A Response to the Forum on Mikhail BakhtinAuthor(s): Ken HirschkopSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jun., 1985), pp. 672-678Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343423Accessed: 09/02/2010 01:34

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Critical Response

I

A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin

Ken Hirschkop

Critical Inquiry's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin [Critical Inquiry 10 (December 1983): 225-319] is the latest contribution to the spectacular effort of

interpretation and assimilation that is being applied to the work of this

recently recovered critic. In such a situation, analysis proceeds with one

eye on the work in question and the other on current debates in the field; in the case of Bakhtin, interpretation is at the same time an attempt to come to grips with challenges posed by recent literary theory to certain axiomatic critical assumptions about intentionality, textuality, and the human subject. But the matter is also complicated by the fact that we are dealing here with a critic who was active in the USSR. This brings into play additional ideological pressures, generated by the cold war, which bear on the scholarly assimilation of his work.

The debate on Bakhtin is made yet more difficult by the nature of his writing: immensely varied stylistically and topically but also-and more importantly, I believe-writing which strives for solutions it cannot quite articulate. It moves between alternative and contradictory for- mulations in a single essay and thus produces a set of concepts whose explanatory importance is matched by an unnerving tendency to slide from one formulation to the next with disturbing ease. Such ambiguities are not the sign of an open and sceptical mind, but neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely ignored. These internal contradictions dictate that argument over concepts like "dialogism" and "heteroglossia" cannot be settled by a definitive decision as to what they 'really' mean; instead, we must discuss how to manage these complexities and contra-

Critical Inquiry 11 (June 1985)

?1985 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/85/1104-0010$01.00. All rights reserved.

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dictions, and to what ends. Certain definite strategies of management are emerging, and the articles presented in the forum, while by no means reducible to a single position, share key lines of interpretive strategy that I think ought to be brought out into the open and contested. With the notable exception of Susan Stewart's article ["Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's

Anti-Linguistics," pp. 265-81], the contributions share an ideological drift, the ultimate effect of which is to evade the most radical aspects of Bakhtin's work in favor of an interpretation that renders him useful in the argument against the recent advances of post-structuralism and recent

literary theory in general. Nothing reveals this tactic more starkly than the vision we are offered

of what a properly dialogical discourse should look like. The form of

Gary Saul Morson's article ["Who Speaks for Bakhtin?: A Dialogic In- troduction," pp. 225-43] is the most vivid illustration: dialogism as a

friendly and polite discussion in which a difference of opinion is ac-

knowledged as unresolvable but is nonetheless reconciled to the extent that each speaker 'takes into account' the opinions of the other. For Michael Holquist this dialogism which both recognizes and defuses dif- ference can exist because the speaker is confronted by an otherness made less disturbing by the fact that he is 'aware' of it [see "Answering as

Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin's Trans-Linguistics," pp. 307-19]. Dialogical communication, almost by definition, becomes a give-and-take in which

opposing positions find a common ground. And finally, Caryl Emerson

aptly describes the dialogical confrontation as a process of negotiation [see "The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language," pp. 245-64]. (Michael Andre Bernstein's vision of the dialogical is different in tone but ultimately relies on the same conceptual coordinates as the others' [see "When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections Upon the Abject Hero," pp. 283-305].) What we find in common here is a definition of Bakhtinian otherness in terms of a fundamental uniqueness of the individual that ought to be

respected, much as political liberalism in its dominant commonsense form emphasizes respect for the individual as a primary value. At the same time, this vision of dialogism holds out the promise of a coherent and peaceful society in which these individual voices are ultimately rec- onciled because they 'take into account' each other's opinions. This is a far cry from that condition of fierce social struggle outlined by Bakhtin in "Discourse in the Novel," in which the dialogical forces of language actively contest the social and political centralization of their culture. It is likewise remote from the carnival culture described in the study of Franqois Rabelais, which takes its internally dialogical form from its function

Ken Hirschkop is a postgraduate student at Saint Antony's College, Oxford University, working on a book about Mikhail Bakhtin.

