Response to the Excerpt from Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Lee Crull

27 March 2000

In the excerpt from Marxism and the Philosophy of Language given in The Rhetorical Tradition, Mikhail Bakhtin discusses consciousness a lot. It is interesting that he wrote about this totality of attitudes, opinions, and sensitivities that makes up an individual under another man’s name.

Mikhail Bakhtin was born in Russia in 1895, so he was in his early twenties at the time of the Communist Revolution. He taught school, did some writing, and lectured during those revolutionary years. Bakhtin was faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church, so one of the things he lectured on during that time was theology. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin’s power grew rapidly and by the late 1920’s, religion was repressed. The State was suspicious of Bakhtin because of his religious views, and he was arrested and charged with corrupting youth. It was during these difficult years that Bakhtin borrowed the names of men more accepted in Russia’s intellectual establishment for authorship of his writings. This was not motivated by fear of State retribution according to The Rhetorical Tradition which refers to Bakhtin’s biographers, Clark and Holquist, when claiming that "Bakhtin’s willingness to publish under his friends’ names is typical of his lack of personal ambition, his generosity, and his love of practical jokes." Our text says that Bakhtin doubted he could get his own works published on sensitive subjects such as Marxism, but Marxism and the Philosophy of Language seems to have very little to do with Marxism. It is almost entirely a discussion of the philosophy of language.

Class struggle led to a revolution in Russia – to move the nation from a society with individual property-owning producers and distributors to a society in which workers possess the means of production and distribution and thus possess power. But, ultimately, the state would control production and make sure goods were shared equally. Bakhtin does not address that idea of Marxism as such, but in a roundabout way he may be wanting to discuss the role language played in the initial revolution and in the continuing "revolutionary" political rhetoric. There does not seem to be anything written in this particular work that the State would have objected to publishing, unless those in power simply did not like unsolicited advice on how to proceed with implementing their Marxist method. Be that as it may, Bakhtin opens the book by saying that "the Marxist method…cannot continue to move ahead productively without special provision for…investigation and solution" of the "problems of the philosophy of language." It was difficult for me to decipher exactly what these "problems" were and why they had to be solved before Marxism could move ahead, so then I thought perhaps Marxism was included in the title and the opening paragraphs to make the purpose of the writing seem to be the furtherance of the socialist society when in actuality, it was simply a chance for Bakhtin to expound upon his language theories.

One problem Bakhtin discusses is the "problem of consciousness." The dilemma is this: does each person have consciousness that generates ideas which are transmitted via signs? or do signs come into a mind and create consciousness? According to Bakhtin, this problem has created difficulty in psychology and the study of ideologies. He feels that consciousness has become like an asylum where some psychologists want to stash "all unresolved problems" and "all objectively irreducible residues." For Bakhtin, the answer to the problem is obvious. He says that "the only possible objective definition of consciousness is a sociological one" and that ideas "cannot be derived from consciousness." Ideas exist "in the special, social material of signs created by man."

So what are these signs? Bakhtin’s theory is that ideas have meaning because of "signs." In fact, without signs, we would have no ideas. Signs can be artistic-symbolic images, consumer goods, scientific formulas, etc. "Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too." The very best "sign" is a word because it is the purest and most sensitive medium of social intercourse. The word is a neutral sign and can be useful for many types of ideas – religious, ethical, scientific. So, getting back to the topic of consciousness, Bakhtin says that "consciousness could have developed only by having at its disposal material that was pliable and expressible by bodily means – and the word was exactly that kind of material."

Bakhtin also discusses how words are used for "inner speech" and for verbal interaction. With verbal interaction, a word is "a two-sided act." It belongs just as much to the listener as it does to the speaker. Social relations of both the speaker and hearer determine the meaning of a word. The immediate social situation in which words are uttered as well social backgrounds of participants all combine to give words meaning. A person can describe an "I-experience" or a "we-experience." Bakhtin says that as an "I-experience" goes to the extreme limit of "I"-ness, it goes toward extinction – presumably because the "signs" are so specific to one individual that others cannot assimilate them into their consciousness in any meaningful way. When that happens, the I-experience "relinquishes all its potentialities" because it does not have the reliability and firmness of "social roots."

In discussing the "we-experience" and different ideological levels, Bakhtin gives an interesting example using hunger. The sign hunger has an array of meanings that produce a wide variety of results. Depending on interpretation of the sign, hunger causes humility, shame, enviousness, resignation, or protest.

Theme also influences how a sign is interpreted. Bakhtin advises that by using the word theme, he does not mean something like topic – but something like "thematic unity." This may be unintentional on Bakhtin’s part, but it is a good example of how a word can be "two-sided," because without his footnote, I would definitely have been thinking of theme as synonymous with topic. Even after his clarification, it is obvious that we have grown from different social roots because I have no sign filed away in my consciousness to match up with "thematic unity." In short – I still do not know exactly what point he is trying to make here, but Bakhtin sums it up by saying, "There is no theme without meaning and no meaning without theme." Does that make it clearer?

What does seem clear is that meaning gets distorted when utterances are taken out of context. "The theme of an utterance is concrete – as concrete as the historical instant to which the utterance belongs. Only an utterance taken in its full, concrete scope as an historical phenomenon possesses a theme." That is why it seemed important to include some of the background information on Mikhail Bakhtin, the man. It would have been less meaningful to respond only to words without responding