Bakhtin and the Politics of Criticism Author(s): Ken Hirschkop, David Shepherd and Gary Saul Morson Reviewed

work(s): Source: PMLA, Vol. 109, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 116-118 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/463015 . Accessed: 28/10/2012 13:07
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PMLA invites members of the association to submit letters, typed and double-spaced,commentingon articles in previous issues or on matters of general scholarly or critical interest. The editor reserves the right to reject or edit Forum contributionsand offers the authors discussedan opportunityto reply to the letters published. The journal omits titles before persons' names, discouragesfootnotes, and regrets that it cannot considerany letter of more than 1,000 words. Letters should be addressed to PMLA Forum, Modern Language Association, 10 Astor Place, New York, NY 10003-6981.

Bakhtin and the Politics of Criticism

To the Editor: Of late Gary Saul Morson has set himself an ambitious task: to replay the Russian revolution, but with himself in the role of Russian liberal, standing Kerensky-like against the moder-day equivalent of the Bolshevik party, the literary-critical establishment. His introduction to the Russian cluster (107 [1992]: 226-31) presents the "politicization of current criticism" as a repeat of Marxist errors against which he and other Slavists have been immunized by "the Soviet and Eastern European experience." In a letter to a Russian colleague recently published in Moscow he allows the parallel with the "gruesome facts of Soviet history" a little more scope (227): "Of course, here in America, these people control only the universities. They can't arrest me; their power is limited" ("Perepiska iz dvukh mirov" [Correspondence between Two Worlds], Bakhtinskii sbornik, II [The Bakhtin Collection 2], ed. D. Kujundzic and V. Makhlin, Moscow, 1991, 31-43; 38; our trans.). It is as well that the stake in this farcelike repetition of history is not the fate of a nation but the interpretation of the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, whom Morson wishes to claim for the ersatz Russian liberalism (what he has called elsewhere the "counter-tradition") he imagines himself representing. This beguiling vision should not go unchallenged, lest non-Slavists be tempted to accept Morson's account of the relevant intellectual history. Readers of his introduction will have noted that, for all the grand claims he makes for a liberal, individualistic Slavic theoretical tradition, Morson offers little in the way of historical evidence to connect Bakhtin to such a tradition. This is no accident, for the Russian context of which Morson makes so much is largely a projection of his own brand of cold-war liberalism back onto an earlier time. In seeking to present Bakhtin as part of a Russian tradition that values "the initiative of individuals" against all claims made on the basis of abstractions (class, party, etc.), Morson takes Bakhtin's criticism of "theoreticism"as an endorsement of what is effectively a rather vulgar brand of Anglo-Saxon empiricism (Introduction 228). However, Bakhtin's conceptions of the individual and of the role and meaning of consciousness are derived from neo-Kantian, phenomenological, and religious sources, none of which have much to do with Morson's preoccupations and all of which are theoretical (i.e., abstract, just as Bakhtin's critique of theoreticism is) with a vengeance.

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To have to refer to Bakhtin's actual intellectual sources, however, would complicate Morson's polemical and, it needs to be said, politically driven case. For "theoreticism" Morson would have us read "Marxism," so that Bakhtin's critique of the former can come out sounding like an advertisement for "American progressive ideals" (227). Unfortunately, the critique of theoreticism staged in Bakhtin's early essay "Towards a Philosophy of the Deed" is for the most part a critique of certain strands of neo-Kantianism by recourse to theoretical motifs drawn from phenomenology, philosophy of life, and neo-Kantianism itself; "historical materialism" is criticized on a couple of occasions, but then so are a number of other traditions (indeed, at one point Bakhtin claims that "economic materialism" offers an accurate analysis of the depraved condition of European society). To examine this work as social philosophy with any seriousness would lead to conclusions quite different from Morson's. To take the most obvious example, Bakhtin's prizing of individual self-determination in neoKantian terms leads him to explicit condemnation of liberal political economy and its real-world correlate -social systems that reify, materialize, or "biologize" the human by depending on self-interest as a motor of social action. He sustains this position throughout his career;it is difficult to make sense of his absolutization of the claims of consciousness without reference to it. For sure this is not Marxism; it is closer to the neo-Kantian socialism espoused by the likes of Hermann Cohen or the communitarian vision associated with Martin Buber. One has to distort the entire philosophical structure of Bakhtin's work, however, to turn it into an endorsement of the "'normal' or 'civilized"' character of "WesternEuropean or American social systems" (Morson, Introduction 227). If anyone is bending the humanities to the ends of political calculation, it is Morson. His "prosaic" Bakhtin is a political creature in disguise, having little to do with the complexities of social and philosophical debate in Russia. But then his vision, outlined in the letter referredto above, of an America under the sway of "'hegemonic' literature departments" is scarcely more convincing (Introduction 227). For Morson, as a result of these departments' dominance, the worldis dividedinto two opposingcamps.In one live thegood people:women,homosexuals, and,of course,the non-Western world-nonwhites and all those who speak out againstthe West in generaland the United Statesin The West, men, whites, and heterosexualsparticular. theseare now the truesourceof evil in the world.Therefore, the worstthingin the worldis, of course,a sexually normalwhite Americanmale who believesin bourgeois

