Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich
Bakhtin ( 1895–1975) was a Russian philosopher,
literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics,
and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects,
inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions (Marxism,
semiotics, structuralism, religious criticism) 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.
The
Bakhtin Circle, centered on the work of Bakhtin, addressed philosophically the
social and cultural issues posed by the Russian Revolution and its degeneration
into the Stalin dictatorship. Their work focused on the centrality of questions
of significance in social life in general and artistic creation in particular,
examining the way in which language registered the conflicts between social
groups. The key views of the circle are that linguistic production is
essentially dialogic, formed in the process of social interaction, and
that this leads to the interaction of different social values being registered
in terms of reaccentuation of the speech of others. While the ruling stratum
tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, the subordinate classes are
inclined to subvert this monologic closure. In the sphere of literature,
poetry and epics represent the centripetal forces within the cultural arena
whereas the novel is the structurally elaborated expression of popular ideologiekritik,
the radical criticism of society. Members of the circle included Matvei
Isaevich Kagan (1889-1937); Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891-1938); Lev
Vasilievich Pumpianskii (1891-1940); Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii (1902-1944);
Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895-1936); Mariia Veniaminovna Iudina
(1899-1970); and others. (Craig Brandist, IEP)
Definition
Carnivalesque is a term used in the English
translations of works written by the Russian critic Mikhail
Bakhtin, which refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates
the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos.
Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival,
itself related to the Feast of Fools, a medieval festival originally
of the sub-deacons of the cathedral, held about the time of the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January), in
which the humbler cathedral officials burlesqued
the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the
cassock." Also Bakhtin derives carnival and the carnivalization
of literature from the reign of the “Seriocomical” with the examples of Socratic dialogues and Menippean
satire. Within the Socratic dialogue carnival affects all people
into the behavior and rituals in to the carnivalistic life, as in every
individual is affected by carnival, meaning everyone is a constant participant
of carnival. In the base of examples from the Menippean satire, the relativity
of joy that subverts and creates a syncretic pageant that with humor and
grotesque it weds and combines the sacred with the profane.
Carnival – M. Bakhtin
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. (Ben Taylor,
BA.MA,1995).
Since the
mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey,
the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly
articulated the concept of 'carnival' as a valuable form of resistance that
merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and
the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body
of thought. The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin's
Rabelais and fIis World, Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of Everyday Life and
Hakim Bey's TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic
Terrorism. It's a sunny afternoon, and I find myself between two uniformed
groups of people, pressed nose to nose (or rather helmet to helmet) against
each other, neither side apparently much willing to move. On one side are the
police, equipped with the latest in riot gear. Pushing against them are a group
of men and women dressed in white overalls, equipped with cycle helmets, rubber
rings, bubblewrap and stuffed toys sellotaped together into what seems a
surprisingly effective parody of the officers' protective clothing. Behind
them, in the space they're keeping the police from entering, are a crowd made
up of dancing punks, fairies, stilt-walkers, ravel'S, feminists, anarchists and
Marxists of every hue, people in fancy dress, people completely undressed, and
a noisy meeting of street drummers, samba bands, and a pedal-powered sound system.
There is an equal cacophony of ideologies in this space; black flags, red
flags, green flags, flags with stars, multicoloured gay pride flags and banners
demanding liberation for diverse human and animal groups.
This is a
carnival against capitalism, as if thousands of people had decided to take Emma
Goldman's famous attributed proclamation that 'if I can't dance, it's not my
revolution' quite literally. It is a cultural and political phenomenon that has
been growing rapidly since its conception in the early 1990s. This phenomenon has
a modem lineage stretching back to the 'No MIl Link Road' campaign and the
carnivalesque occupation of Claremont Road in London in 1993.
1. After Claremont
Road, carnival appeared as a conscious form of action 147 ANARCHIST
STUDIES throughout the 1990s, most noticeably with Reclaim the Streets, a group
who drew heavily on the ideas put forward in Hakim Bey's The Temporary
Autonomous Zone. These events coalesced into the first 'global street party'
held in cities across the world on 16 May 1998 the day of a G8 summit meeting
in Birmingham. These 'parties' in tum developed into the more general
'carnivals against capitalism' which have marked the form of protest against globalisation
and neoliberalism (amongst other things) since.
