Abstract
The question of the relation of experience to form is the question of the extent to which human beings are able to recognize themselves in the forms that the historical and social moment in which they live makes available to them. It is the question of the way that my experience is reflected in the formally organized world that surrounds me. The relationship between experience and form is necessarily historically located. For Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin, born in Orel, Russia, in 1895, and in Berlin, in 1892, respectively, and entering adult life at the close of the First World War, their historical experience is the experience of a rapidly and radically modernizing world. Though neither saw service in that conflict, they both were only a little younger than the generation of young men who returned shattered and transformed from the battlefields of Europe. In ‘The Storyteller’, his essay of 1936 that notes the decay of the power of traditional narrative forms, caused in part by the experience of mechanized warfare, Benjamin describes the experience of this generation as follows:
A generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.
(GS II 439; SW III 144)
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Notes
The final chapter of Hirschkop’s study provides a subtle analysis of the implications of Bakhtin’s conception of fear for political theory, focusing on the official seriousness and fear inherent in the everyday as an instrument of hegemony. Completed in 1999, the book does not deal with our new culture of fear. See Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, Oxford, 1999, pp. 272–98.
Mouffe articulates her theory of an agonistic democracy, drawing on Schmitt’s definition of the political as the sphere of the friend versus enemy distinction, in, inter alia, Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London, 2005. I do not wish, however, to deny the undoubted and real connection between Schmitt and Benjamin. This is the subject of substantial controversy in Benjamin scholarship.
See Samuel Weber, ‘Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt’, Diacritics, 22, 1992, 3–4, pp. 5–19, and Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt via Thomas Hobbes’, Special edition: ‘Angelus Novus: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin’, Critical Inquiry, 25, 1999, 2, pp. 247–66.
Žižek claims that the gesture of a return to Lenin allows us to think beyond post-ideological coordinates and suspend the Denkverbot of consensus. Slavoj Žižek, ‘A Plea for Leninist Intolerance’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 2002, 2, pp. 542–66.
There have been various attempts to turn Bakhtinian and Benjaminian theory towards the new forms emerging in information technology. See, for example, Bostad’s essay that analyses the new public sphere of the Internet and the forms of dialogueit both enables and inhibits: Finn Bostad, ‘Dialogue in Electronic Public Space: the Semiotics of Time, Space and the Internet’, in Bostad, Brandist, Evensen and Faber (eds), Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture: Meaning in Language, Art and New Media, London, 2004, pp. 167–84.
Köpenick attempts to rethink Benjamin’s concept of the aura for an age of digital reproducibility in Lutz Köpenick, ‘Aura Reconsidered: Benjamin and Contemporary Visual Culture’, in Gerhard Richter (ed.), Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, Stanford CA, 2002, pp. 95–117.
Ziarek maps an extension to Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay for an age of Internet interactivity, where reproductions can be altered by their recipients, in Krzysztof Ziarek, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic Mutability’, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Benjamin and Art, London, 2005, pp. 209–26.
Barry Sandywell, ‘Memories of Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin’, in Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov (eds), Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory, London, 2000, pp. 94–118.
See Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London, 1981. Eagleton is also limited by the fact that Bakhtin’s early works were not available to him at the time of writing.
Pierre (Petr) V. Zima, ‘L’Ambivalence dialectique: entre Benjamin et Bakhtine’, Revue d’esthétique, 1, 1981, 1, pp. 131–40 (136). Zima describes the conception of ambivalence, which he finds in both thinkers and which structures his essay, as follows: ‘The obverse of official culture which recognizes only absolute difference and monologue, carnival presents the conjunction of opposites and the plurality of voices: polyphony. […] In carnival, the absolute difference of values is abolished by the conjunction of opposing values which brings forth laughter. […] By way of parallel, Benjamin starts out from the notion that opposites touch each other and that their conjunction produces the dialectical shock of recognition and criticism. Shock destroys monovalent contemplation by revealing the ambivalence of reality and the equality (but not identity) of opposing values’ (p. 131).
One might mention in passing Schleifer’s study which marshals both Bakhtin and Benjamin, devoting substantial portions of text to a comparison of the two thinkers, in support of an ambitious reassessment of the temporality of the post-Enlightenment age. Confused and inaccurate with relation to both thinkers, Schleifer’s work, however, itself confuses the problem. For example, he wilfully misreads out of context Bakhtin’s use of the word ‘aura’ to imply a point of equivalence between the two thinkers (p. 211). Ronald Schleifer, Modernism and Time: The Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science and Culture 1880–1930, Cambridge, 2000. Cohen’s tendentious study, ‘a transformative mode of reading I will not quite call allographics’ that ‘operates as a form of (perhaps post post-Marxist) ideology critique’ (p. 2), lacks scholarly values and calls for the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes.
Tom Cohen, Ideology and Inscription: ‘Cultural Studies’ after Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin, Cambridge, 1998.
Tihanov comments similarly of his own comparison of Bakhtin and Lukács: ‘the comparison of [Bakhtin and Lukács] necessarily presupposed a selective redefinition and reconstitution of the objects of our attention: not Lukács as such, but the Lukács who emerges when placed next to Bakhtin; not Bakhtin on his own, but rather the Bakhtin who becomes visible only in the light of Lukács’. Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of their Time, Oxford, 2000, pp. 10–11. As Saussure put it, to an important extent, ‘it is the viewpoint adopted that creates the object’.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris, London, 1983, p. 8.
Brandist and Tihanov have performed the task of discovering, reconstructing and elucidating the many sources and ideas that Bakhtin draws on: Bergson, Cassirer, Scheler, Simmel, Walzel, Marty and so forth. In the case of Brandist in particular, however, this can result in a reductionism that presents Bakhtin’s thought as little more than an admittedly imaginative combination of these sources. Thus, taking one of many possible examples, in connection with Bakhtin’s theory of laughter in the novel, Brandist demonstrates that Bakhtin’s two main influences are Bergson and Cassirer. It is debatable whether his subsequent comments add anything to Bakhtin’s theory of laughter other than a sophisticated and convincing argument that Bakhtin draws on Bergson and Cassirer. Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics, London, 2002, pp. 126–28.
This is a frequent claim, made, for example, by Ewen. Frederick Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, his Art, his Times, New York, 1992, p. 224. Jameson is more circumspect: ‘Brecht offered many definitions of this term [Verfremdung], which seems to have migrated from the “ostranenie” or “making-strange” of the Russian Formalists via any number of visits to Berlin by Soviet modernists like Eisenstein or Tretiakov.’
Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, London, 1998, p. 39.
Whilst the relationship between the Bakhtin Circle’s thought and Russian Formalism is a matter of debate, the Bakhtin Circle’s critique of Formalism has, nevertheless, much in common with the object of its attack. See M. M. Bakhtin/P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (1928), trans. Albert J. Wehrle, London, 1985.
Morson and Emerson chart with great subtlety Bakhtin’s complex dialogue with Formalism throughout Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Stanford CA, 1993.
As Adlam puts it: ‘Bakhtin was given an enthusiastic welcome for ostensibly both anticipating and providing the means for a resolution of the impasses of structuralism and post-structuralism.’ Carol Adlam, ‘Critical Work on the Bakhtin Circle: A New Bibliographical Essay’, in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, 2nd edn, Manchester, 2001, pp. 241–65 (247). Kristeva’s essay ‘Word, Dialogue, Novel’ brought a Bakhtinian perspective to the French (post)Structuralist theory of literary production as radical intertextuality, initiated by Roland Barthes.
See Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue, Novel’, in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader, Oxford, 1986, pp. 34–61. The position in which Bakhtin becomes a liberal alternative to and yet still an articulation of post-structuralist themes is expressed most clearly in the work of Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark.
See Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, London, 1984, and for the crudest example of this ideology at work,
Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Mikhail Bakhtin and his World, London, 1990.
Eagleton, for example, finds in Benjamin’s thought support for a Derridean theory of writing with a Marxist edge. See Eagleton, Benjamin. Eagleton takes Benjamin’s notion of reading ‘against the grain’ as the title of his collection of essays, Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Selected Essays 1975–1985, London, 1986. This collection also contains an essay on Bakhtin. The most interesting Derridean appropriation of Benjamin is by Derrida himself. In his essay ‘The Force of Law’, Derrida turns his attention to Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, reading into it a conception of law as the deferral of divine judgement.
See Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “mystical foundation of authority”’, in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, London, 1992, pp. 3–68. Brandist, without reference to Derrida, sees a similar conception of law in Bakhtin, and also points in passing to a similarity with Benjamin.
Voloshinov and Medvedev have exerted a profound influence on thinkers of the British left, such as Raymond Williams, Tony Bennett and, once again, Terry Eagleton. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977,
and Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, London, 1979.
Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, London, 1996, p. 4.
Scholem’s image of Benjamin, the melancholic, has been hugely influential. Gary Smith, in his introductory paragraph to the English publication of Gershom Scholem’s ‘Walter Benjamin and his Angel’, claims that Scholem’s biography is ‘by far the most cited secondary source in the critical literature’. Gary Smith (ed.), On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections, London, 1988, p. 51.
See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin. Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft, Frankfurt/Main, 1975.
Leslie draws attention to the depoliticizing tendency of melancholic memory to ‘fetishize the act of remembering and not the remembrance of acting’. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, London, 2000, pp. 213–14.
