Mikhail Bakhtin And - Gazette Kreatiff
Mikhail Bakhtin andWalter BenjaminExperience and FormTim Beasley-Murray
Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin
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Mikhail Bakhtin andWalter BenjaminExperience and FormTim Beasley-Murray
Tim Beasley-Murray 2007All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of thispublication may be made without written permission.No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmittedsave with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licencepermitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publicationmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.The author has asserted his right to be identifiedas the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,Designs and Patents Act 1988.First published 2007 byPALGRAVE MACMILLANHoundmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010Companies and representatives throughout the worldPALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the PalgraveMacmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdomand other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the EuropeanUnion and other countries.ISBN-13: 978 0 230 53535 0 hardbackISBN-10: 0 230 53535 6 hardbackThis book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fullymanaged and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturingprocesses are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of thecountry of origin.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 116 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07Printed and bound in Great Britain byAntony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
For Charlotte and Felix
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ContentsNote on Abbreviations and ReferencesIntroductionviii11 Habit and Tradition192 Experience483 Language884 Totalities122Notes153Bibliography196Index209vii
Note on Abbreviations andReferencesReferences to most texts by Bakhtin and Voloshinov are to the Englishtranslations of their works and are included in parentheses in the text.The following system of abbreviations is used:AHDIDPMPLRabelaisSGTPABakhtin, M. M., ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’,in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays byM. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov,trans. Vadim Liapunov, Austin TX, 1990.Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays byM. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emersonand Michael Holquist, Austin TX, 1981.Bakhtin, M. M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. andtrans. Caryl Emerson, Manchester, 1984.Vološinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,ed. and trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, London,1973.Bakhtin, M. M., Rabelais and his World, trans. HélèneIswolsky, Bloomington IN, 1984.Bakhtin, M. M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. CarylEmerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee,Austin TX, 1986.Bakhtin, M. M., Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. VadimLiapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov,Austin TX, 1993.Other works by Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle are referred to in thenormal fashion.References to Benjamin are to the German edition of his writingsas well as to English translations, except in the few cases where nopublished translation exists. Most references are also given in parentheses in the text and are abbreviated as follows:GSBenjamin, W., Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols, ed. RolfTiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt/Main, 1974.viii
Note on Abbreviations and ReferencesBriefeSWOGTDAPixBenjamin, W., Briefe, 2 vols, ed. Gershom Scholem andTheodor W. Adorno, Frankfurt/Main, 1993.Benjamin, W., Selected Writings, 4 vols, ed. MichaelW. Jennings and others, trans. Howard Eiland, Rodney Livingstone and others, Cambridge MA, 1996–2003.Benjamin, W., The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. JohnOsborne, London, 1977.Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland andKevin McLaughlin, Cambridge MA, 1999.Whilst the translations given follow the published versions for the mostpart, occasionally I have made slight modifications. I indicate wheresuch modifications have taken place.
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IntroductionExperience and Form: the actuality of Bakhtin andBenjaminThe question of the relation of experience to form is the question ofthe extent to which human beings are able to recognize themselvesin the forms that the historical and social moment in which they livemakes available to them. It is the question of the way that my experience is reflected in the formally organized world that surrounds me.The relationship between experience and form is necessarily historicallylocated. For Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, born in Orel, Russia,in 1895, and in Berlin, in 1892, respectively, and entering adult life atthe close of the First World War, their historical experience is the experience of a rapidly and radically modernizing world. Though neither sawservice in that conflict, they both were only a little younger than thegeneration of young men who returned shattered and transformed fromthe battlefields of Europe. In ‘The Storyteller’, his essay of 1936 thatnotes the decay of the power of traditional narrative forms, caused inpart by the experience of mechanized warfare, Benjamin describes theexperience of this generation as follows:A generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars nowstood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remainedunchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force fieldof destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.(GS II 439; SW III 144)Bakhtin and Benjamin’s thoughts are similarly marked by a sense ofthe fractured nature of specifically modern experience. This fracturing1
2Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjaminarises from an historical dislocation of experience from the forms thatare designed to enable human beings to make sense of that experience (the forms of habitualized social behaviour, tradition, cognition,language, artistic genres, and art per se). Thus, for example, Bakhtin andBenjamin, in their thinking on the epic and the story, respectively, areheirs to a sense similar to Hegel’s sense of the falling into oblivion ofthe practice of forms through transformations in concrete social life.1Nevertheless, both thinkers seek the seeds of new, productive, and emancipatory experience in the new forms that those transformations bringinto being.Bakhtin and Benjamin write of a modernity that may not seem somodern to readers to whom horse-drawn trams are familiar only fromjerky images of silent newsreels and for whom, in the post-Auschwitznuclear age, trench warfare is, by a distance, no longer the most technologically advanced way of killing. Nevertheless, the thematic centreof this study, the question of experience and form, has continuingrelevance today. Unlike affirmative theorists of postmodernity, such asJean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, I do not believe that wehave entirely left Bakhtin and Benjamin’s era – a modernity of flux,characterized, one might argue, by anxiety – and entered a postmodernity of possibility, characterized by play. The dislocation of formand experience continues and has become, if anything, accentuatedby the ever-increasing intensity of centrifugal and centripetal forcesthat operate in processes of globalization and social fragmentation.Never have Bakhtin’s and Benjamin’s insights been more pertinent intheir radical deconstruction of hegemonic and authoritarian hierarchies,combined with a relentless attention to possibilities – not empty possibilities, but possibilities for the intervention of human subjects, possibilities that are tensely coiled in the midst of the new.The age in which we live is not characterized by the official seriousness of medieval culture that Bakhtin saw undermined by Rabelaisiancarnival, nor is it characterized by quite the same alliance of a cult ofprimal experience with technology that Benjamin saw in fascism andto which he opposed his own brand of disjunctive critical thinking anddisjunctive artistic practice. Nonetheless, it might be argued that theStraussian neo-conservatism, currently dominant in the United States,constitutes a qualitatively similar entwinement of myth and technology,and that the promotion of fear and orthodoxy by the proclamation ofa ‘war on terror’ constitutes a new form of official seriousness and fear.2Bakhtin’s and Benjamin’s critiques of such phenomena, then, retaintheir actuality.
Introduction3In similar fashion, the sense of an ‘end of politics’, of the ‘thirdway’, of the absolute and universal necessity of liberal democracy, asexpressed, in different forms, by thinkers such as Anthony Giddens,Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck, has become the hegemonic discourseof our post-1989 world. It has become (taking a Bakhtinian standpoint)the monologic discourse which brooks no answering back. It has become(taking a Benjaminian standpoint) an uncritical hypostatization of theconcept of progress which can conceive of no possible alternative stateof affairs other than the present. Frustration at this situation has ledsome on the left to run into the embrace of some dangerous comrades:Chantal Mouffe into the arms of Carl Schmitt;3 Slavoj Žižek into thearms of Lenin.4 An alliance of Bakhtin and Benjamin may provide a moreeffective theoretical resource in breaking out of the Denkverbot of latecapitalism – for the emancipatory forms that challenge authority neednot be the by-now dusty pages of Dostoevsky or the by-now familiarstage-tricks of Brecht.5 Both thinkers exhibit a lucid ability to see potentialities in the nascent, in the still-coming-into-being. It may take aperspective that draws on both Bakhtin and Benjamin to engage withsuch nascent forms. Furthermore, the alliance of politics and ethics, ofpolitical commitment and loving attention, that is formed when webring Bakhtin’s and Benjamin’s thought alongside each other is valuableand powerful.Angles of comparisonAs far as comparative studies of Bakhtin and Benjamin are concerned,despite many assertions of affinities and many comments in passing,very little has been written. Sandywell’s essay offers suggestions (suchas possible affinities between Benjamin’s concept of translation andBakhtin’s concept of dialogue or between Benjamin’s concept of messianic redemption and Bakhtin’s concept of ‘great time’) but operatesat such a level of generality and abstraction that his contribution isminimal.6 Eagleton’s treatment of Bakhtin in the context of his studyof Benjamin (he devotes in total about 13 pages of his 179-page studyto Bakhtin) is typically provocative but an also typical predominance ofrhetorical élan over analytical content limits its usefulness. Nevertheless, his work on Benjamin is suggestive in its use of Bakhtin’s conception of carnival to supplement Benjamin’s messianic Marxism and inthe concomitant insight that Bakhtin and Benjamin might be broughttogether on the territory of both Marxism and theology.7 Perhaps themost perspicacious study of Bakhtin and Benjamin is the essay by Zima
4Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjaminwhich fastens onto the central similarity between Benjamin’s conceptof the shock of montage and Bakhtin’s concept of carnival laughter. ForZima, both phenomena, shock and laughter, are ‘liberatory elements ofcritique whose ambivalence (the joining of incompatible values) constitutes the motor of a discourse both dialectic and dialogic’.8 Nevertheless,Zima’s emphasis on the eternally unfinalizable nature of what he termsBakhtin’s and Benjamin’s ambivalence is something that I take issuewith in my final chapter.9 Despite these and other contributions, then,this study represents, to the best of my knowledge, the most completeattempt at a comparative study of these two thinkers to date.10There are good reasons for this situation. A comparative study ofBakhtin and Benjamin cannot proceed along straight lines. It would bewrong to ignore the elements of incommensurability in a desire to focuson commensurability and comparison. An awareness of such incommensurabilities has led me along a crooked path through Bakhtin’sand Benjamin’s thought. This produces images of the two thinkers thatdiverge fundamentally from the images that one might construct whenpicturing any one of the thinkers independently. Thus, the image ofBakhtin presented here is one of the Bakhtin who appears in conjunction with Benjamin, and is a product of the oblique angle of comparison – and vice versa.11 My aim is to show that the oblique angle ofcomparison highlights aspects of both thinkers that otherwise remain inthe shadows. Thus, for example, in Chapter 3 that deals with Bakhtin’sand Benjamin’s philosophy of language, a Bakhtinian position on theprimacy of intersubjectivity over the fixed antinomy of subject andobject has led me to a reading of Benjamin’s conceptions of translation and montage as articulations of an intersubjective relationshipbetween the human subject and the world. Similarly, in the final chapteron totality, a Benjaminian standpoint on the temporal relationshipbetween provisional brokenness and future completion has led me toemphasize the provisional nature of dialogue, rather than what somecritics see as its eternal open-endedness. Furthermore, my thematic focuson the nexus between experience, form and modernity aims at morethan the simple intersection of the two thinkers’ ideas: it constitutes anattempt to uncover enduring insights that Bakhtin and Benjamin mayhave into how to make sense of our own modernity.ConnectionsMikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin inhabited worlds that seem,at first glance, to have few points of contact. The two months that
Introduction5Benjamin spent in Moscow in the winter of 1926–27 were marked bythe failure of his love affair with the Latvian communist Asja Lacisand, despite the outwardly enthusiastic tone of his ‘Moscow Diary’,Benjamin found life in the city alienating and exhausting. Benjaminknew no more than a few words of Russian, and whilst his interestin Russian and, especially, Soviet culture was, at times, passionate, itremained second-hand and somewhat naive. It seems improbable thathe could have come into contact with the Bakhtin Circle at all. Likewise,Bakhtin, who never left his native Russia and the Soviet Union, despitebeing rooted in the German-orientated Bildungskultur of his time, showsno evidence of having been acquainted with Benjamin or his work.Benjamin’s publications, in either book or magazine form, would havebeen unlikely to be accessible to Bakhtin, although one might speculatethat Bakhtin was familiar with the entry on Goethe that was commissioned from Benjamin for the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. Nevertheless, asKassack points out in the editorial apparatus to the Gesammelte Schriften,the published text only contains 12 per cent of Benjamin’s originalfrom which everything of substance has been eliminated.12 The pointsof connection, then, between the two subjects of comparison are necessarily mediated obliquely.First and most straightforwardly, one may speak of the two thinkers’similar backgrounds in the European philosophical tradition. Thesemight be considered diachronic contexts. In Chapter 2, I deal withBakhtin’s and Benjamin’s engagement with the philosophical opposition of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century between(neo-)Kantianism and Lebensphilosophie. I argue that these parallelengagements create structures that persist throughout the careers of thetwo thinkers and result in parallel emphases on the question of the relationship between life and culture, experience and form. Yet, as Chapter 2and the book as a whole demonstrate, a reconstruction of diachroniccontext is itself not straightforward given the far from straightforwardways in which the two thinkers relate to and represent their intellectualinheritances.13Second, one may speak of the connections provided by intermediaryfigures on the synchronic axis. One figure who stands out here is GeorgLukács, another thinker whose concern is the relationship betweenform and experience. Lukács’s early work The Theory of the Novel (1914)exerted a profound influence on both thinkers. Similarly, just as hislater work History and Class Consciousness (1923) provides a formativesubterranean strand in Benjamin’s thought from the Trauerspiel bookonwards, so Tihanov, in his book on the subject, demonstrates in great
6Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamindetail the extent of Bakhtin’s complex debt to both the early and laterLukács. One may also include in these synchronic connections thelink between Benjamin and Brecht, on the one hand, and Bakhtin andRussian Formalism, on the other. Formalism and Brecht provide a raremoment where the contemporary intellectual worlds of Bakhtin andBenjamin come into direct contact and the former has an influenceon the latter – for it seems that Brecht, on his trip to Russia in 1935,drew directly on the Formalist concept of ostranenie in his formulationof the notion of Verfremdung.14 Moreover, more generally, the radicalavant-garde aesthetics of both Brecht and Formalism present a disruptiverelationship between experience and form, a relationship conceived ofas the automatization and deautomatization of life and art, that exertsa continuing influence on both thinkers.15Third, it is possible to talk of a form of connection that is posthumous.As I argue in Chapter 1, both Bakhtin and Benjamin hold that themeanings contained in a work, and a work of philosophy as muchas a work of art, are revealed in time in the process of criticism. Theideas of Bakhtin and Benjamin are brought together not just on theterritory of this study but also in the intellectual developments that havefollowed them. By way of example, both thinkers have, to greater orlesser extents, been co-opted into varied discourses of post-Structuralism:Bakhtin, initially through Kristeva’s development of a post-Bakhtiniantheory of intertextuality and later by thinkers who found in Bakhtina gesture of perpetual openness, analogous to Derrida’s notion of theperpetual deferring of signification, which nevertheless did not jettisonthe notion of the individual subject;16 and Benjamin, whose focus onthe hidden resources of writing have proved an inspiration to thosewho have also been inspired by Derrida’s theory of grammatology andwhose conception of reading ‘against the grain’ has likewise drawnthe attention of proponents of Deconstruction.17 In both instances Icontend that Bakhtin and Benjamin have lent themselves to such anappropriation because of their insistence that what seems at first to bea secondary phenomenon (dialogue, writing) might fruitfully be understood as being of primary importance. Another case is that of Bakhtin’scollaborators, Voloshinov and Medvedev, whose work has, like thatof Benjamin, provided some commentators on the left with a moreMarx-based critique of Structuralism than the ideologically ambiguousapproach of post-Structuralism.18Finally, as I have already suggested, the most important connection between the two thinkers lies at the level of their different butanalogous engagements with a world that is distinctively modern. This
Introduction7connection is more than a question of the three years that separate theirbirths and is based on more than an empty notion such as Zeitgeist. Itis a commonplace to say that Benjamin is a thinker of modernity. Hisentire work is preoccupied with finding ways of negotiating and makingsense of
TPA Bakhtin, M. M., Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov, Austin TX, 1993. Other works by Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle are referred to in the . Benjamin, in their thinking on the epic and the story, respectively, are
3 Bakhtin’s carnival 63 4 Bakhtin and contemporary criticism 85 Notes to Part I 99 Part II Extracts from the writings of Bakhtin and his circle 5 V.N.Voloshinov: ‘Language, speech, and utterance’ and ‘Verbal interaction’ 105 6 M.M.Bakhtin and P.N.Medvedev: from ‘Material and device as components of the poetic construction’ 143
critic Mikhail Bakhtin to Western readers (primarily, to the French readership) in 1967 [Kristeva 1967]. Two years later, an English translation of Baktin’s book on Rablais «Rabelais and His World» [Bakhtin 1968] came out, and shortly afterwards, two reviews of the book, written by S. Miller and F. Yeates, appeared in New York magazines.
Mikhail Bakhtin's literary analysis of French author Frarn;ois Rabelais is often considered a paradigm shift in medieval literary theory. A Russian historian, literary scholar, and cultural theorist, Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World recovered Rabelais's writings from obscurity by interpreting them in the con
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Bakhtin Galin Tihanov 47 Heroic Poetry in a Novelized Age: Epic and Empire in Nineteenth- Century Britain Simon Dentith 68 Epic, Nation, and Empire: Notes toward a Bakhtinian Critique Colin Graham 84 “In the Mouths of the Tribe”: Omeros and the Heteroglossic Nation Mara Scanlon 101 Bakhtin: Uttering the “(Into)nation” of the Nation .
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Literacy development lies at the heart of the Grade 1–8 language curriculum. Literacy learning is a communal project and the teaching of literacy skills is embedded across the curriculum; however, it is the language curriculum that is dedicated to instruction in the areas of knowledge and skills – listening and speaking, reading, writing, and viewing and representing – on which literacy .
