Posted on Mar 7, 2021
Bakhtin, Mikhail – Filosofia: An Encyclopedia of Russian Thought
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On March 7, 1975, Mikhail Bakhtin, Russian philosopher, died at the age of 79. From the article:
"Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Russian philosopher of language and phenomenologist of culture, has three lives. The first is his obscure lived biography as a student of the classics, autodidact, invalid, political exile, and eventually professor of literature and aesthetics at a provincial teachers’ college in Saransk, southeast of Moscow. Today, he is best known for his work on the theory, history, and language of novels (especially Dostoevsky and Rabelais), for his image of carnival and the grotesque, and for a way of being in the world that he called “dialogic.” But Bakhtin did not consider himself a literary scholar or cultural critic. He was, he said, a philosopher—or better yet, a thinker (myslitel’). True, the themes he thought about found brilliant illustration in the fictive worlds created by great writers, as well as in the sociolinguistic life of everyday communication. But Bakhtin’s readings in and around literature are so potent, controversial, and provocative precisely because the ideas, the evolving Bakhtinian worldview, always came first.
A second life for Bakhtin began in 1961, when he was discovered by three postgraduate students (Vadim Kozhinov, Georgii Gachev, and Sergei Bocharov) from the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, and by Vladimir Turbin, professor at Moscow State University. Making pilgrimages to Saransk, these four literary scholars became Bakhtin’s disciples and indispensable enablers. To champion a non-conformist thinker like Bakhtin was not without risk for this initial post-Stalinist generation. They rescued his abandoned manuscripts from oblivion, negotiated the publication of delayed or stalled work (including a revised edition of the Dostoevsky book and an edited edition of the dissertation on Rabelais), delivered medicines and books, and, after Bakhtin’s death in 1975, supervised the slow trickling into print of his precarious personal archive.
By the late 1960s Bakhtin’s texts and ideas had begun to move into European languages, to growing acclaim. The Western academy was weary of structuralism and master-narratives. Bakhtin’s rambling prose, his theory of decentered or centrifugal discourse, his passion for pagan carnival and his apparently bottomless tolerance for multiplicity promised to put a human face and the feel of a body back into literary study. As Bakhtin became a desired brand, debates arose over certain “disputed” texts in the corpus: books and essays on Formalism, Marxist philosophy of language, Freudianism, and Vitalism signed by members of his circle (Pavel Medvedev, Valentin Voloshinov, Ivan Kanaev). Bakhtin neither confirmed nor denied his authorship of these works. He was not much interested in idea-ownership. With the exception of the Vitalism essay, published in 1926 under Kanaev’s name and itself lifted from a 1922 essay of the same name by the deported “Idealist” philosophy professor Nikolai Lossky (such “plagiarism” was one strategy for getting ideas banned by the state back in circulation), these disputed texts were most likely the product of group discussions. Individual members with the proper Marxist credentials then wrote them up for publication.
But it was difficult to fit all these variously accented writings into one coherent ideology. As Bakhtin’s fame rose, rival camps competed to claim his identity: Was he a Stoic? Kantian idealist? Marxist? Orthodox Christian? American-style liberal pluralist? Phenomenologist of language? Carnival trickster? Evidence for the latter was found not only in Bakhtin’s cavalier, unmarked integration of others’ work into his own, but also in his borrowing, for his own biography, crucial academic details from his older émigré brother’s CV. Bakhtin never completed any university program. While fully excusable under conditions of war, revolution, and recurring illness, this awkward lack of any academic degree became an obstacle when applying for the PhD, which Bakhtin did, not without scandal, in the 1940s. Then the Soviet Union came to an end. In 1996, under Bocharov’s general editorship, a fully annotated academic edition of Bakhtin’s collected works was planned in seven volumes (originally to include works signed by members of his Circle, but ultimately those were excluded). This Sobranie sochinenii was completed in 2012.
A third, genuinely global life can be said to have begun for Bakhtin in the twenty-first century, with the advent of instant worldwide cyber-communication and translation technologies. After booming interest in his work in Latin America, and a quarter-century of triennial Bakhtin conferences in such routine Western venues as Canada (1983, 1997), Saransk (1995), Finland (2005), and Italy (2011), the 16th International Bakhtin Conference (2017) was held in Shanghai, China. As its program made clear, a startling and rich shift had occurred. Although several intellectual historians in the UK and USA (Craig Brandist, Peter Hitchcock, Galin Tihanov) had anticipated this new global current, Bakhtinian thought looked different outside its immediate European predecessors (the Greek classics, German Enlightenment, continental Romanticism and Phenomenology: the legacy of Kant, Schelling, Scheler, Cassirer). The Shanghai gathering documented a vast pool of Asian-based scholars investigating, as part of a deliberate Europeanization of the Chinese humanities by means of Bakhtin, such topics as dialogism in the Chinese novel, the meaning of “meaning” in character-based writing systems, polyphony in ancient Japanese literature, the costs of centripetal nationalism in India, and the unfinalizable self in the context of Buddhist meditation practices. The second edition of a seven-volume complete collected works of Bakhtin in Chinese was published in 2009.
This utterly globalized Bakhtin has become universal currency for “dialogue” in a world of unprecedented intellectual access. But the terms he devised must be handled carefully. During Bakhtin’s first life, or at least its solidly Soviet second half, dialogue was difficult: at a premium, carried on in sheltered places, often dangerous for its participants. With censorship and ideological Newspeak everywhere the norm, Bakhtin elaborated a worldview that trusted the unique in praesentia face and speaking voice. He shunned politics, official meetings, and the telephone. Today, dialogue is altogether too easy—too easy to start, to fake, to fritter our selves away on. Contact between Bakhtin’s thought and the world’s more ancient contemplative cultural traditions might help us retrieve some depth and answerability from the frantic shallows of the media revolution.
But the twenty-first century Bakhtin presents yet another paradox. In his own time, Bakhtin presumed a verbal environment where the speaking individual was embedded in a given collective, communal body, or socium—and at the mercy of it, for better or worse. An individual consciousness had to battle for its own distinct word, even as that word was composed of thoroughly “socialized” intonations and accents. Today, the shared socium is itself an endangered concept. The ability of every consciousness, at any moment, to “privatize” itself on its personal electronic device with its own “feed” (selecting what it wishes to hear, to see, even to feel, whether from other people or from simulacra) has created a decentered, exclusionary dialogic situation separate from communally shared time and space. Such radical individuation is unmappable onto any reality that Bakhtin ever knew.
Life
Bakhtin was born in 1895 in the northwestern Russian city of Oryol, into a banker’s family of noble lineage. It was a large family (two sons, three daughters), well-educated and upwardly mobile. He spent his childhood in the cosmopolitan provincial cities of Vilnius (where the family moved in 1905) and Odessa (after 1911). Fluent in German since childhood, comfortable with French, Latin, Greek, and endowed with a photographic memory for both poetry and prose, the young Bakhtin read through Continental philosophy as a teenager. His generation, that of the younger Symbolists, was the last in Russia to assume Western European culture as its birthright. In his first interview with Viktor Duvakin in 1973, Bakhtin recalls those years warmly, but notes the many surgeries that followed the onset of his chronic osteomyelitis at age ten (“they drilled into my thigh and knee . . . “). This bone disease invalided Bakhtin for much of his life, causing pain, recurring fevers, and festering skin lesions. But after his arrest, illness might have saved his life. The amputation of his right leg at the hip in 1938 sufficiently improved his health so that he could at last hold a full-time job. Thus two of Bakhtin’s lifelong themes might be said to have emerged out of his own biography: the multilingual mind and the grotesque carnivalized body.
Bakhtin audited courses in Odessa and then, in 1916-17, studied Classics and philosophy at Petrograd University, warming especially to the charismatic lectures of Faddei Zielinsky on ancient non-canonical genres and “laughing forms.” During the Civil War he took refuge in the western Russian town of Nevel and, in 1920, in Vitebsk, where in 1921 he married Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich—who became his indispensable helpmeet for the next fifty years, as Bakhtin was underemployed and often ill. In Nevel, a study group of artists, musicians and literary specialists, later known as the “Bakhtin Circle,” came together to discuss philosophy of culture from the perspective of religion and phenomenology. Bakhtin always remained more a Kantian than a Neo-Kantian, however. Even Kantian precepts and a priori categories were reworked by him into concepts decidedly more concrete, individualized, and energetic. Aesthetic judgment was replaced with aesthetic activity, enacted in value-laden responsive environments. Bakhtin consistently maintained that an ethical or religious event (although not a cognitive event) was always radically personal. It could not be generalized into a norm. For him, what grounds such events is not a categorical ought, as in the Kantian framework, but a “unique or once-occurring ought”— an act that its actants agree to sign, whether or not they caused it. Such a signed act becomes the ground for personal obligation toward another consciousness (or God). Bakhtin’s lectures to his study circles in 1924-25 reflect his passionate early interest in Søren Kierkegaard, as well as his close engagement with the works of the Marburg NeoKantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). Of key import was Cohen’s attempt to disentangle experience from cognition and ground religious reality in the individual subject. During this early phase of his thought, the responsible act was more primary to Bakhtin than the responsive interactive word.
The Circle relocated to Leningrad in 1924. By the end of the decade, the focus of Bakhtin’s thought had shifted from act to word. This “language turn,” so characteristic of the Russian 1920s but pursued very differently by Bakhtin (a holistic thinker and synthesist) than by the Petrograd and Moscow Formalists (who were by temperament analysts), produced the polyphony and dialogism of his Dostoevsky study (orig. 1929, rev. 1963). Dialogue as a philosophical principle would grow into “heteroglossia” (raznorechie), the verbal texture that marked all authentic novels (“Discourse in the Novel,” mid-1930s). But these ideas had no chance to enter the scholarly mainsteam. In 1929, soon after the Dostoevsky study appeared, Bakhtin was arrested in a routine roundup, charged with “philosophical idealism” and illicit religious activity. He later recalled his interrogation as a polite affair (“not like the thugs who came afterwards”), but nevertheless his sentence was five years in the death camp of Solovki. Intervention by influential friends, a positive review of the Dostoevsky book, and considerations of health led to commutation to six years’ internal exile in Kustanai, Soviet Kazakhstan, where he worked as a bookkeeper.
The 1930s were astonishingly productive: essays on the novel, on a time-space metric called the “chronotope” (in which Bakhtin’s revisionist Hegelianism comes strongly to the fore), and a huge study on cultures of laughter in medieval France (the Rabelais book). Recent research on this little-known Kustanai period has documented the disastrous state of the region after forced collectivization, famine, and persecution of Christians and Muslims, all of which was daily background to Bakhtin’s luminous theoretical tracts. After serving his term, Bakhtin and his wife were forbidden to settle legally in any of Russia’s major cities. In 1936 he took a position at the Mordvinia Pedagogical Institute in Saransk but, threatened with dismissal for his suspiciously independent teaching methods, he resigned, moving in 1937 to an even more obscure town, Savelevo. In this year, two of his close colleagues from the Bakhtin Circle were arrested and perished. Out of the eye of authorities as Stalin’s Great Terror gathered steam, Bakhtin completed his (largely lost) study of the German Bildungsroman, interrupted only by the amputation of his infected right leg in 1938. When war was declared in 1941, Bakhtin was teaching German and Russian in high school in the small town of Kimry. Fragments of texts written during these dark years suggest that Bakhtin was returning to the holistic ethical inquiries that had occupied him in the 1920s. The context now was a betrayal of both word and image by the violence inherent in all representation, and the triumph of “thing-cognition” over “personality-cognition” (the latter required for all durable acts of faith and love).
Unable to find a publisher for his massive study on Rabelais, Bakhtin submitted it as a dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow in 1940. The text was erudite, eclectic, full of unprintable words (in the medieval French of François Rabelais), and—while materialist and “populist” enough—neither prudishly edifying nor Party-minded. Its defense in 1946 was a scandal. Bakhtin insisted that his thesis was radically democratic, anti-clerical, and revolutionary; the official examiners were divided. Eventually, in 1952, Bakhtin was granted a research doctorate and the primary goal thereby achieved: a more generous ration card for the Bakhtins, and the credentials to improve his position at the Saransk Pedagogical Institute, where he had been heading the World Literature department since 1945. The institute was upgraded to a university in 1958. There, until his retirement in 1961, Bakhtin held large halls of students spellbound with his charismatic lectures, delivered without notes. These spectacular monologic performances included huge chunks of poetry and prose, from ancient Greek drama up through twentieth-century aesthetics.
In 1967, six years retired and with his revised studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais freshly published, Bakhtin was formally rehabilitated (his arrest annulled). He could now live legally in Moscow. In 1970 he was elected to the Union of Soviet Writers. As survivor and witness to the first creative years of the Bolshevik experiment, Bakhtin was sought out and interviewed. Thanks to a high-placed connection, he gained access to the Kremlin hospital, then a nursing home, and then, after being widowed, to the Peredelkino writer’s colony. Although broken by the loss of his wife, he remarked philosophically that his life was ending on a miraculously “carnivalized” note. Bakhtin died in Moscow in 1975, at the age of 80.
Idea Clusters
Five phases, or basic idea-clusters, mark Bakhtin’s intellectual development. The first is Kantian, ethical, and spatial. The second is verbal. The third and fourth phases develop in parallel, one continuing to investigate the fertility of language and the other the fertility of physical bodies. In his final phase, Bakhtin addresses methodology in the humanities. Common to all these clusters is the distinction between inside (“I”/myself) and outside (“you”/others), and between open (laughing, unfinished, mobile: a personality) and closed (serious, completed, static: a thing). No phenomenon or activity is ever purely one or the other. All events occur on boundaries, or tend toward one extreme or another. But all human being moves between these two poles.
As we have seen, in his first phase (the Kantian writings of the 1920s), Bakhtin focuses on vision, space, responsibility, and value: what does your being outside me enable me to know and oblige me to do? In an essay from 1924 separating his method from Formalism, Bakhtin introduces the distinction between “compositional” and “architectonic” forms: the former qualify as “organized material” and can be known “technically” (through literary devices), but only the latter is capable of registering “aesthetic individuality” and thus it alone can found a history of art. In his second phase (starting in 1929), this individuality is increasingly invested in words, with dialogism (an architectonics of utterances) and polyphony (a decentered authorial stance that grants validity to all voices) exemplified by the prose of Dostoevsky (“The Problem of Content”). The Dostoevsky book declares itself a formal enterprise: its concern is the working of words (“the double-voiced word”), in the narrator’s zone as well as in characters’ speech. Thus, the overall shape of Dostoevsky’s plots and their ethical burden are muted. The goodness or badness of an individual act or word is less important than its structural co-existence and interaction with other acts or idea-positions. Indeed, Bakhtin comes close to exempting Dostoevskian heroes from moral responsibility; they are “idea-persons” existing in the present without past biographies, “unselfish” distillations of ideas rather than fully realized or answerable human stories. This aspect of polyphonic design, which might suggest that Dostoevsky endows all his characters—even the most repellant—with “equal rights” just because their voices co-exist, interact, and continue to be heard, has stimulated vigorous debate.
In the 1930s, Bakhtin’s idea-clusters develop in two fertile parallel strains, one based on the word, the other on the body. Both phases are indebted more to Hegelian becoming than to co-existence or essence, but in each the principle of interaction is celebrated on a grand scale. Expanding dialogism into heteroglossia, Bakhtin advances a theory of the origin of novels in the multiplicity of languages (common to crossroads and cosmopolitan urban centers), and the battle of lowly profane vernaculars against all high, official, unified and sacred discourse. On balance, it would seem, the Tower of Babel was a good thing. The more languages there are, the more modest and inadequate each is shown to be (this is healthy for all speakers), the more angles of approach to a topic or a person become available, and the fewer tempations there are to monologic, despotic, or singular thinking. With this idea, Bakhtin would seem to mark himself off from mainstream Russian philosophy, which traditionally has pursued All-Unity, Vse-edinstvo. This is illusory. The health and harmony of the whole is a constant Bakhtinian theme. But he is that rare thinker who insists that holistic unity can be, and indeed must be, not homogenous but heterogeneous: every part is essential to the whole, yet every part is different from every other.
Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” is also Hegelian, in its dynamism and optimistic forward momentum, located somewhere between word and body. His huge unfinished essay on this evolving time-space matrix, written in the late 1930s and subtitled “sketches in a historical poetics,” moves from genres of antiquity and folklore up through the nineteenth-century novel, noting the ever-increasing particularization of time and space, and therefore of consciousness (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope”). Bakhtin dwells with special affection on rogues, clowns, fools, and masks. These are pockets of freedom within potentially monologic environments. But in general, the history of literature is the history of a benevolent unfolding toward ever more differentiation, proliferation of meaning, and multi-voicedness.
Analogous with the double-voiced word, but in an idea-cluster of its own, is the double-bodied image of carnival. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, read philosophically, is most valuable as a paean to cultures of laughter. The carnival chronotope is empowering, Bakhtin insists—but not in a legal or political sense; it does not aim to change the givens of material existence. It alters personal attitudes. Because laughter (as Bakhtin celebrates it) is indifferent to insult, dissipates fear before violence or the unknown, and thus encourages free inquiry, it is a route to knowledge. It lives in the present, in the realm of the non-obligatory, which (like the chronotope of the mask) is resilient, transitory, and non-judgmental. It follows that the grotesque image is far preferable to the sleek perfected classical body, because it is more open and fertile. Rabelais had great insight into this “laughing” state of mind, and peopled it with fantastic organisms and plots. But Bakhtin was not optimistic about carnival laughter in the long run. Looked at historically, laughter has gotten thinner, meaner, and worse. Elsewhere in his scenarios, good things grow toward fullness, potentials of the future are valued more than the past, but laughter has been continually reduced, collapsed into satire, moved from day to night, from the public square to the closet. Among his unrealized projects was one on the “seriosification” of the Western world.
Parallels between the “double-voiced word” and the “double-bodied image” can easily be drawn. Treated in Bakhtinian fashion, both dialogic words and carnival bodies help us escape the monologic prison of the Cartesian subject. They dispel the illusion that the mind (or body) can be isolated and “cleared out” of others and thus made more reliable and authoritative. In fact, it is only with the death of the subject that a “self” emerges that can be analyzed as a fixed entity (this stabilization is our final “gift” to those still living who care about us). But carnival must be understood not necessarily as a subversive force (that effect is temporary and secondary), and not exclusively in a secular or materialist spirit. Carnival is a transformative attitude that can serve various ideologies, but its primary purpose is to strengthen human agency, cooperation, and fortitude within the framework of the body. In his somber writings during the Second World War on the trumph of the lie, Bakhtin depicts both double-bodied images and double-voiced words as weakened and at risk.
The fifth post-war phase (the 1950s-60s) coincides with Bakhtin’s heightened official duties as teacher and administrator as well as his rising fame. The Stalinist night was over, the Stagnation had not yet set in. Now Bakhtin experiments with a civic voice. The fragments of essays we have discuss speech genres, the relationship of philological texts to creativity, and the state of cultural studies.
Integrating the Bakhtinian Corpus
As Bakhtin’s ideas and catchwords proliferate globally, two priorities would seem to be paramount. The first is to straighten out the evolution of his thought, a difficult task for several reasons. Existing translations are flawed and often made from doctored texts, which obscures the source and stability of crucial terms. In translation (his second and third lives), Bakhtin’s work became famous out of sequence: first his carnival ideas (in the 1960s), then the polyphony of his Dostoevsky book and his dialogic theory of the novel (in the 1970-80s), finally, in the 1990s, his early Kantian-philosophical essays. When any of these idea-clusters is essentialized, continuity of inquiry is lost.
A second priority is to integrate dialogue and carnival, those two potent strands of thought in the 1930s. Early work on Bakhtin, especially in the West, often presumed that one or the other strand was dominant in Bakhtin’s thought, with dialogism and polyphony representing the high moral road and carnival or laughing cultures the lower, amoral and pagan path. Abundant testimony now suggests that thinking in this binary way is a mistake. Bakhtin saw no contradiction between dialogue and carnival—just as he saw no conflict between spirit and matter, or religious faith and the natural sciences. The place to look for his synthesis is in his theory of knowledge. Deeply influenced by German Romanticism (especially Schelling), Bakhtin resisted the nineteenth-century positivist reduction of a philosophy of nature to what was mathematical and measurable. Reality could be known in many ways, but all of them, to be authentic, must insist on flux, impermanence, and continual responsiveness. The difference that matters for Bakhtin is not between dialogue and carnival (both living, interactive principles), but between mechanism and organism. An organism is reactive, emotive, and requires feedback; it cannot be isolated and merely “wound up.” A mechanism either works or breaks. An organism responds, transforms, and laughs.
It remains to be seen if these robust principles underlying Bakhtin’s worldview, now a classic of world criticism, can be adapted to the pace, creative energy, and perverse challenges of the world in which we now live."
"Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Russian philosopher of language and phenomenologist of culture, has three lives. The first is his obscure lived biography as a student of the classics, autodidact, invalid, political exile, and eventually professor of literature and aesthetics at a provincial teachers’ college in Saransk, southeast of Moscow. Today, he is best known for his work on the theory, history, and language of novels (especially Dostoevsky and Rabelais), for his image of carnival and the grotesque, and for a way of being in the world that he called “dialogic.” But Bakhtin did not consider himself a literary scholar or cultural critic. He was, he said, a philosopher—or better yet, a thinker (myslitel’). True, the themes he thought about found brilliant illustration in the fictive worlds created by great writers, as well as in the sociolinguistic life of everyday communication. But Bakhtin’s readings in and around literature are so potent, controversial, and provocative precisely because the ideas, the evolving Bakhtinian worldview, always came first.
A second life for Bakhtin began in 1961, when he was discovered by three postgraduate students (Vadim Kozhinov, Georgii Gachev, and Sergei Bocharov) from the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow, and by Vladimir Turbin, professor at Moscow State University. Making pilgrimages to Saransk, these four literary scholars became Bakhtin’s disciples and indispensable enablers. To champion a non-conformist thinker like Bakhtin was not without risk for this initial post-Stalinist generation. They rescued his abandoned manuscripts from oblivion, negotiated the publication of delayed or stalled work (including a revised edition of the Dostoevsky book and an edited edition of the dissertation on Rabelais), delivered medicines and books, and, after Bakhtin’s death in 1975, supervised the slow trickling into print of his precarious personal archive.
By the late 1960s Bakhtin’s texts and ideas had begun to move into European languages, to growing acclaim. The Western academy was weary of structuralism and master-narratives. Bakhtin’s rambling prose, his theory of decentered or centrifugal discourse, his passion for pagan carnival and his apparently bottomless tolerance for multiplicity promised to put a human face and the feel of a body back into literary study. As Bakhtin became a desired brand, debates arose over certain “disputed” texts in the corpus: books and essays on Formalism, Marxist philosophy of language, Freudianism, and Vitalism signed by members of his circle (Pavel Medvedev, Valentin Voloshinov, Ivan Kanaev). Bakhtin neither confirmed nor denied his authorship of these works. He was not much interested in idea-ownership. With the exception of the Vitalism essay, published in 1926 under Kanaev’s name and itself lifted from a 1922 essay of the same name by the deported “Idealist” philosophy professor Nikolai Lossky (such “plagiarism” was one strategy for getting ideas banned by the state back in circulation), these disputed texts were most likely the product of group discussions. Individual members with the proper Marxist credentials then wrote them up for publication.
But it was difficult to fit all these variously accented writings into one coherent ideology. As Bakhtin’s fame rose, rival camps competed to claim his identity: Was he a Stoic? Kantian idealist? Marxist? Orthodox Christian? American-style liberal pluralist? Phenomenologist of language? Carnival trickster? Evidence for the latter was found not only in Bakhtin’s cavalier, unmarked integration of others’ work into his own, but also in his borrowing, for his own biography, crucial academic details from his older émigré brother’s CV. Bakhtin never completed any university program. While fully excusable under conditions of war, revolution, and recurring illness, this awkward lack of any academic degree became an obstacle when applying for the PhD, which Bakhtin did, not without scandal, in the 1940s. Then the Soviet Union came to an end. In 1996, under Bocharov’s general editorship, a fully annotated academic edition of Bakhtin’s collected works was planned in seven volumes (originally to include works signed by members of his Circle, but ultimately those were excluded). This Sobranie sochinenii was completed in 2012.
A third, genuinely global life can be said to have begun for Bakhtin in the twenty-first century, with the advent of instant worldwide cyber-communication and translation technologies. After booming interest in his work in Latin America, and a quarter-century of triennial Bakhtin conferences in such routine Western venues as Canada (1983, 1997), Saransk (1995), Finland (2005), and Italy (2011), the 16th International Bakhtin Conference (2017) was held in Shanghai, China. As its program made clear, a startling and rich shift had occurred. Although several intellectual historians in the UK and USA (Craig Brandist, Peter Hitchcock, Galin Tihanov) had anticipated this new global current, Bakhtinian thought looked different outside its immediate European predecessors (the Greek classics, German Enlightenment, continental Romanticism and Phenomenology: the legacy of Kant, Schelling, Scheler, Cassirer). The Shanghai gathering documented a vast pool of Asian-based scholars investigating, as part of a deliberate Europeanization of the Chinese humanities by means of Bakhtin, such topics as dialogism in the Chinese novel, the meaning of “meaning” in character-based writing systems, polyphony in ancient Japanese literature, the costs of centripetal nationalism in India, and the unfinalizable self in the context of Buddhist meditation practices. The second edition of a seven-volume complete collected works of Bakhtin in Chinese was published in 2009.
This utterly globalized Bakhtin has become universal currency for “dialogue” in a world of unprecedented intellectual access. But the terms he devised must be handled carefully. During Bakhtin’s first life, or at least its solidly Soviet second half, dialogue was difficult: at a premium, carried on in sheltered places, often dangerous for its participants. With censorship and ideological Newspeak everywhere the norm, Bakhtin elaborated a worldview that trusted the unique in praesentia face and speaking voice. He shunned politics, official meetings, and the telephone. Today, dialogue is altogether too easy—too easy to start, to fake, to fritter our selves away on. Contact between Bakhtin’s thought and the world’s more ancient contemplative cultural traditions might help us retrieve some depth and answerability from the frantic shallows of the media revolution.
But the twenty-first century Bakhtin presents yet another paradox. In his own time, Bakhtin presumed a verbal environment where the speaking individual was embedded in a given collective, communal body, or socium—and at the mercy of it, for better or worse. An individual consciousness had to battle for its own distinct word, even as that word was composed of thoroughly “socialized” intonations and accents. Today, the shared socium is itself an endangered concept. The ability of every consciousness, at any moment, to “privatize” itself on its personal electronic device with its own “feed” (selecting what it wishes to hear, to see, even to feel, whether from other people or from simulacra) has created a decentered, exclusionary dialogic situation separate from communally shared time and space. Such radical individuation is unmappable onto any reality that Bakhtin ever knew.
Life
Bakhtin was born in 1895 in the northwestern Russian city of Oryol, into a banker’s family of noble lineage. It was a large family (two sons, three daughters), well-educated and upwardly mobile. He spent his childhood in the cosmopolitan provincial cities of Vilnius (where the family moved in 1905) and Odessa (after 1911). Fluent in German since childhood, comfortable with French, Latin, Greek, and endowed with a photographic memory for both poetry and prose, the young Bakhtin read through Continental philosophy as a teenager. His generation, that of the younger Symbolists, was the last in Russia to assume Western European culture as its birthright. In his first interview with Viktor Duvakin in 1973, Bakhtin recalls those years warmly, but notes the many surgeries that followed the onset of his chronic osteomyelitis at age ten (“they drilled into my thigh and knee . . . “). This bone disease invalided Bakhtin for much of his life, causing pain, recurring fevers, and festering skin lesions. But after his arrest, illness might have saved his life. The amputation of his right leg at the hip in 1938 sufficiently improved his health so that he could at last hold a full-time job. Thus two of Bakhtin’s lifelong themes might be said to have emerged out of his own biography: the multilingual mind and the grotesque carnivalized body.
Bakhtin audited courses in Odessa and then, in 1916-17, studied Classics and philosophy at Petrograd University, warming especially to the charismatic lectures of Faddei Zielinsky on ancient non-canonical genres and “laughing forms.” During the Civil War he took refuge in the western Russian town of Nevel and, in 1920, in Vitebsk, where in 1921 he married Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich—who became his indispensable helpmeet for the next fifty years, as Bakhtin was underemployed and often ill. In Nevel, a study group of artists, musicians and literary specialists, later known as the “Bakhtin Circle,” came together to discuss philosophy of culture from the perspective of religion and phenomenology. Bakhtin always remained more a Kantian than a Neo-Kantian, however. Even Kantian precepts and a priori categories were reworked by him into concepts decidedly more concrete, individualized, and energetic. Aesthetic judgment was replaced with aesthetic activity, enacted in value-laden responsive environments. Bakhtin consistently maintained that an ethical or religious event (although not a cognitive event) was always radically personal. It could not be generalized into a norm. For him, what grounds such events is not a categorical ought, as in the Kantian framework, but a “unique or once-occurring ought”— an act that its actants agree to sign, whether or not they caused it. Such a signed act becomes the ground for personal obligation toward another consciousness (or God). Bakhtin’s lectures to his study circles in 1924-25 reflect his passionate early interest in Søren Kierkegaard, as well as his close engagement with the works of the Marburg NeoKantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842-1918). Of key import was Cohen’s attempt to disentangle experience from cognition and ground religious reality in the individual subject. During this early phase of his thought, the responsible act was more primary to Bakhtin than the responsive interactive word.
The Circle relocated to Leningrad in 1924. By the end of the decade, the focus of Bakhtin’s thought had shifted from act to word. This “language turn,” so characteristic of the Russian 1920s but pursued very differently by Bakhtin (a holistic thinker and synthesist) than by the Petrograd and Moscow Formalists (who were by temperament analysts), produced the polyphony and dialogism of his Dostoevsky study (orig. 1929, rev. 1963). Dialogue as a philosophical principle would grow into “heteroglossia” (raznorechie), the verbal texture that marked all authentic novels (“Discourse in the Novel,” mid-1930s). But these ideas had no chance to enter the scholarly mainsteam. In 1929, soon after the Dostoevsky study appeared, Bakhtin was arrested in a routine roundup, charged with “philosophical idealism” and illicit religious activity. He later recalled his interrogation as a polite affair (“not like the thugs who came afterwards”), but nevertheless his sentence was five years in the death camp of Solovki. Intervention by influential friends, a positive review of the Dostoevsky book, and considerations of health led to commutation to six years’ internal exile in Kustanai, Soviet Kazakhstan, where he worked as a bookkeeper.
The 1930s were astonishingly productive: essays on the novel, on a time-space metric called the “chronotope” (in which Bakhtin’s revisionist Hegelianism comes strongly to the fore), and a huge study on cultures of laughter in medieval France (the Rabelais book). Recent research on this little-known Kustanai period has documented the disastrous state of the region after forced collectivization, famine, and persecution of Christians and Muslims, all of which was daily background to Bakhtin’s luminous theoretical tracts. After serving his term, Bakhtin and his wife were forbidden to settle legally in any of Russia’s major cities. In 1936 he took a position at the Mordvinia Pedagogical Institute in Saransk but, threatened with dismissal for his suspiciously independent teaching methods, he resigned, moving in 1937 to an even more obscure town, Savelevo. In this year, two of his close colleagues from the Bakhtin Circle were arrested and perished. Out of the eye of authorities as Stalin’s Great Terror gathered steam, Bakhtin completed his (largely lost) study of the German Bildungsroman, interrupted only by the amputation of his infected right leg in 1938. When war was declared in 1941, Bakhtin was teaching German and Russian in high school in the small town of Kimry. Fragments of texts written during these dark years suggest that Bakhtin was returning to the holistic ethical inquiries that had occupied him in the 1920s. The context now was a betrayal of both word and image by the violence inherent in all representation, and the triumph of “thing-cognition” over “personality-cognition” (the latter required for all durable acts of faith and love).
Unable to find a publisher for his massive study on Rabelais, Bakhtin submitted it as a dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow in 1940. The text was erudite, eclectic, full of unprintable words (in the medieval French of François Rabelais), and—while materialist and “populist” enough—neither prudishly edifying nor Party-minded. Its defense in 1946 was a scandal. Bakhtin insisted that his thesis was radically democratic, anti-clerical, and revolutionary; the official examiners were divided. Eventually, in 1952, Bakhtin was granted a research doctorate and the primary goal thereby achieved: a more generous ration card for the Bakhtins, and the credentials to improve his position at the Saransk Pedagogical Institute, where he had been heading the World Literature department since 1945. The institute was upgraded to a university in 1958. There, until his retirement in 1961, Bakhtin held large halls of students spellbound with his charismatic lectures, delivered without notes. These spectacular monologic performances included huge chunks of poetry and prose, from ancient Greek drama up through twentieth-century aesthetics.
In 1967, six years retired and with his revised studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais freshly published, Bakhtin was formally rehabilitated (his arrest annulled). He could now live legally in Moscow. In 1970 he was elected to the Union of Soviet Writers. As survivor and witness to the first creative years of the Bolshevik experiment, Bakhtin was sought out and interviewed. Thanks to a high-placed connection, he gained access to the Kremlin hospital, then a nursing home, and then, after being widowed, to the Peredelkino writer’s colony. Although broken by the loss of his wife, he remarked philosophically that his life was ending on a miraculously “carnivalized” note. Bakhtin died in Moscow in 1975, at the age of 80.
Idea Clusters
Five phases, or basic idea-clusters, mark Bakhtin’s intellectual development. The first is Kantian, ethical, and spatial. The second is verbal. The third and fourth phases develop in parallel, one continuing to investigate the fertility of language and the other the fertility of physical bodies. In his final phase, Bakhtin addresses methodology in the humanities. Common to all these clusters is the distinction between inside (“I”/myself) and outside (“you”/others), and between open (laughing, unfinished, mobile: a personality) and closed (serious, completed, static: a thing). No phenomenon or activity is ever purely one or the other. All events occur on boundaries, or tend toward one extreme or another. But all human being moves between these two poles.
As we have seen, in his first phase (the Kantian writings of the 1920s), Bakhtin focuses on vision, space, responsibility, and value: what does your being outside me enable me to know and oblige me to do? In an essay from 1924 separating his method from Formalism, Bakhtin introduces the distinction between “compositional” and “architectonic” forms: the former qualify as “organized material” and can be known “technically” (through literary devices), but only the latter is capable of registering “aesthetic individuality” and thus it alone can found a history of art. In his second phase (starting in 1929), this individuality is increasingly invested in words, with dialogism (an architectonics of utterances) and polyphony (a decentered authorial stance that grants validity to all voices) exemplified by the prose of Dostoevsky (“The Problem of Content”). The Dostoevsky book declares itself a formal enterprise: its concern is the working of words (“the double-voiced word”), in the narrator’s zone as well as in characters’ speech. Thus, the overall shape of Dostoevsky’s plots and their ethical burden are muted. The goodness or badness of an individual act or word is less important than its structural co-existence and interaction with other acts or idea-positions. Indeed, Bakhtin comes close to exempting Dostoevskian heroes from moral responsibility; they are “idea-persons” existing in the present without past biographies, “unselfish” distillations of ideas rather than fully realized or answerable human stories. This aspect of polyphonic design, which might suggest that Dostoevsky endows all his characters—even the most repellant—with “equal rights” just because their voices co-exist, interact, and continue to be heard, has stimulated vigorous debate.
In the 1930s, Bakhtin’s idea-clusters develop in two fertile parallel strains, one based on the word, the other on the body. Both phases are indebted more to Hegelian becoming than to co-existence or essence, but in each the principle of interaction is celebrated on a grand scale. Expanding dialogism into heteroglossia, Bakhtin advances a theory of the origin of novels in the multiplicity of languages (common to crossroads and cosmopolitan urban centers), and the battle of lowly profane vernaculars against all high, official, unified and sacred discourse. On balance, it would seem, the Tower of Babel was a good thing. The more languages there are, the more modest and inadequate each is shown to be (this is healthy for all speakers), the more angles of approach to a topic or a person become available, and the fewer tempations there are to monologic, despotic, or singular thinking. With this idea, Bakhtin would seem to mark himself off from mainstream Russian philosophy, which traditionally has pursued All-Unity, Vse-edinstvo. This is illusory. The health and harmony of the whole is a constant Bakhtinian theme. But he is that rare thinker who insists that holistic unity can be, and indeed must be, not homogenous but heterogeneous: every part is essential to the whole, yet every part is different from every other.
Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” is also Hegelian, in its dynamism and optimistic forward momentum, located somewhere between word and body. His huge unfinished essay on this evolving time-space matrix, written in the late 1930s and subtitled “sketches in a historical poetics,” moves from genres of antiquity and folklore up through the nineteenth-century novel, noting the ever-increasing particularization of time and space, and therefore of consciousness (“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope”). Bakhtin dwells with special affection on rogues, clowns, fools, and masks. These are pockets of freedom within potentially monologic environments. But in general, the history of literature is the history of a benevolent unfolding toward ever more differentiation, proliferation of meaning, and multi-voicedness.
Analogous with the double-voiced word, but in an idea-cluster of its own, is the double-bodied image of carnival. Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais, read philosophically, is most valuable as a paean to cultures of laughter. The carnival chronotope is empowering, Bakhtin insists—but not in a legal or political sense; it does not aim to change the givens of material existence. It alters personal attitudes. Because laughter (as Bakhtin celebrates it) is indifferent to insult, dissipates fear before violence or the unknown, and thus encourages free inquiry, it is a route to knowledge. It lives in the present, in the realm of the non-obligatory, which (like the chronotope of the mask) is resilient, transitory, and non-judgmental. It follows that the grotesque image is far preferable to the sleek perfected classical body, because it is more open and fertile. Rabelais had great insight into this “laughing” state of mind, and peopled it with fantastic organisms and plots. But Bakhtin was not optimistic about carnival laughter in the long run. Looked at historically, laughter has gotten thinner, meaner, and worse. Elsewhere in his scenarios, good things grow toward fullness, potentials of the future are valued more than the past, but laughter has been continually reduced, collapsed into satire, moved from day to night, from the public square to the closet. Among his unrealized projects was one on the “seriosification” of the Western world.
Parallels between the “double-voiced word” and the “double-bodied image” can easily be drawn. Treated in Bakhtinian fashion, both dialogic words and carnival bodies help us escape the monologic prison of the Cartesian subject. They dispel the illusion that the mind (or body) can be isolated and “cleared out” of others and thus made more reliable and authoritative. In fact, it is only with the death of the subject that a “self” emerges that can be analyzed as a fixed entity (this stabilization is our final “gift” to those still living who care about us). But carnival must be understood not necessarily as a subversive force (that effect is temporary and secondary), and not exclusively in a secular or materialist spirit. Carnival is a transformative attitude that can serve various ideologies, but its primary purpose is to strengthen human agency, cooperation, and fortitude within the framework of the body. In his somber writings during the Second World War on the trumph of the lie, Bakhtin depicts both double-bodied images and double-voiced words as weakened and at risk.
The fifth post-war phase (the 1950s-60s) coincides with Bakhtin’s heightened official duties as teacher and administrator as well as his rising fame. The Stalinist night was over, the Stagnation had not yet set in. Now Bakhtin experiments with a civic voice. The fragments of essays we have discuss speech genres, the relationship of philological texts to creativity, and the state of cultural studies.
Integrating the Bakhtinian Corpus
As Bakhtin’s ideas and catchwords proliferate globally, two priorities would seem to be paramount. The first is to straighten out the evolution of his thought, a difficult task for several reasons. Existing translations are flawed and often made from doctored texts, which obscures the source and stability of crucial terms. In translation (his second and third lives), Bakhtin’s work became famous out of sequence: first his carnival ideas (in the 1960s), then the polyphony of his Dostoevsky book and his dialogic theory of the novel (in the 1970-80s), finally, in the 1990s, his early Kantian-philosophical essays. When any of these idea-clusters is essentialized, continuity of inquiry is lost.
A second priority is to integrate dialogue and carnival, those two potent strands of thought in the 1930s. Early work on Bakhtin, especially in the West, often presumed that one or the other strand was dominant in Bakhtin’s thought, with dialogism and polyphony representing the high moral road and carnival or laughing cultures the lower, amoral and pagan path. Abundant testimony now suggests that thinking in this binary way is a mistake. Bakhtin saw no contradiction between dialogue and carnival—just as he saw no conflict between spirit and matter, or religious faith and the natural sciences. The place to look for his synthesis is in his theory of knowledge. Deeply influenced by German Romanticism (especially Schelling), Bakhtin resisted the nineteenth-century positivist reduction of a philosophy of nature to what was mathematical and measurable. Reality could be known in many ways, but all of them, to be authentic, must insist on flux, impermanence, and continual responsiveness. The difference that matters for Bakhtin is not between dialogue and carnival (both living, interactive principles), but between mechanism and organism. An organism is reactive, emotive, and requires feedback; it cannot be isolated and merely “wound up.” A mechanism either works or breaks. An organism responds, transforms, and laughs.
It remains to be seen if these robust principles underlying Bakhtin’s worldview, now a classic of world criticism, can be adapted to the pace, creative energy, and perverse challenges of the world in which we now live."
Bakhtin, Mikhail – Filosofia: An Encyclopedia of Russian Thought
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Mikhail Bakhtin Everything Philosophers
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Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on March 7, 1975 Russian philosopher of language and phenomenologist of culture Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin died at the age of 79.
Mikhail Bakhtin Everything Philosophers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxC2vwRS_a8
Images:
1. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
2. Carnivalesque image of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
3. Mikhail Bakhtin 'Truth is not born nor is it to be found in the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin 'To think about them means to talk with them; otherwise they immediately turn to us their objectivized side; they fall silent, close up and congeal into finished, objectivized images.
Biographies
1. ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/
2. ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-2/
1. Background from {[https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/]}
In Theory Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia
In the latest addition to his A-Z of Theory series, political theorist Andrew Robinson introduces, in a two-part essay, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century. In part one, Robinson introduces Bakhtin's notions of Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia.
IN THEORY, NEW IN CEASEFIRE - Posted on Friday, July 29, 2011 9:38 - 40 Comments
Tags: in theory
By Andrew Robinson
Mikhail Bakhtin was one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century. He is sometimes termed the most important Soviet thinker in the social sciences. His work also has substantial importance for issues of political resistance. Working under the shadow of Stalinism, he was certainly a controversial figure. He was refused his doctorate because of the controversial nature of his work on Rabelais, and subsequently sentenced to internal exile in Kazakhstan during Stalin’s purges. He also had a disability for much of his life, and while he does not write directly on disability issues, his concern with embodiment is apparent.
Sometimes associated with Russian formalism, Bakhtin operates somewhere between a structural and constructivist approach to discourse. Bakhtin’s works also include detailed typologies of discourses, classified according to their structure and construction. According to Michael Holquist, Bakhtin is a system-builder, but not in the sense of methodological closure. Rather, his system consists of open-ended connections, and refuses to view issues in isolation. Nevertheless, he seeks to conceptualise general tendencies, in contrast to the untheorised collections often found in folklorism.
His works tend to be ‘allusive’ and ‘repetitive’, irritating those who seek an economical and logical presentation. They emphasise historical, cultural and social specificity in texts and practices. Texts should not be read through a modern gaze, but through their context. He also emphasises that particular themes cannot be separated from their place in genres and structures of texts. Phenomena should be composited, theorised and understood, not simply seen as single instances.
Things don’t exist ‘in themselves’, but only in their relations. As a literary analyst, Bakhtin emphasises the location of particular authors in the speech-genres they deploy, and in their spatial and temporal context. Bakhtin sees being as a ‘unique and unified event’. Being is always ‘event’ or ‘co-being’, simultaneous with other beings.
In his early philosophical work, Bakhtin also insists that each person is unique and irreplaceable. This uniqueness is ‘given’ (we’re unique whether we want to be or not), but also has to be actualised by each of us through our life. Each of us makes our existence into a particular ‘task’ or ‘project’ by assigning it meaning. Each of us exists as relations between particular coordinates in time and space, differentiating and relating to other coordinates. As the site of an event, the self cannot tolerate fixity: what it “is”, is undefinable. A person also cannot be fully revealed to or known in the world, because of constant change and ‘unfinalisability’.
We are always in dialogue, not only with other people, but also with everything in the world. Everything ‘addresses’ us in a certain sense. Each of us is uniquely addressed in our particular place in the world. One can see one’s exterior only through others’ perspectives.
Polyphony and Dialogism
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin developed the concepts which were to inform much of his work. The concept of ‘polyphony’ (borrowed from music) is central to this analysis. Polyphony literally means multiple voices. Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s work as containing many different voices, unmerged into a single perspective, and not subordinated to the voice of the author. Each of these voices has its own perspective, its own validity, and its own narrative weight within the novel.
The author does not place his own narrative voice between the character and the reader, but rather, allows characters to shock and subvert. It is thus as if the books were written by multiple characters, not a single author’s standpoint. Instead of a single objective world, held together by the author’s voice, there is a plurality of consciousnesses, each with its own world. The reader does not see a single reality presented by the author, but rather, how reality appears to each character.
The text appears as an interaction of distinct perspectives or ideologies, borne by the different characters. The characters are able to speak for themselves, even against the author – it is as if the other speaks directly through the text. The role of the author is fundamentally changed, because the author can no longer monopolise the ‘power to mean’.
Dostoevsky’s ‘dialogical principle’ is counterposed to the ‘monologism’ (single-thought discourse; also termed ‘homophony’ – single-voice) characteristic of traditional writing and thought. In monologism, one transcendental perspective or consciousness integrates the entire field, and thus integrates all the signifying practices, ideologies, values and desires that are deemed significant. Anything irrelevant to this perspective is deemed superfluous or irrelevant in general.
A monological world is made up of objects, integrated through a single consciousness. Since other subjects have value only in relation to the transcendent perspective, they are reduced to the status of objects. They are not recognised as ‘another consciousness’ or as having rights. Monologism is taken to close down the world it represents, by pretending to be the ultimate word.
In monologism, ‘truth’, constructed abstractly and systematically from the dominant perspective, is allowed to remove the rights of consciousness. Each subject’s ability to produce autonomous meaning is denied. Qualitative difference is rendered quantitative. This performs a kind of discursive ‘death’ of the other, who, as unheard and unrecognised, is in a state of non-being. The monological word ‘gravitates towards itself and its referential object’ (This idea of a tautological closure of dominant discourse is also found in Negri, Marcuse, Baudrillard and Barthes).
In a monological novel for instance, characters exist solely to transmit the author’s ideology, and the author represents only their own idea, not anyone else’s. Any differences between characters occur as if within a single consciousness. Such novels, Bakhtin claims, tend to be featureless and flat, marked by a single tone. Bakhtin is suspicious of authorial intent, as it often involves a failure to respect the autonomy of the other’s voice.
Dialogism in contrast recognises the multiplicity of perspectives and voices. It is also referred to as ‘double-voiced’ or ‘multi-voiced’. It is a ‘principle’ which can become the main referent of a particular aesthetic field. Each character has their own final word, but it relates to and interacts with those of other characters. Discourse does not logically unfold (as in analytical philosophy), but rather, interacts. This makes dialogical works a lot more ‘objective’ and ‘realistic’ than their monological counterparts, since they don’t subordinate reality to the ideology of the author.
A dialogical work constantly engages with and is informed by other works and voices, and seeks to alter or inform it. It draws on the history of past use and meanings associated with each word, phrase or genre. Everything is said in response to other statements and in anticipation of future statements. This style of language-use is, according to Bakhtin, typical of everyday language-use. Its use in novels accurately represents the reality of language-use.
The dialogical word is always in an intense relationship with another’s word, being addressed to a listener and anticipating a response. Because it is designed to produce a response, it has a combative quality (e.g. parody or polemic). It resists closure or unambiguous expression, and fails to produce a ‘whole’. It is a consciousness lived constantly on the borders of other consciousnesses.
For Bakhtin, monological language is a corruption of an underlying dialogism. All signifying practices (i.e. use of language and symbols) have an ultimately dialogical aim. Human consciousness is not a unified entity, but rather, is always conflict-ridden between different consciousnesses. Indeed, a single consciousness separate from interaction with other consciousnesses is impossible.
Consciousness is always a product of responsive interactions, and cannot exist in isolation (If someone offers counter-examples of hermits or psychological difference, it should be noted that such people are still in dialogue – with their ecological surroundings, with nature, with multiple inner voices… there is no reason to assume dialogism stops at the limits of the inter-human). Nevertheless, language-use can maximise this dialogical nature or seek to minimise or restrict it.
Dialogism is not simply different perspectives on the same world. It involves the distribution of utterly incompatible elements within different perspectives of equal value. Bakhtin criticises the view that disagreement means at least one of the people must be wrong. Because many standpoints exist, truth requires many incommensurable voices. Hence, it involves a world which is fundamentally irreducible to unity. It denies the possibility of transcendence of difference (as in Hegel; this is a major difference between dialogics and dialectics). Separateness and simultaneity are permanently with us. There is no single meaning to be found in the world, but a vast multitude of contesting meanings. Truth is established by addressivity, engagement and commitment in a particular context.
In a fully dialogical world-view, the structure of the text should itself be subordinate to the right of all characters to be treated as subjects rather than objects. A novel in this tradition is constructed as a great dialogue among unmerged souls or perspectives. Ideas are not presented in abstraction, but are concretely embodied in the lives of protagonists. A dialogical text presents relations as dialogical rather than mechanical or object-like, and avoids authorial finality. Artistic finalisation is deemed suspect, though also necessary to some minimal degree.
Dialogism in social analysis
This literary analysis has implications for social analysis. For Bakhtinians, the social world is also made up of multiple voices, perspectives, and subjective ‘worlds’. To exist is to engage in dialogue, and dialogue must not come to an end. Dialogues does not occur between fixed positions or subjects. People are also transformed through dialogue, fusing with parts of the other’s discourse. The other’s response can change everything in one’s own consciousness or perspective. Dialogue can produce a decisive reply which produces actual changes.
Bakhtin views humanity as fundamentally indeterminate and unfinalizable. People constantly struggle against external definitions of their thoughts and actions, which have a deadening effect on them. There is something within each concrete person which can only be actualised through a free discursive act, and not in a pre-defined context.
For Bakhtin, dialogism characterises the entire social world. Authentic human life is an open-ended dialogue. The world thus merges into an open-ended, multi-voiced, dialogical whole. Its separation (as in Marxist alienation) or splitting (as in Lacanian master-signification) is overcome through awareness of its dialogical character – in effect, as one big borderland. This is a world of many worlds, all equally capable of expressing themselves and conceptualising their objects.
Bakhtin emphasises that it is not enough to simply understand the other’s perspective. Only if it is made other than itself by being seen from outside can it produce something new or enriching.
Monologism is similar to the master-signifier in Lacanian thought, and arborescence in Deleuze. In politics, we might think of capitalism as monologism: only what is profitable is deemed significant. As Guattari observes, if we laugh or cry, if we fear old age or death, if we are ‘mad’, does not matter to capitalism – it is ‘noise’, in the information-theory sense. Even at a limit-case such as starvation, human need is irrelevant – a poor person may have a vital need for food, but they do not have effective market demand.
Or we might think of the state’s perspective as monological. If the state is concerned with border security, it takes this concern as sufficient grounds to put up fences, walls and checkpoints. The fact that these fences might intersect ancient tribal territories which are meaningful to those who live there is deemed superfluous.
In many ways, the police are the epitome of monologism. Police power is constructed around the assertion of a non-debatable demand, sometimes analysed as a fundamental refusal of dialogue and creativity.
We can also think about dialogism in everyday terms – whether people listen to their partners or housemates, whether parents respond to the needs of their children, whether opposing views are able to get a hearing in meetings, whether political views are treated as self-enclosed ‘opinions’ to which one is ‘entitled’ or can rather be rebutted by a decisive reply. From the often arbitrary moderation of web forums to informal hierarchies in activism, there seems to be a plague of monologisms in the modern world, often reinforced by mutually exclusive categories and roles, conventional expectations of authority, and an emphasis on efficiency and ‘getting things done’.
Heteroglossia
In The Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin extends his analysis of dialogism through the concept of heteroglossia. This analysis emphasises the combination of existing statements or speech-genres to construct a text. Each novel is constructed from a diversity of styles and voices, assembled into a structured artistic system which arranges difference in a particular way.
This is a challenge to the idea of linguistic creativity as an original and individual use of language. Even within a single perspective, there are always multiple voices and perspectives, because the language which is used has been borrowed from others. Bakhtin argues that this is not simply creativity by the author. He is highly critical of such an emphasis on the author, which he sees as expressing a monological view of the novel.
Rather, the author performs a particular syncretic expression of social heteroglossia. The originality is in the combination, not the elements.
The social and historical world is also characterised by heteroglossia and discursive struggle.
On a social scale, Bakhtin criticises those (such as Saussure) who view language as a closed system. He sees such views as complicit in the creation of a unified language as a vehicle of centralised power. Most often, the ‘standard’ language (such as standard English) is taken from the speech of the elite. Such an elevation of a particular hegemonic language suppresses the heteroglossia of multiple everyday speech-types. Everyday speech is commanded to conform to official style so as to be recognised as part of a privileged, closed-off speech-community.
Where this type of ‘monoglossical’ language-use predominates, people display ‘magical’ or ‘mythological’ consciousness. In this consciousness, as in Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensional thought, words and their meanings have a close, stable relationship. The free development of dialogue is seriously impeded. The language becomes closed or ‘deaf’ to voices of difference. This closure of language is associated with nationalism.
Bakhtin sees such centralising tendencies as counterposed to centrifugal processes which diversify language. In particular, ‘folk’ and ‘festive’ languages such as carnivalesque challenge official closure. The history of language is a constant struggle between the two tendencies, which are also forces for stasis and change respectively. This is reminiscent of Kropotkin’s social and political principles, Castoriadis’ instituting and instituted imaginaries, and Negri’s constitutive and constituted power.
Bakhtin did not think monoglossical dominance could last for long. It is doomed to be ruptured by a return of heteroglossia, as the dominant discourse is interrupted by other voices. Heteroglossia is basic, whereas monoglossia is an alienated form of it. Because language always ultimately orients to the other, it is primordially dialogical. There is ultimately no unified literary medium, but rather, a plenitude of local social languages.
In a situation of heteroglossia, the dominant perspective, or one’s own perspective, is itself defamiliarised. This happens because it is made visible from the perspectives of others, as well as one’s own. It ruptures the mythological relationship to language, showing the gap between words and their meanings.
Bakhtin’s view goes against the view that language is simply a means to communicate information. According to Bakhtin, language cannot relate directly to an external world. Rather, a social field of interacting ways of seeing always mediates the relationship between each speaker and the world. Any particular way of seeing illuminates some aspects of an object and obscures others. The idea of language as simply descriptive turns it into a ‘dead, thing-like shell’. Any language-use is mediated by social ways of seeing. Furthermore, these social ways of seeing are always contested, in dialogue, and changing.
Speech is always directed towards or through a field of ‘alien words’ and alien value-judgements. An active and engaged understanding of others’ discourse incorporates the other’s perspective into one’s own frame, giving it new inflections and nuances. It is this possibility of learning from and incorporating the other’s discourse that makes dialogue, and newness in language, possible. Speakers try to aid this process by making their own statements resonate with the listener’s frame. Dialogue thus orients to the perspective of the other, seeking to introduce new elements into it. It is carried out ‘on alien territory’.
One undergoes ‘becoming’ or maturation by selectively assimilating others’ perspectives. One can situate oneself socially by relating one’s own perspective to those of others. This process should occur as a process of self-actualisation. It is the peculiar standpoint of ‘outsideness’ which makes something new of the other’s perspective by merging it with one’s own.
There is a difficulty, however. The alien word of the other can be either ‘authoritative’ or ‘internally persuasive’. Whereas the latter is coextensive with self-actualisation and dialogue, the former projects itself into the self in a reified way, as an object. Authoritative discourse cannot be represented as the words of a hero in dialogue with an author in a novel. A novel can become a site of heteroglossia because it can represent multiple speech-genres. It can thus represent the debates of a time-period, and bring perspectives into fuller understanding of each other. A dialogical novel reveals and relativises linguistic borders, making discourse travel across them. Poetry, in contrast, is viewed with suspicion.
For Bakhtin, a mature subject should learn to reject authoritative discourse and adopt only those parts of others’ perspectives which fit with her or his values and experiences. Such a subject would have an active, independent and responsible discourse, respecting the alien word in its autonomy.
This kind of approach echoes today’s debates around languages. Debates around ‘language-death’ show divisions between views of language as expressive – carrying a way of seeing – or as instrumental – primarily a means to communicate efficiently. The latter view is typical of capitalism, and of massified societies, whereas the former is concerned at the decline of local languages which relate densely to particular settings.
On a different note, Bhabha views the impact of migrants on language and identity as performing a similar process to that theorised by Bakhtin.
Heteroglossia causes long-term linguistic and aesthetic changes. Bakhtin attaches enormous social power to literature, suggesting that entire world-views are shaped by changes between monological and dialogical types of literature. Epics and poetry create fatalistic and closed worlds, whereas novels create open worlds.
Towards a New Linguistics
This approach, as advanced across several works, involves a change in the social role of linguistics. Bakhtin believes linguistics is limited because it reveals only the form of language and not its concrete use. He calls for an alternative ‘meta’ or ‘translinguistics’ which studies dialogical interaction and discourse.
This leads to a shift away from languages as systems, towards social uses of language. Language is only unitary in the abstract. In its social use, it operates as an irreducible plurality of belief-systems. Much of language-use is also intertextual, referring back to others’ statements and views. Bakhtin sees language as an ongoing, unending chain of meaning which is constantly renewed and reborn through each link in the chain. Languages and cultures are always unfinished. Similarly, nothing is ever absolutely dead, since it is connected to everything else by the chain of meanings.
One aspect of this analysis is the idea of speech-genres. According to Bakhtin, in addition to the forms of language, there are standard ways in which language is combined. Particular choices within a national language constitute particular speech-genres. Each sphere of language-use tends to have stable types of utterances. This view, in which the relationship between an entire language and an individual speech-act is mediated by speech-genres, contrasts with the freedom usually attributed to speakers.
Speech-genres include such zones of language as journalistic styles, regional dialects and ideological systems. Each genre embeds in its language particular social values, world-views and intentionalities, as well as space-time references (chronotopes).
An example of a speech genre would be tabloid discourse. Things have to be said in a certain way in tabloid discourse, referring to familiar figures, using humour and outrage in particular ways, and using a restricted vocabulary for example. The ‘rules’ of tabloid discourse are more precise and limiting than the ‘rules’ of English language in general.
We might similarly ask whether there are activist speech-genres. For instance, attempts to construct systems of nonviolent communication or non-oppressive language attempt to build speech-genres which fit with transformative goals. In practice, activists often recognise each other through characteristic subcultures with socially meaningful forms of symbolism. Other kinds of activists achieve familiarity through use or imitation of working-class speech-genres. The differences in speech-genres can impede communication across different groups of activists, or between activists and non-activists.
When discussing such issues, it is important to remember that there is no ‘natural’ or unproblematic speech-genre, and no speech without a genre. We need to be reflexive about the speech-genres we use, and dialogical about their connections with other speech-genres, to avoid the emergence of new monologisms.
Bakhtin treats speech-genres as the site of the intersection between language and history. Different speech-genres give expression to contradictions between past and present, between different social and ideological forces and so on. The interaction of speech-genres constantly produces new speech-genres. New relations produce new forms of speech, or give new meanings to old forms. It is also at the site of speech-genres that language becomes meaningful and useful for particular subjects.
Each speech-genre has its own ‘chronotope’. A chronotope is a set of reference-points in place and time which constitute the particularity of a way of speaking. It refers to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’. Each author or speaker makes use of organising categories of her or his space and time, which are apparent even in fictional works. Scholars such as Keith Basso have applied this idea to the mnemonic function of place in indigenous cosmologies.
Bakhtin uses this theory in his analyses of history. The emergence of dialogism at particular points produces cultural revolutions. Modernity, as an experience of contingency, arose because the hegemony of medieval Latin was replaced by an interplay of languages: classical Latin, medieval Latin and everyday or ‘marketplace’ speech. From this point onwards, elite and popular genres came into constant contact and influenced one another.
The cultural revolution was fundamentally premised on carnivalesque (see below). Popular culture became a vital source of inspiration for Renaissance writers such as Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare, and artists such as Bosch and Breughel, as a means to escape the closure of medieval thought.
For Bakhtin, this was made possible by the collapse of the feudal order and the emergence of new spatial and temporal ways of seeing. Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais emphasises his reliance on folk-cultural references. These references are used both to combat medieval ideas, and to relativise the progressiveness and truth of present and near-future progressive ideas.
However, Bakhtin sees this brief revolutionary moment succumbing to a new authoritarianism and seriousness after the sixteenth century, through absolute monarchy, rationalism and neo-classicism. He also thinks the holism of carnival was individualised in Romanticism. Gradually, ‘bourgeois’ ideas of individualism and order came to predominate, reproducing the closure of feudalism. Bakhtin suggests, however, that the references of carnivalesque retain some of their former energy, just waiting for an opportunity to re-emerge.
Discussion: An Abundance of Dialogue
Dialogism involves a particular ethic which can be applied politically and in everyday life. On the one hand, it is a refusal of closure: it opposes the fixation on any particular monologue. On the other hand, it also refuses dominant liberal forms of coexistence and tolerance. Bakhtin’s vision is not one of an empty juxtaposition of opinions, or a flattening-out of discourse so that all perspectives are equivalent.
Different perspectives are not partial, complementary truths. Rather, the dynamic interplay and interruption of perspectives is taken to produce new realities and new ways of seeing. It is incommensurability which gives dialogue its power.
This is a particular kind of discourse of fundamental rights, taken outside a liberal frame. A Bakhtinian dialogical right, like Foucauldian rights, is a right to a process, to self-activity in the formation of one’s perspective – not a question of an outcome, or a formal right in a particular system. It is recognised only when all subjects are able to speak and act autonomously.
This position will be denied by those who insist that an objective reality can be specified, separately from perspectives (for example, positivists and orthodox Marxists). It will also be denied by those who believe scarcity is ineliminable, and relations among perspectives are necessarily mediated by power (for instance, International Relations Realists and Lacanians/Laclauians). For Lacanians, the fact of dialogism is fundamentally traumatic, and the monologic gesture of imposing a master-signifier becomes a means to produce a minimum of social order and self-identity.
A Bakhtinian utopia would be a space of abundance of dialogue, of coexistence of differences, of the absence of any overarching regulation of the free self-actualisation of different perspectives. It would be something like a permanent carnival. Objections to this vision (‘but who’d get the work done?’, ‘what if everyone started killing each other?’, ‘how would you stop invasions?’) generally refer back implicitly to a monological standpoint: there is taken to be some overarching extra-perspectival necessity to which dialogue must be subordinate (in these cases: production, order, power). Such objections must be rejected by referring back to the issue of dialogism: who decides that this particular good is so important as to render others’ needs unimportant?
Still, from within dialogism, it seems that such conflicts do not go away. The valuing of dialogue would have to be immanent to the space, something recognised from each perspective. A dialogical world would also need means to ‘convert’ those who continue to believe in monologism, or to include them in the dialogue without dominating it. Some of the means towards such a world can be found in theories of conflict transformation.
While such difficulties affect dialogical activist and pedagogical spaces, the main difficulty today is rather different: resisting the overarching imposition of monologism. In a society such as Britain, the extent to which everyday polyphony has been silenced by a self-referential dominant discourse is unprecedented. People may try to negotiate with the system, but it flatly refuses such negotiation, relying increasingly on gestures of decisionist sovereignty and arbitrary command.
The emphasis on non-negotiable demands and compliance enforcement in policing, the emphasis on fixed boundaries and ‘consequences’ in parental and classroom management, the corrosion of union negotiation in the workplace, and the closure of public space to protest and dissent are symptoms of this stance. It seems that the only way to create spaces for dialogue today is through radical gestures of dissensus or interruption of the monologue, usually as insurrectionary acts. But the space for such acts is itself ‘cramped’ by the techniques of preemptive counterinsurgency. The rediscovery of dialogue is now conditioned on overcoming the imposition and enforcement of a social setting of monologue.
Dialogism is associated politically with initiatives such as the World Social Forum. The Spanish and Greek square occupations can also be deemed a recent instance of a dialogical experiment. The breakdown of the exclusivity of groups is one of the notable aspects of accounts of the occupations. The use of consensus decision-making is sometimes taken to produce a dialogical effect in which other voices are included. However, critics will sometimes argue that such experiments are not truly dialogical, since they exclude certain practices, or are hegemonised by particular voices. For such critics, dialogism can be actualised only as autonomous action of particular subjects, driven by their own desires.
In education, dialogism overlaps with the concerns of popular education with deconstructing the power of the teacher as ‘knower’, instead creating a multi-voiced education. Freire for instance refers to the need to learn to ‘speak one’s own word’. Dialogism also arises in initiatives such as OSDE and TOE. One should also bear in mind traditions in sociology which emphasise the importance of meaning-construction.
Issues in Bakhtin Studies
The field of Bakhtin studies is full of controversies. Bakhtin scholarship includes a controversy on whether Bakhtin was a Marxist, or was simply dressing-up his work in Marxist categories to avoid censorship. There are also debates around the authorship of other works attributed to Bakhtin’s colleagues, with Bakhtin sometimes taken to be the real author of Voloshinov’s work on Marxist linguistics.
I would argue that the emphasis on the interconnection of self-actualisation with social life is close to certain views of the early Marx. So, too, is the critique of the monologism and artificial separation of subjects within capitalism. Bakhtin specifically deploys Marxist ideas of reification, alienation and abstraction in his critique of monologism, which he portrays much as Marx portrayed idealism: as a dominance of a single ethical world-view over a much more complex reality, to the exclusion of living historical forces. However, Marx continues to believe in an ultimate human essence which operates as a mnological ‘trunk’ in his theory – defined, for instance, by the centrality of production.
To take a concrete example, the ‘refusal of work’ would for Bakhtin be a dialogical response to capitalism, whereas for Marx, it would be a refusal of one’s essential being (though autonomists would dispute my reading of Marx here). In sociological terms, Bakhtin is closer to interactionist and poststructuralist approaches based on meaning and discourse than to Marxist approaches with their usual emphasis on economics. This said, he resonates strongly with certain neo-Marxists such as Gramsci.
Certain aspects of his approach are unprecedented in either tradition, notably the emphasis on border-zones, dialogue and even struggle. Interactionists and poststructuralists tend to emphasise the self-production of meaning by each agent, whereas Bakhtin emphasises the self-altering, or even self-destroying, effects of contact with the other.
On another matter, Bakhtin perhaps exaggerates the influence of artistic genres on the social impact of literature and other arts. It is important to bear in mind the role of reader-response in constructing the text as it is received. A particular approach to reading can bring a closed text into dialogue, or render an open text closed. This is shown by research on cultural effects. While Bakhtin is alert to the role of context in the speech-genre of the text, it is also necessary to recognise that the ‘answerability’ of the text is dependent on how it is interpreted by the audience.
Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. His ‘In Theory’ column appears every other Friday.
2. Background from {[ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-2/]}
In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power
In the second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the Russian thinker's work: the Carnivalesque.
IN THEORY, NEW IN CEASEFIRE - Posted on Friday, September 9, 2011 8:51
By Andrew Robinson
In the second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the Russian thinker’s work: the Carnivalesque.
Carnival and carnivalesque
In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin discusses carnivalesque (or ‘folk-humour’,) a particular speech-genre which occurs across a variety of cultural sites, most notably in carnival itself.
A carnival is a moment when everything (except arguably violence) is permitted. It occurs on the border between art and life, and is a kind of life shaped according to a pattern of play. It is usually marked by displays of excess and grotesqueness. It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience. It creates a situation in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things, by showing the relative nature of all that exists.
The popular tradition of carnival was believed by Bakhtin to carry a particular wisdom which can be traced back to the ancient world. For Bakhtin, carnival and carnivalesque create an alternative social space, characterised by freedom, equality and abundance. During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self is also transgressed through practices such as masking.
Carnival is a kind of syncretic, ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom. It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder. Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.
Carnival is also taken to provide a positive alternative vision. It is not simply a deconstruction of dominant culture, but an alternative way of living based on a pattern of play. It prefigured a humanity constructed otherwise, as a utopia of abundance and freedom. It eliminated barriers among people created by hierarchies, replacing it with a vision of mutual cooperation and equality. Individuals are also subsumed into a kind of lived collective body which is constantly renewed.
On an affective level, it creates a particular intense feeling of immanence and unity – of being part of a historically immortal and uninterrupted process of becoming. It is a lived, bodily utopianism distinct from utopianisms of inner experience or abstract thought, a ‘bodily participation in the potentiality of another world’. The golden age is lived, not through inner thought or experience, but by the whole person, in thought and body.
An emphasis is placed on basic needs and the body, and on the sensual and the senses, counterposed perhaps to the commands of the will. It lowers the spiritual and abstract to the material level. It thus recognises embodiment, in contrast with dominant traditions which flee from it.
Prefiguring James Scott’s analysis of ‘hidden transcripts’, Bakhtin portrays carnival as an expression of a ‘second life’ of the people, against their subsumption in the dominant ideology. Ir replaces the false unity of the dominant system with a lived unity in contingency. It creates a zone in which new birth or emergence becomes possible, against the sterility of dominant norms (which in their tautology, cannot cretae the new). It also encourages the return of repressed creative energies. It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day will come to an end.
Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.
In carnival, everything is rendered ever-changing, playful and undefined. Hierarchies are overturned through inversions, debasements and profanations, performed by normally silenced voices and energies.
For instance, a jester might be crowned in place of a king. The authoritative voice of the dominant discourse loses its privilege. Humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom in such a way as to subvert it.
Carnival bridges the gap between holism (which necessarily absorbs its other) and the imperative to refuse authority (which necessarily restores exclusions): it absorbs its authoritarian other in a way which destroys the threat it poses. It is also simultaneously ecological and social, absorbing the self in a network of relations. Bakhtin insists that it opposes both ‘naturalism’, the idea of a fixed natural order, and ideas of fixed social hierarchies. It views ecology and social life as relational becoming. Perhaps a complete world cannot exist without carnival, for such a world would have no sense of its own contingency and relativity.
Although carnival succeeded in undermining the feudal worldview, it did not succeed in overthrowing it. Feudal repression was sufficient to prevent its full utopian potential from unfolding. But it is as if it created a space and bided its time. Bakhtin suggests that it took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this cultural revolution.
Bakhtin almost portrays this as a recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalised, and made available for other uses. Yet Bakhtin portrays this as a positive, creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bakhtin suggests that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth century.
Carnivals have turned into state-controlled parades or privatised holidays, humour and swearing have become merely negative, and the people’s ‘second life’ has almost ceased. However, Bakhtin believes that the carnival principle is indestructible. It continues to reappear as the inspiration for areas of life and culture. Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. Rabelais stands out here for a style which is irreducibly unofficial and unserious, and irrecuperable by authoritarianism.
Carnival and the Grotesque
Carnivalesque images often use an approach Bakhtin terms ‘grotesque realism’, drawing on the idea of the grotesque. This style transgresses the boundaries between bodily life and the field of art, bringing bodily functions into the field of art. It also celebrates incompleteness, transgression and the disruption of expectations. It often performs a kind of symbolic degradation aimed at bringing elevated phenomena ‘down to earth’ – to the material, bodily or sensuous level.
This was not conceived as an absolute destruction but as a return to the field of reproduction, regeneration and rebirth. The spirit of carnival was personified as a fat, boisterous man who consumed vast quantities of food and alcohol – similar to Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present.
The carnival body is seen as transgressing and outgrowing its own limits. This effect is achieved by emphasising the orifices and practices which connect the body to the world: eating, drinking, fucking, shitting, birth, and so on.
This is viewed as a kind of “materialism”. The “material” in this excessive, consumptive, reproductive and bodily sense must be contrasted with the material conceived in terms of privatisation and accumulation, as well as in contrast to its medieval adversary, the spiritual or ‘higher’ plane.
In capitalism, the body breaks away from the generating earth and people. Later uses of grotesque realism in literature tend to lose the universalist and holistic implications of the folk view of the body. Instead of finished forms, the different forms of life – animal, plant, human – are portrayed as incomplete and as passing into one another (think, for instance, of gargoyles with mixed human-animal features. This testifies to a view of being as incomplete).
Bakhtin believes that the grotesque is counterposed to the classical aesthetic of ready-made, completed being. The carnivalesque body in contrast expressed ideas of simultaneous death and rebirth. It is counterposed to the classicist idea of art as the pursuit of the sublime.
In medieval times, Bakhtin believes, carnival expressed an entire folk cosmology or perspective which was usually hidden. In this worldview, the earth itself is a kind of grotesque, fertile body. Laughter, counterposed to the monolithically serious official world, is also part of this phenomenon. There is also a vision of time involved, which treats the new and the future as sites of regeneration and abundance.
This contrasts with official ideas of a past ideal time or a timeless order.
The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change.
The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse.
This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil.
The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.
