Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy: Metamorphoses and the Practice of Cultural Theory

Kenneth J. Knoespel Georgia Insititute of Technology

1.0 Introduction

This lecture considers the evolving status of MikhailBakhtin within American scholarship and gives special attention to the reception of Bahktin’s work in the American academy in the past decades and what it both reveals and conceals about the relations between literary scholarship in the United States and . The first part of the lecture provides an overview of Bakhtin’s presence in the United States by giving particular attention to the ideologies that should be recognized in his reception. The second part notices particular elements of Bakhtin’s work and the ways they are contributing to the ongoing emergence of cultural studies in North America. The third part explores aspects of Bakhtin’s work that deserve further attention. Here I will ask how Vladimir Bibler and Anatoly Akhutin extend questions raised by Bakhtin. Just as Bakhtin’s study of discourse structures within the novels of Dostoevsky provided a way of thinking about the cognitive bridging in the imaginary space of literature, an important aspect of his work may also be applied to the study of scientific and technological texts. I will conclude by noticing how Bakhtin challenges readers to ask how we generate and use the socio-cultural constructions such as “epoch” and “period” used to bridge cultural relations at the end of the 20th century and to characterize history itself. I will suggest that Bakhtin capacity to ask how transcultural synchronisms work to both bring together and separate cultural experience may be identified as a major feature of his extensive legacy.

How then are we to explain the “grotesquely anachronistic influence” of Bakhtin’s thought? How are we to account for the position of a non Marxist, nonFormalist, nonFreudian, nonStructuralist, nonexistentialist, noncollectivist, nonutopian, nontheologian? In short, how can we account for a scholar who appears a non- modernist but who became the very subject of a post-modernist bakhtinskii boom? The questions posed by Vitaly Makhlin for Russian colleagues in 1992 confront anyone who surveys the links between Bakhtin’s

1 2 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy writings let alone their bearing in a post-modernist American landscape that seems to change under our feet as we speak.1 Although I hardly can begin to answer Makhlin’s questions from a Russian vantage point, I would like to venture a few observations of my own on the extraordinary metamorphosis of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin within an American setting.

Since there are many Bakhtins, I would like to clarify at the outset the frames that I am using to approach Bakhtin. Russian and Euro-American scholars together now divide Bakhtin’s work and life (1895-1975) into five periods:2 1) His early life as the son of a merchant family from the Orel region (gymnasium years in Vilnius and Odessa) to university studies in Petersburg and his degree in classical studies in 1918); 2) the time in Nevel’/Vitebsk (1919-1924) where he taught language and literature and explored formalist linguistics; 3) his return to Leningrad (Petrograd), (1924-1929) where he continued his group work on formalism. (And when he lived for a short period of time with his wife at Peterhof); 4) the period of being on the margins: exile (Kazakhstan) and teaching (Saransk, Savelovo) from 1930 to the early 1950’s; 5) a late period between 1950s and 1975 when he received a degree for his work on Rabelais and becomes reassimilated into Russian literary culture. As the Bakhtin bibliography shows, the sifting and resifting through each of these periods has been a complicated task. (My single-handout offers a chronology of Bakhtin’s work as well as Russian and American publication dates.)

A detailed affirmation of Bakhtin’s accomplishment together with an implicit prediction of its importance for the future appears in Caryl Emerson’s book, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin.3 The 1999 book on Bakhtin by Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy carries special importance because of its meticulous review of the archival problems surrounding Bakhtin’s manuscripts and their Russian publication.4 As both Emerson and Hirschkop know, it is hardly an exaggeration to talk about a Bakhtin industry. Bakhtin has become a scholarly equivalent of a Medieval poet whose texts have been so dispersed that one is continually confronted with questions of authenticity or chronology. Indeed Bakhtin’s legacy hardly depends on the web sites or digital versions of his work but on a painstaking assembly of a mass of material. This archival work pertains not only to Bakhtin but to the complex dissemination of intellectual activity during the Soviet period. From such a vantage point, Bakhtin should not be isolated but taken as a mark of the important scholarship that took place during the Soviet period. My remarks this afternoon will hardly create a “whole” Mikhail Bakhtin but will instead suggest that the legacy of Bakhtin in the United States has gone through several stages. Rather than simply providing a historical overview, however, I will argue that the most important work on Bakhtin is our own contemporary work.