You can guess that I am endowedwith all democracy. I do not even thesebad qualities, and,most scandalously, considerit necessaryto repentor justify myself before "correct" 38;our trans.) publicopinion. ("Perepiska" Nobody need look to the United States for evidence of this sharp and uncompromising divide between dissident intellectuals and domineering conformists, for it is drawn from quite another source: a vision of the Soviet Union, which Morson thinks has somehow found a second life in, of all places, America itself. But wasn't the American social system proof against just such repression?What went wrong? Nothing, really. Morson simply has an ax to grind, and he has chosen Bakhtin as his whetstone. If the role he seeks is that of noble dissident, he is welcome to it. If his aim is intellectual debate, something else is called for. KEN HIRSCHKOP
Universityof Southampton

DAVID SHEPHERD
Universityof Manchester

Reply: Criticizing my PMLA introduction, Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd write: One has to distortthe entirephilosophical structureof Bakhtin's work,however,to turn it into an endorsement of the "'normal'or 'civilized"'characterof "Western or American socialsystems."... European The sentence in my introduction from which the quoted phrases are drawn appears before I even discuss Bakhtin. The sentence has nothing to do with what Bakhtin thought or would have endorsed. Rather, it marks the difference between many Russian intellectuals of today and their American counterparts by noting that Russianscall each step [w]ithoutirony, reform-minded towardWesternEuropeanor American social systemsa movetowarda "normal" or "civilized" society. The difference between my statement and their misleading rendition of it is rather typical of their letter as a whole. It is not true that "[f]or 'theoreticism' Morson would have us read 'Marxism,' so that Bakhtin's critique of the former can come out sounding like an advertisement for 'American progressive ideals.' ..."

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As Caryl Emerson and I have explained at length, theoretism (our preferred translation of the word) as Bakhtin coined the term applies to many doctrines that think away the "eventness" of events and see the messy particularities of experience as capturable at least in principle by a system of rules or laws. For Bakhtin, structuralism, Russian formalism, and Freudianism, as well as the Marxism he knew and lived under, were all examples of theoretism. As for our "effectively" saying-that is, our not sayingthat Bakhtin endorsed "Anglo-Saxon empiricism": surely Hirschkop and Shepherd are aware of attempts in many cultures and philosophical traditions to argue the irreducibility of the particular to the general. To take a Russian example, Tolstoy explodes system after system in War and Peace. And while Hirschkop and Shepherd insist on German sources, they overlook this theme in Goethe-hardly an Anglo-Saxon empiricist -to whom Bakhtin devoted a study. Nowhere do I (or does Emerson) say that Bakhtin was an American liberal. We do say that in contrast to the picture of him common among a number of British and American commentators, Bakhtin would not have considered himself a Marxist and was, indeed, hostile to Marxism. (In my PMLA introduction, I quote two of his withering comments on it.) And I have argued that in his antipathy to theoretism he belongs to a tradition of Russian writers and thinkers-some of whom were active liberals-who saw the danger of Marxism, of utopianism, and of the penchant for abstract social systematizing common among the prerevolutionary Russian intelligentsia. What I found most startling in a first reading of Hirschkop and Shepherd'sletter, apart from its rather hectoring tone, was the ambitious range of motives, tasks, visions, endorsements, and axes to grind that they project onto me. As my opening example illustrates, they conflate the ideas and viewpoints I have stated as my own with those I have ascribed to others. They fantasize a range of opinions and projects for me. They use quotation marks in such a way as to suggest they are quoting my personal point of view when in fact they are quoting my description of others' viewpoints. And they adopt alternately outraged and sneering tones when referring to some of the most commonplace of historical and political judgments. (Dislike of Stalinist tyranny becomes for them coldwar hysteria.) It is their representation of my views that deserves their term "farcelike." The authors flail around at everything in sight without ever seriously addressing the major contentions in my introduction to the Russian cluster, which are these:

(1) Most American Slavists are rather alienated from the predominant trends in academic literary theory. (2) Most American Slavists are acutely aware of the pitfalls of political reductionism because of their familiarity with Soviet cultural history. For instance, arguments that literary value is entirely relative to social needs or to political power and attempts to reduce all aesthetic categories "ultimately"to political ones are neither new nor attractive to most American Slavists. (Do these two scholars from British universities think I mischaracterize American Slavistics?) (3) This familiarity with Soviet history also leads most American Slavists to be suspicious of Marxists' claims to be the champions of social progress. (4) Most Slavists and Russians diverge widely from the larger American theoretical world in their view of Bakhtin and in the use they make of his terms and concepts. This is not to deny that there are also wide divergences on this subject within the first group, but the intragroup controversies often differ from the intergroup conflicts. My introduction to the Russian cluster appears to have presented Hirschkop and Shepherd a convenient pretext for launching an attack, although their real grievances seem to lie with the views of Bakhtin and literary theory that I have expressed in books and articles over the years. In a short reply, I can hardly correct all the misrepresentations in their letter, but if readers would like to know what I did say about Bakhtin, I refer them first to the book I wrote with Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990); to our introduction to Rethinking Bakhtin. Extensions and Challenges, which contains a detailed summary of Bakhtin's essay "Toward a Philosophy of the Act" (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1989); and, among my recent articles, to "Bakhtin, Genres, and Temporality" (New Literary History 22 [1991]: 1071-92) and "Prosaic Bakhtin" (Common Knowledge2 [1993]: 35-74). GARY SAUL MORSON
Northwestern University

Intentions, Foundationalism, Symmetry To the Editor: Although I agree with many of the substantive points in Barbara Hodgdon's Forum reply to Lucien Goldschmidt, Robert F. Fleissner, and Thomas A.