Professional Documents
Culture Documents
95
charting the flow of innovations from the prestigious langue to the receiv-
ing one. Bartoli was, however, unable to develop his observations beyond
the cataloguing of innovations, and turned to the ‘intellectually repug-
nant’ idealist Bertoni to develop a methodology. Neolinguistics was, how-
ever, dependent only on ‘historicism in general’, with no special reliance
on Crocism, and was thus capable of being developed on a Marxist base.5
This had to be developed through a critical engagement with Crocism,
and particularly with reference to the works of the German philologist
Karl Vossler, who shared significant common ground with both Croce
and Bartoli.
Croce’s romantic populism was also very close to the dominant produc-
tion aesthetic of the Russian avant-garde which, especially in the works
of Andre Bely and the Futurists, viewed art as the absolute adversary of
positivism. The so-called zaum (trans-rational) poetic movement in par-
ticular aspired to the creation of an absolute ‘language in the making’
that could never be fixed in print, hence the slogan of the Cubo-Futurists,
‘After reading tear to pieces’.6 Aesthetic activity and cultural artefacts
were treated as antipodes that parallel the bifurcation of language into
energeia, vital, living discourse, and ergon, the static system of grammati-
cal rules, now finding its modern expression in Saussure’s langue. In
developing this absolute poetic discourse, the poet would be able to raise
the speech of the masses to new heights, releasing their expressive poten-
tial and forging a new communal culture, what the Symbolist Ivanov
called sobornost’. To some extent Bakhtin’s early work can be seen as a
phenomenological investigation of this process, examining how the
author recontextualizes the intention of the hero, and in so doing conse-
crates the existence of that hero. Without the aesthetic activity of the
author, the hero would be condemned to live in a stream of consciousness
the meaning and significance of which would remain shrouded in a thick
fog. By recontextualizing the intention of the hero, the author reveals the
connectedness of the utterance to the immediate situation or event and,
beyond this, the interconnectedness and open-endedness of human
development. When cultural products are isolated from the purposeful
activity of life then that culture will develop immanently according to
impersonal, logical laws reminiscent of Social Darwinism.7 Thus those
doctrines which treat the ergon of culture apart from the energeia of the
creative process are not only mistaken but also dangerous.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bakhtin school should react with
such hostility to the Saussurean system which stressed the autonomous
system of signs as the key factor in structuring social consciousness. The
terms of the Saussurean claim to the ground occupied by phenomenol-
ogy were diametrically opposed to the thrust of Bakhtin’s philosophy
and the expressive aesthetic of the avant-garde. The society described by
5
Gramsci, Selections from the Cultural Writings, p. 174.
6
Michel Acouturier, ‘Theatricality as a Category in Twentieth-Century Russian Culture’,
in Kleberg and Nilsson, eds Theater and Literature in Russia 1900–1930, Stockholm 1984,
p. 17.
7
On this see K. Hirschkop and D. Shepherd, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, Manchester
1989, pp. 6–8. Perhaps the clearest example of this by a member of the Bakhtin school is
Matvey Kagan’s 1923 essay ‘Judaism and the Crisis of Culture’ in Minuvshee 6, Moscow
1992.
96
Saussure’s langue, as Hirschkop notes, is ‘a bureaucratized world . . . in
which every subject behaves according to formal rules, to be obeyed
without reference to ends, values or mitigating circumstances’,8 while
Formalist critics, at least initially, responded to Saussure’s linguistics by
rigorously separating the literary and wider social spheres, device and
motivation. Consequently, stylistic and ideological factors were treated
as autonomous spheres which, like the arbitrarily coincident signifier
and signified, had no necessary connection. Poetic ‘defamiliarization’, as
Medvedev noted, nihilistically strove to destroy the already established
connection, or meaning, without establishing a new, positive meaning.9
The absolute discourse for which the Symbolists and zaumniki strove,
revealing the creative process in language was, according to this account,
a hedonistic play of the signifier revealing the relativity of language. The
traditional demand of the Russian intelligentsia that literature should
‘teach us how to live’, ‘that is, to pervade our being, to affect our deepest
impulses and our most intimate reactions; to shape our sensibility; to
transform and organize our vision—and thus ultimately to affect our
whole behaviour’,10 was now abandoned in favour of ‘tickling our sensi-
bility and providing us with pleasurable sensations’. The only other
alternative was the development of an ideologically didactic literature of
the sort advocated by the theorists of proletarian culture and later
demanded by the state in the form of ‘Socialist Realism’. These two
poles, the two ‘capital sins’ that result from inability ‘to transform’,11
were now legitimized with unrivalled cogency by the Saussurean
account of language. By the late 1920s both directions were becoming
politically unacceptable to Bakhtin’s group.
These political factors impelled the Bakhtin school to directly confront
the works of Saussure, and to do so meant an engagement with the
romantic philosophies of language developed by Croce and Vossler. As
representatives of the Europe-wide movement against positivism in the
human sciences, these theorists proved valuable allies, and had been
drawn upon by a large number of idealist philosophers in Russia in the
early part of the century.12 The chief encounter can be found in Voloshi-
nov’s 1929 book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language which the author
presents as an attempt to develop an area of Marxist theory dominated by
‘the category of mechanistic causality’ and ‘the still unsurmounted posi-
tivistic conception of empirical data—a reverence for “fact” understood
not in a dialectical sense but as something fixed and stable’.13 In effect,
Marxism was contaminated by the very elements that, the book goes on
to show, constituted the Saussurean conception of language. Gramsci
similarly turned to the ideas of Croce to overcome the importation of
mechanical materialism into Marxism under the name of Marxist ortho-
doxy, the most systematic exposition of which he found in Bukharin’s
8
Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, p. 8.
9
P.N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, Baltimore 1978, pp. 59–61.
10
This was how Bakhtin’s older brother defined the demand some years later. Nicholas
Bachtin, Lectures and Essays, Birmingham 1963, p. 26.
11
Ibid., pp. 26–7.
12
On this see L.E. Blyakher, ‘Through the Ideas of Russian Humboldtism’, in I.
Malchenkova, ed., M.M. Bakhtin: Esteticheckoye naslediye i sovremennost’ (M.M. Bakhtin:
Aesthetic Heritage and Modernity), Saransk 1992, vol. 2.
13
V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, Mass. 1973,
p. xiv.
97
The Theory of Historical Materialism (1921). For Gramsci, Croce had
‘translated the progressive acquisitions of the philosophy of praxis into
speculative language and in this retranslation is the best of his thought’.
The task now was ‘to redo for the philosophical conception of Croce the
same reduction that the first theorists of the philosophy of praxis [Marx
and Engels] did for the Hegelian conception’.14
The first move, for Gramsci and the Bakhtin school alike, was to chal-
lenge Croce’s romantic conception of the individual so that language is
no longer individual artistic expression but ‘the “material” of art, a social
product and the cultural expression of a given people’.15 Croce saw lan-
guage in the same terms as Bakhtin characterized the Symbolist poet
who ‘considers the word already aestheticized . . . transforming it into a
mythical or metaphysical entity’.16 Bakhtin’s and Gramsci’s critiques
closely followed on from that of Vossler who had chided the Italian for
his explication of the speaking subject apart from the linguistic environ-
ment. Croce’s abstraction, argued Vossler, was akin to the Hegelian
‘Absolute Mind’, ignoring the diversity of speech communities and
thereby profoundly monologic:
Everything that is spoken on this globe in the course of the ages, therefore,
must be thought of as a vast soliloquy spoken by the human mind, which
unfolds itself in untold millions of persons and characters, and comes to itself
again in their reunion. It follows from this that the human mind as such should
be or become, a single person.17
98
processes were required for one social group to understand another in the
same city, for children to understand parents in the same family, for one
day to understand the next.’20
19
Ibid., p. 182.
20
M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Manchester 1984, p. xxxi.
21
Vossler, The Spirit of Language, pp. 172–6.
99
national language, is, however, subject to the power relations and hierar-
chy of society in which a dominant discourse imposes itself on others,
presenting itself as universal and ideal. This skewing of the linguistic
environment imposes different types of interaction between discourses
such that ‘within a single nation’, as Gramsci noted, ‘a new ruling class
brings about alterations as a “mass”, but the jargons of various profes-
sions, of specific societies, innovate in a molecular way.’22
22
Selections from the Cultural Writings, p. 178.
