Logocentrism vs. Heteroglossia: A literary kaiju battle

So the question was posed in class about how heteroglossia deconstructs logocentrism, or something to that effect.  I found myself thinking about this a lot, eventually breaking down both terms in my mind.  Breaking these terms down eventually led to me picturing it as something similar to those old movies and television shows with foam suit monsters fighting it out in a model cardboard city, complete with sparklers and tiny explosions going off every which direction as the two monsters destroyed everything around them, and I am fully aware of how strange this idea may be.

I took the definition of logocentric in the vaguest form that the Glossary gives us.  It implies that at the center of a thing is an “ultimate truth”.  In other words, if something is considered logocentric, despite any variations to this thing, the core of it is set in stone, there’s no changing it, it’s something undeniable.  When I think about this I get the possibly clichéd image of a spider’s web.  No matter where you’re at on the web, you’re connected to the center (a spider with fangs that’ll tear you in half, I swear). 

Heteroglossia, however, is the newspaper or flyswatter or shoe that comes in and destroys the web and the spider and saves the world.  Bakhtin and the Glossary show that in the idea of heteroglossia, there is no center, not really.  Every voice from every character (author included) is being expressed, possibly at the same time.  This leads to conflicts with language, honestly I think of it as a literary Large Hadron Collider, with voices and concepts of language being accelerated at each other until colliding at massive speeds.  And much like experiments done at the LHC, these heteroglossic collisions lead to new ideas or interpretations in the language, basically throwing conventions to the wind.  Simply put it seems as if the very core of heteroglossia is change, the exact opposite of the idea of a logocentric language.

So really, I’m still not convinced which one deconstructs the other.  Surely, logocentricism could be seen as deconstructing heteroglossia just as easily as heteroglossia doing the deconstruction can be.  I guess in the end, much like the old kaiju programs (think big, foam-suited monsters), I’m content to just watch the two duke it out. It’s entertaining and fun to think about the conflict no matter which one emerges victorious