Ajaya Bhadra KhanalProf Reed and Prof. EpsteinILA 790 Bakhtin and his Circle

History and the Architectonics of Being

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 -- Bakhtin

Abstract

An analysis of Bakhtin’s account in Rabelais (written around 1934) and Forms of

Time and Chronotope (written in 1937-38) suggest a structural model of a fall from an

ideal state to a state of imperfect being. At the same time, however, Bakhtin also

emphasizes the process of becoming, in a process where future remains free and full of

potential, and where future is not a mere appendage to the origin of being. In this way we

see both a return of the utopian impulse and a constant process of becoming, or open-

endedness in Bakhtin’s account of historical unfolding. What is the source of these

seemingly contradictory impulse?

In the second part of the essay, I will go back to Bakhtin’s early texts, and also to

his later texts, in order to trace the philosophical and theological bases for the paradox. I

would argue that Bakhtin’s view of history, as well as ethics, aesthetics and ontology are

framed within the triadic architectonics of Being (with binary distinctions of subject and

object) and non-being. More importantly, I would argue that this paradox is a result of

his philosophical and theological stance toward the notions of being and non-being that

persists from his early works.

A. Introduction and Problematic

A. 1 Introduction

There is a disagreement about the nature of utopian project in Bakhtin’s work,

particularly on Rabelais. Morson and Emerson’s very term “prosaics” is a refutation that

there is an overarching explanatory model or closed system in Bakhtin’s work. Morson

and Emerson see the utopian motifs present within Rabelais and His World as formal

devices. According to these scholars Bakhtin’s purpose was “unremitting skepticism and

unending change without a goal” (p 94). “Generally speaking, Bakhtin was much less

concerned with millenarian fantasies and holy foolishness than with the constraints and

responsibilities of everyday living,” (Morson and Emerson, 67). Gardiner (1992),

meanwhile argues that the overall thrust of Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais and folk-festive

culture involves a radical negation of the traditional view of utopia but without

abandoning the utopian impulse itself. The Bakhtinian conception of carnival

incorporates elements of what he calls “critical utopia”.

This essay springs from this paradox in Bakhtin’s middle period (1930-1938)

reflected in Rabelais and His World and “Forms of Time and Chronotope.” In the first

part of the essay, I will try to establish that there is a paradox in Bakhtin’s view of

history, that Bakhtin’s view of historical unfolding displays both a return of the repressed

(the ancient matrix) and creative imagination that . In the second part of the essay, I will

seek to trace sources for this paradox in his early works and argue that it springs from his

philosophical and theological stance toward the notions of being and non-being.

A. 2 Rabelais

Features of grotesque

According to Bakhtin, the basis of the grotesque imagery is the concept of the

body in its relation to the whole. The grotesque is “the body in the act of becoming”

(317), its outward and inward features are merged (318). There is constant renewal—

death brings nothing to an end—and there are elements common to the entire cosmos. In

this sense the grotesque body is cosmic and universal and therefore can merge with

various natural phenomenon (318). Both the negative and the positive poles are combined

in one image.

Function of grotesque

The image of the grotesque has a “philosophical function” and is directly related

to the life of society and to the cosmic whole (Rabelais, 321). It is a “mode of

representation of the bodily life” (315) working against other modes of representation

that facilitate and uphold social stratification and domination. The theme of the grotesque

“plays a most important part” in the history of struggle against dominant orders”

(Rabelais, 341). Bakhtin argues that the culture of folk humor, which developed during

thousand years, “reflected the struggle against cosmic terror and created the image of the

gay, material bodily cosmos, ever-growing and self-renewing” (Rabelais, 340). Bakhtin

stresses the significance of “transforming fear into laughter”. Grotesque is the means

through which cosmic terror, which according to him is used by all religious systems to

oppress man and his consciousness, is conquered by laughter (Rabelais, 335-336).

Grotesque and history

According to Bakhtin the principle of laughter became meaningful only in

relation to a separation of official and non-official culture. “The serious and the comic

aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally ‘official’ at the early

stages of preclass and prepolitical social order. “In the definitely consolidated state and

class structure such an equality of the two aspects became impossible” (6) giving rise to

“two-world condition”. In relation to official culture, carnival festivities and folk culture

“offered a completely different, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical and extra-political aspect

of the world, of man, and of human relations” (6).

