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phy dissolves Bakhtin's straightforward use of political categories,
which he employs in his mature work, back into the metaphysical
generalities of his earliest writing. Thus in discussing the
Freudianism
book, Clark and Holquist write :
This observation that economic factors of being determine con–
sciousness sounds at first like the most orthodox kind of
a priori
Marxist thinking brought to bear on the specific topic of lan–
guage, but it reads just as easily as a restatement of Bakhtin's
thesis in
The Architectonics
that human existence is the dual in–
teraction between a world that is already there (uze stavsee bytie)
and a mind that is conjoined (priobscen) to this world through
the activity (postupok) of enacting values. . . . Beyond these
general meanings, there is no specifically or exclusively Marxist
significance in such terms as "socioeconomic base" or "class–
groundedness. "
What special pleading is going on here?
If
"socioeconomic base"
and "classgroundedness" are not specifically Marxist terms and used
as such by Bakhtin, one wonders why not. Bakhtin is even called "a
non-Marxist," yet there is no evidence that Bakhtin was not at least
as influenced by Marxism as was Walter Benjamin. What purpose is
served to suggest that
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,
written
with his colleague Volosinov, is a "myth of significance,""a story of a
dying and reviving God," when in fact it is a fairly technical socio–
linguistic discussion about
Marxism and the philosophy of language?
Unfortunately this decision by the authors to dissociate Bakhtin
from his Marxism carries over into the question of "the disputed
texts," the vexed question of authorship surrounding
The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship
(credited to Medvedev);
Freudianism: A
Critical Sketch
and
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
(credited to
Volosinov); and three other articles. "Unfortunately, there is nothing
on paper to resolve this controversy once and for all," write Clark
and Holquist, "no account of how and by whom these texts were
written can ever be indisputable."
In
1975, when Bakhtin assented to
the preparation of a document clarifying the matter and stating that
he wrote the disputed books and the articles concerned, he refused to
sign it when it was offered to him.
Clark and Holquist are then largely thrown back upon internal
evidence to arbitrate over authorship, and here they work on the
assumption that the less directly Marxist the language, the more
