The story of the discovery and perception of Bakhtin
in the West after the 60’s offers an interesting collage of the ideas that have
been “in the air” since then. Hailed as a prophet of post-modernity, Bakhtin’s
peculiar jargon (“dialogism”, “carnival”, “chronotope” and the like), was soon
trivialized in the hands of the booming Bakhtin scholarship (or, “Bakhtin
industry” as it was called derogatively) which had discovered a promising
armamentarium that, as Brandist wittily put it, “offers something to everyone”
(p. 1) — whether post-modern, post-Marxist, structuralist, religious, or
feminist. Soon it became evident that
we have to deal not only with different “Bakhtins” — almost “as many
‘Bakhtins’ as there are interpreters” (ibid) — but moreover with mutually
exclusive versions of Bakhtin. And of course it cannot be but a sheer irony
that the debate regarding the preacher of values like ‘dialogue’, ‘polyphony’,
and the like became extremely polarized (at least with respect to the “accursed
question” regarding Bakhtin’s authorship or co-authorship of books that are
signed by Medvedev and Voloshinov — a question, it should be added in advance,
that, even if it appears pedantic, in fact affects our very understanding of
Bakhtin.)

It was precisely this faithfulness to the fine points that was missing in
the greatest bulk of the speculative and appropriating (if not abusive)
scholarship on Bakhtin. As during the past few years this uncritical enthusiasm
started to ebb (although this by no means has curbed the spate of publications
dedicated to Bakhtin), a more careful examination of his work has been made
available aided by the still in-process edition of his completed works and the
gradual unearthing of material from his archive. It is this line, which seeks
the contextualization of Bakhtin, that Brandist, a lecturer at the Bakhtin
Centre at Sheffield University, follows, along with a group of scholars such as
Hirschkop, Nikolaev, Poole, and Tihanov et al.

The Bakhtin Circle is the
first full-length study on the works of a group of people that used to meet
between 1918 and 1929. Brandist regards these meetings as constitutive for the
intellectual formation of Bakhtin (who, it should be noted, despite his claims,
never received higher education) and argues that even if the group meetings
were terminated following the arrest of some of the members in 1929 (among them
Bakhtin himself), the “dialogue” between members of the circle continued
through their works. In light of this
enduring dialogue — and this is Brandist’s bold hypothesis around which the
entire book gravitates — the work of some members of the group could
illuminate the work of others. What
follows is a scrupulous study of the work of the Circle that is “understood
within the European intellectual context of its time, and seen as a particular
ongoing synthesis of mainly German philosophical currents in peculiarly Soviet
contexts.”(p.5) Brandist’s task is to distinguish the manifold layers such as
Neo-Kantianism, Lebenphilosophie, Phenomenology, Gestalt theory, Marxism,
Semiotics, Sociology, Linguistics and Hegelianism (!), on which Bakhtin’s and
his circle’s work was built. This is not easy if we consider that, at least
according to the author, “these influences are cumulative rather than serial,
with the result that the periods of the Circle’s work do not neatly coincide
with the influence of a single trend, but combine aspects of each in a rather
original fashion” (p. 24).

 Once the Ariadne’s clue is unfolded, what we
have at hand, is not merely a convincing and accessible narrative of the intellectual
background that forms and underpins Bakhtin’s work but nothing less than bold
re-reading of the same that brings to light, along with some non-acknowledged
sources, its limitations, deficiencies, or even inner inconsistencies

However, despite the casting of a sharp eye both to the huge reservoir
of German thought and to the patterns of appropriation by the members of the
Circle, the author’s interpretation remains not entirely unquestionable. Even
if this study has obviously departed from the arbitrary and somehow
impressionistic interpretation of Bakhtin thanks to a close examination of the
sources of the latter’s thought, the problem of the interpretation of these
precise sources remains. In order to illustrate
my argument, which might sound like an easy sophistry, it is interesting to
see, for example, which aspects of Cohen’s or Kagan’s philosophy Coates
underlines as constitutive for Bakhtin’s work in her theological interpretation
of the latter, and those which Brandist 
focuses on in his socio-political interpretation. For even if arbitrariness has been eschewed
in this kind of scholarship, it might reappear not in the form of ignorance but
rather in that of eclecticism. Characteristically, the theologically-orientated
Mihailovic underlines tendencies in Russian religious thought, such as
Bakhtin’s relevance with Florenski, while Brandist tactfully and frankly
bypasses the possibility of a religious dimension in Bakhtin’s work (see pp.
23-24) and consequently regards as fundamental his “dialogue” with the
definitely inter-social considerations of the members of the circle.

Interestingly, Brandist fails to give note to certain members of
Bakhtin’s Circle who had religious affinities, while Mihailovic, on the other
hand, focuses on Bakhtin’s affection for Iudina, who was religious, although
she did not produce any theoretical work. 
And at this point let me add that this downplay might cause an
anachronistic reading. For example,
when the author, referring to the presentation of the masculine and the
feminine subject in the early work by Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic
Activity”, refers vaguely in passing to “some religious significance” in this
essay (which in fact echoes Soloviev’s idea of Sophia and androgyne that might
influenced Bakhtin via Ivanov’s Symbolism) only dismisses “this sexist imagery
[as a]… certainly undesirable element of Bakhtin’s phenomenology.”[sic] (p.45).

In other words, having unearthed the sources, we can easily lapse into a
regressus ad infinitum regarding the interpretation of precisely these sources
and the extent to which we consider them to be authoritative for Bakhtin. It is
the eclecticism of Bakhtin that now “offers something to everyone” and that
gives rise to a possibility for an eclectic underlining of some sources at the
expense of others.

Another question that should be
raised is the problem of the usage of these sources or influences by Bakhtin.
Even if the kindred affinities between Medvedev’s sociological poetics,
Voloshinov’s Marxism, and Bakhtin’s “dialogue” have been convincingly pointed
out, and the thorny question of the authorship of these texts tactfully
eschewed, still Bakhtin might use the same philosophical armamentarium for
different purposes. In reading The Bakhtin Circle, the reader often gets
the impression that these texts have been elevated to a yardstick against which
the works of Bakhtin, diminished somehow to by-products, are judged. This
becomes evident particularly in the last chapter of the book entitled “the
Bakhtinian Research Programme: Yesterday and Today” in which Brandist, having
described the problems and tensions of Bakhtin’s thought, counter-proposes “a
little revolution” and somewhat apologetically leaves the reader to “decide
whether the ‘hard core’ of the Bakhtinian research programme remains intact
after [that]” (p.176) What I personally find arguable is not the critical
stance of the author, who does not hesitate to question “some of Bakhtin’s
ideas [that have] often triumphed over methodological rigour” (p.173) (since
after all such critical vigor should be hailed as filling a lacuna of a
hitherto laudatory scholarship); neither I do oppose the relegation of Bakhtin,
contrary to the recently prevailing image of a mythical figure that appeared
out of the blue, to a lesser position within a wider ideological circle (and
even sometimes given the role of a tacit adaptor or even a plagiarizer, “a
notorious cavalier”); but it is precisely the extent to which the “hard core”
within the Bakhtinian research program remains Bakhtinian at all, having being
dissociated from the “misguidance” of “Bakhtin’s ideological and idealistic
commitments”(p. 190). Indeed, it seems
that Brandist values Voloshinov as more promising than Bakhtin (p.191). Even if the reasons for Bakhtin’s commitment
to idealism are dismissed on the grounds that that they constitute “a
‘political’ choice made on class allegiance rather than an “epistemological”
[one]”, which Brandist sees as evidence of a sort of “aristocratic disdain” on
Bakhtin’s part (p. 190), this ostensibly “political” choice nevertheless
produced an “epistemology” which is the “hard core” of Bakhtin’s thought and
which is incommensurable to both Brandist’s proposals and to the angle from
which he approaches Bakhtin. Inter-personal relationship (whether it is a
deficient remnant of idealism or not) is, after all, the privileged mode of
inter-subjectivity around which the whole work of Bakhtin was concentrated,
and, crucially, is intrinsically apolitical since it remains below and beyond the
political sphere, and has to remain so in order to avoid
“de-personalization”. Even if the
negligence of socio-economic structures in Bakhtin’s conception of
inter-subjectivity provides a “distorted picture of human social life and tends
to collapse politics into ethics”, as the author argues (p. 174), the opposite
situation, even if ‘better’, would not be Bakhtinian at all.

To conclude, and notwithstanding the aforementioned objections,
Brandist’s study is an important contribution by a school of Bakhtin
interpretation. It is indispensable to
anyone who wants to develop a serious approach to Bakhtin. Unfortunately (or rather, luckily), I do not
feel confident to suggest that this work is going to be read for long: it will
surely be a source of inspiration in the never-slowing tide of publications
coming from the “Bakhtin industry”, leading, hopefully, to a series of more
measured studies or PhDs focusing on the less fashionable figures in the
playful market of our post-modern era, which are less trendy but more relevant
and illuminating; perhaps, for example, the relation of Bakhtin to Cassirer,
Scheler, Cohen or even Pumpianskii would replace studies on, say, Bakhtin and
Derrida, and feminism and the like. It
is here the intrinsic value of Brandist’s book lies.

© 2003 Markos Galounis

Markos Galounis, University of Durham

Categories: Philosophical