23
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, Austin 1981, p. 270.
24
Selections from the Cultural Writings, p. 181.
25
Ibid., pp. 189, 180, 189.
26
Ibid., p. 172.
100
Bakhtin and Gramsci is clear, a difference in emphasis, and ultimately
political principle, emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This
stemmed from the specific conditions in which the writers lived and to
which they responded. In Gramsci’s Italy, the fascist party had capital-
ized on the regional economic unevenness of the country which was
‘juridically fixed’ by the absence of a universally utilized national lan-
guage. The division of the national proletariat, and to a greater extent
peasantry, into regional dialect areas obstructed the formation of a
united, revolutionary class alliance of the sort that had facilitated the
revolution in Russia. Thus the process whereby the revolutionary party
could gain political hegemony was intimately tied up with the overcom-
ing of linguistic provinciality which ‘creates friction . . . in the popular
masses among whom local particularisms and phenomena of a narrow
and provincial mentality are more tenacious than is believed.’ Bakhtin,
on the other hand, was less concerned with forming ‘hundreds and thou-
sands of recruits, of the most disparate origins and mental preparation,
into a homogenous army capable of moving and acting in a disciplined
and united manner’27 than with popular resistance to the state’s authori-
tarian imposition of a pattern of social development and accompanying
ideological system. The Stalinist plan in many ways resembled the tyran-
nical shaping of society according to a bureaucratic schema legitimized
with reference to the word of the divinely chosen tsar that had character-
ized the rule of, most notably, Peter I.28 Furthermore, the establishment
and encodement of European literary languages, including Russian, in
the eighteenth century and the secret imposition of ‘Socialist Realism’
also found many fruitful parallels that permitted Bakhtin to plot a con-
stellation between the cultural policy of feudal absolutism and modern
Russia. The unified language thereby became a model of ‘the tyranny of
abstract ideas and dogmas over life’.29
Aesthetics and Politics Redefined
Bakhtin’s treatment of the question of unified language and of the rela-
tionship between poetry and the novel is one of the clearest modern
examples of the disguising of political questions as cultural ones, typical
of single-party dictatorships. As Gramsci noted, when the political func-
tion of a party is indirect, amounting to the exercise of ‘propaganda and
public order, and moral and cultural influence’, then political struggle is
shifted to the sphere of art and culture generally. In the absence of ‘real,
non-mystified political activity’ to resolve social and political contradic-
tions ‘the intelligentsia finds itself in constant “chronic” opposition’30 to
officialdom, like the novelist against the poet in the Bakhtinian scheme.
From 1934 Bakhtin sees the novel as an aestheticized version of popular
carnival, no longer limited to ‘islands’ of popular holidays ‘or in the fluid
realm of familiar speech’ but intensified and systematized so that ‘offi-
cial, serious culture’31 could no longer maintain a parallel and separate
27
Ibid., pp. 182, 184.
28
An interesting and contemporary literary exploration of this parallel is Andrei Plato-
nov’s ‘Yepifanskie shluzy’ (‘The Epifan Locks’) which can be found in English in Russian
Literature Triquarterly, 8, 1974.
29
Nicholas Bachtin, Lectures and Essays, p. 97.
30
Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, Verso, London 1989, p. 87.
31
M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Bloomington 1984, p. 96.
101
existence. Bringing official discourse into contact with ‘immediate real-
ity’, through narrative, facilitates its break-up into socially specific
dialects; as it enters the realm of recontextualization and experiment the
ideological structure, or in Vossler’s terminology the ‘spirit of the lan-
guage’, is revealed. Carnival culture is, however, not so much counter-
hegemonic as anti-hegemonic, at its extreme threatening the very
concept of discursive truth, but always orientated against the fear-inspir-
ing official, ruling stratum. Maximally tied to material reality, the peas-
antry of medieval Europe were maximally imbued with becoming, with
the vital inner form of language, and thus spurned the crystallized offi-
cial language in favour of a Dionysian anti-systematic revel. It takes the
novelist to organize and systematize this popular critical impulse into an
analytical organ that tests the validity of discourses against extra-discur-
sive reality.
Political intuition is not expressed through the artist, but through the ‘leader’;
and ‘intuition’ must be understood to mean not ‘knowledge of men’, but swift-
ness in connecting seemingly disparate facts, and in conceiving the means ade-
quate to particular ends—thus discovering the interests involved and arousing
the passions of men and directing them towards a particular action. The
‘expression’ of the ‘leader’ is his ‘action’.32
32
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 252.
33
Hirschkop and Shepherd, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, p. 8.
102
between discourses but in reality are only providing the means by which
‘his own direct or refracted word might ring out all the more energeti-
cally’.34 This Gramsci sees as constitutive of ‘bureaucratic centralism’ in
which the organization is ‘technically a policing organism, and its name
of “political party” is simply a metaphor of a mythological character’.35
In each case here, any apparent dialogue and debate is merely a means for
the acceptance of the perspective emanating from the centre; the result is
known in advance, ‘all accents are gathered into a single voice’. In
Dostoyevsky’s ‘polyphonic’ novel, however, the authorial design is the
‘most extreme activization of vari-directional accents in double voiced
discourse’ rather than the subordination of these to ‘the verbal and
semantic dictatorship of a monologic, unified style and unified tone’.36
For Gramsci, similarly, a party is ‘progressive’ when it functions accord-
ing to ‘democratic centralism’, keeping previously dominant forces
‘within the bounds of legality and [raising] the backward masses toward
the level of the new legality’.37 Voices usually drowned beneath ‘louder’,
authoritative voices, are raised to an equal level where all compete freely
according to their intrinsic merits rather than the authority they wield.
If each discourse articulates a world-view and discourses struggle to
establish their superiority as a necessary corollary of the class struggle,
then a discourse becomes hegemonic when one social class’s world-view
is accepted as kindred by other social classes. This does not mean the
struggle for hegemony consists merely of a conflict between two pre-
formed ideologies but a conflict of hegemonic principles. Discourses seek to
bind other discourses to themselves according to two basic principles:
either by establishing a relation of authority between the enclosing and
target discourses or by facilitating the further advancement of the target
discourse through the enclosing discourse. In ‘Discourse in the Novel’
Bakhtin terms these hegemonic principles ‘authoritative discourse’ and
‘internally persuasive’ discourse respectively. The former:
[D]emands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite
independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we
encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is
located in the distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to
be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers.38
This is termed the monologic and the poetic approach to another dis-
course. Behind the enclosing discourse lies a power that is is impossible
34
Rabelais and His World, p. 204.
35
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 155.
36
Rabelais and His World, p. 204.
37
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 155. Bakhtin’s treatment of the novel as a ‘legality’
of languages is a development along the lines of semantics, from the aesthetic of Hermann
Cohen, who proposed a ‘juridical’ model of Greek tragedy, and Ivanov’s notion of Dostoy-
evsky’s novel as a ‘novel-tragedy’. A similar approach is taken by another member of
Bakhtin’s group Lev Pumpiansky in Dostoyevsky i antichnost’ (Dostoyevsky and Antiquity)
Petrograd 1922, while in a preface to Turgenev’s Nakanunye (On the Eve) he notes that
‘judgement [sud] is inseparable from literature’: Turgenev, Sochineniye (Collected Works),
vol. 6, Moscow 1929, p. 9. Cohen’s conception is outlined in Voloshinov’s 1926 essay
‘Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry’, in Shukman, ed., Bakhtin School Papers, Essex
1983, p. 25.
38
The Dialogic Imagination, p. 342.
103
to question, any independent ideological perspective is necessarily
excluded. This is the mature form of Bakhtin’s ‘abstract whole’ that
operates at the expense of the specific, or what Nikolai Bachtin called the
‘Platonic attitude’ in which ‘perfection is conceived of as the liberation of
the higher from the lower: a refusal to cooperate with it.’ In the realm of
the mixed ‘we must consider as better that in which the positive imposes
itself forcibly on the negative, subjugates it, conceals, reduces it to
silence.’ Plato’s attitude is that of the intransigent reformer aiming to
‘cut and reshape the living texture of reality—by force, from outside—
according to some rigid and rigorous pattern.’
