LITERARY CRITICISM ASSIGNMENT
“Carnival or Festival by Mikhail
Bakhtin”
Compiled
by:
Name : Anggi Syahputri
NPM : 136224031
ENGLISH LITERATURE
FACULTY OF LETTERS
UNIVERSITY OF MUSLIM NUSANTARA AL
WASHLIYAH
MEDAN
NORTH SUMATERA
ACADEMIC YEAR 2015
CARNIVAL / FESTIVAL BY M. BAKHTIN
1. Bakhtin’s
Carnival and Pretend Role Play
Twentieth-century Russian literary
critic and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin developed an epistemology that linked
carnival, authority, and laughter. Drawing on vhis work, the author
investigates hidden parent-child interactions and children’svdiscourse in
early-childhood play. She argues that Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival and its discourses
apply to young children’s pretend play. Early-childhood play, she holds, bridges
the gap between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, much as does
the mockery of hierarchical order during the carnival festivals described by Bakhtin.
The author uses examples from her study of culturally diverse three- and four-year-old
preschoolers to illustrate the similarities between Bakhtin’s carnival and
pretend play. She discusses such play in the context of children exploring
their identities and negotiating their relationships with the adult world. She
suggests that early-childhood educators could benefit by viewing play from a
child’s perspective, as something not unlike carnival, rather than by forcing
play always to fit more traditional developmental models. Key words: carnival; double-voiced discourse;
dramatic play; grotesque realism; humor; Mikhail Bakhtin; pretend play;
profanity; role reversal.
Carnival and Preschool Play
Bakhtin
wrote about the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, tracing the history of class distinction as expressed in monologic
versus dialogic modes of communicating. He viewed carnival as an act of
rebellion, one of satire and playfulness. He suggested that an individual in the
Middle Ages lived two lives—an official life subjected to the hierarchy of the
social order and everyday existence and an unofficial carnival life freed of
daily social norms and restrictions. In his prologue to Rabelais and His
World, Michael Holquist urges the reader to approach Bakhtin’s work as
double voiced—as a scholarly account of a long tradition of folk culture
reaching its fullest expression in the Middle Ages and as a subversively
satirical attack on many specific aspects of official Stalinist repression in
force in the 1930s Soviet Union at the time of Bakhtin’s writing (1984b).
Bakhtin suggests that the ambivalence of the carnival experience manifests
itself in laughter, feasts, and images of the grotesque body.
For Bakhtin “the
unofficial carnival is people’s second life, organized on the basis of
laughter” (1984b, 8). Carnival is a way of breaking down barriers, of overcoming
power inequalities and hierarchies. Festive life is achieved through the
playful mockery of hierarchical order by individuals oppressed by it. Through free
and familiar interactions, carnival offers a temporary way of experiencing the
fullness of life.
2.
Ruth
and Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival
Ruth and Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival
Mikhail Bakhtin’s thematization of humor and the comic has made him popular in
postmodern critical circles precisely because his studies expand the theory of
carnival beyond a single folk event and identify the carnivalesque as a
semiotic cultural code, signifying more than just texts which focus on the
specific popular tradition in medieval Europe. Bakhtin’s theory of carnival,
manifest in his discussions of Rabelais and “forbidden laughter” in medieval
folk culture, argued that folk celebrations which allowed for rowdy humor and
the parody of authority offered the oppressed lower classes relief from the
rigidity of the feudal system and the church and an opportunity for expressing
nonconformist, even rebellious views. The carnivalesque spirit, therefore, is a
form of popular, “low” humor which celebrates the anarchic and grotesque
elements of authority and of humanity in general and encourages the temporary “crossing
of boundaries” where the town fool is crowned, the higher classes are mocked,
and the differences between people are flattened as their shared humanity, the
body, becomes subject of crude humor. Bakhtin saw in carnivalesque humor a
social force that allowed a text to enter a sociopolitical discourse, while
enjoying impunity, and thus bring about cultural transformation.
