Bakhtin Circle, The

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BAKHTIN CIRCLE, THE

The Bakhtin Circle was a group of Soviet scholars, including the cultural theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975), the linguist Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895–1936), and the literary scholar Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891–1938). Drawing on a variety of philosophical positions, the group developed a philosophy of the human sciences, language, literary production, and history, and a wide-ranging cultural theory. The group's work combined, in various ways, the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School (especially Ernst Cassirer), phenomenology (especially Max Scheler and Karl Bühler), Russian Formalism (especially Lev Iakubinskii), Hegelianism, and various types of Marxism current within Soviet scholarship (especially Georg Lukács and "Marrism").

In K filosofii postupka (Toward a philosophy of the act; 1993 [written in the mid-1920s]), Bakhtin combines a neo-Kantian idealism, in which ethics is the foundation of the human sciences and jurisprudence its "mathematics," with the phenomenological notion of intentionality to develop an ethics based on the acts of the responsible subject. Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti (Author and hero in aesthetic activity; 1990 [written in the mid- to late-1920s]) is a phenomenological investigation into relations between author and hero in narrative fiction based to a considerable extent on the account of intersubjectivity found in Scheler's The Nature and Forms of Sympathy (Poole 2001).

Medvedev and Voloshinov had meanwhile been working on developing a sociological approach to poetics and discursive interaction, respectively. Both sought to bring about a meeting of contemporary philosophical trends with the sociological ideas championed by Russian Marxists at the time, particularly Nikolai Bukharin. In his essay Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii (The formal method in literary scholarship; 1978 [1928]), Medvedev argues that sociological factors shape literature from within and without and that exploration of the category of genre should precede analyses of individual literary devices. In Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka (Marxism and the philosophy of language; 1973 [1929]), Voloshinov contends that language is a product of social interaction, emerging in and through dialogue, and, following Bühler, that the utterance constitutes the primary unit of language in actu. This phenomenology of social interaction in language is given a sociological form, so that specific styles of language use are the discursive embodiments of the worldviews of specific social groups. Modalities of authorship are also reworked into an analysis of various forms of reported speech in literature whereas literary and extraliterary forms of discourse are all held to have generic characteristics. Bakhtin himself accepted this reworking in his now famous Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics; 1984 [1929, 1963]), where the novelist is held to have produced a "polyphonic" form in which all languages, including that of the narrator, interact on an equal and, indeed, democratic basis.

Whereas the Circle ceased to function as a group after Joseph Stalin's consolidation of power at the end of the 1920s, Bakhtin's own most important work was produced in subsequent years. In a series of essays written in the 1930s and 1940s, Bakhtin drew on the work of, among others, Cassirer and Lukács to develop a radical re-reading of literary history and the place of the novel therein. Recasting Cassirer's idealist dialectic of mythical and critical symbolic forms, Bakhtin argues that the novel has roots in popular and skeptical discursive forms that exploit the social stratification of language (heteroglossia) to undermine the truth claims of official, poetic discourse. This skepticism operates through laughter that, following Cassirer and Henri Bergson, Bakhtin sees as deflating discursive pretension and revealing that knowledge of the empirical world is impossible. In a typically Hegelian move, Bakhtin argues that it is in and through the novel that culture, the totality of discursively embodied perspectives (heteroglossia), becomes aware of itself as its own object. The dogmatic and authoritarian attitude toward another's discourse is termed "monologic" whereas a critical and democratic attitude is termed "dialogic." These essays began to be published in the 1970s and appeared in English under the title The Dialogic Imagination (1981).

At the end of the 1930s, Bakhtin develops a theory that the rise of the critical forces of culture represents the reappearance of semantic forms that have survived from preclass society. This theory builds on the theory of "semantic paleontology" developed by the now discredited Soviet archaeologist and linguist Nikolai Marr, who argued that all languages develop from a primordial gesture language in primitive communism. Marr's position had been reworked and applied to literary material by the classicist Ol'ga Freidenberg, who identified certain primordial "semantic clusters" that reappear in various ways throughout cultural history. In Bakhtin's hands this model became the now-famous theory of carnival, in which forms associated with the popular culture of laughter come to permeate and structure literary works. Symbolic inversions, collective festivity, and mockery relativize the dominant culture, parading its conventionality, pomposity, and claims to discursive adequacy. Carnival on the streets is a licensed and limited rebellion against the ruling symbolic order, but once its features enter "great literature," the critical spirit that motivates it restructures the relationship between official and popular culture, democratizing the former and breaking the isolation of the latter. Bakhtin finds such features throughout the literature of the Renaissance, but he gives special attention to the work of the French novelist François Rabelais in Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i Renessansa (Rabelais and his world; 1984 [1965]) written at the end of the 1930s. This work was originally Bakhtin's doctoral (kandidatskaia ) dissertation.

As part of his project dealing with the rise of modern critical culture, Bakhtin also writes important articles on the spatiotemporal characteristics of particular genres, or chronotopes, and a special work on the generic features of Johann Goethe's Bildungsroman the surviving part of which is known as Roman vospitaniia vistorii realizma (The Bildungsroman and its significance in the history of realism, written in the late 1930s). Bakhtin argues that it is in the work of the polymath Goethe that the Renaissance demythification of the world reaches its highest point. Following Stalin's denunciation of Marr in 1950, Bakhtin also sought to distinguish between a human science of discursive or speech (rechevoi ) genres and a natural science of linguistic structures. In Bakhtin's posthumously published final works, translated as Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), this neo-Kantian concern with demarcating the natural and human sciences becomes his central focus. The natural sciences, which adopt a monologic approach to their voiceless object, deal with questions of causality and determination whereas the human sciences, eschewing all such considerations, are based on a dialogic methodology and pursue an ethics of intersubjectivity.

Bibliography

works

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays (Voprosy literatury i estetiki ). Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bakhtin, M. M. K filosofii postupka (c. 1925) (Toward a philosophy of the act). Translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov; edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Bakhtin, M. M. Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (1929) (Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics), edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, 1984.

Bakhtin, M. M. Rabelais and His World (Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i Renessansa ). Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva ). Translated by Vern W. McGee; edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Medvedev, P. N. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii ) (1928).Translated by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

Voloshinov, V. N. Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka (1929) (Marxism and the philosophy of Language). Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press, 1973.

studies

Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture, and Politics. London: Pluto, 2002.

Brandist, Craig, David Shepherd, and Galin Tihanov, eds. The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master's Absence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.

Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Poole, Brian. "From Phenomenology to Dialogue: Max Scheler's Phenomenological Tradition and Mikhail Bakhtin's Development from 'Toward a Philosophy of the Act' to His Study of Dostoevsky." In Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, edited by Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001.

Tihanov, Galin. The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000.

Craig Brandist (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy