Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics

Abstract

During the period of the New Economic Policy, as Lenin sought, rather abashedly, to approach communism via a new form of state capitalism, and as the concrete mode of peasant existence was being transformed into the abstractions of industrial labor, the contradictions between synchrony and diachrony, between sincerity and irony, between insistences simultaneously upon meaning and multivocality were in full flower. The work of the Bakhtin school may be located within this milieu of contradiction. It is clear that Mikhail Bakhtin's project was not a linguistics but, to use his word, a metalinguistics, an attempt to avoid an essentialist view of language and to see, within a social and historical frame, the creation and uses of both language and the term language.' As Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics: