Ajaya Bhadra Khanal

Prof Reed and Prof. Epstein

ILA 790 Bakhtin and his Circle
History and the Architectonics of Being

nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the
world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and
will always be in the future -- Bakhtin

Abstract
An analysis of Bakhtins account in Rabelais (written around 1934) and Forms of
Time and Chronotope (written in 1937-38) suggest a structural model of a fall from an
ideal state to a state of imperfect being. At the same time, however, Bakhtin also
emphasizes the process of becoming, in a process where future remains free and full of
potential, and where future is not a mere appendage to the origin of being. In this way we
see both a return of the utopian impulse and a constant process of becoming, or openendedness in Bakhtins account of historical unfolding. What is the source of these
seemingly contradictory impulse?
In the second part of the essay, I will go back to Bakhtins early texts, and also to
his later texts, in order to trace the philosophical and theological bases for the paradox. I
would argue that Bakhtins view of history, as well as ethics, aesthetics and ontology are
framed within the triadic architectonics of Being (with binary distinctions of subject and
object) and non-being. More importantly, I would argue that this paradox is a result of
his philosophical and theological stance toward the notions of being and non-being that
persists from his early works.

A. Introduction and Problematic

A. 1 Introduction
There is a disagreement about the nature of utopian project in Bakhtins work,
particularly on Rabelais. Morson and Emersons very term prosaics is a refutation that
there is an overarching explanatory model or closed system in Bakhtins work. Morson
and Emerson see the utopian motifs present within Rabelais and His World as formal
devices. According to these scholars Bakhtins purpose was unremitting skepticism and
unending change without a goal (p 94). Generally speaking, Bakhtin was much less
concerned with millenarian fantasies and holy foolishness than with the constraints and
responsibilities of everyday living, (Morson and Emerson, 67). Gardiner (1992),
meanwhile argues that the overall thrust of Bakhtins work on Rabelais and folk-festive
culture involves a radical negation of the traditional view of utopia but without
abandoning the utopian impulse itself. The Bakhtinian conception of carnival
incorporates elements of what he calls critical utopia.
This essay springs from this paradox in Bakhtins middle period (1930-1938)
reflected in Rabelais and His World and Forms of Time and Chronotope. In the first
part of the essay, I will try to establish that there is a paradox in Bakhtins view of history,
that Bakhtins view of historical unfolding displays both a return of the repressed (the
ancient matrix) and creative imagination that . In the second part of the essay, I will seek
to trace sources for this paradox in his early works and argue that it springs from his
philosophical and theological stance toward the notions of being and non-being.
A. 2 Rabelais
Features of grotesque

According to Bakhtin, the basis of the grotesque imagery is the concept of the
body in its relation to the whole. The grotesque is the body in the act of becoming
(317), its outward and inward features are merged (318). There is constant renewal
death brings nothing to an endand there are elements common to the entire cosmos. In
this sense the grotesque body is cosmic and universal and therefore can merge with
various natural phenomenon (318). Both the negative and the positive poles are combined
in one image.
Function of grotesque
The image of the grotesque has a philosophical function and is directly related
to the life of society and to the cosmic whole (Rabelais, 321). It is a mode of
representation of the bodily life (315) working against other modes of representation
that facilitate and uphold social stratification and domination. The theme of the grotesque
plays a most important part in the history of struggle against dominant orders
(Rabelais, 341). Bakhtin argues that the culture of folk humor, which developed during
thousand years, reflected the struggle against cosmic terror and created the image of the
gay, material bodily cosmos, ever-growing and self-renewing (Rabelais, 340). Bakhtin
stresses the significance of transforming fear into laughter. Grotesque is the means
through which cosmic terror, which according to him is used by all religious systems to
oppress man and his consciousness, is conquered by laughter (Rabelais, 335-336).
Grotesque and history
According to Bakhtin the principle of laughter became meaningful only in
relation to a separation of official and non-official culture. The serious and the comic
aspects of the world and of the deity were equally sacred, equally official at the early

