Mikhail Bakhtin and the Question of Rhetoric Author(s): James Thomas Zebroski Source: Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Vol.

22, No. 4 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 22-28 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3885451 Accessed: 25/08/2010 19:12
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Mikhail Bakhtin and the Question of Rhetoric Zebroski JamesThomas

The work of Mikhail Bakhtinhas become increasinglyavailable and visible in the U.S. over the last decade. Bakhtin'sinsights into language and his perspectives on literatureshave been appropriated literarytheoristsin fairly quick order. The by vastness of Bakhtin's enterprise is striking. It stretches from philosophical investigations of answerabilityand of the relations among language, history, and social context, to detailed examinations of specific genres like the novel, and intensive studies of the work of individual authors such as Rabelais and Dostoevsky. These threeessays usefully connect Bakhtin'swork to the question of rhetoric. As a group they nicely complementeach other in content and style. For example, the issues raised in Professor Bialostosky's essay helpfully track those responses which occur to the reader as s/he moves through Professor BernardDonals and Professor Halasek's essays. I think it very appropriate for an intellectual exploration of Bakhtin and rhetoric to take the form of a dialogue of this sort. This form more closely fits the content than would one longer, more inclusive, but also, perhaps, more monologic essay. Bakhtin, I think, might argue that a longer, more finalized essay would guaranteethatthe "same"issues, in fact, were not gotten into in the same way. I see a precedentfor this form/forumin Gary Saul Morson's "dialogue" published first in Critical Inquiry and then in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues On His Work. I am then delighted to have my go at this dialogue by respondingto these texts, these voices.

History, The Absent Cause? What I would like to add to these essays is more considerationof the context of the Bakhtin materials that they appropriate. Bialostosky moves in this direction, but then, for whateverreason, veers away from it. Is it possible, in other words, to get into these explorations more consideration of (at least Russian I literary ) history? Actually, would arguefor some considerationof worldview as well, because it is the difference in worldview that most distinguishes Bakhtin's perspective from those of his contemporaries of currentliteraryand rhetorical and theorists. Certainly,one of the major thrustsin recent literarytheory, and one of the traditionalconcerns of rhetorichas been history (and context). I believe that bringing some historicalcontext to bear on these essays may well rendera few of the problems which they take note of more "solvable,"and at the same time, make their appropriationof Bakhtin seem less formalistic. There are already critics accusing Bakhtin of being a crypto-formalist(to parallel, no doubt, his supposed crypto-Russian Orthodoxy), a charge I don't accept. By not, at the least, noting that we need to historicize Bakhtin, I think these essays may be too easily dismissed by such critics. So, for example, Halasek asks the question-and I like this piece because of its gutsiness in asking the hardquestionthat no one has had the nerve to ask-how can rhetoricappropriate Bakhtinwhen Bakhtinexplicitly seems to exclude rhetoric

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from his project? One way of avoiding the appearance of a grand and eclectic synthesis where "our"Bakhtinrejects "their"Bakhtin'srejection of rhetoric is to historicize the questionof rhetoricin Bakhtin. While Bakhtinnever exactly embracesrhetoric,I think his denials become less vehement at certainperiods thanat others. Most of the passages that Halasek cites in this regard are from Bakhtin's work Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929/1963),The Dialogic Imagination( 1934/1975) and Speech Genres (1979), all Russian publication dates. There is a heavy reliance in Halasek on Bakhtin's pronouncementson rhetoric which appearin his middle work, brief mention of his late work, and no mention at all of his earlier work. In contrast, Bernard-Donals concentrates almost exclusively on the Voloshinov "Bakhtin"of the mid 1920s. One reason the two essays seem so differentthen is that they, throughBakhtin, are speaking through different moments in history and therefore, of necessity, out of different concerns, voices, and questions. Further,they are speaking out of this moment in history and that, at least in principle, suggests the need to historicize these essays, the MLA session they come from, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. to Why at this momentdoes Bakhtinseem so important US rhetoric?Why do "we" (and who exactly are "we"?)"need"him? or do we? (Do we need Bakhtin'swork as an extension of post-structuralist thought? As a weapon to fight it? as an instrumentfor rethinkingand reformingclassroom practice and the general liberal arts curriculumand rhetoric'srole in it? as a practical criticism for appropriating other scholarly texts and constructingtexts like these? for doing ideology critique? or what?)

