Mikhail Bakhtin

The Word in the World

Graham Pechey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134096770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential theorists of philosophy as well as literary studies. His work on dialogue and discourse has changed the way in which we read texts – both literary and cultural – and his practice of philosophy in literary refraction and philological exploration has made him a pioneering figure in the twentieth-century convergence of the two disciplines.

In this book, Graham Pechey offers a commentary on Bakhtin's texts in all their complex and allusive 'textuality', keeping a sense throughout of the historical setting in which they were written and of his own interpretation of and response to them. Examining Bakhtin's relationship to Russian Formalism and Soviet Marxism, Pechey focuses on two major interests: the influence of Eastern Orthodox Christianity upon his thinking; and Bakhtin's use of literary criticism and hermeneutics as ways of 'doing philosophy by other means'.

1
BOUNDARIES VERSUS BINARIES

Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that’s how you get dialectics.

(NM70–71, 147)

Who or what is Mikhail Bakhtin? Two of the monographs we have on him agree on an identity: Bakhtin is a philosopher. The compliment, however well meant, is lethal, and this chapter (if it does nothing else) will contest not only that identity but also any other that might be offered. For Todorov, Bakhtin belongs to the ‘intellectual family’ of existentialism.¹ Tucked away as it is in a footnote, this affirmation might escape our notice if it were not implicitly announced in the bold script of a subtitle borrowed from Martin Buber: The Dialogical Principle. Bakhtin in Todorov’s rendering becomes a proto-existentialist distinguished from all others by his elaboration of a theory of discourse, or what Bakhtin himself calls a ‘translinguistics’. Even this is doubtful when we think of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s grounding of language in intersubjectivity and his contestation of dominant linguistic theories very much on their own terrain. Bakhtin is neither a phenomenologist with a flair for semiotics nor (like Emile Benveniste) a linguist who leavens and widens his technical interests with a little phenomenology. Rather than affirming an identity we should turn our attention to his specificity as a thinker, and we can do this by saying that language for him takes place not in the neutral space of ‘communication’ but in a charged and irreducibly sociopolitical space of its own endless making and remaking. It will not do to deny the existentialist and the semiotician in Bakhtin, but merely to add to each other these two moments of his thinking, without that third dimension modifying both, is to throw away the subversive potential of these Western responses to the twentieth-century crises of (respectively) the subject and of representation. Bakhtin then enters the history of ideas as a character with an honoured minor role in the Western narrative of human freedom.

Against this precipitate appropriation of Bakhtin by the liberal academy it is no use appropriating him as precipitately for ‘Marxism’. What can safely be said is that his thinking is very closely akin to the independent tradition of Western Marxism and at odds with the Soviet Marxism dominant in his time. This uncritical internalization of late-modern scientism, incipient in Friedrich Engels, congealed in the period of the Second International into a dogmatic historical optimism and an economic determinism – in short, a metaphysics of the economic ‘base’. Western Marxism, by contrast, is characterized by a preoccupation with the ‘superstructure’ and a deep dialogical engagement with those novel Western discourses which were beginning to call themselves the human sciences. A reductive account might suggest that this current of thought had simply internalized the opposing pole of the antinomy identified by Marx himself in the Grundrisse, that it was little more than a late-modern variant of that Romantic anti-capitalism which posed against the dystopia of a society commodified from top to bottom the utopian possibilities of ‘art’.² This may be true of Georg Lukács, whose cultural conservatism helps to found such alliance as existed between Soviet and Western Marxism. It is in Walter Benjamin that we find a means of moving beyond Marx’s paralysing antinomy. Benjamin’s welcome to aesthetic modernism is a recognition that the text of dissident and experimental latemodern writing must be engaged in its textuality rather than dismissed in its ideality: the way out of the Entfremdung of reification is not through the category of the totality but through Verfremdung, an alienation-effect which makes art directly political.

Now Bakhtin also represents this insight, with the difference that his engagement with modernism is rather with its theoretical and philosophical than with its literary discourses. He constructs in this engagement an anti-Hegelianism which is compatible with, though by no means the same as, Marx’s, and which is characterized by what we might call a return to a pre-Hegelian moment in the German philosophical tradition. He makes this move in the context of a polity and an economy that thought of themselves as constituting the world’s first exception to ‘bourgeois’ hegemony, and if in one respect he is the beneficiary of this placing – forever sharpening, as it must have done, his sense that the theoretical is inescapably the political – he is also in the short term its victim: in the atmosphere of suspicious defensiveness that reigned in the Soviet state under siege, his tactical heterodoxy might look like treason. In the subtext of the polemics of the 1920s – and then more overtly in the Dostoevsky book, where the signature of Dostoevsky as it were protected him – we can sense a critique that aligns itself with Lukács’ in History and Class Consciousness (1923) while at the same time distancing itself from the Hegelianism of that text. The moment on which Bakhtin fixes is that of Kant and Goethe: he finds in the discourses of this moment a means of resisting Hegel’s total absorption of the world in the absolute self-knowledge of Spirit, his abolition of a multiform objectivity in a uniform subjectivity.

