Creative Marxist Conceptions

Bakhtin: 
In Context of Literary Revolutions

Many of the biographical sketches about the prominent literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975 ) are branding him as a neo-Kantian philosopher . His friendship with Matvei Kagan who later joined the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen, is sited as a reason for this analysis. Hermann Cohen later formed the Marburg school and focused on the problems of epistemology and logic. We can see that neo-Kantians could never resolve the issues of idealist notions on Knowledge and empirical perspectives on the social activity of humans. They never went beyond the idealist architecture of Kantian system. 

Worse to say, neo-Kantianism became a inflated rhetoric over the universal human phenomenology posited by Kant. This sort of ideological position was a reflection of the continuing crisis in the bourgeoisie idealism in the times of World war. It reflected the desperate attempt by bourgeois ideologies to encapsulate the horizons of enlightenment. And many a times neo-Kantians reduced their 'philosophical positions' to mere personal allegations and quarrels. This inevitable locus of events made young George Lukcas to desert his early Kantian notions on the theory of knowledge which is reflected in his early works ( 'Theory of a Novel' ).

Regarding Bakhtinian studies, none of these analysts are showing any interest in seeing the semiotic trajectory of his materialist discourse which traverses the literary works and epistemological structures, toppling the monolithic hierarchies ( and underlying class positions ) and idealist narratives. In Bakhtin's positions, we can see the evolution of a language subsystem with semiotic value system based on the underlying process of historical materialism. He tried to explore the multitude of dimensions of signs and its historic semiotics. 

For him, 'Sign was never arbitrary'. He tried to create new pathways in semiotics by widening the domains of semiosis. Bakhtin was always analytical of the parody in literary works. For him, it was a site of the dialogic imagination. This is the major focus in his doctoral thesis 'Rabelais and his world'. It was a work on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais. Bakhtin explores Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in this thesis. His semiotic orientation is reflected in selecting a work of Parody as a site of textual analysis. 

A work of Parody and satire with dialogic potential will be imminent in the creation of new cultural signs. This can be attributed in his choice of Rabelais. Bakhtin identifies a rare unity of contradicting discourses in the Political satire of Rabelais, which communicated well with the people of his times. It was rich in folk spectacle, carnival atmosphere and festivity of images. But interestingly this aesthetics was too cryptic for the critics of next two centuries. For them, it was too heterogeneous and in eighteenth century it became too incompatible. 

All these can be traced in the works of his imitators (Des Periers , Noel du Fail) itself. Grotesque was used to convey the contradictory and double faced fullness of life in the works of Rabelais. This became a mere shadow in the works of imitators. Bakhtin identifies the elements of dialectics in the composition of grotesque when he invokes the process of negation of negation to describe the organic birth of anew life from the destruction happening in grotesque.

"Negation and destruction ( death of the old ) are included in the essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image ( food, wine, the genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character. This principle is victorious, for the final result is always abundance, increase." 

(Page 62, Rabelais and his world By Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin )

Here we can see Bakhtinian prism traversing through the layers of grotesque image. We have seen similar analysis of archetypal symbols in the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung. But this is evidently more near to the processes of historical materialism. And he identifies the embedded but distorted positivity of primitive life in the compositions and ideological strata of myths. To be more precise, grotesque is materialistic and repellent towards the ideological forces. Always it shows its primitiveness and innate dynamics, even towards much forceful and static lattice of ideology.

If we turn to his notion of 'quoted speech', it throws light on the otherwise cryptic space of our inner speech and on the dynamics involved in the verbal communication. This framework runs through his analysis of the multiplicity of styles involved the discourse of novel. He says that all our communicative acts are reuse or use of quoted speech of others. Thus he locates the dialectic elements of 'I /Other' in the space - time conjecture of speech. 'I /Other ' compound is termed as a dual sign by many Bakhtin analysts. This notion 

is an omission of the historical process behind the dynamics of 'I / Other'. The meanings of the 'I /Other' are positioned with respect to the common material system of language. Hence 'I/Other' cannot exist as independent duals.

Another aspect of debate is about Bakhtin's interest on the folk culture. Linguistic carnival is an essential element in his studies on the culture of the so called lower strata of society. This notion is a negation of the class hierarchies as represented in many of the art works ( Edgar Allan Poe, Doestovsky etc ). And he writes about the carnival atmosphere in the medieval plays. It is deep rooted in primordial order and primordial thinking of man. But he stresses that it is not a literary phenomenon. He annotates it as a syncretic paegentry of ritualistic sort. [Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics ]. He is always careful to say that it can only be transposed into the realms of literature. Here we see Bakhtin traversing beyond the limits of verbal language itself. 

It is also to be noted that Bakhtin's notions about the organics of lower strata of life is quite different from the postmodern notion of subalterns. Bakhtin says that in carnival there are no divisions of performers and spectators. It is not contemplated ; not even performed. In Bakhtin's varied investigations , thus we can see the revolutionary trajectory of a Marxian radiance through the obscure most and primordial terrains of human civilization. Still , a lot to unearth from his theory of discourse and language that spans more than 6 decades of explorations .