On “Secondary Aesthetics, Without Isolation”: Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin’s Theory of Form

This paper discusses the philosophical origins as well as the social context of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of aesthetic form. Bakhtin’s critique of the Russian Formalist conception of form, which reaches its most elaborate form in his 1924 article “The Methodological Questions of Literary Aesthetics” (“K voprosam metodologii estetiki slovesnogo tvorchestva”), is methodologically rooted in various strands of neo-Kantian philosophy and aesthetics, most notably, in the works of Hermann Cohen and Broder Christiansen. It was from the neo-Kantian philosophical repertoire that Bakhtin derived his foundational argument that aesthetic activity represents a “secondary creation.” Art, according to Bakhtin, stands in contrast to the “primary creative acts” of cognition and ethical judgment, hence it encounters a “reality” that had already been articulated and ordered by cognitive and moral acts. In keeping with this principle, Bakhtin postulates that the aesthetic act is the reassessment of, rather than a direct intervention into, empirical reality. In this constellation, artistic form is seen as the quintessential achievement of aesthetic activity that incorporates, but is categorically irreducible to, cognitively and ethically inarticulate material. Having traced the philosophical origins of Bakhtin’s meditation on form in turn-of-the-century German neo-Kantianism, the paper finally aims to appraise Bakhtin’s inquiry into aesthetic form, especially his emphatic rebuttal of the Russian Formalist assertion of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, against the background of more general trends in the humanities, both European and Russian, toward the separation and specialization of disciplines. Bakhtin’s neo-Kantian unitary vision of arts and humanities, the paper concludes, was fundamentally in conflict with the modernizing tendency in arts and humanities, the offshoots of which he recognized, and thus fervently denied, in a number of contemporaneous artistic and intellectual movements and practices

The Emergence of Modern Scientific Communities in Late-1910s and Early Soviet Russia : the case of the Moscow Linguistic Circle

This article assesses the landscape of Russian studies of art and language in the period 1915-1929 in the light of the loosening of the system of social cohesion in Imperial years and in the context of the rise of ‘secular modernity’. The most relevant manifestations of these processes in the field of human sciences are the cognitive transformation of knowledge towards a non-semantic model of art and language and the definitive inauguration of the institutional mode of knowledge production. In order to elucidate the joint working of these two phenomena the paper focuses on the foremost scientific institution at the time, the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which emerges as the chief case study both for the scientific ideas it produced and for the mode of scientific research it espoused. The paper utilises Frickel and Gross’s general theory of scientific and intellectual movements and N. C. Mullins’s group model of scientific development to trace and explain the rise and fall of the Circle’s approach to art and language and finally evaluates the decline of the non-semantic study of art and language as an epistemological reversal indicating the failure of the Soviet 1920s to fulfil its modernising mission.Le sujet de l’article est l’état des sciences du langage et des arts en Russie, durant la période allant de 1915 à 1929, mis en relation avec l’affaiblissement de la cohésion sociale dans l’Empire et l’apparition de la « modernité séculière ». Les manifestations les plus importantes de ces phénomènes sociaux en sciences humaines sont l’émergence d’un modèle non-sémantique dans les sciences du langage et des arts et l’affirmation d’une production institutionnelle du savoir. Afin d’éclairer l’interaction de ces deux phénomènes, l’article est centré sur le Cercle linguistique de Moscou, qui constitue la meilleure étude de cas d’une institution moderne, à la fois pour le savoir produit et pour les méthodes de travail adoptées. L’article mobilise la théorie des mouvements scientifique et intellectuel de Frickel et Gross et le modèle d’évolution des groupes scientifiques de Nicholas Mullins afin de rendre compte du développement, puis du déclin de l’approche proposée par le Cercle. L’abandon d’une étude non-sémantique de l’art et du langage est interprété comme un revirement épistémologique, témoignant de l’échec des années 1920 à remplir leur rôle de modernisation