Ernst Bloch’s use of Goethe against Hegel and Ernst Cassirer’s similar use of Kant provide close parallels for Bakhtin’s project in this (early) period.³ Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–29) is a text acknowledged by Bakhtin and Voloshinov as a Western ally of their own project,⁴ and its publication in the year of Lukács’s heterodox offering dramatizes its importance in that project’s formation. In Bakhtin the word and the body live on their boundaries, just as the sensible and the intelligible do in Cassirer, and the present and future in Bloch. Bakhtin takes his cue from a stage of Western thought in which (as in Schiller, for example) the aesthetic had yet to lose its worldly moorings and be launched to lose itself in the sea of Spirit, as a mere cancelled phase of which philosophy is the subl(im)ation. He interrupts the passage of this stage into that hypostasis of cognitive consciousness which is idealism at its limit, ‘philosophical monologism’ at the height of its ambition. It is not for nothing that Bakhtin cites Kant at the beginning of his essay on the chronotope and insists in the Bildungsroman fragment on the chronotopic character of Goethe’s thinking (FTC, 85; BSHR, 25–50).

Where does this leave Bakhtin? In my view he ends up somewhere between Western Marxism and post-structuralism, more politicized than the latter and with a more sophisticated theory of discourse than the former ever produced. Encoded in the polemic with Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure and Russian Formalism – not as its truth, but simply as one of its bearings – is a complex dialogue and critical consensus with the neo-Kantianism of Cassirer, the heterodox Marxism of Lukács and (to bring another name into the equation) the existential theology of Buber, whose I and Thou was also coincidentally published in 1923. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language makes a tactical alliance with some of the motifs of classical Marxism in its Soviet variant in order to ventilate the claims of an alternative, at once anti-scientistic and anti-Hegelian, to the dominant Marxist tradition. In the New Economic Policy (NEP) phase of early Soviet history the die had not decisively been cast, and a reinvention of Marxism fructified by a dialogue with Western discourses that offered an alternative route out of Hegel was still a possibility.

What we choose to call these discourses matters little: the important point is that they provide a ground for dissent from the official triumphalism of the (then) communist movement and for a rejection at once of the classical (Hegelian) speculative dialectic and of Engels’s ‘dialectics of nature’. In its polemic against the available versions of a proto-structuralism, Bakhtinism precociously invents a post-structuralism which also revives aspects of Marx’s project that had been lost in the philosophizing of his heirs. One of these is the ambivalence of Marx’s dialectic of history, its suspension between a ‘tragic’ and a ‘progressivist’ perspective. This comes through in the books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais and in the profound meditation upon the relationship of the serious and the comic that is contained in them. Bakhtin castigates utopian socialism as idealist, but it is equally clear that the alternative of supposedly ‘scientific’ socialism establishes a dichotomy that he would want to undermine. Against the monologism of ‘actually existing’ socialism in the Stalinist period he poses the popular utopia of laughter and carnival, dialogism that has taken to the streets. The other aspect of Marx’s project revived in the Bakhtin ‘circle’ is apparent mainly in the polemical phase of the 1920s: it is his anti-systemic, critical, deconstructive way with the concepts of modern thought. Marx’s deconstruction of the commodity is echoed in a deconstruction of that severest of all casualties of commodification as Bakhtin and his colleagues saw it: the sign. They do for linguistics and for poetics and stylistics what Marx had done for economics. What Lukács in 1923 calls the ‘formalism’ or the ‘abstract and formal method’ of political economy is replicated in the ‘abstract objectivism’ of Saussure’s linguistics and in the famous ‘formal method’ in Russian literary studies.⁵ In short, we find in works like Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language the prolegomena of a Capital of the ‘superstructure’.

