m of care – feb 27 25
rabelais and his world by mikhail bakhtin reading group – session 5 – [https://museum.care/events/reading-group-mikhail-bakhtin-s-book-rabelais-session-5/]:
Reading Group: Mikhail Bakhtin’s book Rabelais. Session 5
This is our long-awaited reading group on David Graeber’s favorite Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World.
These meetings are limited in number. The group is meeting 12 times during 2024/25, on the last Thursday of each month.
For this fifth session, please read Chapter 2, pages 145 to 170 (pdf in English below).
notes/quotes from meeting:
nika: clown ish people putting political jargon down.. what kind of language can we propose..
from “I want to understand you, I study your obscure language.” to me.. a key part is about letting others’ language be obscure.. that unfinalizable ness he talks about.. i’ve been referring to it as idiosyncratic jargon ness.. which is already encrypted et al.. profane vs sacred not deep enough.. one vs the other or to balance the other is too confining with the means/tech we have available to us today to have a language .. (lanier) beyond words
kyrill: the intervention of all these formal systems.. is the pt of bringing things down/base/market.. we have a more direct connection.. is he making a spiritual claim
ulja – friend w nika: carnival wasn’t permanent.. pt of humor was to create a space for the profane in order to sustain the system where the sacred can exist.. sacred needs profane to exist.. she shares in chat – https://russianartarchive.net/en/catalogue/document/F3407
nika: why i think he’s talking so much about obscenities.. this is how he created a place of freedom outside rules of church.. major thing david was saying as bahktin student.. was need another language
nika: one of strategies of right wing is how to suppress women..
leop: the problem.. the rhetoric of fertility.. which is rhetoric of trump.. monopoly on fertility deeply connected w control of bodies
kyrill: the thing that is difficult.. trump is master of language of markets.. reclaiming of the sacred
nika: reclaiming the sacred.. fertility is sacred.. just need diff way to arrange it.. marketplace and trump do this from church/politics.. that’s what we should do..
ilja: more about the system.. the carnivalesque is something you can’t do on a daily basis.. have to create special places/times for laughing/subversion.. because then society as we know it will collapse.. how to go beyond this very brief moment of liberation.. because for me.. those moments of lib were a way of letting the people get the steam out and then go back to daily lives..
leop: i read it where festivals are where you see it the most.. and this becomes public.. don’t have societal pressure.. i think steam metaphor is dangerous.. then explosive society.. to me.. always all of these things.. have to keep them both..
stas: in order to remind us what rules are.. we need specific times.. vacations.. to break them.. to remind us what the rules are..
nika: all these ideas david was developing we can see here.. complicated social architect and where we can rearrange the rules.. all in this book
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email from nika just before session:
Looking forward to seeing everyone in 2 hours for our Bakhtin reading group! Today, we’ll be discussing a short passage from the second chapter.
One of the most striking parts of this chapter is the epigraph:
“I want to understand you,
I study your obscure language.”If we see the language of the medieval Church, as described by Bakhtin, as a parallel to the language of the liberals—which has dominated public discourse for the past 30 years and is now rapidly being displaced by the language of the streets—then the prologue to Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, analyzed in this chapter, offers a detailed study of the linguistic upheaval unfolding before our eyes.
to me.. a key part is about letting others’ language be obscure.. that unfinalizable ness he talks about
to me.. this is huge.. (as can see in my notes below).. whalespeak is enclosing us and killing us.. we need a means/way beyond the prep/train/rules ness of language as control/enclosure.. for each other.. but also and most/1st.. w/in ourselves.. ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
as i wrote below: this is why i think idiosyncratic jargon is already like an encryptioned (non)language.. so that people can feel free about sharing/exposing their self-talk as data to connect us
and also from below: Bakhtin has been called “the philosopher of human communication”. [from his wikipedia page]
we need to switch from shaw communication law.. to rumi words law and lanier beyond words law
and for that.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
the thing we’ve not yet tried (in language and in everything): the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
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notes/quotes from reading – Chapter 2, pages 145 to 170 – via pdf download provided on event page:
[just copying from notes i took from session for – read to 195 then]
169 (of 508 in pdf).. 145 (of 483 in actual book)
CHAPTER TWO
The Language of the Marketplace in RabelaisI want to understand you, I study your obscure language.