One question that lends itself, however, only to speculation is the influence on Benjamin of his close friend, the conservative intellectual, Florens Christian Rang, and his theory of carnival. Rang’s lecture of 1909, which Benjamin knew in manuscript form, develops a theory of carnival that, in its heavily Nietzschean tone, reads like a dark obverse to Bakhtin’s thought. The key to Rang’s conception of carnival is scornful laughter (Hohngelächter) which tears down spiritual hierarchies as the ‘first blasphemy’. Carnival laughter is also, as in Bakhtin, a means of combating fear: in ancient carnival man got intoxicated ‘until he finally did not take himself seriously; until he cast off his cares and the spectre became comical; he abandoned God, as well as the false God of being a good man; he drank away his fear with scorn and laughter’. Florens Christian Rang, ‘Historische Psychologie des Karnevals’, in Lorenz Jäger (ed.) Karneval, Berlin, 1983, pp. 7–45 (18).
Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations, Cambridge, 2002, p. 159. Gilloch also points out that such laughter has nothing in common with the laughter of the entertainment industry. Adorno’s criticisms of Benjamin’s enthusiasm for popular cinema emerged, in part, from a view of the cruelty of laughter in popular culture: ‘The laughter of the audience at a cinema […] is anything but good and revolutionary; instead, it is full of the worst Sadism.’ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Letters to Benjamin’, trans. Harry Zohn, in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, London, 1977, pp. 110–33 (123). Adorno may have in mind the violent buffoonery of early cinematic slapstick.
Averintsev is healthily sceptical towards Bakhtin’s claim in the Rabelais book that ‘violence never lurks behind laughter’, commenting: ‘Is it true that violence never, ever lurks behind laughter? Well, violence seldom lurks behind laughter, but announces its presence through laughter at the top of its voice.’ Sergei S. Averintsev, ‘Bakhtin and the Russian Attitude to Laughter’, in David Shepherd (ed.), Bakhtin, Carnival and Other Subjects, Special edition of Critical Studies, 3–4, 1993, pp. 13–19 (16). Bernstein also takes Bakhtin to task on this point, noting that ‘in Rabelais it seems to me that we never respond to all the killings, maimings, humiliations and catastrophes as if they happened to human beings’, implying that Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais contains a ‘very un-Bakhtinian’ indifference to the human.
Michael André Bernstein, ‘When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Reflections on the Abject Hero’, in Gary Saul Morson (ed.), Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on his Work, London, 1986, pp. 99–121 (117).
I am referring to the distinction made by Arendt. See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, London, 1991. As quoted by Emerson, Sergei Averintsev, in his article, ‘Bakhtin, smekh, khristianskaia kul’tura’, in Rossia/Russia, 1988, 6, makes a similar point, also, it seems, drawing on this distinction: ‘Laughter is always experienced as movement “from a certain unfreedom to a certain freedom,” which is to say that laughter is “not freedom, but liberation.” As such, there is an inevitable mechanical and involuntary aspect to it, the initiating gesture of a person who is not yet free.’
Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, Princeton NJ, 1997, p. 181.
Ruth Coates, Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author, Cambridge, 1998, p. 23.
M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Dopolneniia i izmeneniia k Rable’ (Additions and amendments to ‘Rabelais’), in S. G. Bocharov and L. A. Gogotishvili (eds), Sobranie sochinenii, Vol. 5, Moscow, 1996, pp. 80–129 (81). Hirschkop discusses this distinction in Hirschkop, Bakhtin, pp. 275–78. In the Rabelais book, Bakhtin also approves of Greek tragedy which is fused with the ‘spirit of creative destruction’, and later genres of ‘deep and pure, open seriousness’ are likewise praised for being ‘always ready to submit to death and renewal’ (Rabelais 121–22).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848), in David McClellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford, 1977, pp. 221–47 (224).
In the case of Benjamin, the work of Scholem, as already indicated, is an example of this. In the case of Bakhtin, one might note, in particular, the work of Mihailovic in which a focus on the incarnational origin of the word obscures the social and political import of Bakhtin’s thought. See Alexandar Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse, Evanston IL, 1997.
One might suggest, with Münster, that the end of class struggle might be marked by a ‘double happening both religious and political’ in which the ‘social revolution, as realization of the reign of liberty and suppression of universal alienation, necessarily coincides with the act of the redemption of humanity, of oppression, of exploitation and injustice’. Arno Münster, Progrès et catastrophe: Walter Benjamin et l’histoire. Réflexions sur l’itinéraire philosophique d’un marxisme mélancolique, Paris, 1996, p. 53.
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© 2007 Tim Beasley-Murray
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Beasley-Murray, T. (2007). Introduction. In: Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230589605_1
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