Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin

10.3726/78000_121

Augusto Ponzio Università di Bari

Abtsract Two declarations by Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1973 conversations with Duvakin: that he is an unofficial person; and a philosopher more than a philologist. The first express- es the desire to escape forms of representation, formal, technical, specialized attitudes, denounced as “imposture”. The second, connected to it, concerns his choice not to remain inside the philologist’s world, in the specialism of a discipline despite how he had known and practiced it during his studies, a wide-ranging approach which included literary history, literary criticism, modern and ancient languages, classical literatures, study of popular literature and folklore, comparative linguistics, general linguistics, aesthetics, philosophy. For Bakhtin all this “knowhow” is connected with life, with individual responsibility, “non-alibi in existing”, expressed with the central concept “chronotope”: to connect two chronotopes, foster dialogue between them: that of verbal art and of life. His choice: an “unofficial” philosopher evading all forms of theoreticism to construct a “philosophy of singularity”, supported by knowledge as a “philologist”, which too makes him the great Bakhtin.

Keywords Philology, Philosophy, Discourse genres, Chronotope, Responsibility-without- alibis

1. Two Declarations by Mikhail Bakhtin, by Way of a Premise

1.1 An unofficial person

I will begin with two declarations made by Mikhail Bakhtin in his conversations of 1973 (in Bakhtin 1996, second edition 2002, It. trans. Mikhail Bakhtin, In dialogo, 2008) with Viktor Duvakin (1899–1982, a Majakovskij expert). After teaching literature for over forties years at the university of Moscow, Duvakin spent the last fifteen years of his life recording memories about Russian culture in the early twentieth century. The first declaration made by Bakhtin in his 1973 conversations ßwith Victor Duvakin (1996, It. trans., p. 347) concerns Marija Judina

(1899–1970). She too was a member of the so-called “Bakhtin circle”, at the time “philosophical circle”, from the time it was inaugurated in Nevel’ in 1918: “Marija Veniaminovna Judina as person was absolutely unofficial. Anything official was a burden for her. The same for me. I can’t bear the official either”. Bakhtin, an unofficial person: with respect to official, public circles, he was from another circle, one tending towards unofficialness, even before his arrest and conviction. Thanks to this attitude he was able to pro- ceed in his intellectual travels in spite of long years of total exclusion from the culture of his time, always thinking and writing. Mikhail Mikhajlovic Bakhtin was born on 17th November (4th according to the Julian calendar) 1895 in Orël. He belongs to the same generation as the semiotician Roman Jakobson (1896), the ethnologist Vladimir Propp (1895), the formalist Victor Sklovskij (1893), the psy- chologist Lev Vygotskij. After long years spent in exile for having collaborated with the religious-philosophical association founded by Alek- sandr Mejer, he died in Moscow in 1975, the year his first collection of writings was published, followed by another in 1979. During his lifetime, after publication of his monograph on Dostoevsky in 1929, banished from official culture during the Stalinist period, he published a second amplified edition of this work in 1963, followed by his monograph on Rabelais in 1965. Bakhtin carried out his university studies in Odessa and Petrograd where Veselovskij, Baudouin de Courtenay and Zelinskij taught their cours- es. On shifting to Vitebsk in 1920, Bakhtin met Pavel N. Medvedev (born in 1891, executed in 1938) and Valentin N. Vološinov (1885–1936). They became friends and collaborated closely, forming a circle which after Bakh- tin’s death was denominated the “Bakhtin circle”. Other members included the pianist Marija Judina, the musicologist Sollertiskij, the biologist Kanaev, the writer Vaginov, the indiologist Tubjanskij, the poet Kljuev.

1.2 From philology to philosophy

The second declaration made by Bakhtin in his 1973 conversations with Victor Duvakin (1996, It. trans., p. 347) concerns the relation in his work between philology and philosophy:

Duvakin: But weren’t you also a classicist? Bakhtin: I was… I was a philosopher. What I’d say is… D: Were you more of a philosopher than a philologist? B: Philosopher more than philologist. Philosopher: and that’s what I am still today. I’m a philosopher. I’m a thinker. Well then, let me see, in Peters- burgh, Petrograd, as in Odessa, there was no philosophy department. All the same, there they would ask “what is philosophy?”, and the answer was, “neither fish nor fowl”. There was no specialization that could re- spond adequately. Of course, there was a department where philosophy was taught, but not an independent department. You want to finish your studies and continue in philosophy? Fine, but you are obliged to finish them in something like a Department of Russian studies, or German studies… D: And do so in the historical-philological area? B: In the historical-philological area … that is, the classical section. Let’s say I decided for the classical… A diploma was possible in the two depart- ments, because the philosophical section in itself did not offer… D: Did not offer the possibility of having a profession. B: … it didn’t give a profession. D: In general that’s fair enough. B. Yes, I believe so. After all, what is a philosopher? … Generally, let’s say, philosophers are distinguished as humanist philosophers and philosophers of nature: the latter are specialized in natural sciences, physics, mathemat- ics, in addition to philosophy; the former in the human sciences (Bakhtin, 1996, It. trans., p. 120).