The celebration of the immortal collective body in carnival bolsters fearlessness. The amorphous fears are brought ‘down to earth’ through parody and degradation, turned into something worldly which can be overcome, stripped of its metaphysical pretensions. It tends to produce a complete liberty conditioned on complete fearlessness.
Against the timeless force of becoming, the pretensions of serious officials and rulers, and even of one’s own serious self and ego, seem irrelevant and comical. Laughter overcomes fear because it is uninhibited and limitless. Carnival is differentiated from other kinds of humour because the crowd also includes itself in the world which is mocked, and which is reborn.
According to Bakhtin, the grotesque is widespread in folk culture, from the giants and demons of myth to colloquial swearing and insults.
Curses, parody and debasing are used to subvert the stabilising tendencies of dominant speech-genres. Today’s swearing retains only the remainders of this culture, since it keeps only the destructive and not the reproductive elements. Still, its continuing attraction shows that it carries the remnants of the energy of folk culture and carnival.
The culture of the ‘marketplace’ also figures in Bakhtin’s account of carnival. In contrast to today’s use of the ‘market’ to signify official discourse, the medieval market was a site of transgressive discourse. This may explain how the rising capitalists were able to use references to the market to hegemonise popular strata.
Today, a genre similar to carnivalesque appears in shows such as South Park and Monty Python. The grotesque also remains widespread in various fields of art, and many examples can be found.
It is, however, against Bakhtin’s method to treat all instances of carnivalesque or grotesque as equivalent to their historical precedents. Everything must be re-examined as a product of its own context. Today’s Bakhtinians often read such phenomena in directly Bakhtinian terms. It is likely, however, that Bakhtin would have seen in them a pale, individualised and spectacularised shadow of the original culture of carnival. He would nevertheless recognise that they contain some of the energy of the original.
Carnival and Contingency: Bakhtin’s Place in Critical Theory
Carnival in Bakhtin’s account is a kind of de-transcendence of the world, the replacement of the fixed order of language – held in place by a master-signifier or ‘trunk’ – with a free slippage of signifiers in a space of immanence. The contingency of being/becoming can be embraced as an ecstatic potential, but it can also figure in literature as a horrifying monstrosity, as in the works of HP Lovecraft, and more broadly in the horror genre.
Does this express an unconscious longing for carnival which is at the same time disturbing to other layers of the psyche? We are here in the field of the dispute between affirmative theories of contingency (such as Bakhtin, Nietzsche, Negri, Deleuze, and Bey) against negative theories of contingency for which the openness of the ‘Real’ or the finitude and contingency of existence is always threatening (a repetition of the ‘cosmic terror’ Bakhtin critiques, ranging from Schmitt, Burke and Hobbes to Heidegger, Lacan and Laclau).
Why is contingency not universally celebrated, in a carnivalesque spirit? According to Reich, active force becomes threatening through being associated, as a result of authoritarian conditioning, with repressed desires and fear of authority. There are also questions of the effects of carnivalesque decomposition on one’s own ego or sense of self, on identities, and on habitual social practices or familiar spaces.
Theories with an affirmative view of contingency tend to share with Bakhtinian carnival a belief in an eternal creative force which unfolds in difference – active force in Deleuze and Nietzsche, constitutive power in Negri, the instituting imaginary in Castoriadis and so on. Theories with a negative view, in contrast, believe in an eternal need for order which is constantly threatened by the contingent nature of existence. The establishment of order occurs with the decision, the master-signifier and so on.
Between these positions, a lot depends on whether the ‘evil’ of disorder is sufficient to outweigh the effects of repression. It seems to do so only from the standpoint of the privileged. From the standpoint of the excluded, it just makes things worse: the excluded are left with both disorder and repression.
Bakhtin’s challenge is deeper than this, however. Bakhtin believes ‘disorder’ can be affirmative. For Bakhtin, immanence is non-threatening because it is associated with the dialogical nature of language. Because networks and connections continue to be performed in a space of dialogical immanence, the loss of transcendence is not a loss of meaning, life, or social being.
This reverses the Hobbesian account: rather than social death ensuing from the chaos of the collapse of meaning, social death is an effect of the artificial separation, rigidity and silencing which result from transcendence. As Benjamin has argued, disaster is not waiting on the edge of existence; the present is the disaster.
Authors such as Michael Holquist reduce the radicalism of Bakhtin’s immanence by suggesting that monologue remains necessary to his thought, as the point against which transgression occurs. Bakhtin certainly takes aspects of language-use such as speech-genres and the self-other gap to be universal, but he affirms the possibility of a radically different type of genre which is open to its own deconstruction.
Each person necessarily has a perspective or frame, but these frames do not need to be unified, nor are they necessarily unchanging. A rhizomatic world such as carnival has its perspectives, frame, and patterns. It does not engender an existentialist ‘lightness of being’.
But, precisely because these patterns are dissensual, holistic, reflexive, consciously relative and situated, they create a kind of freedom. This is neither a repetition of monologue, nor its redemption through recognition of its own contingency. It is an entirely different perspective in which dialogue and immanence are actualised.
Bakhtin’s account of carnival is criticised by some authors, such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner and Roger Sales, for ignoring carnival’s temporary character. For such critics, carnival is a kind of safety-valve through which people let off steam. It ultimately sustains and is functional for the dominant system. It might even reinforce dominant values by contrasting them with their opposites. James Scott responds that, if this were the case, the powerful would be more sympathetic to carnival than was actually the case. Also, carnivals did, in fact, sometimes pass over into rebellion. And rebellions often used symbolism borrowed from carnival.
It should be added, however, that not every carnivalesque act is emancipatory, because sometimes, it can disinhibit reactive desires arising from the system. Bakhtinian theory is sometimes used to defend texts which arguably reproduce dominant values, but do so in an ‘ironic’ or ‘humorous’ way. This happens because of the layers of prohibitions: the system often promotes something (such as sexism), then inhibits its unconstrained expression.
Hierarchies were perhaps simpler in medieval times. We get into complexities today around the distinction between ‘true’ transgressions and those which repeat dynamics of the system at a deeper level. The system can use such ‘false’ transgressions to channel the carnivalesque into its own reproduction. Consider, for instance, how the transgressiveness of football culture has been displaced into the fascism of the EDL.
The tendencally resistant space of fan culture, by being displaced through repression, is turned into the pseudo-transgression of performative racism. At one level, racial abuse is transgressive (of liberal norms), but on another, it reproduces dominant structures (of underlying racism).
Such displays are similar to true carnival in their excess and expressiveness, but they ultimately uphold the transcendentalism of the in-group through transgressions which reinforce their privilege at the expense of an out-group. This is especially clear from Theweleit’s work: reactionaries and fascists are terrified of being overwhelmed by the ‘floods’ and ‘bodies’ of interpenetration with the other, though they must constantly return to the point of the threat of interpenetration so as to ward it off.
If carnival brings down to earth, its rightist transmutation plants heads firmly in clouds, making the self feel secure in its place by putting the other in her/his place. It belittles the other and not the self; or it belittles both, but in such a way as to keep the gap between them.
Carnivalesque Activism
Carnival has become an underpinning for activist initiatives such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination and Reclaim the Streets, particularly the Carnival against Capital. The free party movement can also be seen as a reclamation of the spirit of carnival.
The carnivalesque style of activism emphasises the deconstruction of relations, including those between activists and police, to create an uncontrollable space. Such tactics can be remarkably successful in disorienting and repelling the monologists of state power.
Abby Peterson’s studies of the ethnography of militant social movements emphasise an affective structure similar to Bakhtin’s carnival. The experience of lived immediacy and joy is constructed through a movement orientation to the enacted event with no separation between actor and audience. This serves as a means to integrate movements without reference to standard techniques of master-signification, though it does require ‘action spaces’ and in many cases adversaries. Peterson echoes Bakhtin’s idea of the immediacy of activist ‘rituals’ as something distinct from theatre or spectacle. David Graeber makes similar reference to puppetry and creativity in protets movements.
Figures of carnivalesque immediacy can also be found in authors such as Hakim Bey and Feral Faun. One can also liken Bakhtin’s view of creating new combinations with Situationist practices of derive and detournement.
Similar strategies can also be seen in social movements such as La Ruta Pacifica, who use techniques of ‘social weaving’ to recompose a sense of empowerment against the fear caused by civil war and state terror. Much of the state’s power is based on anxiety. The Bakhtinian hypothesis is that anxiety can be neutralised through joyous experiences of collective festivity.
These occasions strip power of its performed mystification, breaking into its ideological reproduction. They show its contingency by exposing it to ridicule and distortion. And they create a sense of counter-power through the permanence of the creative force of becoming, counterposed to the fixed order of being. It doesn’t so much confront state power as render it irrelevant and ineffectual.
Whether this is effective may depend on the tools the two sides have available to actualise their ideologies in spaces and practices. State tactics such as kettling are specifically designed to instil terror, as an antidote to joy. The popular culture which provided the basis for carnival is, in the most harshly capitalist countries, being destroyed by the penetration of the state into everyday life.
It persists, of course, in many marginal settings. We should remember here that the Europe Bakhtin discusses was itself a periphery in a world-economy focused on the Mediterranean. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that its modes of resistance look like those of marginal sites today.
Reclaiming contingency and carnival in the dead heartlands of the core, where people are strongly invested in their official identities and the preservation of an order which they believe protects them, is a more difficult task.
Traditional carnivals continue to exist in places ranging from Germany and Notting Hill, London to the Caribbean and Brazil. Other related phenomena, such as holi in India, also persist. While state regulation is a problem, such events still provide platforms for alternative visions and for political critique.
One can also point to carnivalesque aspects in practices such as graffiti, which may bring ‘down to earth’ such contemporary sacred as police cars, banks, or corporate logos. And why do children so often add giant willies, sex-acts, or swear-words to street-signs?
The grotesque, exaggerated body and the bringing down-to-earth of systemic abstractions are present even in such small, apparently apolitical gestures. They signify what is missing in the official picture – much as those who perform such acts are often excluded from the official world. They create a full reality in which the world is restored to its fullness and creativity.
Overall, therefore, carnivalesque remains a potential counter-power in everyday life and activism, but is ‘cramped’ in its potential by the repressive construction of spaces of monologue. Medieval carnival was possible because the spaces it inhabited could be carved-out and defended through the ‘arts of resistance’ and the power of the weak. There is a need to recompose such powers to resist, in order to recreate spaces where alternatives can proliferate.
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Mikhail Bakhtin Everything Philosophers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxC2vwRS_a8
Images:
1. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
2. Carnivalesque image of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
3. Mikhail Bakhtin 'Truth is not born nor is it to be found in the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin 'To think about them means to talk with them; otherwise they immediately turn to us their objectivized side; they fall silent, close up and congeal into finished, objectivized images.
Biographies
1. ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/
2. ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-2/
1. Background from {[https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/]}
In Theory Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia
In the latest addition to his A-Z of Theory series, political theorist Andrew Robinson introduces, in a two-part essay, the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century. In part one, Robinson introduces Bakhtin's notions of Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia.
IN THEORY, NEW IN CEASEFIRE - Posted on Friday, July 29, 2011 9:38 - 40 Comments
Tags: in theory
By Andrew Robinson
Mikhail Bakhtin was one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century. He is sometimes termed the most important Soviet thinker in the social sciences. His work also has substantial importance for issues of political resistance. Working under the shadow of Stalinism, he was certainly a controversial figure. He was refused his doctorate because of the controversial nature of his work on Rabelais, and subsequently sentenced to internal exile in Kazakhstan during Stalin’s purges. He also had a disability for much of his life, and while he does not write directly on disability issues, his concern with embodiment is apparent.
Sometimes associated with Russian formalism, Bakhtin operates somewhere between a structural and constructivist approach to discourse. Bakhtin’s works also include detailed typologies of discourses, classified according to their structure and construction. According to Michael Holquist, Bakhtin is a system-builder, but not in the sense of methodological closure. Rather, his system consists of open-ended connections, and refuses to view issues in isolation. Nevertheless, he seeks to conceptualise general tendencies, in contrast to the untheorised collections often found in folklorism.
His works tend to be ‘allusive’ and ‘repetitive’, irritating those who seek an economical and logical presentation. They emphasise historical, cultural and social specificity in texts and practices. Texts should not be read through a modern gaze, but through their context. He also emphasises that particular themes cannot be separated from their place in genres and structures of texts. Phenomena should be composited, theorised and understood, not simply seen as single instances.
Things don’t exist ‘in themselves’, but only in their relations. As a literary analyst, Bakhtin emphasises the location of particular authors in the speech-genres they deploy, and in their spatial and temporal context. Bakhtin sees being as a ‘unique and unified event’. Being is always ‘event’ or ‘co-being’, simultaneous with other beings.
In his early philosophical work, Bakhtin also insists that each person is unique and irreplaceable. This uniqueness is ‘given’ (we’re unique whether we want to be or not), but also has to be actualised by each of us through our life. Each of us makes our existence into a particular ‘task’ or ‘project’ by assigning it meaning. Each of us exists as relations between particular coordinates in time and space, differentiating and relating to other coordinates. As the site of an event, the self cannot tolerate fixity: what it “is”, is undefinable. A person also cannot be fully revealed to or known in the world, because of constant change and ‘unfinalisability’.
We are always in dialogue, not only with other people, but also with everything in the world. Everything ‘addresses’ us in a certain sense. Each of us is uniquely addressed in our particular place in the world. One can see one’s exterior only through others’ perspectives.
Polyphony and Dialogism
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin developed the concepts which were to inform much of his work. The concept of ‘polyphony’ (borrowed from music) is central to this analysis. Polyphony literally means multiple voices. Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s work as containing many different voices, unmerged into a single perspective, and not subordinated to the voice of the author. Each of these voices has its own perspective, its own validity, and its own narrative weight within the novel.
The author does not place his own narrative voice between the character and the reader, but rather, allows characters to shock and subvert. It is thus as if the books were written by multiple characters, not a single author’s standpoint. Instead of a single objective world, held together by the author’s voice, there is a plurality of consciousnesses, each with its own world. The reader does not see a single reality presented by the author, but rather, how reality appears to each character.
The text appears as an interaction of distinct perspectives or ideologies, borne by the different characters. The characters are able to speak for themselves, even against the author – it is as if the other speaks directly through the text. The role of the author is fundamentally changed, because the author can no longer monopolise the ‘power to mean’.
Dostoevsky’s ‘dialogical principle’ is counterposed to the ‘monologism’ (single-thought discourse; also termed ‘homophony’ – single-voice) characteristic of traditional writing and thought. In monologism, one transcendental perspective or consciousness integrates the entire field, and thus integrates all the signifying practices, ideologies, values and desires that are deemed significant. Anything irrelevant to this perspective is deemed superfluous or irrelevant in general.
A monological world is made up of objects, integrated through a single consciousness. Since other subjects have value only in relation to the transcendent perspective, they are reduced to the status of objects. They are not recognised as ‘another consciousness’ or as having rights. Monologism is taken to close down the world it represents, by pretending to be the ultimate word.
In monologism, ‘truth’, constructed abstractly and systematically from the dominant perspective, is allowed to remove the rights of consciousness. Each subject’s ability to produce autonomous meaning is denied. Qualitative difference is rendered quantitative. This performs a kind of discursive ‘death’ of the other, who, as unheard and unrecognised, is in a state of non-being. The monological word ‘gravitates towards itself and its referential object’ (This idea of a tautological closure of dominant discourse is also found in Negri, Marcuse, Baudrillard and Barthes).
In a monological novel for instance, characters exist solely to transmit the author’s ideology, and the author represents only their own idea, not anyone else’s. Any differences between characters occur as if within a single consciousness. Such novels, Bakhtin claims, tend to be featureless and flat, marked by a single tone. Bakhtin is suspicious of authorial intent, as it often involves a failure to respect the autonomy of the other’s voice.
Dialogism in contrast recognises the multiplicity of perspectives and voices. It is also referred to as ‘double-voiced’ or ‘multi-voiced’. It is a ‘principle’ which can become the main referent of a particular aesthetic field. Each character has their own final word, but it relates to and interacts with those of other characters. Discourse does not logically unfold (as in analytical philosophy), but rather, interacts. This makes dialogical works a lot more ‘objective’ and ‘realistic’ than their monological counterparts, since they don’t subordinate reality to the ideology of the author.
A dialogical work constantly engages with and is informed by other works and voices, and seeks to alter or inform it. It draws on the history of past use and meanings associated with each word, phrase or genre. Everything is said in response to other statements and in anticipation of future statements. This style of language-use is, according to Bakhtin, typical of everyday language-use. Its use in novels accurately represents the reality of language-use.
The dialogical word is always in an intense relationship with another’s word, being addressed to a listener and anticipating a response. Because it is designed to produce a response, it has a combative quality (e.g. parody or polemic). It resists closure or unambiguous expression, and fails to produce a ‘whole’. It is a consciousness lived constantly on the borders of other consciousnesses.
For Bakhtin, monological language is a corruption of an underlying dialogism. All signifying practices (i.e. use of language and symbols) have an ultimately dialogical aim. Human consciousness is not a unified entity, but rather, is always conflict-ridden between different consciousnesses. Indeed, a single consciousness separate from interaction with other consciousnesses is impossible.
Consciousness is always a product of responsive interactions, and cannot exist in isolation (If someone offers counter-examples of hermits or psychological difference, it should be noted that such people are still in dialogue – with their ecological surroundings, with nature, with multiple inner voices… there is no reason to assume dialogism stops at the limits of the inter-human). Nevertheless, language-use can maximise this dialogical nature or seek to minimise or restrict it.
Dialogism is not simply different perspectives on the same world. It involves the distribution of utterly incompatible elements within different perspectives of equal value. Bakhtin criticises the view that disagreement means at least one of the people must be wrong. Because many standpoints exist, truth requires many incommensurable voices. Hence, it involves a world which is fundamentally irreducible to unity. It denies the possibility of transcendence of difference (as in Hegel; this is a major difference between dialogics and dialectics). Separateness and simultaneity are permanently with us. There is no single meaning to be found in the world, but a vast multitude of contesting meanings. Truth is established by addressivity, engagement and commitment in a particular context.
In a fully dialogical world-view, the structure of the text should itself be subordinate to the right of all characters to be treated as subjects rather than objects. A novel in this tradition is constructed as a great dialogue among unmerged souls or perspectives. Ideas are not presented in abstraction, but are concretely embodied in the lives of protagonists. A dialogical text presents relations as dialogical rather than mechanical or object-like, and avoids authorial finality. Artistic finalisation is deemed suspect, though also necessary to some minimal degree.
Dialogism in social analysis
This literary analysis has implications for social analysis. For Bakhtinians, the social world is also made up of multiple voices, perspectives, and subjective ‘worlds’. To exist is to engage in dialogue, and dialogue must not come to an end. Dialogues does not occur between fixed positions or subjects. People are also transformed through dialogue, fusing with parts of the other’s discourse. The other’s response can change everything in one’s own consciousness or perspective. Dialogue can produce a decisive reply which produces actual changes.
Bakhtin views humanity as fundamentally indeterminate and unfinalizable. People constantly struggle against external definitions of their thoughts and actions, which have a deadening effect on them. There is something within each concrete person which can only be actualised through a free discursive act, and not in a pre-defined context.
For Bakhtin, dialogism characterises the entire social world. Authentic human life is an open-ended dialogue. The world thus merges into an open-ended, multi-voiced, dialogical whole. Its separation (as in Marxist alienation) or splitting (as in Lacanian master-signification) is overcome through awareness of its dialogical character – in effect, as one big borderland. This is a world of many worlds, all equally capable of expressing themselves and conceptualising their objects.
Bakhtin emphasises that it is not enough to simply understand the other’s perspective. Only if it is made other than itself by being seen from outside can it produce something new or enriching.
Monologism is similar to the master-signifier in Lacanian thought, and arborescence in Deleuze. In politics, we might think of capitalism as monologism: only what is profitable is deemed significant. As Guattari observes, if we laugh or cry, if we fear old age or death, if we are ‘mad’, does not matter to capitalism – it is ‘noise’, in the information-theory sense. Even at a limit-case such as starvation, human need is irrelevant – a poor person may have a vital need for food, but they do not have effective market demand.
Or we might think of the state’s perspective as monological. If the state is concerned with border security, it takes this concern as sufficient grounds to put up fences, walls and checkpoints. The fact that these fences might intersect ancient tribal territories which are meaningful to those who live there is deemed superfluous.
In many ways, the police are the epitome of monologism. Police power is constructed around the assertion of a non-debatable demand, sometimes analysed as a fundamental refusal of dialogue and creativity.
We can also think about dialogism in everyday terms – whether people listen to their partners or housemates, whether parents respond to the needs of their children, whether opposing views are able to get a hearing in meetings, whether political views are treated as self-enclosed ‘opinions’ to which one is ‘entitled’ or can rather be rebutted by a decisive reply. From the often arbitrary moderation of web forums to informal hierarchies in activism, there seems to be a plague of monologisms in the modern world, often reinforced by mutually exclusive categories and roles, conventional expectations of authority, and an emphasis on efficiency and ‘getting things done’.
Heteroglossia
In The Dialogical Imagination, Bakhtin extends his analysis of dialogism through the concept of heteroglossia. This analysis emphasises the combination of existing statements or speech-genres to construct a text. Each novel is constructed from a diversity of styles and voices, assembled into a structured artistic system which arranges difference in a particular way.
This is a challenge to the idea of linguistic creativity as an original and individual use of language. Even within a single perspective, there are always multiple voices and perspectives, because the language which is used has been borrowed from others. Bakhtin argues that this is not simply creativity by the author. He is highly critical of such an emphasis on the author, which he sees as expressing a monological view of the novel.
Rather, the author performs a particular syncretic expression of social heteroglossia. The originality is in the combination, not the elements.
The social and historical world is also characterised by heteroglossia and discursive struggle.
On a social scale, Bakhtin criticises those (such as Saussure) who view language as a closed system. He sees such views as complicit in the creation of a unified language as a vehicle of centralised power. Most often, the ‘standard’ language (such as standard English) is taken from the speech of the elite. Such an elevation of a particular hegemonic language suppresses the heteroglossia of multiple everyday speech-types. Everyday speech is commanded to conform to official style so as to be recognised as part of a privileged, closed-off speech-community.
Where this type of ‘monoglossical’ language-use predominates, people display ‘magical’ or ‘mythological’ consciousness. In this consciousness, as in Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensional thought, words and their meanings have a close, stable relationship. The free development of dialogue is seriously impeded. The language becomes closed or ‘deaf’ to voices of difference. This closure of language is associated with nationalism.
Bakhtin sees such centralising tendencies as counterposed to centrifugal processes which diversify language. In particular, ‘folk’ and ‘festive’ languages such as carnivalesque challenge official closure. The history of language is a constant struggle between the two tendencies, which are also forces for stasis and change respectively. This is reminiscent of Kropotkin’s social and political principles, Castoriadis’ instituting and instituted imaginaries, and Negri’s constitutive and constituted power.
Bakhtin did not think monoglossical dominance could last for long. It is doomed to be ruptured by a return of heteroglossia, as the dominant discourse is interrupted by other voices. Heteroglossia is basic, whereas monoglossia is an alienated form of it. Because language always ultimately orients to the other, it is primordially dialogical. There is ultimately no unified literary medium, but rather, a plenitude of local social languages.
In a situation of heteroglossia, the dominant perspective, or one’s own perspective, is itself defamiliarised. This happens because it is made visible from the perspectives of others, as well as one’s own. It ruptures the mythological relationship to language, showing the gap between words and their meanings.
Bakhtin’s view goes against the view that language is simply a means to communicate information. According to Bakhtin, language cannot relate directly to an external world. Rather, a social field of interacting ways of seeing always mediates the relationship between each speaker and the world. Any particular way of seeing illuminates some aspects of an object and obscures others. The idea of language as simply descriptive turns it into a ‘dead, thing-like shell’. Any language-use is mediated by social ways of seeing. Furthermore, these social ways of seeing are always contested, in dialogue, and changing.
Speech is always directed towards or through a field of ‘alien words’ and alien value-judgements. An active and engaged understanding of others’ discourse incorporates the other’s perspective into one’s own frame, giving it new inflections and nuances. It is this possibility of learning from and incorporating the other’s discourse that makes dialogue, and newness in language, possible. Speakers try to aid this process by making their own statements resonate with the listener’s frame. Dialogue thus orients to the perspective of the other, seeking to introduce new elements into it. It is carried out ‘on alien territory’.
One undergoes ‘becoming’ or maturation by selectively assimilating others’ perspectives. One can situate oneself socially by relating one’s own perspective to those of others. This process should occur as a process of self-actualisation. It is the peculiar standpoint of ‘outsideness’ which makes something new of the other’s perspective by merging it with one’s own.
There is a difficulty, however. The alien word of the other can be either ‘authoritative’ or ‘internally persuasive’. Whereas the latter is coextensive with self-actualisation and dialogue, the former projects itself into the self in a reified way, as an object. Authoritative discourse cannot be represented as the words of a hero in dialogue with an author in a novel. A novel can become a site of heteroglossia because it can represent multiple speech-genres. It can thus represent the debates of a time-period, and bring perspectives into fuller understanding of each other. A dialogical novel reveals and relativises linguistic borders, making discourse travel across them. Poetry, in contrast, is viewed with suspicion.
For Bakhtin, a mature subject should learn to reject authoritative discourse and adopt only those parts of others’ perspectives which fit with her or his values and experiences. Such a subject would have an active, independent and responsible discourse, respecting the alien word in its autonomy.
This kind of approach echoes today’s debates around languages. Debates around ‘language-death’ show divisions between views of language as expressive – carrying a way of seeing – or as instrumental – primarily a means to communicate efficiently. The latter view is typical of capitalism, and of massified societies, whereas the former is concerned at the decline of local languages which relate densely to particular settings.
On a different note, Bhabha views the impact of migrants on language and identity as performing a similar process to that theorised by Bakhtin.
Heteroglossia causes long-term linguistic and aesthetic changes. Bakhtin attaches enormous social power to literature, suggesting that entire world-views are shaped by changes between monological and dialogical types of literature. Epics and poetry create fatalistic and closed worlds, whereas novels create open worlds.
Towards a New Linguistics
This approach, as advanced across several works, involves a change in the social role of linguistics. Bakhtin believes linguistics is limited because it reveals only the form of language and not its concrete use. He calls for an alternative ‘meta’ or ‘translinguistics’ which studies dialogical interaction and discourse.
This leads to a shift away from languages as systems, towards social uses of language. Language is only unitary in the abstract. In its social use, it operates as an irreducible plurality of belief-systems. Much of language-use is also intertextual, referring back to others’ statements and views. Bakhtin sees language as an ongoing, unending chain of meaning which is constantly renewed and reborn through each link in the chain. Languages and cultures are always unfinished. Similarly, nothing is ever absolutely dead, since it is connected to everything else by the chain of meanings.
One aspect of this analysis is the idea of speech-genres. According to Bakhtin, in addition to the forms of language, there are standard ways in which language is combined. Particular choices within a national language constitute particular speech-genres. Each sphere of language-use tends to have stable types of utterances. This view, in which the relationship between an entire language and an individual speech-act is mediated by speech-genres, contrasts with the freedom usually attributed to speakers.
Speech-genres include such zones of language as journalistic styles, regional dialects and ideological systems. Each genre embeds in its language particular social values, world-views and intentionalities, as well as space-time references (chronotopes).
An example of a speech genre would be tabloid discourse. Things have to be said in a certain way in tabloid discourse, referring to familiar figures, using humour and outrage in particular ways, and using a restricted vocabulary for example. The ‘rules’ of tabloid discourse are more precise and limiting than the ‘rules’ of English language in general.
We might similarly ask whether there are activist speech-genres. For instance, attempts to construct systems of nonviolent communication or non-oppressive language attempt to build speech-genres which fit with transformative goals. In practice, activists often recognise each other through characteristic subcultures with socially meaningful forms of symbolism. Other kinds of activists achieve familiarity through use or imitation of working-class speech-genres. The differences in speech-genres can impede communication across different groups of activists, or between activists and non-activists.
When discussing such issues, it is important to remember that there is no ‘natural’ or unproblematic speech-genre, and no speech without a genre. We need to be reflexive about the speech-genres we use, and dialogical about their connections with other speech-genres, to avoid the emergence of new monologisms.
Bakhtin treats speech-genres as the site of the intersection between language and history. Different speech-genres give expression to contradictions between past and present, between different social and ideological forces and so on. The interaction of speech-genres constantly produces new speech-genres. New relations produce new forms of speech, or give new meanings to old forms. It is also at the site of speech-genres that language becomes meaningful and useful for particular subjects.
Each speech-genre has its own ‘chronotope’. A chronotope is a set of reference-points in place and time which constitute the particularity of a way of speaking. It refers to ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’. Each author or speaker makes use of organising categories of her or his space and time, which are apparent even in fictional works. Scholars such as Keith Basso have applied this idea to the mnemonic function of place in indigenous cosmologies.
Bakhtin uses this theory in his analyses of history. The emergence of dialogism at particular points produces cultural revolutions. Modernity, as an experience of contingency, arose because the hegemony of medieval Latin was replaced by an interplay of languages: classical Latin, medieval Latin and everyday or ‘marketplace’ speech. From this point onwards, elite and popular genres came into constant contact and influenced one another.
The cultural revolution was fundamentally premised on carnivalesque (see below). Popular culture became a vital source of inspiration for Renaissance writers such as Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare, and artists such as Bosch and Breughel, as a means to escape the closure of medieval thought.
For Bakhtin, this was made possible by the collapse of the feudal order and the emergence of new spatial and temporal ways of seeing. Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais emphasises his reliance on folk-cultural references. These references are used both to combat medieval ideas, and to relativise the progressiveness and truth of present and near-future progressive ideas.
However, Bakhtin sees this brief revolutionary moment succumbing to a new authoritarianism and seriousness after the sixteenth century, through absolute monarchy, rationalism and neo-classicism. He also thinks the holism of carnival was individualised in Romanticism. Gradually, ‘bourgeois’ ideas of individualism and order came to predominate, reproducing the closure of feudalism. Bakhtin suggests, however, that the references of carnivalesque retain some of their former energy, just waiting for an opportunity to re-emerge.
Discussion: An Abundance of Dialogue
Dialogism involves a particular ethic which can be applied politically and in everyday life. On the one hand, it is a refusal of closure: it opposes the fixation on any particular monologue. On the other hand, it also refuses dominant liberal forms of coexistence and tolerance. Bakhtin’s vision is not one of an empty juxtaposition of opinions, or a flattening-out of discourse so that all perspectives are equivalent.
Different perspectives are not partial, complementary truths. Rather, the dynamic interplay and interruption of perspectives is taken to produce new realities and new ways of seeing. It is incommensurability which gives dialogue its power.
This is a particular kind of discourse of fundamental rights, taken outside a liberal frame. A Bakhtinian dialogical right, like Foucauldian rights, is a right to a process, to self-activity in the formation of one’s perspective – not a question of an outcome, or a formal right in a particular system. It is recognised only when all subjects are able to speak and act autonomously.
This position will be denied by those who insist that an objective reality can be specified, separately from perspectives (for example, positivists and orthodox Marxists). It will also be denied by those who believe scarcity is ineliminable, and relations among perspectives are necessarily mediated by power (for instance, International Relations Realists and Lacanians/Laclauians). For Lacanians, the fact of dialogism is fundamentally traumatic, and the monologic gesture of imposing a master-signifier becomes a means to produce a minimum of social order and self-identity.
A Bakhtinian utopia would be a space of abundance of dialogue, of coexistence of differences, of the absence of any overarching regulation of the free self-actualisation of different perspectives. It would be something like a permanent carnival. Objections to this vision (‘but who’d get the work done?’, ‘what if everyone started killing each other?’, ‘how would you stop invasions?’) generally refer back implicitly to a monological standpoint: there is taken to be some overarching extra-perspectival necessity to which dialogue must be subordinate (in these cases: production, order, power). Such objections must be rejected by referring back to the issue of dialogism: who decides that this particular good is so important as to render others’ needs unimportant?
Still, from within dialogism, it seems that such conflicts do not go away. The valuing of dialogue would have to be immanent to the space, something recognised from each perspective. A dialogical world would also need means to ‘convert’ those who continue to believe in monologism, or to include them in the dialogue without dominating it. Some of the means towards such a world can be found in theories of conflict transformation.
While such difficulties affect dialogical activist and pedagogical spaces, the main difficulty today is rather different: resisting the overarching imposition of monologism. In a society such as Britain, the extent to which everyday polyphony has been silenced by a self-referential dominant discourse is unprecedented. People may try to negotiate with the system, but it flatly refuses such negotiation, relying increasingly on gestures of decisionist sovereignty and arbitrary command.
The emphasis on non-negotiable demands and compliance enforcement in policing, the emphasis on fixed boundaries and ‘consequences’ in parental and classroom management, the corrosion of union negotiation in the workplace, and the closure of public space to protest and dissent are symptoms of this stance. It seems that the only way to create spaces for dialogue today is through radical gestures of dissensus or interruption of the monologue, usually as insurrectionary acts. But the space for such acts is itself ‘cramped’ by the techniques of preemptive counterinsurgency. The rediscovery of dialogue is now conditioned on overcoming the imposition and enforcement of a social setting of monologue.
Dialogism is associated politically with initiatives such as the World Social Forum. The Spanish and Greek square occupations can also be deemed a recent instance of a dialogical experiment. The breakdown of the exclusivity of groups is one of the notable aspects of accounts of the occupations. The use of consensus decision-making is sometimes taken to produce a dialogical effect in which other voices are included. However, critics will sometimes argue that such experiments are not truly dialogical, since they exclude certain practices, or are hegemonised by particular voices. For such critics, dialogism can be actualised only as autonomous action of particular subjects, driven by their own desires.
In education, dialogism overlaps with the concerns of popular education with deconstructing the power of the teacher as ‘knower’, instead creating a multi-voiced education. Freire for instance refers to the need to learn to ‘speak one’s own word’. Dialogism also arises in initiatives such as OSDE and TOE. One should also bear in mind traditions in sociology which emphasise the importance of meaning-construction.
Issues in Bakhtin Studies
The field of Bakhtin studies is full of controversies. Bakhtin scholarship includes a controversy on whether Bakhtin was a Marxist, or was simply dressing-up his work in Marxist categories to avoid censorship. There are also debates around the authorship of other works attributed to Bakhtin’s colleagues, with Bakhtin sometimes taken to be the real author of Voloshinov’s work on Marxist linguistics.
I would argue that the emphasis on the interconnection of self-actualisation with social life is close to certain views of the early Marx. So, too, is the critique of the monologism and artificial separation of subjects within capitalism. Bakhtin specifically deploys Marxist ideas of reification, alienation and abstraction in his critique of monologism, which he portrays much as Marx portrayed idealism: as a dominance of a single ethical world-view over a much more complex reality, to the exclusion of living historical forces. However, Marx continues to believe in an ultimate human essence which operates as a mnological ‘trunk’ in his theory – defined, for instance, by the centrality of production.
To take a concrete example, the ‘refusal of work’ would for Bakhtin be a dialogical response to capitalism, whereas for Marx, it would be a refusal of one’s essential being (though autonomists would dispute my reading of Marx here). In sociological terms, Bakhtin is closer to interactionist and poststructuralist approaches based on meaning and discourse than to Marxist approaches with their usual emphasis on economics. This said, he resonates strongly with certain neo-Marxists such as Gramsci.
Certain aspects of his approach are unprecedented in either tradition, notably the emphasis on border-zones, dialogue and even struggle. Interactionists and poststructuralists tend to emphasise the self-production of meaning by each agent, whereas Bakhtin emphasises the self-altering, or even self-destroying, effects of contact with the other.
On another matter, Bakhtin perhaps exaggerates the influence of artistic genres on the social impact of literature and other arts. It is important to bear in mind the role of reader-response in constructing the text as it is received. A particular approach to reading can bring a closed text into dialogue, or render an open text closed. This is shown by research on cultural effects. While Bakhtin is alert to the role of context in the speech-genre of the text, it is also necessary to recognise that the ‘answerability’ of the text is dependent on how it is interpreted by the audience.
Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. His ‘In Theory’ column appears every other Friday.
2. Background from {[ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-2/]}
In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power
In the second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the Russian thinker's work: the Carnivalesque.
IN THEORY, NEW IN CEASEFIRE - Posted on Friday, September 9, 2011 8:51
By Andrew Robinson
In the second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the Russian thinker’s work: the Carnivalesque.
Carnival and carnivalesque
In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin discusses carnivalesque (or ‘folk-humour’,) a particular speech-genre which occurs across a variety of cultural sites, most notably in carnival itself.
A carnival is a moment when everything (except arguably violence) is permitted. It occurs on the border between art and life, and is a kind of life shaped according to a pattern of play. It is usually marked by displays of excess and grotesqueness. It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience. It creates a situation in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things, by showing the relative nature of all that exists.