Between the
works of Bakhtin, the Situationist International and modern anarchist theory,
particularly the writing of Hakim Bey, there is a continual return to a shared
constellation of ideas, which makes a comparative analysis of their ideas productive.
Each theoryses joy and desire as the basis of a culturally and politically
radical event wInch they variously term as a 'carnival', 'festival',
'situation' or a 'temporary autonomous zone'. In each case this event embodies
a number of related qualities.
2. It is seen
as a politicalIy radical fusion of life and art, a realisation of joy and
desire in the form of a broadly anarchistic micro-society.
The popular
cultures of the Middle Ages and early modernity have proven to be an exceptionally
rich subject of research that attracted great minds such as Umberto Ecoʼs, Peter Burkes (1978),
and Piero Camporesi 1994. the carnival culture is understood as
an inversion of the prevailing order; a challenge to the ruling elites in
Rabelais period in which is contained a universalization of the culture of
laughter that makes it relevant for the historical reality in which
Bakhtin lives and works: the 930s Soviet Union ruled by Stalin, where Bakhtinʼs study questions Stalinʼs homogenization of politics and
culture, the purges, the increasing strangling of the Russian avantgarde by the
workings of a monolithic censorship. Because according to Bakhtin laughter is
universal it is also ambivalent, and thus censorable only at the price of being
ludicrous to the point of being tragic (some yearsago, at Houston airport
passengers were reminded that “joking about the security measures will lead to
your arrest”, Echavarría/Koppensteiner 2008). Bakhtin
and Carneval Culture Twentieth-century Russian literary critic and
semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin developed an epistemology that linked carnival,
authority, and laughter. Drawing on his work, the author investigates hidden
parent-child interactions and children’s discourse 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.
Bakhtin
wrote about the carnivals and popular festivals of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, tracing the history of class distinction as expressed in
mono-logic 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’swork 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 (1984 b). 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.
(Bakhtin’s Carnival and Pretend Role Play, Lynn E. Cohen).
The Carnival, then, is sanctioned, permitted revelry in which
the rigid order of the world during the rest of the year is thrown off.
Inverted power relationships are temporarily celebrated. Carnivalesque
imagery in fiction draws on the qualities mentioned below. These
qualities are indicative of the traditions and the spirit of this
celebratory nature of the Carnival, and in turn wrestles with the capacity of
such imagery to truly upset power.
One of the qualities of the Carnival was that everyone would
temporarily dress up as something they were not the rest of the year.
This is true of our Halloween where you can dress up as something you would
never be otherwise. Because of this, there was a spirit of
possibility in the Carnival; one could be anything, one was not bound by
any limits. It is this spirit of possibility that most characterizes the
Carnival. The Carnival was characterized by laughter, by celebration, by a
throwing off of seriousness. If the rest of the year was dedicated work
or serious devotion in church, then the Carnival was a time of laughter and
celebration. But there was also a certain type of laughter,
typically open public mocking laughter directed towards authority. (Francois
Rabelais (1532-1564), Rabelais and
His World).
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. (Passages
taken from Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolsky.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984).
Bakhtin
(1984a) argues that the most inquisitive and challenging Socratic dialogues are
rooted inancient, medieval traditions of carnival. In carnival, normal life is
suspended, including hierarchical distances between people produced by family,
groups, associations, institutions,
traditions, and the society, and what Bakhtin (1984a, p.130) calls a ‘‘frank’’
exchange occurs, or an exchange, governed by internally persuasive discourse
(‘‘internal’’ to the discourse, not to the person’s psyche) that is outside of
any social propriety and convention. Authority is decrowned, we become aware of
the laughing side of things, apart from fear, and there is a profound and
collectiveengagement with alternative ‘truths’ to the officious, the
convention, and the tradition – e.g. to see such monolithic concepts as death
or religion as serious as well as humorous and open to parody. As such carnival
should not be read onlyas moments of complete disorganisation but much more as
an epistemology – one where we sensuously interact with truth from many angles,
e.g. with the laughing side of things. In carnival, three-dimen-sional truth
emerges.