The orientation chosen by Bakhtin was historical-philological: in Petrograd he continued his studies at the historical-philological faculty, but in the department of classical studies (Ibid. p. 122). At the University of Odessa and in Petrograd (St. Petersburgh) his pro- fessors for European linguistics and classical studies were, among others, Aleksandr Tomson, who studied with Filipp Fortunatov, and author of Intro- duction to linguistics, and Faddej Zelinskij. For philosophy Nikolaj Lange, who followed Wundt, and Aleksandr Vvedenskij, a scholar of logic, “a rig- orous Kantian, but not neo-Kantian” (Ibid., p. 135–136). During the same conversation, Bakhtin premised that:

I’ve had a very valuable formation and education, no doubt. But I have to say this: though I can’t complain about gymnasium or university, fundamentally my education comes from my own readings. Everything and always. Because, in reality, scholastic and official institutions can’t give an education that is fully satisfactory. When you limit yourself to this, essentially you become … an knowledge official. You only learn about the preceding phase of a discipline, but as to the contemporary situation, the

creative …, in my opinion initiation comes about by reading the most recent literature, the most recent books independently. (Ibid., p. 113)

So then, what does Bakhtin mean when he says, “Philosopher more than philologist. Philosopher: and that’s what I am still today. I’m a philosopher”. As he clarifies throughout his writings (see “The Problem of Text”, 1959–61, in Bakhtin, 1986a, pp. 103–104), through to the last two from the early 1970s (“Response to a Question from the Novij Mir Editorial Staff, 1971, and “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences”, 1974, respec- tively in Ibid., pp. 1–9, and 159–171), philosophy for Bakhtin is a study on the points of contact and interaction among different disciplines and as such cannot be described as linguistic, philological, literary, sociological, or semiotic, and so forth. For Bakhtin philosophy means not to accept restriction to the bound- aries of a discipline, nor to the sphere of “general ontology”, to evoke Edmund Husserl, the already given world, the being of things, being as it presents itself in today’s world, in contemporaneity. Bakhtin also indi- cates this movement beyond, this search for the otherwise, this encroach- ment with the particle “meta”: in fact, in the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky, given that his research cannot be contained within clas- sifications established by studies in linguistics and philology, he tags it “metalinguistics”.

2. A Constant Idea: the Notion of Chronotope

In “Notes Made in 1970–71”, Bakhtin outlines an introduction that antici- pates a collection of his writings from various phases in his research. He was working on this collection (Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 1975) just before his death:

This collection of my essays is unified by one theme in the various stages of its development. The unity of the emerging (developing) idea. […] in these works there is much external open-endedness, that is, an open-endedness not of the thought itself but of its expression and exposition. Sometimes it is difficult to separate one open-endedness from another. My love for variations and for a diversity of terms for a single phenomenon.

The multiplicity of focuses. Bringing distant things closer without indicating the inter- mediate links. (Bakhtin, 1979, Eng. trans., p. 155)

In Bakhtin’s works “the theme in the various stages of its development”, “the emerging idea” is the notion of chronotope. This idea is already present in Bakhtin’s text from the early 1920s, “K filosofii postupka” (1920–24, in Russian and Italian in Bachtin e il suo Circolo 2014), where he introduces the notion of exotopy (vnenakodimost’). In this text he also introduces the notion of “architectonics” where all values, meanings and spatial-temporal re- lationships are characterized in terms of otherness: “I-for-myself, the other- for-me, and I-for-the-other” (Bakhtin 1993, p. 54, where postupok is also translated as deed).

All values of actual life and culture are arranged around the basic architectonic point of the actual world of the performed act or deed: scientific values, aesthetic values, political values (including both ethical and social values), and, finally, religious values. (Ibid.)

The text dedicated specifically to the notion of chronotope, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” is dated 1937–38 and a section entitled “Concluding Remarks” which contains traces of what Bakhtin had already outlined in his programmatic article of 1919, “Art and Answera- bility”, is dated 1973 (in a note, also among the additions made in 1973, Bakhtin refers to a conference held by the neurophysiologist Aleksej A. A. Ukhtomskij in 1925). So this text crosses over the whole span of Bakhtin’s research in its various phases, from his early writings to the latest, in a movement that is not only of the temporal order, but also the conceptual. In “Notes Made in 1970–71,” to explain the difference between “architectonics in life” and “architectonics in art”, Bakhtin considers the difference between Dostoevsky the journalist and Dostoevsky the writer. As a writer, Dostoevsky was able to sense in the opinions and ideologies of the time a dialogue on ultimate questions in the “great time”. As a journalist, he dealt with issues that were resolved in his own day:

The journalist is above all a contemporary. He is obliged to be one. He lives in the sphere of questions that can be resolved in the present day (or in any case in the near future). He participates in a dialogue that can be ended and even finalized, can be translated into action, and can become an empirical force. […] When entering the area of Dostoevsky’s journalism, we observe a sharp narrowing of the horizon; the universality of his novels disappears, even though the problems of

the hero’s personal life are replaced by social and political problems. The heroes lived and acted (and thought) before the entire world (before heaven and earth). Ultimate questions that originated in their small personal and daily lives broke away from their lives and attached themselves to “the divine universal life”. (Bakhtin 1979, Eng. trans in Bakhtin 1986a, p. 152)

In “Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel”, Bakhtin describes the relation of interconnectivity and mutual renewal between the “work” and the “world”, that is, between the “work” and “life”, which again evokes and develops his thoughts as presented in his early 1919 text:

The work and the world depicted in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers. Of course this metabolic process is itself chronotopic: it occurs first and foremost in the historically developing social world. We might even speak of a special creative chronotope inside which this exchange between work and life occurs, and which constitutes the distinctive life of the work. (in Bakhtin 1975, 1982, p. 254)

According to Bakhtin, the excess of literary sense with respect to contemporaneity, it’s exotopic point of view, its outsideness with respect to real cultural context, favours its capacity for understanding, in a dialogue that transcends the limits of contemporaneity. In “Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences”, Bakhtin remarks that if literature cannot be studied separately from cultural context, it is even more disastrous to restrict it to the time of its creation, to “contemporaneity”. During their life-time post mortem, great works are enriched with new meanings. Neither Shakespeare nor the interpreters of his own time were aware of the great Shakespeare we know today. The author is impris- oned in his contemporaneity. Subsequent ages liberate him and the function of the science of literature consists in contributing to this liberation. The chronotope determines the unitary character of the literary work and creates the possibility of dialogue beyond the time of its contemporaneity. Likewise with respect to Bakhtin’s work the chronotope is the idea, the theme which determines its unitariness and maintains dialogue between Bakhtin’s work and our own time.

