Two Routes to Concreteness in the Work of the Bakhtin Circle

Craig Brandist

In 1918 the young Georg Lukcs published an obituary of the last major Baden School neo-Kantian Emil Lask in which the latters varied work was commended for being underlain by an essential common drive [Drang]: the drive to concreteness.1 This drive was especially problematic, however, in the work of thinkers overtly committed to neo-Kantianism, a doctrine that was in its own time a byword for abstruseness and academic abstraction. Just how concrete could a neo-Kantian idealism become without abandoning its core insistence that the world is produced by indwelling categories of mind? Lask pursued this problem with a thoroughness unmatched by any other German neo-Kantian, and in doing so he became an important influence on, among others, Lukcs, Max Weber, and Martin Heidegger. This article discusses the prevalence of the same drive in the varied work of those Russian champions of neo-Kantianism, the Bakhtin Circle, where concreteness is invoked so frequently that it almost begins to take on the character of a mantra. The case of the Bakhtin Circle is especially illustrative because the drive to concreteness, which all members of the Circle shared, resulted in a significant difference of opinion about the extent to which the central theses of neo-Kantianism can be salvaged. Like Lask, Bakhtin was particularly keen to maintain the core of neoKantian ideas, while Voloshinov and, following behind him, Medvedev, were much less averse to breaking with the central project of German idealism itself. In each case the Brentanian notion of intentionality, the doctrine that consciousness is always consciousness of something, plays a central role. Consciousness exists in acts directed towards objects, existent or otherwise, that are given to consciousness. Brentano and his followers were invariably anti-Kantian, and they were extremely hostile to the central tenet of neo-Kantian idealism, that objects of consciousness are produced from categories dwelling in a tran1

Georg Lukcs, Emil Lask. Ein Nachruf, Kant-Studien, 22 (1918), 349-70, 350.

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scendental consciousness in general (Bewusstsein berhaupt). While it is far from certain that Brentanian and Kantian principles are incompatible at every level, there is no doubt that any attempt to integrate the notion of intentionality into neo-Kantianism was going to threaten the basis of neo-Kantianism as such.2 As Gabriel Motzkin notes, Lasks attempt to carry such a project through to its logical conclusion ultimately led to the destruction of the neo-Kantian empire from within.3 The Bakhtinian project led in precisely this direction, and this article examines the way in which the work of the Circle shows distinct and ultimately incompatible responses to the crisis of the empire. Revising neo-Kantianism: Ernst Cassirer and Emil Lask The abstract, or what Bakhtin terms the theoretist, character of neoKantianism derived from two fundamental and interrelated features. The first was a principled opposition to all distinctions between cognition and perception, and the second was an identification of subjectivity with the system of objectifying functions that have their true being in cultural documents. According to neo-Kantian principles, nothing is given and everything is posited in an act of subjective spontaneity: objects are constituted from transcendental categories dwelling in pure consciousness. Summing up the philosophical project of Hermann Cohen, the leader of the Marburg School, Ernst Cassirer noted that any appeal to a merely given should fall aside; in place of every supposed foundation in things there should enter the pure foundations of thinking, of willing, of artistic and religious consciousness.4 Though seeking to broaden his own enquiry beyond the trichotomy of the Kantian Critiques, Cassirer, the last major Marburg neo-Kantian, remained wedded to the neo-Kantian project of deriving the transcendental preconditions of the formations in which the objective spirit consists and exists and dealt only with a universal subject devoid of practical limitations.5 Cassirer drew close to phenomenology in the 1920s, when he embarked on his great project The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, presenting a descriptive account of forms of culture in which he attempts to discern the essential structures of linguistic, mythical, and scientific thought. In the final completed volume of

2 Liliana Albertazzi, From Kant to Brentano, in Albertazzi et al (eds.), The School of Franz Brentano (Dordrecht, 1996), 423-63. 3 Gabriel Motzkin, Emil Lask and the Crisis of Neo-Kantianism. The Rediscovery of the Primordial World, Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale, 94 (1989), 171-90, 173. 4 Quoted in Jrgen Habermas, The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers, Philosophical-Political Profiles tr. F. G. Lawrence (London, 1983), 21-43, 26. See also Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen, tr. John Denton (New York, 1997), 89. 5 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, tr. Ralph Mannheim (London, 1957), 57.

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this work (1929) Cassirer argued that the representative function of language comes to dominate the whole of language and he claims to be in complete agreement with Karl Bhlers use of this term, which had actually been based on the notion of intentionality presented in Husserls Logische Untersuchungen (1900, 1913).6 Cassirer even praises Husserls revision of Brentanos theory of intentionality in the Untersuchungen and the Ideen (1913), presenting these works as a continuum inevitably leading to Husserls transcendental turn.7 For Cassirer, Brentanos dualism of physical and psychical phenomena inevitably required the replacement of a real psychic subject with a universal subject (Subjekt berhaupt) if it is not to fall into a mythology of activities. Cassirer goes much further toward re-establishing a neo-Kantian abstraction here than Husserl was to do even at his most Kantian moments, and in so doing he exacerbates the very monologic notion of meaning-conferring acts for which Bhler specifically criticized Husserl. As Fritz Kaufmann puts it: Without annihilating altogether the duality involved in any relation as such, he [Cassirer] pushes it into the direction of a mystical union, where nothing happens to the soul that did not happen in it eternally, and where the I and the Thou are poles of movement in which neither of them has the status of an independent value.8 In place of a theory of intersubjectivity in language use, Cassirer reestablished a neo-Kantian consciousness in general, striving to depict an ultimately unknowable empirical world. This did not, however, prevent the Brentanian psychologist and theorist of language Karl Bhler from praising Cassirers incorporation of an intentional moment into his account of symbolic forms. For the former this reform of neo-Kantianism simply did not go far enough. Intentionality was swamped by an idealist epistemologism which even denied all indirect mediated coordinations between language and states of affairs (Sachverhalte) subsisting in the extra discursive world.9 For Voloshinov, who translated both Bhler and Cassirer into Russian, Cassirers work inaugurated a new period of neo-Kantianism in which the word stands as a third realm between the cognising psycho-physical subject and the empirical actuality surrounding him on the one hand, and the world of transcendental, a priori,

6 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (hereafter PSF, III), tr. Charles Hendel (New Haven, Conn., 1957). 7 PSF, III, 110n4, 196-98. This interpretation was, however, vehemently resisted by the Munich phenomenologists at the time; Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, Against Idealism: Johannes Daubert vs. Husserls Ideas I, Review of Metaphysics, 39 (1985), 76393. 8 Fritz Kaufmann, Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology in P.A. Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, Ill., 1949), 800-54, 847. 9 Karl Bhler, Theory of Language, tr. D. F. Goodwin (Amsterdam, 1990), 48, 215-16.

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formal being on the other.10 Voloshinov is here developing Cassirers ideas further in a phenomenological direction than the German would have countenanced, at least at this time.11 The Circles debt to Cassirer has now been widely recognized,12 but its relationship to Lask is unclear. Lask was certainly known in Russia at the time: S.A. Alekseev (Askoldov) commented on Lasks attempt to combine critical philosophy and empiricism in his book-length critique of neo-Kantianism in 1914, while the legal philosophers Bogdan Kistiakovskii and Sergius Hessen had first hand knowledge of Lasks work during their studies in Germany.13 Bakhtins close friend Matvei Kagan may also have had contact with Lasks work in Germany at the same time, while Pavel Medvedev probably studied Lasks work on law as a student at the neo-Kantian dominated law faculty of Petrograd University. Bakhtin himself was clearly familiar with the work of the Baden School, having occasion to refer to both Windelband and Rickert and to plunder Broder Christansens 1909 (Russian translation 1911) Philosophie der Kunst without acknowledgment in his essay on Content, Material and Form of 1924.14 Whether Bakhtin actually knew the work of Lask is, however, less significant than the parallel intellectual moves made by these two neo-Kantian thinkers in their respective attempts to concretize abstract idealism. While maintaining the neo-Kantian opposition between fact and value, Lask departed from his forebears arguing that the former is divided into realms of psychic experience and a given content of experience. As Motzkin puts it, Lask reinterprets the neo-Platonic notion of two realms in such a way as to draw the fact-value distinction through all of reality.15 Lask here drew upon Hermann Lotzes fundamental opposition between existents and validities (Geltungen), arguing that the a priori constitutes a separate, if rather shadowy realm from that of existents, but it is no longer formal in the Kantian sense. Fact and value remain distinct but no longer constitute the mutually impervious worlds of life and culture that so disturbed the early Bakhtin.16 Instead, they are elements
10 V. N. Voloshinov, Lichnoe delo V.N. Voloshinova in Dialog Karnaval Khronotop, 2 (1995), 70-99, 87. 11 See J. M. Krois, Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism and Metaphysics, Revue de Mtaphysique et Morale, 4 (1992), 437-53. 12 Craig Brandist, Bakhtin, Cassirer and Symbolic Forms, Radical Philosophy, 85 (1997), 20-27; Brian Poole, Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtins Carnival Messianism, South Atlantic Quarterly, 97 (1998), 579-98. 13 S. A. Alekseev (Askoldov) Mysl i deistvitelnost (Moscow, 1914), 61-71; S. I. Hessen, Prilozhenie in Izbrannye sochineniia (Moscow, 1999), 707-82, 729. 14 Ladislav Matejka, Deconstructing Bakhtin, in C. A. Mihailescu and W. Hamarneh, Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology and Poetics (Toronto, 1996), 257-66; A. B. Muratov, Fenomenologicheskaia estetika nachala XX veka i teoriia slovesnosti (B.M. Engelgardt) (St. Petersburg, 1996), 10ff. 15 Motzkin, Emil Lask, 178. 16 M. M. Bakhtin, K filosofii postupka (hereafter KFP), in Raboty 1920x godov (Kiev, 1994), 9-68, 11; Toward a Philosophy of the Act (hereafter TPA), tr. V. Liapunov (Austin, 1995), 2.

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of experience yoked together in intentional acts. Where for Brentano and his followers consciousness is always intentional, that is consciousness of something, for Lask there is no validity that would not be a validity-with-regard-to, a validity-in-respect-of, a validity-of [hingelten].17 Intentionality is thus intentional validating, which is trans-subjective and requires an object beyond validity. Forms are meaningful only in relation to something, in the Urverhltnis (primal relation) of form and material, as Schuhmann and Smith note: To him [Lask], the two realms are rather two incomplete elements which stand to each other as the material on the one handan underlying stuff, substrate or carrier of propertiesto an accidental form or shape or structure on the other. The two elements together make up just one world, i.e. precisely that world which is given in experience. The experienced world is thus always some compound of a given substrate (matter) and a posited form, but this form can never exist as some separable, semi-Platonic theoretical realm of forms in isolation from matter: Sense or meaning, therefore, is not radically and rigorously transcendent to subjectivity as is the object of sensation. The world to which judgments refer is no longer the transcendent realm of things as experienced, but rather a layer of quasi-transcendence founded thereon. Validity is therefore also an object of experience, it is only when subjects turn to matter that objective validity can be actualized, but at the same time validity is irreducible to matter and may be detached from empirical acts. Lask was now on the border of breaking with neo-Kantianism as such, as he recognized in a letter to Husserl in December 1911: When mentioning your influence upon me as to my view concerning the relation between subject and object, I may perhaps specify this by hinting at the fact that I make the type of intentionality you defend take the place of all [neo-Kantian] notions of consciousness-in-general. Subjectivity is itself a real part of the matter to which validity relates rather than the transcendental principle still maintained by Cassirer, while meaning and value depend upon acts which relate physical and psychic phenomena.18
17 Quoted in Steven Galt Crowell, Emil Lask: Aletheiology and Ontology, Kant-Studien, 87 (1996), 69-88, 79. Hingelten literally means to be valid, or to hold there. 18 Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, Two Idealisms: Lask and Husserl, Kant-Studien, 83 (1993), 448466, 455-56. It is important to note that the only book of Husserl with which Lask was familiar was the Investigations, and so the theory of intentionality adopted by Lask is that outlined there.