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as an oppositional and subversive culture. Indeed, given the conditions of internal social warfare in which Bakhtin was writing in the 1920s and 1930s, it would be extraordinary if he thought of social difference in terms of amicable disagreement. This is not to say that a utopian vision of such a dialogism is not to be found in Bakhtin, but this utopia must be seen as a response to a decidedly nonutopian situation-that is, dialogism itself, as a certain kind of discourse, must be situated dialogically.

What is being negotiated in these interpretations is the double sense of the term "dialogism": it is both the natural state of being of language as such and a valorized category of certain discourses. It has a role both in the theoretical critique of Saussurian linguistics and in the evaluative literary history Bakhtin narrates. When these two senses of the term are conflated, the specific form dialogism takes in the novel is assumed to be the manifestation of the true essence of language, an essence somehow repressed in the monological. In fact, it is the status of monologism which is the most problematic: if dialogism is the nature of all language, then what gives rise to monologism? For monologism is not merely an illusion or an error, it is a form of discourse with real, if mystifying, effects, which must be accounted for in a theory of language. It is this reality, or effectivity, of an illusionary or mystifying language which is evaded when the monological is treated as a theoretical error.

But this repression of a natural dialogism exists as a genuine problem in Bakhtin. His concentration on the transitional moments of cultural history has been often commented upon. The implication of this history is that dialogical forms flourish in those periods located between the deadening effects of a preceding and a following social structure: thus transitional moments are seen as spaces between structures rather than as periods in which the new struggles to supplant the old. That vitalism which Holquist has documented is transplanted into the social realm to produce a distinctly anarchist vision of social change, featuring a natural dialogism again and again repressed by an unnatural monologism. This is not a problem which can be solved by a purely 'interpretive' approach to Bakhtin: if we are going to continue using "dialogism" as a theoretical term denoting a general quality of linguistic practice, then some revision of the term is needed, so that specifically monological cultural forms are understood asforms of the dialogical-dialogical in some profound sense- rather than as some inexplicable perversion of the dialogical. But this also means that monologism must itself be recognized as a strategy of response toward another discourse, albeit a strategy which aims to 'ignore' or 'marginalize' the opposite discourse. We are thus led to a very different vision of what Bakhtin means by "dialogue," one which includes not only the liberal exchange of views but also questions of cultural oppression and power.

The assumption that the working of language in the oppositional form of the novel is but the extreme manifestation of the essence of

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language also leads to the reading of Bakhtin as a champion of some kind of pure and limitless relativism. What this misses is the political meaning of a historicizing and relativizing discourse when it opposes a

ruling discourse that presents itself as timeless, natural, and self-evident; dialogism, in its novelistic form, is itself defined by its relation to monologism. Bertolt Brecht's strategy was roughly similar: to dismantle a naturalizing ideology, one opposed it with a discourse which historicized life, revealing it as something produced and therefore changeable, and this was in the service of a definite political project. I entirely agree with Stewart's de-

scription of Bakhtin's metalinguistics as a polemic rather than as a tran- scendence, and I think this places her essay at odds with the rest of the contributions, which each, in one way or another, present novelistic dial-

ogism as something in principle separable from its opposite. The extreme case of this is Holquist's contention that the monological and dialogical actually stand for two different orders of being. The recasting of the

opposition in terms of a mind/world dualism preserves the sense of an intimate and necessary relation between the two terms but, crucially, depoliticizes them: an opposition between two competing forms of activity, two opposing linguistic practices, is transformed into a conceptual dis- tinction between two components of all linguistic practice. It may well be that some primordial Kantian split was the starting point from which Bakhtin developed, but by presenting the opposition of linguistic practices described in the 1930s as just another version of this split, Holquist collapses the social struggle implied in the novel/poetic genre distinction into the conceptual distinctions of Bakhtin's critique of Ferdinand de Saussure. For Bakhtin, however, relativizing dialogism is not a theoretical