Bakhtin and the Big Picture One thing that all of these essays do that I really admire is they do not allow themselves to get mired in Bakhtin minutiae. Everything in our professional life pressuresa would-be Bakhtinophileto stay with the teenytiny safe stuff or move to the easy "everythingis dialogue; everythingis beautiful in its own way" approach. These essays refuse to take the easy way out. They are smart, technical, correct, and careful, but they also ask the hard questions. It would be a lot easier (not to mention safer) to talk about some tiny aspect of Bakhtin. Bakhtin's work, like Derrida's,is a universe, or at least a galaxy, in itself. These essays try to explore some of the key questionson the borders,at the edge of that galaxy, and I am afraid that we will be seeing less and less of this in the near future, as Bakhtin becomes just one more item in our new and improvedcanon. So Bernard-Donals,instead of taking any single concept or question already found in the Bakhtin corpus, takes on Bakhtin's method in a way no one else I know of yet has. The Kantian-like separating of rhetoric from science (Materiality?) and then the move to make each category "different," but "answerable" to the other, is absolutely Bakhtinian and supported by the most recently released Bakhtinianwork, Holquist'sDialogism, but also Bakhtin's new old essays-notes collected as Art and Answerability. Halasek asks the hardestquestion of all-is it "right"or "fitting" for rhetoric to appropriateBakhtin? No one has asked that and I do not expect anyone else to do so soon. It really is a kind of "The emperor has no clothes" carnivalesque move. I am not sure I agree with the answer for precisely the reasons given by Bialostosky, but I sure do like the question.

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Finally, Bialostosky does an admirablejob of putting all of this in context (the summaries are accurate and fair; the criticisms firm but gentle) and in suggesting where this might all go. In a sense, I read him as implicitly raising the question that I believe should be posted on every academic's mirror, every morning-so what?Who cares?Why is it importantfor us and importantfor me to do this or to do more of this? Some days I don't have good answers to that question, which all the more strengthensmy admirationof those who ask it and ask it in public. But then I always have privileged doubt (perhapsbecause it is unfinalizable?) which drew me to Bakhtinin the first place, I guess.

Responding

to "Mikhail Bakhtin, Classical Rhetoric and Praxis"

I like this paper a lot, both because I am sympatheticto what I read to be its motive (though it is precisely here thatI'dappreciatemore elaborationand clarity) of and because the appropriation Bakhtin is interestingand unusual in terms of most of the present uses (and abuses) of Bakhtin in literary theory. The essay does not simply appropriatea quotation or a concept, but reveals the depth of Bakhtin'smethod. This neo-Kantian understandingof Bakhtin by appropriating distinguishing of two concepts (rhetoric and science in this case) and then discovering the ways in which they are (or are not) answerableto each other, seems to be a constant in Bakhtin's work for over fifty years. Also the most recent translation of Bakhtin's early essays in Art and Answerability reveal that this approachwas key to Bakhtin'searliest work. What I see as the real strengthof this essay is its bypassing of the usual authoritative citing of Bakhtin much too common (and not very useful in the long run ) in a rangeof fields including literary theory. This paper doesn't do that and it definitely does get into things worth getting into. However, Bialostosky is quite correct in picking up on and questioning Bernard-Donals's motive for using this aspect of Bakhtin's work. I don't read Bernard-Donals'sessay as arguing for a separation of science (critique?) from rhetoric (ideology?) so that one might do a "scientific"and "certain"ideological analysis of reigning social relationsand resultingoppressivediscursive formations, which is somehow differentfrom merely bourgeoishumanist"opinion"about such things. The essay is too smart. This was worked through by post-Althusserian Marxists nearly twenty years ago. Still, the fact is that a few passages seem to open up that possibility. For example, Bernard-Donalssays "... so there is no sense of materialcertaintyby which one can adjudicate different rhetorics."That and would seem to imply a retrogradeshift to structuralism the notion of a "metatheory"or a "metalevel"to which we humanbeings via science might ascend and then look down upon mere "rhetoric"and judge it, though I don't believe that Bernard-Donalsis saying this. I think it might have helped to consider Habermas and his notion of three differentsort of rationalitiesincluding technical rationality, the lowest form (my words). One can make a very strong claim for the existence of a scientific realm that is not rhetoricalin a narrow sense, without resorting to dogmatism or monologism. The readerwould be helped if the motive for such an argumentwere even morefully developedhere. In terms of substance,I see a majorshift in the argumentthatI have witnessed when others have used Bakhtin/Voloshinov thatbothersme as a Bakhtinscholar. It occurs in these sorts of places-