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The proximity of this development to the Bakhtin Circles point of departure is quite uncanny. Like Lask, the early Bakhtin also sought to reverse neoKantianisms detachment of theoretical forms of a judgment from the unity of the actual act-deed of its realisation by moving toward phenomenology.19 While maintaining a fundamental split between fact and value, Bakhtin treats the former as comprising moments of a given content of experience, eschewed by neoKantianism, and psychic experience. The self-sufficiency of the neo-Kantian realm of validity was rejected: the experienced world is a compound of given content and objective validity. In the Author and Hero essay from the mid 1920s Bakhtin describes lived experience as a trace of meaning [smysl] in being, a relationship to meaning and to an object.20 This intentional relationship does not change significantly even when Bakhtins focus shifts from ethical to discursive acts as can perhaps most clearly be discerned in some notes Bakhtin wrote in 1961 dealing with the utterance as a meaning-bestowing act: The utterance is never a reflection or expression of something given and already existing outside it. It always creates something that before it never was, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, besides it always has an attitude toward a value (towards the true, the good, the beautiful etc). But something created is always created from something given (language, an observed phenomenon of actuality, an experienced feeling, the speaking subject himself, prepared in this world view etc). Everything given is transformed into what is created.21 The something given is but the raw material out of which a new object of knowledge (the world as meaningful) can be created, but in a public world it is always already a compound of matter and validity. Both the realms of validity and the given substrate are trans-subjective, but so, too, is the compound that is the experienced world bequeathed to each subject. Each object of cognition is created as absolutely new and unrepeatable since a new psycho-physical compound is brought into being and bequeathed as the newly given for other subjects. Thus, the world as a psycho-physical phenomenon in which the realms of

