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On this level, however, we should not suppose that Bakhtin’s perspective is free of teleology. It is, for instance, according to a ‘decisive evolution’ of the novel that Dostoevsky’s work appears (‘. . 26 But there is a ‘beyond’ to dialogism strictly speaking, seen in the way a singular expression manages to ‘overcome’ its own time, and contributes to the formation of a higher spiritual form in such a way that its singularity belongs to a larger universality. 31 But let us look further at how Bakhtin responds to Hegel on this level.

Similarly, the ‘anti-bourgeois’ art of aesthetic modernity in the fine arts calls for an evaluation of what is at stake there in terms of the ideological and historical developments of contemporary culture. If the task of historical poetics is to develop a more general understanding of this dimension in understanding the relation of meaning to universal history, the concept of the chronotope appears to be central for grasping the real possibility of the dynamic at work in aesthetic creation. The chronotope allows us to see the emergence of singular cultural expressions, which already possess an ‘historical individuality’ because of their existence as aesthetic forms, and also allows us to conceive the ‘trans-historical’ relations of these forms among themselves.

According to Holquist, ‘Dialogism, then, is part of a major tendency in European thought to reconceptualise epistemology the better to accord with the new versions of mind and the revolutionary models of the world that began to emerge in the natural sciences in the nineteenth century . . Bakhtin begins by accepting Kant’s argument that there is an unbridgeable gap between mind and the world . . The non-identity of mind and world is the conceptual rock on which dialogism is founded and the source of all the other levels of non-concurring identity which Bakhtin sees shaping the world and our place in it.