Imagery and social organization

Renaissance realism, Bakhtin argues, contains “two types of imagery reflecting

the conception of the world”. He opposes the imagery in the folk culture of humor to the

“bourgeois conception of the completed atomized being”. For him “the every-growing,

inexhaustible, every-laughing principle which uncrowns and renews” is the opposite of

“the petty, inert ‘material principle’ of class society” (24). From this statement we could

argue that the conception of the completed atomized being belongs to the class society,

while the laughing principle belongs to the folk culture of humor. In the “framework of

class and feudal political structure,” carnivals and festivals became the “utopian realm of

community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (9) where people could temporarily enter.

Grotesque realism is related to this utopian project. It projects “the cosmic, social, and

bodily elements” as “indivisible whole” and “this whole is gay and gracious” (19).

Problem: Epistemology or Ontology?

From the above discussion, we can see that there are two seemingly contradictory

layers of meaning in Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais. One is the epistemological layer, where

the principle of laughter can be seen as a principle that organizes our knowledge,

therefore, experience of the world. At the same time, however, it allows us to intervene in

the real world of human relations. The principle of laughter leads to specific modes of

representation, or cognitive frames that allow individuals to take part in a historical

process. On the other hand, the second layer can be seen as ontology, or Bakhtin’s

statement about objective reality. Bakhtin could be taken to mean that he believes in the

existence of an undifferentiated utopia as the internal or necessary logic of existence.

From this second perspective, individuals can be seen as undifferentiated parts of a “gay

and gracious” whole and that alienation or differentiation of this whole is what drives

history forward.

A.3 Forms of Chronotope

According to Bakhtin, forms of time and chronotope in art is a reflection of forms

in real life. This allows us to connect Bakhtin’s discussion of artistic forms in relation to

history. Historical movement is one of the central themes in Bakhtin’s essay, “Forms of

Time and Chronotope in the Novel” written in 1937-38 and published for the first time in

1973. In this essay, not only does he elaborate his attitude to utopia, but also his vision of

what drives history.

Greek Period.

In relation to his work on Rabelais, Bakhtin raises the significance of the Greek

period as a moment that marked the transition from preclass and prepolitical social order

to a world with differentiation. Bakhtin’s evaluative attitude to Greek period is a positive

one, but not nostalgic. His ambivalent attitude seems to be the result of co-existence of

the seemingly contradictory ideas of ‘wholeness’ and ‘becoming.’

In Forms of Time, he appreciates the utter exteriority of classical Greek period

where “every aspect of existence could be seen and heard,” (134)? He sees the Greek

public square as “that square upon which the self-consciousness of European man first

coalesced” (135). After that period, not only was there stratification in society, but

stratification within man.

In following epochs, man’s image was distorted by his increasing participation in

the mute and invisible spheres of existence. He was literally drenched in

muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness. The personal and

detached human being—‘the man who exists for himself’—lost the unity and

wholeness that had been a product of his public origin. Once having lost the

popular chronotope of the public square, his self-consciousness could not find an

equally real, unified and whole chronotope; it therefore broke down and lost its

integrity, it be-came abstract and idealistic. A vast number of new spheres of

consciousness and objects appeared in the private life of the private individual

that were not, in general, subject to being made public (the sexual sphere and

others), or were subject only to an intimate, conditional, closeted expression. The

human image became multi-layered, multi-faceted. A core and a shell, an inner

and an outer, separated within it” (p 136).

The Greek period is similar to that of Rabelais and Goethe. They are distinctly

significant periods in the history of consciousness. He argues that “the most remarkable

experiment to re-establish the fully exteriorized individual in world literature—although

without the stylization of the ancient model—was made by Rabelais” (DI, 136).

Similarly, another attempt to “resurrect the ancient wholeness and exteriority, but on an

entirely different basis, was made by Goethe” (DI, 136). Although Bakhtin celebrates the

ancient Greek period as one that provided a sense of wholeness to individual and society,

Bakhtin is not nostalgic. According to Bakhtin, the wholeness of the human image had

“manifested itself in epic and tragedy” (DI, 137) and there was no quality of ‘becoming.”

In the encomium, the image of man was “extremely simple and pre-formed” (DI, 136).

This new concern with the process of becoming poses some problems, as well as

insights into Bakhtin’s attitude to ancient Greek period. According to Bakhtin, the

Aristotelian influence resulted in “inversion in a character’s development” that excludes

any authentic ‘becoming’ in character:

“A man’s entire youth is treated as nothing but a preliminary to his maturity. The

familiar element of ‘movement’ is introduced into biography solely as a struggle

of opposing impulses, as fits of passion or as an exercise in virtue—in order to

invest this virtue with permanence” (Bakhtin, DI, 140).