KFP, 15; TPA, 7. M. M. Bakhtin, Avtor i geroi v estetichekoi deiatelnost (hereafter AG), in Raboty, 69256, 180-81; Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (hereafter AH), in Art and Answerability, tr. V. Liapunov (Austin, 1995), 4-256, 115-16. 21 M. M. Bakhtin, 1961 god. Zametki, in Sobranie sochinenii T.5 (Moscow, 1996), 32960, 330.
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validity and matter are mutually involved (what Lask called Bewandtnis)22 is constantly being co-created through the incursion of mutually implicated subjectivities. This allows Bakhtin to maintain a link with Marburg neoKantianism, in which religion is dissolved into ethics and the co-creation of the world is an unending task of striving for a transcendent truth, Cohens Messianic Ursprungsprinzip, untouched by all subjectivity. Intentionality remains central to Bakhtins theory of the novel even though the Brentanian terminology is more oblique in the later work. In the 1929 study Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, Bakhtin speaks of the the directly intentional word that is directed at its object [predmet] and the object [obektnoe] word which is also an object [predmet] of an alien authorial intention. This terminology is, however, replaced in the 1963 edition, from which the English translation is taken: the word intentional (intentsionalnoe) is replaced with fully-signifying (polnoznachnoe) and intention (intentsiia) with directedness (napravlennost).23 The terminological change is already present in the 1934 essay Discourse in the Novel, where Bakhtin explicitly terms the directedness of the word on its object as the word intention.24 As for Lask, however, intentionality provides only a concept of givenness or evidence which allows us to see how logical meaning is present in pre-theoretical experience.25 The Novel in a Fallen World For Bakhtin and Lask objects in themselves are a lost paradise from which humanity was banished by the original sin of knowledge. The object has always already been defined (in Lasks terms, it has already been made the object of intentional acts and therefore transformed through the incursion of subjectivity). It is therefore no longer what it originally was but a bequeathed psycho-physical complex. Bakhtin makes a very similar statement: Only the mythical Adam, approaching a still unspoken-about, virginal world, the solitary Adam, could actually and fully escape this interorientation with alien discourses in the object. This is not available to
Emil Lask, Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kagetorienlehre in Gesamelte Schriften (3 vols.; Tbingen, 1923-24), II, 1-282, 69. 23 M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva/poetiki Dostoevskogo (Kiev, 1994), 87, 403 (hereafter PTD); Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Manchester, 1984), 188-89 (hereafter PDP). Given the problematic status of the existing translations of the work of the Circle I will be using my own translations and indicating both the Russian and English editions. 24 M. M. Bakhtin, Slovo v romane (hereafter SR), Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow, 1975), 72-233, 91; Discourse in the Novel (hereafter DN), tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, 1981), 259-22, 277. 25 Steven Galt Crowell, Lask, Heidegger, and the Homelessness of Logic, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 23 (1992), 222-39, 231.
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It is important to note here that the interorientation is in [v] rather than about [o] the object. Bakhtin takes the Biblical metaphor further than Lask, probably responding to the acmeists foregrounding the topos of Adam in literary debates of the time.27 For Bakhtin, the object is fraught with inner contradictions, while surrounded by a Babylonian mixture of national and social languages each of which is equally (in)capable of being a language of truth, and each of which is equally relative, objectual and limited.28 Logical contradictions permeate the object itself, while the languages in which the logical forms are embodied each becomes an object itself, making up a constituent moment of the experienced world. Indeed, sense [smysl] itself exists only in its embodiment in the material of language, the sign, in the form of an utterance. In so doing the word becomes meaningful-valid [znachimyi] and so a given material for future creation. In this post-lapsarian world even word-objects are unknowable in themselves, and while words are always overpopulated with the intentions of others, the speaker or writer always maintains a loophole (lazeika), that is the reservation for oneself of the possibility of changing the final, ultimate sense of ones word.29 The object, whether a word or anything else, is not the object as given but as intended, i.e., transformed through the incursion of subjectivity. This is an operation that is as much destructive as constructive, as becomes especially clear in Bakhtins essays on the novel from the 1930s and 1940s. Here, the novelist is a self-consciously post-lapsarian critical thinker who carries out a comic operation of dismemberment30 on the object. Lask does not foreground a comic element, but neither does Bakhtin in the 1920s. In his book on Dostoevsky of 1929 Bahktin still treats comic discourses such as parody as but a subdivision of the various modes of indirect discourse, which are simultaneously specific modes of turning a given discourse into an object of knowledge. While there are many subtle variations highlighted by Bakhtins typology, each in one way or another divides the whole sense it comes across into simpler and simpler significative elements, and every statement into more and more elementary stylistic and linguistic components.31 The thrust of this
SR, 92; DN, 279. Cf. Lask, Die Lehre vom Urteil in Gesamelte Schriften, II, 415-26. Michael Eskin, Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelstam and Celan (Oxford, 2000), 126-27. 28 SR, 92, 178; DN, 279, 367. 29 PTD, 136; PDP, 233. 30 M. M. Bakhtin, Epos i roman in Voprosy, 477-83, 466; Epic and Novel, in Dialogic, 3-40, 24. 31 Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz, A Type of Reflection and the Literary Genre in E. Czaplejewicz and M. Melanowicz, Reflection on Literature in Eastern and Western Cultures (Warsaw, 1990), 7-50, 46.
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argument is very close to Lasks account of intentionality as the breaking up of the original unity of the object and piecing it back together by means of secondary meaning structures, or concepts.32 This spirit permeates all critical genres, which are not concerned with grasping wholes but creating meaning by fitting forms precisely to the fragmented given. As Lask puts it at one stage, it is not the intact objects which become the matter for the form of judgment; what enters into the judgment is only their dismembered and isolated elements.33 Such too are the objects of the aesthetic activity of Bakhtins novelist as opposed to the epic poet in the Epic and Novel essay of 1941. Bakhtins Ethics While sharing much in the sphere of epistemology, in the sphere of ethics Bakhtin and Lask are quite different thinkers. Bakhtins ethics have their roots in Cohens messianic (and quasi-juridical) ethics of co-creation adapted in accordance with his own Christian convictions. Like Cohens aesthetic of pure feeling, Bakhtins aesthetic activity is an act of love which elevates man above the sensuous longing for particulars. Unlike empathy (Einfhlung), but like sympathy (gleichsam Erfrlung), this pure feeling is double-sided, and this is perhaps what led Bakhtin to build his own modality of authorship on the basis of another, more concrete and Christian account of sympathy, that of Scheler.34 Bakhtin divided knowledge into reflection on the subjects turn toward being (the natural sciences) on the one hand, and the subjects teleological orientation toward other juridical persons and ultimately the semi-divine superaddressee (nadadresat) on the other (the human sciences).35 Lask, on the other hand, argued that all knowledge is knowledge of an objective and transcendent psycho-physical substrate, and this is as true of ethical-juridical knowledge as of any other type: The specifically juridical attitude towards reality is made up of two mutually pervading elements. The real substratum is transformed into a spiritual world of pure meanings, under the guidance of teleological relationships; at the same time the totality of what may be experienced is unravelled into mere partial contents.36