The popular tradition of carnival was believed by Bakhtin to carry a particular wisdom which can be traced back to the ancient world. For Bakhtin, carnival and carnivalesque create an alternative social space, characterised by freedom, equality and abundance. During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self is also transgressed through practices such as masking.
Carnival is a kind of syncretic, ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom. It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder. Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.
Carnival is also taken to provide a positive alternative vision. It is not simply a deconstruction of dominant culture, but an alternative way of living based on a pattern of play. It prefigured a humanity constructed otherwise, as a utopia of abundance and freedom. It eliminated barriers among people created by hierarchies, replacing it with a vision of mutual cooperation and equality. Individuals are also subsumed into a kind of lived collective body which is constantly renewed.
On an affective level, it creates a particular intense feeling of immanence and unity – of being part of a historically immortal and uninterrupted process of becoming. It is a lived, bodily utopianism distinct from utopianisms of inner experience or abstract thought, a ‘bodily participation in the potentiality of another world’. The golden age is lived, not through inner thought or experience, but by the whole person, in thought and body.
An emphasis is placed on basic needs and the body, and on the sensual and the senses, counterposed perhaps to the commands of the will. It lowers the spiritual and abstract to the material level. It thus recognises embodiment, in contrast with dominant traditions which flee from it.
Prefiguring James Scott’s analysis of ‘hidden transcripts’, Bakhtin portrays carnival as an expression of a ‘second life’ of the people, against their subsumption in the dominant ideology. Ir replaces the false unity of the dominant system with a lived unity in contingency. It creates a zone in which new birth or emergence becomes possible, against the sterility of dominant norms (which in their tautology, cannot cretae the new). It also encourages the return of repressed creative energies. It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day will come to an end.
Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.
In carnival, everything is rendered ever-changing, playful and undefined. Hierarchies are overturned through inversions, debasements and profanations, performed by normally silenced voices and energies.
For instance, a jester might be crowned in place of a king. The authoritative voice of the dominant discourse loses its privilege. Humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom in such a way as to subvert it.
Carnival bridges the gap between holism (which necessarily absorbs its other) and the imperative to refuse authority (which necessarily restores exclusions): it absorbs its authoritarian other in a way which destroys the threat it poses. It is also simultaneously ecological and social, absorbing the self in a network of relations. Bakhtin insists that it opposes both ‘naturalism’, the idea of a fixed natural order, and ideas of fixed social hierarchies. It views ecology and social life as relational becoming. Perhaps a complete world cannot exist without carnival, for such a world would have no sense of its own contingency and relativity.
Although carnival succeeded in undermining the feudal worldview, it did not succeed in overthrowing it. Feudal repression was sufficient to prevent its full utopian potential from unfolding. But it is as if it created a space and bided its time. Bakhtin suggests that it took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this cultural revolution.
Bakhtin almost portrays this as a recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalised, and made available for other uses. Yet Bakhtin portrays this as a positive, creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bakhtin suggests that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth century.
Carnivals have turned into state-controlled parades or privatised holidays, humour and swearing have become merely negative, and the people’s ‘second life’ has almost ceased. However, Bakhtin believes that the carnival principle is indestructible. It continues to reappear as the inspiration for areas of life and culture. Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. Rabelais stands out here for a style which is irreducibly unofficial and unserious, and irrecuperable by authoritarianism.
Carnival and the Grotesque
Carnivalesque images often use an approach Bakhtin terms ‘grotesque realism’, drawing on the idea of the grotesque. This style transgresses the boundaries between bodily life and the field of art, bringing bodily functions into the field of art. It also celebrates incompleteness, transgression and the disruption of expectations. It often performs a kind of symbolic degradation aimed at bringing elevated phenomena ‘down to earth’ – to the material, bodily or sensuous level.
This was not conceived as an absolute destruction but as a return to the field of reproduction, regeneration and rebirth. The spirit of carnival was personified as a fat, boisterous man who consumed vast quantities of food and alcohol – similar to Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present.
The carnival body is seen as transgressing and outgrowing its own limits. This effect is achieved by emphasising the orifices and practices which connect the body to the world: eating, drinking, fucking, shitting, birth, and so on.
This is viewed as a kind of “materialism”. The “material” in this excessive, consumptive, reproductive and bodily sense must be contrasted with the material conceived in terms of privatisation and accumulation, as well as in contrast to its medieval adversary, the spiritual or ‘higher’ plane.
In capitalism, the body breaks away from the generating earth and people. Later uses of grotesque realism in literature tend to lose the universalist and holistic implications of the folk view of the body. Instead of finished forms, the different forms of life – animal, plant, human – are portrayed as incomplete and as passing into one another (think, for instance, of gargoyles with mixed human-animal features. This testifies to a view of being as incomplete).
Bakhtin believes that the grotesque is counterposed to the classical aesthetic of ready-made, completed being. The carnivalesque body in contrast expressed ideas of simultaneous death and rebirth. It is counterposed to the classicist idea of art as the pursuit of the sublime.
In medieval times, Bakhtin believes, carnival expressed an entire folk cosmology or perspective which was usually hidden. In this worldview, the earth itself is a kind of grotesque, fertile body. Laughter, counterposed to the monolithically serious official world, is also part of this phenomenon. There is also a vision of time involved, which treats the new and the future as sites of regeneration and abundance.
This contrasts with official ideas of a past ideal time or a timeless order.
The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change.
The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse.
This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil.
The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.
The celebration of the immortal collective body in carnival bolsters fearlessness. The amorphous fears are brought ‘down to earth’ through parody and degradation, turned into something worldly which can be overcome, stripped of its metaphysical pretensions. It tends to produce a complete liberty conditioned on complete fearlessness.
Against the timeless force of becoming, the pretensions of serious officials and rulers, and even of one’s own serious self and ego, seem irrelevant and comical. Laughter overcomes fear because it is uninhibited and limitless. Carnival is differentiated from other kinds of humour because the crowd also includes itself in the world which is mocked, and which is reborn.
According to Bakhtin, the grotesque is widespread in folk culture, from the giants and demons of myth to colloquial swearing and insults.
Curses, parody and debasing are used to subvert the stabilising tendencies of dominant speech-genres. Today’s swearing retains only the remainders of this culture, since it keeps only the destructive and not the reproductive elements. Still, its continuing attraction shows that it carries the remnants of the energy of folk culture and carnival.
The culture of the ‘marketplace’ also figures in Bakhtin’s account of carnival. In contrast to today’s use of the ‘market’ to signify official discourse, the medieval market was a site of transgressive discourse. This may explain how the rising capitalists were able to use references to the market to hegemonise popular strata.
Today, a genre similar to carnivalesque appears in shows such as South Park and Monty Python. The grotesque also remains widespread in various fields of art, and many examples can be found.
It is, however, against Bakhtin’s method to treat all instances of carnivalesque or grotesque as equivalent to their historical precedents. Everything must be re-examined as a product of its own context. Today’s Bakhtinians often read such phenomena in directly Bakhtinian terms. It is likely, however, that Bakhtin would have seen in them a pale, individualised and spectacularised shadow of the original culture of carnival. He would nevertheless recognise that they contain some of the energy of the original.
Carnival and Contingency: Bakhtin’s Place in Critical Theory
Carnival in Bakhtin’s account is a kind of de-transcendence of the world, the replacement of the fixed order of language – held in place by a master-signifier or ‘trunk’ – with a free slippage of signifiers in a space of immanence. The contingency of being/becoming can be embraced as an ecstatic potential, but it can also figure in literature as a horrifying monstrosity, as in the works of HP Lovecraft, and more broadly in the horror genre.
Does this express an unconscious longing for carnival which is at the same time disturbing to other layers of the psyche? We are here in the field of the dispute between affirmative theories of contingency (such as Bakhtin, Nietzsche, Negri, Deleuze, and Bey) against negative theories of contingency for which the openness of the ‘Real’ or the finitude and contingency of existence is always threatening (a repetition of the ‘cosmic terror’ Bakhtin critiques, ranging from Schmitt, Burke and Hobbes to Heidegger, Lacan and Laclau).
Why is contingency not universally celebrated, in a carnivalesque spirit? According to Reich, active force becomes threatening through being associated, as a result of authoritarian conditioning, with repressed desires and fear of authority. There are also questions of the effects of carnivalesque decomposition on one’s own ego or sense of self, on identities, and on habitual social practices or familiar spaces.
Theories with an affirmative view of contingency tend to share with Bakhtinian carnival a belief in an eternal creative force which unfolds in difference – active force in Deleuze and Nietzsche, constitutive power in Negri, the instituting imaginary in Castoriadis and so on. Theories with a negative view, in contrast, believe in an eternal need for order which is constantly threatened by the contingent nature of existence. The establishment of order occurs with the decision, the master-signifier and so on.
Between these positions, a lot depends on whether the ‘evil’ of disorder is sufficient to outweigh the effects of repression. It seems to do so only from the standpoint of the privileged. From the standpoint of the excluded, it just makes things worse: the excluded are left with both disorder and repression.
Bakhtin’s challenge is deeper than this, however. Bakhtin believes ‘disorder’ can be affirmative. For Bakhtin, immanence is non-threatening because it is associated with the dialogical nature of language. Because networks and connections continue to be performed in a space of dialogical immanence, the loss of transcendence is not a loss of meaning, life, or social being.
This reverses the Hobbesian account: rather than social death ensuing from the chaos of the collapse of meaning, social death is an effect of the artificial separation, rigidity and silencing which result from transcendence. As Benjamin has argued, disaster is not waiting on the edge of existence; the present is the disaster.
Authors such as Michael Holquist reduce the radicalism of Bakhtin’s immanence by suggesting that monologue remains necessary to his thought, as the point against which transgression occurs. Bakhtin certainly takes aspects of language-use such as speech-genres and the self-other gap to be universal, but he affirms the possibility of a radically different type of genre which is open to its own deconstruction.
Each person necessarily has a perspective or frame, but these frames do not need to be unified, nor are they necessarily unchanging. A rhizomatic world such as carnival has its perspectives, frame, and patterns. It does not engender an existentialist ‘lightness of being’.
But, precisely because these patterns are dissensual, holistic, reflexive, consciously relative and situated, they create a kind of freedom. This is neither a repetition of monologue, nor its redemption through recognition of its own contingency. It is an entirely different perspective in which dialogue and immanence are actualised.
Bakhtin’s account of carnival is criticised by some authors, such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner and Roger Sales, for ignoring carnival’s temporary character. For such critics, carnival is a kind of safety-valve through which people let off steam. It ultimately sustains and is functional for the dominant system. It might even reinforce dominant values by contrasting them with their opposites. James Scott responds that, if this were the case, the powerful would be more sympathetic to carnival than was actually the case. Also, carnivals did, in fact, sometimes pass over into rebellion. And rebellions often used symbolism borrowed from carnival.
It should be added, however, that not every carnivalesque act is emancipatory, because sometimes, it can disinhibit reactive desires arising from the system. Bakhtinian theory is sometimes used to defend texts which arguably reproduce dominant values, but do so in an ‘ironic’ or ‘humorous’ way. This happens because of the layers of prohibitions: the system often promotes something (such as sexism), then inhibits its unconstrained expression.
Hierarchies were perhaps simpler in medieval times. We get into complexities today around the distinction between ‘true’ transgressions and those which repeat dynamics of the system at a deeper level. The system can use such ‘false’ transgressions to channel the carnivalesque into its own reproduction. Consider, for instance, how the transgressiveness of football culture has been displaced into the fascism of the EDL.
The tendencally resistant space of fan culture, by being displaced through repression, is turned into the pseudo-transgression of performative racism. At one level, racial abuse is transgressive (of liberal norms), but on another, it reproduces dominant structures (of underlying racism).
Such displays are similar to true carnival in their excess and expressiveness, but they ultimately uphold the transcendentalism of the in-group through transgressions which reinforce their privilege at the expense of an out-group. This is especially clear from Theweleit’s work: reactionaries and fascists are terrified of being overwhelmed by the ‘floods’ and ‘bodies’ of interpenetration with the other, though they must constantly return to the point of the threat of interpenetration so as to ward it off.
If carnival brings down to earth, its rightist transmutation plants heads firmly in clouds, making the self feel secure in its place by putting the other in her/his place. It belittles the other and not the self; or it belittles both, but in such a way as to keep the gap between them.
Carnivalesque Activism
Carnival has become an underpinning for activist initiatives such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination and Reclaim the Streets, particularly the Carnival against Capital. The free party movement can also be seen as a reclamation of the spirit of carnival.
The carnivalesque style of activism emphasises the deconstruction of relations, including those between activists and police, to create an uncontrollable space. Such tactics can be remarkably successful in disorienting and repelling the monologists of state power.
Abby Peterson’s studies of the ethnography of militant social movements emphasise an affective structure similar to Bakhtin’s carnival. The experience of lived immediacy and joy is constructed through a movement orientation to the enacted event with no separation between actor and audience. This serves as a means to integrate movements without reference to standard techniques of master-signification, though it does require ‘action spaces’ and in many cases adversaries. Peterson echoes Bakhtin’s idea of the immediacy of activist ‘rituals’ as something distinct from theatre or spectacle. David Graeber makes similar reference to puppetry and creativity in protets movements.
Figures of carnivalesque immediacy can also be found in authors such as Hakim Bey and Feral Faun. One can also liken Bakhtin’s view of creating new combinations with Situationist practices of derive and detournement.
Similar strategies can also be seen in social movements such as La Ruta Pacifica, who use techniques of ‘social weaving’ to recompose a sense of empowerment against the fear caused by civil war and state terror. Much of the state’s power is based on anxiety. The Bakhtinian hypothesis is that anxiety can be neutralised through joyous experiences of collective festivity.
These occasions strip power of its performed mystification, breaking into its ideological reproduction. They show its contingency by exposing it to ridicule and distortion. And they create a sense of counter-power through the permanence of the creative force of becoming, counterposed to the fixed order of being. It doesn’t so much confront state power as render it irrelevant and ineffectual.
Whether this is effective may depend on the tools the two sides have available to actualise their ideologies in spaces and practices. State tactics such as kettling are specifically designed to instil terror, as an antidote to joy. The popular culture which provided the basis for carnival is, in the most harshly capitalist countries, being destroyed by the penetration of the state into everyday life.
It persists, of course, in many marginal settings. We should remember here that the Europe Bakhtin discusses was itself a periphery in a world-economy focused on the Mediterranean. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that its modes of resistance look like those of marginal sites today.
Reclaiming contingency and carnival in the dead heartlands of the core, where people are strongly invested in their official identities and the preservation of an order which they believe protects them, is a more difficult task.
Traditional carnivals continue to exist in places ranging from Germany and Notting Hill, London to the Caribbean and Brazil. Other related phenomena, such as holi in India, also persist. While state regulation is a problem, such events still provide platforms for alternative visions and for political critique.
One can also point to carnivalesque aspects in practices such as graffiti, which may bring ‘down to earth’ such contemporary sacred as police cars, banks, or corporate logos. And why do children so often add giant willies, sex-acts, or swear-words to street-signs?
The grotesque, exaggerated body and the bringing down-to-earth of systemic abstractions are present even in such small, apparently apolitical gestures. They signify what is missing in the official picture – much as those who perform such acts are often excluded from the official world. They create a full reality in which the world is restored to its fullness and creativity.
Overall, therefore, carnivalesque remains a potential counter-power in everyday life and activism, but is ‘cramped’ in its potential by the repressive construction of spaces of monologue. Medieval carnival was possible because the spaces it inhabited could be carved-out and defended through the ‘arts of resistance’ and the power of the weak. There is a need to recompose such powers to resist, in order to recreate spaces where alternatives can proliferate.
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Mikhail Bakhtin and Dialogic Criticism
Mikhail Bakhtin became known in the western academic world in 1980s though he published his seminal work much earlier. And now he has become a phenomenal fig...
Mikhail Bakhtin and Dialogic Criticism
Mikhail Bakhtin became known in the western academic world in 1980s though he published his seminal work much earlier. And now he has become a phenomenal figure in the field of literary studies. The concepts he introduced into literary studies still retain freshness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPSTV5T30ks
Images:
1. Bakhtin Circle, Leningrad, 1924-26 Mikhail at front left and his wife Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich next to him
2. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin 'In none of Dostoevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit, in fact there is no evolution, no growth in general.
3. Bakhtins theory of Dialogic Process.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin 'The primary carnivalesque act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king.'
Background from {[https://iep.utm.edu/bakhtin/]}
The Bakhtin Circle
The Bakhtin Circle was a 20th century school of Russian thought which centered on the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The circle addressed philosophically the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into the Stalin dictatorship. Their work focused on the centrality of questions of significance in social life in general and artistic creation in particular, examining the way in which language registered the conflicts between social groups. The key views of the circle are that linguistic production is essentially dialogic, formed in the process of social interaction, and that this leads to the interaction of different social values being registered in terms of reaccentuation of the speech of others. While the ruling stratum tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, the subordinate classes are inclined to subvert this monologic closure. In the sphere of literature, poetry and epics represent the centripetal forces within the cultural arena whereas the novel is the structurally elaborated expression of popular ideologiekritik, the radical criticism of society. Members of the circle included Matvei Isaevich Kagan (1889-1937); Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891-1938); Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii (1891-1940); Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii (1902-1944); Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895-1936); and others.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Early Works: 1919-1927
3. The Concluding Works of the Bakhtin Circle: 1928-1929
4. Bakhtin and the Theory of the Novel: 1933-1941
5. Carnival, History And Popular Culture: Rabelais, Goethe And Dostoyevsky As Philosophers
6. Bakhtin’s Last Works
7. Conclusion
1. Introduction
M.M. Bakhtin and his circle began meeting in the Belorussian towns of Nevel and Vitebsk in 1918 before moving to Leningrad in 1924. Their group meetings were terminated due to the arrest of many of the group in 1929. From this time until his death in 1975, Bakhtin continued to work on the topics which had occupied his group, living in internal exile first in Kustanai (Kazakhstan, 1930-36), Savelovo (about 100 km from Moscow, 1937-45), Saransk (Mordovia, 1936-7, 1945-69) and finally moving in 1969 to Moscow, where he died at the age of eighty. In Saransk Bakhtin worked at the Mordov Pedagogical Institute (now University) until retirement in 1961.
The Bakhtin circle is reputed to have been initiated by Kagan on his return from Germany, where he had studied philosophy in Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg. He had been a pupil of the founder of Marburg Neo-Kantianism Herman Cohen and had attended lectures by Ernst Cassirer. Kagan established a “Kantian Seminar” at which various philosophical, religious and cultural issues were discussed. Kagan was a Jewish intellectual who had been a member of the Social Democratic Party (the precursor of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) and he may have been attracted to Cohen’s philosophy for its supposed affinity with Marxism (Cohen regarded his ethical philosophy as completely compatible with that of Marx), while rejecting the atheism of Russian Communism. Whatever the truth of the matter, the members of the circle did not restrict themselves to academic philosophy but became closely involved in the radical cultural activities of the time, activities which became more intense with the movement of the group to Vitebsk, where many important avant-garde artists such as Malevich and Chagall had settled to avoid the privations of the Civil War. One of the group, Pavel Medvedev, a graduate in law from Petrograd University, became rector of the Vitebsk Proletarian University, editing the town’s cultural journalIskusstvo (Art) to which he and Voloshinov contributed articles, while Bakhtin and Pumpianskii both gave public lectures on a variety of philosophical and cultural topics, as seen in recently published student notes. Pumpianskii, it is known, never finished his studies at Petrograd university, while it is doubtful whether Bakhtin had any formal higher education at all despite his claims, now disproven, to have graduated from the same University in 1918. It seems that Bakhtin attempted to gain acceptance in academic circles by adopting aspects of his older brother’s biography. Nikolai Bakhtin had a solid classical education from his German governess and graduated from Petrograd University, where he had been a pupil of the renowned classicist F.F. Zelinskii. Bakhtin had therefore been exposed to philosophical ideas since his youth. After Nikolai’s departure for the Crimea, and Mikhail’s move to Nevel, it seems that Kagan took the place of his brother as unofficial mentor, having an important influence on Bakhtin’s philosophy in a new and exciting cultural environment, although the two friends went their separate ways in 1921, the year Bakhtin married.
Kagan, however, moved to take up a teaching position at the newly established provincial university in Orel in 1921. While there he published the only sustained piece of philosophy to be published by a member of the group before the late 1920s entitled “Kak vozmozhna istoria” (How Is History Possible) in 1922. The same year he produced an obituary of Hermann Cohen in which he stressed the historical and sociological aspects of Cohen’s philosophy and wrote other unpublished works. 1922 also saw the publication of Pumpianskii’s paper “Dostoevskii i antichnost´” (Dostoyevsky and Antiquity), a theme that was to recur in Bakhtin’s work for many years. While Bakhtin himself did not publish any substantial work until 1929, he was clearly working on matters related to Neo-Kantian philosophy and the problem of authorship at this time. Bakhtin’s earliest published work is the two page “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost´” (Art and Answerability) from 1919 and fragments of a larger project on moral philosophy written between 1920 and 1924, now usually referred to as K filosofii postupka (Towards a Philosophy of the Act).
Most of the group’s significant work was produced after their move to Leningrad in 1924. It seems that there the group became acutely aware of the challenge posed by Saussurean linguistics and its development in the work of the Formalists. Thus there emerges a new awareness of the importance of the philosophy of language in philosophy and poetics. The most significant work on the philosophy of language was published in the period 1926-1930 by Voloshinov: a series of articles and a book entitledMarksizm i filosofia iazyka (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) (1929). Medvedev, who had been put in charge of the archive of the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, participated in the vigorous discussions between Marxist and formalist literary theorists with a series of articles and a book, Formal´lnyi metod v literaturovedenii (The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship) (1928) and the first book-length study of Blok’s work. Voloshinov also published an article and a book (1925, 1926) on the debate which raged around Freudianism at the time. In 1929 Bakhtin produced the first edition of his famous monograph Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Work), but many other works dating from 1924-9 remained unpublished and usually unfinished. Among these was a critical essay on formalism called “Problema soderzheniia i formy v slovesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve” (The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Artistic Creation) (1924) and a book length study called “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel´nosti” (Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity) (1924-7).
Since the 1970s the works published under the names of Voloshinov and Medvedev have often been ascribed to Bakhtin, who neither consented nor objected. A voluminous, ideologically motivated, often bad-tempered and largely futile body of literature has grown up to contest the issue one way or another, but since there is no concrete evidence to suggest that the published authors were not responsible for the texts which bear their names, there seems no real case to answer. It seems much more likely that the materials were written as a result of lively group discussions around these issues, which group members wrote up according to their own perspectives afterwards. There are clearly many philosophical, ideological and stylistic discrepancies which, despite the presence of certain parallels and points of agreement, suggest these very different works were largely the work of different authors. In accordance with Bakhtin’s own philosophy, it seems logical to treat them as rejoinders in ongoing dialogues between group members on the one hand and between the group and other contemporary thinkers on the other.
The sharp deterioration in the situation of unorthodox intellectuals in the Soviet Union at the end of 1928 effectively broke the Bakhtin circle up. Bakhtin, whose health had already begun to deteriorate, was arrested, presumably because of his connection with the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical society, and was sentenced to ten years on the Solovetskii Islands. After vigorous intercession by Bakhtin’s friends, a favourable review of his Dostoyevsky book by Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharskii and a personal appeal by Maksim Gor´kii, this was commuted to six years exile in Kazakhstan. With the tightening of censorship at the time, very little was published by Voloshinov, while Medvedev published a book on theories of authorship V laboratorii pisatelia (In the Laboratory of the Writer) in 1933 and a new version of the Formalism study, revised to fit in more closely with the ideological requirements of the time, in 1934. Medvedev was appointed full professor at the Leningrad Historico-Philological Institute but was arrested and disappeared during the terror of 1938. Voloshinov worked at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad until 1934 when he contracted tuberculosis. He died in a sanitorium two year later leaving unfinished a translation of the first volume of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a book which is of considerable importance in the work of the circle. Kagan died of angina in 1937 after working as editor of an encyclopedic atlas of energy resources in the Soviet Union for many years. Pumpianskii pursued a successful career as Professor of Literature at Leningrad University, but published only short articles and introductions to works of Russian authors, most notably Turgenev. Sollertinskii joined the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1927 as a lecturer, but soon established himself as one of the leading Soviet musicologists, producing over two hundred articles, books and reviews. He died of a heart attack, probably resulting from the privations of the Leningrad blockade, in 1944.
While in Kazakhstan Bakhtin began work on his now famous theory of the novel which resulted in the now famous articles Slovo v romane (Discourse in the Novel) (1934-5), Iz predystorii romannogo slovo (From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse) (1940), Epos i roman (Epic and Novel) (1941),Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane (Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel) (1937-8). Between 1936 and 1938 he completed a book on the Bildungsroman and its significance in the history of realism which was lost when the publishing house at which the manuscript was lying awaiting publication was destroyed in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Voluminous, most still unpublished, preparatory material still exists, although part is lost, allegedly because Bakhtin used it for cigarette papers during the wartime paper shortage. Bakhtin’s exceptional productiveness at this time is further accentuated when one considers that one of his legs was amputated in February 1938. He had suffered from inflammation of the bone marrow, osteomyelitis, for many years, which gave him a lot of pain, high temperatures, and often confined him to bed for weeks on end. This had been a factor in the appeals of his friends and acquaintances for clemency when he was internally exiled, a factor that may well have saved his life. This did not, however, prevent him from presenting a now famous doctoral thesis on Rabelais to the Gor´kii Institute of World Literature in 1940. The work proved extremely controversial in the hostile ideological climate of the time and it was not until 1951 that Bakhtin was eventually granted the qualification of kandidat. It was not published in book form until 1965.
The period between the completion of the Rabelais study and the second edition of the Dostoyevsky study in 1963 is perhaps the least well known of Bakhtin’s life in terms of work produced. This has been recently (1996) rectified with the publication of archival materials from this period, when Bakhtin was working as a lecturer at the Mordov Pedagogical Institute. The most substantial work dating from this period is Problema rechevykh zhanrov (The Problem of Speech Genres) which was most likely produced in response to the reorganisation of Soviet linguistics in the wake of Stalin’s article Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia (Marxism and Questions of Linguistics) of 1953. Many other fragments exist from this time, including notes for a planned article about Maiakovskii and more methodological comments on the study of the novel.
In the more liberal atmosphere of the so-called “thaw” following Khruschev’s accession, Bakhtin’s work on Dostoyevsky came to the attention of a group of younger scholars led by Vadim Kozhinov who, upon finding out that he was still alive, contacted Bakhtin and tried to convince him to republish the 1929 Dostoyevsky book. After some initial hesitation, Bakhtin responded by significantly expanding and fundamentally altering the overall project. It was accepted for publication in September 1963 and received a generally favourable reception. Publication of the Rabelais study, newly edited for purposes of acceptability (mainly the toning down of scatology and an analysis of a speech by Lenin) followed soon after. As Bakhtin’s health continued to decline, he was taken to hospital in Moscow in 1969 and in May 1970 he and his wife, who died a year later, were moved into a retirement home just outside Moscow. Bakhtin continued to work until just before his death in 1975, producing work of a mainly methodological character.
Since Bakhtin’s death, several collections of his work have appeared in Russian and many translations have followed. English language translations have been appearing since 1968, although the quality of translation and systematicity of publication has been uneven. Up to ten different translators have published work by a writer whose terminology is very specific, often rendering key concepts in a variety of different ways. This has exacerbated problems of interpretation and questions of theoretical heritage, especially since there is a quite sharp distinction between works written before and after the 1929 Dostoyevsky study. Another problem has been the questions of authorship of the Bakhtin circle and the extent to which a Marxist vocabulary in the works of Voloshinov and Medvedev should be taken at face value. Those, for example, who argue Bakhtin was the author of these works also tend to argue that the vocabulary is mere “window dressing” to facilitate publication, while those who support the authenticity of the original publications also tend to take the Marxist arguments seriously. As a result writers about Bakhtin have tended to choose one period of Bakhtin’s career and treat it as definitive, a practice which has produced a variety of divergent versions of “Bakhtinian” thought. The recent appearance of the first volume of a collected works in Russian might help to overcome the problems which have dogged Bakhtin studies.
2. The Early Works: 1919-1927
The work of the Bakhtin Circle should be regarded as a philosophy of culture. Questions which seem to be of very specific relevance, such as the modality of author-hero relations, actually involve questions of a much more general nature encompassing the value-laden relations between subject and object, subjects and other subjects. The phenomenological arguments presented by the young Bakhtin are directed against the abstractions of rationalist philosophy and contemporary positivism. He draws much of his conceptual structure from the work of the Marburg School (most notably Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Paul Natorp (1854-1924) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950)) and German phenomenologists such as Max Scheler (1874-1928) and Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936). However, it is particularly difficult to trace the precise influence of these writers because Bakhtin was notoriously inconsistent in crediting his sources and was not averse to copying whole passages which he had translated from German into Russian in his works without reference to the original. This has led many commentators either to guess at influences on the young Bakhtin or to credit him with the invention of a philosophical vocabulary almost from nothing. However, recent archival work by Brian Poole has uncovered notebooks in which Bakhtin made copious notes from various German idealist philosophers which give us a better idea both of the sources of his ideas and the originality of the philosophical work which resulted from his fusion of disparate ideas.
The ideas of the Marburg School were undoubtedly filtered to Bakhtin through the works of Matvei Kagan on his return from Germany at the end of the First World War. In his obituary of Cohen Kagan stressed the religious, messianic aspects of the former’s philosophy, which emerges in his later work. For the late Cohen, “the unity of objective being, as an unending large process of the unity of being and concept demands the unending small unity of the singular individuum…. The whole problem of religion is contained in the problem of the individuum as in the question of God.” The continual relationship between the individuum and God is the absolute element of subjectivity and is the unity of monotheism. The individual does not combine with God but continually relates to God. This has social significance, for religion grows out of ethics: “the religion of the unity of humanity is monotheism…. Religion is everywhere, in all regions of culture…. Religion itself is philosophy.” Problems of intersubjectivity must be related to questions of historical development: “in our opinion, the problem of individual relationships, the problem of subjective consciousness, ontological subjectivity can be based on the pathos of the individual condition of the struggle of the historical life of culture, the person and humanity.” Kagan stresses the parallels between Cohen’s ethics and the traditions of Russian populism, a factor which recurs later in Bakhtin’s career when the novel becomes linked with a populist political process. (M. Kagan, German Kogen, 1922) The unity of the individual is dependent on the unity of the people and this is in turn dependent on the unity of God.
Whatever the difficulties of tracing his more immediate precursors, there is no doubt that Bakhtin’s philosophical project maintained a fundamental connection with the traditions of Enlightenment aesthetics and with Kantianism in particular. As for Kant, the aesthetic is distinguished by its “disinterestedness,” the uncoupling of purposiveness from representation of the end. Where Kant concentrated on aesthetic judgement, however, Bakhtin was interested in aesthetic activity which can help to establish a mode of reciprocal intersubjective relationships necessary to produce an intimate unity of individuals whose specificity is in no way endangered. This project, which remains constant throughout his work, adopts various forms. The aesthetic is the realm where now detached from the “open event of being” and “finalized” by virtue of the author’s “exteriority” (vnenakhodimost´), the value-laden essence of the hero’s deed is manifested. If the hero’s activity were not objectified by the author then he or she would remain in some perpetual stream of consciousness, completely oblivious to the wider significance of those deeds. However, in order to visualise the meaningful nature of those deeds, the author must also have an insight into the subjective world of the hero, his or her horizon, sphere of views and interests (krugozor). Only the appropriate mode of empathy and objectification can produce the sort of productive whole Bakhtin envisages.
Several problems arise from this model. The first is that Bakhtin seems to want to use the author-hero model as a reciprocal principle within society and as a model of relations in literary composition. In the first model authors and heroes change their roles constantly, the unique perspective of each subject allows the objectification of others except oneself, who is objectified by others. Although the concept hardly appears in the early works, from 1928 onwards dialogue becomes the model of such interactions: one gains an awareness of one’s own place within the whole through dialogue, which helps to bestow an awareness on others at the same time. This is a very pleasant model as long as relationships remain equal. Yet the author-hero model also assumes a fundamental inequality in that the hero of a work can never have a reciprocal vantage point from which to objectify the author and thus the creator. There is a crucial difference between a person-to-person and a person-to-God relationship which Bakhtin’s model seems to obscure.
Furthermore, Bakhtin’s model of the unique perspective of each author/hero, which is drawn from the Kantian model of an individual consciousness bearing a-priori categories encountering and giving form to the manifold of sense impressions, is seriously compromised when one admits a socio-linguistic dimension into the equation. This happens in Voloshinov’s 1926 article on discourse in life and poetry. The alternative adopted by Voloshinov foregrounds the intonational dimension of language which manifests the unique evaluative connections between subject and object. Language enmeshed within everyday practical activity is extracted, or liberated, from its connection with the “open event of being” by the author who then reflects upon it, from his or her own unique vantage point, manifesting its total intonational meaning. The hero’s language is alien to the author and therefore ripe for objectification; the crucial category is the latter’s exteriority. Stress on this intonational dimension allows the encounter of the two consciousnesses to be spoken about in phenomenological rather than linguistic terms and therefore allows Bakhtin to counter what he calls “theoreticism”, the tendency to consider the inner meaning of an action and its historical specificity in isolation from each other. This might include Hegel‘s tendency to view the particular incident as meaningful only as an instance of the unfolding of reason, Husserl‘s sublation of inter-subjective relations in transcendental subjectivity or the positivistic assumption that categorisation of a phenomenon is sufficient to explain that phenomenon.
The distinctively Bakhtinian approach to language only really begins to emerge in Voloshinov’s 1926 essay Slovo v zhizni i slovo v poezii: k voprosam sotsiologicheskoi poetiki (Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry: Questions of Sociological Poetics), written during his postgraduate studies at the Institute of Material, Artistic and Verbal Culture in Leningrad where L.P. Iakubinskii, the pioneer of the study of dialogic speech, was among his advisers. This work, which has been seen as the earliest example of pragmatics by more than one commentator, is the first work of the circle to be presented as an explicitly Marxist text. The author attempts to define the aesthetic as a specific form of social interaction characterised by its “completion by the creation of the artistic work and by its continual recreations in cocreative perception and it does not require any other objectifications”. In the artistic work unspoken social evaluations are “condensed” and determine artistic form. The deeper structural features of a particular social interaction are made manifest in a successful artistic work; as Voloshinov puts it, “form should be a convincing evaluation of the content” (Bakhtin School Papers ed. Shukman, Colchester 1983 p.9, 19, 20). The early Bakhtinian phenomenology is now recast in terms of discursive interaction, with a specifically sociological frame of reference.
Another of Voloshinov’s projects was a critical response to incipient psychoanalysis and contemporary attempts to attempt a fusion of Marxism and Freudianism. In 1927 he published his first book calledFreidizm: Kriticheskii ocherk (Freudianism a Critical Sketch), which continued the theme of an earlier article from 1925 Po tu storonu sotsial´nogo (Just Beyond the Social) in which Freud was accused of a biological reductionism and subjectivism quite alien to the spirit of Marxism. Leaning upon a sociological analysis of language and culture, Voloshinov stresses that intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity as such and that all meaning production and thus repression of meanings are socio-ideological rather than individual and biological as Freud supposed. It must be noted, however, that Voloshinov does not pay any attention to Freud’s later work on cultural phenomena and thus presents a rather one-sided view of contemporary psychology. Furthermore, Freudianism is treated as a manifestation of “bourgeois decay” very much in the spirit of the later Lukács. This indicates a turning towards a more Hegelian approach to questions of cultural and philosophical development, while the recasting of the Freudian superego in terms of the repression of unofficial ideologies by an official ideology anticipates one of the central themes that would occupy Bakhtin in the 1930s and 1940s.
3. The Concluding Works of the Bakhtin Circle: 1928-1929
In the late 1920s the sociological and linguistic turn signalled by Voloshinov’s article on discourse had begun to form into a distinct school of thought in which language was the index of social relations and embodiment of ideological worldview. While Voloshinov’s linguistic studies were undoubtedly crucial to this reorientation, one of the central influences on the group at the time was the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose ground-breaking Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 Vols) was published between 1923 and 1929. One of Voloshinov’s unfinished projects, which he began while at University, was a translation of the first volume of Cassirer’s work on language. This volume marked the culmination of Cassirer’s move away from Marburg Neo-Kantianism to a Hegelian rectification of Kant. Adopting Hegel’s dialectical orientation, evolutionary approach to human knowledge and existence and concentration of the totality of human activities, Cassirer sought to overcome the exclusivity of the Kantian focus on mankind’s rational thought processes. At the same time, however, Cassirer strove to resist the Hegelian subsumption of all realms of the human spirit into the Absolute by retaining the Kantian distinction between the “languages” of the human spirit. To this end Cassirer drew upon Herder and von Humboldt’s identification of thought and signification, viewing the “symbolic function” as the common element to all areas of knowledge, but which took a specific form in each of them. The truth, agreed Cassirer and Hegel, is whole, but the former understood this to mean that each of the perspectives offered by various symbolic forms is equally valid and must be progressively “unfolded” so as to fully articulate itself. This formulation, as we shall see, had a far reaching effect on the later work of Bakhtin, but there are signs of its influence almost immediately in the work of the group.
