Between Philosophy and Literature

Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804788397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

This is an original reading of Mikhail Bakhtin in the context of Western philosophical traditions and counter-traditions. The book portrays Bakhtin as a Modernist thinker torn between an ideological secularity and a profound religious sensibility, invariably concerned with questions of ethics and impelled to turn from philosophy to literature as another way of knowing.

Most major studies of Bakhtin highlight the fragmented and apparently discontinuous nature of his work. Erdinast-Vulcan emphasizes, instead, the underlying coherence of the Bakhtinian project, reading its inherent ambivalences as an intersection of philosophical, literary, and psychological insights into the dynamics of embodied subjectivity. Bakhtin's turn to literature and poetry, as well as the dissatisfactions that motivated it, align him with three other "exilic" Continental philosophers who were his contemporaries: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Adopting Bakhtin's own open-ended approach to the human sciences, the book stages a series of philosophical encounters between these thinkers, highlighting their respective itineraries and impasses, and generating a Bakhtinian synergy of ideas.

PART ONE

HOMESICKNESS, BORDERLINES, AND CONTRABAND

THE ARCHITECTONICS OF SUBJECTIVITY

The search for the ultimate foundation is as much an unremovable part of human culture as is the denial of the legitimacy of this search.

Leszek Kołakowski, Metaphysical Horror

ONE OF BAKHTIN’S EARLIEST SURVIVING FRAGMENTS, translated and published in the West as Toward a Philosophy of the Act, reads like the beginning of a monumental project. What is announced at the outset is a sense of disillusionment with what Bakhtin calls “fatal theoreticism” (27), the Cartesian legacy of formal rationalism, objectivism, and abstraction, which has set the direction for Western philosophy:

It is an unfortunate misunderstanding (a legacy of rationalism) to think that truth [pravda] can only be the truth [istina] that is composed of universal moments; that the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable and constant in it. Moreover, that what is universal and identical (logically identical) is fundamental and essential, whereas individual truth [pravda] is artistic and irresponsible, i.e., it isolates the given individuality. (TPA, 37)

It is this legacy, Bakhtin says, “that leads philosophical thinking, which seeks to be on principle purely theoretical, to [the] peculiar state of sterility, in which it, undoubtedly, finds itself at the present time” (18–19).

Bakhtin’s point of departure appears to be epistemological, but his view of the sterility of philosophy is most evident in what he describes as the failure of formal Kantian ethics with its “essential and fundamental abstraction from the fact of my unique being and from the moral sense of that fact—‘as if I did not exist’” (9). His critique of philosophy focuses explicitly on its inability to address the question of the concrete ethical event, the moment of actual choice, the singularity and uniqueness of the context:

Formal ethics (which developed exclusively within the bounds of Kantianism) . . . theorizes the ought, and, as a result, loses the individual act or deed. And yet the ought is precisely a category of the individual act; even more than that—it is a category of the individuality, of the uniqueness of a performed act, of its once-occurrent compelledness, of its historicity, of the impossibility to replace it with anything else, or to provide a substitute for it. (25)

Rather than a structure of normativity, Bakhtin proposes to study the “moral subiectum,” the concrete and unique individual facing a moment of ethical choice and answerability (6). Like some of his continental contemporaries, to whom we shall turn later on, Bakhtin sets out to replace the formal, abstract, and universalist Kantian system with an alternative phenomenological conception of ethics, to explore the actual “ethical moment,” both in the sense of a vector within a dynamic event and as that point in time when the encounter with the other takes place.