Crowell, Lask, Heidegger, 232. Quoted in Schuhmann and Smith, Two Idealisms, 459. 34 sthetik des reinen Gefhls (Berlin, 1923), 185-86. 35 See Craig Brandist, The Hero at the Bar of Eternity: The Bakhtin Circles Juridical Theory of the Novel, Economy and Society, 30 (2001), 208-28. 36 Emil Lask, Legal Philosophy tr. Kurt Wiek in The Legal Philosophy of Lask, Radbruch, and Dabin (Cambridge, 1950).
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This unravelling is paradigmatic of cognition as such. For Lask the will to cognition is irrevocably a negative faculty of subjectivity ... which leads to an atomization of the original object into isolated bits and pieces.37 Thus, in Lask there is nothing akin to the Marburgian unending task of holiness that guides knowledge through jurisprudence as the mathematics of the human sciences. Instead, law is intentional validity, the most formal structure within the teleological web of the typical, social value or cultural meaning.38 As Motzkin puts it: Lask argued that the pervasion of subjectivity by objectivity and the inaccessibility of the objective to the subjects act implied that, as in the Neoplatonist model, two ways of access exist, where access for Lask meant access to the world beyond subjective theory. One way of access was that of Intellect, a reflection of the Neoplatonist reversion to Being. The other way, reflecting the Neoplatonist reversion to the One, was that of experiencing (Erleben). Since the access is to the world and not to God, experience replaces the Neoplatonists Love.39 Even though Bakhtin follows Scheler in making ethical value an object of intuition, this essence is in no sense empirical or typical but an object of the intentional act of love.40 For Bakhtin as for Cassirer before him,41 the cognitive will to formations is a creative and ethically progressive faculty that facilitates a neo-Hegelian sublation of being. The appearance of consciousness in the world leads the given to cease simply being and to begin to be in itself and for itself, to be enriched and transformed. What is given to us, and thus what can be known, is something absolutely new supra-being [nadbytie]. In this supra-being there is already not just a kernel of being, rather, all being exists in it and for it. The notion of freedom, and thus the ethic that informs this is exclusively the juridical freedom of the witness and judge who can change the meaning [smysl] of being (recognise, justify etc) but must leave the universe unchanged materially, so to speak. It is the relative freedom that remains in being and changes the make-up of being but not its meaning [smysl] that can become a violent force in Lasks sense, not the absolute freedom of witness and judge.42 What Bakhtin seems to have in mind here is
Schuhmann and Smith, Two Idealisms, 62. Gillian Rose, The Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford, 1984), 31. 39 Motzkin, Emil Lask, 177. 40 V. J. McGill, Schelers Theory of Sympathy and Love, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2 (1942), 267-91, 281. 41 PSF, I, 63-65. 42 M. M. Bakhtin Iz zapiski 1970-1971 godov, in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1979), 336-60, 341; From Notes Made in 1970-71, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern McGee (Austin, 1986), 132-58, 137.
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Cassirers distinction between efficient and formative energy, the latter leading to the development of symbolic forms and that holds back the blind stream of life and in so doing develops a sense of ethical responsibility.43 Science for Lask plays a similarly juridical role to the witness and judge here, with the philosopher investigating the roots of such formative activity and holding back the stream of life. As the most systematic and thorough literary agent of parody, Bakhtins novel is undoubtedly the most fundamentally destructive of the given world. However, the novelist is engaged in aesthetic activity, that is the consolidation of an object of aesthetic knowledge from the fragments of the given world through the loving imposition of form. The fragments are raised to validity by being enclosed in and caressed by intentional form. As the early Bakhtin put it, in a truly problematic image, it is in this act that the feminine passivity and the naivet of available being becomes beautiful.44 The novels positive project is ultimately the construction of a system of images of languages, but those images are but shards that can never reconstruct the original languages the novelist has dismembered let alone the extra-discursive world they naively sought to grasp. Rather, they reflect but a tiny corner of the world and compel us to guess at and grasp for a world beyond their mutually reflecting aspects that is wider, more multi-planar and multi-purviewed [mnogokrugozornyi] than would be available to a single language, a single mirror.45 The world reflected in the shards is not, however, the transcendent realm of things as experienced. This is irrevocably lost. As it was for Lask, it is a layer of quasitranscendence founded thereon by intentional acts. Voloshinov and Medvedev Bakhtins colleagues and friends Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev drew on different resources to concretize their thought and were much more prepared to shift firmly into neo-Brentanian territory. This was perhaps partly due to their Marxist conviction, but also because they specialized in areas then more or less untouched by Bakhtin himself: contemporary psychology, the philosophy of language and German art scholarship. For these figures the principled unknowability of objects themselves is by no means secure. The crucial concept maintained by both of Bakhtins colleagues, but absent from Bakhtins own work, is refraction, a concept which owes something to the reflection theory of knowledge developed by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism but which also draws heavily from Gestalt theory.
43 Ernst Cassirer, Spirit and Life in Contemporary Philosophy, in P. A. Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, Ill., 1949), 857-80, 868-69. 44 AG, 197; AH, 136. 45 SR, 226; DN, 414-15.

