Mikhail Bakhtin
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Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Russian:
Михаил Михайлович Бахти́н, pronounced)
(November 17, 1895, Oryol – March 7,
1975) was a Russian philosopher,
literary critic, semiotician and scholar
who worked on literary theory, ethics,
and the philosophy of language. His
writings, on a variety of subjects,
inspired scholars working in a number of
different traditions (Marxism,
semiotics, structuralism, religious
criticism) and in disciplines as diverse
as literary criticism, history,
philosophy, anthropology and psychology.
Although Bakhtin was active in the
debates on aesthetics and literature
that took place in Soviet Russia in the
1920s, his distinctive position did not
become well known until he was
rediscovered by Russian scholars in the
1960s.
Introduction
Bakhtin had a difficult life and
career, and few of his works were
published in an authoritative form
during his lifetime. As a result, there
is substantial disagreement over matters
that are normally taken for granted:
what discipline he worked in (was he a
philosopher or literary critic?), how to
periodize his work, and even what texts
he wrote (see below). He is known for a
series of concepts that have been used
and adapted in a number of disciplines:
dialogism, the carnivalesque, the
chronotope, heteroglossia and "outsidedness"
(the English translation of a Russian
term vnenakhodimost, sometimes rendered
into English — from French rather than
from Russian — as "exotopy"). Together
these concepts outline a distinctive
philosophy of language and culture that
has at its center the claims that all
discourse is in essence a dialogical
exchange and that this endows all
language with a particular ethical or
ethico-political force.
As a literary theorist, Bakhtin is
associated with the Russian Formalists,
and his work is compared with that of
Yuri Lotman; in 1963 Roman Jakobson
mentioned him as one of the few
intelligent critics of Formalism. During
the 1920s, Bakhtin's work tended to
focus on ethics and aesthetics in
general. Early pieces such as Towards a
Philosophy of the Act and Author and
Hero in Aesthetic Activity are indebted
to the philosophical trends of the time
– particularly the Marburg School
Neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen,
including Ernst Cassirer, Max Scheler
and, to a lesser extent, Nicolai
Hartmann. Bakhtin began to be discovered
by scholars in 1963, but it was only
after his death in 1975 that authors
such as Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan
Todorov brought Bakhtin to the attention
of the Francophone world, and from there
his popularity in the United States, the
United Kingdom, and many other countries
continued to grow. In the late 1980s,
Bakhtin's work experienced a surge of
popularity in the West.
Bakhtin’s primary works include Toward a
Philosophy of the Act, an unfinished
portion of a philosophical essay;
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art, to which
Bakhtin later added a chapter on the
concept of carnival and published with
the title Problems of Dostoyevsky’s
Poetics; Rabelais and His World, which
explores the openness of the Rabelaisian
novel; The Dialogic Imagination, whereby
the four essays that comprise the work
introduce the concepts of dialogism,
heteroglossia, and chronotope; and
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, a
collection of essays in which Bakhtin
concerns himself with method and
culture.
In the 1920s there was a "Bakhtin
school" in Russia, in line with the
discourse analysis of Ferdinand de
Saussure and Roman Jakobson.
Biography
Bakhtin was born in Oryol, Russia, to an
old family of the nobility. His father
was the manager of a bank and worked in
several cities. For this reason Bakhtin
spent his early childhood years in Orel,
Vilnius, and then Odessa, where in 1913
he joined the historical and
philological faculty at the local
university. Katerina Clark and Michael
Holquist write: "Odessa..., like
Vilnius, was an appropriate setting for
a chapter in the life of a man who was
to become the philosopher of
heteroglossia and carnival. The same
sense of fun and irreverence that gave
birth to Babel's Rabelaisian gangster or
to the tricks and deceptions of Ostap
Bender, the picaro created by Ilf and
Petrov, left its mark on Bakhtin." He
later transferred to Petersburg
University to join his brother Nikolai.
It is here that Bakhtin was greatly
influenced by the classicist F. F.