In 1928 P.N. Medvedev published a book-length critique of Russian Formalism. This work begins with a definition of literary scholarship as “one branch of the study of ideologies”, a study which “embraces all areas of man’s ideological creativity”. Medvedev goes on to argue that while Marxism has established the basis of such a study, including its relationship to economic factors, the study of “the distinctive features and qualitative individuality of each of the branches of ideological creation — science, art, ethics, religion, and so forth. — is still in the embryonic stage” (p.3). Despite the replacement of “symbolic forms” with “branches of ideological creation” the continuity of approach is clear. Where Cassirer sought to examine the symbolic function as “a factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two takes exactly the same shape” (vol. 1, p.84), Medvedev sought to investigate the “sociological laws of development” which can be found in each “branch” of “ideological creation” but which manifests itself in specific ways. This sociological adaption of Cassirer’s work was to feature largely in Bakhtin’s work from the 1930s and 1940s, where, as Poole has demonstrated, many unattributed passages from the former’s work appear in Russian translation within the body of the latter’s work. Medvedev felt that the Formalists were correct in attempting to define the specific features of literary creation but fundamentally mistaken in the positivistic approach they took towards literary devices which tended to efface the ideological, meaning-bearing and thus sociological aspect of literary form. In conclusion Medvedev recommended that the formalists be treated respectfully and seriously, even if their fundamental premises were erroneous. Marxist criticism, he argued, should value Formalism as an object of serious criticism through which the bases of the former can be clarified.
While subjecting the Russian Formalists to intense criticism on the basis of their partisan alliance with the Futurist movement and their sharing its tendency towards a nihilistic destruction of meaning, Medvedev particularly praised Western “formalist art scholarship” such as the work of Hildebrand, Wölfflin and Worringer. These theorists were important for the development of the Bakhtin circle because they treated changes of artistic forms and styles as changes of “artistic volition”, that is, having ideological significance. Worringer saw art history to be marked by an alternation of naturalism (empathy) and abstraction (estrangement) which correlated to the harmony or otherwise in the relationship of man and his environment. While formal and evaluative aspects are not identical, they do tend to maintain a close affiliation and this, Medvedev concluded, can be applied to literary form as well as visual art. This particular chapter, along with some shorter extracts of the book were omitted from the second edition of the book published with the title Formalizm I formalisty (Formalism and the Formalists) in 1934. By this time a tolerant attitude towards the Formalists or Western scholarship was not permitted, and thus an additional and extremely hostile chapter called “The Collapse of Formalism” was included. Earlier writers on the Bakhtin Circle tended to ascribe the first edition to Bakhtin and the second to Medvedev, but it is clear that the body of the second edition is an expurgated version of the first.
Medvedev’s formulation was carried over into Bakhtin’s now famous study Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Work) published in 1929. Here the great nineteenth-century novelist’s own verbally affirmed and often reactionary ideology is downplayed in favour of his “form-shaping ideology” which is seen to be imbued with a profoundly democratic spirit. Bakhtin attacks those critics, such as Engelgardt, who characterised Dostoyevsky’s creative method as Hegelian. In such a scheme two positions struggle for ascendancy but are transformed into a synthesis at the end; however, according to Bakhtin, there is no merging of voices into a final, authoritative voice as in the Hegelian absolute. Dostoyevsky does not present an abstract dialectic but an unmerged dialogue of voices, each given equal rights. Bakhtin follows the nineteenth-century German novelist and critic Otto Ludwig in terming this type of dialogue “polyphonic dialogue”, which allows Cassirer’s insistence on a plurality of cultural forms to be extended to a plurality of discourses in society and the novel. In the course of Dostoyevsky’s novels, argues Bakhtin, very much in the spirit of Cassirer, the worldviews of Dostoyevsky’s heroes “unfold”, presenting their own unique perspective upon the world. The novelist does not, as is the case with Tolstoi, submerge all positions beneath a single authoritative perspective, but allows the voice of the narrator to reside beside the voices of the characters, bestowing no greater authority on that voice than on any of the others. Voices intersect and interact, mutually illuminating their ideological structures, potentialities, biases and limitations.
Bakhtin’s early phenomenology is now translated into discursive terms. Where Bakhtin was initially concerned with intersubjective relations and the modality of authorial and heroic interaction, this is now examined in terms of the way in which one language encounters another, reporting and modifying the utterance by reaccentuating it. Modes of interaction range from stylisation to explicit parody, which Bakhtin spends a considerable proportion of the book cataloguing. As only the later edition of the book (1963) has been published in English, there is a tendency to confuse the chronology of the emergence of Bakhtin’s key concepts. It should be noted that there is no reflection on carnival or on the Menippean Satire in the first edition of the Dostoyevsky study. These features only emerged in the next decade in relation to the history of the novel as a genre. The first edition of the Dostoyevsky study is a monograph on the work of the famous novelist in terms which in many respects embody the poetics of a significant portion of contemporary “fellow-traveller” writing. When considered in its historical context, the Dostoyevsky study can be seen as a sort of rearguard defence of liberality in the cultural arena against the encroachment of political control. The book was published on the eve of the destructive RAPP dictatorship, when bellicose advocates of “proletarian culture” were granted free reign by the newly victorious Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. Formal experimentation and an inadequately tendentious narrative position was branded as reactionary, while Bakhtin’s work defended the presentation of a plurality of perspectives free from “monologic” closure. The formal characteristics of a work were themselves of ideological significance, but the reactionary tendency was in the imposition of a unitary perspective on a varied community of opinion.
The semiotic dimension of the new orientation of the Bakhtin Circle was developed at the same time by Voloshinov. In a series of articles between 1928 and 1930 punctuated by the appearance of the book-length Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) in 1929 (2nd edition 1930) Voloshinov published an analysis of the relationship between language and ideology unsurpassed for several decades. Voloshinov examines two contemporary accounts of language, what he calls “abstract objectivism”, whose leading exponent is Saussure, and “individualistic subjectivism”, developed from the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt by the romantic idealists Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Karl Vossler (1872-1942). Voloshinov argues that the two trends derive from rationalism and romanticism respectively and share both the strengths and weaknesses of those movements. While the former identifies the systematic and social character of language it mistakes the “system of self-identical forms” for the source of language usage in society; it abstracts language from the concrete historical context of its utilisation (Bakhtin’s “theoreticism”); the part is examined at the expense of the whole; the individual linguistic element is treated as a “thing” at the expense of the dynamics of speech; a unity of word meaning is assumed to the neglect of the multiplicity of meaning and accent and language is treated as a ready-made system whose developments are aberrations. The latter trend is correct in viewing language as a continuous generative process and asserting that this process is meaningful, but fundamentally wrong in identifying the laws of that creation with those of individual psychology, viewing the generative process as analogous with art and treating the system of signs as an inert crust of the creative process. These partial insights, Voloshinov argues that a stable system of linguistic signs is merely a scientific abstraction; the generative process of language is implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers; the laws of language generation are sociological laws; although linguistic and artistic creativity do not coincide, this creativity must be understood in relation to the ideological meanings and values that fill language and that the structure of each concrete utterance is a sociological structure.
Several commentators have noted how Voloshinov’s approach to language anticipates many of the criticisms of linguistic philosophy levelled by present day Poststructuralists, but does so without invoking the relativism of much of the latter or the nullity of Derrida‘s “hors texte.” Voloshinov firmly establishes the sign-bound nature of consciousness and the shifting nature of the language system, but instead of viewing the subject as fragmented by the reality of difference, he poses each utterance to be a microcosm of social conflict. This allows sociological structure and the plurality of discourse to be correlated according to a unitary historical development. In this sense Voloshinov’s critique bears a strong resemblance to the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci’s account of hegemony in his Prison Notebooks. Like Voloshinov and Bakhtin, Gramsci drew upon the work of Croce and Vossler and Matteo Bartoli’s Saussurean “spatial linguistics”, and combined it with a Hegelian reading of Marxism. As we have seen, however, Voloshinov was heavily influenced by the work of Cassirer, whose admiration for the work of von Humboldt, the founder of generative linguistics, was substantial. Voloshinov’s critique thus tended towards the romantic pole of language study rather than taking up the equidistant position he claimed in his study. This can be seen in the tendency to see social groups as collective subjects rather than institutionally defined collectives and such assertions as those which suggest the meaning of a word is “totally determined” by its context. What Voloshinov effectively does is to supplement Humboldt’s recognition of individual and national linguistic variability with a sociological dimension. Humboldt’s “inner-form” of language is recast as the relationality of discourse, dialogism. Abandoning the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, Voloshinov follows Cassirer and Hegel in seeing the variety of linguistic forms as expressions of a single essence. It is significant that Gramsci, who adopted a consistently pragmatist epistemology followed the same course and emerged with startlingly similar formulations.
This suggests that the relations between the work of the Bakhtin school and Marxism are ones which are complex and worthy of close scrutiny. Those who have tried to set up a Chinese wall between the two tendencies or who have tried to identify them, have consistently failed to do justice to this philosophical dialogue. Some have even gone so far as to see the work of the group as fundamentally anti-Hegelian, a charge which collapses as soon as one traces the use of terminology in the works from the late 1920s.
4. Bakhtin and the Theory of the Novel: 1933-1941
The shift in Bakhtin’s thought from Kant towards Hegel is nowhere clearer than in his central works on the novel. This can be seen in the new centrality Bakhtin grants to the history of literature to which Kant had been largely indifferent. As if to stress his indebtedness to German idealism, Bakhtin adopts all of the characteristics of the novel as a genre catalogued by Goethe, Schlegel and Hegel with little modification and traces how the “essence” of the genre “appears” over a course of time. The development of the novel is described in a way distinctly reminiscent of Cassirer’s “symbolic forms” which unfold to present their unique view of the world which is itself a modified version of Hegel’s characterisation of thePhenomenology of Spirit as the representation of “appearing knowledge”. At the same time, however, the novel adopts many of the features of the role of Hegel’s philosophy in its Cassireran guise as the philosophy of culture. Such a philosophy, argued Cassirer, does not attempt to go behind the various image worlds created by the human spirit but “to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle” (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 1, Language p.113). The novel, according to the scheme developed by Bakhtin, elucidates this principle with regard both to other literary genres and socio-ideological discourses. The old idealist formulation of the novel’s imperative that it be a “full and comprehensive reflection of its era” is reformulated as “the novel must represent all the ideological voices of its era… all the era’s languages that have any claim to being significant” (411). The novel is a symbolic form, but a specific one in which the “basic formative principle” of symbolic forms becomes visible. The socially stratified national language, heteroglossia in itself, becomes heteroglossia for-itself rather as thought perceives itself as its own object at the climax of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
The novel, for Bakhtin, uncovers the formative principle of discourse, its relationality, dialogism, without presenting some final absolute language of truth such as that which constitutes Hegelian conceptualism. The novel develops into something akin to a visio intellectualis of the sort Cassirer found in the work of Nicholas Cusanus. This is a whole which includes all various viewpoints in its accidentiality and necessity, “the thing seen and the manner and direction of the seeing” (Cassirer The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy 1963, p.32). No individual perspective is adequate to the whole in itself, for only the concrete totality of perspectives can present the whole:
Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, each of which in its own way reflects a little piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp behind their inter-reflecting aspects for a world that is broader, more multi-levelled and multi-horizoned than would be available to one language, one mirror. (Bakhtin Voprosy literatury i estetikipp.225-26)
While this aspect of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is most likely based on the philosophy of Cassirer, who developed his work as a defence of liberal values in the context of an increasingly chauvinistic atmosphere in Weimar Germany, a different political slant becomes markedly more apparent in Bakhtin’s work of the 1930s. The novelist now becomes the heir of an anti-authoritarian popular cultural strategy to deflate the pretensions of the official language and ideology and institute a popular-collective learning process. The antecedent of this strategy is not German bourgeois liberalism but Russian populism (narodnichestvo). Thus the dialectic of mythical and critical symbolic forms which Cassirer outlined in his philosophy now becomes fused with a dialectic of official and popular socio-cultural forces. On one side stand the forces of cultural centralisation and stabilisation: the “official strata”, unitary language, the literary canon and so on. On the other side stands the decentralising influence of popular culture: popular festivity and collective ridicule, literary parody, and the anti-canonic novel. The rise of the novel is correlated with the collapse of antique unity and the breaking down of cultural boundaries. Where the official culture developed a canon of poetic genres which posited a rarified language in opposition to the common spoken language, presented a monolithically serious worldview and epic accounts of a golden age and heroic beginnings, the novel parodies these features, ridiculing the official culture’s claims to universal validity and the ossified conventionality of canonic forms and language.
The novel is thus a literary expression of a whole socio-cultural process, but this process is rather too broad to be incorporated under the label Bakhtin gives to it without considerable problems with regard to conceptual accuracy. The adjective poetic becomes shorthand for the whole complex of institutional and cultural forms which can be included on the side of officialdom. Thus poetic denotes both a type of discourse used in artistic texts and a hierarchical relation between discourses which constitutes the hegemonic relationships of an unequal society. Correspondingly, novelistic describes both the character of a genre, multi-accented artistic discourse, and an anti-authoritarian relationship between discourses. Another pair of terms which is often used interchangeably with these two is monologic and dialogic. The former denotes a mono-accentual type of discourse and an authoritarian stance towards another discourse. The latter describes a multi-accentual discourse, the relationality of discourse, and an orientation on a monologic discourse which seeks to reveal the ideological structure lurking behind surface appearances. The ground between formal and political terms shifts before the reader, who is constantly reminded of the institutional co-ordinates for all discursive phenomena but is never presented with a sociological account of those co-ordinates. This might be explained both by the ideological restrictions placed on any writer in Stalin’s Russia and by the idealist frame of Bakhtin’s own theory. This ambiguity has allowed very different interpretations of Bakhtin’s work to be drawn, ranging from a tendency to reduce the whole argument to one of artistic forms, leading to a liberalistic formal criticism and attempts to correlate Bakhtin’s argument with the institutional forms of modern capitalist society. Bakhtin’s work has thus become a battleground between (mainly American) liberal academics and (mainly British) anti-Stalinist Marxists.
In its classical phase, Russian populism was, according to Walicki, “opposed to the “abstract intellectualism” of those revolutionaries who tried to teach the peasants, to impose on them the ideals of Western socialism, instead of learning what were their real needs and acting in the name of such interests and ideals of which the peasants had already become aware”. Yet it also suggested an opposition to those Second International Marxists who argued that capitalism was an unavoidable stage in the development of Russia (The Controversy Over Capitalism 1989 p.3). In one sense, then, it was a political ideology compatible with Third International Marxism, but in another it sought to reverse the hegemony of intellectuals over “the people”. Bakhtin’s poet is a hegemonic intellectual whose language relates in an authoritative fashion to the discourse of the masses, while the novelist aims to break and indeed reverse that hegemonic relationship. In Bakhtin’s formulation, the locus of critical forces of culture is the people, while the mythological forces of culture emerge from the official stratum.
Many of the central works on the novel were at least partially written in response to the theory of the novel developed by Georg Lukács. Bakhtin had begun to translate Lukács’ Theory of the Novel in the 1920s but abandoned the project upon learning that Lukács no longer liked the book but in the 1930s, when Lukács accommodated to the Stalin regime and essentially became a right Hegelian, his theory of the novel became canonical. Bakhtin agreed with Lukács that the novel represented the “essence of the age” and that irony constituted a central factor of the novelistic method, but rejected the latter’s assertion that unless the novel revealed the thread of rationality running through a seemingly anarchic world, that is, presented an authoritative perspective, the author had succumbed to bourgeois decadence. Modernist formal experimentation and the dominance of parody in modernist literature Lukács found to be a reflection of “bourgeois decay”, while Bakhtin strove to reveal its popular-democratic roots. The novel should not be seen as a compensation for the restlessness of contemporary society, uncovering the assured road to progress, but the embodiment of the dynamic forces that could shape society in a popular-democratic fashion. Thus where Lukács championed epic closure, Bakhtin highlighted novelistic openendedness; where Lukács advocated a strong narrative presence, Bakhtin advocated the maximalisation of multilingual intersection and the testing of discourse. Bakhtin takes a left Hegelian stance against Lukács; dialogism becomes analogous to Hegel’s Geist, both describing the social whole and standing in judgement over those eras in which the dialogic imperative is not realised.
5. Carnival, History And Popular Culture: Rabelais, Goethe And Dostoyevsky As Philosophers
The high point of Bakhtin’s populism can be seen in his now famous 1965 study of Rabelais and the heavily revised second edition of the 1929 Dostoyevsky book (1963). The former had been composed as Bakhtin’s doctoral dissertation which had been written in the late 1930s but was only prepared for publication when he emerged from obscurity in the 1960s. Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul´tura srednevekov´ia i renessansa (The work of François Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance) is a remarkable work. Bakhtin concentrates on the collapse of the strict hierarchies of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance by looking at the way in which ancient modes of living and working collectively, in accordance with the rhythms of nature, re-emerge in the forms of popular culture opposed to official culture. In Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics) Bakhtin summarises the essence of the question thus:
It could be said (with certain reservations, of course) that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict temporal boundaries. (p.129-30)
The activities of the carnival square: collective ridicule of officialdom, inversion of hierarchy, violations of decorum and proportion, celebration of bodily excess and so on embody, for Bakhtin, an implicit popular conception of the world. This conception is not, however, able to become ideologically elaborated until the radical laughter of the square entered into the “world of great literature” (Rabelais p.96). The novel of Rabelais is seen as the epitome of this process of breaking down the rigid, hierarchical world of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern era. Rabelais is much more than a novelist for Bakhtin: his work embodies a whole new philosophy of history, in which the world is viewed in the process of becoming. The grotesque is the image of this becoming, the boundaries between person and person, person and thing, are erased as the individual merges with the people and the whole cosmos. As the individual body is transcended, the biological body is negated and the “body of historical, progressing mankind” moves to the centre of the system of images. In the carnival focus on death and rebirth the individual body dies, but the body of the people lives and grows, biological life ends but historical life continues.
The carnivalesque becomes a set of image-borne strategies for destabilising the official worldview. In a recently published article written for inclusion in the Soviet Literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Literary Encyclopaedia) in 1940, Bakhtin defines the satirical attitude as the “image-borne negation” of contemporary actuality as inadequacy, which contains within itself a positive moment in which an improved actuality is affirmed. This affirmed actuality is the historical necessity implicit in contemporary actuality and which is implied by the grotesque image. The grotesque, argues Bakhtin, “discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable” (Rabelais p.48). The grotesque image of the body, as an image which reveals incomplete metamorphosis no longer represents itself, it represents what Hegel called the “universal dialectic of life”.
The Renaissance birth of the historical world led to a new development in the Enlightenment. Where Rabelais was presented as the high point of Renaissance literary and philosophical development, the Enlightenment reaches one of its high points in the work of Goethe. The process dispersing the “residue of otherworldly cohesion and mythical unity” was completed at this time, helping “reality to gather itself together and condense into the visible whole of a new world” (Speech Genres and Other Late Essaysp.45). The Enlightenment, argues Bakhtin in a section which draws heavily on Cassirer (the corresponding passage is The Philosophy of the Enlightenment p.197), should no longer be considered an a-historical era, but “an epoch of great awakening of a sense of time, above all … in nature and human life” (p.26). But, argues Bakhtin “this process of preparing for the disclosure of historical time took place more rapidly, completely, and profoundly in literary creativity than in the abstract philosophical, ideological views of Enlightenment thinkers” (p.26). Goethe’s imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:
Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space. Therefore the plot (sum of depicted events) and the characters … are like those creative forces that formulated and humanised this landscape, they made it a speaking vestige of the movement of history (historical time), and, to a certain degree, predetermined its subsequent course as well, or like those creative forces a given locality needs in order to organise and continue the historical process embodied in it. (p.49)
Goethe wanted to “bring together and unite the present, past and future with the ring of necessity” (p.39), to make the present creative. Like Rabelais, Goethe was as much a philosopher as a writer.
The same pattern of analysis shapes the 1963 version of the Dostoyevsky study. Here Dostoyevsky is no longer treated, as in the 1929 version, as a totally original innovator, but as the heir to a tradition rooted in popular culture. The novelist stood poised at the threshold of a new era, as the rigidly hierarchical Russian Empire was poised to give way to the catastrophic arrival of capitalist anarchy and ultimately revolution. Dostoyevsky thus intersected with the threshold poetics of carnival at a different stage in its development, he sought to present the voices of his era in a “pure simultaneity” unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:
Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii’s world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. Thus there is no causality in Dostoevskii’s novels, no genesis, no explanations based on the past, on the influences of the environment or of upbringing and so forth. Every act a character commits is in the present, and in this sense is not predetermined; it is conceived of and represented by the author as free. (p.29)
The roots of such a conception lie in carnival and, according to Bakhtin, in the carnivalised philosophical dialogues that constituted the Menippean Satire. This philosophico-literary genre reaches a new stage in Dostoyevsky’s work, where the roots of the novel as a genre stands out particularly clearly. One of those roots was the Socratic Dialogue, which was overwhelmed by the monologic Aristotelian treatise, but which continued to lead a subterranean life in the non-canonical minor satirical genres and then became a constitutive element of the novel form and, implicitly, literary modernism. This accounts for its philosophical importance.
6. Bakhtin’s Last Works
In his last years Bakhtin returned to the methodological questions that had preoccupied his earlier years, though now with a rather different perspective. This began with his work on speech genres in the 1950s, though apart from this study, did not yield any sustained texts until the 1970s. Bakhtin now began to stress the dialogic character of all study in the “human sciences”, the fact that one needs to deal with another “I” who can speak for and about his or herself in a fundamentally different way than with an inanimate and voiceless object. To this end he sought to differentiate his position from that of incipient Soviet structuralism, which adopted the “abstract objectivist” approach to language and the constitution of the subject. Bakhtin’s approach to subjectivity is dialogic, referring to the exchange of utterances rather than narrowly linguistic, and this extends to the analysis of texts which are always intertextual, meeting and illuminating each other. Just as texts have genres, “definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole” so too does speech. Thus the boundaries between complex genres such as those commonly regarded as literary and other less formalised genres should be seen as porous and flexible, allowing a dialogue of genres as well as styles.
7. Conclusion
The work of the Bakhtin circle is multifaceted and extremely pertinent to contemporary philosophical concerns. Yet their work moves beyond philosophy narrowly defined to encompass anthropology, literary studies, historiography and political theory. The vicissitudes of intellectual life in the Soviet Union have complicated assessment of the work of the circle, as has the way in which the works have been published and translated in recent years. On top of this, the works of the group have been read into a theoretical position framed by present-day concerns over poststructuralism and the fate of the subject in modern philosophy. A proper historical assessment of the work of the Bakhtin Circle will be much aided by the publication of Bakhtin’s Complete Works which will appear over the next few years. This will hopefully be followed by a harmonised English translation which will facilitate an informed assessment in the English speaking world.'
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Mikhail Bakhtin became known in the western academic world in 1980s though he published his seminal work much earlier. And now he has become a phenomenal figure in the field of literary studies. The concepts he introduced into literary studies still retain freshness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPSTV5T30ks
Images:
1. Bakhtin Circle, Leningrad, 1924-26 Mikhail at front left and his wife Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich next to him
2. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin 'In none of Dostoevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit, in fact there is no evolution, no growth in general.
3. Bakhtins theory of Dialogic Process.
4. Mikhail Bakhtin 'The primary carnivalesque act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king.'
Background from {[https://iep.utm.edu/bakhtin/]}
The Bakhtin Circle
The Bakhtin Circle was a 20th century school of Russian thought which centered on the work of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). The circle addressed philosophically the social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration into the Stalin dictatorship. Their work focused on the centrality of questions of significance in social life in general and artistic creation in particular, examining the way in which language registered the conflicts between social groups. The key views of the circle are that linguistic production is essentially dialogic, formed in the process of social interaction, and that this leads to the interaction of different social values being registered in terms of reaccentuation of the speech of others. While the ruling stratum tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, the subordinate classes are inclined to subvert this monologic closure. In the sphere of literature, poetry and epics represent the centripetal forces within the cultural arena whereas the novel is the structurally elaborated expression of popular ideologiekritik, the radical criticism of society. Members of the circle included Matvei Isaevich Kagan (1889-1937); Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891-1938); Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii (1891-1940); Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii (1902-1944); Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895-1936); and others.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. The Early Works: 1919-1927
3. The Concluding Works of the Bakhtin Circle: 1928-1929
4. Bakhtin and the Theory of the Novel: 1933-1941
5. Carnival, History And Popular Culture: Rabelais, Goethe And Dostoyevsky As Philosophers
6. Bakhtin’s Last Works
7. Conclusion
1. Introduction
M.M. Bakhtin and his circle began meeting in the Belorussian towns of Nevel and Vitebsk in 1918 before moving to Leningrad in 1924. Their group meetings were terminated due to the arrest of many of the group in 1929. From this time until his death in 1975, Bakhtin continued to work on the topics which had occupied his group, living in internal exile first in Kustanai (Kazakhstan, 1930-36), Savelovo (about 100 km from Moscow, 1937-45), Saransk (Mordovia, 1936-7, 1945-69) and finally moving in 1969 to Moscow, where he died at the age of eighty. In Saransk Bakhtin worked at the Mordov Pedagogical Institute (now University) until retirement in 1961.
The Bakhtin circle is reputed to have been initiated by Kagan on his return from Germany, where he had studied philosophy in Leipzig, Berlin and Marburg. He had been a pupil of the founder of Marburg Neo-Kantianism Herman Cohen and had attended lectures by Ernst Cassirer. Kagan established a “Kantian Seminar” at which various philosophical, religious and cultural issues were discussed. Kagan was a Jewish intellectual who had been a member of the Social Democratic Party (the precursor of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) and he may have been attracted to Cohen’s philosophy for its supposed affinity with Marxism (Cohen regarded his ethical philosophy as completely compatible with that of Marx), while rejecting the atheism of Russian Communism. Whatever the truth of the matter, the members of the circle did not restrict themselves to academic philosophy but became closely involved in the radical cultural activities of the time, activities which became more intense with the movement of the group to Vitebsk, where many important avant-garde artists such as Malevich and Chagall had settled to avoid the privations of the Civil War. One of the group, Pavel Medvedev, a graduate in law from Petrograd University, became rector of the Vitebsk Proletarian University, editing the town’s cultural journalIskusstvo (Art) to which he and Voloshinov contributed articles, while Bakhtin and Pumpianskii both gave public lectures on a variety of philosophical and cultural topics, as seen in recently published student notes. Pumpianskii, it is known, never finished his studies at Petrograd university, while it is doubtful whether Bakhtin had any formal higher education at all despite his claims, now disproven, to have graduated from the same University in 1918. It seems that Bakhtin attempted to gain acceptance in academic circles by adopting aspects of his older brother’s biography. Nikolai Bakhtin had a solid classical education from his German governess and graduated from Petrograd University, where he had been a pupil of the renowned classicist F.F. Zelinskii. Bakhtin had therefore been exposed to philosophical ideas since his youth. After Nikolai’s departure for the Crimea, and Mikhail’s move to Nevel, it seems that Kagan took the place of his brother as unofficial mentor, having an important influence on Bakhtin’s philosophy in a new and exciting cultural environment, although the two friends went their separate ways in 1921, the year Bakhtin married.
Kagan, however, moved to take up a teaching position at the newly established provincial university in Orel in 1921. While there he published the only sustained piece of philosophy to be published by a member of the group before the late 1920s entitled “Kak vozmozhna istoria” (How Is History Possible) in 1922. The same year he produced an obituary of Hermann Cohen in which he stressed the historical and sociological aspects of Cohen’s philosophy and wrote other unpublished works. 1922 also saw the publication of Pumpianskii’s paper “Dostoevskii i antichnost´” (Dostoyevsky and Antiquity), a theme that was to recur in Bakhtin’s work for many years. While Bakhtin himself did not publish any substantial work until 1929, he was clearly working on matters related to Neo-Kantian philosophy and the problem of authorship at this time. Bakhtin’s earliest published work is the two page “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost´” (Art and Answerability) from 1919 and fragments of a larger project on moral philosophy written between 1920 and 1924, now usually referred to as K filosofii postupka (Towards a Philosophy of the Act).
Most of the group’s significant work was produced after their move to Leningrad in 1924. It seems that there the group became acutely aware of the challenge posed by Saussurean linguistics and its development in the work of the Formalists. Thus there emerges a new awareness of the importance of the philosophy of language in philosophy and poetics. The most significant work on the philosophy of language was published in the period 1926-1930 by Voloshinov: a series of articles and a book entitledMarksizm i filosofia iazyka (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) (1929). Medvedev, who had been put in charge of the archive of the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok, participated in the vigorous discussions between Marxist and formalist literary theorists with a series of articles and a book, Formal´lnyi metod v literaturovedenii (The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship) (1928) and the first book-length study of Blok’s work. Voloshinov also published an article and a book (1925, 1926) on the debate which raged around Freudianism at the time. In 1929 Bakhtin produced the first edition of his famous monograph Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Work), but many other works dating from 1924-9 remained unpublished and usually unfinished. Among these was a critical essay on formalism called “Problema soderzheniia i formy v slovesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve” (The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Artistic Creation) (1924) and a book length study called “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel´nosti” (Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity) (1924-7).
Since the 1970s the works published under the names of Voloshinov and Medvedev have often been ascribed to Bakhtin, who neither consented nor objected. A voluminous, ideologically motivated, often bad-tempered and largely futile body of literature has grown up to contest the issue one way or another, but since there is no concrete evidence to suggest that the published authors were not responsible for the texts which bear their names, there seems no real case to answer. It seems much more likely that the materials were written as a result of lively group discussions around these issues, which group members wrote up according to their own perspectives afterwards. There are clearly many philosophical, ideological and stylistic discrepancies which, despite the presence of certain parallels and points of agreement, suggest these very different works were largely the work of different authors. In accordance with Bakhtin’s own philosophy, it seems logical to treat them as rejoinders in ongoing dialogues between group members on the one hand and between the group and other contemporary thinkers on the other.
The sharp deterioration in the situation of unorthodox intellectuals in the Soviet Union at the end of 1928 effectively broke the Bakhtin circle up. Bakhtin, whose health had already begun to deteriorate, was arrested, presumably because of his connection with the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical society, and was sentenced to ten years on the Solovetskii Islands. After vigorous intercession by Bakhtin’s friends, a favourable review of his Dostoyevsky book by Commissar of Enlightenment Lunacharskii and a personal appeal by Maksim Gor´kii, this was commuted to six years exile in Kazakhstan. With the tightening of censorship at the time, very little was published by Voloshinov, while Medvedev published a book on theories of authorship V laboratorii pisatelia (In the Laboratory of the Writer) in 1933 and a new version of the Formalism study, revised to fit in more closely with the ideological requirements of the time, in 1934. Medvedev was appointed full professor at the Leningrad Historico-Philological Institute but was arrested and disappeared during the terror of 1938. Voloshinov worked at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad until 1934 when he contracted tuberculosis. He died in a sanitorium two year later leaving unfinished a translation of the first volume of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, a book which is of considerable importance in the work of the circle. Kagan died of angina in 1937 after working as editor of an encyclopedic atlas of energy resources in the Soviet Union for many years. Pumpianskii pursued a successful career as Professor of Literature at Leningrad University, but published only short articles and introductions to works of Russian authors, most notably Turgenev. Sollertinskii joined the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1927 as a lecturer, but soon established himself as one of the leading Soviet musicologists, producing over two hundred articles, books and reviews. He died of a heart attack, probably resulting from the privations of the Leningrad blockade, in 1944.
While in Kazakhstan Bakhtin began work on his now famous theory of the novel which resulted in the now famous articles Slovo v romane (Discourse in the Novel) (1934-5), Iz predystorii romannogo slovo (From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse) (1940), Epos i roman (Epic and Novel) (1941),Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane (Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel) (1937-8). Between 1936 and 1938 he completed a book on the Bildungsroman and its significance in the history of realism which was lost when the publishing house at which the manuscript was lying awaiting publication was destroyed in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Voluminous, most still unpublished, preparatory material still exists, although part is lost, allegedly because Bakhtin used it for cigarette papers during the wartime paper shortage. Bakhtin’s exceptional productiveness at this time is further accentuated when one considers that one of his legs was amputated in February 1938. He had suffered from inflammation of the bone marrow, osteomyelitis, for many years, which gave him a lot of pain, high temperatures, and often confined him to bed for weeks on end. This had been a factor in the appeals of his friends and acquaintances for clemency when he was internally exiled, a factor that may well have saved his life. This did not, however, prevent him from presenting a now famous doctoral thesis on Rabelais to the Gor´kii Institute of World Literature in 1940. The work proved extremely controversial in the hostile ideological climate of the time and it was not until 1951 that Bakhtin was eventually granted the qualification of kandidat. It was not published in book form until 1965.
The period between the completion of the Rabelais study and the second edition of the Dostoyevsky study in 1963 is perhaps the least well known of Bakhtin’s life in terms of work produced. This has been recently (1996) rectified with the publication of archival materials from this period, when Bakhtin was working as a lecturer at the Mordov Pedagogical Institute. The most substantial work dating from this period is Problema rechevykh zhanrov (The Problem of Speech Genres) which was most likely produced in response to the reorganisation of Soviet linguistics in the wake of Stalin’s article Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia (Marxism and Questions of Linguistics) of 1953. Many other fragments exist from this time, including notes for a planned article about Maiakovskii and more methodological comments on the study of the novel.
In the more liberal atmosphere of the so-called “thaw” following Khruschev’s accession, Bakhtin’s work on Dostoyevsky came to the attention of a group of younger scholars led by Vadim Kozhinov who, upon finding out that he was still alive, contacted Bakhtin and tried to convince him to republish the 1929 Dostoyevsky book. After some initial hesitation, Bakhtin responded by significantly expanding and fundamentally altering the overall project. It was accepted for publication in September 1963 and received a generally favourable reception. Publication of the Rabelais study, newly edited for purposes of acceptability (mainly the toning down of scatology and an analysis of a speech by Lenin) followed soon after. As Bakhtin’s health continued to decline, he was taken to hospital in Moscow in 1969 and in May 1970 he and his wife, who died a year later, were moved into a retirement home just outside Moscow. Bakhtin continued to work until just before his death in 1975, producing work of a mainly methodological character.
Since Bakhtin’s death, several collections of his work have appeared in Russian and many translations have followed. English language translations have been appearing since 1968, although the quality of translation and systematicity of publication has been uneven. Up to ten different translators have published work by a writer whose terminology is very specific, often rendering key concepts in a variety of different ways. This has exacerbated problems of interpretation and questions of theoretical heritage, especially since there is a quite sharp distinction between works written before and after the 1929 Dostoyevsky study. Another problem has been the questions of authorship of the Bakhtin circle and the extent to which a Marxist vocabulary in the works of Voloshinov and Medvedev should be taken at face value. Those, for example, who argue Bakhtin was the author of these works also tend to argue that the vocabulary is mere “window dressing” to facilitate publication, while those who support the authenticity of the original publications also tend to take the Marxist arguments seriously. As a result writers about Bakhtin have tended to choose one period of Bakhtin’s career and treat it as definitive, a practice which has produced a variety of divergent versions of “Bakhtinian” thought. The recent appearance of the first volume of a collected works in Russian might help to overcome the problems which have dogged Bakhtin studies.
2. The Early Works: 1919-1927
The work of the Bakhtin Circle should be regarded as a philosophy of culture. Questions which seem to be of very specific relevance, such as the modality of author-hero relations, actually involve questions of a much more general nature encompassing the value-laden relations between subject and object, subjects and other subjects. The phenomenological arguments presented by the young Bakhtin are directed against the abstractions of rationalist philosophy and contemporary positivism. He draws much of his conceptual structure from the work of the Marburg School (most notably Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), Paul Natorp (1854-1924) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950)) and German phenomenologists such as Max Scheler (1874-1928) and Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936). However, it is particularly difficult to trace the precise influence of these writers because Bakhtin was notoriously inconsistent in crediting his sources and was not averse to copying whole passages which he had translated from German into Russian in his works without reference to the original. This has led many commentators either to guess at influences on the young Bakhtin or to credit him with the invention of a philosophical vocabulary almost from nothing. However, recent archival work by Brian Poole has uncovered notebooks in which Bakhtin made copious notes from various German idealist philosophers which give us a better idea both of the sources of his ideas and the originality of the philosophical work which resulted from his fusion of disparate ideas.
