Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

 
In the unlikely event that I have regular readers, some of them might happen to recall that one of my obscure passions is the early twentieth century literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin:

"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....

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...

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."


Eagleton's review does an excellent task of highlighting what I found so appealing in Bakhtin; his defence of the untidy, unfinished and chaotic, that which defies order and system. Nonetheless, for all of the comparisons evinced here Bakhtin's work contains no assumption that there is nothing outside language, pertains largely to the formal and linguistic properties of the novel and lacks any metaphysical critique of meta-narratives. One can draw some parallels with Derrida, viewing differance and dialogism as being spiritually akin concepts but any such parallel is necessarily rather strained. The figure Bakhtin does remind me of isn't so much Derrida but Sartre. Both Bakhtin and Sartre were drawn in many respects to Marxism as a philosophy (albeit with Sartre far more committed to it than the man who was to die in one Stalin's gulags). In the former case, Bakhtin's work treats of the novel in materialistic terms as a product of specific cultural, historical and social forces as much as the linguistic ones Eagleton highlights. His work nonetheless treats of the ways in which these forces combine to ensure that the novel is, to purloin a phrase, condemned to be free or, to use Bakhtin's phrase, to be dialogic. Similarly, Sartre's work struggles to yoke together the heterogenous elements of existentialism and communism, of how freedom could gear itself to the social conditions it found itself in. The polyphonic novel was naturally the ideal vehicle for Sartre to manifest those ideas, utilising concepts like the cutups and multiple viewpoints that he had borrowed from Dos Passos but which also bore a distinct resemblance to Bakhtinian dialogism.

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posted by Richard 6:54 pm