Zelinsky, whose works contain the
beginnings of concepts elaborated by
Bakhtin.
Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918
and moved to a small city in western
Russia, Nevel (Pskov Oblast), where he
worked as a schoolteacher for two years.
It was at this time that the first "Bakhtin
Circle" formed. The group consisted of
intellectuals with varying interests,
but all shared a love for the discussion
of literary, religious, and political
topics. Included in this group were
Valentin Voloshinov and, eventually, P.
N. Medvedev, who joined the group later
in Vitebsk. German philosophy was the
topic talked about most frequently and,
from this point forward, Bakhtin
considered himself more a philosopher
than a literary scholar. It was in Nevel,
also, that Bakhtin worked tirelessly on
a large work concerning moral philosophy
that was never published in its
entirety. However, in 1919, a short
section of this work was published and
given the title "Art and
Responsibility." This piece constitutes
Bakhtin’s first published work. Bakhtin
relocated to Vitebsk in 1920. It was
here, in 1921, that Bakhtin married
Elena Aleksandrovna Okolovich. Later, in
1923, Bakhtin was diagnosed with
osteomyelitis, a bone disease that
ultimately led to the amputation of his
leg in 1938. This illness hampered his
productivity and rendered him an
invalid.
In 1924, Bakhtin moved to Leningrad,
where he assumed a position at the
Historical Institute and provided
consulting services for the State
Publishing House. It is at this time
that Bakhtin decided to share his work
with the public, but just before "On the
Question of the Methodology of
Aesthetics in Written Works" was to be
published, the journal in which it was
to appear stopped publication. This work
was eventually published fifty-one years
later. The repression and misplacement
of his manuscripts was something that
would plague Bakhtin throughout his
career. In 1929, "Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Art," Bakhtin’s first major
work, was published. It is here that
Bakhtin introduces the concept of
dialogism. However, just as this
revolutionary book was introduced,
Bakhtin was accused of participating in
the Russian Orthodox Church's
underground movement. The truthfulness
of this charge is not known, even today.
Consequently, during one of the many
purges of artists and intellectuals that
Stalin conducted during the early years
of his rule, Bakhtin was sentenced to
exile in Siberia but appealed on the
grounds that, in his weakened state, it
would kill him. Instead, he was
sentenced to six years of internal exile
in Kazakhstan.
Bakhtin spent these six years working as
a book keeper in the town of Kustanai,
during which time he wrote several
important essays, including "Discourse
in the Novel." In 1936 he taught courses
at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute
in Saransk. An obscure figure in a
provincial college, he dropped out of
view and taught only occasionally. In
1937, Bakhtin moved to Kimry, a town
located a couple of hundred kilometers
from Moscow. Here, Bakhtin completed
work on a book concerning the
18th-century German novel which was
subsequently accepted by the Sovetskii
Pisatel' Publishing House. However, the
only copy of the manuscript disappeared
during the upheaval caused by the German
invasion.
After the amputation of his leg in 1938,
Bakhtin’s health improved and he became
more prolific. In 1940, and until the
end of World War II, Bakhtin lived in
Moscow, where he submitted a
dissertation on Rabelais to the Gorky
Institute of World Literature to obtain
a postgraduate title, a dissertation
that could not be defended until the war
ended. In 1946 and 1949, the defense of
this dissertation divided the scholars
of Moscow into two groups: those
official opponents guiding the defense,
who accepted the original and unorthodox
manuscript, and those other professors
who were against the manuscript’s
acceptance. The book's earthy, anarchic
topic was the cause of many arguments
that ceased only when the government
intervened. Ultimately, Bakhtin was
denied a doctorate and granted a lesser
degree by the State Accrediting Bureau.