In defiance of what he calls “epistemologism,” that is, the Cartesian postulate of generalization and abstraction, Bakhtin claims: “Man-in-general does not exist; I exist and a particular concrete other exists—my intimate, my contemporary (social mankind), the past and future of actual human beings (of actual historical mankind)” (47). Rather than a “system” or a “systematic inventory of values,” he proposes to provide “a description of the actual, concrete architectonic of value-governed experiencing of the world—not with an analytical foundation at the head, but with that actual, concrete center (both spatial and temporal) from which valuations, assertions, and deeds come forth” (61). Rather than a normative model or an ethical system, he offers an “architectonics,” a dynamic conception of the embodied subject in the ethical event. Notwithstanding the use of the Kantian term, Bakhtin’s project is, in fact, a new departure. The ambitious task outlined in this fragment is the beginning of an alternative “first philosophy,” which proceeds, not by “constructing universal concepts, propositions, and laws,” but by offering “a phenomenology” of the “answerably performed act,” taking the experience of the concrete, historically situated and fully embodied subject as its point of departure (31).

The Bakhtinian architectonics of the subject is thus profoundly anti-Cartesian in that it offers a view of the human subject as fully embodied, singular rather than generic, and always in the process of becoming, taking the experience of the concrete, historically situated person as its point of departure. But, though much closer to Montaigne in this sense, Bakhtin, as we shall see, can neither fully revert to nor remain content with the open-endedness of Montaigne’s quest. Being both temperamentally religious and deeply concerned about the danger of ethical relativism, so closely attendant on the loss of metaphysical moorings, Bakhtin must struggle to produce his own version of subjectivity. His “architectonics,” however, is not a structure made up of the building blocks of theory: it is a relational process, a “meeting of two movements on the surface of a human being that consolidates or gives body to his axiological boundaries” (AH, 91). The precise nature and the dynamics of these “two movements” are not explicitly articulated in Bakhtin’s subsequent work, but it is arguable that they correspond to what he elsewhere called the “centripetal” and the “centrifugal” forces (DN, 270–73) in reference to historical formations of language and culture. I suggest that these forces are just as active within the human psyche as they are in the socio-linguistic sphere, and the dynamics of this architectonic conception may be troped as the visual puzzle of a Möbius strip, where the two sides of the band are clearly distinguishable, yet seem to fold back and reverse their positions as they intersect.

This first chapter focuses on the two texts that most explicitly articulate the “centripetal” and the “centrifugal” modalities of subjectivity, but it is important to note at the outset that, notwithstanding the apparent predominance of the former in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” and the latter in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, it is not the transition between these texts and their respective modalities of subjectivity, but the internal contradictions, the irreducible ambivalence and equivocation within these texts, that generate the “architectonics” of the subject: the tensile relation between the “centripetal” and the “centrifugal”—between Descartes and Montaigne, as it were—is translated in Bakhtin’s work into a tug-of-war between a critique of the transcendental subject and an equally compelling recognition of metaphysics as a constitutive vector of subjectivity.

HOMESICKNESS: THE CENTRIPETAL VECTOR OF SUBJECTIVITY

“Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” probably written in 1922–24,¹ offers an oddly anachronistic prescription for the “relationship” between the author and the fictional hero (both invariably designated as masculine).² Within the aesthetic framework, the relationship is predicated on the author’s “outsideness,” his “transgredient” position beyond and above the characters, which allows for an “excess of seeing” and, thus, of knowledge: the author can contain the hero in a field of vision far wider than that of any of the characters themselves; he can know what the hero is in principle incapable of knowing. This excess of knowledge enables the author to “consummate” the hero, to see him in his wholeness, to gather the hero’s moment of birth, the moment of his death, his background, the environment against which he acts (which, from the hero’s vantage point, is a mere “horizon”), and the axiological “rhythm,” the pattern of his life, which can only be perceived against its totality: “The organizing power in all aesthetic forms is the axiological category of the other, the relationship to the other, enriched by an axiological ‘excess’ of seeing for the purpose of achieving transgredient consummation” (AH, 189).