1 Cited in Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 4. See also V. L. Makhlin, “Nasledie M. M. Bakhtina v kontekste sapadnogo postmodernizma,’ in MMB kak filosof 92, 206-20, espe. 206, 209-10, 219. 2 For periodization see Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Prosaics (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990) 3 Emerson, The First Hundred Years. 3

1.1 Ideologies of Reception

A fundamental mark of Bakhtin’s critical philosophy involves his challenge that we become aware that the language with which we work is never ours alone.5 In sharp contrast to poetic theory that would individualize the experience of language--a kind of Cartesian poetics—Bakhtin reminds us that we are in continuous conversation with others. Such a cognitive and dialogical understanding of language requires us to acknowledge that the reception of Bakhtin is hardly neutral but that it is received into a developed intellectual network. Indeed in that even our discussions at this conference are hardly neutral but must be approached from our already being engaged.

Certainly it is necessary at the outset to recognize that the Cold War has functioned as a filter of reception in the case of Bakhtin. If we wish, we may ask about the perception or distortion of the through the “lens” of the iron curtain. What was seen and what was not seen through this lens? Whether one considers the anti-communist work of generations, the Soviet Union was often translated into a dangerous and sometimes exotic landscape. Of course, the landscape was filtered again by a distinction between the Soviet Union and the . It is interesting that one finds no references to Bakhtin in the work of Isaiah Berlin who certainly functioned as one of the cultural filters of Cold War ideology. While the Soviets were evil, the Russians could represent an even greater ideal of humanity. The Cold War intensified the western romance of the Russian nineteenth century. Within such a setting, Bakhtin became first and foremost a figure that followed the American discovery of Boris Pasternak, Nadezhda Mandelstahm, and . But how then was Bakhtin read? Was it his intellectual work that was most significant or his figure as “another” Russian intellectual who suffered more than we can imagine? Intellectual or saint within a moral drama? Where should we place Bakhtin in our own academic carnivals?6

Since I raise these questions allow me to give an overview of my own engagement in Bakhtin. I think that I first heard the name Bakhtin at the University of Wisconsin where Professor Stephen Nichols, a student of Rene Wellek, talked about Rabelais and His World in a 1968 graduate seminar on the history of literary theory. For a more detailed encounter, I needed to wait until I had visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1971. While teaching at the University of Uppsala (1970-73), I often spoke with Annika

4 Ken Kirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999) 5 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London: Routledge, 1990) 6 Eric Hobsbawm makes the following observation about the historiographic consequences of the end of the twentieth century: “Again, even the world which has survived the end of the October Revolution is one whose institutions and assumptions were shaped by those who were on the winning side of the Second World War. Those who were on the losing side or associated with it were not only silent and silenced, but virtyually written out of history and intellectual life except in the role of ‘the enemy’ in the moral world drama of Good versus Evil. (This may now also be happening to the losers in the Cold War of the second half of the century, though probably not to quite the same extent or for so long.) This is one of the penalties of living through a century of religious wars. Intolerance is their chief characteristic. From The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 4-5. 4 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy

Bäckstöm, a Swedish scholar of Russian literature whose scholarship and of Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Admoni, and Joseph Brodsky introduced names that I would never have encountered in the United States. When I returned to the United States and began my graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1974, one of my first encounters with my professors in comparative literature was with the Russian Slavist Edward Wasiolek who was in the process of editing Dostoevsky’s notebooks. A year or so later when I first read Rabelais, I approached it as a work related to my own work in Medieval and Renaissance literature. Here, I thought, was a Russian Johann Huizinga. Almost at the same time I encountered the “novelistic” Bakhtin who challenged me to think about the polyphonic structure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its relation to universal history. From the same time, I have a defined memory of meeting Anatoly Liberman, from the University of Minnesota, who talked about Bakhtin in regard to Gogal. In the later 1980s my encounters with Bakhtin were closely related to Tzvetan Todorov,7 Franticek Galan8 (another Wellek student) and Lindsay Waters, the visionary editor first at the University of Minnesota and now at Harvard University Press.

In 1991 another trip to Russia introduced me to Daniel Alexandrov and ongoing Russian work on Bakhtin. Discussions with Yuri Treyakov and Tatiana Treyakova brought the “Euro-American” Bakhtin closer to the Russian Bakhtin. My own work as editor for Configurations allowed me to organize a workshop with Michael Holquist, Daniel Alexandrov, and Anton Struchkov in Atlanta in 1993 and it was this workshop that led to the publication of a special issue of Configurations devoted to “Communities of Science and Culture in Russian Science Studies.”9 Since 1993 my work with Bakhtin has involved research into the scientific discourse as well as into the epochal dimension of dialogics.10 I have been struck in thinking about how my encounters with Bakhtin are never simply encounters with Bakhtin but encounters through teachers, colleagues, and students. Such mediated encounters are an immediate reminder of the multiple voices that participate in the formulation of a single figure.

From the vantage point of 1968, (the time of my own incidental encounter with Bakhtin) it is important to recall that Bakhtin was received by a generation that had studied Erich Auerbach, Ernst Curtsius, and Leo Spitzer. Each scholar stands not only for a body of historiographic and philological criticism but for an often unacknowledged task of rebuilding and reaffirming the value of European and German humanities after the Second World War. Auerbach himself calls attention to this in his afterward to Mimesis where he describes a

7 See especially Tzvetan Todorov, Makhaïl Bakhtine le principe dialogique suivi de écrits du cercle de Bakhtine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981) 8 I want to especially remember F. W. Galan (1947-1991) who was my colleague in the English Department at the Georgia Institute of Technology. See his book, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946 (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1985) 9 Communities of Science and Culture in Russian Science Studies, Configurations: A Jouranl of Literature, Science, and Technology (1:3) (Balitmore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), 10 See for example "Russian Discourse Communities in the Information Age" in Communication, Culture, and Language in the Open World of Science (St.Petersburg: Russian Academy of Science, 1999). 5 scholarship without access to a library.11 Auerbach was read in thousands of classrooms from the 1950- 1970’s. What is so striking is the way that Bakhtin’s rediscovery in the Soviet Union intersects with the rebuilding of the humanities in an American setting. More particularly, Bakhtin was received by a generation of American criticism influenced by pre-second world war scholarship. The reception of Bakhtin within such a setting in many ways affirms Bakhtin’s own reading of German criticism in the 1920’s and 30’s. What is so remarkable is that the scholarly figure of Bakhtin begins to be assembled in the 1960’s by academic communities who were reading works that he had read decades earlier. What draws the disparate groups together is not the Marburg School of German philosophy but the efforts to retain an identity of western culture during a century that Hobsbawm has described a the century of warfare. The work of Michael Holquist serves as a good example of Bakhtin’s integration with early twentieth-century German philosophy and since I can hardly review the connections here I must refer people to Holquist’s introduction to Art and Answerability.12

But if American reception of Bakhtin is influenced by German scholars, it is accomplished by Russian émigré scholars. It was Roman Jacobson and Kyrstyna Pomorska who supervise the publication of Rabelais and Pomorska who writes the introduction. The formalist-interest of Jakobson and Pomorska deserves special attention. For Pomorska, Bakhtin offers an opportunity not only to review tenants of Russian Formalism but also to show how Bakhtin has extended its application.13

The author is no longer confined to the verbal language but investigates and compares different sign systems such as verbal, pictorial, and gestural. In the book on Dostoevsky Bakhtin had already mentioned that his analysis of the dialogue/monologue structure actually belongs to a metalingual level. In the present study he has proved to be most consistent in this creative development. The critic presents Rabelais’ work in the richest context of medieval and Renaissance cultures, treating them as systems of multiform signs.

What should be emphasized as well is that unlike many Russian theorists, beginning in 1968, Bakhtin becomes of interest not simply to Slavists but to a broad range of professors and students in the study of literature. In reviewing recent research on Bakhtin for this lecture, I expected to be overwhelmed by articles and books that testified both to the Bakhtin industry in the United States and to multiple theoretical “personalities” that had been created for Bakhtin. In large part what I expected was true but I also discovered

11 “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts….I hope that my study will reach its readers—both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, as well as all the others for whom it was intended. And may it contribute to bringing together again those whose love for our western history has serenely perservered.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1953 (German 1946), 557. 12 M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, Introduction, ix- xlix. 13 Krystyna Pomorska, “Introduction” to Mikahil Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), x. 6 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy that it might be more realistic to speak not so much of a Bakhtin industry as a Bakhtin laboratory. While it is certainly possible to discover many instances of Bakhtin being torn away from a Russian intellectual setting and even more being torn away from Russian, it is important to see that Bakhtin’s migration has also challenged the often isolated position of Slavic departments in the United States. In effect, Bakhtin has become a “cross-over” figure that has brought Russian theory even in English Departments.14 One reason may be located in the importance of Rene Wellek who drew such attention to the history of cultural theory during the 1960’s. I think an even more important reason is found in influence of French philosophy and theory during the 1960s.

1968 marked the publication not only of Bakhtin’s Rabelais but also of Jacques Derrida’s Grammatology. What is noteworthy is that in retrospect it is possible to see that the publication of one did indeed have a bearing on the other. Although there is no time here for great detail, it is important to recognize how the obscurity of “new” French criticism worked to bring together the formalist and neo- Kantian of Bakhtin’s reception. The integration of different methodology becomes reinforced by the challenges posed by the complex reception of French criticism at the end of the 1960’s. While many theoreticians may be cited, let me mention only three: Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. In contrast to formalist study of language, Derrida sought to detect the ways in which language functions self-referentially. Deconstruction works through a practice of building neologisms or neo-logical sites from which logical order could be tested. In fact, in practice deconstruction is closely related to mathematical analysis. If we wish, it is possible to see how deconstruction provides Anglo-American education tools with which it may decode unacknowledged logical structure that had become encoded in language. Even more simply, deconstruction provided English speakers with a vehicle for revealing the ways that religious ideology shaped experience. If deconstruction offered a means for asking questions about the costs of unquestioned recourse to religion, Foucault’s work asked about the ways in which language may be used to conceal institutional power. Foucault’s work proceeds not as a commentary on Marxist sociology but develops a far more eclectic approach that seeks to gather tools from multiple disciplines. The psychoanalytic “turn” marked by Lacan represents another component of the setting in which Bakhtin was received.

The combination of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan and the multitude of interpreters that explored their writing provided (and still provides) a setting for the reception of Bakhtin. Put in the simplest terms, the American recognition of Bakhtin does not mark the simple discovery of a great Russian theoretician, but also a strong reaction against or, at the very least, an interrogation of French theory. Contrary to the philosophical abstraction of French theory, Bakhtin offered a means of integrating formalist theory with German hermeneutics. Even more he located the focal point for research in literature.

14 See Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “The New Model of Discourse in Post-Soviet Russian Fiction,” Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture ed. Mikhail N. Epstein (Alexander A. Genis, Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 227-268; 229. 7

1.2 Concepts and Appropriation

But at this point let me turn from the broad reception of Bakhtin to several remarks about the strength of the positions he brought to American literary scholarship. Bakhtin’s major contribution must be located in the multifaceted concept of dialogue. The emphasis on dialogue should be seen from the outset as a decision open research in the prose rather than poetry. Looking at novels rather than verse – looking at prosaics rather than poetics – Bakhtin built a methodology that allowed him to look not at differences between everyday speech and poetry but at the linguistic and psychological mechanisms that moved back and forth between prose and everyday speech. On the level of psychology, Bakhtin could show that the study of linguistics itself needed to be understood as an interchange between cognitive and social linguistics. Inner speech is not the consequence of the creation of a single authorial voice but rather the consequence of a dynamic integration of voices. Contrary to Freud’s view of the human psyche, Bakhtin shows that “what makes us human is not a ‘natural memory’ close to perception, but a memory of cultural signs that allows meaning to be generated without external stimulation.”15

When applied to the study of the novel, prosaics transformed the novel from a study of plot and structure to a study of the psychological orchestration of voices. Where some study would direct itself toward comparing plot and structure within an expanding taxonomy of genres, Bakhtin sought to ask about the polyphony of voices encountered by the reader and the ways that they were assembled into an evolving “event” horizon. By asking about an active process of assembling voices, Bakhtin also came to show that a novel’s polyphony was also closely related to the manipulation of time within the novel. I think we might emphasize something even more fundamental. While nineteenth-century Russian theorists such as Belinsky and Chernyshevsky participate in showing how the novel functions as a laboratory for social change, Bakhtin shows how the novel provides information that extends beyond a the social and moral structures of genre. Rather than abstract lessons, Bakhtin asks about the ways in which humans participate in or enact the discourse of which they are part. We might say that Bakhtin challenges his readers to see that “reading” cannot be enclosed in a hermeneutical process alone but must also engage a process of enacting what we read.16 Although it certainly can be argued that such insights are also made within German and French work (Heidegger and Derrida), Bakhtin makes the world of assembly and enactment far more accessible because he bases his discussion not only on literature but also on novels that are already well known.

15 Bakhtin’s inherent criticism of Freud is also found in the questions he raised about Dostoevsky. “And later Mikhail Bakhtin said about Dostoevsky that he saw in psychology ‘a reification of human soul that is humiliating.’” Quoted in Svetlana Boym, Common Places (Harvard: Harvard Univ. Press, 1994) 85) For the Bakhtin Circles critique of Freud in the 1920s see Boym, 89. See also Epstein, Russian Postmodernism, 18. 16 For remarks regarding Bakhtin’s relation to western phenomenology See Slobodnaka Vladiv-Glover, “The 1960s and the Rediscovery of the Other in Russian Culture: Andrei Bitov” in Russian Postmodernism, 31-86, esp 77 n 8. 8 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy

Bakhtin’s analysis of the ways that time-frames or chronotopes function in prose shaped another area of research that continues to influence American scholarship. Bahktin’s departure point was to ask how time is both created by the author and experienced by the reader. His insight was to ask how a particular text works as a medium for the creation of time and space between an author and the reader. The question anticipates extensive work in the phenomenology of reading (for example, Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser). But even more Bakhtin’s question resonates with Paul Ricoeur’s research on narrative and time. Ricoeur clearly acknowledges the importance of Bakhtin for his own research.17 Rather than track the legacy of chronotope through American literary theory, however, I want to emphasize that Bakhtin’s chronotope comes not from post-war seminars in phenomenology but from neo-Kantian German sources best represented by Ernst Cassirer. In fact, Bakthin’s recognition of Einstein’s importance for literary studies must be related to Cassirer’s own dissertation on Einstein.18 It is of utmost importance as well to acknowledge Bakhtin’s reference to physics hardly for ideological reasons pertaining to the Soviet Union but because his discourse also involved science and technology.

Although Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais celebrates the polyphony of voices integrated within Gargantua and Pantagruel, the discussion also concerns the ways a work of literature functions in time. There is a sense in which Bakhtin’s work, like Rabelais’ own creation, displays great erudition at the same time that it shows how “scholarship” may be used to question authority. On a level of Medieval and Renaissance scholarship, Bakhtin can catalogue low speech (or to use the Latin term deployed by Auerbach, sermo humilis) and show how it parodies high speech. But it is not “show-off” scholarship that is most vital here but the ways in which Bakhtin provides an opportunity for reading of contemporary Russian culture. Bakhtin accomplishment is so remarkable because it at once defends the “high” Medieval and Renaissance scholarship at the same time that it defended the vast array of “Soviet jokes.” With categories such as polyphony, carnival, Menippean satire, and gay relativity, Bakhtin recognized Russian cultural manifestations in ways that extended beyond the sanctioned ethnographic displays of Soviet culture. (Cultural Studies, 44, 64)19

1.3 Extensions

Allow me to conclude by commenting on several aspects of Bakhtin’s work that deserve more attention. My comments will be directed to three areas: 1) science and technology, 2) cognitive science, and 3) what I will call cultural dialogism. Although Bakhtin has been repeatedly approached as literary scholar, his work

17 See especially Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 2 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1985), 96-98. 18 See Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (1910) and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1921) (New York: Dover, 1953 (English, 1923). 9 also carries implications for the study of science and technology. As my earlier reference to Bakhtin’s use of Einstein suggested, a departure point for such projects surely may be found in Bakhtin’s own commentary. It is even more important to notice how Vladimir Bibler and Anatoly Akhutkin have drawn on Bakhtin to develop their own techno-scientific commentaries.20 (It would be possible to include in this discussion: Dmitri Panchenk, Vadim Borisov Felix Perchenok Arsenii Roginksy, Kirill Rossianov, Julius Shreider).

In an interview with Daniel Alexandrov, Akhutin calls attention to the ways in which dialogue applies to science. “Bakhtin challenges us to understand how “a scientific text can be understood as a (literary) creation as well.” (344) Even though it may appear that science is “monological” (an observation made by Bakhtin himself), its univocal and even authoritarian voice may be a consequence of scientists effort to “erase this ‘dialogical dimension”? (341)21 Just as a work of fiction is in effect a “half-text” that must be made a “whole” text by the reader, so a scientific text must be made whole. “Unfortunately, this essential aspect of Bakhtin’s approach is paid no heed in so-called science studies, in the history of science.’ (344) The method of creating a “whole” text, however, is not simply analysis but often involves recognizing how each work claims its own beginning. Just as we pay attention to the unique experience provided by a novel, we should recognize how creation functions in scientific texts. “Twentieth-century theoretical thought abounds with such epochal creations, for its essence is found precisely in fundamental theoretical criticism of the first principles…It appears that the pattern of contemporary scientific thought is not unlike the pattern of the ‘circular novella’: each displays recourse to its own beginnings. (345) In brief, “What Bakhtin’s approach enables is the perception of the pattern of (artistic) creation even in the scientific text, its comprehension as an integral creation of theoretical thought.” (346)

The conversation between Alexandrov and Akhutin offers a point of departure for showing that the apparent monological voice of science can be resolved into multiple voices of embedded orality. A scientific text does not exist in a written form alone but is continually activated through speech. What is so striking is that orality in the classroom while taken for granted (for example the presentation of a mathematics problem) is simply not regarded as a constitutive element of science. Instead classrooms are so “text” based that it appears as if science and technology are deaf. In practice, quite the opposite is the case. Oral dialogics not only in the classroom but also in science and technology “in-action” deserve much more research. Such

19 For a discussion of a contemporary application of the “carnivalesque” to Russian life see Mikhail N. Epstein, “Charms of Entropy and New Sentimentality: The Myth of Venedikt Erofeev” Russian Postmodernism, 423-455; 439-444. 20 See B. C. Bibler, Mikali Mikailovich Bakhtin ili poetika kulturi (: Isdatelstvo ‘Progress’, 1991); and Anatoli Akhutin, Tryashva o Bitii (Moskva, Rysskoe Pinomenologichskoe Obshestvo, 1997). 21 The point is that the text’s cultural significance is not assigned to it by the fact that it may be torn asunder, quoted, supplemented, covertly or overtly disputed, parodied, and so forth. No; for the text to become culturally significant, it is necessary to focus attention on the whole—to comprehend the speech genre, the peculiarity of this literary creation as integral utterance. What does this mean? 1) This means that the model for analysis (and synthesis) of texts is all spheres of culture is that which has long since become the principal topic of attention and understanding of literary critics: namely, the phenomenon of literary creation, with its mean features of composition, peripeteia, inner completedness from the beginning to the end—in other words, whatever makes it a single indivisible whole. “Bakhtin’s Legacy and the History of Science and Culture: An Interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler” Configurations, 335-386; 344. 10 Mikhail Bakhtin’s American Legacy research is even more appropriate at a time in which digital technology is transforming the traditional notion of texts.

My second observation concerns cognitive science in particular. At a time when the use of the label “cognitive science” is growing so rapidly, Bakhtin’s work may help temper the promiscuous use of the term. More particularly, a dialogical practice may permit a more detailed integration of the “hard” neuro- physiological aspect of cognitive science with the “softer” cultural-linguistic aspect of field-work undertaken under its rubric. Here it is not simply a matter of a simple dialogical link between the multiple “voices” of cognitive science but rather an emphasis on the very language that being deployed within the extended spectrum of cognition. For example, it strikes me that Gerald Edelman’s computer modelling of neurophysiology could be studied from the vantage point of Bakhtin.22 Edwin Hutchin’s work on distributed cognition also raises questions that might be explored through Bakhtin.23 By extending dialogics to incorporate the artefacts that we think with and through we will discovery even further implication of Bakhtin’s research.

My final observation would underscore several implications of dialogism. In his 1993 interview Anatoly Akhutin observed that there was a relation between the “novelistic word as key” and “the idea of intercourse between epochs in the ‘great time’ of culture.” (342) There is an important insight here and it should be taken much further. Just as we have taken for granted the orality of science and technology, we have taken for granted the powerful ways in which we bracket time. We are taught to use cultural periods not only as containers but codes that permit us to abbreviate arguments. Bakhtin’s work challenges us not to take such taxonomies for granted but to look at the ways in which they function as an architectonic structure in our discourse. For example, what do references such as "the eighteenth century” or “ninth century” or the “pre- Columbian period” means within our conversations? Perhaps even more poignantly we may recall Eric Hobsbawm’s observation about the ways the past becomes “designed” for the purposes of the present. “The past [becomes] redesigned, a little like haute couture, to put a particular political objective in smart clothing, so that the elites, the educated minorities which govern, could impose their version of history and literature on the rest of the people.”24 When we use such chronological measurements, do we not enact computational structures that not only help us think but above all help us think with others? Dialogics emphasizes not only challenges the romantic illusion of individual autonomy but shows that social-linguistics has a function that extends beyond a single language. Bakhtin shows how the novel works as a laboratory for thinking about time. He asks us as well to think about the ways in which epochal time has been embedded in our discourse on science and technology.

22 See Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992) and Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 23 Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) 24 Eric Hobsbawm, On the Edge of the New Century (New York: The New Press, 2000), 27. 11

1.4 Conclusion

The legacy of Bakhtin in the United States, like his legacy in Russia, continues to emerge. Certainly the questions posed by Vitaly Makhlin are significant because they reveal the ephemeral nature of our categories of thought and their utter dependence on living communities of discourse. Perhaps one of the single most important aspects of Bakhtinian research during the past ten years has been to show how his legacy is witnessed to by the ongoing work between Russian and American scholars. From the vantage point of cultural dialogics--especially at a time when our own witness of warfare and weapons of mass destruction is so immediate--it is appropriate for us to return not simply to Bakhtin but to the answers that we must seek together.