Young, Robert - Back To Bakhtin

Back to Bakhtin Author(s): Robert Young Reviewed work(s): Source: Cultural Critique, No. 2 (Winter, 1985-1986), pp.
71-92 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354201 . Accessed: 26/11/2012 13:42
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Back to Bakhtin RobertYoung
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Britain in the 1970s there were effectively two possible positions for Marxist literary critics, symbolized by two names, E.P. Thompson and Louis Althusser, and by two rival annual gatherings, the Oxford History Workshop and the Essex Sociology of Literature Conference. In intellectual terms they could be characterised as the Marxist humanism developed by the New Left after the 1956 Twentieth Party Congress in the USSR and the anti-humanist structuralist Marxism advanced in the late sixties and seventies. The arguments between the two camps, finally devolving onto the question of the poverty or necessity of theory, only ceased with the autocritical self-destruction of Althusserianism by the Althusserians.'
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1. An early version of this paper was given at the University of Sussex. I would like to thank those present for their very helpful discussion and comments. For the & Other arguments between the two camps see E.P. Thompson, ThePoverty of Theory Essays(London: Merlin, 1978); Keith Nield andJohn Seed, "Theoretical Poverty or the and PovertyofTheory: British Marxist Historiography and the Althusserians," Economy and 8, no. 4 (1979): 383-416; Paul Hirst, "The Necessity of Theory," Economy Society 8, no. 4 (1979): 417-45. For the autocriticism see Jacques Ran~iere, La Lemon Society d'Althusser trans. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974); Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, Grahame Lock(London: NLB, 1976); BarryHindess and Paul Hirst, Mode ofProduction andSocial Formation: AnAuto-Critique Modes (London: MacofProduction" of"Pre-Capitalist millan, 1977); Antony Cutler, Barry Hindess, Paul Hirst, and Athar Hussain, Marx's 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977-78); and Today, "Capital"and Capitalism Paul Hirst, On Law and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1979).
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At the very moment of its greatest self-doubt Marxist literary theory then found itself under a new pressure, this time stemming from the critiques of poststructuralism. In this beleaguered situation the work of Bakhtin seemed increasingly to offer the possibility of deliverance: Perhaps one way out of this impasse lies in a reworking of sociological poetics following the example of the Bakhtin school; for it was this school... who in the twenties provided the first serious marxist critique of the Russian formalists and paved the way for a theory and practice of textual politics whereby literary criticism would avoid the twin reductionisms of formalist poetics and vulgar marxist sociology.2 In making this proposal John Hoyles was following an initial suggestion from Tony Bennett in 1979, endorsed in 1981 and 1982 by Terry Eagleton, further supported by David Forgacsin 1982, Graham Pechey in 1983, and Allon White in 1984.3 These often programmatic declarations created a general consensus that the way forward was back to Bakhtin. Although the work of Bakhtin and his collaborators Volosinov and Medvedev - whom I will continue to distinguish by the books signed with their names - began to be translatedin the late sixties, it is striking that it had little impact on Marxist criticism until the 1980s. Jameson's The Prison-House andRussian A Critical Account ofLanguage: of Structuralism Formalism for of makes no mention at all the Bakhtin instance, (1972), circle. It might well be thought that the resurgence of interest in Bakhtin coincided, as it did in the U.S.A., with the 1981 translation, The Dialogic Imagination (availablein French since 1978), but Marxiststurned rather to Rabelaisand His World(1968). Thus in 1979 Tony Bennett announced that "Bakhtin's study of Rabelais would seem fully to
2. John Hoyles, "Radical Critical Theory and English," in Re-Reading English,ed. Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1982), 44-5. 3. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism(London: Methuen, 1979); Terry Eaglea Revolutionary ton, WalterBenjamin,or Towards Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), and "Wittgenstein's Friends," NLR 135 (1982): 64-90; David Forgacs, "Marxist Literary eds. Ann Jefferson and David Robey (London: Theories," in Moder Literary Theory, Batsford, 1982), 134-69; Graham Pechey, "Bakhtin,Marxism, and Post-Structuralism," in The Politics eds. Francis Barkeret al. (Colchester: University of Essex Press, of Theory, 1983), 234-47; Allon White, "Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction," in The Theory ofReading,ed. Frank Gloversmith (Brighton: Harvester, 1984), 123-46. Further references will be cited in the text.
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exemplify what a Marxist - that is, a historical and materialist approach to the study of literary texts should look like" (95). If it does, then it has to be added that Problems Poetics and The Dialogic ofDostoevsky's not only fail to repeat the performance but imply serious Imagination complications for the use of Bakhtin for Marxism at all. A warning was signalled by the fact that at the very moment when Marxist interest in Bakhtin began to quicken, everyone else's did as well. InJune 1983, for instance, an article by David Lodge on "Joyce and Bakhtin" appeared on the front page of theJamesJoyceBroadsheet. According to Lodge, Bakhtin's appeal stems from the way that he between the analytical appears "to offer some kind of rapprochement of Formalism and a marxist or humanist conception of literarigour ture as an institution serving the cause of human freedom."4 Lodge goes on to apply a form of Bakhtin's typology of literary discourse to and Finnegans Wake with little noticeable sense that he is producUlysses an of "what a Marxist approach to the study of literary ing example texts should look like," or, it might be added, thatJoyce and Bakhtin had first been "rapproched" by Julia Kristeva sixteen years earlier. Long articles on Bakhtin also appeared in 1983 from David Carroll, Paul de Man, and Wayne Booth. In the same year a newsletter was founded and a special conference on Bakhtin held in Ontario. At the time of writing no less than fivejournals have recently produced or are planning special issues on Bakhtin.5 If Bakhtin seems to offer a "way out" for English Marxists, it is clear that many others have also been attracted by his egressive charms. The unprecedented extent of Bakhtin's appeal, comparable in recent critical history only to that of Derrida, led de Man to ask "who, if anyone, would have reason to find it difficult or even impossible to enlist Bakhtin's version of dialogism among his methodological tools or
4. David Lodge, "Double Discourses;Joyce and Bakhtin,"JamesJoyce Broadsheet 11 June 1983): 1. 5. David Carroll, "The Alterity of Discourse: Form, History, and the Question of the Political in M.M. Bakhtin," Diacritics 13, no. 2 (1983): 65-83; Paul de Man, 4, no. 1 (1983): 99-107; Wayne Booth, "Free"Dialogue and Dialogism," PoeticsToday dom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism," Critical Inquiry9, no. 1 (1982): 45-76. Further references will be cited in the text. For special issues on Bakhtin see Critical "Forum on Bakhtin," 10, no. 2 (1983); EtudesfranInquiry, caises,"Bakhtine mode d'emploi," 20, no. 1 (1984); and American Journalof Semiotics, Literature Century Esprit,and Studiesin Twentieth (forthcoming).
