Bakhtin and the Human Sciences

No Last Words

Michael E Gardiner, Michael Mayerfeld Bell, Michael E Gardiner, Michael Mayerfeld Bell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780761955306, 9780761955290
• eBook ISBN: 9781446223277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bakhtin and the Human Sciences demonstrates the abundance of ideas Bakhtin?s thought offers to the human sciences, and reconsiders him as a social thinker, not just a literary theorist. The contributors hail from many disciplines and their essays? implications extend into other fields in the human sciences. The volume emphasizes Bakhtin?s work on dialogue, carnival, ethics and everyday life, as well as the relationship between Bakhtin?s ideas and those of other important social theorists.

In a lively introduction Gardiner and Bell discuss Bakhtin?s significance as a major intellectual figure and situate his ideas within current trends and developments in social theory.

1

BAKHTIN AND THE HUMAN
SCIENCES: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Michael Gardiner and Michael Mayerfeld Bell

[T]ruth itself, in its uttermost, indivisible, ‘atomic’ kernel, is dialogue

–Vladimir Bibler¹

By anyone’s standards, the life of the social philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin was an extraordinary odyssey, during a period of Russian history not noted for its uneventfulness. Trained as a classicist and philologist in St Petersburg, his promising academic career was cut short by the cataclysmic revolutionary events of 1917. The ensuing terror and civil war even split his family asunder, as his older brother, also a scholar of high repute, rejected Bolshevism and fought for the Whites.² Bakhtin’s own initial cautious support for the new Soviet regime was eventually replaced by intellectual dissent, prompted by the termination of the relatively open New Economic Policy (NEP) era and Stalin’s consolidation of power in the late 1920s. Official banishment to Kazakhstan for ideological reasons; the disappearance of friends, family, and colleagues; continual harassment and censorship by state authorities; physical deprivation and chronic illness – these were the defining moments of a personal narrative that paralleled the plight of countless others during the darkest days of the former Soviet Union.³

Miraculously, however, Bakhtin was granted a second lease on life – and scholarship. Partially rehabilitated by the regime in the 1950s during the Khrushchevite thaw and allowed to return to the Moscow area, he was once again able to engage in active theoretical work. This, in turn, led to the rediscovery of his writings by a new generation of Soviet intellectuals and subsequently by the West. This rediscovery yet continues.

The reasons for Bakhtin’s renaissance are compelling. Despite the difficult vicissitudes of his personal life, Bakhtin managed to prosecute a highly successful intellectual career that encompassed a prodigious range of topics, which survives today as a challenging, complex, and many-hued body of work. If we include the writings of the Bakhtin circle as well as Bakhtin’s own undisputed single-authored texts,⁴ such an œuvre could be said to encompass, as a partial list, the following areas: an existential phenomenology that focuses on human perception, the body, and intersubjectivity; the aesthetics of cultural creation; the philosophy of language; literary theory; the revolutionary potential of humour; social ecology; the temporal and spatial constitution of human life; critical interrogations of Freudianism, Marxism, Russian formalism, and Saussurean linguistics; and the ethical and moral implications of all of the foregoing. These interventions were supplemented by a series of more programmatic reflections on the nature of the human sciences, mainly written in the post-war era and collected in the posthumous volume Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), as well as various applications of his theoretical and philosophical insights to textual and linguistic analysis, European literature, and cultural history. Bakhtin’s death in 1975 was a significant event within Russian dissident and academic circles, and, aided by the openness of the perestroika period, his reputation grew dramatically in subsequent years, both in his native land and abroad.

The sheer breath, complexity, and conceptual richness of Bakhtin’s intellectual legacy has much to offer to a panoply of academic disciplines. Judging from the current international interest in Bakhtin’s ideas and the upsurge of articles and books that evoke his concepts and theoretical vocabulary, it might appear, at least on the surface, that this promise has been largely fulfilled.⁵ Curiously, however, the impact of Bakhtin’s ideas has remained somewhat asymmetrical and selective, with the possible exception of that increasingly nebulous domain generally referred to as ‘cultural studies’. In spite of his repeated insistence that his project was an inclusive and open-ended one, with broad relevance for all the human sciences – centring around an approach that has been variously termed ‘dialogism’ or ‘translinguistics’⁶ – the majority of scholarly work using Bakhtin can still be located in the realm of literary theory and textual analysis.⁷ Disciplines like sociology, philosophy, political science, and so forth have been slow to recognize the potential of Bakhtin’s ideas.

