http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n12/eagl01_.html	

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 12 dated 21 June 2007 | Terry Eagleton

I Contain Multitudes
Terry Eagleton

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World by Graham Pechey · Routledge, 238 pp,
£19.99

For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry
than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing
transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives,
global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural
theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the
mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope,
heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of
contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom
have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to
appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian,
religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural
sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these
things together?

That this once obscure Soviet philologist is now a star of the postmodern
West is less surprising than it might seem. For there is hardly a hot
postmodern topic that Bakhtin did not anticipate. Discourse, hybridity,
otherness, sexuality, subversion, deviance, heterogeneity, popular culture,
the body, the decentred self, the materiality of the sign, historicism,
everyday life: this precocious post-structuralist, as Graham Pechey calls
him, prefigured so much of our own times that it is surprising not to find
allusions in his work to Posh and Becks. Since little of this culture is the
direct result of his influence, one might claim that had Bakhtin not
existed, there would have been no need to invent him.

Why this curious parallelism between the age of Stalinist terror and the era
of the iPod? The answer is fairly obvious. Just as Bakhtin’s work is among
other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs
in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard,
Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted
leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on
political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now
cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy
about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring,
palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about
the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the
gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes
dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating
homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to
object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may
stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system
cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed. And since there
is no political hope in the heartlands of capitalism, where the proletariat
has upped sticks without leaving a forwarding address, the postmodern gaze
turns mesmerically to the Other, whatever passport (woman, gay, ethnic
minority) it happens to be travelling on.

Bakhtin, too, was a fifth columnist. He was born in the provincial Russian
town of Orel in 1895, the son of an untitled nobleman turned banker, and
studied classics at Petersburg University. His years as a student coincided
with the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Bakhtin, the
Bolsheviks, Futurists and Formalists emerged more or less at the same
explosive historical moment; and though he was a devout Russian Orthodox
Christian rather than a Marxist, Bakhtin lived through a period of heady
cultural synthesis in which a marriage of Communism and Christ didn’t seem
out of the question. If he was not exactly a historical materialist, his
thinking was both historical and materialist. The intensely communal bent of
the Russian Church, along with its spirituality of the senses, played its
part in this alliance. So did its quasi-materialist belief in the sacredness
of the bodily. It was a faith which hymned the humanity of Christ and the
complex richness of everyday life. Behind Bakhtin’s fascination with the
materiality of the word, as Pechey’s title suggests, lies an incarnational
theology. The Word-made-flesh is the figure in the carpet of his work.

After the revolution, Bakhtin worked in a number of small towns, dogged by
poverty and ill-health. He suffered from osteomyelitis, and had a leg
amputated in 1938. This celebrant of the body was in pretty poor shape. He
was also a fanatical smoker, a habit which eventually resulted in emphysema,
and despite his admiration for Rabelaisian feasting seemed to survive on
nothing but tea, which he downed by the gallon. Deprived of cigarette papers
in the Second World War, he deprived posterity of some priceless insights by
tearing up one of his own manuscripts to roll his tobacco.

In the town of Nevel, Bakhtin taught in a school; in Vitebsk he lectured at
the Institute of Education. Still acceptable to the Soviet regime at this
early point, he also ran a literary circle for the regional Communist Party
and taught courses on aesthetics to workers in the arts. In 1924, he
returned to St Petersburg, where he eked out a dismally meagre state pension
by lecturing to informal groups in private apartments. Here, as always, he
was surrounded by a close group of anarchically minded writers and eccentric
polymaths. Indeed, the story of his life is the tale of one such coterie
after another; they seemed to form spontaneously around him in whatever
godforsaken backwater he happened to wash up. He was a man who practised
dialogism as well as preached it. By the late 1920s, however, the kind of
religiosity which his circle promoted was in increasing disfavour with the
state; and in 1929 Bakhtin was arrested for membership of a religious
circle, anti-Communist proclivities and corrupting the young by his
teaching. The thinker whose notions of dialogism, subversive irony and
indirect speech ran back to Socrates now seemed about to suffer his
predecessor’s fate.

What saved the ailing Bakhtin from certain death in a labour camp was,
appropriately enough, a book. His great study of Dostoevsky’s poetics
appeared with providential timing in the year of his arrest, securing a
favourable review from Anatoly Lunacharsky, commissioner of education and
amateur cultural theorist. Saved from the camps, he was sentenced instead to
six years of relatively mild exile in Kazakhstan. As an intellectual child
abuser, he was forbidden from teaching there; but his wife, Elena
Alexsandrovna, took odd jobs to keep the pair alive, and this devotee of
Dante and Goethe ended up teaching accountancy to pig farmers as part of the
collectivisation effort. Having served his time in Kazakhstan, he settled in
Saransk, where he lived for a while in a disused jail and taught at the
Pedagogical Institute as a one-man world literature department. He also gave
a lecture on aesthetics to workers at a light-bulb factory, and became
something of a local celebrity. From there, at the height of the Great Purge
of the 1930s, his wanderings took him to Savelovo in the Mordovian republic,
where he would have starved to death without the generosity of friends.