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skills" (104). Whereas Derrida raised passionate disciples and equally passionate opponents, it seems that just about anyone can, and probably will, appropriate Bakhtin for just about anything. Why and how could this be so? Everyone is attracted to the fact that Bakhtin appears to offer a reconciliation between poetics and hermeneutics, between questions of form and questions of interpretation, in the context of their relation to society and to history. The spectre of Derrida also looms large and helps to account for Bakhtin'ssudden appeal around 1980. For humanist critics a key factor lies in the way in which Bakhtin'swork emerges as a critique of Russian Formalism: he thus appears as a critic who has gone "beyond" structuralism, who uncannily anticipates much poststructuralist thought but presents it in a more traditional guise. He talks, it seems, reassuringly about characters, plots, the author, and consciousness, offering a humanist version ofpoststructuralismtogether with a liberal politics centering on the idea of the word as guarantor of human freedom. The humanist claim on Bakhtin is graphically illustrated by the telling transformation of a book originally entitled QuesandAesthetics tionsofLiterature i estetiki) into the resoundliteratury (Vosprosy The For Marxists Bakhtin's attracaffirmative Dialogic Imagination. ingly tions are not altogether dissimilar: he provides a sociological critique of structuralism, as well as the materialist theory of language so conspicuously missing in Marxist theory.6 Rather than offering an alternative to Derrida in the sense of an entirely oppositional position, he seems to allow the assimilation of some of the more compelling aspects of his thought while placing them within a more acceptable sociohistorical framework. Derrida himself can then be more or less rejected altogether. If everyone wishes to appropriate Bakhtin, inevitably much of this takes the form of recuperation. His sudden popularity has come at the same time as the culmination of a movement to assimilate the works of two members of his circle, Medvedev and Volosinov, to Bakhtin himself (Medvedev and VoloSinov having died in 1938 and 1936 respectively, the former perhaps for the privilege of publishing Bakhtin's
6. Discussions of the contributions of Volosinov's Marxismand the Philosophy of Language(1929, English translation 1973, French translation 1977) can be found in Raymond Williams, Marxismand Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1977), 35-42, and in JeanLouis Houdebine, Langage et Marxisme (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), 161-73.
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work under his name).7 The effect of this monological drive to reduce multiple authorship to the works of a single genius is to reduce the importance of Marxism. Volosinov's translator, I.R. Titunik, for instance, claims that the sociological poetics of the Baxtin group (minus Medvedev's eclecticism; that is, minus Marxist presuppositions) and the formal method... represented parallel, overlapping, interdependent, and ultimately completely reconcilable methods.8 Take the Marxist presuppositions out of Medvedev and Volosinov and you get a perfectly acceptable Bakhtin. The same dismissal of Bakhtin's Marxism can be found in Michael Holquist's account of why Bakhtin entered into such polyphonic arrangements with his friends about authorship. According to Holquist it was merely a case of expedience: "Bakhtin was notorious in Leningrad circles as a cerkovnik,a devout Orthodox Christian." Bakhtin's Marxism was simply a disguise which can now, outside Stalinist USSR, be discarded: Marxist terms are . . most often present in Bakhtin's books ... as a kind of convenient, in the abstract, not neces- flag under which inimical but above all, necessary sarily to advance his own views: If the Christian word were to take on Soviet flesh it had to clothe itself in ideological disguise.9 Can Bakhtin be said to be a Marxist or not? Is it possible to discard his Marxism, or would it be equally possible to discard his Christianity? The Marxistuse of Bakhtincan also be recuperative.FredricJameson, for example, readjusts Bakhtin's dialogism so that it comes to signify straightforward class antagonism within the overall framework of
7. The authorship question was initiated by V.V. Ivanov in 1973. For a detailed suivi discussion of the issues, see Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine: leprincipe dialogique, de Ecrits de Bakhtine du Cercle (Paris:Seuil, 1981), 16-24. Further references will be cited in the text. 8. V.N. Volosinov, Marxismand the Philosophy of Language,trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 200. and Representa9. Michael Holquist, "The Politics of Representation," in Allegory the EnglishInstitute1979-80, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltition:Selected Papersfrom more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 171, 173.
