mikhail bakhtin
adding page via nika dubrovsky‘s (actually david graeber‘s) interest in him and in fyodor dostoevsky
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (/bʌxˈtiːn/ bukh-TEEN; Russian: Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, IPA: [mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪtɕ bɐxˈtʲin]; 16 November 1895 – 7 March 1975) was a Russian philosopher, literary critic 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.
in 1919, a short section of this work was published and given the title “Art and Responsibility”. This piece constitutes Bakhtin’s first published work.
art – being human and responsibility
rather.. art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
another art world et al
In 1929, “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art”, Bakhtin’s first major work, was published. It is here that Bakhtin introduces the concept of dialogism. However, just as this book was introduced, on 8 December 1928, right before Voskresenie’s 10th anniversary, Meyer, Bakhtin and a number of others associated with Voskresenie were apprehended by the Soviet secret police, the OGPU. The leaders received sentences of up to ten years in labor camps of Solovki, though after an appeal to consider the state of his health, Bakhtin’s sentence was commuted to exile to Kazakhstan, where he and his wife spent six years in Kustanai (now Kostanay). In 1936, they moved to Saransk (then in Mordovian ASSR, now the Republic of Mordovia), where Bakhtin taught at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute.
dialogism – the use in a text of different tones or viewpoints, whose interaction or contradiction is important to the text’s interpretation.
In 1940, and until the end of World War II, Bakhtin lived in Moscow, where he submitted a dissertation on François Rabelais to the Gorky Institute of World Literature to obtain a postgraduate title, although the dissertation could not be defended until the war ended. ..The book’s earthy, anarchic topic was the cause of many arguments that ceased only when the government intervened. Ultimately, Bakhtin was denied a higher doctoral degree (Doctor of Sciences) and granted a lesser degree (Candidate of Sciences, a research doctorate), by the State Accrediting Bureau. Later, Bakhtin was invited back to Saransk, where he took on the position of chair of the General Literature Department at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute.
Bakhtin’s works and ideas gained popularity only after his death, and he endured difficult conditions for much of his professional life, a time in which information was often seen as dangerous and therefore was often hidden. As a result, the details provided now are often of uncertain accuracy. Also contributing to the imprecision of these details is the limited access to Russian archival information during Bakhtin’s life. It was only after the archives became public that scholars realized that much of what they thought they knew about Bakhtin’s life was false or skewed, largely by Bakhtin himself
During his time in Leningrad, Bakhtin shifted his view away from the philosophy characteristic of his early works and towards the notion of dialogue. It was at this time that he began his engagement with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is considered to be Bakhtin’s seminal work, a work in which he introduces a number of important concepts.
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.
On the individual level, this means that a person can never be entirely externally defined: the ability to never be fully enclosed by others’ objectifications is essential to subjective consciousness. Though external finalization (definition, description, causal or genetic explanation etc) is inevitable and *even necessary, it can never be the whole truth, devoid of the living response. Bakhtin is critical of what he calls the monologic tradition in Western thought that seeks to finalize humanity, and individual humans, in this way.
He argues that Dostoevsky always wrote in opposition to ways of thinking that turn human beings into objects (scientific, economic, social, psychological etc.) – conceptual frameworks that enclose people in an alien web of definition and causation, robbing them of freedom and responsibility: “He saw in it a degrading reification of a person’s soul, a discounting of its freedom and its unfinalizability… Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable, and unpredeterminable, turning point for their soul.”..t
*graeber can’t know law.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. naming the colour ness.. et al
‘Carnivalization’ is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible..t The “carnival sense of the world”, a way of thinking and experiencing that Bakhtin identifies in ancient and medieval carnival traditions, has been transposed into a literary tradition that reaches its peak in Dostoevsky’s novels. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the “joyful relativity” of free participation in the festival. According to Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin’s carnival is “the apotheosis of unfinalizability”. Carnival, through its temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the ‘threshold’ situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction. In carnival, “opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another.” Bakhtin sees carnivalization in this sense as a basic principle of Dostoevsky’s art: love and hate, faith and atheism, loftiness and degradation, love of life and self-destruction, purity and vice, etc. “everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite.’
Carnivalization and its generic counterpart—Menippean satire—were not a part of the earlier book, but Bakhtin discusses them at great length in the chapter “Characteristics of Genre and Plot Composition in Dostoesky’s Works” in the revised version. He traces the origins of Menippean satire back to ancient Greece, briefly describes a number of historical examples of the genre, and examines its essential characteristics. These characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, inappropriate behaviour, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues. Bakhtin credits Dostoevsky with revitalizing the genre and enhancing it with his own innovation in form and structure: the polyphonic novel.