A Bakhtinian reading of Ruth uncovers
the subversive elements in this ancient Hebrew masterpiece and highlights the
semantic and semiotic codes of cultural exchange between authority and the marginalized
inherent in it.1 The Bakhtinian paradigm also centralizes the end-of-harvest
celebration, followed by the climactic scene between Boaz and Ruth at the
threshing floor, as a mini-carnival in which existing structures are mocked and
parodied, bringing about a social, psychological, and theological transformation.
3.
From the "Introduction"
"The aim of the present
introduction is to pose the problem presented by the culture of folk humor in
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and to offer a description of its original traits.
"Laughter and its forms represent... the least scrutinized sphere of the
people's creation.... The element of laughter was accorded to the least place
of all in the vast literature devoted to myth, to folk lyrics, and to epics.
Even more unfortunate was the fact that the peculiar nature of the people's
laughter was completely distorted; entirely alien notions and concepts of humor,
formed within the framework of bourgeois modern culture and aesthetics, were
applied to this interpretation. We may therefore say without exaggeration that
the profound originality expressed by the culture of folk humor in the past has
remained unexplored until now. "And yet, the scope and the importance of
this culture were immense in the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. A boundless
world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious
tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture" (4).
"Carnival festivities and the
comic spectacles and ritual connected with them had an important place in the
life of medieval man. Besides carnivals proper, with their long and complex
pageants and processions, there was the 'feast of fools' (festa stultorum) and
the 'feast of the ass'; there was a special free 'Easter laughter' (risus
paschalis), consecrated by tradition. Moreover, nearly every Church feast had
its comic folk aspect, which was also traditionally recognized. Such, for
instance, were the parish feasts, usually marked by fairs and varied open-air
amusements, with the participation of giants, dwarfs, monsters, and trained
animals. A carnival atmosphere reigned on days when mysteries and soties were
produced. This atmosphere also pervaded such agricultural feasts as the
harvesting of grapes (vendange) which was celebrated also in the city. Civil
and social ceremonies and rituals took on a comic aspect as clowns and fools,
constant participants in these festivals, mimicked serious rituals such as the
tribute rendered to the victors at tournaments, the transfer of feudal rights,
or the initiation of a knight. Minor occasions were also marked by comic
protocol, as for instance the election of a king and queen to preside at a
banquet 'for laughter's sake' (roi pour rire)" (5).
These occasions "built a second
world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval
people participated more or less, in which they lived during a given time of
the year. If we fail to take into consideration this two-world condition,
neither medieval cultural consciousness nor the culture of the Renaissance can
be understood. To ignore or underestimate the laughing people of the Middle
Ages also distorts the picture of European culture's historic development"
(6).
"But at the early stages of
preclass and prepolitical social order it seems that the serious and the comic
aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally 'official.'
This similarity was preserved in rituals of a later period of history. For
instance, in the early period of the Roman state the ceremonials of the
triumphal procession included on almost equal terms the glorifying and the
deriding of the victor. The funeral ritual was also composed of lamenting (glorifying)
and deriding the deceased. But in the definitely consolidated state and class
structure such an equality of the two aspects became impossible. All the comic
forms were transferred, some earlier and others later, to a nonofficial level.
There they acquired a new meaning, were deepened and rendered more complex,
until they became the expression of folk consciousness, of folk culture. Such
were the carnival festivities of the ancient world, especially the Roman
Saturnalias, and such were the medieval carnivals. They were, of course, far
removed from the primitive community's ritual laughter" (6-7).
"In fact, carnival does not know
footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between
actors and spectators.... Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they
live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the
people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During
carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own
freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire
world, of the world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. Such is the
essence of carnival, vividly felt by all its participants.... The tradition of
the Saturnalias remained unbroken and alive in the medieval carnival, which
expressed this universal renewal and was vividly felt as an escape from the
usual official way of life" (7-8).
4.
In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival
against Power
In the
second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist
Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the
Russian thinker’s work: the Carnivalesque.