Later, Bakhtin was invited back to
Saransk, where he took on the position
of chair of the General Literature
Department at the Mordovian Pedagogical
Institute. When, in 1957, the Institute
changed from a teachers' college to a
university, Bakhtin became head of the
Department of Russian and World
Literature. In 1961, Bakhtin’s
deteriorating health forced him to
retire, and in 1969, in search of
medical attention, Bakhtin moved back to
Moscow, where he lived until his death
in 1975.
Bakhtin’s works and ideas gained
popularity after his death, and he
endured difficult conditions for much of
his professional life, a time in which
information was often seen as dangerous
and therefore often hidden. Therefore,
the details provided now are often of
uncertain accuracy. Also contributing to
the imprecision of these details is the
limited access to Russian archival
information during Bakhtin’s life. It is
only after the archives became public
that scholars realized that much of what
they thought they knew about the details
of Bakhtin’s life was false or skewed
largely by Bakhtin himself.
Works and ideas
Toward a Philosophy of the Act
Toward a Philosophy of the Act was first
published in Russia in 1986 with the
title K filosofii postupka. The
manuscript, written between
1919–1921,was found in bad condition
with pages missing and sections of text
that were illegible. It is for this
reason that this philosophical essay
appears today as a fragment of an
unfinished work. Toward a Philosophy of
the Act comprises only an introduction,
of which the first few pages are
missing, and part one of the full text.
However, Bakhtin’s intentions for the
work were not altogether lost, for he
provided an outline in the introduction
in which he stated that the essay was to
contain four parts. The first part of
the essay deals with the analysis of the
performed acts or deeds that comprise
the actual world; "the world actually
experienced, and not the merely
thinkable world." For the three
subsequent and unfinished parts of
Toward a Philosophy of the Act Bakhtin
states the topics he intends to discuss.
He outlines that the second part will
deal with aesthetic activity and the
ethics of artistic creation; the third
with the ethics of politics; and the
fourth with religion.
Toward a Philosophy of the Act reveals a
young Bakhtin who is in the process of
developing his moral philosophy by
decentralizing the work of Kant. This
text is one of Bakhtin’s early works
concerning ethics and aesthetics and it
is here that Bakhtin lays out three
claims regarding the acknowledgment of
the uniqueness of one’s participation in
Being:
1. I both actively and passively
participate in Being.
2. My uniqueness is given but it
simultaneously exists only to the degree
to which I actualize this uniqueness (in
other words, it is in the performed act
and deed that has yet to be achieved).
3. Because I am actual and irreplaceable
I must actualize my uniqueness.
Bakhtin further states: "It is in
relation to the whole actual unity that
my unique ought arises from my unique
place in Being." Bakhtin deals with the
concept of morality whereby he
attributes the predominating legalistic
notion of morality to human moral
action. According to Bakhtin, the I
cannot maintain neutrality toward moral
and ethical demands which manifest
themselves as one’s voice of
consciousness.
It is here also that Bakhtin introduces
an architectonic model of the human
psyche which consists of three
components: "I-for-myself,"
"I-for-the-other," and "other-for-me."
The I-for-myself is an unreliable source
of identity, and Bakhtin argues that it
is the I-for-the-other through which
human beings develop a sense of identity
because it serves as an amalgamation of
the way in which others view me.
Conversely, other-for-me describes the
way in which others incorporate my
perceptions of them into their own
identities. Identity, as Bakhtin
describes it here, does not belong
merely to the individual, rather it is
shared by all.
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art:
polyphony and unfinalizability
During his time in Leningrad,
Bakhtin shifted his focus away from the
philosophy characteristic of his early
works and towards the notion of
dialogue. It is at this time that he
began his engagement with the work of
Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s
Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s
seminal work, and it is here that
Bakhtin introduces three important
concepts.
First, is the concept of the
unfinalizable self: individual people
cannot be finalized, completely
understood, known, or labeled. Though it
is possible to understand people and to
treat them as if they are completely
known, Bakhtin’s conception of
unfinalizability respects the
possibility that a person can change,
and that a person is never fully
revealed or fully known in the world.