Throughout this period, Bakhtin was at work on the doctoral dissertation
that was to become Rabelais and His World; and in 1946 he submitted the work
for examination. His examiners took offence at its scatology, sexual
explicitness, folkloric sentimentalism and scorn for dogma, and he was
granted the degree only 12 years later. It was not until the 1960s that his
gradual rehabilitation got underway, partly through the good offices of the
Formalist scholar Roman Jakobson. Bakhtin enthusiasts in the Soviet Union,
at least one of whom did not realise that the great man was still alive,
pressed for the republication of the Dostoevsky book, which after a
protracted struggle with the authorities saw the light of day again in 1963.
After an intensive press campaign, the Rabelais book eventually appeared as
well, its scatology prudently bowdlerised (‘penis’ became ‘bâton de
mariage’). The Bakhtins, now both seriously ill, secured places in a Moscow
hospital with the help of the daughter of Yuri Andropov. They moved from
there to an old people’s home usually reserved for inmates from the Third
World, and were finally granted residency in Moscow.

Rather as life and death are interwoven in Bakhtin’s carnivalesque vision,
so his reputation flourished as his body failed. Lionised by literary
scholars, sought out by aged Formalists and acclaimed by the intellectual
young, he died in 1975, just as literary theory was riding high in the West.
His last words, despite his having denied in his work that there was any
such thing as a last word, were ‘I go to thee.’ Religious Bakhtinians take
‘thee’ to mean God; Marxist Bakhtinians take it to mean his wife, who had
died four years earlier.

Bakhtin’s central concept of dialogism does not mean bending a courteous ear
to others, as some of his more liberal commentators seem to imagine. It
means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other,
perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped.
It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality.
There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern
thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us.
Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds
itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances
sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces
simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human
subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and
language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first
word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and
unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two
of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human
freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never
self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes
what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning
the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible
heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism.
Language is torn between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces – the former
decentring, the latter centralising. National languages aspire to be
monological but are in fact thoroughly ‘heteroglossic’, spawning a
multiplicity of dialects and speech styles.

In all these ways, Bakhtin’s work marks a momentous shift from language to
discourse. Whereas Saussure and his disciples reduced language to a formal,
contextless system, Bakhtin is seized by everything in language that cannot
be formalised: context, intonation, implication, the materiality of the
word, the non-said, the taken-for-granted, ideological evaluations and the
social relations between speakers. If communication is what makes us human,
linguistics can never be entirely distinguished from ethics.

The verbal sign, then, is ‘multi-accentual’, an unstable force which lives
only in its orientation to other signs. Bakhtin’s cultural interests are
accordingly in those forms – carnival, Menippean satire, the novel and so on
– which represent a mighty ‘polyphonic’ contest of discourses, with one form
of signification relativising and decentring another, one kind of idiom
invading, subverting, citing, framing and dismantling those around it. The
chief literary name for this is the novel, that mongrelised genre which –
unlike epic, pastoral or tragedy – is entirely without rules, and which in
Bakhtin’s eyes is less a definable form than a deconstructive force. The
novel lives purely in its dialogic relation to other literary modes,
cannibalising and parodying them. It is a maverick anti-genre, deviant and
non-canonical, a secular scripture which shows up all discourse as partial
and provisional. In Bakhtin’s view, it is no accident that this great
collision of verbal forms arose in both the Hellenistic era and the
Renaissance from the ruins of some more authoritative ideological system.

In Rabelais and His World, this orgy of signification takes to the street in
the form of a carnival. In the Russian tradition of the holy fool, the
ancient art of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits
all official values to satiric parody. Like the novel, it celebrates flux
and mutability, the dynamic and unstable. All absolute values are ridiculed
and relativised. Against the high-mindedness of official doctrine is pitted
the lethal power of laughter. Travesty, disfigurement and inversion
(nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane, man/woman, high culture/low
culture) rampage for a euphoric moment through the byways and marketplaces.
Rigid oppositions are scabrously dismantled. Birth and death, destruction
and renewal, body and spirit, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are
sent packing with their tails in each other’s mouths. Orifices are seen as
the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into
each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too
slippery to be pinned down. Carnival deflates the sublime and portentous;
and behind this desublimation lies the bathos of the Christian gospel, for
which salvation comes down to the gift of a cup of water. As the first
movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at
the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks
distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

