Bakhtin, Mikhail (1895–1975)

For the vast majority of his life, the Russian philosopher, linguist, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin failed to find the intellectual celebrity that many in the humanities now feel he deserves. His major works were not immediately published in Russian and, for the most part, were not published in English until after his death. It was only in the final third of the twentieth century, a time of immense social, cultural, and economic upheaval, that Bakhtin's work was plucked from relative obscurity to help explain the brave new world of global consumer culture and shed light on the relationship between consumer symbolism, ideology, and human subjectivity.

Bakhtin was primarily interested in language and the interaction that takes place between different forms of language. He used the term heteroglossia to identify a system of different and competing languages, and his work on this area underlies much of contemporary Bakhtinian analysis. For Bakhtin (see 1984a, 1987), language is organized into different stratified subgroups, each with their own associations, dialects, jargon, and contextual meanings. Much of Bakhtin's writing on heteroglossia relates to the transference of language into literature. For example, novels often incorporate many different voices. For Bakhtin, it is the interaction and conflict between these voices that gives the novel its power, as the normative hierarchy of language has the potential to shift as the text evolves.

As traditionally powerful languages attempt to retain and extend their control, subordinate languages attempt to avoid or subvert this power. Bakhtin called the interaction between these languages dialogism. A skilled novelist can use these interactions to create mood, drive the narrative forward, or structure the reader's interpretation of characters, and for Bakhtin, it is the job of the literary critic to identify these dialogic meanings in their full complexity. Bakhtin also uses dialogism to make sense of human speech and interaction by essentially suggesting that our everyday speech is structured in response to things that have been said and things that might be said in the future. Our speech is thus dynamic, reliant on context, and reflects structures of power and the interaction of speech forms that possess varying degrees of power.

Bakhtin's most noted work, Rabelais and His World, was not published in English until 1968, but the originality of his thought and the emphasis Bakhtin placed on language, subversion, and discursive meanings quickly found favor with the Western liberal intelligentsia as they embarked on a cultural turn away from the metanarrative and toward postmodernism, a new, fluid world of infinite variability and divergent meanings, a world that could no longer be explained by macrolevel political economy or deterministic structural analysis. Bakhtin may have been writing in postrevolution Soviet Russia, but his work was quickly recontextualized as a means of grasping the essence of a Western world in which the old certainties of modernism had collapsed.

[Page 84]In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin attempts to reread the work of French Renaissance scholar Francois Rabelais, whose humorous novels addressed aspects of conventionality and the absurd. Bakhtin was particularly taken with the social transformations that occur during times of carnival. For Bakhtin, the carnival essentially offered “a time out of time” in which the populous could revel in the grotesque and embrace sexuality and carnality. The specific context of carnival required individuals to suspend their normative identity and become part of a collective in which the traditional social order was suspended, partially inverted, and mocked.

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