Readers may find that this conception
reflects the idea of the soul; Bakhtin
had strong roots in Christianity and in
the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann
Cohen, both of which emphasized the
importance of an individual's
potentially infinite capability, worth,
and the hidden soul.
Second, is the idea of the relationship
between the self and others, or other
groups. According to Bakhtin, every
person is influenced by others in an
inescapably intertwined way, and
consequently no voice can be said to be
isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once
explained that,
In order to understand, it is immensely
important for the person who understands
to be located outside the object of his
or her creative understanding—in time,
in space, in culture. For one cannot
even really see one's own exterior and
comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors
or photographs can help; our real
exterior can be seen and understood only
by other people, because they are
located outside us in space, and because
they are others. ~New York Review of
Books, June 10, 1993.
As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly
respected the influences of others on
the self, not merely in terms of how a
person comes to be, but also in how a
person thinks and how a person sees him-
or herself truthfully.
Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's
work a true representation of polyphony,
that is, many voices. Each character in
Dostoevsky's work represents a voice
that speaks for an individual self,
distinct from others. This idea of
polyphony is related to the concepts of
unfinalizability and self-and-others,
since it is the unfinalizability of
individuals that creates true polyphony.
Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic
concept of truth. He criticized the
assumption that, if two people disagree,
at least one of them must be in error.
He challenged philosophers for whom
plurality of minds is accidental and
superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a
statement, a sentence or a phrase.
Instead, truth is a number of mutually
addressed, albeit contradictory and
logically inconsistent, statements.
Truth needs a multitude of carrying
voices. It cannot be held within a
single mind, it also cannot be expressed
by "a single mouth." The polyphonic
truth requires many simultaneous voices.
Bakhtin does not mean to say that many
voices carry partial truths that
complement each other. A number of
different voices do not make the truth
if simply "averaged" or "synthesized."
It is the fact of mutual addressivity,
of engagement, and of commitment to the
context of a real-life event, that
distinguishes truth from untruth.
When, in subsequent years, Problems of
Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into
English and published in the West,
Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept
of carnival and the book was published
with the slightly different title,
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics.
According to Bakhtin, carnival is the
context in which distinct individual
voices are heard, flourish and interact
together. The carnival creates the
"threshold" situations where regular
conventions are broken or reversed and
genuine dialogue becomes possible. The
notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way
of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic
style: each individual character is
strongly defined, and at the same time
the reader witnesses the critical
influence of each character upon the
other. That is to say, the voices of
others are heard by each individual, and
each inescapably shapes the character of
the other.
Rabelais and His World: carnival and
grotesque
During World War II Bakhtin
submitted a dissertation on the French
Renaissance writer François Rabelais
which was not defended until some years
later. The controversial ideas discussed
within the work caused much
disagreement, and it was consequently
decided that Bakhtin be denied his
doctorate. Thus, due to its content,
Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle
Ages and Renaissance was not published
until 1965, at which time it was given
the title, Rabelais and His World.
A classic of Renaissance studies, in
Rabelais and His World Bakhtin explores
Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Bakhtin declares that, for centuries,
Rabelais’s book had been misunderstood,
and claimed that Rabelais and His World
clarified Rabelais’s intentions. In
Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin concerns
himself with the openness of Gargantua
and Pantagruel; however, the book itself
also serves as an example of such
openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin
attempts two things: he seeks to recover
sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel
that, in the past, were either ignored
or suppressed, and conducts an analysis
of the Renaissance social system in
order to discover the balance between
language that was permitted and language
that was not. It is by means of this
analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two
important subtexts: the first is
carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin
describes as a social institution, and
the second is grotesque realism which is
defined as a literary mode. Thus, in
Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies
the interaction between the social and
the literary, as well as the meaning of
the body.