I

Perhaps the most direct route to an understanding of Bakhtin’s specific anti-Hegelianism is through his pronouncements on the dialectic. A gnomic sentence from one of his later works provides a starting-point: ‘Dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level’ (MHS, 162). What this seems to imply is that the classical speculative dialectic is itself the product of a dialectical process; it is the ‘abstract product’ which results when dialogue (in Bakhtin’s strong internal – sense) is monologized by being located in a ‘unique abstract consciousness’, when its ‘division of voices’ is abolished in a single voice (PDP, 293; N70–71, 147). By staying there, however, we have only explicated the first stage of Bakhtin’s critique, a preliminary re-situation of the dialectic within a process which it claims to transcend as that process’s privileged metalanguage. We remain in this explication at the level of the signified. Moving to the level of the signifier – reading Bakhtin’s sentence not as a sentence but as an utterance, not as exhaustible in a paraphrase but as an (inexhaustible) answer – we can see in its language nothing less than a parody of the language of the classical dialectic, bringing out the critical force of the (non-)concept of dialogism by granting dialogue priority. He blows apart the closure of the thesis–antithesis–synthesis model (the negation of the negation) by putting what for dialectics would be mere ‘mediation’ in the place of the thesis, so that it undergoes rather than effects the Aufhebung. Thus:

DIALOGUE DIALECTIC DIALOGISM (‘synthesis’)

What is ‘restored’ is not identity or self-coincidence but non-identity; the ‘synthesis’ is a term which undermines as an active force all synthesizing and homogenizing projects whatever. Bakhtin’s mock synthesis is that which all institutional or conceptual syntheses endlessly posit themselves against. The philosophy of Hegel is from this perspective a kind of felix culpa of discourse, propelling dialogue-in-itself into the dialogue-for-itself which is dialogism. The logic of particular and universal is first of all reversed and then displaced altogether. That which lives unself-consciously outside itself encounters a unitary meaning on its inside – it acquires what Bakhtin calls in an early formulation an ‘inner territory’ – only to recoil from this discovery into a militant ‘outsideness’, an explicit politics of the boundary removed altogether from the logic and implicit politics of the binary (PCMF, 274). Thus:

OUTSIDE INSIDE BOUNDARY

Others as given Self Others for others...

In Bakhtin’s philosophy there is a use of the language of rationality which is always at the same time a parodic displacement of that language, a dialogization of its monologism. Dialectics does not magically convert itself into an (or the) antagonist of metaphysics by taking on the attribute or assuming the ‘content’ of matter rather than spirit. It will remain a metaphysics unless and until it is truly radicalized in that self-parody of dialectics which has now issued in certain varieties of ‘deconstruction’.

This radical politics of the boundary has its fullest elaboration, for Bakhtin, in the existential poetics of Dostoevsky. What the various existentialisms have in common is a protest against Being in general, a revolt of being-in-the-world against a metaphysics experienced as unfreedom, a disempowering tyranny of the essence. Now if Bakhtin’s anti-philosophy is refracted through the tragic personalism of Dostoevsky it is nonetheless no more to be identified with the latter than with an optimistic collectivism imposed from above. Orthodox Marxism recognized only one route out of Hegel: that of so-called ‘dialectical materialism’ or diamat. Bakhtin asserts the right to dialogue with other post-Hegelian voices which do not implicate the thinker in the materialism–idealism binary and which help him to question the very form of the dialectic itself. Idealism is opposed not because it is a philosophy of the spirit but because it is the most authoritarian and totalitarian monologism imaginable. Spirit is opposed not because it is not matter but because it is one of the names of the identical subject–object, and to assign the role of identical subject–object to anything else (even the proletariat) is to remain within an identitarian or idealist problematic. Any systematic alternative to the latter sooner or later finds itself to be no alternative at all. There can be no ‘dialogics’ – to use a barbarous and falsifying term much in use now but with no basis whatever in Bakhtin. Indirection is not simply a response to the danger of direct assertion under Stalinism; it is an internal imperative of Bakhtin’s thinking. Which is as much as to say: there are in Bakhtin only ‘philosophy effects’ generated by discourses that are not in themselves philosophical. The liminal discipline of translinguistics is not a philosophy – not even a ‘philosophy of language’ – but rather a discourse which signals certain philosophical bearings and has effects that might be called philosophical, while it is more directly preoccupied with other business: either polemicizing with other disciplines of the sign or working on and within those special sites of dialogism called ‘novel’ and ‘carnival’. Bakhtin’s ‘philosophy’ is in this sense strategic rather than systematic, a matter of polemical or parodic glancing blows that avoid confronting systems with their elaborated antitheses or antidotes because of the complicities this entails. We are not surprised to find that the late ‘experiments in philosophical analysis’ never get beyond the stage of the note or the fragment. ‘Every entry into the sphere of meaning is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope’: thus Bakhtin, concluding his last completed piece of writing (FTC, 258). Even abstract thought, he claims, is impossible without ‘temporal-spatial expression’: like Marx and Derrida (at least in Michael Ryan’s construction of them) Bakhtin knows that theory is always situated in and exceeded by history and materiality.⁶ Some of Bakhtin’s more ‘materialist’ readers might have a problem with the parenthesis that closes the sentence which we have taken as our starting-point, and which for the purposes of this analysis I have thus far suppressed. The full sentence actually reads: ‘Dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return to dialogue at a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)’ (MHS, 162). Now it is obvious that some Western canonizers of Bakhtin would seize on this parenthesis as a means of identifying him with a personalist ‘philosophy’. Our answer to this should not be to excuse a late aberration in Bakhtin but rather to affirm the burden of his parenthesis by first of all reconstructing the context to which it plainly alludes – I mean the moment of the Dostoevsky book – and then showing how this emphasis on ‘personalities’ might be put to use anew in our context, and without any awkward apology.