The ideas of the Marburg School were undoubtedly filtered to Bakhtin through the works of Matvei Kagan on his return from Germany at the end of the First World War. In his obituary of Cohen Kagan stressed the religious, messianic aspects of the former’s philosophy, which emerges in his later work. For the late Cohen, “the unity of objective being, as an unending large process of the unity of being and concept demands the unending small unity of the singular individuum…. The whole problem of religion is contained in the problem of the individuum as in the question of God.” The continual relationship between the individuum and God is the absolute element of subjectivity and is the unity of monotheism. The individual does not combine with God but continually relates to God. This has social significance, for religion grows out of ethics: “the religion of the unity of humanity is monotheism…. Religion is everywhere, in all regions of culture…. Religion itself is philosophy.” Problems of intersubjectivity must be related to questions of historical development: “in our opinion, the problem of individual relationships, the problem of subjective consciousness, ontological subjectivity can be based on the pathos of the individual condition of the struggle of the historical life of culture, the person and humanity.” Kagan stresses the parallels between Cohen’s ethics and the traditions of Russian populism, a factor which recurs later in Bakhtin’s career when the novel becomes linked with a populist political process. (M. Kagan, German Kogen, 1922) The unity of the individual is dependent on the unity of the people and this is in turn dependent on the unity of God.
Whatever the difficulties of tracing his more immediate precursors, there is no doubt that Bakhtin’s philosophical project maintained a fundamental connection with the traditions of Enlightenment aesthetics and with Kantianism in particular. As for Kant, the aesthetic is distinguished by its “disinterestedness,” the uncoupling of purposiveness from representation of the end. Where Kant concentrated on aesthetic judgement, however, Bakhtin was interested in aesthetic activity which can help to establish a mode of reciprocal intersubjective relationships necessary to produce an intimate unity of individuals whose specificity is in no way endangered. This project, which remains constant throughout his work, adopts various forms. The aesthetic is the realm where now detached from the “open event of being” and “finalized” by virtue of the author’s “exteriority” (vnenakhodimost´), the value-laden essence of the hero’s deed is manifested. If the hero’s activity were not objectified by the author then he or she would remain in some perpetual stream of consciousness, completely oblivious to the wider significance of those deeds. However, in order to visualise the meaningful nature of those deeds, the author must also have an insight into the subjective world of the hero, his or her horizon, sphere of views and interests (krugozor). Only the appropriate mode of empathy and objectification can produce the sort of productive whole Bakhtin envisages.
Several problems arise from this model. The first is that Bakhtin seems to want to use the author-hero model as a reciprocal principle within society and as a model of relations in literary composition. In the first model authors and heroes change their roles constantly, the unique perspective of each subject allows the objectification of others except oneself, who is objectified by others. Although the concept hardly appears in the early works, from 1928 onwards dialogue becomes the model of such interactions: one gains an awareness of one’s own place within the whole through dialogue, which helps to bestow an awareness on others at the same time. This is a very pleasant model as long as relationships remain equal. Yet the author-hero model also assumes a fundamental inequality in that the hero of a work can never have a reciprocal vantage point from which to objectify the author and thus the creator. There is a crucial difference between a person-to-person and a person-to-God relationship which Bakhtin’s model seems to obscure.
Furthermore, Bakhtin’s model of the unique perspective of each author/hero, which is drawn from the Kantian model of an individual consciousness bearing a-priori categories encountering and giving form to the manifold of sense impressions, is seriously compromised when one admits a socio-linguistic dimension into the equation. This happens in Voloshinov’s 1926 article on discourse in life and poetry. The alternative adopted by Voloshinov foregrounds the intonational dimension of language which manifests the unique evaluative connections between subject and object. Language enmeshed within everyday practical activity is extracted, or liberated, from its connection with the “open event of being” by the author who then reflects upon it, from his or her own unique vantage point, manifesting its total intonational meaning. The hero’s language is alien to the author and therefore ripe for objectification; the crucial category is the latter’s exteriority. Stress on this intonational dimension allows the encounter of the two consciousnesses to be spoken about in phenomenological rather than linguistic terms and therefore allows Bakhtin to counter what he calls “theoreticism”, the tendency to consider the inner meaning of an action and its historical specificity in isolation from each other. This might include Hegel‘s tendency to view the particular incident as meaningful only as an instance of the unfolding of reason, Husserl‘s sublation of inter-subjective relations in transcendental subjectivity or the positivistic assumption that categorisation of a phenomenon is sufficient to explain that phenomenon.
The distinctively Bakhtinian approach to language only really begins to emerge in Voloshinov’s 1926 essay Slovo v zhizni i slovo v poezii: k voprosam sotsiologicheskoi poetiki (Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry: Questions of Sociological Poetics), written during his postgraduate studies at the Institute of Material, Artistic and Verbal Culture in Leningrad where L.P. Iakubinskii, the pioneer of the study of dialogic speech, was among his advisers. This work, which has been seen as the earliest example of pragmatics by more than one commentator, is the first work of the circle to be presented as an explicitly Marxist text. The author attempts to define the aesthetic as a specific form of social interaction characterised by its “completion by the creation of the artistic work and by its continual recreations in cocreative perception and it does not require any other objectifications”. In the artistic work unspoken social evaluations are “condensed” and determine artistic form. The deeper structural features of a particular social interaction are made manifest in a successful artistic work; as Voloshinov puts it, “form should be a convincing evaluation of the content” (Bakhtin School Papers ed. Shukman, Colchester 1983 p.9, 19, 20). The early Bakhtinian phenomenology is now recast in terms of discursive interaction, with a specifically sociological frame of reference.
Another of Voloshinov’s projects was a critical response to incipient psychoanalysis and contemporary attempts to attempt a fusion of Marxism and Freudianism. In 1927 he published his first book calledFreidizm: Kriticheskii ocherk (Freudianism a Critical Sketch), which continued the theme of an earlier article from 1925 Po tu storonu sotsial´nogo (Just Beyond the Social) in which Freud was accused of a biological reductionism and subjectivism quite alien to the spirit of Marxism. Leaning upon a sociological analysis of language and culture, Voloshinov stresses that intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity as such and that all meaning production and thus repression of meanings are socio-ideological rather than individual and biological as Freud supposed. It must be noted, however, that Voloshinov does not pay any attention to Freud’s later work on cultural phenomena and thus presents a rather one-sided view of contemporary psychology. Furthermore, Freudianism is treated as a manifestation of “bourgeois decay” very much in the spirit of the later Lukács. This indicates a turning towards a more Hegelian approach to questions of cultural and philosophical development, while the recasting of the Freudian superego in terms of the repression of unofficial ideologies by an official ideology anticipates one of the central themes that would occupy Bakhtin in the 1930s and 1940s.
3. The Concluding Works of the Bakhtin Circle: 1928-1929
In the late 1920s the sociological and linguistic turn signalled by Voloshinov’s article on discourse had begun to form into a distinct school of thought in which language was the index of social relations and embodiment of ideological worldview. While Voloshinov’s linguistic studies were undoubtedly crucial to this reorientation, one of the central influences on the group at the time was the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose ground-breaking Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (3 Vols) was published between 1923 and 1929. One of Voloshinov’s unfinished projects, which he began while at University, was a translation of the first volume of Cassirer’s work on language. This volume marked the culmination of Cassirer’s move away from Marburg Neo-Kantianism to a Hegelian rectification of Kant. Adopting Hegel’s dialectical orientation, evolutionary approach to human knowledge and existence and concentration of the totality of human activities, Cassirer sought to overcome the exclusivity of the Kantian focus on mankind’s rational thought processes. At the same time, however, Cassirer strove to resist the Hegelian subsumption of all realms of the human spirit into the Absolute by retaining the Kantian distinction between the “languages” of the human spirit. To this end Cassirer drew upon Herder and von Humboldt’s identification of thought and signification, viewing the “symbolic function” as the common element to all areas of knowledge, but which took a specific form in each of them. The truth, agreed Cassirer and Hegel, is whole, but the former understood this to mean that each of the perspectives offered by various symbolic forms is equally valid and must be progressively “unfolded” so as to fully articulate itself. This formulation, as we shall see, had a far reaching effect on the later work of Bakhtin, but there are signs of its influence almost immediately in the work of the group.
In 1928 P.N. Medvedev published a book-length critique of Russian Formalism. This work begins with a definition of literary scholarship as “one branch of the study of ideologies”, a study which “embraces all areas of man’s ideological creativity”. Medvedev goes on to argue that while Marxism has established the basis of such a study, including its relationship to economic factors, the study of “the distinctive features and qualitative individuality of each of the branches of ideological creation — science, art, ethics, religion, and so forth. — is still in the embryonic stage” (p.3). Despite the replacement of “symbolic forms” with “branches of ideological creation” the continuity of approach is clear. Where Cassirer sought to examine the symbolic function as “a factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no two takes exactly the same shape” (vol. 1, p.84), Medvedev sought to investigate the “sociological laws of development” which can be found in each “branch” of “ideological creation” but which manifests itself in specific ways. This sociological adaption of Cassirer’s work was to feature largely in Bakhtin’s work from the 1930s and 1940s, where, as Poole has demonstrated, many unattributed passages from the former’s work appear in Russian translation within the body of the latter’s work. Medvedev felt that the Formalists were correct in attempting to define the specific features of literary creation but fundamentally mistaken in the positivistic approach they took towards literary devices which tended to efface the ideological, meaning-bearing and thus sociological aspect of literary form. In conclusion Medvedev recommended that the formalists be treated respectfully and seriously, even if their fundamental premises were erroneous. Marxist criticism, he argued, should value Formalism as an object of serious criticism through which the bases of the former can be clarified.
While subjecting the Russian Formalists to intense criticism on the basis of their partisan alliance with the Futurist movement and their sharing its tendency towards a nihilistic destruction of meaning, Medvedev particularly praised Western “formalist art scholarship” such as the work of Hildebrand, Wölfflin and Worringer. These theorists were important for the development of the Bakhtin circle because they treated changes of artistic forms and styles as changes of “artistic volition”, that is, having ideological significance. Worringer saw art history to be marked by an alternation of naturalism (empathy) and abstraction (estrangement) which correlated to the harmony or otherwise in the relationship of man and his environment. While formal and evaluative aspects are not identical, they do tend to maintain a close affiliation and this, Medvedev concluded, can be applied to literary form as well as visual art. This particular chapter, along with some shorter extracts of the book were omitted from the second edition of the book published with the title Formalizm I formalisty (Formalism and the Formalists) in 1934. By this time a tolerant attitude towards the Formalists or Western scholarship was not permitted, and thus an additional and extremely hostile chapter called “The Collapse of Formalism” was included. Earlier writers on the Bakhtin Circle tended to ascribe the first edition to Bakhtin and the second to Medvedev, but it is clear that the body of the second edition is an expurgated version of the first.
Medvedev’s formulation was carried over into Bakhtin’s now famous study Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Work) published in 1929. Here the great nineteenth-century novelist’s own verbally affirmed and often reactionary ideology is downplayed in favour of his “form-shaping ideology” which is seen to be imbued with a profoundly democratic spirit. Bakhtin attacks those critics, such as Engelgardt, who characterised Dostoyevsky’s creative method as Hegelian. In such a scheme two positions struggle for ascendancy but are transformed into a synthesis at the end; however, according to Bakhtin, there is no merging of voices into a final, authoritative voice as in the Hegelian absolute. Dostoyevsky does not present an abstract dialectic but an unmerged dialogue of voices, each given equal rights. Bakhtin follows the nineteenth-century German novelist and critic Otto Ludwig in terming this type of dialogue “polyphonic dialogue”, which allows Cassirer’s insistence on a plurality of cultural forms to be extended to a plurality of discourses in society and the novel. In the course of Dostoyevsky’s novels, argues Bakhtin, very much in the spirit of Cassirer, the worldviews of Dostoyevsky’s heroes “unfold”, presenting their own unique perspective upon the world. The novelist does not, as is the case with Tolstoi, submerge all positions beneath a single authoritative perspective, but allows the voice of the narrator to reside beside the voices of the characters, bestowing no greater authority on that voice than on any of the others. Voices intersect and interact, mutually illuminating their ideological structures, potentialities, biases and limitations.
Bakhtin’s early phenomenology is now translated into discursive terms. Where Bakhtin was initially concerned with intersubjective relations and the modality of authorial and heroic interaction, this is now examined in terms of the way in which one language encounters another, reporting and modifying the utterance by reaccentuating it. Modes of interaction range from stylisation to explicit parody, which Bakhtin spends a considerable proportion of the book cataloguing. As only the later edition of the book (1963) has been published in English, there is a tendency to confuse the chronology of the emergence of Bakhtin’s key concepts. It should be noted that there is no reflection on carnival or on the Menippean Satire in the first edition of the Dostoyevsky study. These features only emerged in the next decade in relation to the history of the novel as a genre. The first edition of the Dostoyevsky study is a monograph on the work of the famous novelist in terms which in many respects embody the poetics of a significant portion of contemporary “fellow-traveller” writing. When considered in its historical context, the Dostoyevsky study can be seen as a sort of rearguard defence of liberality in the cultural arena against the encroachment of political control. The book was published on the eve of the destructive RAPP dictatorship, when bellicose advocates of “proletarian culture” were granted free reign by the newly victorious Stalinist leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. Formal experimentation and an inadequately tendentious narrative position was branded as reactionary, while Bakhtin’s work defended the presentation of a plurality of perspectives free from “monologic” closure. The formal characteristics of a work were themselves of ideological significance, but the reactionary tendency was in the imposition of a unitary perspective on a varied community of opinion.
The semiotic dimension of the new orientation of the Bakhtin Circle was developed at the same time by Voloshinov. In a series of articles between 1928 and 1930 punctuated by the appearance of the book-length Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) in 1929 (2nd edition 1930) Voloshinov published an analysis of the relationship between language and ideology unsurpassed for several decades. Voloshinov examines two contemporary accounts of language, what he calls “abstract objectivism”, whose leading exponent is Saussure, and “individualistic subjectivism”, developed from the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt by the romantic idealists Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) and Karl Vossler (1872-1942). Voloshinov argues that the two trends derive from rationalism and romanticism respectively and share both the strengths and weaknesses of those movements. While the former identifies the systematic and social character of language it mistakes the “system of self-identical forms” for the source of language usage in society; it abstracts language from the concrete historical context of its utilisation (Bakhtin’s “theoreticism”); the part is examined at the expense of the whole; the individual linguistic element is treated as a “thing” at the expense of the dynamics of speech; a unity of word meaning is assumed to the neglect of the multiplicity of meaning and accent and language is treated as a ready-made system whose developments are aberrations. The latter trend is correct in viewing language as a continuous generative process and asserting that this process is meaningful, but fundamentally wrong in identifying the laws of that creation with those of individual psychology, viewing the generative process as analogous with art and treating the system of signs as an inert crust of the creative process. These partial insights, Voloshinov argues that a stable system of linguistic signs is merely a scientific abstraction; the generative process of language is implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers; the laws of language generation are sociological laws; although linguistic and artistic creativity do not coincide, this creativity must be understood in relation to the ideological meanings and values that fill language and that the structure of each concrete utterance is a sociological structure.
Several commentators have noted how Voloshinov’s approach to language anticipates many of the criticisms of linguistic philosophy levelled by present day Poststructuralists, but does so without invoking the relativism of much of the latter or the nullity of Derrida‘s “hors texte.” Voloshinov firmly establishes the sign-bound nature of consciousness and the shifting nature of the language system, but instead of viewing the subject as fragmented by the reality of difference, he poses each utterance to be a microcosm of social conflict. This allows sociological structure and the plurality of discourse to be correlated according to a unitary historical development. In this sense Voloshinov’s critique bears a strong resemblance to the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci’s account of hegemony in his Prison Notebooks. Like Voloshinov and Bakhtin, Gramsci drew upon the work of Croce and Vossler and Matteo Bartoli’s Saussurean “spatial linguistics”, and combined it with a Hegelian reading of Marxism. As we have seen, however, Voloshinov was heavily influenced by the work of Cassirer, whose admiration for the work of von Humboldt, the founder of generative linguistics, was substantial. Voloshinov’s critique thus tended towards the romantic pole of language study rather than taking up the equidistant position he claimed in his study. This can be seen in the tendency to see social groups as collective subjects rather than institutionally defined collectives and such assertions as those which suggest the meaning of a word is “totally determined” by its context. What Voloshinov effectively does is to supplement Humboldt’s recognition of individual and national linguistic variability with a sociological dimension. Humboldt’s “inner-form” of language is recast as the relationality of discourse, dialogism. Abandoning the Marxist distinction between base and superstructure, Voloshinov follows Cassirer and Hegel in seeing the variety of linguistic forms as expressions of a single essence. It is significant that Gramsci, who adopted a consistently pragmatist epistemology followed the same course and emerged with startlingly similar formulations.
This suggests that the relations between the work of the Bakhtin school and Marxism are ones which are complex and worthy of close scrutiny. Those who have tried to set up a Chinese wall between the two tendencies or who have tried to identify them, have consistently failed to do justice to this philosophical dialogue. Some have even gone so far as to see the work of the group as fundamentally anti-Hegelian, a charge which collapses as soon as one traces the use of terminology in the works from the late 1920s.
4. Bakhtin and the Theory of the Novel: 1933-1941
The shift in Bakhtin’s thought from Kant towards Hegel is nowhere clearer than in his central works on the novel. This can be seen in the new centrality Bakhtin grants to the history of literature to which Kant had been largely indifferent. As if to stress his indebtedness to German idealism, Bakhtin adopts all of the characteristics of the novel as a genre catalogued by Goethe, Schlegel and Hegel with little modification and traces how the “essence” of the genre “appears” over a course of time. The development of the novel is described in a way distinctly reminiscent of Cassirer’s “symbolic forms” which unfold to present their unique view of the world which is itself a modified version of Hegel’s characterisation of thePhenomenology of Spirit as the representation of “appearing knowledge”. At the same time, however, the novel adopts many of the features of the role of Hegel’s philosophy in its Cassireran guise as the philosophy of culture. Such a philosophy, argued Cassirer, does not attempt to go behind the various image worlds created by the human spirit but “to understand and elucidate their basic formative principle” (The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 1, Language p.113). The novel, according to the scheme developed by Bakhtin, elucidates this principle with regard both to other literary genres and socio-ideological discourses. The old idealist formulation of the novel’s imperative that it be a “full and comprehensive reflection of its era” is reformulated as “the novel must represent all the ideological voices of its era… all the era’s languages that have any claim to being significant” (411). The novel is a symbolic form, but a specific one in which the “basic formative principle” of symbolic forms becomes visible. The socially stratified national language, heteroglossia in itself, becomes heteroglossia for-itself rather as thought perceives itself as its own object at the climax of Hegel’s Phenomenology.
The novel, for Bakhtin, uncovers the formative principle of discourse, its relationality, dialogism, without presenting some final absolute language of truth such as that which constitutes Hegelian conceptualism. The novel develops into something akin to a visio intellectualis of the sort Cassirer found in the work of Nicholas Cusanus. This is a whole which includes all various viewpoints in its accidentiality and necessity, “the thing seen and the manner and direction of the seeing” (Cassirer The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy 1963, p.32). No individual perspective is adequate to the whole in itself, for only the concrete totality of perspectives can present the whole:
Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, each of which in its own way reflects a little piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp behind their inter-reflecting aspects for a world that is broader, more multi-levelled and multi-horizoned than would be available to one language, one mirror. (Bakhtin Voprosy literatury i estetikipp.225-26)
While this aspect of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is most likely based on the philosophy of Cassirer, who developed his work as a defence of liberal values in the context of an increasingly chauvinistic atmosphere in Weimar Germany, a different political slant becomes markedly more apparent in Bakhtin’s work of the 1930s. The novelist now becomes the heir of an anti-authoritarian popular cultural strategy to deflate the pretensions of the official language and ideology and institute a popular-collective learning process. The antecedent of this strategy is not German bourgeois liberalism but Russian populism (narodnichestvo). Thus the dialectic of mythical and critical symbolic forms which Cassirer outlined in his philosophy now becomes fused with a dialectic of official and popular socio-cultural forces. On one side stand the forces of cultural centralisation and stabilisation: the “official strata”, unitary language, the literary canon and so on. On the other side stands the decentralising influence of popular culture: popular festivity and collective ridicule, literary parody, and the anti-canonic novel. The rise of the novel is correlated with the collapse of antique unity and the breaking down of cultural boundaries. Where the official culture developed a canon of poetic genres which posited a rarified language in opposition to the common spoken language, presented a monolithically serious worldview and epic accounts of a golden age and heroic beginnings, the novel parodies these features, ridiculing the official culture’s claims to universal validity and the ossified conventionality of canonic forms and language.
The novel is thus a literary expression of a whole socio-cultural process, but this process is rather too broad to be incorporated under the label Bakhtin gives to it without considerable problems with regard to conceptual accuracy. The adjective poetic becomes shorthand for the whole complex of institutional and cultural forms which can be included on the side of officialdom. Thus poetic denotes both a type of discourse used in artistic texts and a hierarchical relation between discourses which constitutes the hegemonic relationships of an unequal society. Correspondingly, novelistic describes both the character of a genre, multi-accented artistic discourse, and an anti-authoritarian relationship between discourses. Another pair of terms which is often used interchangeably with these two is monologic and dialogic. The former denotes a mono-accentual type of discourse and an authoritarian stance towards another discourse. The latter describes a multi-accentual discourse, the relationality of discourse, and an orientation on a monologic discourse which seeks to reveal the ideological structure lurking behind surface appearances. The ground between formal and political terms shifts before the reader, who is constantly reminded of the institutional co-ordinates for all discursive phenomena but is never presented with a sociological account of those co-ordinates. This might be explained both by the ideological restrictions placed on any writer in Stalin’s Russia and by the idealist frame of Bakhtin’s own theory. This ambiguity has allowed very different interpretations of Bakhtin’s work to be drawn, ranging from a tendency to reduce the whole argument to one of artistic forms, leading to a liberalistic formal criticism and attempts to correlate Bakhtin’s argument with the institutional forms of modern capitalist society. Bakhtin’s work has thus become a battleground between (mainly American) liberal academics and (mainly British) anti-Stalinist Marxists.
In its classical phase, Russian populism was, according to Walicki, “opposed to the “abstract intellectualism” of those revolutionaries who tried to teach the peasants, to impose on them the ideals of Western socialism, instead of learning what were their real needs and acting in the name of such interests and ideals of which the peasants had already become aware”. Yet it also suggested an opposition to those Second International Marxists who argued that capitalism was an unavoidable stage in the development of Russia (The Controversy Over Capitalism 1989 p.3). In one sense, then, it was a political ideology compatible with Third International Marxism, but in another it sought to reverse the hegemony of intellectuals over “the people”. Bakhtin’s poet is a hegemonic intellectual whose language relates in an authoritative fashion to the discourse of the masses, while the novelist aims to break and indeed reverse that hegemonic relationship. In Bakhtin’s formulation, the locus of critical forces of culture is the people, while the mythological forces of culture emerge from the official stratum.
Many of the central works on the novel were at least partially written in response to the theory of the novel developed by Georg Lukács. Bakhtin had begun to translate Lukács’ Theory of the Novel in the 1920s but abandoned the project upon learning that Lukács no longer liked the book but in the 1930s, when Lukács accommodated to the Stalin regime and essentially became a right Hegelian, his theory of the novel became canonical. Bakhtin agreed with Lukács that the novel represented the “essence of the age” and that irony constituted a central factor of the novelistic method, but rejected the latter’s assertion that unless the novel revealed the thread of rationality running through a seemingly anarchic world, that is, presented an authoritative perspective, the author had succumbed to bourgeois decadence. Modernist formal experimentation and the dominance of parody in modernist literature Lukács found to be a reflection of “bourgeois decay”, while Bakhtin strove to reveal its popular-democratic roots. The novel should not be seen as a compensation for the restlessness of contemporary society, uncovering the assured road to progress, but the embodiment of the dynamic forces that could shape society in a popular-democratic fashion. Thus where Lukács championed epic closure, Bakhtin highlighted novelistic openendedness; where Lukács advocated a strong narrative presence, Bakhtin advocated the maximalisation of multilingual intersection and the testing of discourse. Bakhtin takes a left Hegelian stance against Lukács; dialogism becomes analogous to Hegel’s Geist, both describing the social whole and standing in judgement over those eras in which the dialogic imperative is not realised.
5. Carnival, History And Popular Culture: Rabelais, Goethe And Dostoyevsky As Philosophers
The high point of Bakhtin’s populism can be seen in his now famous 1965 study of Rabelais and the heavily revised second edition of the 1929 Dostoyevsky book (1963). The former had been composed as Bakhtin’s doctoral dissertation which had been written in the late 1930s but was only prepared for publication when he emerged from obscurity in the 1960s. Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul´tura srednevekov´ia i renessansa (The work of François Rabelais and the Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance) is a remarkable work. Bakhtin concentrates on the collapse of the strict hierarchies of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance by looking at the way in which ancient modes of living and working collectively, in accordance with the rhythms of nature, re-emerge in the forms of popular culture opposed to official culture. In Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics) Bakhtin summarises the essence of the question thus:
It could be said (with certain reservations, of course) that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as it were, two lives: one that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict temporal boundaries. (p.129-30)
The activities of the carnival square: collective ridicule of officialdom, inversion of hierarchy, violations of decorum and proportion, celebration of bodily excess and so on embody, for Bakhtin, an implicit popular conception of the world. This conception is not, however, able to become ideologically elaborated until the radical laughter of the square entered into the “world of great literature” (Rabelais p.96). The novel of Rabelais is seen as the epitome of this process of breaking down the rigid, hierarchical world of the Middle Ages and the birth of the modern era. Rabelais is much more than a novelist for Bakhtin: his work embodies a whole new philosophy of history, in which the world is viewed in the process of becoming. The grotesque is the image of this becoming, the boundaries between person and person, person and thing, are erased as the individual merges with the people and the whole cosmos. As the individual body is transcended, the biological body is negated and the “body of historical, progressing mankind” moves to the centre of the system of images. In the carnival focus on death and rebirth the individual body dies, but the body of the people lives and grows, biological life ends but historical life continues.
The carnivalesque becomes a set of image-borne strategies for destabilising the official worldview. In a recently published article written for inclusion in the Soviet Literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Literary Encyclopaedia) in 1940, Bakhtin defines the satirical attitude as the “image-borne negation” of contemporary actuality as inadequacy, which contains within itself a positive moment in which an improved actuality is affirmed. This affirmed actuality is the historical necessity implicit in contemporary actuality and which is implied by the grotesque image. The grotesque, argues Bakhtin, “discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable” (Rabelais p.48). The grotesque image of the body, as an image which reveals incomplete metamorphosis no longer represents itself, it represents what Hegel called the “universal dialectic of life”.
The Renaissance birth of the historical world led to a new development in the Enlightenment. Where Rabelais was presented as the high point of Renaissance literary and philosophical development, the Enlightenment reaches one of its high points in the work of Goethe. The process dispersing the “residue of otherworldly cohesion and mythical unity” was completed at this time, helping “reality to gather itself together and condense into the visible whole of a new world” (Speech Genres and Other Late Essaysp.45). The Enlightenment, argues Bakhtin in a section which draws heavily on Cassirer (the corresponding passage is The Philosophy of the Enlightenment p.197), should no longer be considered an a-historical era, but “an epoch of great awakening of a sense of time, above all … in nature and human life” (p.26). But, argues Bakhtin “this process of preparing for the disclosure of historical time took place more rapidly, completely, and profoundly in literary creativity than in the abstract philosophical, ideological views of Enlightenment thinkers” (p.26). Goethe’s imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:
Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space. Therefore the plot (sum of depicted events) and the characters … are like those creative forces that formulated and humanised this landscape, they made it a speaking vestige of the movement of history (historical time), and, to a certain degree, predetermined its subsequent course as well, or like those creative forces a given locality needs in order to organise and continue the historical process embodied in it. (p.49)
Goethe wanted to “bring together and unite the present, past and future with the ring of necessity” (p.39), to make the present creative. Like Rabelais, Goethe was as much a philosopher as a writer.
The same pattern of analysis shapes the 1963 version of the Dostoyevsky study. Here Dostoyevsky is no longer treated, as in the 1929 version, as a totally original innovator, but as the heir to a tradition rooted in popular culture. The novelist stood poised at the threshold of a new era, as the rigidly hierarchical Russian Empire was poised to give way to the catastrophic arrival of capitalist anarchy and ultimately revolution. Dostoyevsky thus intersected with the threshold poetics of carnival at a different stage in its development, he sought to present the voices of his era in a “pure simultaneity” unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:
Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii’s world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. Thus there is no causality in Dostoevskii’s novels, no genesis, no explanations based on the past, on the influences of the environment or of upbringing and so forth. Every act a character commits is in the present, and in this sense is not predetermined; it is conceived of and represented by the author as free. (p.29)
The roots of such a conception lie in carnival and, according to Bakhtin, in the carnivalised philosophical dialogues that constituted the Menippean Satire. This philosophico-literary genre reaches a new stage in Dostoyevsky’s work, where the roots of the novel as a genre stands out particularly clearly. One of those roots was the Socratic Dialogue, which was overwhelmed by the monologic Aristotelian treatise, but which continued to lead a subterranean life in the non-canonical minor satirical genres and then became a constitutive element of the novel form and, implicitly, literary modernism. This accounts for its philosophical importance.
6. Bakhtin’s Last Works
In his last years Bakhtin returned to the methodological questions that had preoccupied his earlier years, though now with a rather different perspective. This began with his work on speech genres in the 1950s, though apart from this study, did not yield any sustained texts until the 1970s. Bakhtin now began to stress the dialogic character of all study in the “human sciences”, the fact that one needs to deal with another “I” who can speak for and about his or herself in a fundamentally different way than with an inanimate and voiceless object. To this end he sought to differentiate his position from that of incipient Soviet structuralism, which adopted the “abstract objectivist” approach to language and the constitution of the subject. Bakhtin’s approach to subjectivity is dialogic, referring to the exchange of utterances rather than narrowly linguistic, and this extends to the analysis of texts which are always intertextual, meeting and illuminating each other. Just as texts have genres, “definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction of the whole” so too does speech. Thus the boundaries between complex genres such as those commonly regarded as literary and other less formalised genres should be seen as porous and flexible, allowing a dialogue of genres as well as styles.
7. Conclusion
The work of the Bakhtin circle is multifaceted and extremely pertinent to contemporary philosophical concerns. Yet their work moves beyond philosophy narrowly defined to encompass anthropology, literary studies, historiography and political theory. The vicissitudes of intellectual life in the Soviet Union have complicated assessment of the work of the circle, as has the way in which the works have been published and translated in recent years. On top of this, the works of the group have been read into a theoretical position framed by present-day concerns over poststructuralism and the fate of the subject in modern philosophy. A proper historical assessment of the work of the Bakhtin Circle will be much aided by the publication of Bakhtin’s Complete Works which will appear over the next few years. This will hopefully be followed by a harmonised English translation which will facilitate an informed assessment in the English speaking world.'
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On May 2, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Slavic literary scholar Michael Holquist for a lecture entitled “On a Footnot...
On a Footnote in Bakhtin
On May 2, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Slavic literary scholar Michael Holquist for a lecture entitled “On a Footnote in Bakhtin.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G14IMVkVehw
Images:
1. The Bakhtin Circle, Mikhail Bakhtin sitting in the centre
Mikhail Bakhtin biography from files.eric.ed.gov
Background from {[https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1166855.pdf/]}
Abstract Dialectics and a dialogical approach constitute two distinct theoretical frameworks with long intellectual histories. The question of relations between dialogue and dialectics provokes discussions in academic communities. The present paper highlights the need to clarify the concepts ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectics’ and explore their origins in the history of human thought. The paper attempts to examine mutual relations between dialectics and dialogue in a historical perspective and develop a theoretical reconstruction of their philosophical underpinnings. It proposes to deal with challenges connected with the creation of spaces for sharing and mutual enrichment between dialogue and dialectics. Manolis Dafermos is an associate professor in the epistemology of psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Crete. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. His interests include cultural historical psychology, critical psychology, the history of psychology, and methodological and epistemological issues in the social sciences.
Introduction
The question of the relations between dialogue and dialectics has been the topic of extensive debates in the international academic communities. Diametrically opposite positions have been stated by different scholars (Reigel, 1979; White, 2011; Matusov, & Hayes, 2000; Sullivan, 2010; Nikulin, 2010; Matusov, 2011; Rule, 2015). This question has been formulated by many of them as a question of relations between Bakhtinian Dialogic and Vygotskian Dialectic. The integration (or combination) between Bakhtin's ideas of dialogism and Vygotsky's Cultural historical psychology has been presented as an attractive perspective in human and social sciences (Wertsch, 1993; Roth, 2013). Other scholars focus on fundamental differences between Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's research programs and the theoretical incompatibility of their theories (Cheyne, & Tarulli, 1999; Wegerif, 2008; White, 2011; Matusov, 2011).
From my perspective, the question of the relationship between Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories could be examined as a part of the wider issue of the relationship between dialogue and dialectics in the context of the history of human thought. Under the influence of postmodern theories, an exceedingly hostile stance towards dialectics became dominant in the North Atlantic Academy. “Recourse to dialectics is generally associated with grand, totalising social theory and a ‘foundationalist’ epistemology... ” (Gardiner, 2000, p.119). The anti-dialectic stance is very strong in the field of Bakhtin studies in which a dialogical approach has been developed. The representatives of the anti-dialectic ‘camp’ focus mainly on ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) the conceptual incommensurability and incompatibility of dialectics and dialogism. In contrast to this dominant interpretation, several thinkers consider dialogue and dialectical thinking as compatible concepts (Paul, 2012) and several attempts have been made to integrate dialogue and dialectics (for example, the theory of relational dialectic) (Baxter, 2004).
The present paper is an attempt to examine the complex and ambiguous relationship between dialogue and dialectics focusing mainly on their philosophical underpinnings. Firstly, I concentrate on defining the concepts dialogue and dialectics, their origin and multiple meanings. This requires a reconstruction of the genesis of these concepts in the history of human thought. Secondly, the present paper explores the relationships between dialectics and dialogue as well as several attempts to compare, contrast or integrate them.
The underlying purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that despite their fundamental differences, the dialogical approach and dialectics can be brought closer together. It is important to understand that the relations between different approaches such as dialogical and dialectical approaches are not fixed and stable, but they change in the history of human thought. What may seem impossible in one particular stage of development in the history of human thought becomes possible in another. The paper explores the possibility of the creation of a common space between dialogism and dialectics as theoretical frameworks and the perspective of their mutual enrichment.
A historical and philosophical account of the dynamic and changing relations between dialogue and dialectics can challenge the presently dominant idea about their total incompatibility and offer an insight into contemporary discussion in the field of dialogical pedagogy. In contrast to mainstream schooling, bringing together dialogue and dialectics may create the space for alternative and unpredictable encounters in the domain of education. Βringing together dialogue and dialectics in the domain of education is a promising, open-ended issue, outside the scope of the present paper that focuses mainly on the philosophical examination of dialogue and dialectics as theoretical frameworks. The paper is intended to encourage scholars and practitioners to think seriously about the possibility of the creation of a common space between dialogue and dialectic that remains largely terra incognita.
What is dialogue?
Dialogue in different forms (political, philosophical, and dramatic) historically emerged in Ancient Greece in the context of the polis as a community of actively participating citizens (Dafermos, 2013a). Plato's dialogues, the first written dialogical accounts in human history were formed in the context of ancient polis.
After a long eclipse in the history of human thought dialogue was reborn in the twentieth century in the writings of Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. He developed a multifaceted theory of dialogism based on a set of concepts such as dialogue, monologue, polyphony, heteroglossia, utterance, voice, speech genres and chronotope. Bakhtin's writings inspired many scholars and practitioners to elaborate and apply various dialogical approaches in pedagogy (Matusov, 2009; Matusov, & Miyazaki, 2014), psychology (Shotter, 1995; Hermans, & Kempen, 1993), psychotherapy (Seikkula, 2011; Hermans, & Dimaggio, 2004) and cultural studies (Wertsch, 1993; Thornton, 1994).
One of the reasons for the apparent confusion in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dialogical studies is connected with the polysemy of the notion of dialogue and the multiple meanings of its use in different contexts. I will attempt to define several meanings of the term ‘dialogue’. In accordance with a first definition, dialogue is a live conversation between two or more people. In other words, dialogue can be identified with oral communication between two or more interlocutors. Being with other people and responding to their voices is an essential feature of a conversation. However, a difficult question at once arises whether dialogue is every form of conversation or a specific type of deep communication between different subjectivities. Nikulin (2010) defined four components that turn a conversation into a dialogue: a. the existence of personal other, b. voice, c. unfinalizability, d. allosensus (constant disagreement with other).
The second meaning of the term ‘dialogue’ refers to dialogue as a genre or literary device. Plato's dialogues are one of the most famous forms of using a dialogical form as a genre. Plato's written dialogues historically appeared as an imitation of oral communication in times of heated debates about the transition from oral to written communication. Dialogue as a genre has been used by many thinkers to formulate their ideas in various ways. However, the dialogical genre might be used as an external form for monological content. For example, dialogue might be used as a teaching method of catechesis. It refers to an instrumental approach to dialogue that tends to be considered as an “an effective means for nondialogic ends, which are understood outside of the notion of dialogue, within a monological framework” (Matusov, & Miyazaki, 2014, p.2). However, if there is a perfect, final and absolute truth as in catechesis, there is no place and need for genuine dialogue.
In accordance with a third meaning, “...dialogue is the universal condition of using language at all” (Womack, 2011, p.48). From this perspective both oral and written speech, moreover, language itself has a dialogical character. Language can be considered mainly as an intersubjective communicative engagement, rather than a simple, formal, symbolic system.
Bakhtin offered a classic formulation of the dialogic nature of consciousness that can be regarded as the fourth meaning of the dialogue which goes beyond purely linguistic or literary phenomena: “I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou) … The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate … To be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.287).
Dialogue is an essential characteristic of consciousness. The word ‘consciousness’ originates from the Latin ‘conscius’ (con- ‘together’ + scientia- ‘to know’). ‘Conscious’ means sharing knowledge. Toulmin (1982) offers a brilliant interpretation of the etymology of the term ‘consciousness’:
“Etymologically, of course, the term ‘consciousness’ is a knowledge word. This is evidenced by the Latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we to make of the prefix con- that precedes it? Look at the usage in Roman Law, and the answer will be easy enough. Two or more agents who act jointly—having formed a common intention, framed a shared plan, and concerted their actions—are as a result conscientes. They act as they do knowing one another’s plans: they are jointly knowing” (Toulmin, 1982, p. 64).
In Latin “to be conscious of something was to share knowledge of it, with someone else, or with oneself” (Zeman, 2001, p.1265). “When two or more men know of one and the same fact, they are said to be conscious of it one to another” (Hobbes, 1660, Leviathan, chapt. VII). However, the predominant use of the term ‘consciousness’ is connected with John Locke's definition: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind” (Locke, 1690, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, i, 19). It refers to ‘inner perceptions’ that are conceived by an individual. The understanding of consciousness as a private, internal awareness became dominant in contemporary scientific literature.
However, it is interesting to note that the term ‘consciousness’ has similar etymology in different languages: In Russian ‘Сознание’ (Со-знание), in Greek ‘συνείδηση’ (συν- ειδέναι), in English ‘Conscientia,’ in French ‘Conscience’ (Con-science), in Italian ‘Coscienza’ (Co-scienza). The prefix ‘co’ refers to joint action, reciprocal interaction between people. The concept of ‘consciousness’ includes knowledge as its essential moment. However, consciousness is not reducible to simple knowledge but it refers to coproducing knowledge in the process of communication between different subjects. It refers to joining knowledge with another or shared knowledge. From this perspective, consciousness has dialogic structure and orientation. The understanding of the dialogic nature of consciousness enables the demonstration of the mirrors of cognitivism and scientism. One of the most powerful objections to cognitivism has been formulated by Michael Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 110). Dialogue has been defined by Bakhtin as opposed to monologism. Individual consciousness cannot grasp the complexity and variety of the human world. In contrast to the single, isolated, monological consciousness, a dialogical coexistence of different irreducible consciousnesses develops. Bakhtin argued that the idea is not developed in isolated individual consciousness but in dialogic communication between several consciousnesses. “...the idea is inter-individual and inter-subjective - the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogic communion between consciousnesses. The idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses” (Bakhtin, 2003, p.98). The meeting spaces and dramatic processes of making meaning between different and not reducible consciousnesses constitute the ontological foundation of dialogue. The “ontological dialogue” (Sidorkin, 1999; Matusov, & Miyazaki, 2014) between consciousnesses penetrates the deeper and most important aspects of human existence. Although dialogue has been defined as being contrary to monologue, the consideration of dialogue as a positive and monologue as a negative term leads inevitably to oversimplification of dialectic relationships between them. I totally agree with Matusov's position that “Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and monologue is complementary” (Matusov, 2009, p.112). Matusov argues that the concepts of dialogicity and monologicity mutually constitute each other. “Monologicity makes clear who is speaking (i.e., authorship and responsibility) and what is said (i.e., the message). In other words, monologicity objectivizes others and the themes of communication... Monologicity reflects centripetal forces of language, communication, and community oriented on centralization, unification, unity with action, seriousness, cohesiveness and integrity of voice (and position), articulateness, globalization, decontextualization, exactness and correctness of meaning (finalizing the meaning)” (Matusov, 2009, p. 131). However, many Bakhtinian scholars tend to interpret the concepts ‘dialogue-monologue’ in terms of Western post-modernism such as ‘the death of author’ (more generally, the ‘death of subject’), ‘deconstruction,’ ‘decentration,’ ‘intertextuality’ (Bell, & Gardiner, 1998; Holquist, 2002). From the perspective of post-modernism, monologue is defined as a ‘grand narrative’ that should be ‘killed’ and ‘destroyed’. With the total ‘death of monologue’ any claims for ‘seriousness,’ ‘cohesiveness,’ ‘integrity of voice (and position),’ ‘articulateness’ and ‘correctness of meaning’ might disappear. The celebration post-modern, deconstructionist discourse tends to lead to the deconstruction not only of ‘old’ metaphysics and ‘grand’ monologic narratives, but also of scientific thinking and knowledge itself. “...the deconstruction of metaphysics is the deconstruction of the scientificity of science. The deconstructive strategy aims at the very source of science itself, at the kind of question that gives rise to scientific investigation” (Evans, 1999, p.156). It could be argued that the destruction of reason itself may give rise to a new form of irrationalism. Based on the analysis of post-Hegelian philosophical tradition, Lukács (1954) demonstrated that the destruction of reason and the advent of irrationalism prepared the ground for fascist ideas. Flecha (1999) distinguishes two kinds of racism: modern racism is based on the idea of the existence of inferior or superior ethnicities and races, while postmodernist racism built on postmodern relativism, “...accepts diversity and difference but accords different groups a place in their own, distinctive contexts” (Flecha, 1999, p. 153). Postmodern relativism promotes proliferation of differences and fragmentation of social space. Flecha proposes a dialogic approach as an alternative platform that can deal simultaneously with both forms of racism. Dialogue as a dynamic and positive force offers the opportunity to stimulate unpredictable meetings between the participants and build bridges across differences. Going beyond the tension between absolutism and postmodern relativism, dialogue can promote deep communication and encourage mutual recognition and understanding between the participants.
What is dialectics?
The concept ‘dialectics’ has acquired different forms and meanings in various historical contexts. In ancient Greece dialectics emerged as an art of dialogue and a problem solving method through argumentation. The term ‘dialectics’ has a similar origin of the term ‘dialogue’. It refers to the art of conversation or debate that is connected with seeking truth through reasoning. “... someone tries, by means of dialectical discussion and without the aid of any sense-perceptions, to arrive through reason at the being of each thing itself” (Plato, 2004, Republic, 532a). By the power of discussions, dialectics provides genuine knowledge. Dialectics as a method originates from the Socratic elenchus, a method of hypothesis elimination that takes the form of a question-answer dialogue and brings out the contradictions in the interlocutor's arguments.
Dialectics constitutes a way of thinking based on the understanding of the contradictory nature of both reason and being. Naive, spontaneous dialectics had been developed by ancient thinkers as an attempt to offer a living, sensory concrete perception of the world in the process of its change and becoming. “Tao-Te-Ching” in Ancient China as well as Heraclitus’ philosophy in Ancient Greece were forms of ancient spontaneous dialectics that were expressed in the idea that “everything is in a state of flux” (Skirbekk, & Gilje, 2001, p.13). Although Heraclitus didn't use the term ‘dialectic,’ he developed a dialectical understanding that everything is becoming. However, a conceptual, categorical system for the representation of things as processes did not yet exist in the ancient world. Becoming is expressed through metaphors, images of an aesthetic equivalent such as the image of a river: “you cannot step into the same river twice” (Plato, 1997, Cratylus, 402a).
The meaning of the concept ‘dialectics’ was transformed by Aristotle. For Aristotle dialectic wasn’t a form of being but rather a method of logical argumentation. Moreover, dialectic broke down its interconnection with dialogue and became mainly a method of building knowledge. In the Middle Ages dialectic was constructed as a method of argumentation on the basis of a set of logical rules (Nikulin, 2010).
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an analytic method of knowledge production dominated in concrete sciences and a metaphysical mode of thinking in the field of philosophy (Pavlidis, 2010). The metaphysical mode of thinking is based on the consideration of reality as a sum of separated, unconnected independent entities. A metaphysical outlook considers things as self-subsistent, isolated and abstracted from their context (Sayers, 1976). It denies fundamentally both the internal relatedness of all things and their development.
The concept of ‘dialectic’ was reborn and acquired new meanings and connotations in the context of German classical philosophy from Kant to Hegel and later in Marxism. Kant proposed “transcendental dialectic” as the logic of errors and illusions that arise when reason goes beyond its proper role in attempting to grasp the actual objects themselves (the thing-in-itself) (Williams, 2014). Kant demonstrated the structural necessity and inevitability of illusions. According to Kant, thinking confronts antinomies and falls into conflict with itself. Challenging Kant’s concept of dialectic as a logic of illusions, Hegel developed a “positive” dialectic based on the examination of a universal as a concrete unity of multiple determinations (Hegel, 2010). Dialectics was developed by Hegel as a method of thought that included the process of expounding contradictions and their resolution in the corpus of a rational understanding of an object (Ilyenkov, 1977). Materialistic dialectics developed by K. Marx as an attempt of the theoretical reconstruction of a concrete organic whole (the capitalist mode of production) through the creation of a system of interconnected concepts.
The conscious (or systematic) dialectics stood against the metaphysical method of thinking. Dialectics and metaphysics constitute two different ways of thinking about thinking. In contrast to the metaphysical method based on one-dimensional, abstract analysis of an object and its elements as unchanging and immutable, dialectical thinking examines an object in the process of its change. The dialectical method focuses on the examination of things in their mutual connections, movement and development. Dialectics as a way of thinking grasps and represents the developmental process of a concrete object in its interconnections with other objects (Pavlidis, 2010).
In the late 19th century and early 20th century the tendency of the rejection of dialectic and the acceptance of other trends such as Kantianism, philosophy of life and positivism became dominant in Western academy. The bulk of research for a long period in the Western academy was primarily associated with the assumptions of positivism and reductionism. In contrast to widespread reductionism in concrete disciplines which focuses on analysis of isolated elements of reality, the dialectic approach is oriented to grasp full complexity of interrelationships of reality and the contradictions that embody them (Bidell, 1988). The famous formula ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ represents a very schematic and over simplistic description of the dialectical understanding of development. Such kind of caricatured representation of dialectics can give rise to the negative stance (or total rejection) of dialectical thinking. Laske (2009) argues that the dialectical mode of thinking “remains a closed book for the majority of adults in the Western world, while in Asian cultures nurtured by Buddhism it more easily assumes a common sense form” (Laske, 2009). Although the explanation of the negative stance toward a dialectical mode of thinking is out of scope of the present paper, I would like only to note that the increasing individualization, fragmentation and commercialization of social life in North America and Western Europe is not unconnected to a lack of understanding of dialectic at the level of everyday life.
The multiple crises (economic, political, ecological and scientific) as a result of the increasing social contradictions and asymmetries in a rapidly changing world may provoke interest in dialectics as a way of the conceptualization of contradictions. However, dialectics is not a given system of postulates that can be immediately applied as an external guiding system for investigating problems. The application of dialectics to the concrete fields presupposes its essential development. The question of how to further develop dialectics in a rapidly changing world remains open for future investigation.
Bakhtin's dialogism and dialectics
Obviously, there are strong arguments for the incompatibility between dialectics and dialogism. It is possible to find several critical remarks on dialectics in Bakhtin's works: in his book “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” (PDP), and some writing included in the anthology “Speech Genres and Other Late Essays” (SG). Bakhtin's treatment of dialectics has fragmentary character and it did not include a systematic examination of the relationship between dialectics and dialogue.
Bakhtin focused mainly on incompatibility between dialectics and dialogue. “Take a dialogue and remove the voices…remove the intonations…carve out the abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that’s how you get dialectics” (Bakhtin, 1986a, p. 147). Nevertheless, there is nothing more alien to dialectics than the idea of isolated, individual and abstract consciousness. Dialectics as a way of thinking emphasizes internal, essential connections between people rather than a separated individual, an abstract consciousness.
Moreover, the concept ‘abstract’ has a different meaning in the dialectical theory of knowledge in relation to Bakhtin's quotation. Ilyenkov (1982b) brought into light the shortcoming of the view that the ‘concrete’ is a product of sensuous experience and the ‘abstract’ is a result of rational thinking. Ilyenkov (1982b) demonstrated that the examination of the concrete as a synonym of an immediate sensual image, and the abstract, as a synonym of the conceptual follows the empiricist tradition. The repudiation of dialectics as a form of abstract thinking is based on the assumptions of empiricism that remains a dominant “paradigm” in the Western academy.
Hegel in his wonderful text “Who thinks abstractly” pointed out that in regarding all other people exclusively from a narrow pragmatic viewpoint, an undeveloped person thinks abstractly. He highlighted the essence of the abstract thinking: “This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality” (Hegel, 1808/1966). Taking only one quality of a person and ignoring all of his (her) other qualities, not interested in the history of his (her) life is the essence of abstract thinking. In contrast to abstract thinking, Hegelian dialectics attempts to look at an object as a concrete unity of multiple and interconnected determinations.
Bahktin's critical remarks on dialectics do not prove a replete incompatibility between dialectics and dialogue. Firstly, it is important to take into account the polemical context in which Bakhtin criticized the dominant, dogmatic version of dialectical materialism ("Diamat") in the USSR. Bakhtin's critique of Hegelian dialectic served as a form of disguised criticism of the official ideology in the form of "Diamat". Additionally, going beyond explicit criticism of Hegel's dialectic, it is possible to demonstrate that Bakhtin was implicitly involved in dialogue with it. Hegelian philosophy could not leave Bakhtin indifferent. Hegel’s philosophy was developed in dialogue with the main philosophical theories of his time as well as the previews stages in the history of philosophy. “... it is difficult to see how Hegel’s philosophy could not be considered part of a dialogue taking place with other philosophies of his time (and a dialogue in the history of philosophy as well). It would be just as difficult to consider his ‘monologue’ to be unanswered or ‘unresponded’. It would be unfair, though, to reproach Bakhtin for a failure to understand Hegel’s voice, and to refuse to enter into a dialogue with it. Rather, we can assume that beyond the superficial direct critique of Hegel, Bakhtin in fact responded actively and more often implicitly to Hegelian philosophy in his own works...” (Côté, 2000, p. 26).
Several Bakhtin's followers argue that dialectics is a synonym of the Cartesian solitary consciousness or monological view of the world. “Dialectics is a product of the old monological, Newtonian view of the world” (Morson, & Emerson, 1990, p.57). However, dialectics had existed long before the appearance of the Newtonian view of the world in direct connection with dialogue.
Hegel was far from accepting Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”). From a Hegelian perspective, Man is not a solitary thinking being, a single individual. For Hegel, knowledge is a constituent moment of consciousness and self-consciousness, rather than an independent entity. Hegel's view that logical concepts cannot be derived from the individual mind provides a creative insight on the intersubjective nature of thinking. In contrast to the widespread reception of Hegelian philosophy in terms of Cartesian solitary consciousness and monologism, Luther (2009) offers evidence of Hegel's shift from Kantian-Cartesian “I” into “We”:
“For Descartes and Kant, the individual subject is the source of knowledge; however, for Hegel, knowledge is a collective achievement. This represents a crucial shift from the first person singular to first person plural standpoint, and it has much in common with the paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of intersubjectivity in the late twentieth century” (Luther, 2009, p. 4)
At the same time, the Hegelian idea of absolute knowledge and Hegel's representation of his own philosophical system as the completion of self-development of thinking in human history is a monologic as well as an anti-dialectical idea. It is possible to reveal a contradiction between Hegel's dialectical thinking and his close, dogmatic system (as well as an internal contradiction in Hegel's understanding of dialectics).
However, totally rejecting Hegelian dialectics means throwing out the baby with the bath water. The Hegelian analysis of master–slave relations1 in “Phenomenology of Spirit” is especially important for understanding the interconnection between dialectics and dialogue. The dialogical concept of mutual recognition became an integral part of the dialectical process of the historical development of consciousness and self-consciousness. In other words, Hegel incorporated the concept of dialogue in his dialectical Odyssey of consciousness and self-consciousness toward knowledge. The Hegelian analysis of master–slave relations provides a dialectical understanding of dialogue and the difficulties of promoting it in human history.
Hegel attempted to describe the relations between self and other in a world in which there is no pre-established harmony between different participants, but a struggle for recognition between them takes place. Consciousness does not live in a self-sufficient isolation, but in a mutual relation with other consciousnesses. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (Hegel, 2004, p.111). For Hegel, developing an independent self-consciousness goes through mutual recognition.
Hudson (2010) argues that despite their differences, it is possible to find some links between the Hegelian concept of mutual recognition and Buber's “I-Thou” philosophy of dialogue. Moreover, the Hegelian idea of an incomplete form of recognition between Master and Slave as a result of the perception of Slave as object bears striking similarities to Buber's formulation of the I-It relation. The treatment of asymmetrical relations between Master and Slave is one the most important contributions of the Hegelian investigation of the historical development of consciousness. 1 The German expression “Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” has been translated as “Master and Slave” (Or “Lordship and Bondage”) (Hegel, 2004).
Unlike Kant, Hegel didn't examine the relationships between consciousnesses in terms of an idealized deontological norm, but as they are shaped in hard contradictory historical reality. Hegel demonstrated that in human history the recognition between different consciousnesses is not mutual and reciprocal. Human history is not a linear progression but a contradictory, dramatic process. The inequality between Lordship and Bondage has been expressed in the fact that one consciousness recognizes other without being recognized. One consciousness has been recognized as an ‘autonomous’ existence and another as a ‘dependent’ existence. Hegel's analysis of dialectic of the dominance and servitude demonstrates in which way the hierarchical power relations reproduce distorted forms of consciousness. Moreover, Hegel brought to light the struggle for recognition as a crucial moment in the history of consciousness and self-consciousness.
Marx's account of alienation and commodity fetishism offers a deep understanding of the distortion (degradation) of human relationships in the capitalist society. The relations between people appear to be relations between ‘things’ (commodities). From this perspective, it is hard to develop dialogic spaces without taking into account challenges of the commodification of human relationships and asymmetrical power relationships. The commodification of human relationships reproduces a monological way of thinking, because other subjects have been reduced to the status of material objects. It is interesting to note that Bakhtin linked monologism with “...absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself” (Bakhtin, 1984, 18).
Obviously, it would be simplistic to equate the dialogic idea of multiple perspectives and voices with Marxian materialistic dialectics. Bakhtin's theory of dialogism has developed under the influence of fundamental ideas from neo-Kantianism, philosophy of life, and phenomenology. Especially important for the development of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism was Dilthey's understanding of human sciences as grounded in ‘lived experience’ (Erleben), ‘expression’ (Ausdruck), and ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) (Brandist, 2002, p.18). However, Marxism was also one of the strong voices in Bakhtin Circle. The impact of Marxism is felt in Voloshinov's (1973, 1976) books “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” and “Freudianism: A Marxist critique”.
Bulavka and Buzgalin (2004) consider dialectics as the basis of Bakhtin's dialogical world. From their perspective, the subject-subject relationship of dialogue as a relationship of qualitatively different integral beings represents a dialectical process of breakdown of the world of alienation, in which people relate to one another primarily as objects (commodity and money fetishism, the fetishization of bureaucratic hierarchy). Dialogue is presented as a window into a world of collaborative creativity, a joint creation of the participants themselves.
Bulavka and Buzgalin (2004) distinguish two types of dialectics: the ‘old’ dialectical logic is oriented primarily toward the representation of objective processes, which do not depend on the will and activity of the subject. The ‘new’ dialectic is oriented to reflecting the subject-subject relationship, polyphony and collaborative creativity of the ‘realm of freedom’. The transition from the ‘old’ to new dialectics is examined through the prism of the shift from the ‘realm of necessity’ to the ‘realm of freedom’. A possible objection to this original interpretation of dialectics might be that the confrontation between the representation of objective processes and the reflection on subject-subject relationships reproduces an antidialectical subject-object dualism. The issue of the conceptualization of subject-subject and subjectobject relationships from a dialectical perspective remains at stake and provoke tensions. However, there is no doubt that resisting against the objectivation of human being, the adherents of the dialogical approach are focused mainly on understanding of subject-subject relationships.
Interconnection between consciousness and knowledge
Dialectics and dialogue constitute two distinct traditions and each of them has its own logic of development in the history of human thought. Nevertheless, there was not an absolute gap between these traditions and it is possible to find complex relationships between them.
Traditionally, dialectics has been conceived as a mode of thinking connected with a concrete form of knowledge production. “...modern dialectic still tends to become the organon of thinking...” (Nikulin, 2010, p.71). Dialogue, on the other hand, has been traditionally conceptualized as a particular type of communication that creates shared meanings between different subjects. The concept of dialogue is more connected with the communication between consciousnesses rather than with knowledge production. However, there is not a gap between consciousness and knowledge. Dialectic connections develop in the interspace between consciousness and knowledge. On one side, consciousness includes knowledge as one of its moments. On the other side, reflective thinking has been involved in the dialogic communication between different subjects. Thus, thinking is not a solitary activity of a purely autonomous subject but a dialogical act, unfolding between different subjects. The knowledge representation of an object is socially mediated and the path to knowledge passes through relationships between subjects. Knowing with the other evidences the dialogical quality of consciousness (Shotter, 2006).
The investigation of developing interrelations between thinking and speech was examined by Vygotsky (1987) as the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. The analysis of the internal relations between thinking and speaking as sides of human consciousness constitutes one of the most important foundations for linking dialectics and dialogue. Vygotsky (1987) addressed this crucial issue from a psychological perspective, but it remains under-investigated. However, it is worth emphasizing that dialectical thinking is a specific type of thinking that develops at a concrete stage of the process of historical development of human consciousness. Dialectical thinking offers the opportunity to overcome widespread positivism and reductionism in science (Ilyenkov, 1982a, 1982b; Dafermos, 2014).
In contrast to monologism, the dominant ‘paradigm’ in social and human sciences, Bakhtin revealed not only the dialogic nature of consciousness but also the perspective of conceptualization of thinking as a dialogue. “This mode of thinking makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.270). Dialogue was portrayed by Bakhtin as a unique meeting between several consciousnesses in a concrete moment of a historical and cultural chronotope. Bringing together dialectics and dialogue, Feuerbach pointed out that “The true dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself. It is a dialogue between “I” and “You” (Feuerbach, 1843). Criticizing Hegelian philosophy, Feuerbach demonstrated the shortcomings of a pure speculation, which a single thinker carries on by or with himself, and subsequently, he focused on dialogue between “I” and “You” as sensuous and concrete human beings. It is worth mentioning that Feuerbach's ideas on dialogue inspired Vygotsky to develop his theory of social education in the field of defectology: “Only social education can lead severely retarded children through the process of becoming human by eliminating the solitude of idiocy and severe retardation. L. Feuerbach’s wonderful phrase, might be taken as the motto to the study of development in abnormal children: ‘That which is impossible for one, is possible for two.’ Let us add: That which is impossible on the level of individual development becomes possible on the level of social development” (Vygotsky, 1993, pp. 218-219).
For Vygotsky, dialogue and collaboration between people becomes the basis of their social development. However, the question as to whether dialogue and development are compatible raises objections.
Dialogue and development
The issue of development provokes tensions between dialogic and dialectic approaches. Dialectics historically emerged as a way of the conceptualization of change and development. From a dialectical perspective, development has been conceptualized as a process that occurs due to internal contradictions within an object. Adherents of the dialogical approach tend to view the concept of development with an ambivalent attitude.
Roth (2013) notes that scholars who follow Bakhtin's tradition often focus mainly on language use but not on the existence of different levels and forms of development (ontogenetic and phylogenetic). Moreover, Hegel's dialectical concept of development has been criticized by dialogical scholars for its monologism, determinism, and teleology (Holquist, 2002). “Hegel is often associated with a kind of postmodernist caricature of an abstract, hierarchical, decontextualised reason, but this is far from the truth” (Derry, 2013, p.110-111). Both Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories of development have been accused of universalism, decontextualization, ethnocentrism, and adultcentrism (Matusov, & Hayes, 2000).
Frequently, the critique of the dialectical concept of development has been implemented from the perspective of postmodernism that became a fashion trend in North Atlantic academic communities. “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the giveness of natures and the coherence of identities” (Eangleton, 2003, vii). Eagleton argues that postmodernism has as a material condition a shift to a new form of capitalism - “to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics’” (Eagleton, 2003, vii).
However, in its attacks against ‘grand narratives of modernity’ postmodernism presupposes precisely these principles that it simultaneously rejects. “The Hegelian reply to postmodern discourse theory is as powerful as it is simple. Postmodern discourse theory presupposes exactly what it omits: the totality of an intersubjective rationality expressed in the medium of a shared language” (Boucher, 2000). Moreover, rejecting universalistic claims of developmentalism, cultural relativism leads to legitimation of the universalistic claims of diverse cultural communities and hierarchical relations of power within them. “The increasing globalization and homogenization of culture and its fragmentation and localization are in fact closely related. Global universalism and postmodern particularism are actually two sides of the same coin” (Dafermos, 2013b, p.8).
Cultural differences and local contexts tend to become new absolutes: “...if something is contextual, it cannot be universal’. Interestingly enough, relativism seems to be based on such absolutes” (Bang, 2008, p.51). In contrast to traditional developmental absolutism, a post-modernistic antidevelopment absolutism emerged with “its total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic.... ” (Harvey, 1989, p.44). Anti-development absolutism is based on the postmodern celebration of cultural differences, heterogeneity and plurality. Promoting a post-modern celebration of particularity tends to turn into a fashionable monologue about difference based on the reception and assimilation of ‘otherness’ in terms of cultural difference. Post-modern monologism of difference is connected with the strong tendencies toward fragmentation of social life that characterizes new form of capitalism.
The idea of the existence of irreconcilable differences between participants of a dialogue is based on the dominance of alienation. Both the idea of the existence of irreconcilable differences between the participants of a dialogue and the legalistic concept of ‘consensus’ between them constitute two sides of the same coin of a society based on alienation, isolation and fragmentation. The concept of ‘consensus’ points to an external type of agreement between alienated people in the context of a legalistic approach to human relations. The post-modern celebration of irreconcilable differences between the participants of dialogue might give rise to the legalization of the fragmentation of social space as well as the alienation between people.
Contrary to the view about an absolute gap between a dialogical approach and a dialectical concept of development, it is possible to find in Bakhtin's writings some ideas that seem unpredictably closer to dialectical understanding than to postmodernist celebration of the fragmentation of culture. “The study of culture (or some area of it) at the level of system and at the higher level of organic unity: open, becoming, unresolved and unpredetermined, capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is, exceeding its own boundaries” (Bakhtin, 1986a, p.135). Bakhtin's idea of an open, developing organic unity is a truly dialectical insight in the theorizing of human sciences. The contradictory coexistence of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ constitutes a moment of a dialectical understanding of culture. I don't claim that Bakhtin was a dialectical theorist, but only that it is possible to find influences of dialectics in his writings. In other words, there is no absolute gap or a rupture between dialogic and dialectic traditions but paradoxically, a dramatic relation between them might be detected.
From a developmental perspective, dialogue cannot be reduced to a simple communicative interaction or a conversation. Not every communicative interaction or conversation promotes human development. Dialogue is such a conversation that does promote human development. Dramatic tensions and collisions in a dialogue might become a source of personal growth for their participants. In other words, dialogue opens up the perspective of personal growth for subjects engaged in it (Apatow, 1998). “...the discursive dynamics has as its central question the ways to critically negotiate/collaborate meanings, highlighting the contradiction as a driving force for the development between participants with different social, historical, cultural and political constitutions” (Magalhães, Ninin, & Lessa, 2014, p.142).
Explaining the deep meaning of the general genetic law of cultural development as it was formulated by Vygotsky, Veresov notes: “Dramatic character development, development through contradictory events (acts of development), category (dramatic collision) — this was Vygotsky's formulation and emphasis” (Veresov, 2010, p.88). The dramatic collision, conflicts and contradictory relations that emerge in a dialogue as they are experienced by its participants may promote their self reflection and personal growth. The dialectic of change constitutes an essential dimension of a dialogue. “...neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent development of the dialogue” (Bakhtin, 1986a, p.170
Both dialogue and dialectics can be examined in terms of a drama that includes tensions, conflicts between opposing forces, contradictions and crises. Bakhtin wrote about Dostoevsky who was able to offer “a living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day...Where others saw a single thought, he was able to find and feel out two thoughts, a bifurcation; where others saw a single quality, he discovered in it the presence of a second and contradictory quality” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.30). From this perspective, a dialectical understanding of the internal contradictions of society as they are expressed in everyday life means the dramatic relationships between people are an essential moment of a dialogue. Dialogue without considering such kind of dramatic tensions and contradictions as they have been experienced by subjects involved in this process may be turned into an external lifeless form. Οn the contrary, as I already mentioned, dramatic tensions and contradictions in the dialogical spaces may become a source of development for their participants.
If dialogue wants to consider larger social dynamics, it has to talk to the dialectic tradition
I will conclude by saying that the relationships between dialectics and dialogue are more complex and paradoxical than they are usually presented. The ‘horror of dialectics’ (Gardiner, 2000) in the field of Bakhtin studies constitutes an obstacle for developing a dialogue between these distinct but interrelated traditions in human sciences. Although both dialogue and dialectic share a common origin in ancient Greek philosophy, they historically developed as independent theoretical traditions with their own conceptual apparatus. The dialogic tradition is associated with the concepts of ‘voices,’ ‘utterance,’ speech genres, ‘polyphony’. The dialectic tradition is based on the concepts of ‘contradiction,’ ‘development,’ the distinction between ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’. In contrast to the dominance of positivism in the North Atlantic Academy, both dialectics and dialogism have been developed as attractive alternatives. However, while dialogism and dialectics as theoretical frameworks have essential differences, there is a common space between them and “they also mutually enrich each other” (Sullivan, 2010, p.362).
Dialectics might offer in dialogical research a creative perspective for re-opening history (included the history of thought) as a contradictory process. For example, the lack of dialectical thinking constitutes an obstacle in the study of the historical development of Bakhtin's works. Many Bakhtian scholars encounter difficulties in understanding “inconsistent positions”, “shifts in terminology” in writings of the founder of theory of dialogism, “...contradictory evidence regarding the authorship of the so-called disputed texts...”, “quite contradictory account of his life” (Brandist, & Shepherd, 1998, p.9,10). As a result of the dominance of a presentist and teleological mode of thinking and the absence of a dialectical understanding of the development of Bakhtin works, many Bakhtian scholars tend to “read the early texts through those of the central or later period, which were published first, and thus to read early concepts in terms of later ones” (Brandist, & Shepherd, 1998, p.10). A dialectical approach with its focus on contradictions, change, totality, development may offer insights on Bakhtin’s creative laboratory and reveal its complexity.
Dialectical thinking can also contribute to an understanding of the difficulties in developing dialogue in hard reality of the overarching power relations (presented by Hegel as ‘master–slave relations’), growing social inequalities and increasing commoditization of all aspects of human life and experience. Οtherwise, dialogue may be turned into a noble and idealized deontological principle but unable to meet the challenges of hard historical reality.
Dialogue offers a creative insight into going beyond truth as ‘istina’ (as a pure cognitive endeavor) toward truth as ‘pravda’ (as embodied and lived) (Bakhtin, 1993; Sullivan, 2010). “As we develop our consciousness through participation in social life, it is the potential of the other’s response and its affective impact upon our sense of what we are doing that makes consciousness more indeterminate and more experiential than the truth of the dialectic allows” (Sullivan, 2010, p. 375). Focusing on intersubjective and ethical dimensions of knowing, a dialogical approach allows intellectualism to be avoided and challenges of communication to be faced between unique personalities in complex and uncertain situations.
Dialectical thinking is ongoing and unfinalizable as is dialogue. Both dialogue and dialectics historically change. Opening up new spaces for sharing and mutual enrichment between dialogue and dialectics may give rise to their unpredictable transformations. Perhaps, the initial starting point of the internal connection between ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectic’ in Ancient Greece will be reborn in a new, unpredictable form in the future. “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth” (Bakhtin, 1986b, p. 393). Despite his serious objections, noted above, Bakhtin acknowledged that dialectics can give rise “a higher level dialogue” (Matusov, 2009, p.385). Bakhtin found a perspective of bridging dialectics and dialogue on the basis of a Hegelian argument: “Dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)” (Bakhtin, 1986a, 166).
Acknowledgement I would like to gratefully and sincerely thank the unknown reviewers for their insightful comments on the manuscript, as these comments led me to an improvement of the work.
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On May 2, 2016, the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia welcomed Slavic literary scholar Michael Holquist for a lecture entitled “On a Footnote in Bakhtin.”
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Abstract Dialectics and a dialogical approach constitute two distinct theoretical frameworks with long intellectual histories. The question of relations between dialogue and dialectics provokes discussions in academic communities. The present paper highlights the need to clarify the concepts ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectics’ and explore their origins in the history of human thought. The paper attempts to examine mutual relations between dialectics and dialogue in a historical perspective and develop a theoretical reconstruction of their philosophical underpinnings. It proposes to deal with challenges connected with the creation of spaces for sharing and mutual enrichment between dialogue and dialectics. Manolis Dafermos is an associate professor in the epistemology of psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Crete. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. His interests include cultural historical psychology, critical psychology, the history of psychology, and methodological and epistemological issues in the social sciences.
Introduction
The question of the relations between dialogue and dialectics has been the topic of extensive debates in the international academic communities. Diametrically opposite positions have been stated by different scholars (Reigel, 1979; White, 2011; Matusov, & Hayes, 2000; Sullivan, 2010; Nikulin, 2010; Matusov, 2011; Rule, 2015). This question has been formulated by many of them as a question of relations between Bakhtinian Dialogic and Vygotskian Dialectic. The integration (or combination) between Bakhtin's ideas of dialogism and Vygotsky's Cultural historical psychology has been presented as an attractive perspective in human and social sciences (Wertsch, 1993; Roth, 2013). Other scholars focus on fundamental differences between Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's research programs and the theoretical incompatibility of their theories (Cheyne, & Tarulli, 1999; Wegerif, 2008; White, 2011; Matusov, 2011).
From my perspective, the question of the relationship between Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories could be examined as a part of the wider issue of the relationship between dialogue and dialectics in the context of the history of human thought. Under the influence of postmodern theories, an exceedingly hostile stance towards dialectics became dominant in the North Atlantic Academy. “Recourse to dialectics is generally associated with grand, totalising social theory and a ‘foundationalist’ epistemology... ” (Gardiner, 2000, p.119). The anti-dialectic stance is very strong in the field of Bakhtin studies in which a dialogical approach has been developed. The representatives of the anti-dialectic ‘camp’ focus mainly on ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) the conceptual incommensurability and incompatibility of dialectics and dialogism. In contrast to this dominant interpretation, several thinkers consider dialogue and dialectical thinking as compatible concepts (Paul, 2012) and several attempts have been made to integrate dialogue and dialectics (for example, the theory of relational dialectic) (Baxter, 2004).
The present paper is an attempt to examine the complex and ambiguous relationship between dialogue and dialectics focusing mainly on their philosophical underpinnings. Firstly, I concentrate on defining the concepts dialogue and dialectics, their origin and multiple meanings. This requires a reconstruction of the genesis of these concepts in the history of human thought. Secondly, the present paper explores the relationships between dialectics and dialogue as well as several attempts to compare, contrast or integrate them.