stages of preclass and prepolitical social order. In the definitely consolidated state and
class structure such an equality of the two aspects became impossible (6) giving rise to
two-world condition. In relation to official culture, carnival festivities and folk culture
offered a completely different, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical and extra-political aspect
of the world, of man, and of human relations (6).
Imagery and social organization
Renaissance realism, Bakhtin argues, contains two types of imagery reflecting
the conception of the world. He opposes the imagery in the folk culture of humor to the
bourgeois conception of the completed atomized being. For him the every-growing,
inexhaustible, every-laughing principle which uncrowns and renews is the opposite of
the petty, inert material principle of class society (24). From this statement we could
argue that the conception of the completed atomized being belongs to the class society,
while the laughing principle belongs to the folk culture of humor. In the framework of
class and feudal political structure, carnivals and festivals became the utopian realm of
community, freedom, equality, and abundance (9) where people could temporarily enter.
Grotesque realism is related to this utopian project. It projects the cosmic, social, and
bodily elements as indivisible whole and this whole is gay and gracious (19).
Problem: Epistemology or Ontology?
From the above discussion, we can see that there are two seemingly contradictory
layers of meaning in Bakhtins work on Rabelais. One is the epistemological layer, where
the principle of laughter can be seen as a principle that organizes our knowledge,
therefore, experience of the world. At the same time, however, it allows us to intervene in
the real world of human relations. The principle of laughter leads to specific modes of

representation, or cognitive frames that allow individuals to take part in a historical

process. On the other hand, the second layer can be seen as ontology, or Bakhtins
statement about objective reality. Bakhtin could be taken to mean that he believes in the
existence of an undifferentiated utopia as the internal or necessary logic of existence.
From this second perspective, individuals can be seen as undifferentiated parts of a gay
and gracious whole and that alienation or differentiation of this whole is what drives
history forward.
A.3 Forms of Chronotope
According to Bakhtin, forms of time and chronotope in art is a reflection of forms
in real life. This allows us to connect Bakhtins discussion of artistic forms in relation to
history. Historical movement is one of the central themes in Bakhtins essay, Forms of
Time and Chronotope in the Novel written in 1937-38 and published for the first time in
1973. In this essay, not only does he elaborate his attitude to utopia, but also his vision of
what drives history.
Greek Period.
In relation to his work on Rabelais, Bakhtin raises the significance of the Greek
period as a moment that marked the transition from preclass and prepolitical social order
to a world with differentiation. Bakhtins evaluative attitude to Greek period is a positive
one, but not nostalgic. His ambivalent attitude seems to be the result of co-existence of
the seemingly contradictory ideas of wholeness and becoming.
In Forms of Time, he appreciates the utter exteriority of classical Greek period
where every aspect of existence could be seen and heard, (134)? He sees the Greek
public square as that square upon which the self-consciousness of European man first

coalesced (135). After that period, not only was there stratification in society, but
stratification within man.
In following epochs, mans image was distorted by his increasing participation in
the mute and invisible spheres of existence. He was literally drenched in
muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness. The personal and
detached human beingthe man who exists for himselflost the unity and
wholeness that had been a product of his public origin. Once having lost the
popular chronotope of the public square, his self-consciousness could not find an
equally real, unified and whole chronotope; it therefore broke down and lost its
integrity, it be-came abstract and idealistic. A vast number of new spheres of
consciousness and objects appeared in the private life of the private individual
that were not, in general, subject to being made public (the sexual sphere and
others), or were subject only to an intimate, conditional, closeted expression. The
human image became multi-layered, multi-faceted. A core and a shell, an inner
and an outer, separated within it (p 136).

The Greek period is similar to that of Rabelais and Goethe. They are distinctly
significant periods in the history of consciousness. He argues that the most remarkable
experiment to re-establish the fully exteriorized individual in world literaturealthough
without the stylization of the ancient modelwas made by Rabelais (DI, 136).
Similarly, another attempt to resurrect the ancient wholeness and exteriority, but on an
entirely different basis, was made by Goethe (DI, 136). Although Bakhtin celebrates the
ancient Greek period as one that provided a sense of wholeness to individual and society,
Bakhtin is not nostalgic. According to Bakhtin, the wholeness of the human image had
manifested itself in epic and tragedy (DI, 137) and there was no quality of becoming.
In the encomium, the image of man was extremely simple and pre-formed (DI, 136).

This new concern with the process of becoming poses some problems, as well as
insights into Bakhtins attitude to ancient Greek period. According to Bakhtin, the
Aristotelian influence resulted in inversion in a characters development that excludes
any authentic becoming in character:
A mans entire youth is treated as nothing but a preliminary to his maturity. The
familiar element of movement is introduced into biography solely as a struggle
of opposing impulses, as fits of passion or as an exercise in virtuein order to
invest this virtue with permanence (Bakhtin, DI, 140).