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dialectical materialism. Because Bakhtin'swork is, he claims, restricted to the notion of carnival, it is necessary to add the qualification that the normal form of the dialogical is essentially an antagonistic one, and that the dialogue of class struggle is one in which two opposing discourses fight it out within the general unity of a shared code. 10 Jameson goes on to claim that Bakhtin's dialogism is indistinguishable from orthodox Marxist dialectics - "the basic formal requirement of dialectical analysis is maintained, and its elements are still restructured in terms of contradiction (85). The argument that Bakhtin's ideas are restricted to carnival and therefore need to be extended - into a traditional dialectics - betrays a characteristic move of appropriation and limitation. Bakhtin, on the other hand, makes itvery clear in those texts signed with his own name that dialogism cannot be confused with dialectics. Dialogism cannot be resolved; it has no teleology. It is unfinalizable and open ended. Dialectics, according to Bakhtin, are monological. II Marxist literarycritics tend to want to restrict Bakhtin's contribution to carnival.1 It is not obvious, however, that it can be detached from its place in the larger argument: by the time of its re-emergence in the form of the nineteenth-century novel, for instance, carnival has simply become a name for a new instance of the ubiquitous dialogic principle. There are other problems. In its historical manifestation as a Medieval and Renaissance institution, carnival is offered as an example of a revolutionary dispersal of a hegemonic feudal order, its uncontrollable laughter performing a directly political and anti-ideological function. At the same time, carnival also allows the kind of free communication between all members of society of which Habermas dreams, providing a "utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and
as a Socially Narrative Political Unconscious: 10. FredricJameson, The SymbolicAct (London: Methuen, 1981), 84. Cf. also 285. 11. A tendency noticeable inJameson, Eagleton, Pechey, and White. Bennett and Forgacs are the exceptions.
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abundance."12 This means, however, that its functions are in contradiction with each other. Carnival cannot be both parodic, subversive of the official ideology but necessarily remaining within its terms, and an uncensored realm of free expression, implying an originary utopic realm rather than competing points of view of heteroglossia. It is as if carnival has to work according to the contradictory descriptions of both the Freudian and theJungian unconscious. Its anti-ideological function is further complicated by the fact that it is permitted by the state authorities and thus could be said merely to constitute an instance of repressive tolerance. As Terry Eagleton observes, Carnival is, of course, a spasmodic, officially licensed affair, without the rancour, discipline and organization essential for an effective revolutionary politics. Any politics which predicates itself on the carnivalesque moment alone will be no more than a compliant, containable libertarianism.'1 In spite of these problems Eagleton and other Marxist critics consistently value carnival as the particular contribution of Bakhtin. Perhaps, however, these difficulties explain why Tony Bennett, in suggesting that Rabelaisand His World"would seem fully to exemplify what a Marxist - that is, a historical and materialist - approach to the study of literary texts should look like," ignores both carnival and dialogism: Remarkably free from the concerns of traditional aesthetics, it explains the distinguishing formal features of Rabelais' work not as the manifestationof some invariantset of uniquely distinguishing aesthetic properties but as the product of a particular, historically and materially constrained practice of writing. Furthermore, this 'materialism of production' is counterbalanced by 'a materialism of consumption' in the equally concrete and historically specific analysis Bakhtin
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelaisand His World,trans. Helene Iwolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), 9. 13. Terry Eagleton, "Wittgenstein's Friends," 89-90; the same point is made in Walter 148. A different view of carnival is advanced byJulia Kristevawho conBenjamin, tends that its laughter is serious, "the only way that it can avoid becoming either the scene of the law or the scene of its parody, in order to become the scene of its other" toLiterature and A Semiotic ("Word, Dialogue, and Novel," in Desirein Language: Approach Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1980], 80).
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offers of the different ways in which Rabelais' work has functioned and been recuperated within different ideological and political conjunctures. (95) In spite of the new emphasis on the mode of consumption, Bennett's evaluation makes Bakhtin look rather less distinctive and innovative. The "exemplary" Marxist text, in fact, turns out to be a comparatively orthodox account of the production and consumption of a literarytext by determining sociohistorical forces. What is most remarkable,however, is that Bennett omits any reference to the book's own historical context. While praising Bakhtin for his analysis of the mode of production of Rabelais's book he himself entirely neglects that of Bakhtin's. For all his talk of "the different political and ideological conjunctures which the text enters into during the course of its historical existence" (92), Bennett fails to mention andHis World thatRabelais itself constituted an attempt at direct political intervention. Eagleton alone emphasizes this aspect of its exemplary status as a work of Marxist criticism: Produced in the darkest era of Stalinism, a period during which Bakhtin himself ominously disappeared from public view... it blasts Rabelais's work out of the homogeneous continuum of literary history, creating a lethal constellation between that redeemed Renaissance moment and the trajectory of the Soviet state ... in what is perhaps the boldest, most devious gesture in the history of 'Marxist criticism,' Bakhtin pits against that 'official, formalistic and logical authoritarianism,' whose unspoken name is Stalinism, the explosive politics of the body, the erotic, the licentious and semiotic. (Walter Benjamin,144) It is only by ignoring the historical context of its political strategy that Bennett can neglect the importance of carnival in his estimation of and His World. Rabelais We have seen that for Marxists carnival is a difficult concept to use: it is closely related to dialogism and is in any case suspect on straightforward political grounds. On the other hand, it was also the means of a political intervention that constitutes one of the boldest moves in the history of Marxist criticism. Bakhtin's book articulates a gap between the propriety of Marxist criticism as a discipline of historical knowledge and an ideologically improper but direct and potentially effective intervention into the contemporary political arena. In fact, of course,
