The Thinking Reed

Bakhtin’s basic principles are simple enough: ‘Other people’s consciousnesses cannot be contemplated, analysed, defined as objects, as things — one can commune with them only through dialogue.’52 One can understand a person only through conversation with him, putting one’s own questions to him and answering his. But this applies also to works of art, to philosophical treatises past and present — to culture in general, as a sphere of subjective activity. In ‘studying’ our interlocutor through dialogue, however, we at the same time get to know ourselves. Furthermore, the measure of our self-knowledge corresponds to the depth of our penetration into the soul of ‘the other’. This, strictly speaking, is the departure point of the entire culturological school.

It must be appreciated that the concept ‘culture’ is used here in a rather broad sense. In his lecture on Bakhtin, Bibler defined it as a sort of historical ‘sediment’. Culture is everything we have inherited from past epochs, from social formations that no longer exist. To it belong philosophical works, art, traditions, the people’s historical experience, science and the level of technology that has been attained. In so far as all this can be looked at and studied as a whole, we can speak of ‘culture’. This approach makes the theory of culture a very important element in sociohistorical theory. It is quite natural that the culturological school should be in resolute opposition to the official ‘received wisdom’, the whole essence of which comes down to the ‘fitting’ of all historical facts into a previously given schema.

The culturological school could, broadly speaking, be called Marxist-Bakhtinist. However, for some of its representatives, such as V. Bibler and A.Ya. Gurevich, Marx is perhaps given first place, whereas for L. Batkin the influence of Bakhtin is of central methodological importance. Very important in Gurevich’s development of new historical and culturological ideas was the thought of the French historian Marc Bloch, and for Bibler this role was played by Hegel’s philosophy. All these different sources can be brought into unity through an overall critical-dialectical and, above all, historical approach to culture. The special role of Marx is defined for the Moscow culturologists53 as, first and foremost, that he began ‘the transition to a historical science of a new type’.54 At the same time, despite the differences between individual writers, the whole school is clearly working for the enrichment of method.

It is one of the ironies of history that it should be the Christian Bakhtin, a deeply religious man quite alien to Marxism, who has had an immensely stimulating effect on the development and revival of Marxist dialectics in the USSR. In 1936 Trotsky wrote that although everyone in our country considers himself a Marxist, not a single Marxist book gets published. That was true also of the 1960s, at least as far as the first half of that decade was concerned. The presence of quotations and references in general schemas was in no way proof of the flourishing of Marxist thought, because the most important thing — namely, method — remained in oblivion.

In order to understand the methodological revolution brought about in the sphere of culturology one must compare Bakhtin with E.V. Il'enkov. Both men worked for the revival of dialectics, which had been reduced in the textbooks to a collection of examples (something to which Engels himself objected), and for its transformation into a way of thinking. Whereas Bakhtin’s dialectics were rooted in the New Testament, Il'enkov’s goes back to Marx’s Capital. The culturologists of the seventies — being of a different generation, a different education, a different training — did not share Bakhtin’s religious ideas, although they seized upon his scientific conclusions. A demand arose for a methodological ‘correction’ of Bakhtin’s philosophy ‘in accordance with Marx’. (Here a role was played by Il'enkov’s works, which were examples of serious scientific thinking.)