Geographic tongue: Does Candida play a role in its pathogenesis

Background/Aim: Geographic tongue (GT), a benign self-limiting condition (inflammation) is commonly seen in practice. Although quite easy for clinical diagnosis, in clinical practice it is commonly misdiagnosed and treated as Candida infection. The main aim of this study was to compare the prevalence of Candida spp. on tongue in patients with GT and subjects with clinically healthy oral mucosa. Additional aims were to evaluate subjective symptoms, uncontrolled usage of prescribed or non-prescribed antifungal topical medications and the presence of the cancerophobia or other health concerns in patients with GT. Material and Methods: A total of 70 subjects were divided into two groups: Group B - patients with diagnosed Geographic tongue and group A - aged and gender matched controls with clinically health oral mucosa. Anamnestic charts designed for this study included information about symptoms (measured by Visual Analogue Scale), previous knowledge or fear about presence of GT and received therapy for this condition. Detection of Candida spp. from tongue was done using sterile cotton swab and Sabouraud dextrose agar. Results: At the time of this study, 18 (52.94%) of subjects with GT were aware of having this condition and even 12 of them (66.7%) used topical antifungal drugs prescribed by physician. Also, 66.7% of them experienced fear about the presence of GT at some moment. Detection of Candida spp. was similarly distributed in both groups (22.2% in group A and 17.6% in group B). Conclusions: Geographic tongue has frequently been treated by topical antifungal drugs. In this study, GT was not associated with presence of Candida spp

Rani Bahtin

The Early Work of Mikhail Bakhtin engages with the formative intellectual years of the Russian philosopher, literary and cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin. The volume, which is divided into six chapters, opens with the discussion of Bakhtin’s programmatic essay “Art and Answerability” (1919), and concludes with the account of the Russian critic’s monograph Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Work (1929). In addition to introducing the academic public with the hitherto insufficiently elucidated corpus of Bakhtin’s ideas, this monograph also addresses the issue of intellectual (dis)continuity of Bakhtin’s early legacy. By viewing Bakhtin’s early intellectual trajectory neither as a linear continuum, nor as a radical discontinuity, The Young Bakhtin positions itself beyond either of the dominant trends in modern Bakhtin studies. Recoiling from the ways of traditional Geistesgeschichte, the monograph is not pursuing “influences, traditions, and continuities”: rather, it sets itself a task of identifying and evaluating epistemological models in Bakhtin’s early thought. In this manner, Radunović’s monograph reconstructs the developmental logic of Bakhtin’s thought from its early ethical-cum-aesthetic paradigm towards the dialogic cognitive model, and arrives at the conclusion that the scientific growth in Bakhtin’s early creative period occurred through the succession of re-appropriation of his earliest philosophical ideas, and innovation, that is, adoption of new conceptual solutions. Following several attempts to modify his early ethical-aesthetic model in early 1920s, Bakhtin acquires the conceptual model of sociological linguistics in the late 1920-ih, thereby reinventing, but not fully discarding, his initial theoretical framework. Upon identifying this interplay of re-appropriation and innovation, which enabled for the dialogic paradigm to emerge, the monograph concludes that the qualitative transformation of Bakhtin’s thought did not take place in the form of a big bang (as a traditional, Kuhnian model of scientific discovery would stipulate), but rather, suggests that the Russian thinker’s cognitive break took shape through the series of small-scale modifications. Consequently, the present monograph argues that the paradigmatic change that occurred in the late 1920s with the Bakhtin’s acquisition of the organon of sociological linguistics cannot be thought of or assessed in terms of a linear logic of scientific progress. To that end, The Early Work of Mikhail Bakhtin relates the dynamic of Bakhtin’s intellectual growth in the 1920s to Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblances, according to which the kinship between complex mental phenomena may be established through the series of distantly related qualities, rather than through one, essentialist feature

Bahtinov “lingvistički obrt”

U ovom radu autor pristupa pitanju o strukturnoj podudarnosti između ranog etičkog korpusa misli ruskog mislioca Mihaila Bahtina i nešto kasnijih lingvističkih radova ovog autora. Osnovna teza svodi se na postojanje čvrste konceptualne veze između pomenutih faza Bahtinovog stvaralaštva. Teorijska komplementarnost ishodi iz jednog broja filosofskih opredeljenja koja je Bahtin usvojio još u jednom od svojih najranijih spisa pod nazivom Ka filosofiji postupka. Naime, iako je krajem dvadesetih godina izabrao lingvistiku za polje svog intelektualnog delovanja, Bahtin nikada nije napustio fundamentalne uvide koje je usvojio u ranim, formativnim godinama svog stvaralaštva. Po našem mišljenju, načelo Bahtinovog Weltanschauung-a čini uvid u dinamičku i događajnu prirodu sveta i aktivnu, i štaviše konstitutivnu ulogu subjekta u tom svetu: svi aspekti Bahtinove i Vološinovljeve ideje govorne komunikacije suštinski počivaju upravo na tim filosofskim pretpostavkama