by M. M. Bakhtin
trans. and notes by Vadim Liapunov,
ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov
Austin: Texas UP, 1993, xxiv + 106 pages
ISBN 0-292-76534-7 $25.00 hardcover
ISBN 0-292-70805-X $10.95 softcover
The remarkable odyssey of this slim volume, from near destruction to
publication in the West amid considerable fanfare, is at least as interesting
as its ostensive content. It was written during Bakhtin's so-called Nevel'/Vitebsk
period between 1919 and 1924 immediately following his stint at Petersburg
University, where he studied classical literature and philology. Bakhtin
was arrested in 1929 for unspecified "religious activities," which
coincided with the appearance of his Dostoevsky book, and he was subsequently
exiled to Kazakhstan for many years. These personal experiences of Stalinism,
including the arrest and disappearance of several members of the "Bakhtin
Circle," encouraged Bakhtin to lead a kind of sub rosa intellectual
life. He was highly sensitive to shifts in the political wind and wary of
public exposure. As a precautionary measure, during the darkest days of
Stalin's reign, he hid a number of his manuscripts in the backyard woodshed
of his house in Saransk (the capital of Moldovia), where he resided following
his Kazakhstan exile. It was not until 1972, after a degree of political
and cultural liberalization, that Bakhtin revealed their existence to his
students who then managed to retrieve them, albeit in a somewhat mouldy
and mouse-eaten state. (As Bakhtin aficionados know, a number of other manuscripts
met an even more ignominious fate: an inveterate smoker, Bakhtin cavalierly
tore up some of them during World War II - including a major work on Goethe
- for cigarette paper.) Several of these manuscripts have already been published.[1]
The Philosophy of the Act (a posthumous title amended by contemporary
translators) is apparently the last of Bakhtin's extant papers held in the
former Soviet Union.
Anecdotes aside, The Philosophy of the Act is of considerable interest
for another reason: the politics of cultural theory. As is often the case
with a complex and seminal thinker, the legacy of Bakhtin has, in recent
years, been subject to an intensely politicized struggle between two opposing
camps. Crudely speaking, on the one hand, there is a neo-liberal or "pluralist"
group (consisting mainly of American Slavists), and, on the other, a left
or Marxian-influenced school (in which I would include feminists, deconstructionists,
and so forth). The latter seek to appropriate Bakhtin's ideas for a radical
cultural politics, whereas the former strenuously resist this appropriation
and defend a much more conservative and "humanist" reading of
Bakhtin. The Philosophy of the Act has played a curious role in this
debate, mainly because two prominent Slavic specialists on Bakhtin - Gary
Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson - have vociferously argued that this text
provides us with considerable evidence that Bakhtin was fundamentally hostile
towards radical politics in general and Marxism in particular.[2]
In this essay, they claim, Bakhtin develops a sustained critique of
"theoretism," an embryonic concept which he later came to designate
as "monologism." "Theoretism" can be described as the
rationalistic desire to subsume the open-ended and "messy" qualities
of real-life communicative and social acts under the aegis of an all-encompassing
explanatory system. But such a transcription inevitably suppresses the "eventness"
of the everyday social world, its concrete particularity, which encourages
a blind faith in abstract technical systems and laws which function according
to an inexorable internal logic. Morson and Emerson identify such approaches
as Marxism, systematic or "formal" ethics and psychoanalysis as
representative examples of theoretism. Such an impoverishing and necessitarian
mode of thought can only be combated by a repudiation of theoretical abstraction
per se, in order to grasp the phenomenological nature of the "act"
as the essential "value-centre" for human existence. This must,
in turn, involve an understanding of the alterity between self and other,
insofar as we can only construct a unified image of self and engage in morally
and aesthetically productive tasks through our reciprocal relation to the
other. It is Morson and Emerson's contention that The Philosophy of the
Act is crucial for a proper understanding of Bakhtin's intellectual
corpus as a whole. It demonstrates his general belief in the "unfinalizability"
of people and the centrality of genuine responsibility to human experience,
and hence his hostility to nomothetic social science or abstract, speculative
philosophy (the archetypal example being Hegel's dialectic). Accordingly,
they contend that Bakhtin's later writings on "carnival," which
many have read as an uncompromising radical-populist attack on authoritarian
social systems and which project a utopian vision of human freedom, solidarity
and egalitarianism, is (as they put it) "anarchistically irresponsible,"
an "abberation" which is belied by the sober and deeply ethical
meditations found within earlier texts like The Philosophy of the Act.
The latter,[3] Morson and Emerson clearly imply, represents
the "genuine" or unadulterated Bakhtin.
It goes without saying that Morson and Emerson's privileging of this early
and formative essay affects our overall apprehension of Bakhtin's career.
Now that The Philosophy of the Act is finally available in English
translation, it is possible for non-Russian speakers with an interest in
Bakhtin to judge for themselves. On the one hand, I find myself in substantial
agreement that this work contains in nuce many of his later ideas
about authorship, responsibility, aesthetics, and the relationship between
self and other - although it is worth stressing that these concepts were
substantially transformed after the emergence of his distinctive metalinguistic
paradigm in the late 1920s. Yet, on the other hand, I find little textual
evidence that this essay represents the definitive, anti-Marxist Bakhtin.