Thus the interaction of discourses in the novel is but the most thorough-
going manifestation of the interactions within the language community
itself. The polyphonic novel is the artistically heightened expression of
the progressive hegemonic principle which is always present within soci-
ety, while the monologic principle is akin to the workings of authoritar-
ian social forces.
104
from within the dominating discourse with the dawning of ‘critical
understanding of self’ which ‘takes place through a struggle of political
“hegemonies” and of opposing directions, first in the ethical sphere and
then in that of politics proper, in order to arrive at the working out at a
higher level of one’s own conception of reality.’41 This process Bakhtin
very closely approaches in the 1934 essay on the novel, noting that
‘[w]hen thought begins to work in an independent and discriminating
way, what first occurs is a separation between internally persuasive dis-
course and authoritarian, enforced discourse, along with a rejection of
those congeries of discourses that do not matter to us, that do not touch
us’. With this separation begins the long process through which ‘one’s
own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of others’ words that
have been acknowleged and assimilated’.42
It was Vossler who had first analyzed the struggle between languages in
terms of the aesthetically regulated acceptance of one worldview by
another. Yet Vossler also made a distinction within the world of signs
between languages with a hegemonic potential and those whose status is
less secure. In terms of language, therefore, as of politics, there are lead-
ers and led. For Gramsci and Voloshinov it is only the bourgeoisie and
proletariat who can develop a thoroughly differentiated and united dis-
course by virtue of their structural positions within the relations of pro-
duction. Proletarian hegemonic language is Marxism, which can unite
economic, political, intellectual and moral conceptions, but must be
developed ‘to the point of it becoming the hegemonic exponent of high
41
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 327, 333.
42
Rabelais and His World, p. 345.
43
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 335. As the editors point out, ‘totalitarian’ here is
in the sense of ‘simultaneously “unified” and “all absorbing” ’ rather than the modern
sense.
105
culture’, a development which is simultaneously ‘the struggle for the
cultural unification of the human race’.44 The ideologies of other social
groups are akin to Vossler’s conception of ‘doubtful national languages’:
In doubtful cases a national language is like a church—one can belong to it,
and also change it. That language binds us into nations is a natural historical
fact, but not a law of nature.45
The status of the social discourses of the peasantry and other intermedi-
ate groups is akin to that of dialects in relation to a national language
with universal aspirations. In a modern context we could mention the
‘spontaneous’ discourses of different oppressed groups like gay libera-
tion, feminism and black nationalism which remain limited to their own
group concerns. Those discourses which are unable to develop beyond
this stage must seek alliances with other, potentially hegemonic dis-
courses:
[A] language that is merely individual, merely ornamental and national, and
remains fixed in its particular provincialism, will degenerate into a mere
dialect. Above all, in the iron grip with which the language would try to retain
its national aspect, the language itself would crumble.46
44
Ibid., pp. 442, 445.
45
The Spirit of Language, p. 120.
46
Ibid., p. 135.
47
Ibid., p. 191.
106
is necessary to reject vigorously as counter-revolutionary any conception
that makes the [proletarian] party into a synthesis of heterogeneous ele-
ments.’48 In Bakhtin’s formulation this is not clearly defined. As
Hirschkop notes, the role of author in consecrating the existence of the
hero implies a God to person (irreversible) relationship, while the deriva-
tion of these roles from everyday experience suggests a person to person
(reversible) relationship.49
Perhaps the biggest problem with Bakhtin’s analysis is an all too com-
plete translation of a political problem into the terms of an artistic form.
The institutions within which literary production and reception are
realized and controlled disappear from view and their effects are felt
only in terms of linguistic forms whose relevance largely depends upon
that institutional framework. Perhaps the clearest example of this is
Bakhtin’s entirely negative attitude to the avant garde poets’ attempt to
48
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 363.
49
Hirschkop, ‘The Author, the Novel and the Everyday’, Times Higher Education Supple-
ment, 1 May 1992, p. 27.
50
The Dialogic Imagination, p. 400.
51
Rabelais and His World, p. 69.
52
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 341.
53
The Dialogic Imagination, p. 409.
54
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 341.