Oddly, though, this thesis, which seems almost trivial when we bear in mind the different ontological status of author and character (the “real” and the “fictional” are, after all, ontologically distinct at the most commonsensical level), evolves into a treatise on human subjectivity in blatant disregard of ontological distinctions, conceptual boundary lines, and fundamental categories of philosophical conceptualization. The essay is premised on an analogy between the fictional “hero” and an “I-for-myself” mode of being (that is, the lived experience of the phenomenal, embodied subject)—terms used interchangeably throughout the text, as if there were no distinction to be made between a character in a work of fiction and the living subject. Conversely, the term “author” is often replaced by “other” with the same disregard for ontological or epistemological distinctions.

Dispensing with all forms of rhetorical or logical mediation, establishing an unproblematic continuum between the real and the fictional, Bakhtin moves back and forth between these two sets of conceptual categories with alarming ease. The essay, which relegates itself to the safety of aesthetic theory and reads like an apologia for authorial omniscience, is thus also—primarily, perhaps—a thesis on the constitution of human subjectivity, premised on a constant slippage and extrapolation between these two conceptual sets.³ There is no recognition of boundaries or seam lines; no attempt to mediate the shift either logically or rhetorically. The aesthetic theory seems to blend into a philosophical theory of the subject, and vice versa. Bakhtin himself is not unaware of his own engagement in philosophical contraband: “It is true,” he blandly admits, “that the boundary between a human being (the condition for aesthetic vision) and a hero (the object of aesthetic vision) often becomes unstable” (AH, 228).⁴ There is not a shade of apology in this admission.

What enables this slippage is the analogy of relational structures. True to his programmatic statement in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin sets out from the experiential situatedness of the human subject.⁵ There is, he argues, an essential asymmetry between the perceptual experience of “I-for-myself” and “I-for-the-other.” Experiencing myself from within, I cannot produce an autonomous and whole representation of my self; my own boundaries are structurally inaccessible to my perception and consciousness: I cannot directly perceive the top of my head, see myself from behind, observe myself as fully positioned within my surroundings, or consciously experience the moment of my own birth and my death. This phenomenological observation of the perspectival finitude and limitations of the embodied subject, who cannot perceive its own spatial and temporal boundary lines is, as Michael Holquist points out (“The Role of Chronotope in Dialog”), directly related to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and does not offer a new insight in and of itself. But the perceptual experience of being invisible to oneself is also translated in this early essay—far less trivially, I contend—into axiological terms:

A human being experiencing life in the category of his own I is incapable of gathering himself by himself into an outward whole that would be even relatively finished. The point here is . . . the absence in principle of any unitary axiological approach from within a human being himself to his own outward expressedness. (AH, 35; see also 59, 91)

Hence, says Bakhtin, “a human being’s absolute need for the other, for the other’s seeing, remembering, gathering, and unifying selfactivity—the only self-activity capable of producing his outwardly finished personality. This outward personality could not exist, if the other did not create it” (35–36). The other—whether fully internalized or external to the subject—is analogous to the author, “the living bearer and sustainer of this unity of consummation,” who is transgredient to the hero and therefore able to “collect the hero and his life and to complete him to the point where he forms a whole by supplying all those moments which are inaccessible to the hero himself from within himself” (14). Just like a hero authored by a writer of fictional narratives, the living human subject is “authored,” configured, contained, and rendered whole by an internalized other. In precisely the same way, the human subject’s sense of itself is always confined to a partial “internal” perspective, which can only be transcended through an external vantage point. “I myself cannot be the author of my own value, just as I cannot lift myself by my own hair” (55), or, as we might say, by my own bootstraps.

NARRATIVE IDENTITY AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The cultural and temporal remoteness of the Bakhtinian vocabulary, compounded by his partiality for idiosyncratic word formations, should not obscure the relevance of this early essay to the “narrativity paradigm” that has informed so much of the work done in the humanities and the social sciences during the last two decades of the twentieth century.⁶ Translated into the philosophical frames of reference offered by thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur (1992), David Carr (1986, 1991), or Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), for instance, Bakhtin’s views of the aesthetic relationship and the concomitant conception of subjectivity are clearly associated with the same human need for emplotment, configuration, and narrativization of life into a coherent whole.⁷ It is the same need for a unifying “transgredient” perspective, a definable structure, a plot, as it were, that generates the narrative coherence we call the self, since the “aesthetic validity” of the subject can only be obtained through the framing gaze of the authorial other (AH, 59, 188–89).

