Heteroglossia is thus "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance" and that which always guarantees "the primacy of context over text.
When heteroglossia is incorporated into the novel, it is "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way".
[3] Bakhtin proposes that these stratifications of language represent distinct points of view on the world, characterized by their own meanings and values.
Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires speakers or authors to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect in which they will speak.
Bakhtin does not object to such an effort, but he insists that it must be recognized as an imposition of order on something that fundamentally lacks it: "A unitary language is not something given [дан, dan] but is always in essence posited [задан, zadan]".
[6] Disciplines like philology, linguistics, stylistics and poetics take something that is an ideal, something that is posited in a struggle for social unity, and mistake it for something that really exists.
The posited system is reified and an explanatory force is arbitrarily bestowed upon it, effectively denying the existence of the living, disordered, heteroglot reality upon which it is imposed.
Linguistic features are not fixed and definitive: they are a consequence—"traces", "crystallizations", or "sclerotic deposits"―of these attitudes and worldviews, which are themselves the consequence of particular forms of active participation in life and culture.
Such participation is a creative response to the circumstances and demands of daily life: "discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse (направленность, napravlennost') toward the object; if we wholly detach ourselves from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life.
Theoretically, the peasant may use each of these languages at the appropriate time, prompted by context, mechanically, without ever questioning their adequacy to the task for which he has acquired them.
But languages combined within an individual (or within a social unit of any size), do not exist merely as separate entities, neatly compartmentalised alongside each other, never interacting.
[13][14] Any sort of unitary significance or monologic value system assumed by a discrete language is irrevocably undermined by the presence of another way of speaking and interpreting.
In the assimilation of new words and syntactic forms, which are then employed and deployed for one's own purposes, there is no thought of abstracting away their accents and addressivity in order to systematize them.
This type of discourse is viewed as past, finished, hierarchically superior, and therefore demands "unconditional allegiance" rather than accepting interpretation.
Bakhtin concludes by arguing that the role of the novel is to draw the authoritative into question, and to allow what was once considered certain to be debated and open to interpretation.