Probably the best book on Bakhtin to have appeared so far in Britain is Ken
Hirschkop’s Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, published in 1999.
Hirschkop’s book has the edge on Pechey’s study in several ways. For one
thing, Hirschkop, unlike Pechey, reads Russian, and has served his time in
the Moscow libraries. For another thing, Hirschkop writes lucid,
companionable prose, whereas Pechey’s artfully wrought eloquence
occasionally sails close to verbosity. He has rather too eager an ear for
the solemnly resonant phrase, and at times can even wax mildly parsonical in
tone, as in ‘the sinful hubris of modern reason produces in the 20th century
the terroristic heresies of its characteristic politics.’ Despite his
admiration for Bakhtin, Hirschkop can be sharply critical, whereas Pechey
has scarcely a bad word to say of him. The well-nigh flawless thinker with
whom he presents us is far from unfinished, evolving, ambiguous and
conflictive, whereas Hirschkop is particularly good at flushing out his
shifts and inconsistencies. Finally, though Hirschkop is a Marxist, he is
not bent on hijacking Bakhtin for his own position; whereas Pechey, a
Marxist-turned-Christian, is eager to do precisely that. Mikhail Bakhtin:
The Word in the World is a finely perceptive study of formidable
intellectual subtlety; but beneath its rather involuted academic prose it is
also a deeply partisan affair.

Pechey argues persuasively that Bakhtin was out to rewrite the history of
modernity. Epistemology yields to aesthetics, as the abstract reason of the
Enlightenment is replaced by the sensuous particularity of art. A brutally
instrumental rationality makes way for a form of communicative reason. The
falsely autonomous subject of the modern age is overturned by the dialogical
self. In all these ways, the aesthetic in the modern age becomes the
repository of lost or sidelined forms of knowledge. Pechey argues this case
with skill and force; but he can’t resist demonising his various opponents
in the most undialogical fashion. The flawed, rich, stunningly original work
of the Russian Formalists is dismissed as so much critical technocracy.
Indeed, the book proposes an outrageous parallel between them and the
Stalinists. All avant-gardes (Rimbaud? Cubism? Surrealism?) are to be
consigned to hell (Pechey’s own language) as literary Leninism, conspirators
in the very modernising projects they are meant to challenge. This glib
caricature might have come as a surprise to Mayakovsky, who committed
suicide in 1930 as Stalin’s grip tightened. Pechey misses the true
complexity of a European Modernism that was both ultra-modern and
anti-modern at the same time. Modernity is a matter of ‘abstract ideas and
bloodless epistemology’; there is nothing to be said in favour of the
Enlightenment (democracy? feminism? liberalism? universal rights?); and
though Bakhtin suffered under the barbarous irrationalism of the Soviet
regime, we are invited to admire ‘any group which has reason to suspect
Reason’ (note the scare cap).

Though Pechey wants to rescue Bakhtin from the mildest taint of Marxism, he
is somewhat inconsistent on this score. The suggestion that Bakhtin wrote a
couple of Marxist texts under the names of two of his colleagues is at one
point scornfully repudiated as a ‘delusion’; yet elsewhere these works are
said to have been ‘inspired’ or even ‘ventriloquised’ by him. The fact that
Bakhtin probably welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in his own idealist way
passes unmentioned. Pechey wouldn’t, he assures us rather stiffly, want to
‘politicise’ his author’s work; yet he reads it more than once as
anti-Soviet polemic, and even allows that Bakhtin adhered to a form of
‘quasi-“Western Marxism”’ (one observes the double qualification). Elsewhere
in the book, this judicious formulation becomes, rather more recklessly,
Bakhtin as a precursor of post-colonialism – though rather dismayingly
Pechey, a South African, seems to think that there is little or nothing to
choose between the apartheid state of his homeland and the ‘orthodoxy of
subversion’ which opposed it. A disillusionment with the ANC, along with
that shift to the right known as growing older, might well have played its
part in his own evolution from Marxism to Christianity. In so far as
Bakhtin, too, may well have shifted from a distant sympathy for Marxism to
an understandable antagonism to it, the book may have its autobiographical
dimension.

For all its over-drawn oppositions, Pechey’s study is an intellectual tour
de force, the fruit of a thinker who has meditated long and deeply on his
subject. One might recall, however, that there is nothing inherently
positive about change, dynamism, plurality, hybridity and open-endedness.
What has altered since Bakhtin’s time, although neither Pechey nor the
postmodernists seem to have noticed, is that if these were once alternatives
to the system, they are now entirely indispensable to it. No regime is more
in love with the multiple and dynamic than late capitalism. One might
remember, too, that one virtue of Marxism has been its insistence that there
is no need to cobble together an alternative modernity, since that
alternative lies deep in modernity itself. The very forces which make for
human misery and oppression can also make for emancipation and wellbeing.
Perhaps this, after all, is the most audacious form of dialogism.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at
Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.