Indeed, despite his growing international notoriety, there remains considerable resistance to the development of Bakhtinian-inspired theoretical frameworks within many academic spheres.⁸ The reasons for this situation are complex and multifarious. At least in part, it has to do with the fact that Bakhtin’s texts were made available to Western audiences in an oddly haphazard fashion. For instance, his early philosophical works are only now being published in English, whereas the literary and textual analysis from what is often termed his ‘middle period’ work, and best represented by the influential study Rabelais and His World (written in the late 1940s), has existed in English translation for nearly three decades.

And these well-known middle-period works, which are far more than literary criticism, have been mis-framed by many potential readers from other disciplines – which is not to belittle the importance of literary criticism. But there has been a problem of intellectual cataloguing. Bakhtin’s project was too complex, too interdisciplinary – to raise that much-used and much-abused and rarely fulfilled term – to be contained on only one bookshelf. Despite suggestions from many quarters that disciplinary confines are now undergoing a process of irreversible dissolution, academic boundaries in Western post-secondary educational institutions still retain a depressing resiliency, and works like Bakhtin’s continue to be rejected out-of-hand or consigned to a single box by the potato-sorters.⁹

Also, it must be noted that much of what Bakhtin wrote during his lifetime was never intended for publication, and was hence written in a cryptic and highly allusive style that has not encouraged a wide, multidisciplinary readership or promoted a broadly synthetic approach to the appropriation and extension of his ideas. This has, of course, been further complicated by the exigencies of translation and the reception of translated texts within particular national and linguistic intellectual cultures.¹⁰ And then there is the sheer density of some of his writing, particularly the early philosophical works. Nevertheless, Bakhtin was a good, and highly quotable, writer – as the chapters in this book attest – and an extraordinarily rewarding partner in the dialogue of reading.

Finally, for many years, the reception of Bakhtin’s work was tainted by ideological differences fostered by the lengthy post-war geo-political stalemate between the state-socialist Eastern bloc and the liberal-capitalist West. This encouraged a very proprietorial attitude towards Bakhtin’s legacy and a number of fierce, and sometimes unhelpful polemics, especially between Slavicist interpreters of Bakhtin, who have tended towards the conservative side of the political spectrum, and those who have favoured the utilization of Bakhtinian ideas for a progressive sociocultural critique and praxis, including feminists, Marxists, poststructuralists, and others (Hirschkop, 1986; Shepherd, 1993). Equally proprietorial was the debate in the West over whether Bakhtin was a Marxist, which for a number of years preoccupied some scholars and probably alienated some others. This kind of intellectual tribalism is, of course, distressing and regrettable, but also seems now to be waning. Perhaps the time is upon us when Bakhtin can be evaluated in a fresh light, without the distorting influence of academic boundary-making and cold war clichés and platitudes.

For these and other reasons, the result is that Bakhtin is generally associated with literary studies by individuals working in other academic areas. When he has been recognized as a figure of note outside literary criticism, Bakhtin has often been (quite inaccurately) lumped in with the ‘new wave’ of mainly French poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers, represented by the likes of Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Lacan. One effect of this conflation is that Bakhtin has been absorbed willy-nilly into the modernity versus postmodernity debate, and held up as an iconic figure to be either scorned or celebrated, depending on one’s theoretical and ideological convictions. Such selective enlistment has often obscured the originality of Bakhtin’s project and the complex nature of his relationship to postmodern thought. This, in turn, has militated against the creative utilization of his ideas by a wide range of intellectual domains, as a fecund source of inspiration for theorizing about and responding to current sociopolitical and cultural developments.¹¹

It could also be noted that the recent publication in English translation of some of Bakhtin’s earliest writings – including Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (1990) and Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1993) – adds impetus to the suggestion that his ideas have considerable relevance outside literary studies proper. (It seems there are still more manuscripts of these early works currently being prepared for publication in Russia.) These texts, written when he was only in his mid-twenties, are best described as philosophical and social-theoretical works that address a wide range of key issues in the human sciences, including aesthetics and the nature of cultural creation, the ontology of intersubjective life and the life-world (centring around a phenomenology of the ‘deed’ or ‘act’), interhuman ethics, the process of value construction in sociocultural life, and the critique of an abstract, formalized rationality. Although written before he developed his characteristic metalinguistic paradigm in the late 1920s, these formative studies contain in nuce Bakhtin’s ideas about the dialogical character of language, culture and selfhood, the open-ended or ‘unfinalizable’ nature of such phenomena, and the central importance of ethics and responsibility in human life. They also reveal more clearly some of his key formative influences, including Bergson, Husserl, Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, all of whom can be regarded primarily as philosophers and social thinkers. These writings reveal a quite different side to Bakhtin, one that has received much less attention to date than his later texts, which contain such by now familiar concepts as ‘carnival’, ‘polyphony’, and ‘heteroglossia’. They demonstrate conclusively that he is a social theorist in a very significant and profound sense. The debate over this aspect of Bakhtin’s work and its contribution to theoretical development in the human sciences is only at a very embryonic stage.

Thus far, we have argued for the potential importance of Bakhtin’s ideas for the human sciences, with respect to the chronotope of our present-day consumer society. But, in more specific terms, why should Bakhtin interest contemporary sociologists, philosophers, political theorists, psychologists, historians, geographers, social ecologists and so forth? Eschewing a general exegesis of Bakhtin’s central ideas, a function that has already been admirably discharged by a number of existing studies,¹² we will focus on briefly situating Bakhtin vis-à-vis the current climate of theoretical work.

First, Bakhtin is of topical interest because, in a quite remarkable fashion, he anticipated a number of later developments within poststructuralist and postmodernist theory which have been part of the broad assault on the axioms of Western science and rationality in recent years. It is significant to note, for example, that he was at the forefront of the ‘linguistic turn’, perhaps the defining feature of twentieth-century social thought, in that he early identified communicative and symbolic practices as the locus classicus of human life. All sociocultural phenomena, according to Bakhtin, are constituted through the ongoing, dialogical relationship between individuals and groups, involving a multiplicity of different languages, discourses, and symbolizing practices. In prioritizing the relation over the isolated, self-sufficient monad, his ideas dovetail neatly with present attempts to supersede what is often called ‘subject-centred reason’. As Wald Godzich puts it, Bakhtin offers us ‘an alternative conception of the constitution of the subject to the prevailing one that is anchored in the theoretic and produces the familiar dyad of subject and object’ (1991: 10). Furthermore, Bakhtin is no less incredulous than Jean-François Lyotard regarding the metanarrative. He is fully sensitized to the domineering potential of abstract Reason, and he strives to resist the seductive blandishments of Hegelian-style dialectics. As such, Bakhtin, like his postmodernist counterparts, privileges the marginal, the de-centred, the contingent, and the unofficial. In highlighting the dialogical relations between different symbolic systems and practices that have generated the kinds of ‘heteroglot’ and composite cultural forms that we are becoming increasingly familiar with today in the wake of a pervasive globalization process, a Bakhtinian model holds considerable promise with respect to the theorization of such phenomena as the new media, popular cultural forms, ‘hybridization’ and multiculturalism, and the emergence of post-colonialist discourses, just to name a few (Featherstone, 1995; Young, 1995).

Secondly, Bakhtin’s work parallels the current reawakening of interest in the everyday lifeworld, and with the nature of ‘intercarnal’ and intersubjective experience, as opposed to the theorization of general ‘laws’ of socio-historical development (Dallmayr, 1991). Throughout his investigations, Bakhtin was concerned with a number of interlocking phenomena that are only now receiving sustained attention in social and cultural theory – such as the body, the chronotopic organization of ‘lived’ time and space with respect to the constitution of social experience, the nature of ‘primal’ or pre-reflective intersubjectivity, the role played by value, affect, and desire, and many others. Bakhtin’s approach indicates a pronounced hostility towards transhistoric and deterministic theorizing, such as Saussure’s structural linguistics and orthodox Marxism, not only because such theories ignored or denigrated the sphere of everyday sociality, but also inasmuch as they violated his stress on the open-endedness of history and the ‘unfinalizable’ nature of the thoughts and actions of the human subject with respect to what he liked to call the ‘event of Being’. In this sense, Bakhtin’s work has considerable relevance with respect to the recent upsurge of research on sexuality, gender issues, everyday life studies, body politi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: A Brief Introduction Michael Gardiner and Michael Mayerfeld Bell
• PART I DIALOGICS
• PART II CARNIVALS
• PART III CONVERSATIONS
• PART IV ETHICS AND EVERYDAY LIVES
• Index