Ecology and carnival: Traces of a ?green? social theory in the writings of M. M. Bakhtin

Abstract

Visions of a life in harmony with a bountiful natural world have long pervaded human history, from Hesiod's Golden Age to the medieval Land of Cokaygne and contemporary environmentalism.2 Yet with some important exceptions most notably the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, the "post-industrial utopianism" of Rudolf Bahro, Andr6 Gorz, and Herbert Marcuse, and in certain strands of feminist and ecological thought it is only relatively recently that radical social theory has aimed at a systematic analysis of our problematic relation with the non-human world and reflected upon the possibility of a "reconciliation" of humanity and nature in the context of an imagined "good society."3 It is my contention here that such current attempts to rethink human-nature relations find substantial, if perhaps unexpected, support in the idiosyncratic and heterodox writings of the Soviet cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. As it stands, this assertion may seem rather odd, for whereas Bakhtin's intellectual career encompassed a prodigious range of topics, from the phenomenology of perception to the history of the European novel, the issue of human-nature relations received little direct or sustained attention in his writings. Nonetheless, my argument is that his theories do contain a number of elements that are at least compatible with several recent critiques of "human-centered" instrumental reason, which have been entirely overlooked in the existing literature of Bakhtin.