3. The Unity of Science, Art, and Life

In “Art and Answerability” (1919, Eng. trans., p. 1–2), a kind of programmatic manifesto (his first published text), Bakhtin observes that the three domains of human culture – science, art, and life – only reach unity in the uniqueness of the single individual’s praxis. The single individual integrates these domains into the unity of his acts, his responsible acts. However, in most cases, this union is only “mechanical”. What does “mechanical” mean here? A whole is called “mechanical”, as Bakhtin says, when its parts are united in space and time only externally, with no internal unity in terms of sense: the parts of this whole are contiguous, but remain alien to each other. Bakhtin repeats this observation à propos the lack of unity among the three domains of human culture in the conclusion to the second 1963 edition of his monograph, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he dis- cusses the contemporary separation between science and art. However, this is not a separation between abstract concepts, but rather between scientific consciousness and artistic consciousness, therefore between concrete scientific praxis and concrete artistic praxis:

The scientific consciousness of contemporary man has learned to orient itself among the complex circumstance of “the probability of the universe”: it is not confused by any “indefinite quantities” but knows how to calculate them and take them into account. This scientific consciousness has long since grown accustomed to the Einsteinian world with its multiplicity of systems of measurement, etc. But in the realm of artistic cognition people sometimes continue to demand a very crude and primitive definitive- ness, one that quite obviously could not be true. (Bakhtin 1963, Eng. trans. p. 272)

It ensues that the new form of the novel as created by Dostoevsky (whose innovative features are evidenced by Bakhtin in the first edition of his monograph),

may be considered a huge step forward not only in the development of novelistic prose […] but also in the development of the artistic thinking of humankind. It seems to us that one could speak directly of a special polyphonic artistic thinking extending beyond the bounds of the novel as genre. This mode of thinking makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions. (Ibid., p. 270)

The connection between scientific consciousness and artistic praxis intro- duced by Dostoevsky with his new artistic vision evidences the innovative potential of life, of one’s relationship with self and with others (see Ibid.). Bakhtin was interested in both the artistic and scientific research of his time. He traces an analogous relation between artistic praxis and scientific consciousness in Kazimir Malevich’s “suprematism” and declares as much in his conversations with Viktor Duvakin (1996, It. trans., p. 220) when he recounts his first encounter with Malevich in Vitebsk. As his friend, the biologist Ivan Kanaev, declared to Bočarov, though signed by the latter, Bakhtin himself was the real author of the essay on contemporary vitalism (“Sovremennyj vitalizm”), published in 1926, in a journal of biology. We know from Bakhtin how he was influenced by Aleksej Ukhtomskij (apart from the concept of chronotope, Ukhtomskij also influenced his interpretation of Dostoevsky), and by Wladimir Vernadskij (renowned for the concept of “biosphere”). In “Notes Made in 1970–71,” Bakhtin draws on Vernadskij in his discussion of the difficulties involved in understanding dynamical processes in the cultural sphere as much as in the biological and in the evolution of species – too extended in time to understand, which leads to denying them. In “Art and Answerability” (1919), Bakhtin, as observed, maintains that the unity of science, art, and life in human culture is only possible in the unique single individual who integrates them into his own unity, which is neither fixed nor guaranteed ontologically. This connection is only guaranteed by the unity of individual answerability. The single individual is answerable in praxis, in everyday life. The division created between two mutually impervious worlds can only be superseded in life when we cog- nize, choose, act, create, build worlds where life itself becomes the object of a given domain of culture. In responsible praxis, in the answerability of our own acts, all constituent aspects of culture “must not only fit next to each other in the temporal sequence of his life, but must also interpene- trate each other in the unity” of an individual person:

I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life. But answerability entails guilt, or liability to blame. It is not only mutual answerability that art and life must assume, but also mutual liability to blame. The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willing- ness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life. (Ibid., p. 1–2)

These ideas are developed by Bakhtin in the early 1920s, but are only published in 1986, thanks to Sergej G. Bočarov, under the title “K filosofii postupka”. The topic of this text is closely related to the first chapter of a longer work, it too from the early 1920s, published as “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” in Estetika slovesnogo tvorčestva, Bakhtin’s 1979 collection. Considered as fragmentary, this chapter was excluded from the 1979 Russian original and published by Sergej Bočarov in 1986 together with “K filosofii postupka” and subsequently in Bakhtin’s Autor i geroy, a book edited by Bočarov in 2000. These two texts are of great interest not only because of their intrinsic theoretical value, but also as a key to the interpretation of Bakhtin’s research and writings as they extend into the first half of the 1970s.

4. For a Philosophy of the Postupok

Postupok, the word used by Bakhtin, and consequently by Bočarov, in the title of the text in question, “K filosofii postupka”, refers to a “lived act”. According to Bakhtin, “postupok” evokes the world of responsive praxis enacted by the unique single individual. In this world, the world of responsive praxis, abstract meaning and mechanical unity in science, art, acade- mies, politics, technology, impersonal social roles, tasks, duties all recover their sense and are integrated into the unity of responsible acts. Postupok, act, or deed, contains “stup”, which means “step” in the sense of “decision”, “an important step”, “a big step”, “to take a step”, “bring himself to take a certain step”: initiative, stance, to pass from the level of the theoretic, of planning, of the normative, to the level of personal answerable praxis. Bakhtin also uses the verb postupat’, to act, to perform an answerable act, or deed. Understood as “to take a step”, “postupok” recalls the expression “transgredient”, which Bakhtin connects to “outsideness”, “exotopy”, “vnenakodimost’”, “transgredient”: from Latin transgredo; English, step across, step over. In “K filosofii postupka” Bakhtin characterizes the crisis of the contemporary world as the crisis of the contemporary act, which has become technical, formal, mechanical action. He identifies this crisis in the separation

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 130 Augusto Ponzio of the act – with its concrete participative, responsible motivation – from its cultural product, which is reified and loses sense. This interpretation is similar to that formulated by Husserl and his phenomenology, especially as developed in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (published posthumously in 1954). However, unlike Husserl where a certain theoreticism persists, in Bakhtin sense is not conferred by intentional consciousness, by the transcendental subject, but rather by answerable praxis without alibis of the singular individual in the existing world. Bakhtin emphasizes how separation of the product from the answerable act, culture from life, involves loss of sense, that is, knowledge emptied of sense in the cultural world. But when individual praxis is isolated from cultural meanings, the act itself separated from social values is emptied of its ideal moments and degraded to biological and economic motivation: outside objective culture, the act appears as “bare biological subjectivity”, “biological activity”. The value placed by Bakhtin on the act is that of unitary and unique answerable praxis distinct from technical action with its special, that is, limited answerability. As says Bakhtin in Toward a Philos- ophy of the act:

The contemporary crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of contemporary act (postupok). An abyss has formed between the motive of the actually performed act or deed and its product. But in consequence of this, the product of the deed, severed from its essential roots, has withered as well. Money can become the motive of the deed […]. In relation to the present moment, economic materialism is in the right […]. All the energy of answerable performing is drawn off into the autonomous domain of culture, and, as a result, the performed act, detached from that energy, sinks to the level of elementary biological and economic motivation, that is, loses all its ideal moments: that is precisely what constitutes the state of civilisation. The whole wealth of culture is placed at the service of biological activity [act]. Theory consigns the performed act or deed to the realm of brute existence […]. Given this state of affairs, it may seem that what remains, after we subtract the sense-moments of objective culture, is bare biological subjectivity, the activity qua biological need. That is why it seems that I am objective and spiritual only as a poet or a scientist/ scholar, i.e. only from within the product I have brought forth. And it is from within these produced objects that my biography must be constructed; after substracting that, all that remains is a subjective activity. (Bakhtin 1993, Eng. trans. reported with variations, cf. pp. 54–55)

Bakhtin evidences two forms of answerability: 1) “Special, or technical, or formal answerability” relative to a given domain of culture, a given content, a given role and function, delimited, defined, circumscribed answerability, referred to the repeatable identity of the objective and interchangeable individual; 2) “Moral answerability”, “absolute answerability” without limits or alibis, which alone renders individual action unique, answerability of the singular individual that cannot be abdicated. Praxis, actual experience, as Bakhtin says, is “a two-faced Janus” oriented in two different directions: never-repeatable uniqueness, and objective, abstract unity. The connection between these two types of answerability is that between objective, repetitive, fixed meaning conferred by the domain of culture in which action is objectified, and the unrepeatable self-determination of existing as a unique and unitary event, as praxis in its entirety and complexity, non subdivisible and unclassifiable.

5. Official Consciousness, Unofficial Consciousness, and Critique of Political Proxy

In Bakhtin’s view, the uniqueness of the answerable act establishes a connection in individual living consciousness between institutional values and life, “official consciousness” and “unofficial consciousness”. When this is not the case, cultural, cognitive, scientific, aesthetic, political values rise to the status of values-in-themselves and lose all possibility of verification, functionality, transformation. With reference to politics, Bakhtin observes that all this has Hobbesian implications: absolute cultural values find their counterpart in the idea that people choose once only, surrendering to the State and giving up their freedom, after which they are slaves to their own free decision (cf. Ibid., p. 35). In subsequent research Bakhtin demonstrates how all this contra- dicts popular resistance to “State truth”, the irreducibility of “non official ideology” to “official ideology”, popular culture. The capacity in popular

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 132 Augusto Ponzio culture for innovation and regeneration with respect to dominant culture is Bakhtin’s object of study in his monograph on Rabelais (1965). Most significant is that when Bakhtin returns to his book on Dostoevsky for his 1963 edition, he completes it with a chapter on the genesis of Dostoev- sky’s polyphonic novel tracing its roots back to the serio-comical genres of popular culture. The polyphonic novel is the greatest expression of “car- nivalized literature”. As Bakhtin claims in one of his annotations (in Literaturno-kritičeskie stat’I, Moscow, 1986), insofar as it belongs to “class ideology”, State truth “at a certain point comes up against the insurmountable barrier of irony and degrading allegory”, “the carnival spark of allegorical-ironical impre- cation, which destroys all gravity and seriousness” and “never dies in the heart of the people” (in Ponzio and Jachia, ed., 1993, pp. 191–192). From this point of view Bakhtin’s monograph on Rabelais is pivotal in his overall conception. By contrast with oversimplifying, even suffocating interpretations of Marxism, Bakhtin develops Marx’s idea that the human only reaches fulfillment with the end of the reign of necessity. Conse- quently, a social system effectively alternative to capitalism is one that considers time available for self and for others, and not work time, as the real social wealth: this is the “time of festivity” as described by Bakhtin, which is closely connected to the “great time” of literature. In a passage from Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin reflects on forms of proxy, in particular political proxy and the practice of dele- gating responsibility. In political representation the attempt at relieving oneself of political answerability, leads to a loss of sense of one’s roots in unique, personal participation without alibis. Consequently, answerability becomes void, specialized and formal answerability, with all the risks that such loss of sense involves (cf. Ibid., p. 52): Bakhtin says:

In attempting to understand our whole life as representation and every act we perform as ritual action, we turn into impostors. Every representation does not abolish but merely specializes my personal answerability. […] The loss of once-occurrent participation in the course of specialization is especially frequent in the case of political answerability. The same loss of the singular unity takes place as a result of the attempt to see in every act, in every object of a given act, not a singular individual concretely involved, but a representative of a certain large and whole.

What is answerable does not dissolve in what is specialized (politics), otherwise what we have is not an answerable deed, but a technical or instrumental action. (Ibid., pp. 52–57)

6. “Non-alibi in Existing” and the Singular, Unique, Incomparable Act

In Toward a Philosophy of the Act (p. 37), Bakhtin refuses the concept of truth, in the sense of the Russian word istina (inherited from rationalism) as general and universal, repetitive and constant, separate from the individual and the subjective. Instead, truth understood as pravda, is reached through participation of each one of us in the choices we are each called to make responsibly and in the first person without delegations or substitutes. The being of each one of us is not given a priori. Being becomes in events, in the choices made from a unique place, in which each one is positioned at each occurrence. The unity of each I, identity of the I is decided through its responsible acts. It is not conceived by Bakhtin as something fixed in terms of universal content, principles, duties, imperatives, and even less so of being: a clear standpoint against all forms of dogmatic absolutism, including the ontological. Neither being nor value is identical or autonomous, a constant principle, isolated from the live act of identification as a given being or value:

It is not the content of an obligation that obligates me, but my signature below it […] And what compelled me to sign at the moment of undersigning was not the content of the given performed act or deed. This content could not by itself, in isolation, have prompt- ed me to perform the act or deed – to undersign-acknowledge it, but only in correlation with my decision to undertake an obligation – by performing the act of undersigning- acknowledging. (Ibid., p. 38)

The critique of ontology (extensible to Heidegger’s ontology) is an important aspect of Bakhtin’s reformulation of “first philosophy” as “moral philosophy”. On this account particularly significant is the following passage from Toward a Philosophy of the Act:

Participation in the being-event of the world in its entirety does not coincide, from our point of view, with irresponsible self-surrender to Being, with being-possessed

by Being. What happens in the latter case is that the passive moment in my participation is moved to the fore, while my to-be-accomplished self-activity is reduced. The aspiration of Nietzsche’s philosophy reduces to a considerable extent to this pos- sessedness by Being (one-sided participation); its ultimate result is the absurdity of contemporary Dionysianism. (p. 49)

In “K filosofii postupka” Bakhtin uses the expression bytie, sobytie, bytie- sobytie, to exist, or existence, according to context: “to exist as event”, “event within existence” (from German Seins-geschehen). In the English translation by Liapunov (ed. by Holquist 1993), bytie is translated as Being, written with a capital letter. The shadow of Heidegger! in spite of the ante litteram critique of Heideggerian ontology in the passage quoted above. “Non-alibi in existing” involves my uniqueness and irreplaceable involvement. It transforms void possibility into an answerable real performa- tive act (or deed); “non-alibi in existing” confers actual validity and sense to all meanings and values which would otherwise be abstract. “It gives a face” to the event which is otherwise anonymous. Because of “non-alibi” in existing, neither objective nor subjective reason exists. Each one of us is right in his/her own place and is right not subjectively but answerably, without the possibility of his/her praxis being interpreted as “contradiction” if not for a third, non incarnated, non participative consciousness and in the perspective of abstract, non-dialogic dialectics, that is, of a pseudo-dialectics which Bakhtin explicitly calls to question in “From Notes Made in 1970–71”. A key-word in Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act is Edinstivennyj, singular, unique, incomparable, sui generis, equivalent to German einzig. The word einzig recurs in the title of Max Stirner’s work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844). But unlike Stirner’s selfish, egotistic individual, Bakhtin refers to a personal oneness, a personal singularity, open to the relation of otherness with itself and with others, a singularity connected to the whole universe and which contains a sense of the infinite in its finiteness. Edin- stivennyj, singular, unique, in some respects evokes Soeren Kierkegaard’s “singular individual”. Bakhtin was familiar with this author, even before his works were translated into Russian, as he recounts in his conversations with Duvakin, noting “an incredible similarity” of ideas between Kier- kegaard and Dostoevsky (It. trans. 2008, p. 115). “Non-alibi in existing” relates to the other, not in terms of indifference to a generic other, mankind in general, but rather in terms of concrete involvement and unindifference to the life of one’s neighbour, one’s contemporary, to the past and future of real persons.

An abstract truth referred to mankind in general, such as “man is mortal”, acquires sense and value only from my unique place in the world: the expression, “man is mortal”, acquires sense as the death of my neighbour, my own death, the death of an entire community, of historically real humanity:

And, of course, the emotional-volitional, valuative sense of my death, of the death of an other who is dear to me, and the fact of any actual person’s death are all profoundly different in each case, for all these are different moments in once-occurent Being-as- event. For a disembodied, detached (non-participating) subiectum, all deaths may be equal. No one, however, lives in a world in which all human beings are – with respect to value – equally mortal. (Bakhtin 1993, p. 48)

Bakhtin insists that involvement with the other is inevitable – a concrete other and not another abstract self. Participative answerability is achieved from the uniqueness of one’s place in the world. To be answerably participative involves apprehension for the other; answerability of the act, of the deed is above all answerability for the other and my uniqueness makes it impossible for me to abdicate answerability, not being replaceable.

7. The Destructive and Terrifying Force of the Technical Separated from Once-occurrent Unity of Life

One can attempt to escape from non-alibi answerability. But such attempts only testify to its weight and inevitable presence. All roles with their special answerability do not abolish my personal answerability, answerability without limits and guarantees, without alibis. Detached from absolute answerability, special answerability loses sense, it becomes technical answerability, the mere representation of a role, action, technical performance. As “technical activity” special answerability is an illusion. With respect to the decision, to the step, to the concrete act of its as- sumption, all given meaning, all that which is aesthetically, scientifically, morally significant, as claims Bakhtin citing Husserl, only has technical value because it is indifferent to the single individual’s answerable act. Particularly significant are Bakhtin’s reflections on the autonomy of what is technologically valid, which is governed by its own immanent

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 136 Augusto Ponzio laws, acquires a value of its own, with power over the life and praxis of the single individual, and ultimately loses any connection with the live uniqueness of the answerable act. As says Bakhtin:

All that which is technological, when divorced from the once-occurrent unity of life and surrendered to the will of the law immanent to its development, is frightening; it may from time to time irrupt into this once-occurrent unity as an irresponsibly destructive and terrifying force. (p. 7)

Bakhtin insists on the alien character of life considered in its singularity as “answerable, risk-fraught, and open becoming” (p. 9), determined in its uniqueness and unrepeatability by comparison to the world of theoretical constructions and abstract being, “unburdened” of historical existence. Theoretical reason “is indifferent to the central fact – central for me” (p. 9) of my unique and actual answerability. Although the “unity-uniqueness” of my life-act remains alien to indifferent theoretical consciousness, unity-uniqueness is the foundation of the latter “insofar as the act of cognition as my deed is included, along with all its content, in the unity of its answerability, in which and by virtue of which I actually live – perform deeds” (p. 12). Therefore, as Bakhtin says:

Once-occurent uniqueness or singularity cannot be thought of, it can only be partici- patively experienced or lived through. All of theoretical reason in its entirety is only a moment of practical reason, i.e., the reason of the unique subiectum’s moral orientation within the event of once-occurent existing. (p. 13, “existing”, replaces “Being” from the official English translation)

The assertion that theoretical reason is part of practical reason does not mean that Bakhtin was a follower of Kantianism. Moral philosophy or “first philosophy”, as he sometimes calls it, should concentrate on de- scribing Being-as-event as known by answerable action; the question of answerable action cannot avail itself of the Kantian conception or of the Neo-Kantian revival, as much as they value the moral problem. Bakhtin accuses Kant and the Kantians, their formal ethics, of theoreticism, that is, of “the abstracting from my unique self ”: there is no approach to a living act performed in the real world (p. 27). A philosophy of the answerable act can only be a phenomenology, a participative description of the world of action, assuming it not as contem- plated or theoretically thought out from the outside, but rather from the inside in its answerability. Though connected with Husserl’s phenomenology,

Bakhtin’s approach is substantially different, given his focus on the otherness relationship centered on “moral answerability” as against the noe- sis-noema, subject-object relationship. From this point of view Bakhtin’s attitude toward Husserl’s phenomenology is similar to that taken by Em- manuel Lévinas (cf. Ponzio 1992, 1994, 1995). The indifference of theoreticism is superseded by the unindifference of participation, by the uniqueness, unrepeatability, unreplaceability of my existence in the world, by “my non-alibi in existing”. With unindifference (which does not ensue from a theoretical admission, but is the very condition of my interest, desire, cognition, action), dogmatism and generic hypo- theticism, absolute determinism and abstract freedom understood as a void possibility, objectivism and all forms of subjectivism and psychologism, void rationalism and irrationalism complementary to it are all superseded.

8. The Uniqueness of my Life, Language and Verbal Art

Language itself flourishes in participative thought and action, and the word – not the abstract word from the dictionary – becomes a live and “answerably-significant” word. Bakhtin’s early considerations on language are developed in his subsequent books, as in essays by Vološinov and his two volumes, Freudianism (1927), and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). The word manifests itself fully in relation to the uniqueness of action, not only as content-sense, but also as expression-image, and (in emotional-volitional terms) as intonation. Unindifference deriving from the connection with answerable action orients language and favours the comprehension of objects, of living experience: to speak about an object means to enter an unindifferent relationship with it, so that the uttered word cannot avoid being intonated. But all that is experienced is intonated and even the most abstract thought, insofar as it is concretely thought, has a volitional-emotional tone, and if an essential tie were not established between content and its emotional tone, which constitutes its actual value, a given word could not be uttered, a given thought could not be thought, a given object could not enter living experience. In “Part I”, after the “Introduction”, in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin reflects on the problem of whether or not it is possible to

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 138 Augusto Ponzio understand and describe the axiological, spatial-temporal concrete architectonic whole, arranged around a unique participative and unindifferent center, the center of value represented by each one of us in our non-alibi answerability. Such architectonics cannot be understood by the same subject around which it is organized, by the same self, by discourse of the “confession” genre, direct discourse, which as such is incapable of a global vision. Nor is comprehension possible from a cognitive point of view which is neither emotionally nor valuatively participative; which insofar as it is objective, indifferent is incapable of comprehending what it describes; which ends up impoverishing the latter and losing sight of the details that render it living and unfinalizable. Nor can such architectonics be based on empathy which too would be (if this were possible) an impoverishment insofar as it reduces the relationship between two mutually external and non interchangeable positions to a single vision. According to Bakhtin the architectonics of interpretation-comprehension presupposes the other, different, unindifferent and mutually participative. Consequently, there are two value-centers, myself and the other, the two value-centers of life itself around which the architectonics of answerable action is organized and arranged. And these two centers of value must remain reciprocally other. From a spatial-temporal and axiological viewpoint the architectonic relationship among two others must remain, the viewpoint of the I must not dominate. Bakhtin finds that the architectonics of answerability is achieved in literature, in verbal art: in the architectonics of verbal art the center of value is represented by the author/hero relationship, and point of view is characterized by the capacity for transgredience, extralocalization, exotopy. In fact, to achieve artistic value, the author’s unitary gaze must evidence the hero’s otherness and extra-artistic values. Therefore the author’s gaze must be extralocalized – in terms of space, time and sense – with respect to the hero, especially if autobiographical. Otherwise the author’s unitary action takes on confessional tones devoid of artistic value, as in the case of autobiography. In all this we already find clear signs of Bakhtin’s critique of Russian formalism which is systematically developed by Med- vedev in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928).

9. Spatial-temporal Centres of Life and the Art of Poetry

In part “I” of Toward a Philosophy of the Act and in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, precisely in the part titled “Fragment from the first chapter of ‘Author and Hero’”, Bakhtin analyses a poem by Pushkin, Razlu- ka (Parting, 1830) as part of his study on the architectonic layout of the aesthetic vision. Subsequently, he focuses on the relationship between “author and hero in aesthetic activity” producing a long text with the same title. The first chapter in this text begins with an analysis of the same poem, developing considerations from the final part of the fragment mentioned above. This is particularly interesting for an understanding of Bakhtin’s research itineraries overall. Having identified an example of the type of architectonics he intended to analyse in the point of view of literature, Bakhtin ended up focussing on this viewpoint (intended as an example) for the rest of his life. Another important point to underline is that Bakhtin’s initial approach to the aesthetic vision was through the lyrical genre. This is where he first identified the relationship of dialogic otherness among different points of view – in the case of the above mentioned poem by Pushkin the dialogic dialectic between the author’s context and that of the two protagonists, the author-hero and the heroine. This undermines the fallacy that Bakhtin was not interested in the lyrical genre. Dialogism according to Bakhtin is always present in the artistic word, in any genre whatsoever. What remains if at all is a difference in the degree of dialogism. Consequently, in Bakh- tin’s vision we do not have an opposition between absolutely monological genres and absolutely dialogical genres. Bakhtin compares the beginning of Pushkin’s poem in the final version and the first version. Final version:Bound for the shores of your distant homeland / You were leaving this foreign land…There are two voices, two viewpoints; “I” (the author-hero) and “you” (the heroine). First version: Bound for the shores of a distant foreign land / you were leaving your homeland… There is only one voice, one viewpoint, that is, the voice and the viewpoint of the “I”, the author-hero. In the final version of this poem, all concrete moments in the beginning and throughout revolve around two centers of value, the author-hero, that is, the “I” of the remembrance, of the narration, and the heroine with her emotional-volitional tone. In the first version both the foreign land (Italy) and the homeland (Russia) are presented in the valuative context and with

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 140 Augusto Ponzio the emotional-volitional tones of the author-hero, of the “I”, alone. Con- sequently, the first version lacks in poetic value, something which Pushkin perceives and corrects. The world correlated to myself, to an “I”, cannot on principle enter aesthetical architectonics. To contemplate aesthetically is to refer to the valuative viewpoint of the other. Bakhtin develops and specifies such statements in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”:

My own axiological relationship to myself is completely unproductive aesthetically: for myself, I am aesthetically unreal. […]. The organizing power in all aesthetic forms is the axiological category of the other, the relationship to the other, enriched by an axiological “excess” of seeing for the purpose of achieving a transgredient consummation. (Bakhtin 1920–23, in Bakhtin 1979, Eng. trans.: 188–189)

An understanding of the uniqueness and irreducible otherness of the existing single individual does not call for the direct, objective vision of the “I”, of the subject, but for the indirect and objectified viewpoint of “other”, as developed in literary writing. Bakhtin’s text on the philosophy of the act contains the premises that guided him through the whole course of his research. This text sheds light on the itinerary that led him to his 1929 monograph on Dostoevsky. In the second edition of his monograph on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin declares that his analysis of the concrete life of the word is not linguistic, but “meta- linguistic”. The live dynamics of language cannot be understood through an approach to linguistics that abstracts from the internal dialogism of the concretely oriented and specifically intonated word.

10. Speech Genres in Life and in Verbal Art

As Bakhtin demonstrates in his essay of 1952–53, “The Problem of Speech Genres”, discourse genres may be divided into primary or simple genres, the genres of everyday dialogue, and secondary or complex genres, literary genres which represent and objectify everyday, ordinary, objective dialogical exchange. As a component of secondary genres, the dialogue of primary genres becomes represented dialogue, which loses its direct link

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin 141 with the real context of everyday life and its aims, therefore its instrumen- tality and functionality. The word leaves its monological context in which it is determined with respect to its object and the other words forming its context, and enters the context of the word that represents it, the complex verbal interaction with the author who objectifies and pictures it in the form of indirect, direct and free indirect discourse and their variants (dis- cussed in part three of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). Bakhtin maintains that the complexity of dialogue can be studied through the depicted word and its internal dialogization, present in the secondary discourse genres of literature – especially the novel – which evidence aspects of dialogue that are not revealed by primary, simple, direct, objective discourse genres. Such a study is particularly interesting, as Bakhtin 1952–53 maintains, when the object of analysis is the utterance considered as the cell of dialogic exchange, and not the sentence or proposition, the cell of the system of language. As Bakhtin says:

A one-sided orientation toward primary genres inevitably leads to a vulgarization of the entire problem (behaviorist linguistics is an extreme example). The very interrelations between primary and secondary genres and the process of the historical formation of the latter shed light on the nature of the utterance (and above all on the complex problem of the interrelations among language, ideology, and world view). (Bakhtin 1952–53, Eng. trans. 62)

According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s “philosophy” should not be identified in the specific standpoints of the heroes in his novels or of specific contents. For this phenomenon he uses the description “Dostoevskyism” (in Russian “Dostoevschina”), which he considers a mistake. Instead, Bakhtin finds traces of his architectonics in the general structure of Dostoevsky’s works which are organized according to the principle of dialogism, alluded to by Bakhtin when he says: “To affirm someone else’s ‘I’ not as an object but as another subject – this is the principle governing Dostoevsky’s worldview” (Bakhtin 1963, Eng. trans.: 10). Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic novel” describes the character no longer as an “I”, as an object, but as a center that is “other” and the perspective according to which his world is organized:

Dostoevsky carried out, as it were, a small-scale Copernican revolution when he took what had been a firm and finalizing authorial definition and turned it into an aspect of the hero’s self-definition. […] Not without reason does Dostoevsky force Makar Devushkin to read Gogol’s “Overcoat” and to take it as a story about himself […]

Devushin had glimpsed himself in the image of the hero of “The Overcoat,” which is to say, as something totally quantified, measured, and defined to the last detail: all of you is here, there is nothing more in you, and nothing more to be said about you. He felt himself to be hopelessly predetermined and finished off, as if he were already quite dead, yet at the same time he sensed the falseness of such an approach. […] The serious and deeper meaning of this revolt might be expressed this way: a living human being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand, finalizing cognitive process. In a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal; in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse; something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition. […] The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetra- tion of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself. (Bakhtin 1963, Eng. trans.: 49–59)

This is the itinerary followed by Bakhtin from his early works. Furthermore, thanks to Bakhtin’s initial interest in the philosophy of the answerable act, this research itinerary develops coherently into an interest for the philosophy of literature, where of literature is a subject genitive: not a philosophical vision to which literature is subjected, but a philosophical vision which literature, verbal art, makes possible.

11. In the Aesthetic Chronotope, Away from the Subject-object Relationship

Surprizingly Bakhtin’s last text of 1974, “Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences” (in Bakhtin 1979), also insists on the same issue as that proposed at the beginning of his research. This text was mostly written toward the end of the 1930s or beginning of the 1940s. It returns to the problem of the impossibility of applying categories proper to the subject-object relationship to the human world. When dealing with human expression, the criterion of knowledge is neither “exactness”, nor philosophical “rigorousness”, in the Husserlian sense, but the “profoundness of answering comprehension”. The center of value in the world of aesthetic vision is not man in general, man in his abstraction and in relation to abstract values such as good and evil, but rather a concrete human being, a concrete individual,

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin 143 a mortal human being. All spatial and temporal moments as well as all values such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, become concrete moments only when they are correlated with concrete values in the architectonics of the concrete individual as a mortal human. In the aesthetic chronotope all spatial and temporal relations are correlated with man and only in relation to man do they acquire valuational meaning: “high”, “far”, “above”, “below”, “abyss”, “infinity”, bound- lessness”. All these expressions reflect life and the relation to a mortal human individual: in the horizon and in the environment of mortal man space gains body, time possesses depth and weight (cf. Toward a Philos- ophy of the Act, p. 64–65).

12. By way of a Conclusion. “An Un-self-interested Love” for the Other: here is What to Transfer from Art to Life

Moreover, according to Bakhtin, the centre of value in the architectonic of the aesthetic vision is not self-identical man, but man “as a lovingly affirmed concrete actuality” (Ibid., p. 63). All constituent moments in the architectonics of the aesthetic vision are encompassed by an all-accepting loving affirmation of the human being. In this sense the relationship of the author and consequently of the reader to his hero is “an un-self-interested interest”, an un-self-interested participation. As Bakhtin says:

In this sense one could speak of objective aesthetic love (but not in a passive psy- chological sense) as the principle of aesthetic seeing. A variety of human values can present itself only to a loving contemplation. […] Only un-self-interested love on the principle of “I love him not because he is good, but he is good because I love him”, only lovingly interested attention, is capable of generating a sufficiently intent power and encompass and retain the concrete manifoldness of existing, without impoverishing and schematizing it. (Ibid., p. 64)

On the contrary, an indifferent, loveless, or hostile reaction is always a reaction that impoverishes, breaks, ignores, neglects. The biological function itself of indifference consists in diverting from what is inessential for one’s own needs: a kind of economy or preservation. This is the function of oblivion. In conclusion, as says Bakhtin: “Only love is capable of being

© Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 144 Augusto Ponzio aesthetically productive, only in correlation with the loved is fullness of the manifold possible”. (Ibid.) What is responsive comprehension in life, in the architectonics of life, in its chronotope?, what is responsive comprehension with respect to experience and understanding in art, in its architectonics, in its chronotope?, so that everything we have experienced and understood does not remain ineffectual in life? Bakhtin’s answer: responsive comprehension is recognition, un-selfish valuation of the other, appreciation of the other’s value, listening to the other, to the distinctive, peculiar word of the other, in everyday life, in all aspects of daily praxis. We can now understand what Bakhtin intended with his two declarations reported at the beginning, the first with which he stated that he was an absolutely unofficial person, and that like Judina he could not bear the official, the second that he was a philosopher more than a philologist. The first concerns his desire of escaping all forms of void representation, all purely formal, technical, specialized attitudes which he denounced as “imposture”. The second is connected to the first and concerns his choice not to stay closed in the specialized world of the philologist, in the specialism of a discipline, a science, in spite of how he had known and practiced it during his studies, that is, according to a wide-ranging approach which included the history of literature, literary criticism, knowledge of modern and ancient languages, of classical literatures, comparative linguistics, general linguistics, aesthetics, the study of philosophy. For Bakhtin all this “knowhow” should be connected with life, with the problem of individual responsibility, with the responsibility of the condition of “non-alibi in existing”. All this can be expressed in terms of the central Bakhtinian concept of “chronotope”: in fact a question of connecting two chronotopes, of fostering dialogue between them: that of art, in particular verbal art, the art of literature, and that of life. Here then his choice: I am an “unofficial” philosopher intent upon evading all forms of theoreticism to construct a “philosophy of the postupok”, a “philosophy of singularity”, of the concrete responsible act, engaging all his knowledge as a philologist: all his work as a “philosopher”, as he rightly defines himself, benefits from his knowledge as a “philologist”, and this is another reason why he is the great Bakhtin as we know him.1

1 Translation from Italian by Susan Petrilli.

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