Most of us remember a time when submissions to PMLA routinely cited Northrop Frye, and when articles on Slavic linguistics or poetics inevitably mentioned Roman Jakobson. A scanning of literary journals suggests that Slavists and non-Slavists alike may now be approaching the age of Baxtin.Just as in any school of critical thought, there have been excesses in dialogic criticism, to be sure. Most of these have been mechanistic applications of Bakhtin's dialogism to a bewildering array of authors and titles, as Morson points out above. Yet a good deal of dialogic criticism has been legitimate application of Bakhtin's ideas to relevant works of literature. [3] Still, Russian critic Sergei Averinstev asserts that Bakhtin's thought should not be casually and routinely used as a critical tool: "His works are not a stockpile of ready-made results which can be mechanically `applied.' They are something different and larger. They are a source of intellectual energy" (124).You will know that age has arrived when you are no longer surprised at journals filled with articles like "Carnivalization in the Quebecois Novel," "Dialogical Midwifery," "Nuclear Dialogism," "Aesopian Language in Baxtin's Analyses of Aesop," "The Poetry of Dialogue and the Dialogue of Poetry," and "The Chronotope of the Road [or the bridge, or the canal, or the square, or the city, or the bathhouse) in the works of (fill in the author's name)." (81)
Another problem of Bakhtin's influence in literary criticism is that his theories have been adopted by a variety of modern critics from competing schools of thought to further their own agendas, sometimes with contradictory results. Mathew Roberts says this modern trend is a continuation of the "tradition, established two decades ago by Soviet and French semioticians, of a laudatory appropriation rather than a critical analysis of Bakhtin's texts . . ." (115). Many Marxist critics, for example, have touted Bakhtin as one of their own, often buying into the argument that Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was in fact penned by Bakhtin. Terry Eagleton, for one, in his article "Wittgenstein's Friends," calls Bakhtin "one of the major Marxist philosophers and aestheticians of the twentieth century" (76) and states his entire oeuvre serves to "unite what we might now rhetorically call certain Derridean and Lacanian positions with a politics revolutionary enough to make much post-structuralism nervous" ("79). A number of other critics have also nudged Bakhtin into the Marxist fold, citing individual works of Bakhtin as theoretical proof. [4]
But there are some aspects of Bakhtin's life and work that present theoretical conflicts for these strident Marxist critics. One of these concerns Bakhtin's apparent belief in Christianity via his Russian Orthodox upbringing and his arrest in 1929 for membership in a religious organization seeking to synthesize Christian and Marxist thought (Holquist, Introduction xxxix). Furthermore, Bakhtin's early essays in Art and Answerability clearly demonstrate the impact that Christianity had on his thought. As Michael Holquist points out, Bakhtin had sought, in the unfinished magnum opus from which these essays come, to "completely rethink West European metaphysics in the light of religious thought; to show, as it were, that philosophy had in a sense always been anticipated by religion" ("Politics" 171). [5] Art and Answerability, however, was translated into English only in 1990, whereas most Marxist appropriations of Bakhtin occurred during the early 1980s.
Another problem for any Marxist appropriation of Bakhtin concerns the difference between dialectics and dialogics, two terms which Marxist critic Frederic Jameson attempts to lump together in The Political Unconscious (84-85). However, as Robert Young points out, "Bakhtin . . . makes it very clear in those texts signed with his own name that dialogism cannot be confused with dialectics. Dialogism cannot be resolved . . . . Dialectics, according to Bakhtin, are monological" (76). Indeed, in a notebook from his later period, Bakhtin contrasts dialogics with the Marxist sense of dialectic:
Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness -- and that's how you get dialectics. (Speech Genres 147)The question of whether or not Bakhtin was indeed a Marxist, however, is incidental to an understanding of his intellectual legacy. Slapping labels on his work does no one any real good, though there are some aspects of his work -- such as his insistence on the social nature of language -- that could be interpreted as having Marxist overtones. But to label Bakhtin a Marxist seems to be a gross exaggeration in light of his early philosophical works and his apparent belief in Russian Orthodoxy. If he was a Marxist, he was not a Marxist in the dogmatically political or academic sense we understand today.
More recently, there has been a trend to fuse Bakhtin's theories in a variety of ways with feminist critical thought, taking the example of Julia Kristeva some two decades earlier. Such feminist appropriations of Bakhtin's dialogism seem much more logical than those by Marxist critics. Although Bakhtin wrote nothing specifically about feminism, his dialogic theory of language holds a certain attractiveness for feminist critics, who view it as subverting the authoritative, monological language of the ruling patriarchal society. Peter Hitchcock, for one, in Dialogics of the Oppressed, uses Bakhtin's theories to analyze the work of four noted feminist writers.