The Socratic dialogues emerge out of
this tradition for a number of reasons, Bakhtin
(1984a) explains. In contrast to monologism, such as the monologism of official
dogma, truth is notready-made but is born in a discourse between people, often
assisted by Socrates. In his own carnivalesque description, Socrates is a
‘midwife’ to truth. Nothing is taken for granted and instead concepts have the
ambivalence of carnival – e.g. courage is both foolish and seriously admirable.
(Bakhtin,
Socrates and the carnivalesque in education, Paul
Sullivan, Mark Smith, Eugene Matusov).
Bakhtin sees
carnival as a great social leveler, bringing together people from all echelons of society in a “free
and familiar” way. “People who in life are separated by impenetrable
hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival
square.”This attitude of temporary equality and familiarity permeates through
carnival life and allows and instigates carnival profanities and carnivalesque
mergings of “the lofty and the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise
with the stupid. This carnivalistic mésalliance accommodates and introduces
another of the major hallmarks of carnival laughter. Carnival laughter is, yet
again, deeply ambivalent. “Combined in the act of carnival laughter are death and
rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing laughter).” It is one of
the key forces that allows the high to
become low, and enables the sense of community and “free and familiar” contact
that defines the relational distances of carnivalesque literature. It “is
directed toward something higher toward a shift of authorities and truths, a
shift of world orders” and drags it down, in order for it to be renewed and
reaffirmed as high when the carnival is over and the laughter has stopped.
(Beneath Lowry’s Carnival: The Abject in Under the Volcano)
The
Russian critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin is once again in favor, his
influence spreading across many discourses including literature, film, cultural
and gender studies. This book provides the most comprehensive introduction to
Bakhtin’s central concepts and terms. Sue Vice illustrates what is meant by
such ideas as carnival, the grotesque body, dialogism and heteroglossia. These
concepts are then placed in a contemporary context by drawing out the
implications of Bakhtin’s writings, for current issues such as feminism and
sexuality. Vice’s examples are always practically based on specific texts such
as the film Thelma and Louise, Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend and
James Kelman's How late it was, how late.(sue vice, Introducing
Bakhtin).
The true
Carnival is possible only in intelligent recognition of texts. A valid
probability of Carnival consists in the realized creative perception, reading
between lines, turning the senses upside down, in synchronous understanding of
the text and simultaneous process of replacement of meaning and building of a
metaphor. It provides pluralism and tolerance to innovative comprehension of a
reality by others. The process of journalistic ingenuity and reception of pleasure
from creation of the text, and from its consumption consists in the use of
metaphors and original stylistic construction (selection of forms and ideas).
(Dr. Anna Sosnovskaya St.Petersburg State University Russia, Representations
of National Identity)
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 asociopolitical discourse, while enjoying impunity, and
thus bring about cultural transformation.
(Nehama Aschkenasy, Ruth and
Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival )
PREFERENCES
Ben Taylor,
BA.MA,1995. Bakhtin. carnival and comic
theory. (Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy)
Gavin Grindon
, 1990. Carnival
against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin, Vaneigem and Bey . (http://1000littlehammers.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/grindon-gavin-carnival-against-capital-comparison-bakhtin-vaneigem-and-bey.pdf)
Paul
Sullivan, Mark Smith, Eugene Matusov,2009. Bakhtin,
Socrates and the carnivalesque in education. (Department of
Social Sciencesand Humanities, University of Bradford, University of Bradford, Richmond
Building, Bradford BD71DP, UK University of Delaware, USA)
Andrew
McLeod, Beneath Lowry’s Carnival: The Abject in Under the
Volcano. (http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/colloquy/files/2014/12/mcleod-28.pdf)
Helene, 1984
Passages taken from Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World. Iswolsky. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press)
Nehama
Aschkenasy, Ruth and Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival. (http://home.nwciowa.edu/wacome/Aschkenasy%20BakhtinforSBLNov07.pdf)
Francois Rabelais,1532-1564. Rabelais
and His World (http://www.longwood.edu/staff/miskecjm/314carnival.html)
I have been looking for the information about Bakhtin for a long time. I am glad that yours is well-structured and you also provide the references. By the way, at special-essays.com i also get the help with it and I am happy that here it a chance to save 18% g6oa39rW
ReplyDelete