Carnival
and carnivalesque
In Rabelais and his World,
Bakhtin discusses carnivalesque (or ‘folk-humour’,) a particular speech-genre
which occurs across a variety of cultural sites, most notably in carnival
itself.
A carnival is a moment when everything (except arguably violence) is permitted. It occurs on the border between art and life, and is a kind of life shaped according to a pattern of play. It is usually marked by displays of excess and grotesqueness. It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience. It creates a situation in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things, by showing the relative nature of all that exists.
The popular tradition of carnival was
believed by Bakhtin to carry a particular wisdom which can be traced back to
the ancient world. For Bakhtin, carnival and carnivalesque create an
alternative social space, characterised by freedom, equality and abundance.
During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished
and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which
were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the
individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective
which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated
individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a
collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self
is also transgressed through practices such as masking.
Carnival is a kind of syncretic,
ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief
moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom.
It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder.
Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also
sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of
practical conditions.
Carnival is also taken to provide a
positive alternative vision. It is not simply a deconstruction of dominant
culture, but an alternative way of living based on a pattern of play. It
prefigured a humanity constructed otherwise, as a utopia of abundance and
freedom. It eliminated barriers among people created by hierarchies, replacing
it with a vision of mutual cooperation and equality. Individuals are also
subsumed into a kind of lived collective body which is constantly renewed.
On an affective level, it creates a
particular intense feeling of immanence and unity – of being part of a
historically immortal and uninterrupted process of becoming. It is a lived,
bodily utopianism distinct from utopianisms of inner experience or abstract
thought, a ‘bodily participation in the potentiality of another world’. The
golden age is lived, not through inner thought or experience, but by the whole
person, in thought and body.
An emphasis is placed on basic needs
and the body, and on the sensual and the senses, counterposed perhaps to the
commands of the will. It lowers the
spiritual and abstract to the material level. It thus recognises
embodiment, in contrast with dominant traditions which flee from it.
Prefiguring James Scott’s analysis of
‘hidden transcripts’, Bakhtin portrays carnival as an expression of a ‘second
life’ of the people, against their subsumption in the dominant ideology. Ir
replaces the false unity of the dominant system with a lived unity in
contingency. It creates a zone in which new birth or emergence becomes
possible, against the sterility of dominant norms (which in their tautology,
cannot cretae the new). It also encourages the return of repressed creative
energies. It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems
of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day
will come to an end.
Reading this in a contemporary way,
we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves
the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as
opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings
together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are
rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of
this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.
In carnival, everything is rendered
ever-changing, playful and undefined. Hierarchies are overturned through
inversions, debasements and profanations, performed by normally silenced voices
and energies.
For instance, a jester might be
crowned in place of a king. The authoritative voice of the dominant discourse
loses its privilege. Humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom
in such a way as to subvert it.
Carnival bridges the gap between
holism (which necessarily absorbs its other) and the imperative to refuse
authority (which necessarily restores exclusions): it absorbs its authoritarian
other in a way which destroys the threat it poses. It is also simultaneously
ecological and social, absorbing the self in a network of relations. Bakhtin
insists that it opposes both ‘naturalism’, the idea of a fixed natural order,
and ideas of fixed social hierarchies. It views ecology and social life as
relational becoming. Perhaps a complete world cannot exist without carnival,
for such a world would have no sense of its own contingency and relativity.
Although carnival succeeded in
undermining the feudal worldview, it did not succeed in overthrowing it. Feudal
repression was sufficient to prevent its full utopian potential from unfolding.
But it is as if it created a space and bided its time. Bakhtin suggests that it
took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for
carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency
and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred
because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency
on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this cultural
revolution.
Bakhtin almost portrays this as a
recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalised,
and made available for other uses. Yet Bakhtin portrays this as a positive,
creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bakhtin suggests
that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth
century.