Thus, the aspect of becoming becomes a category for evaluating ideas and processes.
What drives history?
Bakhtin seems to redefine fantastic realism as a model for historical movement.
He arrives at this through discovery of historical inversion, and the forms it takes in
mythological and artistic thinking. According to Bakhtin the essence of historical
inversion is found in the fact that mythological and artistic thinking locates such
categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and
society and the like in the past (DI, 147).
A thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is
here portrayed as something out of the past, a thing that is in no sense part of the
pasts reality, but a thing that is in its essence a purpose, an obligation (Bakhtin,
DI, 147).

One result of historical inversion is a greater readiness to build a superstructure

for reality (the present) along a vertical axis of upper and lower than to move forward
along the horizontal axis of time (DI, 148). Similarly, the historical inversion in
philosophical structures is characterized by a corresponding assumption of beginnings

as the crystal-clear, pure sources of all being, of eternal values and modes of existence
that are ideal and outside time (DI, 148). In eschatology, the real future is drained and
bled of its substance because it is perceived as the end of everything that exists, as the
end of all being. Furthermore, the end is perceived as being relatively close at hand,
(DI, 148).
Historical inversion is a moment in the history of consciousness. There is a
cyclical and mutually reinforcing relationship between social contradictions and
uncovering of those contradictions (consciousness). In other words, the relation between
social differentiation and attempts to understand it through new forms pushes time into
the future. Sharp social differentiation leads to initial feeble attempt at new forms that can
incorporate and shape new content. This in turn leads to the uncovering of social
contradictions. The more profoundly these contradictions are uncovered and the riper
they become in consequence, the more authentic and comprehensive becomes times
fullness as the artist represents it (147). In this way, the ability of chronotopes to
represent fullness of time becomes an important category for Bakhtins evaluation of
history.
Bakhtin, however, assigns a significant feature to fantastic realism. This involves
a conceptualization of human nature, which is significant for understanding his view of
history and utopia. In folklore, Bakhtin argues, the spatial and temporal growth of a
man is a direct and straightforward growth of a man in his own right and in the real
world of the here-and-now, a growth process without any inauthentic debasing, without
any idealized compensation in the form of weakness and need (DI, 150). In other words,
the fantastic in folklore relies on the real-life possibilities of human development:

possibilities not in the sense of a program for immediate practical action, but in
the sense of the needs and possibilities of men, those eternal demands of human
nature that will not be denied. These demands will remain forever, as long as
there are men; they will not be suppressed, they are real, as real as human nature
itself, and therefore sooner or later they will force their way to a full realization
(DI, 151).

The eternal demands of human nature, therefore, seem to be another element that gives
directionality to history. Thus, in Forms of Time and Chronotope, we find new
categories like fullness of time, demands of human nature and becoming and wholeness.
These categories suggest that Bakhtins stance toward the future and toward history in
Forms of Time and Chronotope is different from his stance in Rabelais.
Bakhtin has a positive evaluative attitude toward Dante, who he sees as being
located in the cusp of two epochs. In Dante there is an extraordinary tension between
the living historical time and the extratemporal other-worldly ideal (DI, 158). The
contents, images and ideas that fill the vertical world are filled with a powerful desire to
escape this world, to set out along the historically productive horizontalEach image is
full of historical potential. But the artists will condemns it to an eternal and immobile
place on the extratemporal vertical axis (DI, 157). ). According to Bakhtin, Dante
resolves, through artistic form, the tension between the form-generating principle of the
whole and the historical and temporal form of its separate parts (158). In the
Renaissance, forms of the novel paved the way for a restoration of the spatial and
temporal material wholeness of the world on a new, more profound and more complex
level of development (Bakhtin, 166).

Historical movement reestablishes a new type of relationship. Literary forms are a