According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel, and it was a fundamentally new genre that could not be analysed according to preconceived frameworks and schema that might be useful for other manifestations of the European novel. 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...”..t Later he defines it as “the event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses.”
for that.. need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us
infinitesimal structures approaching the limit of structureless\ness and/or vice versa .. aka: ginorm/small ness
Rabelais and His World: carnival and grotesque
It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body and the material bodily lower stratum.
In his chapter on the history of laughter, Bakhtin advances the notion of its therapeutic and liberating force, arguing that “laughing truth … degraded power”.
The Dialogic Imagination: chronotope and heteroglossia
Main article: The Dialogic Imagination
Heteroglossia is “the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance.” To make an utterance means to “appropriate the words of others and populate them with one’s own intention.” Bakhtin’s deep insights on dialogicality represent a substantive shift from views on the nature of language and knowledge by major thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Immanuel Kant.
idiosyncratic jargon ness.. but no need to appropriate words of others .. no need for words even
In writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is *forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which the author lives. For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages reality.
*perhaps until now.. now can listen to and use as data.. the itch-in-8b-souls
The term heteroglossia refers to the qualities of a language that are extralinguistic, but common to all languages. These include qualities such as perspective, evaluation, and ideological positioning. In this way most languages are incapable of neutrality, for every word is inextricably bound to the context in which it exists.
He is known for a series of concepts that have been used and adapted in a number of disciplines: dialogism, the carnivalesque, the chronotope, heteroglossia and “outsidedness” (the English translation of a Russian term vnenakhodimost, sometimes rendered into English—from French rather than from Russian—as “exotopy”). Together these concepts outline a distinctive philosophy of language and culture that has at its center the claims that all discourse is in essence a dialogical exchange and that this endows all language with a particular ethical or ethico-political force.
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.”
again.. need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature ie: tech as it could be
Communication and culture
According to Leslie Baxter, “Bakhtin’s life work can be understood as a critique of the monologization of the human experience that he perceived in the dominant linguistic, literary, philosophical, and political theories of his time.” He was “critical of efforts to reduce the unfinalizable, open, and multivocal process of meaning-making in determinate, closed, totalizing ways.”..t For Baxter, Bakhtin’s dialogism enables communication scholars to conceive of difference in new ways.
Carnivalesque and communication
Sheckels contends that “what [… Bakhtin] terms the ‘carnivalesque’ is tied to the body and the public exhibition of its more private functions […] it served also as a communication event […] anti-authority communication events […] can also be deemed ‘carnivalesque’.” 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. Steele furthers the idea of carnivalesque in communication as she argues that it is found in corporate communication. Steele states “that ritualized sales meetings, annual employee picnics, retirement roasts and similar corporate events fit the category of carnival.” Carnival cannot help but be linked to communication and culture as Steele points out that “in addition to qualities of inversion, ambivalence, and excess, carnival’s themes typically include a fascination with the body, particularly its little-glorified or ‘lower strata’ parts, and dichotomies between ‘high’ or ‘low’.” The high and low binary is particularly relevant in communication as certain verbiage is considered high, while slang is considered low. Moreover, much of popular communication including television shows, books, and movies fall into high and low brow categories. This is particularly prevalent in Bakhtin’s native Russia, where postmodernist writers such as Boris Akunin have worked to change low brow communication forms (such as the mystery novel) into higher literary works of art by making constant references to one of Bakhtin’s favorite subjects, Dostoyevsky.
the communication (2 conversations) we need as infra.. to legit turn us back into us
ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
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in prep for mikhail bakhtin reading group via museum of care:
one of david’s fav books.. Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) is the most famous Russian philosopher of the 20th century. Bakhtin’s notions of the “chronotope”, “polyphony” and “carnivalization” influenced thinkers such as Julia Kristeva. He mostly wrote in obscurity during his life and became known only after his death. Besides his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin’s masterpiece is Rabelais and His World (1940), to which this reading group is dedicated. He wrote the book briefly after losing one leg due to an illness. The Rabelais book develops original theories of carnival and collectivity, the materiality of time, bodily
transformation, the grotesque, laughter and the transgression of power. During carnival, Bakhtin wrote, all people are equal. Old authorities are suspended and freedom reigns.
carnival.. rabelais and his world.. [also adding a bunch of notes here: scott on bakhtin].. et al
giant puppets et al.. david on fun.. pirates.. et al
Text excerpts to read from Bakhtin’s Rabelais book: (following this pdf:
https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Bakhtin_Mikhail_Rabelais_and_His_World_1984.pdf)first session: m of care – oct 31 24
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expanding the rabelais ness on m of care starting here:
dgi – benjamin palof – 11 14 25
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be you. 