Dialogical Imagination

Dialogical imagination refers to a way of creating imagination through the dialogue process which is based on the theory of linguist M. Bakhtin (1984). It is both related to or having the character of dialogue and its establishment. A dialogical is encountered communication presented in the form of dialogue. Dialogic processes refer to implied meaning in words uttered by a speaker and interpreted by a listener. We may enter the "dialogical imagination" that Bakhtin discusses by entering another's fantasy, expression and narration world, and forgetting of one's own and asking one's own questions.

As mentioned by M. Holquist (1990) derived from M. Bakhtin “in dialogue the person who gives direction to the narratives is the listener, but not the teller”; and the things give direction to the listener is imagination made of memories and desires like stories. In the mosaic form of immense cities, the stories and past experiences which give form to our memories and practices. Either they or narratives set up the cities, and we could edify on the users’ operations detectable in spatial narratives through establishing and perceiving dialogues and their embodiment in spaces and city within “dialogical imagination”.

Beyond the imagination of authority -such as city planner, architect, client, etc. -, different social actors will have different spatial narratives to tell about their practices through the city. The following argument about cities is advanced by Tonkiss (2005): “Cities, after all, are dense material realities which also take their shape in memory and perception”; they are both real also imagined as in narratives. Different ways of being in the city can be both a question and an answer to establishing spatial narratives through ordinary dialogues practiced in everyday life. Dialogues are created spontaneously in the city; acted and fabricated by the ordinary people just want to share their stories.

In the dialogue as an action, speech allows the transfer of information among the individuals through verbal traditions, practical creativity, and performances of everyday life and ensures a social exchange. According to De Certeau (1984), the social exchange “builds an action against and action and a body, voice, and emphases against a body and it requires a complete supplementary information hierarchy required for interpreting a message beyond a simple statement – counseling and saluting rituals, stereotyped statements, nuances added with toning, and the mimics”. The dialogue established immanently to this exchange brings the “dialogical imagination” together with the requirement of the unconscious and fundamental relationship type between voice, meaning, and body enabling the individual to introduce himself/herself and to individualize.

The act of establishing dialogue, with an epistemological reference to Piaget (1977), has the “set of balances” that are the “individual and interpersonal coordination, the most fundamental structures of the coordination of actions”. In the way of establishing dialogue, the imagination creates an action transforming and shaping the use of common language in dialogue through the reuse, and it opens a private domain for the subject within the imposed order. It is related to the authority relationships structuring the social area, as well as the information domain. By granting the individual with privileges such as achieving knowledge and ordering and subjectively integrating them, “it enables the subject to have an authority on it, and thus the imposition of ready and prearranged information becomes ineffective” (Berger, Luckmann, 1966). Regarding the imagination in dialogue, the point where the autonomy emerges and creates itself is the “narration”.

The narration is basically the built “discourse”, but the dialogue constitutes the “fiction” in narration. Foucault (2006) argues that fiction is the way of narration’s organization or, in other words, the different organization types in which it is “told”. The dialogue constructs the relationship between the narrator and the narrated subject established through the discourse itself. The dialogical imagination that enables to an overlap of multiple narrations and generates patterns is capable of producing the spatial narratives. Spatial narratives established through this ordinary practice of verbal communication is the creation of “dialogical imagination”.

As a result of the performed analyses of the processes, the dialogue is a spatial narrative as a speech act (a). It is the dialogical imagination in the process (b) of the establishment of narration, where this speech act transforms into cognitive and literary representation style. This is a spatial narrative maintaining its traces of experiences, which constitute the establishment process, on time and space (c). The spatial narratives are produced through the transformation of the dialogic imagination in these various processes of dialogue and the integration and overlap in form of network-like pattern.