Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy

by Ken Hirschkop

This book makes a radical break with earlier interpretations of Bakhtin's work. Using recent Russian scholarship, Ken Hirschkop explodes many of the myths which have surrounded Bakhtin and his work and lays the ground for a new, more historically acute sense of his achievement. Through a comprehensive reading of Bakhtin's work, Hirschkop demonstrates that his discussion of the philosophy of language, literary history, popular festive culture, and the phenomenology of everyday life revolved around a lifelong search for a new kind of modern ethical culture. A detailed examination of the major works reveals the careful interweaving of philosophical and historical argument which makes Bakhtin at once so compelling and so frustrating a writer. Hirschkop treats Bakhtin not as a metaphysician or a philosopher for the ages, but as a writer inevitably drawn into the historical conflicts produced by a modernizing and democratizing Europe. As a consequence, Bakhtin becomes a more sober but
also more original writer, with a striking contribution to make to the definition of the democratic project.

Genres: Philosophy

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[H]

Democracy must mean more than procedure; it needs the depth culture has to offer. An emancipated society has to mean not only control over economic life, but satisfying relationships, everyday dignity and solidarity, and narratives which make one's life not only prosperous but also meaningful. (ix)

And dialogue is not an innocent or open procedure, either: it is the search for that great white whale of the liberal imagination, compromise, a search which rules out certain kinds of solution in advance. Like the term 'democracy' itself, 'dialogue' sanctions a strategic call for specific procedures under the rubric of abstract principle. (9)

For with the triumph of the novel and 'novelization', history has become an internal rather than merely external fact of genre. (13)

One can easily imagine a democratic situation within which language is employed, but the thesis that there is such a thing as a novelistic style means that there is a democratic way of employing it, that grammatical, syntactic, and lexical structures themselves instance or embody kinds of social relationship. 'Style' is Bakhtin's name for the place where the external 'facts' manifest themselves at the level of the sign, where meaning becomes impossible without them. (21)

The novel--'artistically organized social heteroglossia' (DN 76/262)--is Bakhtin's word for those modern and democratic facts of language with which traditional stylistics cannot cope. And so as we try to grasp the distinctiveness of novelistic style we find ourselves having to reconceptualize the communicative process itself, and draw into it the historical world which had been left outside. (23)

But what Rousseau or Kant have written makes no difference unless it describes the compelling force of such erasons in practice; it is only when objects feel bound to norms and values because they are the result of democratic discourse that we are moving in the universe of modern democracy. (32)

Language does not articulate values or principles from a neutral perspective, making their acceptance or rejection a matter for individual initiative: its meanings are positions taken or refused, its forms opportunities for ethical relationships. (35)

But the inability to account for the legitimacy of many modern political orders--we see it today when analysts throw up their hands in the face of the 'antique hatreds' of nationalism--may be the symptom of an unresolved theoretical problem: the belief that justice in pure form is enough to motivate support for a political order.
Bakhtin, too, sees authoritarianism as 'pre-modern'; his bearers of the alien holy word have supposedly been expelled from the linguistic territory of modernity. But in his account, the opposite of authoritarian fear and submissiveness is not purely 'political' reason purged fo all emotion, but democratic 'sobriety' and ironic distance. The political theory which restricts dialogically maintained consent to questions of pure right panics when confronted with popular acquiescence in manifest injustice, and must call upon the psychologism it otherwise rejects. But the psychic forces in play when 'totalitarianism' is the order of the day do not disappear in democracies, and they too must be part of any intersubjectivity which supports a democratic life. In that case, democratic orders do not depend upon the mere absence of fear, ressentiment, or whatever emotion one associates with the 'totalitarian', but upon the presence of its opposite, whether this is called sobriety, confidence, civility, or respect. (40)

Compromise has distinctive formal features: it cannot, by definition, be incarnated in a systematic philosophy or theory of society--it must assume the form of a narrative, to wit, of the realist novel fo the nineteenth century. In modernity 'culture' takes over the task of legitimation from religion, but this entails not the substitution of one system of belief for another, but the replacement of the strong and systematic belief necessary for religion by the weak, narrative kind of belief typical of the novel. Or, to put it more exactly, it entails the replacement of belief in the usual senes of the word by narrative itself, which alone can make compromise something liveable and even pleasurable.
One cannot, therefore, simply confront liberal democracy with its own claim to justice and fairness, for it alraedy has cultural mechanisms which assume the world is unfair, or cruel, occasionally arbitrary, and often violent. The culture fo the capitalist democracies works not through persuasion or strong ideological argument, but by the creation of templates for a lief well lived, in full knowledge of the world's dissonances and inadequacies. In which case a critical democratic culture must take aim at the weak, narrative kind of belief embodied in modern culture, not in order to demonstrate that it is weak, which is its premiss, but to point a (42) critical gaze at the anxieties and dissatisfactions which it seeks to defues or displace. (43)

Weber himself more or less admitted this when he efined demoracy as the absolute antithesis of legal rationality, as an irrational 'charismatic authority'. The majority who follow a charismatic leader do so spontaneously--neither procedures nor mechanisms have a role in the creation of the obligation which binds the former to the latter. They see in their leader a promise or an aura, and Weber clearly thinks that those who believe in this sort of thing are beyond the pale of rational discourse. (43)

Thus in his earlier Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau argues that 'there are some tongues favourable to liberty. They are thre sonorous, prosodic, harmonious tongues in which discourse can be understood from a great distance.' (46)

Meaning relies on the presence of oral language much as sovereignty depends on the presence of the people; representation in politics is thus deemed corrupting and dangerous for the same reasons that representation of speech by writing is deemed dangerous and unstable. In this context, 'writing' signifies a political problem, not the mere fact that no field is big enough to contain 'the people', and it is the definitive rebuke to Rousseau's concept of a homogenous body politic which needs to learn nothing because it needs only know itself. 'Writing' means not so much the physical fact of graphic language as the uncertainty, flexibility, and disputatiousness which are part of every public sphere, an openness which Rousseau hopes to shut out of modern democratic politics. (47)

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really frustrating. At its best, this is the best scholarly writing on Bakhtin I’ve come across, but the book is horribly organised and bears some of the worst hallmarks of early 90s theory-laden academic writing, and is basically unreadable in parts even for someone with a pretty good knowledge of Bakhtin + the critical discourse around his work.