The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope,
Heteroglossia
The Dialogic Imagination (first
published as a whole in 1975) is a
compilation of four essays concerning
language and the novel: "Epic and Novel"
(1941), "From the Prehistory of
Novelistic Discourse," "Forms of Time
and of the Chronotope in the Novel," and
"Discourse in the Novel." It is through
the essays contained within The Dialogic
Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the
concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and
chronotope, making a significant
contribution to the realm of literary
scholarship. Bakhtin explains the
generation of meaning through the
"primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia),
the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia)
and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).
Heteroglossia is "the base condition
governing the operation of meaning in
any utterance." To make an utterance
means to "appropriate the words of
others and populate them with one's own
intention." Bakhtin's deep insights on
dialogicality represent a substantive
shift from views on the nature of
language and knowledge by major thinkers
as Ferdinand de Saussure and Kant.
In "Epic and Novel," Bakhtin
demonstrates the novel’s distinct nature
by contrasting it with the epic. By
doing so, Bakhtin shows that the novel
is well suited to the post-industrial
civilization in which we live because it
flourishes on diversity. It is this same
diversity that the epic attempts to
eliminate from the world. According to
Bakhtin, the novel as a genre is unique
in that it is able to embrace, ingest,
and devour other genres while still
maintaining its status as a novel. Other
genres, however, cannot emulate the
novel without damaging their own
distinct identity.
"From the Prehistory of Novelistic
Discourse" is a less traditional essay
in which Bakhtin reveals how various
different texts from the past have
ultimately come together to form the
modern novel.
"Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in
the Novel" introduces Bakhtin’s concept
of chronotope. This essay applies the
concept in order to further demonstrate
the distinctive quality of the novel.
The word chronotope literally means
"time space" and is defined by Bakhtin
as "the intrinsic connectedness of
temporal and spatial relationships that
are artistically expressed in
literature." For the purpose of his
writing, an author must create entire
worlds and, in doing so, is forced to
make use of the organizing categories of
the real world in which he lives. For
this reason chronotope is a concept that
engages reality.
The final essay, "Discourse in the
Novel," is one of Bakhtin’s most
complete statements concerning his
philosophy of language. It is here that
Bakhtin provides a model for a history
of discourse and introduces the concept
of heteroglossia. The term heteroglossia
refers to the qualities of a language
that are extralinguistic, but common to
all languages. These include qualities
such as perspective, evaluation, and
ideological positioning. In this way
most languages are incapable of
neutrality, for every word is
inextricably bound to the context in
which it exists.
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
In Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays Bakhtin moves away from the novel
and concerns himself with the problems
of method and the nature of culture.
There are six essays that comprise this
compilation: "Response to a Question
from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff," "The
Bildungsroman and Its Significance in
the History of Realism," "The Problem of
Speech Genres," "The Problem of the Text
in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human
Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical
Analysis," "From Notes Made in 1970-71,"
and "Toward a Methodology for the Human
Sciences."
". Response to a Question from the Novy
Mir Editorial Staff" is a transcript of
comments made by Bakhtin to a reporter
from a monthly journal called Novy Mir
that was widely read by Soviet
intellectuals. The transcript expresses
Bakhtin’s opinion of literary
scholarship whereby he highlights some
of its shortcomings and makes
suggestions for improvement.
"The Bildungsroman and Its Significance
in the History of Realism" is a fragment
from one of Bakhtin’s lost books. The
publishing house to which Bakhtin had
submitted the full manuscript was blown
up during the German invasion and
Bakhtin was in possession of only the
prospectus. However, due to a shortage
of paper, Bakhtin began using this
remaining section to roll cigarettes. So
only a portion of the opening section
remains. This remaining section deals
primarily with Goethe.
"The Problem of Speech Genres" deals
with the difference between Saussurean
linguistics and language as a living
dialogue (translinguistics). In a
relatively short space, this essay takes
up a topic about which Bakhtin had
planned to write a book, making the
essay a rather dense and complex read.
It is here that Bakhtin distinguishes
between literary and everyday language.
According to Bakhtin, genres exist not
merely in language, but rather in
communication. In dealing with genres,
Bakhtin indicates that they have been
studied only within the realm of
rhetoric and literature, but each
discipline draws largely on genres that
exist outside both rhetoric and
literature. These extraliterary genres
have remained largely unexplored.
Bakhtin makes the distinction between
primary genres and secondary genres,
whereby primary genres legislate those
words, phrases, and expressions that are
acceptable in everyday life, and
secondary genres are characterized by
various types of text such as legal,
scientific, etc.
"The Problem of the Text in Linguistics,
Philology, and the Human Sciences: An
Experiment in Philosophical Analysis" is
a compilation of the thoughts Bakhtin
recorded in his notebooks. These notes
focus mostly on the problems of the
text, but various other sections of the
paper discuss topics he has taken up
elsewhere, such as speech genres, the
status of the author, and the distinct
nature of the human sciences. However,
"The Problem of the Text" deals
primarily with dialogue and the way in
which a text relates to its context.
Speakers, Bakhtin claims, shape an
utterance according to three variables:
the object of discourse, the immediate
addressee, and a superaddressee. This is
what Bakhtin describes as the tertiary
nature of dialogue.
"From Notes Made in 1970-71" appears
also as a collection of fragments
extracted from notebooks Bakhtin kept
during the years of 1970 and 1971. It is
here that Bakhtin discusses
interpretation and its endless
possibilities. According to Bakhtin,
humans have a habit of making narrow
interpretations, but such limited
interpretations only serve to weaken the
richness of the pastt.
The final essay, "Toward a Methodology
for the Human Sciences," originates from
notes Bakhtin wrote during the
mid-seventies and is the last piece of
writing Bakhtin produced before he died.
In this essay he makes a distinction
between dialectic and dialogics and
comments on the difference between the
text and the aesthetic object. It is
here also, that Bakhtin differentiates
himself from the Formalists, who, he
felt, underestimated the importance of
content while oversimplifying change,
and the Structuralists, who too rigidly
adhered to the concept of "code."
Disputed texts
Some of the works which bear the
names of Bakhtin's close friends V. N.
Vološinov and P. N. Medvedev have been
attributed to Bakhtin – particularly The
Formal Method in Literary Scholarship
and Marxism and Philosophy of Language.
These claims originated in the early
1970s and received their earliest full
articulation in English in Clark and
Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. In
the years since then, however, most
scholars have come to agree that
Vološinov and Medvedev ought to be
considered the true authors of these
works. Although Bakhtin undoubtedly
influenced these scholars and may even
have had a hand in composing the works
attributed to them, it now seems clear
that if it was necessary to attribute
authorship of these works to one person,
Vološinov and Medvedev respectively
should receive credit.
Influence
He is known today for his interest
in a wide variety of subjects, ideas,
vocabularies, and periods, as well as
his use of authorial disguises, and for
his influence (alongside György Lukács)
on the growth of Western scholarship on
the novel as a premiere literary genre.
As a result of the breadth of topics
with which he dealt, Bakhtin has
influenced such Western schools of
theory as Neo-Marxism, Structuralism,
and Semiotics. However, his influence on
such groups has, somewhat paradoxically,
resulted in narrowing the scope of
Bakhtin’s work. According to Clark and
Holquist, rarely do those who
incorporate Bakhtin’s ideas into
theories of their own appreciate his
work in its entirety.
While Bakhtin is traditionally seen as a
literary critic, there can be no denying
his impact on the realm of rhetorical
theory. Among his many theories and
ideas Bakhtin indicates that style is a
developmental process, occurring both
within the user of language and language
itself. His work instills in the reader
an awareness of tone and expression that
arises from the careful formation of
verbal phrasing. By means of his
writing, Bakhtin has enriched the
experience of verbal and written
expression which ultimately aids the
formal teaching of writing.Some even
suggest that Bakhtin introduces a new
meaning to rhetoric because of his
tendency to reject the separation of
language and ideology.
Bakhtin has been compared to Derrida and
Michel Foucault.