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Bakhtin's strategy failed, for the thesis was refused and publication came only long after the end of Stalinism. But the suppression of the book also testifies to its potential political effectivity at a particular historical moment. This is the real force of carnival in Bakhtin. Dehistoricized and extracted as a concept or as a general principle of revolutionary textual politics carnival is unworkable and untenable. Bakhtin teaches that politics are strategic and historically conditioned, and that the cost of this may be a theoretical and ideological impropriety. In fact Bakhtin has been more useful to Marxists in terms of strategic politics than in producing the promised revival of sociological poetics. Marxist literary critics are not, after all, in the last instance terribly interested in poetics as such.'4 Bakhtin has rather been deployed to counter the supposed attacks of deconstruction, offering the unusual possibility of exploiting its vulnerabilities. Eagleton has several times remarked on the way in which Bakhtin seems to recapitulate many of the dominant motifs of contemporary poststructuralism and at the same time lends them an historical basis ("Wittgenstein," 78). But for Bakhtin any "basis" must inevitably be that of dialogism, not history;history merely provides different instances of dialogism at work. Eagleton's argument illustrates new difficulties: Bakhtin must comprehend poststructuralism while at the same time surpassing it through the addition of history. He is forced to claim, on the slender evidence of a single footnote in an article by David Carroll, that poststructuralists have refused all affinities with Bakhtin and generally denigrate his work. Bakhtin, Eagleton contends, unites "what we might now rhetoricallycall certain Derridean and Lacanianpositions with a politics revolutionary enough to make much post-structuralism nervous" (79). Yet his illustration of how Bakhtin does this turns out to be nothing less than carnival - "the Nietzschean playfulness of contemporary post-structuralism leaves the academy and dances in the streets" (79) - the very concept which he himself dismisses eleven pages later as "no more than a compliant, containable libertarianism"
14. Thus the studies of Lotman and Uspensky, which continue the work of the Bakhtin School in the area of sociological poetics, are rarely mentioned in contemporary discussions of Marxist literary theory; Costanzo di Girolamo's interesting work in the area (A Critical Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981) Theory ofLiterature, suffers from equal neglect. Bakhtin's sociological poetics have rather often been taken up and developed by narratologists rather than by Marxists. Todorov would be a case in point.
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(90). In the meantime the real historical force of Bakhtin's attempted historical intervention in the 1940s seems to have been forgotten. Once again the specific historical conjuncture disappears in favor of the invocation of "history" as the validating principle and basis of Marxist thought. Eagleton's assertion that Bakhtin "combines and surpasses" Derrida and Lacan, or elsewhere Derrida and Wittgenstein, is repeated in a slightly different form by Allon White who argues that "Bakhtin's theory simultaneously encompassed and pushed beyond" structuralism and deconstruction (123). Bakhtin's work in general, White declares, "seems to me to transcend both Deconstruction and Structuralism by revealing each to be a one-sided abstraction from the lived complexity of language" (141). If Bakhtin manages to transcend the critique of transcendence he seems to do it by being pushed back into dialectics. Dialogism, however, defines itself by its refusal of all forms of transcendence, all attempts to unify. Bakhtin always maintained, as Todorov remarks, a certain distrust of what he called "the monological dialectic of Hegel" (Mikhail Bakhtine,160). In the same way, he criti cized Engelhardt's analysis of Dostoevsky on the grounds that he attempted to turn Dostoevsky's dialogism into a transcendent dialectics.15 For Eagleton, Bakhtin "combines and surpasses" Derrida and Wittgenstein;for White he encompasses structuralismand deconstruction in order to "push beyond" them. But in Bakhtin's own terms, any individual elements that are contained will be set against each other unmerged, rather as in Dante's world where "multi-leveledness is extended into eternity" (Dostoevsky, 27). If Bakhtin "transcends" anythen his own definition his own text must be monological. thing, by In spite of his acknowledgement of the similarity of many of its arguments to those of Bakhtin, White, however, claims that it is deconstruction that is monological. Deconstruction, he suggests, is a "compromised, idealist carnival" that is monological because it remains within academic discourse rather than moving out into "social history," presumably to dance in the streets. However, there is no such thing in Bakhtin as monological carnival. Bakhtin's description of carnival's "lively play with the 'languages' of poets, scholars, monks"
15. Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtine, p. 160; Bakhtin, Problems Poetics,trans. ofDostoevsky's Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 26. Further references will be cited in the text.
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clearly states it to be "consciously opposed" to authoritarian literary language: "It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized."'6 Parody, as has been suggested, has to remain within the orbit of monological languages precisely in order to dialogize them. The ordinarylanguage of the people outside these discourses makes up a heteroglossia that has not been dialogized and therefore remains politically ineffective, mindless, and opaque. 7 Dancing in the streets partakes of the utopic, nostalgic element in carnival; parody of the official discourses, identified with deconstruction, makes up the subversive, politically effective component. White suggests that the reason why deconstruction has so quickly found that "its natural metier is fairground nonsense and gameplaying" is because of its "triviality"(139). This dismissal is particularly odd given his simultaneous espousal of the value of carnival against deconstruction. Yet deconstruction's play, parody, punning, crossing of academic boundaries, and subversion of academic discourse's blindness to the status of its own language is, as White agrees, a form of carnivalization, a decentering of the official discursive norms that in its own way is comparable to the greatest claims made by Bakhtin for Sterne - "a parody of the logical and expressive structure of any
ideological discourse as such" - or Rabelais - "a parody of the very
act of conceptualizing anything in language."'8 It seems that when White encounters a contemporary example of the carnivalesque he cannot recognize it for what it is and dismisses it as trivial. It is noticeable that his own critique takes the form of a serious academic discourse, not obviously permeated by the heteroglossia of social history, while it solemnly dismisses the parodic play of deconstruction as "ludic nar16. M.M. Bakhtin, TheDialogicImagination: FourEssays,trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 273. Further references will be cited in the text. 17. "As distinct from the opaque mixing of languages in living utterances that are spoken in a historically evolving language... the novelistic hybrid is an artistically in contact withoneanother, a system having as organized systemfor bringing different languages its goal the illumination of one language by means of another" (Dialogic Imagination, 361). The novel achieves its special status, and special perspective, by "artistically organizing" the languages of heteroglossia. In itself heteroglossia is "mindless," "an opaque mechanistic mixture of languages" (366); it is because it is like this that Bakhtin places so much emphasis on'carnival. In his view carnival provides the only historical moment in which the heteroglossia of the world is dialogized. 18. DialogicImagination, 308-9; cf. also the description of scepticism, 401.
