Bakhtin, Marxism and Post-Structuralism

Abstract

It may help to situate the project of this paper to say that it sets out to elaborate the implications of something I wrote three years ago. In a review of Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship I suggested that the 'other side' of this 'downright contestation' of Russian Formalism was a 'symptomatic reading' of its texts – 'an obverse of polemic determining from within the very positions from which the polemic is conducted' (Pechey 1980). The fact that I would now want to delete the 'perhaps' with which (incidentally) that statement was qualified and argue the point at length is no mere accident of autobiography: it is rather a necessity of autocritique forced upon me by the direction in which the debate around literary theory has shifted since then. Substitute 'deconstructive' for 'symptomatic' and the issue clarifies at once; in a moment when deconstruction appears to have a monopoly of radicalism and novelty in the theorization of discourse we need to turn from applause for the style of Bakhtinian polemic or the paraphrase of Bakhtinian themes to the deconstructive and indeed selfdeconstructive activity which is the determining obverse of both. In other words, what needs now to be presented as exemplary are not the gestures of negating or positing but the textual process which conditions and exceeds these gestures. Bakhtinian theory is sometimes referred to as 'post-formalism', as if it were a question of merely being chronologically the later of two related but 'full' positions. It would be truer to character-deconstruction of the concept of form which Russian Formalism had already carried out. In an early move this concept is nominally retained on the basis of a preliminary reversal: outside becomes inside, and 'form' is undoubtedly redefined in a way that breaks with the idealism of the age-old form-content couple. On this (traditional) view, form and content are the terms of a correlation within the work; neither can be invoked without also invoking this internal correlation. Formalism decisively detaches 'form' from this correlation by insisting that the work is all form: form is 'the whole entity' (Eikhenbaum 1971, p. 12); content is non-or pre-aesthetic and can only enter the work by becoming a formal element along with the rest. Now to say that the content of the work is its form (as Shklovsky does in some contexts) is only to confirm the ancient dualism in a murder of definition which is anything but deconstructive. Formalism sidesteps this dead-end by setting up, in effect, two external correlations:Form in general: absence of form A particular form: other formsIn the first of these new correlations 'poetic language' stands over against an aformal (aesthetically neutral) 'practical language' in a distinction which cuts across the old generic distinction of 'poetry' and 'prose' and has all the appearance of being absolute. The 'literariness' which Formalism takes as its object is founded in this negative external correlation which for all its provocation has to bear the blame for the weakness of much early Formalist writing. What then takes its place is our second –differential rather than negative – external correlation, whereby the work cannot be understood apart from the historical succession and interaction of forms. Literary history proceeds not by the expression of new contents but by a dynamic of the replacement of old forms whose literariness has been exhausted. This firm articulation of textuality upon the movement of intertextual relations is the great strength of the Formalist case; we are not surprised to find both Bakhtinism and structuralism carrying it forward.