5. The
Philosophy of Carnival
Bakhtin’s writing reflects the spirit
of carnival: it defies systematic explanation. He imbues his key terms with
unexpected and even shifting, intertwining meanings. In this section, I will
fix these mobile terms enough to indicate the main elements of carnival and
their relationship to discourse. By grounding his philosophical explorations in
subversion, laughter, ambivalence, and becoming, Bakhtin emphasizes the dynamic
movement underlying "unofficial" language.
The fullest exploration of carnival
in Bakhtin's work is Rabelais and His World (1968).2 In this
book, Bakhtin argues that Rabelais' 16th-century novel Gargantua and
Pantagruel is based on, and can only be understood through, late
medieval-early Renaissance "popular-festive forms." Rabelais and
His World describes an elaborate aesthetics of medieval peasant culture, referred
to alternately as "the people," "the folk," "the
second world," "the unofficial world," and "popular-festive
culture," defined against the "official world" of civil and
religious authority. Bakhtin insists that readers canapprehend the true
philosophical importance of Rabelais' book only by listening with the ears of
the 16th century, which were finely tuned to the aesthetics of the grotesque.
The ideals that correspond to folk grotesque images of feasting, violence, and
"the material lower bodily stratum" cannot be understood through the
limited scope of convention. The grotesque expresses a pointed reversal of
moral and logical expectations.
Carnival reversal implies a change
from principles of stability and closure to constant possibility. Bakhtin notes
that folktales usually end notwith death-the order that life imposes-but with a
banquet, for "the end must contain the potentialities of the new
beginning, just as death leads to a new birth" (1968:283). The banquet
features the collective carnival body, constituted entirely of openings. The
carnival emphasis on orifices, both physical and conceptual, emphasizes the
absence of individual boundaries in the medieval imagination. Mouths, for
instance, are always open, eating and drinking, laughing, shouting: they take
in and commune with the outer world and never shut it out. This openness
corresponds to a cosmic openness: nothing is fixed in Bakhtin's carnival world,
and everything is in a state of becoming.
6.
Bakhtin,
carnival and comic theory
In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail
Bakhtin presents us both with a theory of carnival, andwith an account of the historical
decline of the carnivalesque since the Renaissance. This thesis uses Bakhtin's
work as a point of departure for an analysis of particular moments in the
history of post-Renaissance comic theory. It is argued both Bakhtin's account
of carnivalesque decline provides us with a potent framework within which to perform
such an analysis, and that this in turn facilitates a thorough interrogation
of, and engagement with, Bakhtin's theory of carnival.
Chapter One outlines Bakhtin's
theory. identifying its historical and utopian dimensions, and exploring some
of the problems which it generates. Chapter Two addresses some of the methodological
issues relating to a historical analysis of comic theory, and situates
Bakhtin's theory of carnival in relation to recent work in the area of comic
theory. The remaining chapters focus on particular comic theory texts in the light
of Bakhtin's thesis. Chapter Three contrasts Kant's analysis of humour with Schopenhauer's
theory, relating the former to its Enlightenment context and the latter to its
Romantic context. Chapter Four explores Bergson's discussion of laughter,
situating it in relation to modernism, while Chapter Five reviews Freud's
theory of jokes, examining the proximity between the structures of carnival and
the structures of the Freudian joke. Chapter Six focuses on a Brechtian theory
of comedy, assessing its relationship with the carnivalesque tradition, while
Chapter Seven attempts to update Bakhtin's thesis in relation to contemporary
configurations by exploring recent arguments concerning the comic credentials
of postmodern culture. It is argued in conclusion that, if post- Renaissance
culture has witnessed a decline in the significance of the carnivalesque, then
the trajectory of that decline has undergone' a complex series of historical
shifts and reversals.
7. Carnivalesque
For the literary theorist and
philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin1,
the carnivalesque is both the description of a historical phenomenon and the
name he gives to a certain literary tendency. Historically speaking, Bakhtin
was interested in great carnivals of Medieval Europe. He saw them as occasions
in which the political, legal and ideological authority of both the church and
state were inverted — albeit temporarily — during the anarchic and liberating
period of the carnival.
The carnival was not only liberating
because - for that short period - the church and state had little or no control
over the lives of the revelers, although Terry Eagleton points out this would
probably be “licensed” transgression at best. But, its true liberating
potential can be seen in the fact that set rules and beliefs were not immune to
ridicule or reconception at carnival time; it “cleared the ground” for new
ideas to enter into public discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that
the European Renaissance itself was made possible by the spirit of free
thinking and impiety that the carnivals engendered.
Bakhtin recognizes that the tradition of
carnival dwindled in Europe following the Renaissance and the eventual
replacement of feudalism with capitalism. As a result, he says, the public
spirit of the carnival metamorphosed into the “carnivalesque”: that is, the
spirit of carnival rendered into literary form. The person who, existing on the
cusp of this social upheaval, most fully represented this spirit was François
Rabelais, and the book which holds the greatest purchase on Bakhtin’s
imagination is Rabelais” Gargantua and Pantagruel. The comic violence,
bad language, exaggeration, satire, and shape-shifting which fill this book
are, for Bakhtin, the greatest example of carnivalesque literature. Ever
concerned with the liberation of the human spirit, Bakhtin claimed that
carnivalesque literature — like the carnivals themselves — broke apart
oppressive and moldy forms of thought and cleared the path for the imagination
and the never-ending project of emancipation.
Bakhtin suggests that carnivalesque
literature also became less common as the increasingly privatized world of
modern, individualistic capitalism took hold.
Instances of the Carnivalesque?
o
Reality TV
o
Spring Break
o
Girls Gone Wild
o
Homecoming
o
Costume parties
o
Saturday Night Live
o
Halloween
o
Super Bowl
o
Mardi Gras
8. CARNIVAL
AND COMEDY: ON BAKHTIN’S MISREADING OF BOCCACCIO
Bakhtin’s theory of carnival as it is
developed in the two seminal studies Rabelais and his World1 and Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics2 has impacted on a variety of disciplines.
Although essentially literary in conception, it claims a historical
underpinning. Bakhtin’s fundamental premise is that carnival, understood as the
‘sum total of all diverse festivities, rituals and forms of a carnival type’,3 was
a historical and cultural phenomenon of incalculable importance for the development
of European comic narrative from classical antiquity onwards. He speaks of the ‘determining
influence of carnival’ on literature (p.122), and uses the term ‘carnival’ to
describe particular features that the literary ‘genres of the serio-comical’ and
actual festival forms have in common; as he sees it, the various kinds of comic
writing which translate and continue the carnival tradition are ‘saturated with
a specific carnival sense of the world’ (p. 107). For Bakhtin, carnival is a
manifestation of ‘folk laughter’ and ‘folk humour’; it embodies a popular, folk
based culture which is defined by its irreverent antipathy to the official and
hierarchical structures of everyday, noncarnival life. Bakhtin claims that in
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance a ‘boundless world of humorous forms and
manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical
and feudal culture’;4 he characterizes carnival as ‘the people’s second life,
organized on the basis of laughter’ (p. 8), insisting that the laughter which
gave form to carnival rituals freed them ‘completely from all religious and
ecclesiastical dogmatism’ (p. 7).
Carnival laughter is for Bakhtin
above all an assertion of freedom; its function is to bring about a ‘temporary liberation
from the prevailing truth and from the established order’ (p. 10). Bakhtin
argues that the ‘laws, prohibitions and restrictions that determine the structure
and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during
carnival’; and he contends that ‘what is suspended first of all is hierarchical
structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety and etiquette connected
with it — that is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any
other form of inequality among people (including age)’.5 It is the suspension
of social and behavioural codes that generates ‘the atmosphere of joyful relativity
characteristic of a carnival sense of the world’ (p. 107) by allowing ‘free and
familiar contact among people’ who in the normal course of things are divided by
‘impenetrable hierarchical barriers’ (p. 123).
