The Thinking Reed

The new school, following Bakhtin, formulated the fundamental conclusions of the theory of dialogue. First and foremost they formed the view that ordinary dialectics — the universal theory of development of nature and society — is inadequate for the explanation of thought. Thinking is more than dialectical, it is dialogical. It is not enough to establish the presence of ‘two sides’ to every concept, its inner contradictoriness. The contradictions of thought are much more fundamental. Creative thinking is based not on conflict between a thesis and the antithesis that this engenders, but on conflict between two initial theses, resulting in a synthesis. Consequently, all cognition is dialogical, and the cognition of culture especially so. But for dialogue, as we know, two sides are needed. It is necessary to recognize the cultural sovereignty of the past. ‘Unless we realize that,’ said Batkin in his famous lectures on Leonardo de Vinci, ‘we cannot comprehend the originality and distinctiveness of our own epoch and our own method. The present is not the absolute criterion for history…’55

New tasks arise from this. We have to understand the culture of the past as a whole, as an independent system, and development not as a process of steady advance but as a more complex accumulation of historical experience through a dialogue of cultures. In his lecture on Leonardo, Batkin declared against the traditional academic idealizing of the past, against reverential ‘rounding off and excision of contradictions. For him it was important to know not only what people thought but also how they thought, and not only to establish this but also to understand it.

Here one finds oneself recalling Bertolt Brecht, the playwright — or rather the theoretician — with his ‘alienation effect’, looking from the side, objectivizing. The method of the Moscow culturologists is based on a threefold dialectical alienation. First, alienation of one’s view of the past, purging it of stereotyped ideas, those prejudices about it which come naturally to us. The second alienation happens when, after jettisoning the most banal of our schemas, we still remain people of our own epoch and alienate the past itself, and then we sometimes see things that contemporaries did not see — when, to use Bakhtin’s own phrase, ‘we put to an alien,culture questions which it did not put to itself.’56 In this way we manage, now and then, to perceive new features in the culture of a past epoch. Thus, for example, the tragic nature of Leonardo’s personality was clear to Batkin although he himself did not realize this. Lastly we have alienation of our own time: in studying the past we begin to look in a new way at the present. The ‘alien’ culture puts its own questions to us.

Here we perceive a manifest break with the official theory of culture and society. The writers of textbooks — and, of course, we have in mind here not only manuals for students but also some ‘serious’ works in the category of official ‘education in historical materialism’ — consider that investigation is complete when events have been reduced to a sociological-dialectical schema. Here we have everything — the productive forces, the relations of production, the social factors and even, sometimes, mention of cultural and religious traditions. One thing alone is missing: living interaction, movement, process: in other words, dialectics itself. M.Ya. Gefter noted that this whole schema is

a distorted representation of the structure and logic of Marxism, in which the materialist conception of history becomes something secondary, derived from the philosophy of nature according to ‘diamat’. The true picture of the genesis of materialist dialectics is distorted; but what is even more important is that this merely instructional schema, when implanted in people’s minds, maintains the isolation of contemporary historical materialism both from dialectics and from concrete study of society in past and present alike.57

The culturologists, on the contrary, address themselves both to dialectics and to concrete study. For them scientific work begins precisely where, for the dogmatists, it stops.