Towards a New Material Aesthetics

Bakhtin, Genre and the Fates of Literary Theory

Alastair Renfrew

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351197090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Set in the context of the various materialist approaches to literary aesthetics that emerged in the twentieth century, Renfrew's study presents a new synthesis of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) and his circle, Russian Formalism, and elements of the 'official' ideology of the early Soviet period. The book's central aim in offering such a synthesis is to negotiate the poles of postmodernist subjectivism and 'traditional' materialism around which much current literary and critical theory has stagnated, and, as the title suggests, to point the way towards a newly conceived material basis for textual and literary analysis."

Chapter 1
The Problem of Material

The counter-intuitive similarity between Formalism and Marxism with regard to the dichotomy of form and content is dramatically laid bare in the comparison of their respective conceptions of literary material. The Formalist conception material is examined at length in Medvedev's The Formal Method, but, given the book’s particular ideological and practical location as an ostensibly Marxist critique, it falls to its latter-day reader to develop the inference of the kind of ‘deconstructive' act of synthesis through negation we have identified as the basis of the Bakhtin school’s continuing utility for literary and critical theory.

Once again with Shklovskii firmly in mind, Medvedev begins by attacking the early Formalist conception of material as ‘absolutely indifferent’ (FM, 108; 148), which leads inexorably to ‘the devaluation of content, [nizvedenie soderzhaniia] (FM, 110; 151). This tendency is predicated upon Formalism’s ‘fear of meaning, which, with its ‘not here’ and ‘not now’ is able to destroy the materiality [veshchnost'] of the work and the fullness of its presence in the here and now’ (FM, 105; 145). Medvedev goes on to dismiss this — Shklovskian or early-Formalist — conception of material in the following conclusive terms:

It is inadmissible to treat fabula (in the sense of a specific event ‘in life’), the hero, the idea, and everything ideologically significant in general as material, since all this does not exist as a given outside the work. (FM, 112; 153)

What is immediately remarkable, however, is that this would function also as a convincing dismissal of a Marxist conception of the material of the literary work, were we only to omit the word fabula and replace it with the gloss Medvedev provides in parentheses and the elements he goes on to identify, ‘the hero, the idea, and everything ideologically significant in general’. Formalism’s devaluation of content may ostensibly place it in diametrical opposition to Marxism, but both extremes are in fact predicated on a broadly shared y conception of the material of the literary work. Whether the events of history, domestic life, class relations, etc. are merely the ‘motivation of the device', pace early Formalism, or instead constitute the ideological content that must be absorbed, transformed and represented in the literary ‘vessel’, neither tendency doubts that it is what is external to the literary work, in the crudest of ontological terms, that constitutes its material. For the Forma this pre-literary material may have been conceived predominantly in terms o neutral experiential phenomena, the raw material for a nascent narratology; for the Marxists, of course, it was profoundly ideological, related more closely to the social context of any given experiential phenomena and to their imbrication in ‘relations of production’, the basis for a nascent sociology of literature. For the Formalists material thus conceived is nothing, while for the Marxists, it is everything. For the Formalist ‘fear of meaning’ read the Marxist ‘fear of form’. Formalism’s expulsion of content and Marxism’s disregard for form are produced by the same misconception of the material of the literary work.

In ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form’, Bakhtin had earlier taken a different view, responding to Shklovskii’s rhetorical over-determination not with loud denunciation, but rather with a classic understatement, arguing that the question of the relationship between art and life and its implications for material simply ‘requires more precise scientific formulation’ (PCMF, 275; 277). Bakhtin prefigures Medvedev’s objection to the conception of ‘life’ or ‘reality’ as in any sense the raw materials for the literary work, arguing that reality is ‘already thorough aestheticised’ [uz he sushchestvenno estetizovano] prior to being brought into contact with ‘art’ (PCMF, 276; 278). He then proceeds, in emphatic style, to outline the basis of a conception of ‘aesthetic activity’ that goes far beyond the horizons of early Formalism:

We must remember once and for all that there is no reality in itself, no neutral reality which can be placed in opposition to art: in the act of talking about reality and placing it in opposition to something, we also define and evaluate it in some particular manner. (PCMF, 276; 278)

Bakhtin too accuses contemporary poetics of the ‘denial of content' [otritsanie soderzhaniia], by describing it either as an aspect of form, or as an aspect of material (PCMF, 282; 284). Bakhtin and Medvedev even employ an apparently identical analogy in dismissing the idea of material as somehow inert, that of the sculptor working marble; contrary, however, to the obvious conclusion of affinity between these analyses (perhaps even to the point of physical identification), it is in the varying grounds of this analogy as it is respectively used that a clear distinction between the two begins to emerge.

Medvedev’s use of the analogy is intended to force home his rejection of the association of material and fabula, and is in fact a specific preface to examination of a second and quite different conception of ‘material’, which Medvedev attributes to Viktor Zhirmunskii and later, in modified form, to Tynianov:

The word ‘material’ itself, as it is used here, is ambiguous in the highest degree. [. . .] It seems to us that it is admissible to talk of material in art only as something already found by the artist, and not as something created by him according to an artistic plan. [. . .] It is possible to treat language as the material of literature, as Zhirmunskii does, because language in its linguistic specificity is indeed found by the individual artist. (FM, 112; 153)¹

Medvedev, in search of something that might be said to ‘exist as a given outside the work’ and is not ‘already thoroughly aestheticized’, performs an act of subtle rhetorical sleight of hand: having denied the validity of what we must now call the first Formalist conception of material, for which we have used Shklovskii’s militant iconoclasm as a convenient shorthand, Medvedev now identifies a second conception of material, which he characterizes as both hyper-formalist and hyper-abstract, but not, provisionally at least, ontologically and aesthetically impermissible. Medvedev, as we shall see, questions the limitations of this second Formalist conception of material in it relation to a very particular conception of language, not its fundamental tenability.

If Bakhtin were in fact the author The of Formal Method, however, we would be obliged to term this an act of rhetorical regression. In ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form’, having paid scant attention to the first conception of material in its association with fabula, Bakhtin utilizes the analogy of the sculptor working marble in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of this second conception of material as ‘language in its linguistic specificity’; he anticipates, that is, the inadequacy of what Medvedev, having rejected a broadly Shklovskian notion of the relation of material and fabula, appears to arrive at as a slightly more acceptable alternative. For Bakhtin, the artist’s ‘axiological-artistic activity' [tsennostno-khudozhestvennaia aktivnost´] is directed not at what is ‘found’, but at the ‘aesthetically significant form of the human being and his body ’, at the ‘aesthetic object’, which cannot simply be identified with the material from which it is ‘made’ (PCMF, 265; 267)². The realization of the artistic form is certainly impossible without the marble, just as it is, incidentally, without the chisel, which ‘is in no sense part of the artistic object' (PCMF, 265; 267). Where the material is verbal, Bakhtin argues, ‘the situation becomes somewhat more complex and is not quite so obvious at first glance [. . .] but is in principle no different’ (PCMF, 265; 267). Material thus conceived, i.e. as the neutral medium that allows the differentiation or ‘specification’ of different forms of art, takes on a quasi-instrumental character, and any ‘material aesthetics' becomes a theory of instrumentality, a theory of the ‘secondary, derivative' [vtorichnyi, proizvodnyi] aspects of the artist’s relation to his or her object.

What is crucial here is that Bakhtin at no time associates material, within the frame of Formalist poetics, with fabula, with the ethical and experiential data that precede the literary work. He makes no explicit attempt to respond to Shklovskii's inversion of the substance of life and the mechanics of representation, and assumes from the beginning that the operative Formalist definition of the material of verbal art is simply ‘the word in linguistics'slovo [lingvistiki], which corresponds to what Medvedev later terms the second Formalist conception of material. For Bakhtin, even in 1924, it is precisely linguistics’ misprision of the nature of ‘the word' that most urgently requires redress, and not the implicitly unsustainable aesthetic iconoclasm of Shklovskii. Medvedev, writing after Bakhtin, embarks on a critique of the implications of conceiving of language as inert material, and the artistic work as ‘organized material, as a thing’ (PCMF, 264; 266), only after he has dealt with the ‘genetic core’ of Formalism, its first conception of material, thus allowing us to identify a certain distance between the exteriorized, performed ‘concrete utterances’ of Medvedev and Bakhtin on this matter, despite their origins in an avowedly common conception.

When Bakhtin speaks of the ‘ambiguity' [dvusmyslennost´] of the term material, an ambiguity which ‘particularly frequently’ pertains in specifically verbal aesthetics, he is not referring to a choice between shifting Formalist redactions of the concept of material, as is Medvedev and, indeed, Victor Erlich, whose later treatment of the problem of material in his Russian Formalism: History — Doctrine might in fact have been conditioned by Medvedev’s own. Erlich asks whether ‘material’ constitutes ‘the subject matter of reality embodied in literature, or its medium, language’, and answers that, although ‘there was apparently no complete unanimity among the Formalist and near-Formalist spokesmen’ on this matter, the ‘latter interpretation appears to have prevailed’ (this extremely tentative non-conclusion is preceded, incidentally, by conflicting instances drawn from Shklovskii, who ‘paid his due to both rival interpretations; consistency or terminological neatness was not his forte’) (Erlich, Russian Formalism, 189). Bakhtin is not primarily concerned with the earlier Formalist conception of material, and in fact never directly refers to it. The corollary of such a conception, i.e. the usurpation of ideologically significant content by the technical ‘device’, is implicitly rejected in the discussion of the ‘already aestheticized’ nature of reality and Formalism’s ‘denial of content’, but the conception itself is apparently unworthy of explicit response.³