I have already implied that Bakhtin’s ‘strategic’ anti-philosophizing is inseparable from the positive hermeneutic of this great monograph, a hermeneutic which has as its negative obverse a critique of the instrumental rationality peculiar to modernity. What needs to be emphasized now is that this text marks the transition from the Bakhtin Circle’s polemicizing and sociologizing of the 1920s to the politicizing and historicizing work of the 1930s – from the deconstruction of theories of signification which perpetuate the inside–outside binary in theory to an exploration of the forms and institutions which deconstruct it in practice. In the polemical work under other signatures than Bakhtin’s own we have something like a sociolinguistics or a speech-act theory: translinguistics in this phase tends perhaps to take the sociopolitical space of discourse as given, whereas in the later phase it extends to an exploration of how hegemonies are organized, how the space of the sociopolitical ‘real’ is created. When the whole of Bakhtin’s actual context was in creative flux – when the Russian Revolution still licensed a carnival of ideas – there is a tendency for the subject and the referent to be substantialized: in the text are inscribed ‘relations between people’, and ‘extralinguistic reality’ has the status of a homogenized transcendence. When this carnival is over, Bakhtin is driven to seek out sites and times where the play of signifiers is a manifest material force and when ‘play’ is itself the ‘work’ of history. Against the Formalists, for whom ‘discourse in art’ was the function of a cancelled sociality, Bakhtin and his colleagues rethought ‘art’ as an intensified sociality, an intensification of the immanent sociality of ‘discourse in life’. If in the 1920s ‘art’ is thus assimilated to ‘life’, in the 1930s ‘life’ is assimilated to ‘art’: in the midst of ‘ideology’ Bakhtin conjures up (in Karl Mannheim’s sense of these words) a ‘utopia’ of popular and novelistic deconstruction.⁷

It doesn’t require much perspicacity to read the supersession of carnivalesque counterculture in a new official culture described in Rabelais and his World as an allegory of the betrayal of the revolution. Much more fundamental is the shift from the implicit homogeneity of a referent given before discourse to a referent understood as both irreducibly heterogeneous and issuing ceaselessly from the ‘creative work’ of discourse itself, in an active and collective making of the future. Discourse is never conceived as anything other than actively interventionist, but in the 1930s Bakhtin moves from a stress on the power of the utterance to ‘resolve situations’ to an almost hyperbolic affirmation of the power of popular assertion to turn the world upside down. Bakhtin’s answer to the brutal abolition of popular politics under Stalinism is a reconstruction of the space of the sociopolitical as the realized and realizing self-activity of the ‘people’ – of ‘historical becoming’ as inseparable from powerful acts of meaning, acts which no ‘power’ can destroy without ultimately destroying itself.

Hindsight makes it possible for us to see the Dostoevsky book as the point of transition between these two phases: defined by its difference from both of them. Between the sociologizing imperative of his friends’ polemical texts and the historicizing imperative of his own work on carnival and the novel, this book is the locus classicus of that existentializing imperative which we need to recognize – and affirm – as a perennial force in Bakhtin’s thinking. By contrast with the aggressive assertion of an alternative objectivism to the ‘abstract objectivism’ of Saussurean...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• MIKHAIL BAKHTIN
• CRITICS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION: Not the last word
• 1: BOUNDARIES VERSUS BINARIES
• 2: AESTHETICS AND THE AVANT-GARDE
• 3: SYNTAX AND ITS SUBVERSION
• 4: CHRONOTOPICITY AND CONCEPTUALITY
• 5: THE NOVEL AND ITS OTHERS
• 6: ETERNITY AND MODERNITY
• 7: PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
• 8: ‘FIRST PHILOSOPHY’ AND THE ‘FIRST’ BAKHTIN
• APPENDIX: On the naming of ‘free indirect discourse’
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY