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Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy

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This book produces a picture of Mikhail Bakhtin completely new to a general English-language readership. Hirschkop's analysis is rendered in lucid, fluent, often funny prose, largely devoid of the forest of academic jargon one might expect to find in such a volume; he draws on a huge variety of texts of Bakhtin's never seen in English, and some never published at all. And his unabashedly opinionated reading of the existing Bakhtin scholarship, complete with frank appraisals of the failings of many of the best-known English works on Bakhtin, is welcome, useful, often funny, and even more often devastatingly accurate. Deflating many of the prevalent myths, legends, apocrypha, and anecdotes about the elusive Russian critic, Hirschkop argues for a Bakhtinian aesthetic of dialogue as a feature of radical, utopian democracy. He has not only rescued Bakhtin from his academic fans -- a worthy goal in itself! -- but produced a fascinating text in its own right on the politics of aesthetics.

Settling into winter early in 2012 with such a fine appreciation of heckling, I can appreciate Ken Hirschkop's book, Mikhail Bakhtin/an Aesthetic For Democracy (1999, 2002) much better than when I received it in 2010. Meaninglessness is a fiction, and I now find something that is worth quoting because I am so familiar with Weber's idea of "purposive-rational action" (p. 265) that I can see how to love literature in a society of spectacle turning ordinary life inside out on a much deeper level than life pretends to have.

Meaningless, endless, probably
repetitive everyday life is
therefore not so much a product
of modernity as one of its leading
fictions. Bakhtin thus parts company
with the line of cultural criticism
with which he otherwise has a great
deal in common - the critique of
instrumental reason. According to
the line of cultural argument
which extends from early sociology
through to Habermas, the sin of
capitalist civilization is that
it introduces a means-oriented,
instrumental rationality which
worries only about how to be
efficient, rather than about
the value of one's actions.
Whether this is expressed in
Weber's idea of `purposive-
rational action', the Frankfurt
School's idea of instrumental
reason, or Habermas's concept of
strategic action, it expresses
the belief in the possibility
of a mode of conduct where
unrationalized interests drive
one forward. The strategic actor
aims to manipulate others, or
maximize profits, or maintain
power, and he (one may well
let it remain a he in this case)
uses language to achieve the
desired result. (p. 265).

Adjusting to a crash in which I take part at the bottom in the bottom dropping out of anything that resembled mathematics in a society that is based on simple electronic piracy makes it easy to see literary life in pure forms of heckling where intellectuals like Hirschkop still have questions:

The obvious question
is whether such a thing
is, in fact, possible,
or whether the strategic
actor is merely a useful
fiction for those who
hope that culture or language
in themselves are a source
of cooperation and unselfish
human effort. One could hardly
deny that people act
instrumentally - that they
manipulate others, make
cost-benefit calculations,
seek to maximize their
power and wealth, or just
react in self-defense.
But whether one can explain this
by recourse to the political-
economic category of `interest'
(class or personal), the ethico-
religious idea of the selfish,
or belief in an ego which can
effectively isolate itself from
intersubjective considerations,
is another matter. (p. 265).

I have been struggling with some issues that seem historical to me, in spite of the fact that screaming in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota is like a voice crying in the wilderness, even when I yell: I would rather be Samson. I really would like to understand this book, but any individual interest is compared to an inert object, unable to take part in the intersubjectivity that makes language part of socio-ideological movements in history. The book is way too optimistic about democracy for me. All the messages I hear about tax cuts based on the economic interests of individual millionaires and billionaires might not be exciting in a novel, but they don't get to the fundamental question: who did these people think they were trying to fool?