Bakhtin refers instead to what Medvedev later calls the second Formalist conception of material, the proposition that it is language itself which must be considered the material of literature and, crucially, to the fundamentally conflicting conclusions which may flow from this premise. This in a sense marks not the end, but the beginning of Bakhtin’s engagement with Formalism; it is possible to imagine Bakhtin and, say, Zhirmunskii provisionally agreeing that language must in some way be the material of the literary work, but any consequent definitions of the function of material and of the processes involved in its transformation in aesthetic activity remain separated by their fundamentally opposed conceptions of language itself. Bakhtin will later take linguistics to task for its impoverished conception of what he insists on terming living language ⁴, but at this early stage in his own engagement with language the focus is on the imperialism of linguistics, rather than its (nonetheless implied) inadequacy. Linguistic analysis should restrict itself the ‘mastery’ [ovladenie] of its own object (in which respect it had not progressed beyond the complex sentence) rather than speculating on the ‘significance [of the purely linguistic particularities of language itself] for art, for science and for religion', a task more appropriate for aesthetics and for cognitive science (PCMF, 292; 293–94). Essentially, Bakhtin accuses linguistics of attempting to pass itself off as aesthetics, to subsume analysis of the aesthetic nature and function of, specifically, verbal art in its own implicitly inappropriate methodologies. More specifically, he accuses contemporary poetics, increasingly convinced of the significance of a simplistically conceived linguistic material basis for literature, of coalescing with abstract linguistics in a project which will culminate in the ‘impoverishment'[obednenie] of the object of poetics, and even ‘the replacement [podmena] of this object [. . .] with something quite different’ (PCMF, 258; 260).

The immediately perceived danger, from the perspective of 1924, is thus the enlistment of an abstract linguistic analysis in the construction of a new ‘immanent' poetics. Despite the ‘undoubted productiveness and significance’ of certain works produced by ‘representatives of the so-called formal or morphological method' (PCMF, 258; 261), the problem is that

poetics clings tightly to linguistics, fearing to take more than a single step away from it (in the case of the majority of the formalists and of V. M. Zhirmunskii), and sometimes even directly striving to become only a division of it (in the case of V. V. Vinogradov).

For poetics, as for any specialized aesthetics, in which it is necessary to take account of the nature of the material (in the present case — verbal) as well as general aesthetic principles, linguistics is of course necessary as a subsidiary discipline; but here it begins to occupy a completely inappropriate leading position, almost precisely the position which should be occupied by general aesthetics. (PCMF, 261; 263)

It is true that these concerns are generally shared by Medvedev in The Formal Method, and it is those passages in which Medvedev turns to explicit discussion of an embryonic ‘translinguistics’ that offer the most cogent evidence of the direct influence of Bakhtin (or perhaps of Voloshinov), in whatever form.The Formal Method also represents a direct development of Bakhtin’s tentative proposition of the utterance as the critical unit of a concrete (as opposed to abstract) linguistics in 'The Problem of Content, Material and Form’, especially the concluding section of Chapter 6 (FM, 118–28; 143–74).⁵ Medvedev here confirms Voloshinov’s proposition that the missing link, ‘which unites the material presence of the word with its meaning', is in fact ‘social evaluation' [sotsial´ naia otsenka] (FM, 119; 162). Social evaluation can have nothing to do with the linguistic example, which is only a ‘conditional utterance’ [uslovnoe vyskazyzanie], as opposed to the ‘concrete speech performance’ [konkretnoe rechevoe vystuplenie] that is the social utterance (FM, 122; 166). Poetry itself — and by extension all literary production — must therefore be understood not as a hermetically sealed domain for conveniently abstract linguistic but analysis, but as a type of concrete utterance, cognate with a limitless range of other types of utterance associated with the various non-literary locations of linguistic performance (FM, 126–28; 171–74). Having rejected the earlier Formalist conception of material as the motivation of device, Medvedev voices a unified Bakhtinian rejection of the second Formalist conception of material as language: ‘Language, understood as a totality or system of linguistic possibilities (phonetic, grammatical, lexical), is, least of all, the material of poetry. The poet chooses not linguistic forms, but rather the evaluations that are deposited in them’ (FM, 122; 166).

There is clearly something of paradox in the fact that the earlier work, Bakhtin’s ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form’, pays almost no explicit attention to the earlier stage of Formalism’s development, virtually ignoring, as we have see, the first Formalist definition of material; Medvedev’s later work, although its scope covers the period in the mid-1920s when this conception of material (along with much else in Formalist thinking) undergoes fundamental revision, nevertheless dwe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Note on the Text and List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Between the Lines in the Soviet 1920s
• 1 The Problem of Material
• 2 Bakhtin and Dostoevsky beyond Formalism
• 3 The Problem of Material and the Problem of Genre
• 4 Representation and the Two Lines of Genre Theory in Bakhtin
• 5 A Neo-Idealist Theory of Genre
• 6 Speech Genres and Literary Genres
• Conclusion: The Fates of Literary Theory
• Bibliography
• Index