On the contrary, I find interesting parallels in The Philosophy of the
Act with the theme of alienation found in the writings of the early
Marx, as well as later critiques of modernity advanced by the likes of Simmel
and Lukács - although, admittedly, Bakhtin's vocabulary is largely
neo-Kantian rather than Marxist in inspiration. This is perhaps not surprising,
given that The Philosophy of the Act is steeped in the Lebensphilosophie
of Rickert, Dilthey and Nietzsche, a distinctive social philosophy that
emerged in central Europe in the late nineteenth century in reaction to
the prevailing intellectual hegemony of scientific positivism.
It is this parallel I want to investigate here. The central argument in
The Philosophy of the Act is that there is a disjunction or gap between
immediate experience and symbolic representations of this experience. At
least since the advent of modernity, scientific rationalism has encouraged
the transcription of "Being-as-event" (that is, Being as constituted
by ongoing, lived experience) into a series of universal abstractions that
cleave Being from becoming. Yet Being-as-event remains the "value-center"
of human life: it is only from this location that I construct meaningful
relations with the world at large, transforming the "givenness"
of the world into a coherent "world-for-me." Otherwise, the world
remains a world of objective, empty possibility. If I remain in communion
with the concrete deed, with immediate experience, then I exist in a relation
of "answerability" to the world at large, in the sense that I
can accept full responsibility for my actions and thoughts. Because my participation
in the world is unique and non-recurrent, shared by no other person, no
one else can accept responsibility on my behalf. This explains Bakhtin's
recurring phrase: there is no "alibi" in Being. But neither can
we justify our deeds by recourse to an abstraction like the Categorical
Imperative, the Unconscious, the Historical Mission of the Proletariat,
or whatever. This provides us with just such an alibi for evading our responsibility,
in which case "what we have is not an answerable deed but a technical
or instrumental action" (56), which is justified by an appeal to efficiency
rather than morality. If we act purely out of obligation to such forms or
abstractions (aesthetic, scientific, etc.), then we "turn into imposters
or pretenders" (52) and abrogate the onus of answerability.
Bakhtin's ethical meditations in this essay underscore his insistence that
"A philosophy of life can only be a moral philosophy" (56), a
sentiment that finds covert expression in all of his writings. It is also
a timely sentiment, one quite literally rescued from the dustheap of history,
especially given the currently widespread suspicion of "grand theory"
coupled with a renewed interest in the local and the particular within recent
feminist and postmodern thought. Quite apart from this, and in keeping with
my focus on the debate over Bakhtin's legacy as mentioned above, there are
two brief points I wish to make. Firstly, I would argue that Bakhtin's approach
in this text is largely compatible with the critique of idealism and the
concept of "praxis" found in the early Marx. In his Paris Manuscripts,
Theses on Feuerbach, and so forth, Marx railed against idealist philosophy
for ignoring concrete human activity and for adhering to arid abstractions
severed from the actual production and reproduction of human existence.[4]
Feuerbach successfully argued that thought was a product of human beings
rather than the reverse, but clung to an abstract "human essence"
that bore no relation to concrete human praxis and self-transformation.
For Marx, idealism could only be overcome by ending human self-alienation,
by transforming the "realm of necessity" into the "realm
of freedom." Communism, as Marx understood it, thereby subordinated
the blind compulsion of external, ill-fathomed forces to conscious human
control. Likewise, Bakhtin suggests that the abstract and self-referential
world of pure theoretical cognition is antithetical to lived experience
and the historicity of Being: "it is quite inadmissable to conceive
of the act/deed of actual thinking as a psychic process [a product of mind],
and then to incorporate it in theoretical Being along with all its content"
(11). Theoretism excludes "the actual - individual and historical -
self-activity of the performed act" (26). And, moreover, he argues
that the world-as-event does not simply consist of finished, static things
(this is to view things as reifications); rather, the world presents itself
to us as a project, something to be completed through creative human practice
and an on-going process of value-creation. Again, the "givenness"
(the immanent necessity) of the world must be transformed into something
that has meaning for me. Only through "my to-be-accomplished self-activity"
can I actualize my uniqueness. The following quotation from Bakhtin would
not look out of place in The German Ideology, for instance: "Man-in-general
does not exist; I exist and a particular concrete other exists -
my intimate, my contemporary (social mankind), the past and future of actual
human beings (of actual historical mankind)" (47).
This interpretation is given added credence insofar as Bakhtin makes a number
of favourable comments about historical materialism in The Philosophy
of the Act. For example, he suggests that although it is not without
its shortcomings, historical materialism contains a significant degree of
what he calls "participative thinking" (i.e., thinking that remains
intimately connected to Being-as-event). This is mainly because
of its effort to build a world in such a way as to provide a place in it for the performance of determinate, concretely historical, actual deeds; a striving and action-performing consciousness can actually orient itself in the world of historical materialism. In the present context we shall not deal with the question of the particular ... incongruities in method by way of which historical materialism accomplishes its departure from within the most abstract theoretical world and its entry into the living world of the actually performed answerable deed. What is important for us, however, is that it does accomplish this departure, and that is what constitutes its strength, the reason for its success. (20)