But Bakhtin's theories have been applied by feminist critics in a number of ways. Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry have used Bakhtin's theories to forge what they call a "feminist dialogics," which simultaneously counters contemporary assumptions of a singular feminist voice (1) and subverts male-dominated forms of discourse (3). Still other feminists have concentrated on applying theories of Bakhtin's other than dialogism. Toril Moi, for example, uses his concept of carnival from Rabelais and His World to assert that:
anger is not the only revolutionary attitude available to us. The power of laughter can be just as subversive, as when carnival turns the old hierarchies upside-down, erasing old differences, producing new and unstable ones. (40)However, it could be argued that Moi and others have made erroneous use of Bakhtin's carnival by trying to apply it as a counterforce to modern political or social authority. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin states that carnivalization was a phenomenon specific only to ancient times leading up to the Renaissance and foresees problems with any modern application of carnival:
To understand correctly the problem of carnivalization, one must dispense with the oversimplified understanding of carnival found in the masquerade line of modern times, and even more with a vulgar bohemian understanding of carnival. Carnival is past millennia's way of sensing the world as one great communal performance . . . . [T]here is not a grain of nihilism in it, nor a grain of empty frivolity or vulgar bohemian individualism. (159-60)Yet appropriation of Bakhtin's dialogics by the above feminist critics and a host of others [6] has served to broaden the scope of feminist critical theory by placing it in a dialogue -- one not necessarily terminally combative -- with male-dominated society. Diane Price Herndl, however, sees a danger in applying dialogics to feminist criticism, arguing it has encouraged competing varieties of feminist theory that may cause "feminists to drown out their own voices and thereby return to silence" (20).
Some poststructuralist thinkers have also cited Bakhtin's influence in their works, including New Historicist Michael Bristol's relevant appropriation of carnival to demonstrate the "vitality and power of popular culture in the Elizabethan period" (Selden 108). There have also been suggestions that Bakhtin's dialogics is somehow compatible with or complementary to the ideas of Derrida. [7]
But there can be no compromise between Bakhtin and deconstruction, a fact understood all too well by one of its foremost proponents, the late Paul de Man. In his 1983 essay "Dialogue and Dialogism," de Man criticizes Bakhtin's dialogics and poses the following question: "[H]ow does dialogism . . . cope with and indeed seem to overcome the ever-recurring question of the status of fact, meaning, and fiction in the novel?" (106). Of course, de Man answers that it does not, and while admitting a certain admiration for some of Bakhtin's writings, he describes dialogism as incompatible with any true "hermeneutic understanding" (112).
De Man's argument here is extremely complex, but hinges on what he sees as Bakhtin's erroneous definition of tropes as "pure episteme and not a fact of language," which in turn "excludes tropes from literary discourse . . . and locates them, perhaps surprisingly, in the field of epistemology" (112). Mathew Roberts, however, takes de Man to task for incorrectly assuming Bakhtin's dialogic concept of epistemology belongs to "that `theoretical world' of abstract unity, where a `common logic' would ensure complete decodability of texts," which Roberts argues it does not (133-34).
While there may be similarities between Derrida and Bakhtin, there are a number of marked differences also. Both thinkers sought to overturn earlier rationalist theories of communication which posited that meaning resided in either an abstract ideal or an individual consciousness. But when faced with the new view of language posited by structuralist thought, Bakhtin steered clear of the nihilistic trap that ensnared Derrida and his followers and led them to believe that any attempts to wring meaning from a text are an illusionary scam of the Western critical tradition. Bakhtin acknowledges some of the inherent ambiguities of language, but where the deconstructionists would highlight this ambiguity as the inability of words to convey precise meaning, Bakhtin welcomes this vagueness of language as a means by which to create meaning dialogically through the socially derived and shared medium of language. As David Lodge has pointed out, Bakhtin's dialogism was able to reconcile these difficulties of philosophy of language without resorting to deconstruction's endless questioning:
It has been Bakhtin's ironic fate to be invoked as a counterforce to movements that arose "after" him. Bakhtin is sometimes described as a "post-formalist," and his critique of formalism . . . is parallel at several points to the post- structuralist critique of structuralism. [8] But this did not lead him, as it had led the exponents of deconstruction, into an antihumanist scepticism about meaning, communication, and the value of the western cultural tradition . . . . (4)Where Derrida sees discourse as the free play of signifiers, Bakhtin sees these signifiers as being arranged in socially derived genres of speech that are our primary means for understanding one another.
Additionally, Bakhtin would very much oppose Derrida's belief that all Western discourse erroneously assumes a guiding presence outside the system of language. In one of the most important notebook entries from his latter period, entitled "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences," Bakhtin introduced an extension of his earlier concept of "addressivity" mentioned in the essay on speech genres. This extension is referred to as the "superaddressee" or "loophole addressee," which is the higher authority that a speaker or writer addresses beyond an immediate audience:
[T]he author of the utterance, with a greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time (the loophole addressee). In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally true responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions . . . . (Speech Genres 126)How one refers to this force -- whether it be "God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, [or] science" (Speech Genres 126) -- Bakhtin did not really care.
What is important is that Bakhtin believed all discourse was impossible without paying at least unconscious homage to such a presence. This force, Bakhtin states, need not be "mystical or metaphysical," but can be viewed instead as a "constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it" (127). In fact, this phenomenon of language that Bakhtin calls the "superaddressee" seems to stem from the dialogic "nature of the word, which always wants to be heard, always seeks responsive understanding, and does not stop at immediate understanding but presses on further and further (indefinitely)" (127). Since language is a socially acquired system of communication that is used primarily in social settings, human beings, even when in total isolation, cannot help but project their language outside themselves into a social setting, even if that setting happens to be absent at the time. In fact, this natural tendency to project language outside ourselves is what gave rise to the birth of writing, which can be seen as a monological, compositional form of dialogic expression.