The underlying purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that despite their fundamental differences, the dialogical approach and dialectics can be brought closer together. It is important to understand that the relations between different approaches such as dialogical and dialectical approaches are not fixed and stable, but they change in the history of human thought. What may seem impossible in one particular stage of development in the history of human thought becomes possible in another. The paper explores the possibility of the creation of a common space between dialogism and dialectics as theoretical frameworks and the perspective of their mutual enrichment.
A historical and philosophical account of the dynamic and changing relations between dialogue and dialectics can challenge the presently dominant idea about their total incompatibility and offer an insight into contemporary discussion in the field of dialogical pedagogy. In contrast to mainstream schooling, bringing together dialogue and dialectics may create the space for alternative and unpredictable encounters in the domain of education. Βringing together dialogue and dialectics in the domain of education is a promising, open-ended issue, outside the scope of the present paper that focuses mainly on the philosophical examination of dialogue and dialectics as theoretical frameworks. The paper is intended to encourage scholars and practitioners to think seriously about the possibility of the creation of a common space between dialogue and dialectic that remains largely terra incognita.
What is dialogue?
Dialogue in different forms (political, philosophical, and dramatic) historically emerged in Ancient Greece in the context of the polis as a community of actively participating citizens (Dafermos, 2013a). Plato's dialogues, the first written dialogical accounts in human history were formed in the context of ancient polis.
After a long eclipse in the history of human thought dialogue was reborn in the twentieth century in the writings of Russian literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. He developed a multifaceted theory of dialogism based on a set of concepts such as dialogue, monologue, polyphony, heteroglossia, utterance, voice, speech genres and chronotope. Bakhtin's writings inspired many scholars and practitioners to elaborate and apply various dialogical approaches in pedagogy (Matusov, 2009; Matusov, & Miyazaki, 2014), psychology (Shotter, 1995; Hermans, & Kempen, 1993), psychotherapy (Seikkula, 2011; Hermans, & Dimaggio, 2004) and cultural studies (Wertsch, 1993; Thornton, 1994).
One of the reasons for the apparent confusion in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dialogical studies is connected with the polysemy of the notion of dialogue and the multiple meanings of its use in different contexts. I will attempt to define several meanings of the term ‘dialogue’. In accordance with a first definition, dialogue is a live conversation between two or more people. In other words, dialogue can be identified with oral communication between two or more interlocutors. Being with other people and responding to their voices is an essential feature of a conversation. However, a difficult question at once arises whether dialogue is every form of conversation or a specific type of deep communication between different subjectivities. Nikulin (2010) defined four components that turn a conversation into a dialogue: a. the existence of personal other, b. voice, c. unfinalizability, d. allosensus (constant disagreement with other).
The second meaning of the term ‘dialogue’ refers to dialogue as a genre or literary device. Plato's dialogues are one of the most famous forms of using a dialogical form as a genre. Plato's written dialogues historically appeared as an imitation of oral communication in times of heated debates about the transition from oral to written communication. Dialogue as a genre has been used by many thinkers to formulate their ideas in various ways. However, the dialogical genre might be used as an external form for monological content. For example, dialogue might be used as a teaching method of catechesis. It refers to an instrumental approach to dialogue that tends to be considered as an “an effective means for nondialogic ends, which are understood outside of the notion of dialogue, within a monological framework” (Matusov, & Miyazaki, 2014, p.2). However, if there is a perfect, final and absolute truth as in catechesis, there is no place and need for genuine dialogue.
In accordance with a third meaning, “...dialogue is the universal condition of using language at all” (Womack, 2011, p.48). From this perspective both oral and written speech, moreover, language itself has a dialogical character. Language can be considered mainly as an intersubjective communicative engagement, rather than a simple, formal, symbolic system.
Bakhtin offered a classic formulation of the dialogic nature of consciousness that can be regarded as the fourth meaning of the dialogue which goes beyond purely linguistic or literary phenomena: “I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou) … The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate … To be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself” (Bakhtin, 1981, p.287).
Dialogue is an essential characteristic of consciousness. The word ‘consciousness’ originates from the Latin ‘conscius’ (con- ‘together’ + scientia- ‘to know’). ‘Conscious’ means sharing knowledge. Toulmin (1982) offers a brilliant interpretation of the etymology of the term ‘consciousness’:
“Etymologically, of course, the term ‘consciousness’ is a knowledge word. This is evidenced by the Latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. But what are we to make of the prefix con- that precedes it? Look at the usage in Roman Law, and the answer will be easy enough. Two or more agents who act jointly—having formed a common intention, framed a shared plan, and concerted their actions—are as a result conscientes. They act as they do knowing one another’s plans: they are jointly knowing” (Toulmin, 1982, p. 64).
In Latin “to be conscious of something was to share knowledge of it, with someone else, or with oneself” (Zeman, 2001, p.1265). “When two or more men know of one and the same fact, they are said to be conscious of it one to another” (Hobbes, 1660, Leviathan, chapt. VII). However, the predominant use of the term ‘consciousness’ is connected with John Locke's definition: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind” (Locke, 1690, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, i, 19). It refers to ‘inner perceptions’ that are conceived by an individual. The understanding of consciousness as a private, internal awareness became dominant in contemporary scientific literature.
However, it is interesting to note that the term ‘consciousness’ has similar etymology in different languages: In Russian ‘Сознание’ (Со-знание), in Greek ‘συνείδηση’ (συν- ειδέναι), in English ‘Conscientia,’ in French ‘Conscience’ (Con-science), in Italian ‘Coscienza’ (Co-scienza). The prefix ‘co’ refers to joint action, reciprocal interaction between people. The concept of ‘consciousness’ includes knowledge as its essential moment. However, consciousness is not reducible to simple knowledge but it refers to coproducing knowledge in the process of communication between different subjects. It refers to joining knowledge with another or shared knowledge. From this perspective, consciousness has dialogic structure and orientation. The understanding of the dialogic nature of consciousness enables the demonstration of the mirrors of cognitivism and scientism. One of the most powerful objections to cognitivism has been formulated by Michael Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 110). Dialogue has been defined by Bakhtin as opposed to monologism. Individual consciousness cannot grasp the complexity and variety of the human world. In contrast to the single, isolated, monological consciousness, a dialogical coexistence of different irreducible consciousnesses develops. Bakhtin argued that the idea is not developed in isolated individual consciousness but in dialogic communication between several consciousnesses. “...the idea is inter-individual and inter-subjective - the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogic communion between consciousnesses. The idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses” (Bakhtin, 2003, p.98). The meeting spaces and dramatic processes of making meaning between different and not reducible consciousnesses constitute the ontological foundation of dialogue. The “ontological dialogue” (Sidorkin, 1999; Matusov, & Miyazaki, 2014) between consciousnesses penetrates the deeper and most important aspects of human existence. Although dialogue has been defined as being contrary to monologue, the consideration of dialogue as a positive and monologue as a negative term leads inevitably to oversimplification of dialectic relationships between them. I totally agree with Matusov's position that “Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and monologue is complementary” (Matusov, 2009, p.112). Matusov argues that the concepts of dialogicity and monologicity mutually constitute each other. “Monologicity makes clear who is speaking (i.e., authorship and responsibility) and what is said (i.e., the message). In other words, monologicity objectivizes others and the themes of communication... Monologicity reflects centripetal forces of language, communication, and community oriented on centralization, unification, unity with action, seriousness, cohesiveness and integrity of voice (and position), articulateness, globalization, decontextualization, exactness and correctness of meaning (finalizing the meaning)” (Matusov, 2009, p. 131). However, many Bakhtinian scholars tend to interpret the concepts ‘dialogue-monologue’ in terms of Western post-modernism such as ‘the death of author’ (more generally, the ‘death of subject’), ‘deconstruction,’ ‘decentration,’ ‘intertextuality’ (Bell, & Gardiner, 1998; Holquist, 2002). From the perspective of post-modernism, monologue is defined as a ‘grand narrative’ that should be ‘killed’ and ‘destroyed’. With the total ‘death of monologue’ any claims for ‘seriousness,’ ‘cohesiveness,’ ‘integrity of voice (and position),’ ‘articulateness’ and ‘correctness of meaning’ might disappear. The celebration post-modern, deconstructionist discourse tends to lead to the deconstruction not only of ‘old’ metaphysics and ‘grand’ monologic narratives, but also of scientific thinking and knowledge itself. “...the deconstruction of metaphysics is the deconstruction of the scientificity of science. The deconstructive strategy aims at the very source of science itself, at the kind of question that gives rise to scientific investigation” (Evans, 1999, p.156). It could be argued that the destruction of reason itself may give rise to a new form of irrationalism. Based on the analysis of post-Hegelian philosophical tradition, Lukács (1954) demonstrated that the destruction of reason and the advent of irrationalism prepared the ground for fascist ideas. Flecha (1999) distinguishes two kinds of racism: modern racism is based on the idea of the existence of inferior or superior ethnicities and races, while postmodernist racism built on postmodern relativism, “...accepts diversity and difference but accords different groups a place in their own, distinctive contexts” (Flecha, 1999, p. 153). Postmodern relativism promotes proliferation of differences and fragmentation of social space. Flecha proposes a dialogic approach as an alternative platform that can deal simultaneously with both forms of racism. Dialogue as a dynamic and positive force offers the opportunity to stimulate unpredictable meetings between the participants and build bridges across differences. Going beyond the tension between absolutism and postmodern relativism, dialogue can promote deep communication and encourage mutual recognition and understanding between the participants.
What is dialectics?
The concept ‘dialectics’ has acquired different forms and meanings in various historical contexts. In ancient Greece dialectics emerged as an art of dialogue and a problem solving method through argumentation. The term ‘dialectics’ has a similar origin of the term ‘dialogue’. It refers to the art of conversation or debate that is connected with seeking truth through reasoning. “... someone tries, by means of dialectical discussion and without the aid of any sense-perceptions, to arrive through reason at the being of each thing itself” (Plato, 2004, Republic, 532a). By the power of discussions, dialectics provides genuine knowledge. Dialectics as a method originates from the Socratic elenchus, a method of hypothesis elimination that takes the form of a question-answer dialogue and brings out the contradictions in the interlocutor's arguments.
Dialectics constitutes a way of thinking based on the understanding of the contradictory nature of both reason and being. Naive, spontaneous dialectics had been developed by ancient thinkers as an attempt to offer a living, sensory concrete perception of the world in the process of its change and becoming. “Tao-Te-Ching” in Ancient China as well as Heraclitus’ philosophy in Ancient Greece were forms of ancient spontaneous dialectics that were expressed in the idea that “everything is in a state of flux” (Skirbekk, & Gilje, 2001, p.13). Although Heraclitus didn't use the term ‘dialectic,’ he developed a dialectical understanding that everything is becoming. However, a conceptual, categorical system for the representation of things as processes did not yet exist in the ancient world. Becoming is expressed through metaphors, images of an aesthetic equivalent such as the image of a river: “you cannot step into the same river twice” (Plato, 1997, Cratylus, 402a).
The meaning of the concept ‘dialectics’ was transformed by Aristotle. For Aristotle dialectic wasn’t a form of being but rather a method of logical argumentation. Moreover, dialectic broke down its interconnection with dialogue and became mainly a method of building knowledge. In the Middle Ages dialectic was constructed as a method of argumentation on the basis of a set of logical rules (Nikulin, 2010).
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an analytic method of knowledge production dominated in concrete sciences and a metaphysical mode of thinking in the field of philosophy (Pavlidis, 2010). The metaphysical mode of thinking is based on the consideration of reality as a sum of separated, unconnected independent entities. A metaphysical outlook considers things as self-subsistent, isolated and abstracted from their context (Sayers, 1976). It denies fundamentally both the internal relatedness of all things and their development.
The concept of ‘dialectic’ was reborn and acquired new meanings and connotations in the context of German classical philosophy from Kant to Hegel and later in Marxism. Kant proposed “transcendental dialectic” as the logic of errors and illusions that arise when reason goes beyond its proper role in attempting to grasp the actual objects themselves (the thing-in-itself) (Williams, 2014). Kant demonstrated the structural necessity and inevitability of illusions. According to Kant, thinking confronts antinomies and falls into conflict with itself. Challenging Kant’s concept of dialectic as a logic of illusions, Hegel developed a “positive” dialectic based on the examination of a universal as a concrete unity of multiple determinations (Hegel, 2010). Dialectics was developed by Hegel as a method of thought that included the process of expounding contradictions and their resolution in the corpus of a rational understanding of an object (Ilyenkov, 1977). Materialistic dialectics developed by K. Marx as an attempt of the theoretical reconstruction of a concrete organic whole (the capitalist mode of production) through the creation of a system of interconnected concepts.
The conscious (or systematic) dialectics stood against the metaphysical method of thinking. Dialectics and metaphysics constitute two different ways of thinking about thinking. In contrast to the metaphysical method based on one-dimensional, abstract analysis of an object and its elements as unchanging and immutable, dialectical thinking examines an object in the process of its change. The dialectical method focuses on the examination of things in their mutual connections, movement and development. Dialectics as a way of thinking grasps and represents the developmental process of a concrete object in its interconnections with other objects (Pavlidis, 2010).
In the late 19th century and early 20th century the tendency of the rejection of dialectic and the acceptance of other trends such as Kantianism, philosophy of life and positivism became dominant in Western academy. The bulk of research for a long period in the Western academy was primarily associated with the assumptions of positivism and reductionism. In contrast to widespread reductionism in concrete disciplines which focuses on analysis of isolated elements of reality, the dialectic approach is oriented to grasp full complexity of interrelationships of reality and the contradictions that embody them (Bidell, 1988). The famous formula ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ represents a very schematic and over simplistic description of the dialectical understanding of development. Such kind of caricatured representation of dialectics can give rise to the negative stance (or total rejection) of dialectical thinking. Laske (2009) argues that the dialectical mode of thinking “remains a closed book for the majority of adults in the Western world, while in Asian cultures nurtured by Buddhism it more easily assumes a common sense form” (Laske, 2009). Although the explanation of the negative stance toward a dialectical mode of thinking is out of scope of the present paper, I would like only to note that the increasing individualization, fragmentation and commercialization of social life in North America and Western Europe is not unconnected to a lack of understanding of dialectic at the level of everyday life.
The multiple crises (economic, political, ecological and scientific) as a result of the increasing social contradictions and asymmetries in a rapidly changing world may provoke interest in dialectics as a way of the conceptualization of contradictions. However, dialectics is not a given system of postulates that can be immediately applied as an external guiding system for investigating problems. The application of dialectics to the concrete fields presupposes its essential development. The question of how to further develop dialectics in a rapidly changing world remains open for future investigation.
Bakhtin's dialogism and dialectics
Obviously, there are strong arguments for the incompatibility between dialectics and dialogism. It is possible to find several critical remarks on dialectics in Bakhtin's works: in his book “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics” (PDP), and some writing included in the anthology “Speech Genres and Other Late Essays” (SG). Bakhtin's treatment of dialectics has fragmentary character and it did not include a systematic examination of the relationship between dialectics and dialogue.
Bakhtin focused mainly on incompatibility between dialectics and dialogue. “Take a dialogue and remove the voices…remove the intonations…carve out the abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that’s how you get dialectics” (Bakhtin, 1986a, p. 147). Nevertheless, there is nothing more alien to dialectics than the idea of isolated, individual and abstract consciousness. Dialectics as a way of thinking emphasizes internal, essential connections between people rather than a separated individual, an abstract consciousness.
Moreover, the concept ‘abstract’ has a different meaning in the dialectical theory of knowledge in relation to Bakhtin's quotation. Ilyenkov (1982b) brought into light the shortcoming of the view that the ‘concrete’ is a product of sensuous experience and the ‘abstract’ is a result of rational thinking. Ilyenkov (1982b) demonstrated that the examination of the concrete as a synonym of an immediate sensual image, and the abstract, as a synonym of the conceptual follows the empiricist tradition. The repudiation of dialectics as a form of abstract thinking is based on the assumptions of empiricism that remains a dominant “paradigm” in the Western academy.
Hegel in his wonderful text “Who thinks abstractly” pointed out that in regarding all other people exclusively from a narrow pragmatic viewpoint, an undeveloped person thinks abstractly. He highlighted the essence of the abstract thinking: “This is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality” (Hegel, 1808/1966). Taking only one quality of a person and ignoring all of his (her) other qualities, not interested in the history of his (her) life is the essence of abstract thinking. In contrast to abstract thinking, Hegelian dialectics attempts to look at an object as a concrete unity of multiple and interconnected determinations.
Bahktin's critical remarks on dialectics do not prove a replete incompatibility between dialectics and dialogue. Firstly, it is important to take into account the polemical context in which Bakhtin criticized the dominant, dogmatic version of dialectical materialism ("Diamat") in the USSR. Bakhtin's critique of Hegelian dialectic served as a form of disguised criticism of the official ideology in the form of "Diamat". Additionally, going beyond explicit criticism of Hegel's dialectic, it is possible to demonstrate that Bakhtin was implicitly involved in dialogue with it. Hegelian philosophy could not leave Bakhtin indifferent. Hegel’s philosophy was developed in dialogue with the main philosophical theories of his time as well as the previews stages in the history of philosophy. “... it is difficult to see how Hegel’s philosophy could not be considered part of a dialogue taking place with other philosophies of his time (and a dialogue in the history of philosophy as well). It would be just as difficult to consider his ‘monologue’ to be unanswered or ‘unresponded’. It would be unfair, though, to reproach Bakhtin for a failure to understand Hegel’s voice, and to refuse to enter into a dialogue with it. Rather, we can assume that beyond the superficial direct critique of Hegel, Bakhtin in fact responded actively and more often implicitly to Hegelian philosophy in his own works...” (Côté, 2000, p. 26).
Several Bakhtin's followers argue that dialectics is a synonym of the Cartesian solitary consciousness or monological view of the world. “Dialectics is a product of the old monological, Newtonian view of the world” (Morson, & Emerson, 1990, p.57). However, dialectics had existed long before the appearance of the Newtonian view of the world in direct connection with dialogue.
Hegel was far from accepting Cartesian “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”). From a Hegelian perspective, Man is not a solitary thinking being, a single individual. For Hegel, knowledge is a constituent moment of consciousness and self-consciousness, rather than an independent entity. Hegel's view that logical concepts cannot be derived from the individual mind provides a creative insight on the intersubjective nature of thinking. In contrast to the widespread reception of Hegelian philosophy in terms of Cartesian solitary consciousness and monologism, Luther (2009) offers evidence of Hegel's shift from Kantian-Cartesian “I” into “We”:
“For Descartes and Kant, the individual subject is the source of knowledge; however, for Hegel, knowledge is a collective achievement. This represents a crucial shift from the first person singular to first person plural standpoint, and it has much in common with the paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of intersubjectivity in the late twentieth century” (Luther, 2009, p. 4)
At the same time, the Hegelian idea of absolute knowledge and Hegel's representation of his own philosophical system as the completion of self-development of thinking in human history is a monologic as well as an anti-dialectical idea. It is possible to reveal a contradiction between Hegel's dialectical thinking and his close, dogmatic system (as well as an internal contradiction in Hegel's understanding of dialectics).
However, totally rejecting Hegelian dialectics means throwing out the baby with the bath water. The Hegelian analysis of master–slave relations1 in “Phenomenology of Spirit” is especially important for understanding the interconnection between dialectics and dialogue. The dialogical concept of mutual recognition became an integral part of the dialectical process of the historical development of consciousness and self-consciousness. In other words, Hegel incorporated the concept of dialogue in his dialectical Odyssey of consciousness and self-consciousness toward knowledge. The Hegelian analysis of master–slave relations provides a dialectical understanding of dialogue and the difficulties of promoting it in human history.
Hegel attempted to describe the relations between self and other in a world in which there is no pre-established harmony between different participants, but a struggle for recognition between them takes place. Consciousness does not live in a self-sufficient isolation, but in a mutual relation with other consciousnesses. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (Hegel, 2004, p.111). For Hegel, developing an independent self-consciousness goes through mutual recognition.
Hudson (2010) argues that despite their differences, it is possible to find some links between the Hegelian concept of mutual recognition and Buber's “I-Thou” philosophy of dialogue. Moreover, the Hegelian idea of an incomplete form of recognition between Master and Slave as a result of the perception of Slave as object bears striking similarities to Buber's formulation of the I-It relation. The treatment of asymmetrical relations between Master and Slave is one the most important contributions of the Hegelian investigation of the historical development of consciousness. 1 The German expression “Herrschaft und Knechtschaft” has been translated as “Master and Slave” (Or “Lordship and Bondage”) (Hegel, 2004).
Unlike Kant, Hegel didn't examine the relationships between consciousnesses in terms of an idealized deontological norm, but as they are shaped in hard contradictory historical reality. Hegel demonstrated that in human history the recognition between different consciousnesses is not mutual and reciprocal. Human history is not a linear progression but a contradictory, dramatic process. The inequality between Lordship and Bondage has been expressed in the fact that one consciousness recognizes other without being recognized. One consciousness has been recognized as an ‘autonomous’ existence and another as a ‘dependent’ existence. Hegel's analysis of dialectic of the dominance and servitude demonstrates in which way the hierarchical power relations reproduce distorted forms of consciousness. Moreover, Hegel brought to light the struggle for recognition as a crucial moment in the history of consciousness and self-consciousness.
Marx's account of alienation and commodity fetishism offers a deep understanding of the distortion (degradation) of human relationships in the capitalist society. The relations between people appear to be relations between ‘things’ (commodities). From this perspective, it is hard to develop dialogic spaces without taking into account challenges of the commodification of human relationships and asymmetrical power relationships. The commodification of human relationships reproduces a monological way of thinking, because other subjects have been reduced to the status of material objects. It is interesting to note that Bakhtin linked monologism with “...absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself” (Bakhtin, 1984, 18).
Obviously, it would be simplistic to equate the dialogic idea of multiple perspectives and voices with Marxian materialistic dialectics. Bakhtin's theory of dialogism has developed under the influence of fundamental ideas from neo-Kantianism, philosophy of life, and phenomenology. Especially important for the development of Bakhtin's theory of dialogism was Dilthey's understanding of human sciences as grounded in ‘lived experience’ (Erleben), ‘expression’ (Ausdruck), and ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) (Brandist, 2002, p.18). However, Marxism was also one of the strong voices in Bakhtin Circle. The impact of Marxism is felt in Voloshinov's (1973, 1976) books “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” and “Freudianism: A Marxist critique”.
Bulavka and Buzgalin (2004) consider dialectics as the basis of Bakhtin's dialogical world. From their perspective, the subject-subject relationship of dialogue as a relationship of qualitatively different integral beings represents a dialectical process of breakdown of the world of alienation, in which people relate to one another primarily as objects (commodity and money fetishism, the fetishization of bureaucratic hierarchy). Dialogue is presented as a window into a world of collaborative creativity, a joint creation of the participants themselves.
Bulavka and Buzgalin (2004) distinguish two types of dialectics: the ‘old’ dialectical logic is oriented primarily toward the representation of objective processes, which do not depend on the will and activity of the subject. The ‘new’ dialectic is oriented to reflecting the subject-subject relationship, polyphony and collaborative creativity of the ‘realm of freedom’. The transition from the ‘old’ to new dialectics is examined through the prism of the shift from the ‘realm of necessity’ to the ‘realm of freedom’. A possible objection to this original interpretation of dialectics might be that the confrontation between the representation of objective processes and the reflection on subject-subject relationships reproduces an antidialectical subject-object dualism. The issue of the conceptualization of subject-subject and subjectobject relationships from a dialectical perspective remains at stake and provoke tensions. However, there is no doubt that resisting against the objectivation of human being, the adherents of the dialogical approach are focused mainly on understanding of subject-subject relationships.
Interconnection between consciousness and knowledge
Dialectics and dialogue constitute two distinct traditions and each of them has its own logic of development in the history of human thought. Nevertheless, there was not an absolute gap between these traditions and it is possible to find complex relationships between them.
Traditionally, dialectics has been conceived as a mode of thinking connected with a concrete form of knowledge production. “...modern dialectic still tends to become the organon of thinking...” (Nikulin, 2010, p.71). Dialogue, on the other hand, has been traditionally conceptualized as a particular type of communication that creates shared meanings between different subjects. The concept of dialogue is more connected with the communication between consciousnesses rather than with knowledge production. However, there is not a gap between consciousness and knowledge. Dialectic connections develop in the interspace between consciousness and knowledge. On one side, consciousness includes knowledge as one of its moments. On the other side, reflective thinking has been involved in the dialogic communication between different subjects. Thus, thinking is not a solitary activity of a purely autonomous subject but a dialogical act, unfolding between different subjects. The knowledge representation of an object is socially mediated and the path to knowledge passes through relationships between subjects. Knowing with the other evidences the dialogical quality of consciousness (Shotter, 2006).
The investigation of developing interrelations between thinking and speech was examined by Vygotsky (1987) as the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. The analysis of the internal relations between thinking and speaking as sides of human consciousness constitutes one of the most important foundations for linking dialectics and dialogue. Vygotsky (1987) addressed this crucial issue from a psychological perspective, but it remains under-investigated. However, it is worth emphasizing that dialectical thinking is a specific type of thinking that develops at a concrete stage of the process of historical development of human consciousness. Dialectical thinking offers the opportunity to overcome widespread positivism and reductionism in science (Ilyenkov, 1982a, 1982b; Dafermos, 2014).
In contrast to monologism, the dominant ‘paradigm’ in social and human sciences, Bakhtin revealed not only the dialogic nature of consciousness but also the perspective of conceptualization of thinking as a dialogue. “This mode of thinking makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.270). Dialogue was portrayed by Bakhtin as a unique meeting between several consciousnesses in a concrete moment of a historical and cultural chronotope. Bringing together dialectics and dialogue, Feuerbach pointed out that “The true dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself. It is a dialogue between “I” and “You” (Feuerbach, 1843). Criticizing Hegelian philosophy, Feuerbach demonstrated the shortcomings of a pure speculation, which a single thinker carries on by or with himself, and subsequently, he focused on dialogue between “I” and “You” as sensuous and concrete human beings. It is worth mentioning that Feuerbach's ideas on dialogue inspired Vygotsky to develop his theory of social education in the field of defectology: “Only social education can lead severely retarded children through the process of becoming human by eliminating the solitude of idiocy and severe retardation. L. Feuerbach’s wonderful phrase, might be taken as the motto to the study of development in abnormal children: ‘That which is impossible for one, is possible for two.’ Let us add: That which is impossible on the level of individual development becomes possible on the level of social development” (Vygotsky, 1993, pp. 218-219).
For Vygotsky, dialogue and collaboration between people becomes the basis of their social development. However, the question as to whether dialogue and development are compatible raises objections.
Dialogue and development
The issue of development provokes tensions between dialogic and dialectic approaches. Dialectics historically emerged as a way of the conceptualization of change and development. From a dialectical perspective, development has been conceptualized as a process that occurs due to internal contradictions within an object. Adherents of the dialogical approach tend to view the concept of development with an ambivalent attitude.
Roth (2013) notes that scholars who follow Bakhtin's tradition often focus mainly on language use but not on the existence of different levels and forms of development (ontogenetic and phylogenetic). Moreover, Hegel's dialectical concept of development has been criticized by dialogical scholars for its monologism, determinism, and teleology (Holquist, 2002). “Hegel is often associated with a kind of postmodernist caricature of an abstract, hierarchical, decontextualised reason, but this is far from the truth” (Derry, 2013, p.110-111). Both Piaget's and Vygotsky's theories of development have been accused of universalism, decontextualization, ethnocentrism, and adultcentrism (Matusov, & Hayes, 2000).
Frequently, the critique of the dialectical concept of development has been implemented from the perspective of postmodernism that became a fashion trend in North Atlantic academic communities. “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the giveness of natures and the coherence of identities” (Eangleton, 2003, vii). Eagleton argues that postmodernism has as a material condition a shift to a new form of capitalism - “to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics’” (Eagleton, 2003, vii).
However, in its attacks against ‘grand narratives of modernity’ postmodernism presupposes precisely these principles that it simultaneously rejects. “The Hegelian reply to postmodern discourse theory is as powerful as it is simple. Postmodern discourse theory presupposes exactly what it omits: the totality of an intersubjective rationality expressed in the medium of a shared language” (Boucher, 2000). Moreover, rejecting universalistic claims of developmentalism, cultural relativism leads to legitimation of the universalistic claims of diverse cultural communities and hierarchical relations of power within them. “The increasing globalization and homogenization of culture and its fragmentation and localization are in fact closely related. Global universalism and postmodern particularism are actually two sides of the same coin” (Dafermos, 2013b, p.8).
Cultural differences and local contexts tend to become new absolutes: “...if something is contextual, it cannot be universal’. Interestingly enough, relativism seems to be based on such absolutes” (Bang, 2008, p.51). In contrast to traditional developmental absolutism, a post-modernistic antidevelopment absolutism emerged with “its total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic.... ” (Harvey, 1989, p.44). Anti-development absolutism is based on the postmodern celebration of cultural differences, heterogeneity and plurality. Promoting a post-modern celebration of particularity tends to turn into a fashionable monologue about difference based on the reception and assimilation of ‘otherness’ in terms of cultural difference. Post-modern monologism of difference is connected with the strong tendencies toward fragmentation of social life that characterizes new form of capitalism.
The idea of the existence of irreconcilable differences between participants of a dialogue is based on the dominance of alienation. Both the idea of the existence of irreconcilable differences between the participants of a dialogue and the legalistic concept of ‘consensus’ between them constitute two sides of the same coin of a society based on alienation, isolation and fragmentation. The concept of ‘consensus’ points to an external type of agreement between alienated people in the context of a legalistic approach to human relations. The post-modern celebration of irreconcilable differences between the participants of dialogue might give rise to the legalization of the fragmentation of social space as well as the alienation between people.
Contrary to the view about an absolute gap between a dialogical approach and a dialectical concept of development, it is possible to find in Bakhtin's writings some ideas that seem unpredictably closer to dialectical understanding than to postmodernist celebration of the fragmentation of culture. “The study of culture (or some area of it) at the level of system and at the higher level of organic unity: open, becoming, unresolved and unpredetermined, capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is, exceeding its own boundaries” (Bakhtin, 1986a, p.135). Bakhtin's idea of an open, developing organic unity is a truly dialectical insight in the theorizing of human sciences. The contradictory coexistence of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ constitutes a moment of a dialectical understanding of culture. I don't claim that Bakhtin was a dialectical theorist, but only that it is possible to find influences of dialectics in his writings. In other words, there is no absolute gap or a rupture between dialogic and dialectic traditions but paradoxically, a dramatic relation between them might be detected.
From a developmental perspective, dialogue cannot be reduced to a simple communicative interaction or a conversation. Not every communicative interaction or conversation promotes human development. Dialogue is such a conversation that does promote human development. Dramatic tensions and collisions in a dialogue might become a source of personal growth for their participants. In other words, dialogue opens up the perspective of personal growth for subjects engaged in it (Apatow, 1998). “...the discursive dynamics has as its central question the ways to critically negotiate/collaborate meanings, highlighting the contradiction as a driving force for the development between participants with different social, historical, cultural and political constitutions” (Magalhães, Ninin, & Lessa, 2014, p.142).
Explaining the deep meaning of the general genetic law of cultural development as it was formulated by Vygotsky, Veresov notes: “Dramatic character development, development through contradictory events (acts of development), category (dramatic collision) — this was Vygotsky's formulation and emphasis” (Veresov, 2010, p.88). The dramatic collision, conflicts and contradictory relations that emerge in a dialogue as they are experienced by its participants may promote their self reflection and personal growth. The dialectic of change constitutes an essential dimension of a dialogue. “...neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent development of the dialogue” (Bakhtin, 1986a, p.170
Both dialogue and dialectics can be examined in terms of a drama that includes tensions, conflicts between opposing forces, contradictions and crises. Bakhtin wrote about Dostoevsky who was able to offer “a living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day...Where others saw a single thought, he was able to find and feel out two thoughts, a bifurcation; where others saw a single quality, he discovered in it the presence of a second and contradictory quality” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.30). From this perspective, a dialectical understanding of the internal contradictions of society as they are expressed in everyday life means the dramatic relationships between people are an essential moment of a dialogue. Dialogue without considering such kind of dramatic tensions and contradictions as they have been experienced by subjects involved in this process may be turned into an external lifeless form. Οn the contrary, as I already mentioned, dramatic tensions and contradictions in the dialogical spaces may become a source of development for their participants.
If dialogue wants to consider larger social dynamics, it has to talk to the dialectic tradition
I will conclude by saying that the relationships between dialectics and dialogue are more complex and paradoxical than they are usually presented. The ‘horror of dialectics’ (Gardiner, 2000) in the field of Bakhtin studies constitutes an obstacle for developing a dialogue between these distinct but interrelated traditions in human sciences. Although both dialogue and dialectic share a common origin in ancient Greek philosophy, they historically developed as independent theoretical traditions with their own conceptual apparatus. The dialogic tradition is associated with the concepts of ‘voices,’ ‘utterance,’ speech genres, ‘polyphony’. The dialectic tradition is based on the concepts of ‘contradiction,’ ‘development,’ the distinction between ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’. In contrast to the dominance of positivism in the North Atlantic Academy, both dialectics and dialogism have been developed as attractive alternatives. However, while dialogism and dialectics as theoretical frameworks have essential differences, there is a common space between them and “they also mutually enrich each other” (Sullivan, 2010, p.362).
Dialectics might offer in dialogical research a creative perspective for re-opening history (included the history of thought) as a contradictory process. For example, the lack of dialectical thinking constitutes an obstacle in the study of the historical development of Bakhtin's works. Many Bakhtian scholars encounter difficulties in understanding “inconsistent positions”, “shifts in terminology” in writings of the founder of theory of dialogism, “...contradictory evidence regarding the authorship of the so-called disputed texts...”, “quite contradictory account of his life” (Brandist, & Shepherd, 1998, p.9,10). As a result of the dominance of a presentist and teleological mode of thinking and the absence of a dialectical understanding of the development of Bakhtin works, many Bakhtian scholars tend to “read the early texts through those of the central or later period, which were published first, and thus to read early concepts in terms of later ones” (Brandist, & Shepherd, 1998, p.10). A dialectical approach with its focus on contradictions, change, totality, development may offer insights on Bakhtin’s creative laboratory and reveal its complexity.
Dialectical thinking can also contribute to an understanding of the difficulties in developing dialogue in hard reality of the overarching power relations (presented by Hegel as ‘master–slave relations’), growing social inequalities and increasing commoditization of all aspects of human life and experience. Οtherwise, dialogue may be turned into a noble and idealized deontological principle but unable to meet the challenges of hard historical reality.
Dialogue offers a creative insight into going beyond truth as ‘istina’ (as a pure cognitive endeavor) toward truth as ‘pravda’ (as embodied and lived) (Bakhtin, 1993; Sullivan, 2010). “As we develop our consciousness through participation in social life, it is the potential of the other’s response and its affective impact upon our sense of what we are doing that makes consciousness more indeterminate and more experiential than the truth of the dialectic allows” (Sullivan, 2010, p. 375). Focusing on intersubjective and ethical dimensions of knowing, a dialogical approach allows intellectualism to be avoided and challenges of communication to be faced between unique personalities in complex and uncertain situations.
Dialectical thinking is ongoing and unfinalizable as is dialogue. Both dialogue and dialectics historically change. Opening up new spaces for sharing and mutual enrichment between dialogue and dialectics may give rise to their unpredictable transformations. Perhaps, the initial starting point of the internal connection between ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectic’ in Ancient Greece will be reborn in a new, unpredictable form in the future. “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth” (Bakhtin, 1986b, p. 393). Despite his serious objections, noted above, Bakhtin acknowledged that dialectics can give rise “a higher level dialogue” (Matusov, 2009, p.385). Bakhtin found a perspective of bridging dialectics and dialogue on the basis of a Hegelian argument: “Dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)” (Bakhtin, 1986a, 166).
Acknowledgement I would like to gratefully and sincerely thank the unknown reviewers for their insightful comments on the manuscript, as these comments led me to an improvement of the work.
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FYI LTC John Shaw 1SG Steven ImermanSSG Pete FishGySgt Gary CordeiroPO1 H Gene LawrenceSgt Jim BelanusSGM Bill FrazerMSG Tom EarleySSgt Marian MitchellSGT Michael HearnSGT Randell RoseSSG Jimmy CernichSGT Denny EspinosaA1C Riley SandersSSgt Clare MaySSG Robert WebsterCSM Chuck StaffordPFC Craig KarshnerSFC Don VanceSFC Bernard Walko
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