(A. S. PUSHKIN, “POEM COMPOSED DURING A SLEEPLESS NIGHT”)
yeah that.. that’s what safeguards the idiosyncratic jargon ness of self-talk as data
We shall examine first of all those elements of Rabelais’ language that, from the seventeenth century on, were a stumbling block for his admirers and readers, those that La Bruyere considered “filthy
depravation” and Voltaire “impertinence.” Let us call these components conditionally and metaphorically the marketplace and billingsgate elements of the novel. It was precisely this language that the Abbe Marsy and Abbe Perraud tried to expurgate in the eighteenth century and George Sand in the nineteenth. These elements still prevent public reading of Rabelais, although in other respects no author is better suited for such reading.
so did they legit want to know? or pressured to think they want to know?..
this is why i think idiosyncratic jargon is already like an encryptioned (non)language.. so that people can feel free about sharing/exposing their self-talk as data to connect us
171 (147)
The very image of the boy must be revised. He is the symbol of youth, of immaturity and incompleteness. Such an image holds good only superficially; Rabelais’ youth is the youth of antiquity,
the “playing boy” of Heraclitus. From the historic point of view, Rabelais’ cynicism belongs to the most ancient stratum of his novel.172 (148)
These examples prove that the slinging of excrement and drenching in urine are traditional debasing gestures, familiar not only to grotesque realism but to antiquity as well. Their debasing meaning was generally known and understood. We can find probably in every language such expressions as “I shit on you.” (Bowdlerized equivalents are: “I spit on you” or “I sneeze on you.”)
177 (153)
First of all, these elements are not isolated; they are an organic part of the entire system of images and style. They become isolated and specific *only for modern literary consciousness. Within the system of **grotesque realism and popular festive forms they were an essential part of the imagery representing the material bodily lower stratum. True, they were unofficial in character, but so too was all popular-festive literature of the Middle Ages, so too was laughter. We, therefore, brought out the billingsgate and marketplace images only conventionally. We mean by these terms all that is directly linked with the life of the people, bearing its mark of ***nonofficial freedom; but at the same time these
images cannot be referred to as popular-festive literature in the strict sense of this word.. First of all, we have in mind certain forms of familiar speech-curses, profanities, and oaths-and second the colloquialisms of the marketplace:
*to me.. ‘organic’ ness has been squashed/covered by lit & num as colonialism since forever
**getting impression that ie: excretion throwing/drowning, profanities, et al.. are assumed ***nonofficial freedom.. just because ie: counter, rebellious, et al
black science of people/whales law
The marketplace of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was a world in itself, a world which was one; all “performances” in this area, from loud cursing to the organized show, had something in common and were imbued with the same atmosphere of freedom, frankness, and familiarity. Such elements of familiar speech as profanities, oaths, and curses were fully legalized in the marketplace and were easily adopted by all the festive genres, even by Church drama. The marketplace was the center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology, it always remained “with the people.”
to me.. whalespeak.. meaning.. even in the marketplace/carnival et al.. we are not-us.. we need a global detox leap
178 (154)
This territory, as we have said, was a peculiar second world within the official medieval order and was
ruled by a special type of relationship, a *free, familiar, marketplace relationship. Officially the palaces, churches, institutions, and private homes were dominated by hierarchy and etiquette, but in the
marketplace a special kind of speech was heard, almost a language of its own, quite unlike the language of Church, palace, courts, and institutions. It was also unlike the tongue of official literature or of the ruling classes-the aristocracy, the nobles, the high-ranking clergy and the top burghers-though the elemental force of the folk idiom penetrated even these circles. On feast days, especially
during the carnivals, this force broke through every sphere, and even through the Church. as in “the feast of fools.” The festive marketplace combined many genres and forms, all filled with” the same ***unofficial spirit.
*to me.. not free if market ness.. ie: 10-day-care-center\ness et al.. of math and men.. graeber violence/quantification law.. et al
**idiosyncratic jargon ness.. but need to undo our hierarchical listening for that dance to dance
***need even deeper than what anyone has ever had.. ie: sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
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notes from mikhail bakhtin page:
The concept of unfinalizability is particularly important to Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s approach to character, although he frequently discussed it in other contexts. He summarises the general principle behind unfinalizability in Dostoevsky thus:
Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future.
Dostoevsky does not describe characters and contrive plot within the context of a single authorial reality: rather his function as author is to illuminate the self-consciousness of the characters so that each participates on their own terms, in their own voice, according to their own ideas about themselves and the world. Bakhtin calls this multi-voiced reality “polyphony”: “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices
Bakhtin has been called “the philosopher of human communication”. . Kim states that “culture as Geertz and Bakhtin allude to can be generally transmitted through communication or reciprocal interaction such as a dialogue.”
Essentially, the act of turning society around through communication, whether it be in the form of text, protest, or otherwise serves as a communicative form of carnival, according to Bakhtin
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examine methodically and in detail the constitution or structure of (something, especially information), typically for purposes of explanation and interpretation.
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be you. 