Thus, the aspect of “becoming” becomes a category for evaluating ideas and processes.

What drives history?

Bakhtin seems to redefine fantastic realism as a model for historical movement.

He arrives at this through discovery of historical inversion, and the forms it takes in

mythological and artistic thinking. According to Bakhtin the ‘essence’ of historical

inversion is “found in the fact that mythological and artistic thinking locates such

categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and

society and the like in the past” (DI, 147).

A thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is

here portrayed as something out of the past, a thing that is in no sense part of the

past’s reality, but a thing that is in its essence a purpose, an obligation (Bakhtin,

DI, 147).

One result of historical inversion is a “greater readiness to build a superstructure

for reality (the present) along a vertical axis of upper and lower than to move forward

along the horizontal axis of time” (DI, 148). Similarly, the historical inversion in

philosophical structures is “characterized by a corresponding assumption of ‘beginnings’

as the crystal-clear, pure sources of all being, of eternal values and modes of existence

that are ideal and outside time” (DI, 148). In eschatology, “the real future is drained and

bled of its substance” because it is “perceived as the end of everything that exists, as the

end of all being.” Furthermore, the end is perceived as being “relatively close at hand,”

(DI, 148).

Historical inversion is a moment in the history of consciousness. There is a

cyclical and mutually reinforcing relationship between social contradictions and

uncovering of those contradictions (consciousness). In other words, the relation between

social differentiation and attempts to understand it through new forms pushes time into

the future. Sharp social differentiation leads to initial feeble attempt at new forms that can

incorporate and shape new content. This in turn leads to the uncovering of social

contradictions. “The more profoundly these contradictions are uncovered and the riper

they become in consequence, the more authentic and comprehensive becomes time’s

fullness as the artist represents it” (147). In this way, the ability of chronotopes to

represent ‘fullness of time’ becomes an important category for Bakhtin’s evaluation of

history.

Bakhtin, however, assigns a significant feature to fantastic realism. This involves

a conceptualization of human nature, which is significant for understanding his view of

history and utopia. In folklore, Bakhtin argues, “the spatial and temporal growth of a

man” is a “direct and straightforward growth of a man in his own right and in the real

world of the here-and-now, a growth process without any inauthentic debasing, without

any idealized compensation in the form of weakness and need” (DI, 150). In other words,

the fantastic in folklore relies on the real-life possibilities of human development:

possibilities not in the sense of a program for immediate practical action, but in

the sense of the needs and possibilities of men, those eternal demands of human

nature that will not be denied. These demands will remain forever, as long as

there are men; they will not be suppressed, they are real, as real as human nature

itself, and therefore sooner or later they will force their way to a full realization”

(DI, 151).

The “eternal demands of human nature”, therefore, seem to be another element that gives

directionality to history. Thus, in Forms of Time and Chronotope, we find new

categories like fullness of time, demands of human nature and becoming and wholeness.

These categories suggest that Bakhtin’s stance toward the future and toward history in

Forms of Time and Chronotope is different from his stance in Rabelais.

Bakhtin has a positive evaluative attitude toward Dante, who he sees as being

located in the cusp of two epochs. In Dante there is an “extraordinary tension” between

the living historical time and the extratemporal other-worldly ideal” (DI, 158). The

contents, images and ideas that fill the vertical world are filled with “a powerful desire to

escape this world, to set out along the historically productive horizontal…Each image is

full of historical potential”. But the artist’s will “condemns it to an eternal and immobile

place on the extratemporal vertical axis” (DI, 157). ). According to Bakhtin, Dante

resolves, through artistic form, the tension between the “form-generating principle of the

whole and the historical and temporal form of its separate parts” (158). In the

Renaissance, forms of the novel paved the way for a “restoration of the spatial and

temporal material wholeness of the world on a new, more profound and more complex

level of development” (Bakhtin, 166).

Historical movement reestablishes a new type of relationship. Literary forms are a

means of expressing and understanding subjectivity and wholeness of a human being as

well as his relationship (165-66). It is in the evolution of consciousness, in relation to

history that Rabelais’ becomes significant. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais had two tasks,

a polemical task of restoring the authentic world and the affirmative task of restoring the

authentic man (168). The polemical task was “to purge the spatial and temporal world of

those remnants of a transcendent world view still present in it, to clean away symbolic

and hierarchical interpretations still clinging to this vertical world, to purge it of the

contagion of ‘antiphysis’ that had infected it” (168). The affirmative task involved “the

re-creation of a spatially and temporally adequate world able to provide a new

chronotope for a new, whole and harmonious man, and for new forms of human

communication” (168). These tasks determined the “distinctive features of Rabelais’

artistic method, the idiosyncrasies of his fantastic realism” (169).

Ancient complex and the critique of capitalism. The ancient matrix performs as a

model that allows a critique of capitalism as well as the condition of social

differentiation. According to Bakhtin, “as class society develops further and as

ideological spheres are increasingly differentiated, the internal disintegration of each

element of the matrix becomes more and more intense” (DI, 213). The process of

“separating out and detaching individual life-sequences from the whole” reaches its

highest point under capitalism. “When collective labor and the struggle with nature had

ceased to be the only arena for man’s encounter with nature and the world—then nature

itself ceased to be a living participant in the events of life” (217).

Bakhtin points out a negative feature of folkloric time in pre-class period, its

cyclicity. According to Bakhtin, it “limits the force and ideological productivity of this

time. The mark of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repetitiveness, is imprinted on

all events occurring in this type of time. Time’s forward impulse is limited by the cycle.

For this reason even growth does not achieve an authentic “becoming” (DI, 210). A

similar cyclicity is apparent in Bakhtin’s historical account, which shows a cyclical return

of the ancient matrix or a repetition of its impulse. Bakhtin, however, turns this into

creative imagination. Traces and bases of the ancient matrix is preserved in “the treasure

house of language and in certain kinds of folklore” (217). People like Rousseau perceived

these bases as “stages in the development of society and consciousness” and made

attempt to “make contact with that lost ideal, but this time at a new stage of

development” (230). It has multiple uses, not only as a means to protest feudal hierarchy,

inequality, absolutism and false arbitrariness of society, but also against “bourgeois

individuum” (231). The historical process is one in which the ancient matrices are re-

established on a new and loftier base.

A. 4 Setting up the Problem

An analysis of Bakhtin’s account in Rabelais (written around 1934) and Forms of

Time and Chronotope (written in 1937-38) suggest a structural model of a fall from an

ideal state (non-being) to a state of imperfect being. At the same time, however, Bakhtin

also emphasizes the process of becoming, but in a process where future remains free and

full of potential, and where future is not a mere appendage to the origin of being. In this

way we see both a return of the utopian impulse and a constant process of becoming, or

open-endedness in Bakhtin’s account of historical unfolding. What is the source of these

seemingly contradictory impulses?

In the next part, I will go back to Bakhtin’s early texts, and also to his later texts,

in order to trace the philosophical and theological bases for the paradox. I would argue

that Bakhtin’s view of history, as well as ethics, aesthetics and ontology are framed

within the triadic architectonics of Being (with binary distinctions of subject and object)

and non-being. More importantly, I would argue that this paradox is a result of his

philosophical and theological stance toward the notions of being and non-being that

persists from his early works. I would like to show that an important feature of this stance

is the way non-being is related to silence.

B. Architectonics

B.1 Problem of Being and the Unity of the deed

What is the problem of Being? In The Philosophy of the Act, the problem of

Being is the separation of the world into two parts the world of culture and the world of

life.

… facing each other there are two worlds, absolutely not communicating with

each other and impervious one to the other: the world of culture and the world of

life—the unique world in which we create, cognize, contemplate, have lived, and

die; the world in which the act of our activity is made objective and the world in

which that act uniquely and actually flows, is accomplished” (TPA, 2/82-83).

The world of Being becomes possible only through binary divisions like meaning and

fact; the universal and the individual; the real and the ideal. On the basis of this we can

draw a simple triadic structure consisting of Non-Being or undifferentiated whole in the

absolute realm (A), and Being, differentiated and having at least binary opposition (B and

C) in the conditioned realm.

In this sense, Bakhtin’s concern, in The Philosophy of the Act, is to unite these

binary oppositions. He attempts to do so by outlining the unity of an event or deed.

The performed act concentrates, correlates and resolves within a unitary and

unique, and, this time, final context both the sense and the fact, the universal and

the individual, the real and the ideal, for everything enters into the composition

of its answerable motivation. The performed act constitutes a going out once and

for all from within possibility as such into what is once-occurrent, (Bakhtin,

TPA, 29).

The architectonics in Bakhtin is the result of different types of subject-object

relationships and the multiple possibilities for the location of the speaking subject in this

configuration. An event, however, can occur only among interacting consciousnessesi.

B.2 Hero, Author and God

In his essay “Author and Hero” Bakhtin suggests that God is the supreme role

model or the perfect reference point for our aesthetic obligation towards others. God is

also needed for our justification, by his role as the supreme other who constitutes us in

his aesthetic activity (Coates, 23).

The hero is the one observed, is incomplete. Recognition of incompleteness

requires the author (the observer) “for the gracious provision of a total aesthetic

perspective on him- or herself which the hero is incapable of achieving” (Coates, 23).

God functions as the “supreme, transcendent Author/Other who can comprehend

us perfectly in time and space” (Coates, 23). God appears as the guarantor of all aesthetic

i See footnote on Problems of Dostevsky’s Poilitics, p 6.

activity in His capacity as Author of the universe (AH, 206/179). God, in this triadic

model is located in the realm of the absolute or undifferentiated whole.

This suggests a triadic structure of Non-Being and Being (with at least two

elements, subject-object). This triad is also appears to be present in the model of Hero

(subject)-Author (other or object)-Superaddressee or God (omniscience).

B.3 Stance to Being and Non-being

Illusion of Being:

“We may say that this is a Fall immanent in being, and experienced from within

it: it lies in the tendency of being towards self-sufficiency; this is the internal self-

contradiction of being […] the self-condensed self-affirmation of being in defiance of the

meaning that gave it birth (a breaking-away from its source) […] (AH, 124/109; quoted

here from Coates, 1998: 23).

“But being, once it has arisen, is irredeemable, ineffaceable, indestructible: the

absolute purity and peace of non-being, now destroyed, can never be restored again.

Neither by redemption nor by nirvana” (Bakhtin, 152; Coates, 150).

Bakhtin’s attitude toward Being and Non-being is both theological and

philosophical. The impossibility of return is a theological attitude, because it is not

logically proven. It is based on faith. The feature of non-being is one of “absolute purity

and peace”. A Sublime is a sublime because it can not be known or even represented.

Non-being, too is beyond knowledge, except based on faith. How do we know the

Sublime except on the basis of faith? This existential predicament, therefore, forces a

historical movement toward becoming. Unfinalizability is precisely the result of this

impossibility of restoration, “neither by redemption nor by nirvana”. Thus Being must

constantly evolve, in relation to “human nature”. It is therefore the eternal human needs

that appear as the single most significant force in the course of history. Thus Bakhtin’s

view of history is based on subjectivity of a human being. And what makes Bakhtin

postmodern is that this subjectivity not only depends on language for self-consciousness,

but its knowledge of the world and social contradictions determine its agency. Thus,

history is both relativized and made free. History is subject to both the creative

imagination of man, and his eternal demand for non-differentiation, and freedom.

“The goodness of this judging soul is devoid of any positive content, it is

completely reduced to the judgement of being, to aversion. It is the voice of non-being

judging being. There isn’t a trace of being in itself, for being has been completely

poisoned by a lie” (Bakhtin, 152, Coates, 151).

B.4 Author and silence/sacrifice/reincarnation

“The battle of non-being with being (with its coming into existence, with the

destruction of the silence and integrity, the completeness of non-being)…the

irreparability of being…It is impossible to tear oneself out of being. Being has no way

out” (Bakhtin, 152; Coates, 150).

Silence and god related. Non-being. The author becoming Christ like self

sacrifices, he becomes silent so that the hero can speak. In this sense, Non-being is

parallel to God, and its silence is the sacrifice of authorial voice (Coates, 101).

“There is a persistent connection between aesthetic activity and love, the act of

bestowing wholeness upon a person being described as one of self-sacrifice and gracious

condescension, a gift of form given freely and without preconditions on the initiative of

the transcendent Other” (Coates, 25).

“In Author and Hero” Christ combines in Himself the two acts of self-effacement

described in Russian Orthodox though as “kenotic”; not only does he divest himself of

His glory to appear in the world as a sacrifice for sins (the kenotic act traditionally

ascribed to the Son), but He also acts out the Father’s kenotic role whereby He effaces

himself in the act of creation” (Coates, 26). If we locate God at the place of Non-being in

the triadic structure, non-being is the result of God’s act of effacement.

“However, Christ is much more for Bakhtin than a good example of authentic

living. He also demonstrates in himself how two opposites may be brought together; in

Christ the transcendent God becomes immanent” (Coates, 26).

C. Implications and Analysis

Note also the process of self-consciousness in cultural evolution. The contribution of polyglossia in the evolution of self-consciousness. “The present, in its all openendedness, taken as a starting point and center for artistic and ideological orientation, is an enormous revolution in the creative consciousness of man” (DI, 38).

Subject object relationships and issues of representation (DI, 27).

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