107
reintegrate art into a transformed social life by creating a ‘special “lan-
guage of poetry”’. This, as Nikolai Bachtin noted some years later, was
not a poetic gesture in Bakhtin’s terms but an intensely novelistic attempt
to ‘release and gather the latent powers of folk-poetry and popular speech
and, investing them with new functions, build up a new medium of
poetic communication’.55 It was precisely the absence of social transfor-
mation, dependent on the internationalization of the revolution, that left
the artists as simply artists and transformed their project into ‘a typical
utopian philosopheme’.56 The degeneration of the mass popular festivals
of 1918–19 in which the avant-gardistes had organized huge carniva-
lesque pageants and public performances, was typical of the bureaucrati-
zation of the institutional and social orders that left the avant garde
beached. The Stalinist eulogization of Mayakovsky and demand for ten-
dentious literature deliberately obscured the changes in the context of
poetic production between the 1930s and the revolutionary era, and
Bakhtin’s ambiguity over the poetic as type of discourse and stance
towards other discourses is undoubtedly a symptom of this. As a result
the generic in itself appeared reactionary rather than the specific condi-
tions of performance that imbued poetry with its social value. The novel
thereby often appears an anti-genre concerned with the purely anti-hege-
monic work of the carnivalesque rather than a counter-genre.57
The meeting of Bakhtin and Gramsci alerts us to these problems in
Bakhtin’s analysis but also shows the incompatibility of Bakhtin’s work
with that of the liberal establishment’s ‘literary critics’ who have tried to
enlist his work in their struggle against the more radical versions of post-
structuralism. From the work of the ‘post-marxist’ idealists of the first
twenty years of the century both Bakhtin and Gramsci fashioned a politi-
cal aesthetics which aimed to organize the deconstructive impulses of the
‘subaltern classes’ into a force for revolutionary change. Furthermore,
Bakhtin, at his best, supplies a welcome corrective to some aspects of
Gramsci’s work which led the latter into a partial accommodation with
Stalinism and moreover does so without sliding into the void of the post-
structualist ‘hors texte’. This chiefly refers to Gramsci’s relatively unde-
veloped understanding of the systematic nature of language which has
allowed writers to advocate the complete separation of the notion of
hegemony from ‘classism’, based on a post-structuralist philosophy of
language in which meaning is solely the unstable effect of shifting rela-
tions of difference.58
Croce believed that the subject could intuit reality before its translation
into the linguistic terms which became its social embodiment. Gramsci
similarly believed that through the synthesizing activity of social prac-
tice workers could have a pre-verbal, semi-consciousness of their position
in productive relations which could then be translated into discourse
given favourable historical conditions. Reminiscent of Lukács, Gramsci
seems to be suggesting that the standpoint of the proletariat is the basis of a
55
Lectures and Essays, p. 37.
56
The Dialogic Imagination, p. 288.
57
In certain cases, however, the Soviet novel does exactly that. The works of Bakhtin’s
close friend Konstantin Vaginov and certain works by Daniil Kharms are examples of this.
58
See especially Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Verso,
London 1985.
108
class consciousness that is synonymous with truth and that the revolu-
tionary party, in providing the highest expression of that consciousness
would have extra-discursive access to reality. Hence his comment that
the party ‘takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative’.59
It is, however, left unexplained as to exactly how a conception of the
world can be implicit in the practice of a given social group, especially
when we consider language as the ‘articulated structure which makes
contact with reality only at the periphery’60 which Saussure’s work
demands. While Gramsci’s anti-realist epistemology allowed him to
break with then dominant ‘false consciousness’ Marxist theories of ideol-
ogy, facilitating the development of an account of ideology as something
continually reorganized in the face of the struggle between classes, it
often led him to reduce the social to the subject’s consciousness of it.
While Bakhtin’s failure to account for the material determinants of
heteroglossia frequently led him into the same reduction, he did more sat-
isfactorily examine this weak area than did Gramsci.
59
Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 133.
60
Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language, London 1973, p. 529. This point is
made very well in Alex Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy, Oxford 1985, pp. 147–53.
61
‘Realism Reconsidered: Bakhtin’s Diologism and the “Will to Reference”’, in Austral-
ian Journal of French Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 1986, pp. 182–3.
109