Early Soviet research projects and the developments of "Bakhtinian" ideas: the view from the archives

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] When the history of Bakhtin studies is finally written, one particularly ironic aspect that will stand out is that an accurate understanding of the development of dialogic ideas has required us to liberate ourselves from a series of monologic myths. Such thinking, to paraphrase Bakhtin himself, 'impoverished' our understanding, 'disorganised and bled' an accurate image of the dynamics of intellectual formation, by 'mixing it up' with 'fantastic' and 'estranged' notions and 'rounding it out' into a 'mythological whole' (Bakhtin 1979 [l 936-81: 224; 1986 [l 936-81: 43) Four particularly persistent varieties may be briefly summarised as follows: 1) Bakhtin was a thoroughly original thinker who thought up all his ideas crA mhilo, 2) Bakhtin surrounded himself with mediocrities and there was a unidirectional flow of ideas from him to, say, Voloshinov and Medvedev, 3) Bakhtin was an 'unofficial' thinker who chose to remain outside the dominant trends within Soviet scholarship and was fundamentally unaffected by that scholarship, 4) where Bakhtin was compelled to engage with Soviet scholarship the result was either rebuttal or inner subversion rather than serious engagement. I will refrain from identifying specific works in which these myths are present since they permeated the majority of research in the field until relatively recently and they have receded only gradually. Furthermore, the myths have not uniformly disintegrated, but have retreated unevenly in the face of a varying amount and quality of research in specific areas

The Perestroika of Academic Labour: The Neoliberal Transformation of Higher Education and the Resurrection of the ‘Command Economy’.

This paper compares the changing function and organisation of higher education (HE) under neoliberal reforms, with particular focus on the UK, with those introduced by the Stalin regime in the 1930s and developed in the decades that followed. Although ideologically contrasting, many policies developed to subordinate HE and other state enterprises more directly to the accumulation of capital driven by competition are in many respects strikingly similar in each case. The historical development of each is examined, along with the political economy underlying them, highlighting the most important common features and differences. The proletarianisation of HE in the UK is shown to have encouraged the adoption of ‘spontaneous’ forms of resistance reminiscent of those workers adopted in the USSR to protect themselves from bureaucratic pressure. The paper suggests ways in which these forms of resistance might be incorporated into a more general struggle against the encroachment of neoliberalism

Le marrisme et l’héritage de la Völkerpsychologie dans la linguistique soviétique

La «Nouvelle théorie du langage» était un ensemble intellectuel éclectique, dans lequel plusieurs thèmes dominants de la philologie russe du XIXème siècle était greffés sur des formules marxistes de surface. Cet article fait remonter les principes du marrisme à la Völkerpsychologie allemande de Steinthal et Lazarus, qui considérait la langue et le mythe comme l'expression de «l'âme du peuple». La Völkerpsychologie dominait la philologie russe pré-révolutionnaire, mais fut obligée de battre en retraite dans la période qui suivit immédiatement la Révolution. En son lieu et place, c'est une théorie du langage à la fois sociologique et protopragmatique qui fut progressivement mise en place. Marr essaya de marrier les deux courants en remplaçant la catégorie de nation (narod, Volk) par celle de classe, ce faisant, il réhabilitait le courant précédent. Les successeurs de Marr prolongèrent cette tentative. Après le rejet des idées marristes en 1950, cette façon d'envisager les choses se perpétua, à ceci près que la centralité de la classe fut à nouveau remplacée par celle de nation

Mikhail Bakhtin and early Soviet sociolinguistics

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Mikhail Bakhtin’s essays on the novel of the 1930s are perhaps his mot original, influential and valuable contributions to the study of European language and literature. The terms and limits of that originally have, however, seldom been systematically analysed, with most commentators content to admire the bold interweaving of sociolinguistic and literary themes which we find in these essays. The sources of Bakhtin’s ideas about the novel have been gradually coming into focus since the 1980s, but the sources of the sociolinguistic ideas embedded in these works have remained unexplored, perhaps because it is generally assumed the idea follow on from those delineated in Valentin Voloshinov’s 1929 book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which has often been ascribed to Bakhtin himself. There is, however, a qualitative difference between the linguistic ideas in Voloshinov’s texts and those in Bakhtin’s essays of the 1930s, not least the discussion of the historical development of language and discursive relations within society and the modelling of these features in the novel as a genre. While Voloshinov’s work facilitated the transformation of Bakhtin’s early phenomenology of intersubjectivity into the account of discursive relations we find in the latter’s 1929 Dostoevskii book, both works present largely synchronic analyses quite distinct from that found in the 1934 essay. Voloshinov succeeded in transforming Bakhtin’s early ‘philosophy of the act’ and aesthetic activity into discursive terms largely through his adoption of Karl Buhler’s ‘organon model’ of the ‘speech event’ or ‘speech act’, but this left the static phenomenology of the earlier work intact. Similarly, Voloshinov and Medvedev managed to recast Bakhtin’s early account of worldview into discursive terms by adopting and sociologising the notion of style found in works by Leo Spitzer and Oskar Walzel, but again the systematic transformations of the discursive environment remained beyond the purview of the Bakhtin Circle. Where, then, did Bakhtin, from 1929 exiled in a small Kazakh town where there was very limited access to books and little contact with his erstwhile colleagues, derive the historical and sociolinguistic ideas that pervade these works