position but a discursive tactic determined by the discourse it opposes. But the core of the problem is that dialogism is found in Bakhtin's

texts as both an oppositional tactic and a theoretical description; the relation of dialogism to monologism is at the same time relational and asymmetrical. While dialogism could not be merely the truth of monolo- gism, it nevertheless contains a utopian element (emphasized in the Rabelais study) lacking in its opposite. The relativist interpretation of Bakhtin avoids this problem and leads to an unfortunate equation: the historicity of discourse equals the relativizing strategy of the novel. The novel (or, more precisely, Bakhtin's novel) seeks to subvert the monological's claim to be timeless, authorless, sacred, and natural; and precisely to the extent that its project is subversive, it will do this by revealing language to be temporal, authored, prosaic, and historical. But the exact meaning of these latter terms should not be construed as the mere converse of their monological antitheses. The form in which the novel brings into con- sciousness the historicity of discourse is as a relativization, a denatural- ization, an uncrowning, but this is not the definition of historicity itself. Discourse is historical; it lacks theological certainty. But this does not mean that its essence is to lack any form of certainty and that therefore

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every statement is equally, and hence absolutely, provisional. Or, to put it another way, to say that discourse is historical is not to say that its

development and movement are random and limitless, in some sense

absolutely free. Change need not be random to be genuine change. But this kind of relativism, whose ideological affinities with the commonplaces of Western cold war discourse (the contrast of a liberal openness with a Left 'dogmatism') cannot be missed, crops up again and again when Bakhtin is interpreted. A quotation from Bakhtin's essay "Towards a

Methodology of the Human Sciences" is revealing in this regard: "In the case of recollections, we take into account the events that followed (within the limits of the past), that is, we interpret and comprehend what is recollected in the context of an unfinished [nezavershennogo] past."' Ne- zavershennost', the open-endedness or "unfinalizability" of discourse, is not the symptom of an utterly unconstrained future but of the fact of historical change, which can be nonrandom without thereby being non- historical. But these two options, a monological denial of history or history as a random mutability pulling the ground out from under our feet, are

presented as the available choice in those versions of Bakhtin which celebrate him as a relativist. From this point of view, Bernstein's is the most rigorous contribution, in that he recognizes that a definition of discourse's historicity as infinite and unpredictable self-parody leads to the bitterness and terror of nihilism: this implies that we have not moved far from the Dostoevskian position that, lacking a theological guarantee, "everything is permitted."

If the realm of discourse is being kept free of all finalizing constraints, then it is being kept free for somebody, and that somebody, not surprisingly, is the human subject, whose sovereignty, irreducibility, and originality is never really in doubt throughout the arguments of Holquist, Morson, and Emerson. Although the claim is repeatedly made that Bakhtin offers

concepts with which to overcome the opposition of self and society, the formulations we are actually presented with define the social as lacking any determinative power or significance in and of itself; it is never more than the sum of its subjects. Throughout we hear the continual echo of

precisely that Saussurian dichotomy of langue and parole which it was Bakhtin's explicit project to surpass. The social as the ahistorical and systematic, the individual as historical, random, the locus of an unpre- dictable activity: Bakhtin's purpose was to reintegrate historicity, evaluation, and activity-in short, all that had been excluded as style-into the social reality of language and thereby to develop a concept of linguistic structure which was dynamic rather than ahistorical. Perhaps this objective is best summed up by a provocative phrase from the essay "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," the idea of "the style of the language as a totality," which proposes the union of value and style, previously subjective phe- nomena, with the social and structural qualities of language.2

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But what is proposed by Holquist, Morson, and Emerson is not a

reintegration but a critique of Saussurian linguistics that relies on categories derived from Saussure himself. It is true that Saussure's concepts of

langue and the sign are insufficient for an analysis of the actual practice of language, but the exclusion of certain aspects of language was part and parcel of the Saussurian project itself; an adequate critique of Saussure must question the initial division and not simply come up with an additional

theory of what has been excluded. In Bakhtin's view, the struggle among styles and voices was a "struggle among socio-linguistic points of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contra- dictions."3 But Holquist, Morson, and Emerson attack the 'logical' bias of

langue by recourse to the other term of the opposition, language as the

struggle of individual wills; the abstract linguistic relationships of langue are countered by the concrete interpersonal relationships of parole. Holquist's characterization of the monological as the realm of dead, inert forms (that is, the realm of langue) commits the same error, for the

monological is not defined by the exclusion of value and activity but by its location of activity, of life, exclusively in the subject. The division of

being into life or force, on one hand, and dead system, on the other, is

exactly the division dictated by monologism. Note in this regard that Bakhtin speaks of the centripetalforces of language; monologism, like

dialogism, is both a particular force and a particular way of conceiving the relationship between force and system.

Because it is based on a conventional liberal opposition of individual and society, the dialogical unit proposed as a radically new unit of analysis is in fact nothing new at all. This version of the dialogical describes exactly the mode of interaction between subjects dictated by a self/society opposition in which society exists as a collection of preconstituted subjects, sharing discourse at the level of logic and reason but individualized at the level of value and desire. Society exists as the space in which individuals encounter each other; to borrow a metaphor from Marx, it is the sack in which the

potatoes are kept. Therefore it is no surprise that Holquist can equate the relation of self and other with the relation of self and society, for to enter into the social world as this schema describes it is to encounter other individuals in the form of alien subjectivities. Intention and value are relocated in the social only insofar as the social as been turned into another subject.

The struggle of dialogical discourse then comes to be defined as the struggle of one subject to incorporate another. Telling in this respect is the pair of options implied by Morson: either the expressing subject successfully incorporates its struggle-ridden discursive into its own dis- course, in which case dialogism has been reduced to an enrichment of the subject's discourse, or else it fails in this effort and we have the resultant tragedy of expression, in which victory belongs to the other

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subject. One subject or the other must win the encounter, and this is the form dialogism takes when we start with two preconstituted subjects; the

initially given absolute otherness which separates them is, in fact, a con-

sequence of this preconstitution. In such a situation the social can figure only as a gloss on, or a barrier to, the hypothetically original, pure intention of the subject.

In a sense what has happened is that the deconstruction of the self/

society opposition has skipped a crucial stage, that which Jacques Derrida calls "overturning," in which the situation of primacy/marginalization existing within the opposition is reversed. The self/society opposition is one in which the self is original and society is secondary. Holquist, Morson, Emerson, and Bernstein have not given sufficient weight to Bakhtin's claim that "verbal discourse is a social phenomenon," and therefore their efforts to displace the opposition always return to the primacy of the self and its attendant themes.4 Again, I am at pains to stress that the inter-

pretation I polemicize against has not been pulled out of the air or arrived at by a distortion of the text: there is ample support for it in many of Bakhtin's interpretations. But it has not solved the problems Bakhtin

attempted to solve-this is the important thing-and it has not done so because it has blunted the most radical aspects of his thought. The trend in the critical literature on Bakhtin in America and England, which is

growing at tremendous pace, is toward an assimilation of Bakhtin into a liberal schema that he opposed, even if he never succeeded in fully transcending it in his theoretical formulations. To say the least, one has to be suspicious of the ideological project enacted in such an assimilation at a time when many critical assumptions based on this schema are under fire.

1. M. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1979), p. 362; my translation. 2. Bakhtin, "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," The Dialogic Imagination:

Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series, no. 1 (Austin, Tex., 1981), p. 62.

3. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, p. 273; my emphasis. 4. Ibid., p. 259.

Ken Hirschkop