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cissism." White goes on to claim that Bakhtin "reveals that naive complicity Deconstruction may have with social control and domination, and the consequent role that dialogic resistance must play to disrupt this" (145). Yet there is also a naivety in the accusation that Derrida's extravagance,game-playing, "punning, crackingjokes, changing masks like a comedian," is somehow complicit with the serious discourse of academicism that enforces social control, when White's own essay takes such norms and presuppositions so much on trust, and is written in an authoritative mode. If he is to identify himself with Bakhtin's "dialogue resistance" then White needs to recognize that for Bakhtin this occurs at the level of language (necessarily, therefore, within discourse) and not in the realm of a "social history" that is somehow outside it. By contrast, the double science of deconstruction might seem much closer to Bakhtin's double-voicedness in which "two points of view are not mixed, but set against each other dialogically" (Dialogic Imagination, 360). III White's critique of deconstruction' s frivolity is curiously blind to the conditions and status of its own undialogized discourse. Inevitably, this suggests a comparison with Bakhtin's own: at first sight, does it not also propose in conventional "high" academic language, not noticeably comic, and full of authoritative jargon, a monological theory which paradoxically denies the possibility of a theory, celebrating laughter, subversion, parody, and "low" genres? Or is there, as Hayden White suggests, a carnivalesque inversion of its own claims to authoritativeness taking place at the same time, illuminating "the very grandiosity of his enterprise as a parody of the methods of scholarship and science alike"?'9 The length of Bakhtin's essays, their unreadability, their repetitive structure,their proliferating jargon, and ever bifurcating categories, are, as Hayden White points out, at odds with the thesis of their content, thus subverting any claim to authoritativeness. This would not be incompatible with some of the other curiosities known about Bakhtin:
19. Hayden White, "The AuthoritativeLie," Partisan Review 50 (1982): 312. A more recent example of carnivalesque inversion, Bernard Sharratt'sReading Relations: Structures Production. A Dialectical Text/Book ofLiterary (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), interrogates the claims of Marxist criticism, providing a superb parody of Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology (1976) in doing so.
Back to Bakhtin During some sixty years as a scholar, Bakhtin assumed many masks, spoke in many voices, published under a number of different names, parodied many methods. Is there any reason to believe that these essays [TheDialogicImagination], published under the name of Bakhtin, represent the fixed position, the real center of his thought, by which to measure the merely parodisticdimensions of his other works, both those recognized as having been written by him and those only thought to be from his hand?20
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Similarly, can we be so sure as Holquist that the real Bakhtin was the devout cerkovnik who wrote the religious magnum opus TheArchitechtonicsof Responsibility in embryonic which, Holquist assures us, "contains, form, everymajoridea Bakhtinwas to havefor the restof his longlife" ("The Politics of Representation," 171)? It is noticeable, at any rate, that, although Bakhtin's subject concerns dialogism in the novel, many of his critics, without showing any awareness of the transference that they are making, write as if such qualities are to be found in Bakhtin himself. Bakhtin begins to become the thing of which he speaks. No doubt this is an effect of the ambivalence of his texts. Is there, in fact, a real Bakhtin that can be appropriated by a particular mode of criticism? Ideas such as the contested nature of the sign, the determination of the utterance from without by social relations, the endless struggle for the word, and the re-accentuation of meanings in texts throughout history, would suggest not. Bakhtin successfully resists integration, preserving an irreducible otherness, enacting in his work the process of exotopy: "not merging with another, but [exotopy] and the surplus preserving one's own position of extralocality of vision and understanding connected with it" (Dostoevsky, 299). This explains why it has proved much more fruitful to analyse Bakhtin's work than to apply his ideas. By definition, as de Man observes, "to imitate or to apply Bakhtin ... betrays what is most valid in his work" ("Dialogue and Dialogism," 107). At first sight, then, Bakhtin appears to offer a Marxist critic the recognition of much of the force of deconstructive arguments while
20. "The Authoritative Lie," 312. The status of Bakhtin's own language is also discussed by Julia Kristeva in her introduction to La Poetique de Dostoievski (Paris: Seuil, eds. 1970), 21 (trans. Vivienne Mylne, "The Ruin of a Poetics," in RussianFormalism, Stephen Bann andJohn E. Bowlt [Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973], 116-17; further references will be cited in the text).
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setting them within a sociohistorical framework. The difficulty comes when admitting the similarities while attempting to maintain the distinctions, a process which happens to constitute the double movement of exotopy itself. Bakhtinis celebrated because he adds the missing element of history to deconstruction, but when this argument is rehearsed in detail it turns out that he offers an alternative only if carnival is, paradoxically,dehistoricized. Even the all important frameworkbegins to seem less secure when Bakhtin explores the ways in which framing destabilizes rather than produces fixity. So Bakhtin provides a somewhat treacherous way out for Marxist criticism. The conflict of dialogue with dialectics is the most substantial of a number of major difficulties: others include the word as a guarantor of human freedom and the refusal of teleology in favour of repetition. The eagerness to claim Bakhtin as a major Marxist aesthetician means that there has been no sustained analysis of these problems. Still more arise with the theory of the novel. Unlike most Marxist theorists since Lenin, Bakhtin conceives the novel not as a reflection but as a space which heterglossia "enters." He rewrites the orthodox imperative, "the novel must be a full and comprehensive reflection of its era" accordingly: The novel must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all the era's languages that have any claim to being significant; the novel must be a microcosm of Imagination, heteroglossia. (Dialogic 411) As a microcosm of the macrocosm, Bakhtin seems to imply that all the different positions in society are necessarily represented in the novel, speaking and contesting in the novel as in the world outside. The relation between the two is one of homology. This allows no space for what the book does not say, for things which must not be said. Or to shift from Macherey to Foucault, it assumes that there are no groups in society that are voiceless or silent, that none have been excluded from speech as such.21In other respects it might seem that Bakhtin is very
trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: 21. Pierre Macherey, A Theory Production, of Literary Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978);Michel Foucault, "The Order of Discourse," trans. Ian Reader,ed. Robert Young (London: McLeod, in Untyingthe Text:A Post-Structuralist Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 48-77; TheHistoryof Sexuality,Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979). In comparing Bakhtin to Foucault it should be noted that, with the possible exception of the Rabelais book, he does not analyse the operations of power according to the sovereignty model of repression that Foucault
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close to Foucault: for both thinkers, society consists of competing contradictory discourses that successively strive for and resist totalization. But differences emerge with Bakhtin's stress on the prevalence of reported speech within discourse, a concept incompatible with Foucault's notion of rival, and therefore distinct, stratificationsof language and discourses of truth. Reported speech makes it impossible to maintain distinctions between discourses in the first place; the struggle for power ultimately resolves onto competing accents attached to individual words. VoloSinov could be compared to Althusser in his analysis of the way in which the individual utterance is wholly determined by social relations. In Althusser's description of ideology, the interpellation of the subject positions him or her within language, the discourse of the other, and only allows him or her to speak from that position.22 Bakhtin's dialogism means that the subject is constituted by both self and other, but the speaker is still allowed to accent words and to compete with other accentuations for his or her own purposes. For all his dispersal of the unity of the subject and the author, Bakhtin contrives to privilege the individual over the system, as his reported remarks on structuralism make clear.23Here ideology simply becomes the expression of different points of view by different classes and hardly explains how a dominant ideology manages to operate successfully. To put it another way, dialogism does not constitute an adequate theory of power. It means that Bakhtin never has to explain in any other terms the operation of the struggle between centripetal and centrifugal forces working within heteroglossia. He merely asserts that conflict takes place: Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uncriticizes. For an important critique of Foucault's theory of discourse see B. Brown and and M. Cousins, "The Linguistic Fault:The Case of Foucault's Archaeology," Economy 9, no. 3 (1980): 251-78. Society 22. VoloSinov, Marxismand the Philosophy of Language,86. Althusser's writings on (London: Verso, 1983). ideology have recently been collected as Essayson Ideology 23. According to Ann Shukman, Bakhtin's attitude was that structuralism "uses mechanical categories, it tends to formalize and depersonalize, it reduces all relationships to logical relationships. 'But I,' wrote Bakhtin 'hear voicesin everything and the dialogic relationships between them' " (Introduction to "Bakhtin School Papers," No. 10 [1983], 4). in Translation, RussianPoetics
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interrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward. (Dialogic Imagination, 272) in novel to become effective, the to be needs dialogized Ifheteroglossia there nevertheless seems to be a benign trust expressed here that whether individuals are aware of it or not absolute monologism is impossible, for heteroglossia will always ensure decentralization. At times this almost seems to imply that the diverse languages of different social groups will in effect do our politics for us. For the dialogic principle is everywhere and permeates everything: "Life by its very nature is dialogic" (Dostoevsky, 293). No explanation is offered for what Bakhtin describes, except dialogism itself as a founding metaphysical principle: Dialogic relationships exist among all elements of novelistic structure; that is, they are juxtaposed contrapuntally. And this is so because dialogic relationships are a much broader phenomena than mere rejoinders in a dialogue, laid out compositionally in the text; they are an almost universal phenomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life - in general, everything that has meaning and significance. (Dostoevsky, 40) Dialogism's ubiquity is such that, as Todorov points out, logically it is not even possible to distinguish between monologic and dialogic discourse, since all discourse is by definition dialogic, that is, maintains inter-textual relations.24In the last analysis, dialogism breaks down all same/other oppositions even while it is predicated on them. Insisting on differences, dialogism simultaneously negates their very possibility. All the conceptual distinctions that Bakhtin proposes are inexorably propelled toward their own dissolution in the same way.
IV
Does this mean that Marxists must give up their claims to Bakhtin and yield him to poststructuralists? The question is not quite so simple.
24. Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin remarks that Bakhtine,165. In TheDialogic Imagination even monoglossia's "perception presumes heteroglossia as a background, and even it interacts dialogically with various aspects of this heteroglossia" (375).