Reflections on the work of R.O. Šor: Materials from institutional archives

The work of Rozalija Osipovna Šor (1894-1939) is examined through materials held in the archives of institutions in which she worked. Particularly important is the text of her self-criticism of 1932 in which she examines the formation of her own ideas and the influences on her work. This is supplemented with reflections on her published work and new information about aspects of her contribution to Soviet linguistc thought in the 1920s and 1930s that have remained unexplored. This brings new light to bear on Šor’s work by illustrating her relationship to European linguistic thought and the development of Soviet intellectual life in the period of the ascendency of the ideas of Nikolaj Marr

Rethinking the colonial encounter with Bakhtin (and contra Foucault)

The limitations of employing a Foucauldian framework for studying the colonial encounter are discussed and an alternative approach drawing on the work of the Bakhtin Circle is proposed. The origins of the Foucauldian approach in postcolonial studies is traced back to the emergence of Stalinist critiques of ‘bourgeois orientalism’ at the beginning of the Cold War, which proposed a dualistic model of closed discourses of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘Soviet’ orientalism. The Bakhtinian approach developed in opposition to Stalinist attempts to ‘monologise’ the critical approaches developed in the USSR, questioning the idea of closed discourses and stressing modes of engagement between different social groups and ideological positions. The second part of the article provides a case study of the emergence on Indo-European philology, which is often presented as a clear example of Western Orientalism. It is shown that this movement developed as a result of collaboration between European philologists and Indian high-caste pandits. It is shown that various agendas were pursued within philology, and that a number of different critical intersections emerged over time. It is suggested that a Bakhtinian approach, suitably revised and developed, provides a superior starting point for understanding these phenomena

Bakhtine, la sociologie du langage et le roman

Le travail de Bakhtine sur le roman dans les années 1930 a généralement été vu comme opposé aux tendances dominantes de la pensée sovietique de l'époque, ou même comme une subversion de cette pensée. Cette impression est fallacieuse, car, à la suite de son arrestation en 1929, Bakhtine a subi une perestroïka intellectuelle», en tous points aussi profonde que celle de nombre de ses contemporains. Il a, en effet, adopté les points fondamentaux du programme marriste, et fait de nombreux emprunts au travail d'intellectuels soviétiques influents. Il n'y a guère de raisons de soupçonner la sincérité de cette réorientation, même si Bakhtine fait subir à ces idées des ajustements très particuliers. Son travail des années 1930 devrait être considéré plutôt comme une contribution à la science soviétique que comme le renversement de ses principes de base, et ses idées sur la langue et la société comme beaucoup moins originales qu'elles ne le paraissaient autrefois. Si l'on veut chercher l'originalité des articles de Bakhtine des années 1930, c'est ailleurs qu'on va la trouver, dans la façon dont il a intégré la socioiinguistique soviétique naissante à la théorie du roman

Language, caste and the Brahmanical framing of European indology: Aleksei Barannikov's "Some positions in the field of indology" (1941)

A translation of the named article by the early Soviet Indologist A. P. Barannikov (1890–1952) is introduced. The topicality of the article in relation to current trends in scholarship is discussed, and a brief consideration of the historical context of the publication of the original article is provided. This includes reflections on the specificities of pre-Revolutionary Indology in Russia, especially as represented in the work ofS. F. Ol’denburg (1863–1934) and F. I. Shcherbatskoi (aka Theodor Stcherbatsky, 1866–1942), and the development of a new form of Indology as represented by the translated article. Information is provided about the intellectual sources of the article, highlighting the development of sociological approaches to language in the early USSR, and comparisons with the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. It is suggested that Barannikov’s work, with its discussion of the centrality of conflictual relations between Sanskrit and vernacular traditions, anticipates some recent works on the anti-caste movement, and it suggests a more complex relationship between colonial philology and oriental studies more generally, and the intellectual traditions of the indigenous elite

The Bakhtin Circle and the East (or What Bakhtinian Ideas Tell Us about “Decolonising the Curriculum”)

The ideas of the Bakhtin Circle, specifically those of Bakhtin and Tubianskii are discussed with regard to the contemporary project to decolonise the university curriculum. The anti-colonial aspects of the work of the circle, which are mainly implicit rather than explicitly stated, are emphasised in relation to the semantic palaeontology Bakhtin adopted and developed from scholars such as Marr, Frank-Kamenetskii and Freidenberg on the one hand and Tubianskii’s discussion of the ideas of Tagore on the other. Links with the early anti-caste movement and contemporary Soviet Indology are drawn and are contrasted with perspectives current in so-called “subaltern studies”. It is suggested that, suitably revised and developed, Bakhtinian ideas can contribute to combatting colonial bases within universities