Bakhtin Symposium: Mikhail Bakhtinand the Question of Rhetoric

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"Thisall boils downto a problem subject-construction." of

"YetI would also suggestthatlanguage a materialfact, andthatit constructs is subjectsas muchas it constructs meaning." * "Thislast principle one on whichBakhtin buildshis notionof subjectivity" is Though I do not wish to bring up the arcane question of authorship and authority here-dare we say Bakhtin'stheory of subjectivity about a text from a book with Voloshinov's name on the cover?-I can'tlet pass the blatantshift here from "consciousness" (in Voloshinov, the Russian soznanie) to "subject," "subjectivity," and by implication "subject position" (the word in Russian is sub'ekt not even close to soznanie, an older form). "Consciousness" and "subjectivity" are not the same thing here. Neither, I might add, are "word" (

slovo) and"sign"(znach),"language" (iazyk)and"discourse" (sometimes slovo, sometimes text),"meaning" (znachenie) "signification,"or "author" and (avtor) and
"subject." Nor can we easily move between "verbal creativity" and rhetoric, or "speech genres" and signifying practices. These are the sorts of loose equivalents too often made when literary theory of a Western European,not to mention US, sort encountersand appropriates Bakhtin. We must be careful that our readings do not simply colonize, ratherthen encounteror perhapsdialogue with, Bakhtin and Russian culture. This bothers me I suppose because it erases the differences between Russian and EasternEuropeanlanguagetheory and WesternEuropean(often French) poststructuralist theory that we must preserve. Easterntheory and Western theory are not the same thing, though they are in a certain interestingand complicated set of relationships both theoreticallyand historically. Recall that Volosinov's book is, as much as anything, a critique of Western language theories, but a critique constructed in Voloshinov's view from the outside, a critiquethat concentratedon the very "origin"of post-structuralist structuralist and theory-Saussure. The idea put forwardin Bernard-Donals-that language speaks the self and the self speaks language is somewhat commensuratewith Russian (but also Estonian, Polish, and Ukrainian ) language theory. The question of, and the critique of, the subject is not. That comes out of an entirely different historical moment and theoretical tradition. It is in these seemingly little, innocuous shifts that Russian theory too often is constructedas one more inept version of post-structuralist Theory. It isn't. It comes out of a different cultural and historical milieux and functions (and functioned) differently in these societies. Russian theory texts may look like Western theory texts, but the contexts are so differentthat they configure the texts differently. I like Bernard-Donals's essay, but I need some kind of qualification or that elaborationhere to feel comfortable differencesare being preserved.

Responding to "Starting the Dialogue: What Can We do About Bakhtin's Ambivalence Toward Rhetoric?" This essay asks the difficult, but correct, question. No one has really dealt with the whole issue of how rhetoricians can in good conscience appropriate Bakhtin, when Bakhtin seems to anathematizerhetoric. I am glad that someone has finally had the courage to say this out loud. Many of us have been silently

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wondering about it all along, after all. In fact, when we finally ask this question, we generate a whole set of related questions. In this spirit, we might ask about how we can privilege elite literaturein English departmentswhen Bakhtin seems to argue for a prosaics, ratherthan a poetics. Bakhtinin similar fashion seems to privilege the novel as genre over poetry. Whatdoes thatmean for us? And where are the texts of everyday life thatBakhtin seems to ask us to study and appreciate? Where in recent U.S. literarytheoryis the folklore thatBakhtintakes up especially in his book on Rabelais? And so on. Beyond the raising of this wonderful question, however, I believe that some consideration of cultural context will help this essay fend off charges of a formalistic appropriationof Bakhtin. It seems to me that the formalist spectre arises in the, to be sure, exploratory and suggestive, section that tries to draw implications from Bakhtin'stheory. So, for example, Professor Halasek wants to focus "...on the ways that tensions between them [polemicand parodicrhetoricsof a dialogicalrhetoricrealm] inform the text." Why not instead use Bakhtin to question our whole notion of what a text (and a context) is, what textualityis, or produces? There is a notion of text implied here that may well tame Bakhtin,if we aren'tcareful. Again Halasek says: She searchesfor dialogueswithin the text, conversations take place in form that and contentbetweenpolemicandparodic searchesinsteadfor the ways rhetoric,... discourse... as bothmadeup [they] ... informanddirectthe text,...views rhetorical of centripetaland centrifugal forces that togethergive a text its orientation... a boththe production the reception the text. and of dialogic analysisinvestigates Also, a text cannotbe defined as what appearson the page but must be informedby and previousutterances by thosethatfollow. It isn't that simple. These formulations seem to me, especially when there is no reference to context, very close to formalism, an expanded and interesting formalism, to be sure, but a formalism, nonetheless. There is an acceptance of what I might call the communication model of language here-i.e. sender, message, receiver, with context encompassing all-that I think Bakhtin refutes. Further, in this regard, I do not think that the implications of dialogic analysis have already been articulated sufficiently by Bakhtin, and especially not by Schuster,Klancher,Clarkand others. While this section is interestingas a gloss on presentday rhetoricas a force of resistance against (or a contribution to) deconstruction and post-structuralist Theory, it really does not come out of Bakhtin's work. Bakhtin says even less about "dialogicanalysis"thanhe does about"rhetoric." (Might "dialogicanalysis" be a contradictionin terms, an anti-formalistformalism?Does Bakhtin ever say something like dialogical analysis? Or ratheris dialogism a force in the world and word, a force that the moment it becomes specifiable in formulae or even as method is no longer dialogic? I am thinkinghere of speech genres, and of Bakhtin and Voloshinov on linguistics and translinguistics. One line that I do recall goes like "One generativeprocess can only be graspedwith the aid of anothergenerative process"). One can argue that Bakhtindoes ratherthan tells of dialogic analysis, but that is a different and more complex story because then the question becomes which Bakhtindoes what when? And thatbrings me back (again) to history.

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The Bakhtin who talks negatively about rhetoricwould seem for the most part to be the middle Bakhtin of the 1930s and the 1940s. The early and late Bakhtin, no matterwhat they say, had fundamentally differentif relatedprojects. It must be rememberedthat Bakhtin'searly work critiqued formalism (and vulgar Marxism) and his work became officially acceptableagain in his old age (in the 1970s) as a way of bashing neo-formalism e.g., structuralism. I think a case might be made that the early and late Bakhtinwere less anti-rhetorical than the middle Bakhtin. One other brief, if hard, question at work under the surface of the Halasek text-who is the "we"? the "us"?the "ours"? And is it true that this "we" does not seem to be "... confronted with a similar authoritarian political situation "? Dialogism is a force in the word, but it is also at work through social relations. What social relationsare impliedby the "we" and where in those social structureis that "we" positioned? And here I am speaking as much for myself as anyone, is it possible for a middle class academicteachingrequiredwriting courses (requiredin fact because they are the sites where the corporateworld and the state sort out and certify students, sites where the existing social relations are supposed to be reproduced)to appropriateBakhtin?And if so, what am I going to leave out and distortby virtue of my position in capitalistsocial relations?Just as one generative process may well be understandable only through another generative process, so one hardquestionmay well generateeven harder questions.

