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.
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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