Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and literary critic who worked on the philosophy of language, ethics, and literary theory. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin was active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, his distinctive position did not become well known until he was rediscovered by Russian scholars in the 1960s.
Early life
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 Oryol, in Vilnius, and then in 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 Petrograd Imperial 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.Career
Bakhtin completed his studies in 1918. He then moved to a small city in western Russia, Nevel, where he worked as a schoolteacher for two years. It was at that 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; Matvei Isaevich Kagan; Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii; Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii; and, eventually, P. N. Medvedev, who joined the group later in Vitebsk. Vitebsk was "a cultural centre of the region" the perfect place for Bakhtin "and other intellectuals lectures, debates and concerts." 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 Okolovič. Later, in 1923, Bakhtin was diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone disease that ultimately led to amputation of a leg in 1938. This illness hampered his productivity, but it help him evade worse punishment after his arrest.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 51 years later. Repression and misplacement of his manuscripts 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 book was introduced, on 8 December 1928, right before Voskresenie's 10th anniversary, Meyer, Bakhtin and a number of others associated with Voskresenie were apprehended by the Soviet secret police, the OGPU. The leaders received sentences of up to ten years in labor camps of Solovki, though after an appeal to consider the state of his health, Bakhtin's sentence was commuted to exile to Kazakhstan, where he and his wife spent six years in Kustanai. In 1936, they moved to Saransk, where Bakhtin taught at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute.
During the six years he spent working as a bookkeeper in the town of Kustanai, he wrote several important essays, including "Discourse in the Novel". In 1936, living in Saransk, he became an obscure figure in a provincial college, dropping out of view and teaching only occasionally. In 1937, Bakhtin moved to Savelovo, across the river from Kimry, a town located one hundred kilometers from Moscow. Here, he 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 of 1941.
After the amputation of a 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 François Rabelais to the Gorky Institute of World Literature to obtain a postgraduate title, although the dissertation 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 higher doctoral degree 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, he moved back to Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1975.
Bakhtin's works and ideas gained popularity only 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 was often hidden. As a result, 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 was only after the archives became public that scholars realized that much of what they thought they knew about 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 the USSR in 1986 with the title K filosofii postupka. The manuscript, written between 1919 and 1921, was found in bad condition with pages missing and sections of text that were illegible. Consequently, 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: 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 provides an analysis of performed acts or deeds that comprise "the world actually experienced", as opposed to "the merely thinkable world." For the three subsequent and unfinished parts of Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin states the topics he intended to discuss: the second part would have dealt 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 Bakhtin in the process of developing his moral system by decentralizing the work of Kant, with a focus on ethics and aesthetics. It is here that Bakhtin lays out three claims regarding the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of one's participation in Being:
- I both actively and passively participate in Being.
- My uniqueness is given but it simultaneously exists only to the degree to which I actualize this uniqueness.
- Because I am actual and irreplaceable I must actualize my uniqueness.
It is here also that Bakhtin introduces an "architectonic" or schematic model of the human psyche, consisting of three components: "I-for-myself", "I-for-the-other", and "other-for-me". The I-for-myself is an unreliable source of identity; Bakhtin argues that it is the I-for-the-other through which human beings develop a sense of identity. The I-for-the-other serves as an amalgamation of the way in which others view the subject. Conversely, other-for-me describes the way in which others incorporate the subject's perceptions of them into their own identities. Identity, as Bakhtin describes it here, does not belong merely to the individual. Instead, it is shared by all.
''Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics'': polyphony and unfinalizability
During his time in Leningrad, Bakhtin shifted his view away from the philosophy characteristic of his early works and towards the notion of dialogue. It was at this time that he began his engagement with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics is considered to be Bakhtin's seminal work, a work in which he introduces a number of important concepts. The work was originally published in Russia as Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Art in 1929, but was revised and extended in 1963 under the new title. It is the later work that is best known in the West.The concept of unfinalizability is particularly important to Bakhtin's analysis of Dostoevsky's approach to character, although he frequently discussed it in other contexts. He summarises the general principle behind unfinalizability in Dostoevsky thus:
Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.On the individual level, this means that a person can never be entirely externally defined: the ability to never be fully enclosed by others' objectifications is essential to subjective consciousness. Though external finalization is inevitable and even necessary, it can never be the whole truth, devoid of the living response. Bakhtin is critical of what he calls the monologic tradition in Western thought that seeks to finalize humanity, and individual humans, in this way. He argues that Dostoevsky always wrote in opposition to ways of thinking that turn human beings into objects – conceptual frameworks that enclose people in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility: "He saw in it a degrading reification of a person's soul, a discounting of its freedom and its unfinalizability... Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable, and unpredeterminable, turning point for their soul."
'Carnivalization' is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible. The "carnival sense of the world", a way of thinking and experiencing that Bakhtin identifies in ancient and medieval carnival traditions, has been transposed into a literary tradition that reaches its peak in Dostoevsky's novels. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the "joyful relativity" of free participation in the festival. According to Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin's carnival is "the apotheosis of unfinalizability". Carnival, through its temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the 'threshold' situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction. In carnival, "opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another." Bakhtin sees carnivalization in this sense as a basic principle of Dostoevsky's art: love and hate, faith and atheism, loftiness and degradation, love of life and self-destruction, purity and vice, etc. "everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite."
Carnivalization and its generic counterpart—Menippean satire—were not a part of the earlier book, but Bakhtin discusses them at great length in the chapter "Characteristics of Genre and Plot Composition in Dostoesky's Works" in the revised version. He traces the origins of Menippean satire back to ancient Greece, briefly describes a number of historical examples of the genre, and examines its essential characteristics. These characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, inappropriate behaviour, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues. Bakhtin credits Dostoevsky with revitalizing the genre and enhancing it with his own innovation in form and structure: the polyphonic novel.
According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel, and it was a fundamentally new genre that could not be analysed according to preconceived frameworks and schema that might be useful for other manifestations of the European novel. Dostoevsky does not describe characters and contrive plot within the context of a single authorial reality: rather his function as author is to illuminate the self-consciousness of the characters so that each participates on their own terms, in their own voice, according to their own ideas about themselves and the world. Bakhtin calls this multi-voiced reality "polyphony": "a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices..." Later he defines it as "the event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses."