Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory
EN3000 – Fall/Winter 2011/2012 – Nemanja Protic
Lecture 2 – Sept 15
Last Week…
- What does it mean to be modern and how is modernity organized in terms of
theories (concepts) and practices (ways of living)?
- What does it mean to be postmodern and how is postmodernity organized in
those same terms?
- Are we, today, modern? Are we postmodern? Or is there a third option?
- More specifically, how are categories and concepts such as truth, history,
subjectivity, and ideology utilised in a construction of praxis in the modern and
postmodern periods?
Praxis (as per Calvin O. Schrag)
“Praxis… [is located] between the theoretical and the practical as they are
generally understood, and particularly as they are understood in modern philosophy.
Praxis as the manner in which we are engaged in the world and with others has its own
insight or understanding prior to any explicit formulation of that understanding… Of
course, it must be understood that praxis, as I understand it, is always entwined with
communication.”
The Modern Era
- Rebellion against traditional forms of authority such as the Church and the
Monarchy, and an attempt to establish the autonomy of the individual’s capability
to reason.
- Rise of democratic political forms, based on the autonomy of the individual.
- This democracy is often described as ‘liberal’ – concerned with rights of
individuals – and as closely related to capitalist economic forms and commerce
epitomised by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of machine production.
- Modern thought, furthermore, builds on this faith in reason and human autonomy,
and leads to a proliferation of subjectivist and individualistic ways of
conceptualising the world.
Modernity: Liberalism vs. Democracy
- Modernity is a concept that embodies cultural aspects of the modern era such as
the rebellion against traditional authority and faith in reason and autonomy of the
individual; these are concretely expressed in liberal-democratic political forms.
- The conflict at the heart of the dominant Western political form, liberal
democracy:
o Liberalism vs. Democracy, or
o Autonomy vs. Rule of the majority
- Fareed Zakaria’s ‘The Rise of the Illiberal Democracy’: ‘Constitutional Liberalism
is about the limitation of power, democracy about its accumulation and use.’
Modernity vs. Modernization
- Modernization is the process of technological development based on forms of
capitalist production and on the system of free markets concretely expressed by
various technological advances, urbanisation and labour relations.
- The conflict at the heart of the Modern Era:
o Modernity vs. Modernization
o Belief in equality vs. unequal distribution of wealth.
- Methodologically speaking, how are theories and concepts developed by various
thinkers throughout the modern period related dialogically?
- Methodological corollary: We must avoid the tendency to see development as
progress – as linear teleological movement form a lower to a higher stage.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)
- Born in Orel, Russia in 1895.
- Died in Moscow, USSR in 1975.
- Critic of Russian Formalists.
- Associated, in his private life, with the Russia Orthodox Church. Exiled to Siberia
(sentence commuted to internal exile in Kazakhstan) in 1929.
- ‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics’ (1929).
- ‘Rabelais and His World’ (1940, 1965).
- Key features of his work are interdisciplinary and a dedication to man as a
concrete historical subject: ‘It is only on a concrete historical subject that a
theoretical problem can be solved.’
Bakhtin on Russian Formalism (via Todorov)
“The main reproach he directs against them…has two parts: the Formalists are
wrong to isolate the study of literature from that of art in general, in other words, from
aesthetics, and, ultimately, from philosophy; their positivistic refusal to examine their
own foundations does not make them immune to aesthetics or philosophy; it merely
leaves them in the shadows. Bakhtin will take it upon himself therefore to formulate their
implicit ideology, which he identifies as ‘aesthetics of the materials.’ For the Formalists,
it is the materials (in literature: language) that wholly determine artistic forms. Such an
approach… necessarily leads to the valorization of empty and dead forms, to the
separation of form and content.’ (37)
Russian Formalism (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)
“A school of literary theory and analysis that emerged in Russia around 1915,
devoting itself to the study of literariness, i.e. the sum of ‘devices’ that distinguish literary
language from ordinary language. In reaction against the vagueness of previous literary
theories, it attempted a scientific description of literature (especially poetry) as a special
use of language with observable features. This meant deliberately disregarding the
contents of literary works… Along with ‘literariness’, the most important concept of the
school was that of defamiliarization: instead of seeing literature as a ‘reflection’ of the
world, Victor Shklovsky and his Formalist followers saw it as a linguistic dislocation, or a
‘making strange’… Rediscovered in the West in the 1960s, the work of the Russian
Formalists has had an important influence on structuralist theories of literature, and on
some of the more recent varieties of Marxist literary criticism.”
Bakhtin’s Criticism of Russian Formalists
- Objective empiricism – reducing the text to its materiality.
- Subjective empiricism – dissolving the text into the psychic state felt by those
who produce or perceive the text.
- Bakhtin: “The scholar latches on these two aspects, afraid of going beyond them
in any way, habitually convinced that only metaphysical or mystical substances
are to be found beyond. But such attempts to treat purely empirically the
aesthetic object have always failed and… are methodologically altogether
illegitimate… There is no reason to be afraid of the fact that the aesthetic object
cannot be found in either psychical phenomena or in the material work; in no
manner does it then become a mystical or metaphysical substance. The… world
of action, of ethical existence is in the same situation. Where is the State? In the
psyche? In physico-mathematical space? On the paper of constitutional
documents? Where is the law? Nonetheless, we have a relationship to the State
and to law, which we fully assume; more even: these values gives meaning and
order to empirical material as well as to our psyche, by allowing us to overcome
its pure subjectivity.”
Why Bakhtin? And Why Now (Then)?
- Late 1960s USSR: De-Stalinization
o Stalin dies on March 5, 1953.
o The Soviet leadership denounces Stalin’s use of terror and eases
repressive controls over party and society.
o Nikita Khrushchev initiates ‘The Thaw’ – “A complex shift in political,
cultural and economic life in the Soviet Union. That included some
openness and contact with other nations and new social and economic
policies with more emphasis on commodity goods, allowing living
standards to rise dramatically while maintaining high levels of economic
growth. Censorship was relaxed as well.” (Wikipedia).
o The trends of this period lead directly to Mikhail Gorbachev’s political and
social reforms of the USSR called perestroika and glasnost, which initiate
further restructuring of the political and economic systems and which free
public access to information after decades of heavy government
censorship.
The Text and the Social
“The [written] work cannot be understood outside the entity in ‘literature’. But this
latter entity, taken as a whole, as well as its elements… cannot be understood outside
the entity ‘ideological life.’ This entity in turn cannot be studied… outside the unitary
socio-economic laws.” – Bakhtin
Dialogic (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)
“Characterized or constituted by the interactive, responsive nature of dialogue
rather than by the single-mindedness of monologue. The term is important in the
writings of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose [work]…contrasts the dialogic or
polyphonic interplay of various characters’ voices in Dostoevsky’s novels with the
‘monological’ subordination of characters to the single viewpoint of the author in
Tolstoy’s. [Bakhtin also argues], against Saussure’s theory of la langue, that actual
utterances are ‘dialogic’ in that they are embedded in a context of dialogue and thus
respond to an interlocutor’s previous utterances and/or try to draw a particular response
from a specific auditor.”
Dialogism
- Exists on all levels of discourse:
o Language and utterance, which always exist as social facts; ‘No
utterance… can be attributed to the speaker exclusively; it is the product
of the interaction of interlocutors, and… the product of the whole complex
social situation in which it has occurred.’ (30)
o The psychological individual: ‘Human personality becomes historically real
and culturally productive only insofar as it is a part of a social whole, in its
class and through its class.” (31)
o Texts and art: The artistic ‘is a specific form of the relation between
creator and contemplators, fixed in the artistic work.” (21)
Rabelais and His World (1940, 1965)
- “It can be said… that medieval man in a way led two lives: one official,
monolithically serious and somber; beholden to strict hierarchical order; filled with
fear, dogmatism, devotion, and piety; the other, of carnival and the public place,
free; full of an ambivalent laughter, sacrileges, profanations of all things sacred,
disparagement and unseemly behaviour, familiar contact with everybody and
everything.” – Bakhtin
- “The category of common language is the theoretical expression of historical
processes of linguistic unification and centralization, the expression of the
centripetal forces of the language. The common language is never given but in
fact always ordained, and at every moment of the life of the language it is
opposed to genuine heterology. But at the same time, it is perfectly real as a
force that overcomes this heterology; imposes certain limits upon it; guarantees a
maximum of mutual comprehension; and becomes crystallized in the real, though
relative, unity of spoken (daily) and literary language, of ‘correct language’.” –
Bakhtin
Bakhtin’s ‘Philosophical Anthropology’
- ‘Otherness’ as a transgredient of consciousness.
- “Our own idea (or perhaps illusion) of what is a whole person, and accomplished
being, can only come from the perception of someone else, and not from the
perception we have of ourselves.” – Todorov
- “It is only in another human being that I find an aesthetically (and ethically)
convincing experience of human finitude, of a marked-off empirical objectivity…
Only another human being can give me the appearance of being consubstantial
with the external world… For only the other can be embraced, totally surrounded,
and explored lovingly in all of his or her limits.” – Bakhtin
Liberalism (The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy)
“A political ideology centred upon the individual thought of as possessing rights
against the government, including rights of due process under the law, equality of
respect, freedom of expression and action, and freedom from religious and ideological
constraints. Liberalism is attacked from the left as the ideology of free markets, with no
defence against the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and as
lacking any analysis of the social and political nature of persons. It is attacked from the
right as insufficiently sensitive to the value of settled instructions and customs, or to the
need for social structure and constraint in providing the matrix for individual freedoms.”
The Ethics of Difference
“Lyotard begins his approach to the theory of human rights through the dialogic
characteristics of speech… As [he] notes in the pragmatic function of language, every
sentence is addressed or destined to someone or something, namely linguistic
interaction is made up of a series of questions and answers. In grammatical terms this
is represented by the relationship between I and you. One can move from these simple
observations to a relatively sophisticated political philosophy. For example, ‘by its
association with the recursiveness and translatability of human language, it cannot help
but bind all human speakers into a speech community. From this effective ‘de facto’
power, there arises what I shall term an effect of right.’… This capacity to speak to
others is a basic human right and perhaps the most basic of human rights. This right is
typically suppressed by silence… Absolute power is thus the power to forget and to
silence interlocution by an arbitrary act. By contrast, civilization is the capacity to listen
and to learn, to be open to otherness. Respect for the other is thus a fundamental
foundation of civilization as such. A civilized society requires a process of learning how
to share dialogue, of attentiveness to the speech of others.”
Bakhtin’s ‘Other’
- ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ are radically distinct, asymmetrical (97).
- One aims to ‘objectivate’ the I and erase its ‘pseudo-singularity’ (97).
- “The body [the individual] is not a self-sufficient entity; it needs the other, his
recognition and his formative activity” (96).
The Dialogic Self
“I achieve self-consciousness; I become myself only by revealing myself to
another, through another, with another’s help. The most important acts, constitutive of
self-consciousness, are determined by their relation to another consciousness (a ‘thou’).
Cutting oneself off, isolating oneself, closing oneself off, those are the basic reasons for
loss of self… It turns out that every internal experience occurs on the border, it comes
across another, and this essence resides in this intense encounter… The very being of
man (both internal and external) is a profound communication. To be means to
communicate… To be means to be for the other and through him, for oneself. Man has
no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary; looking within
himself, he looks in the eyes of the other or through the eyes of the other… I cannot do
without the other; I cannot become myself without the other; I must find myself in the
other, finding the other in me (in mutual reflection and perception).”
Transgredient (as per Todorov)
“Is an ‘element of consciousness that [is] external to it but nonetheless absolutely
necessary for its completion, for its achievement of totalization’.”
Rabelais and His World
“In grotesque realism…the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in
a private, egoistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal,
representing all the people. As such it is opposed to severance from the material and
bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretence to renunciation of the earthy, or
independence of the earth and the body. We repeat: the body and bodily life have here
a cosmic and at the same time an all-people’s character; this is not the body and its
physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. The
material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois
ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed…
manifestations of this life refer to the isolated biological individual, not to the private,
egotistic ‘economic man’, but to the collective ancestral body of all the people.”
The Text and the Social
“The [written] work cannot be understood outside the entity in ‘literature’. But this
latter entity, taken as a whole, as well as its elements… cannot be understood outside
the entity ‘ideological life’. This entity in turn cannot be studied… outside the unitary
socio-economic laws… It is perfectly inadmissible to study the literary work directly and
exclusively as an element of the ideological milieu, as if it were the only instance of
literature, whereas it is directly the element of the literary world in its specificity.”