No other moment of writing so clearly brings out this question of boundary lines as the moment when the living subject tries to become both author and character in his/her own narrative. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Bakhtin should be interested in the generic distinctiveness of autobiography, which is a point of intersection between narrative framing and the constitution of subjectivity. One of the books known to have been in Bakhtin’s possession is the first volume of Georg Misch’s A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1907), a very early and forward-looking study of the genre as an interpretation of experience that is, to a large extent, culturally, socially, and ideologically constructed. The challenge of discerning a pattern in the diversity of autobiographical writings, Misch writes, is not only related to “the infinite natural multiplicity of individual life but also [to] the historically determined multiplicity in its forms of presentation” (5). Misch seems to anticipate much later studies of the genre when he allows for the presence of “unconscious” elements in the narrative of self-consciousness (8), or when he concedes that the self-possession implied in the autobiographical act may well be illusory:

A skeptical observer of the world of men will . . . smile at the way men talk as a matter of course of their “self” or “ego.” He recognizes that it is owing to the self-awareness peculiar to man that the individual with his bodily frame feels himself and is felt by others to be a person; but he smiles at the naïve idea that places an ego at the back of that psychic phenomenon, as a solid and concrete thing that remains constant in spite of the changes of life from birth to death. (9–10)

However, for all his historicist sensibility and his nod toward skepticism, Misch is still very much the Enlightenment scholar in his insistence on the ultimate possibility of self-knowledge and the “truth” that emerges from the “creative objectification of the autobiographer’s mind” (12). The “philosophical dignity” of autobiography derives from the full and panoramic vantage point available to the autobiographer alone:

The man who sets out to write the story of his own life has it in view as a whole, with unity and direction and a significance of its own. In this single whole the facts and feelings, actions and reactions, recalled by the author, the incidents that excited him, the persons he met, and the transactions or movements in which he was concerned, all have their definite place, thanks to their significance in relation to the whole. He himself knows the significance of his experiences, whether he mentions it or not; he only understands his life through the significance he attaches to them. This knowledge, which enables the writer to conceive his life as a single whole, has grown in the course of his life out of his actual experience, whereas we have the life of any other person before us as a whole only ex post facto; the man is dead, or at all events it is all past history. (7)

Bakhtin would take the very opposite view. Autobiography—the attempt to name and appropriate oneself, to establish what is proper to the self and to stake out the boundary lines of its territory—is foredoomed at the outset. This is where we face our foundational heteronomy, because the psychic modality that Bakhtin calls I-for-myself can never become a given object for itself, can never coincide with itself, must always reach out beyond itself as “yet-to-be”:

I can remember myself, I can to some extent perceive myself through my outer sense, and thus render myself in part an object of my desiring and feeling—that is, I can make myself an object for myself. But in this act of self-objectification I shall never coincide with myself—I-for-myself shall continue to be in the act of this self-objectification, and not in its product. . . . I am incapable of fitting all of myself into an object, for I exceed any object as the active subiectum of it. (AH, 38)

The “speaking” subject (the agent of the speech-act, to update the terms) and the “spoken” subject (the grammatical subject of the utterance) can never coincide. The hiatus separating them is the very same gap between the subject of the énonciation and the subject of the énoncé that Émile Benveniste would elaborate some four decades or so afterward. But far beyond the syntactic impossibility, it is the axiological dimension, perceived by Bakhtin as analogous to the parameters of both space and time, and just as real, that underlies the utter impossibility of aut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Homesickness, Borderlines, and Contraband
• Part Two: The Exilic Constellation
• Coda: A Home Away from Home
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index