Carnival as a celebration of freedom
enables a ‘new mode of interrelationship between individuals,counterpoised to
the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival life’. In
keeping with his theory that carnival enacts a process of liberation from oppressive
norms, Bakhtin speaks of the ‘behaviour, gesture, and discourse’ of people
being freed from ‘the authority of all hierarchical positions (social estate, rank,
age, property)’ which define them in noncarnival life, and notes that from the
perspective of noncarnival life they appear ‘eccentric and inappropriate’. On
this view, eccentricity represents ‘a special category of the carnival sense of
the world’ because it permits ‘the latent sides of human nature to reveal and
express themselves’; and it is through the eccentric capacity to overturn repressions
and break with taboos that the grotesque comedy of mismatches or ‘carnivalistic
mésalliances’ is generated. All things which are, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘self-enclosed,
disunified, distanced from one another’ by the normative (and
characteristically decent and decorous) hierarchical worldview pertaining
outside carnival get ‘drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations’. In
its celebration of mismatches and misrule carnival ‘brings together, unifies,
weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great
with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’; it dramatizes the ‘sense of
the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities’; and the comedy it
generates in the process of destabilizing norms is the anarchic, transgressive,
topsy-turvy comedy of a world turned upside down and stood on its head.
9. Play
and/as Carnival: RuNet in the Light of Bakhtin’s Conception of Counterculture
Henrike Schmidt, Freie Universität Berlin
Abstract
The
universal anthropological notion of “play” and the more specific historical
phenomenon of “carnival” are of different categorial status; nevertheless they
share some similar notions and characteristics: thus, both allow for temporal
escapes from the normative restrictions and functional necessities of everday
life; both show a fascination for the adoption of foreign identities, for
playing with masques etc. In my paper I want to reflect on some dis/similarities
between play and carnival in their relevance for the study of contemporary
digital and network culture, relying on the concept of carnival as elaborated
by the Russian theoretician Michail Bachtin.
Possible points of reference are his
ideas of the grotesque body or of scatological humoresque discourses popular on
the WWW in general and the Runet in particular. Of interest are likewise
Bachtin’s observations concerning „carnival as a play without a stage“, since
in the interactive networked environments the formal borderlines which separate
actors and spectators (or players and non-players) erode. While the formal
characteristics of carnival show quite some analogies to contemporary digital
folk culture, Bachtin’s axiological interpretation of carnival as a liberating,
democratic practice opposing official hierarchies probably has to be modified.
As illustrated by, for example, the obscene culture of the so-called “padonki”
(“scumbags”), which got so extremely popular on the Runet, linguistic and literary
norm violations do not necessarily stand in opposition to official power
structures, but may fulfil functions of hedonistic pleasure within the official
framework of homogenizing, centripetal and patriotic State discourses.
10. Bakhtin’s Carnival and Critical
Utopias:
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin
(November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975)
was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who wrote influential
works of literary and rhetorical theory and criticism. Although much of his work
dealt with rhetoric and was looking specifically at writing, his ideas,
theories and writing about the Carnival and Carnivalesque serve as a useful framework
for us to ask questions about design. Bakhtin frames the carnivalesque as a
transformative and transgressive experience:
“...medieval man in a way led two
lives: one official, monolithically serious and somber; beholden to strict hierarchical
order, filled with fear, dogmatism devotion and piety; the other, of carnival
and the public place, free; full of ambivalent laughter, sacrileges,
profanations of all things sacred, disparagement and unseemly behaviour,
familiar contact with everybody and everything.” (Bakhtin, 1984: 173) At the
heart of Bakhtin’s writing is an appeal and search for an expression of free
will and a resistance to structures of control, and more importantly to explore
means and methods to transgress these structures.
“…Carnival celebrated temporary
liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked
the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.
Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal.
It was hostile to all that was immortalised and completed.” (Holloway &
Kneale, 2000: 1981).
“...the utility of the concept of carnival
lies in its capacity to illuminate potentially transgressive elements within
popular social and cultural practices.” (Webb, 2005:1).
“‘...during carnival there is a
temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers so that ‘all
were considered equal’” (Bakhtin, 1984a:15, 10 taken from Webb, 2005:1).
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