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In the attempt to use Bakhtin against poststructuralism generally and Derrida in particular, Marxists have, surprisingly, forgotten about history.The argument has been that "Bakhtinrecapitulatesavantla lettre many of the leading motifs of contemporary deconstruction" (Walter 150), but this implies that somehow the two have always been Benjamin, separate. In the larger historical context it would be necessary to trace their respective relation to the whole Nietzschean tradition and to consider the significance of remarks, such as the following, made by Bakhtin himself in 1961: After my book [Dostoevsky] (but independently of it) the ideas of polyphony, dialogue, unfinalizability, etc., were very widely developed. This is explained by the growing influence of Dostoevsky, but above all, of course, by those changes in reality itself which Dostoevsky (in this sense prophetically) succeeded in revealing earlier than the others. (Dostoevsky, 285) More specifically, the crucial role of Bakhtin in the development of poststructuralist thought is passed over. Kristeva's two remarkable essays date from the late sixties; there she recognized that Bakhtin's work provokes as its corollaries intertextuality, the denial of univocal meaning, infinite interpretation, the negation of originary presence in speech, the positioning of the subject in and by discourse, the breaking down of the identity of the subject, of all inside/outside oppositions, of the semantic identity of the sign, and "the crumbling away of the representational system" as such.25 Above all, however, Kristevaargued that an "other logic" permeates Bakhtin'swork, a logic of non-exclusive opposites and permanent contradiction that transgresses the monologic true/false forms of Western rationalism. As Bakhtin puts it: This is the special logic revealed in Dostoevsky's work. Thus these ideas cannot be adequately understood and analyzed in the usual referentiallylogical, systematicplane (as ordinary philosophic theories). (Dostoevsky, 299) as Dialogism, Kristevasaw, must not be confused with dialectics("Word, Dialogue, and Novel," 88-9; "The Ruin of a Poetics," 110). Its fun25. Kristeva,"The Ruin of a Poetics," 114. "Word, Dialogue, and Novel" was written in 1966.
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damental structure is one of alterity: poles stay apart, as in Buber's IThou relations. It is not finite, it is open, and cannot be resolved. Accordingly Bakhtin praises the "rigorous unfinalizability and dialogic openness of Dostoevsky's artistic world" in which the hero's consciousness of self"lives by its unfinalizability, by its unclosedness, and its indeterminacy" (Dostoevsky, 272, 53). Kristevawas quite clear why Bakhtin's description of the novel was so significant: The novel, and especially, the modern, polyphonic novel, incorporating Menippean elements, embodies the effort of European thought to break out of the framework of causally determined identical substances and head toward another modality of thought that proceeds through dialogue (a logic of distance, relativity, analogy, nonexclusive and transfinite opposition). ("Word, Dialogue, and Novel," 85-6) Carnival, finally, becomes the name of that scene or stage on which such a logic appears. Some have criticized Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin, particularly her strategy of withdrawing "the kernel which links up with the most advanced contemporary research" from the "worn-out ideological husk" that surrounds it. The important point, however, is that almost twenty years ago she recognized Bakhtin'swork as "a hitherto unknown precursor, unaware of its role," of a movement that had hardly begun and had certainly yet to be termed poststructuralism or deconstruction ("Ruin of a Poetics," 107). If poststructuralism means anything at all, it describes a very various body of work that shares a concern with isolating and exploring that different kind of logic that Kristevainvokes. At the end of her first essay on Bakhtin, she predicted its growing importance: The path charted between the two poles of dialogue radically abolishes problems of causality, finality, et cetera, from our philosophical arena. It suggests the importance of the dialogical principle for a space of thought much larger than that of the novel. More than binarism, dialogism may well become the basis of our time's intellectual structure.("Word, Dialogue, and Novel," 89) To say that Bakhtin recapitulates poststructuralism before its time, therefore, ignores the extent to which poststructuralism has developed from the first in close association with his work. The process has
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worked both ways, also affecting the way that Bakhtin has been interpreted. It is remarkable, for instance, how many people seem to think that Bakhtin writes about intertextuality. V For historical reasons alone the idea that Bakhtin can now provide an alternative to poststructuralism is clearly untenable. At the same time his recent invocation by Marxist critics neglects the role that his work has already played in Marxist criticism. It would be possible to argue that Bakhtin's major contribution has already been to assert and to provide a theory of the importance of language in the social sphere. He has brought about a new awareness that it is not necessary to talk about the relation of literature to something called concrete History in order to provide a sociological analysis. He has shown how language itself constitutes and is constituted by the social and history and is not separate from them. Here the crucial shift from orthodox Marxist positions is, as David Forgacs has observed, the way in which "rather than seeing literature as a knowledge of reality, Bakhtin sees it as a practice of language within reality" ("Marxist LiteraryTheories," 163-4). He has also moved Marxist thinking away from its obsessive attention to the mode of production to a consideration of the mode of consumption as well, inevitably foregrounding the importance of the role of the institution in doing so.26 Volosinov's critique of Freudianism has not generally been recognized as providing the earliest theory of a political unconscious in which the text of history produces revolutionary change. However, Volosinov senses no imperative to detect the traces of a vast, uninterrupted narrativeof class struggleasJameson does. The critiqueis particularlyinterestingin that for all his attackon the premises and categoriesof psychoanalysis Volosinov does not dismiss the idea of the unconscious as such. Instead he suggests that, given the absence of a dividing line between the individual psyche and the formulated ideology of its social milieu, what Freud calls the conscious constitutes the official or dominant ideology, what he calls the unconscious forms the unofficial or revolutionary ideology:
26. See, for instance, Tony Bennett's more recent "Text and History," in ReReadingEnglish,223-36.
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Robert Young Those areas of behavioral ideology that correspond to Freud's official, "censored" conscious express the most steadfast and the governing factors of class consciousness. They lie close to the formulated, fully fledged ideology of the class in question, its law, its morality, its world outlook.... Other levels, corresponding to Freud's unconscious, lie at a great distance from the stable system of the ruling ideology. They bespeak the disintegration of the unity and integrity of the system, the vulnerability of the usual ideological motivations.27
Although not every motive in contradictionwith official ideology will do so, any motive that is founded on the economic being of a whole group will develop within a small social milieu and will depart into the underground - not the psychological underground of repressed complexes, but the salutarypolitical underground. in all spheres of culThat is exactly how a revolutionary ideology ture comes about. (90) On the one hand, Volosinov admits that motives in contradiction with official ideology, in the social declasse loner, "little by litte really do turn into a 'foreign body' in the psyche" (89), thus in a certain sense validating the findings of psychoanalysis;28on the other hand, he puts forward a theory of revolutionary change based on Freud's model in which contradictions and censored ideologies can "ultimately burst asunder the system of the official ideology" (88). Such a theory of revolutionary change might recall once more the work of Kristeva who developed Bakhtin's analysis of literature as a practice of radical poetics to the point where she could claim that "there is no equivalence, but rather, identity between challenging official linguistic codes and challenging official law" ("Word, Dialogue, and Novel," 65). Although Kristevaherself was soon to shy away from the full implications of this claim, her work enabled an important
27. V.N. Volosinov, Freudianism: A MarxistCritique, trans. I.R. Titunik (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 88-9. Further references will be cited in the text. 28. Volosinov almost seems to imply on page 90 that psychoanalysis itself constitutes a revolutionary movement. His idea of the unconscious as a foreign body in the psyche should be compared to Nicolas Abraham's "The Shell and the Kernel,"Diacritics 9, no. 1(1979): 16-28.
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development in film and literary theory associated in particular with There the idea was developed that the exposure of the journal Screen. the materiality of the language of the so-called "classic realist text" was virtually a revolutionary act, an exposure generally conducted in an authoritative language that reproduced the very quality that it claimed to unmask.29The school of thought that Screen came to represent did not survive the critique of Althusser. At thatjuncture, critical not only for Screen, many Marxists paradoxicallyattempted to invoke Bakhtin. VI Is there a future use for Bakhtin in Marxist criticism? Yes and no. It is possible that the current interest of sociologists in his epistemology of the human sciences may produce work that will have significant effects for literary criticism.30But at the present time there seems to be less a future for Bakhtin than for Bakhtin without Bakhtin, that is, for the texts of the Bakhtin circle that are not published under his name. There is a case to be made for separating out the works of the sociological period 1926-29, all of which are signed by Medvedev and Volosinov. Todorov, who is sceptical about claims that Bakhtin wrote virtually everything, makes the point that the publications of Medvedev and VoloSinov all take the form of critiques - of psychoanalysis,formalism in literary studies, and contemporary linguistics. Their three books and related articles are the only items in the writings of the Bakhtin circle for which Marxistpresuppositions are crucial. By contrast, Bakhtin's own 1924 essay on Formalism was written within the very terms of German aesthetic theory that Medvedev attacked. References to Marxism in Bakhtin's own writings are minimal; his work on Dostoevsky, first Creative was attacked Practice, published in 1929 as Problems ofDostoevsky's an orthodox M. in a review Marxist, Starinkov, by tellingly entitled
29. Kristeva'smost important work in this vein was LaRevolution du langagepoetique: a lafin du dix-neuvieme et Mallarme(Paris: Seuil, 1977). L'Avant-garde siecle;Lautreamont The most sustained argument of this kind in Britainwas advanced by Rosalind Coward and John Ellis in Language and Materialism: in Semiology and theTheory Developments of the (London: Routledge& Kegan Paul, 1977). Surprisingly, they do not consider the Subject work of Volosinov directly. For a useful critique see Diana Adlam and Angie Salfield, "A Matter of Language," Ideology and Consciousness 3 (1978): 95-111. 30. Chapter Two of MikhaflBakhtinehas recently been translated in Economy and as "Epistemology of the Human Sciences," 13, no. 1 Society (1984): 25-42.
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"Polyphonic Idealism."3"In spite of the resemblances there are some striking differences between Bakhtin and his collaborators, the most remarkable of which is VoloSinov's dismissal of the prevalent use of of Language. reported speech at the end of Marxismand the Philosophy Without Bakhtin, the critical and methodological work of Medvedev and Volosinov provides a coherent body of work that still retains considerablepotential. KeithTribe's discussion of Medvedev and Macherey might provide a starting point here; the work of Michel Pecheux, who proposes a different though not incompatible materialist theory of language, could also be taken into account.32 The Rabelaisbook poses a more difficult question. Of all Bakhtin's works it is most attractive for Marxists because it seems closest to the terms of a Marxist criticism, no doubt an effect of its origins as a thesis written during the Stalin period. As a direct political intervention it should never be underestimated. On the other hand, Bakhtin's Marxism in Rabelais,as David Forgacs observes, is somewhat diluted and utopic ("Marxist Literary Theories," 165). Carnival offers a liberal rather than a Marxist politics. To suggest the separation of Bakhtin from Medvedev and Volosinov is not to devalue his work, only to say that unlike his collaborators he eschews the dialectical method for dialogism. The ambivalence of his texts means that rather than providing support for either Marxism or poststructuralism against each other the texts themselves constitute the most significant contemporary site of their contestation. If this suggests the possibility that Bakhtin's work could open up a dialogic interaction between the two, then such a dialogue, if it takes the form of a"textual" reading of Marx, will need to be more than a merely literary enterprise: it will also have to show that its readings can exert an effective pressure upon current work being done in the social sciences.
31. Todorov, Mikhatl Baktine,20-21. andSociety 32. KeithTribe, "LiteraryMethodology," Economy 9, no. 2 (1980): 241-9; Michel Pecheux, Language,Semantics,and Ideology: Statingthe Obvious,trans. Harbon Nagpal (London: Macmillan, 1982).

Young, Robert - Back To Bakhtin

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Back to Bakhtin Author(s): Robert Young Reviewed work(s): Source: Cultural Critique, No. 2 (Winter, 1985-1986), pp.

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