between diverse consciousnesses, and is intrinsically "full of event potential." Bakhtin's criticism of the monologic conception of truth is that it abstracts and effaces the "eventness" of the event – everything about it that makes it unique, unfinalizable and full of unrealized potential. In his conception, unknown and unforeseen possibilities arise out of the interaction of autonomous, unfinalized consciousnesses, and this is the true, lived nature of human existence. The "open-ended dialogue" is the verbal manifestation of this truth, and polyphony is its artistic representation in literary form. Voice-idea In the polyphonic novel, the voices are "unmerged": they "cannot be contained within a single consciousness, as in monologism. Rather, their separateness is essential to the dialogue: even when they agree, they do so from different perspectives and different senses of the world." Dostoevsky thought not in thoughts as propositions with a quantifiable truth-value, but "in points of view, consciousnesses, voices." The carrier of truth "is not the assertion, but rather the integral point of view, the integral position of the personality." The idea has no substantive existence separate from the personality of a character: there is an "artistic fusion" of personality and idea that produces an irreducible spiritual orientation unique to that character, enabling them to "signify directly". The idea thus "lives" in the world: in Dostoevsky there is no disembodied ("'no-man's'") thought or idea. Bakhtin uses the term 'voice-idea' to designate this unity of idea and personality. In Dostoevsky's creative process the compositional structure of the novel forms spontaneously around the interactions of this multiplicity of voice-ideas. From this, no abstract, monological system can emerge, only "a concrete event made up of organized human orientations and voices." Position of the author Monologic authorship The monological novel is dominated by the author's ideology, which provides the unifying force for the work. The author retains "ultimate semantic authority" at all times. Truths apparently extrinsic to the author, belonging to a character for example, are "represented" truths: they are represented from within the author's ideological framework, invoked for their expediency relative to the author's overall purpose and plan. Ideas are either affirmed or repudiated. An affirmed idea, one that conforms to the unified worldview expressed through the work, "finds objective expression in a special accent of its own, in its special position within the work as a whole, in the very verbal and stylistic form of its utterance and in a whole