Responding to "Bakhtin and the Future of Rhetorical Criticism" In closing, I want to leave Professor Bialostosky's essay with what Bakhtin called a "sideward glance." As I have noted above, I am not sure I agree with Bialostosky's critique of the Bernard-Donalsessay that implied that rhetoricand science were being separated for the usual old-fashioned Marxist reasons-to dichotomize science (or whatever it is that Marxist theory does) from ideology (what all those other bourgeois humanistcritics do). I didn't read Bernard-Donals that way, though in going back, I really don't see any evidence in the text for not reading him this way. More importantly,I want to endorse Bialostosky's use of the Shukman/Perlina and the Wells material. This is welcome because it begins to move us beyond the usual ahistorical,acultural,and unconsciously ideological, almost formalisticapproachthatcharacterizes muchU.S. Bakhtincommentary. By drawing in Shukman,Perlina, and Wells, Bialostosky begins to strike a balance between the Slavicist's immersion in the detail of the historical and cultural contexts of Bakhtin's work, and the too often simpleminded,general appropriation of one more method to read text, typical of too many U.S. literary theorists, critics, education and schooling critics, and (heavens!) even rhetoricians. Bialostosky is nationallyknown for his subtle and interestingreadings of Bakhtin, and this essay, exemplifying this care, is one of the few texts that I have encounteredthatstrikesa balance between the specialist and the generalist. So I want to pick up with Bialostosky's mention of Shukman and note in passing that Shukman has also recently translateda volume that tries to take the work of Bakhtin, but also that of Vygotsky and other Russian and Eastern language theorists to a new area of study that touches on rhetoric, the field of semiotics. Shukman is translatorfor Yuri Lotman's Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theoryof Culture. This book extends the Easterntheoreticaltraditionof which Mikhail Bakhtinis such an important part. It thereforealso gives the reader

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a sense of the cultural rhetoric (Steven Mailloux's term) at work in Russia (and Eastern Europe). That is, it provides the readera sense of the kinds of questions that have interestedRussian theorists and the conversations that produced such theory. It also begins to give the readera feel for the political effects that specific tropes and arguments have had in this cultural matrix. I find it endlessly entertaining that the only U.S. theorist who I have read who ever mentioned Lotmanwas StephenGreenblatt, self- fashioned"new historicist." a JamesThomasZebroski SyracuseUniversity

Work Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (trans.) Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Caryl Emerson (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minneasota Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Helene Iswolsky (trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres. Vern McGee (trans.) Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (trans.) Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Billington, James H. The Icon and the Axe: An InterpretiveHistory of Russian Culture. NY: Vintage Books, 1970. Habermas, Jiurgen. Knowledge and HumanInterests. Jeremy Shapiro (trans.) Boston: Beacon, 1971. Habermas, Jurgen. Communicationand the Evolution of Society. Thomas McCarthy (trans.) Boston: Beacon, 1979. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtinand His World. London and NY: Routledge, 1990. Kagarlitsky, Boris. The ThinkingReed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State. London and NY: Verso, 1988. Lotman, Yuri. Universe of the Mind:A Semiotic Theoryof Culture. Ann Shukman (trans.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Mailloux, Steven. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Mandelstam, Nadezhda. Hope Against Hope. NY: Atheeneum, 1970. Mandelstam, Osip. Osip Mandelstam:Selected Poems. Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin (trans.). NY: Atheneum, 1983. Morson, Gary. "Who Speaks For Bakhtin?"in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, 1-20. Voloshinov, Valentin. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (trans.) Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1986.