means of expressing and understanding subjectivity and wholeness of a human being as
well as his relationship (165-66). It is in the evolution of consciousness, in relation to
history that Rabelais becomes significant. According to Bakhtin, Rabelais had two tasks,
a polemical task of restoring the authentic world and the affirmative task of restoring the
authentic man (168). The polemical task was to purge the spatial and temporal world of
those remnants of a transcendent world view still present in it, to clean away symbolic
and hierarchical interpretations still clinging to this vertical world, to purge it of the
contagion of antiphysis that had infected it (168). The affirmative task involved the
re-creation of a spatially and temporally adequate world able to provide a new
chronotope for a new, whole and harmonious man, and for new forms of human
communication (168). These tasks determined the distinctive features of Rabelais
artistic method, the idiosyncrasies of his fantastic realism (169).
Ancient complex and the critique of capitalism. The ancient matrix performs as a
model that allows a critique of capitalism as well as the condition of social
differentiation. According to Bakhtin, as class society develops further and as
ideological spheres are increasingly differentiated, the internal disintegration of each
element of the matrix becomes more and more intense (DI, 213). The process of
separating out and detaching individual life-sequences from the whole reaches its
highest point under capitalism. When collective labor and the struggle with nature had
ceased to be the only arena for mans encounter with nature and the worldthen nature
itself ceased to be a living participant in the events of life (217).

Bakhtin points out a negative feature of folkloric time in pre-class period, its
cyclicity. According to Bakhtin, it limits the force and ideological productivity of this
time. The mark of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repetitiveness, is imprinted on
all events occurring in this type of time. Times forward impulse is limited by the cycle.
For this reason even growth does not achieve an authentic becoming (DI, 210). A
similar cyclicity is apparent in Bakhtins historical account, which shows a cyclical return
of the ancient matrix or a repetition of its impulse. Bakhtin, however, turns this into
creative imagination. Traces and bases of the ancient matrix is preserved in the treasure
house of language and in certain kinds of folklore (217). People like Rousseau perceived
these bases as stages in the development of society and consciousness and made
attempt to make contact with that lost ideal, but this time at a new stage of
development (230). It has multiple uses, not only as a means to protest feudal hierarchy,
inequality, absolutism and false arbitrariness of society, but also against bourgeois
individuum (231). The historical process is one in which the ancient matrices are reestablished on a new and loftier base.
A. 4 Setting up the Problem
An analysis of Bakhtins account in Rabelais (written around 1934) and Forms of
Time and Chronotope (written in 1937-38) suggest a structural model of a fall from an
ideal state (non-being) to a state of imperfect being. At the same time, however, Bakhtin
also emphasizes the process of becoming, but in a process where future remains free and
full of potential, and where future is not a mere appendage to the origin of being. In this
way we see both a return of the utopian impulse and a constant process of becoming, or

open-endedness in Bakhtins account of historical unfolding. What is the source of these

seemingly contradictory impulses?
In the next part, I will go back to Bakhtins early texts, and also to his later texts,
in order to trace the philosophical and theological bases for the paradox. I would argue
that Bakhtins view of history, as well as ethics, aesthetics and ontology are framed
within the triadic architectonics of Being (with binary distinctions of subject and object)
and non-being. More importantly, I would argue that this paradox is a result of his
philosophical and theological stance toward the notions of being and non-being that
persists from his early works. I would like to show that an important feature of this stance
is the way non-being is related to silence.
B. Architectonics
B.1 Problem of Being and the Unity of the deed
What is the problem of Being? In The Philosophy of the Act, the problem of
Being is the separation of the world into two parts the world of culture and the world of
life.
facing each other there are two worlds, absolutely not communicating with
each other and impervious one to the other: the world of culture and the world of
lifethe unique world in which we create, cognize, contemplate, have lived, and
die; the world in which the act of our activity is made objective and the world in
which that act uniquely and actually flows, is accomplished (TPA, 2/82-83).

The world of Being becomes possible only through binary divisions like meaning and
fact; the universal and the individual; the real and the ideal. On the basis of this we can
draw a simple triadic structure consisting of Non-Being or undifferentiated whole in the

absolute realm (A), and Being, differentiated and having at least binary opposition (B and
C) in the conditioned realm.
In this sense, Bakhtins concern, in The Philosophy of the Act, is to unite these
binary oppositions. He attempts to do so by outlining the unity of an event or deed.
The performed act concentrates, correlates and resolves within a unitary and
unique, and, this time, final context both the sense and the fact, the universal and
the individual, the real and the ideal, for everything enters into the composition
of its answerable motivation. The performed act constitutes a going out once and
for all from within possibility as such into what is once-occurrent, (Bakhtin, TPA,
29).
The architectonics in Bakhtin is the result of different types of subject-object
relationships and the multiple possibilities for the location of the speaking subject in this
configuration. An event, however, can occur only among interacting consciousnesses i.

B.2 Hero, Author and God

In his essay Author and Hero Bakhtin suggests that God is the supreme role
model or the perfect reference point for our aesthetic obligation towards others. God is
also needed for our justification, by his role as the supreme other who constitutes us in
his aesthetic activity (Coates, 23).
The hero is the one observed, is incomplete. Recognition of incompleteness
requires the author (the observer) for the gracious provision of a total aesthetic
perspective on him- or herself which the hero is incapable of achieving (Coates, 23).
God functions as the supreme, transcendent Author/Other who can comprehend
us perfectly in time and space (Coates, 23). God appears as the guarantor of all aesthetic

activity in His capacity as Author of the universe (AH, 206/179). God, in this triadic
model is located in the realm of the absolute or undifferentiated whole.
This suggests a triadic structure of Non-Being and Being (with at least two
elements, subject-object). This triad is also appears to be present in the model of Hero
(subject)-Author (other or object)-Superaddressee or God (omniscience).
B.3 Stance to Being and Non-being
Illusion of Being:
We may say that this is a Fall immanent in being, and experienced from within
it: it lies in the tendency of being towards self-sufficiency; this is the internal selfcontradiction of being [] the self-condensed self-affirmation of being in defiance of the
meaning that gave it birth (a breaking-away from its source) [] (AH, 124/109; quoted
here from Coates, 1998: 23).
But being, once it has arisen, is irredeemable, ineffaceable, indestructible: the
absolute purity and peace of non-being, now destroyed, can never be restored again.
Neither by redemption nor by nirvana (Bakhtin, 152; Coates, 150).
Bakhtins attitude toward Being and Non-being is both theological and
philosophical. The impossibility of return is a theological attitude, because it is not
logically proven. It is based on faith. The feature of non-being is one of absolute purity
and peace. A Sublime is a sublime because it can not be known or even represented.
Non-being, too is beyond knowledge, except based on faith. How do we know the
Sublime except on the basis of faith? This existential predicament, therefore, forces a
historical movement toward becoming. Unfinalizability is precisely the result of this
impossibility of restoration, neither by redemption nor by nirvana. Thus Being must

constantly evolve, in relation to human nature. It is therefore the eternal human needs
that appear as the single most significant force in the course of history. Thus Bakhtins
view of history is based on subjectivity of a human being. And what makes Bakhtin
postmodern is that this subjectivity not only depends on language for self-consciousness,
but its knowledge of the world and social contradictions determine its agency. Thus,
history is both relativized and made free. History is subject to both the creative
imagination of man, and his eternal demand for non-differentiation, and freedom.
The goodness of this judging soul is devoid of any positive content, it is
completely reduced to the judgement of being, to aversion. It is the voice of non-being
judging being. There isnt a trace of being in itself, for being has been completely
poisoned by a lie (Bakhtin, 152, Coates, 151).
B.4 Author and silence/sacrifice/reincarnation
The battle of non-being with being (with its coming into existence, with the
destruction of the silence and integrity, the completeness of non-being)the
irreparability of beingIt is impossible to tear oneself out of being. Being has no way
out (Bakhtin, 152; Coates, 150).
Silence and god related. Non-being. The author becoming Christ like self
sacrifices, he becomes silent so that the hero can speak. In this sense, Non-being is
parallel to God, and its silence is the sacrifice of authorial voice (Coates, 101).
There is a persistent connection between aesthetic activity and love, the act of
bestowing wholeness upon a person being described as one of self-sacrifice and gracious
condescension, a gift of form given freely and without preconditions on the initiative of
the transcendent Other (Coates, 25).

In Author and Hero Christ combines in Himself the two acts of self-effacement
described in Russian Orthodox though as kenotic; not only does he divest himself of
His glory to appear in the world as a sacrifice for sins (the kenotic act traditionally
ascribed to the Son), but He also acts out the Fathers kenotic role whereby He effaces
himself in the act of creation (Coates, 26). If we locate God at the place of Non-being in
the triadic structure, non-being is the result of Gods act of effacement.
However, Christ is much more for Bakhtin than a good example of authentic
living. He also demonstrates in himself how two opposites may be brought together; in
Christ the transcendent God becomes immanent (Coates, 26).
C. Implications and Analysis
Note also the process of self-consciousness in cultural evolution. The contribution
of polyglossia in the evolution of self-consciousness. The present, in its all
openendedness, taken as a starting point and center for artistic and ideological
orientation, is an enormous revolution in the creative consciousness of man (DI, 38).
Subject object relationships and issues of representation (DI, 27).

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