attention to such variables as the choice of words, the form of address, the overall tone, as well as spatial, temporal, and discursive placement of the material in relation to other materials and

variation within its successive iterations has enabled me to take my analysis beyond the level of words and ostensible meanings. In order to undertake this kind of close reading, it was essential that I have access to a full run of the key journals I am working with within the temporal boundaries of my project. In other words, rather than focusing on a select number of major articles and documents directly relevant to my research agenda, I would pay as much attention to the intervening informational “gaps.”

This focus of the immediate, originating context has proved to be a wellspring of intellectual blessing. The tiny fragments recovered from other host texts have often turned into important clues leading to new insights and important discoveries. As one example, a passing mention of film exchanges between North Korea and the Soviet Union during the 1950s in one of my sources prompted me to wonder whether the Soviet Union might have preserved the copies of those films in its archives, which, as it turned out, was indeed the case, leading to an important discovery for the history of Korean cinema, as a whole.23

I also read the North Korean periodicals as heterglossic texts in their own right. Thus, if we think of the common discursive field in our case in terms of the syntactic whole, we can then begin to distinguish between several, often overlapping, “languages” within it, which splits the apparent unity of official discourse. The voices in this discursive chorus whose traces survive on the pages of North Korean journals mix various perspectives, often within the same essay, while belonging to institutionally, personally, and conceptually different agents of enunciation. One of my key sources – the film journal Chosŏn yŏnghwa (“Korean Film”) – presents an interesting case in point. As

23 _{V.S. Mironov, ed. 15 Let Osvobozhdeniia Korei [15 years since Korea’s liberation] (Moskva: Izd-vo} IMO, 1960), 115.

the only specialized periodical on cinema in North Korea, it catered to a diverse and broad audience from industry professionals to ordinary cinephiles, which explains why it was able to emerge as what in Bakhtin’s terminology would be called dialogic site, a forum that brought together both informed and lay opinions to bear upon an ongoing and evolving discussion of issues in contemporary North Korean film theory and practice.