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Gestalt theory appealed to the various members of the Circle for a number of reasons. Some of the earliest work on Gestalt phenomena had been carried out by the Wrzburg School (Klpe, Bhler, Ach, et al.). This was well received by both main schools of neo-Kantianism and was often viewed as being an experimental verification of phenomenology. This made it philosophically acceptable to the more idealist members of the Circle like Bakhtin and Kagan, while the Wrzburgers egalitarian model of consciousness and mode of operating undoubtedly reinforced their appeal among the socialistic thinkers who predominated in the Circle.46 From 1925 until the reactological debate of 1931 Soviet psychologists were suggesting that Gestalt theory is an ally in the Marxist reform of psychology. The Circle gathered around Lev Vygotskii promoted these ideas particularly strongly as representing a holistic, monistic, dialectical, and reactological alternative to both idealist subjectivism and mechanical materialism.47 Like Vygotsky, Voloshinov presented nascent Marxist psychology as a specific type of objective psychology, Marxism itself as a materialistic monism, and insisted upon the interactive basis of the individual psyche. In Freudianism, Voloshinov cites behaviorism, Kornilovs reactology and Pavlovs reflexology as variants of objective psychology, while in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language the same label is applied to post-Brentanian theory (functional psychology) and neo-Kantianism. Meanwhile, Gestalt theory had been introduced into literary scholarship by the European Formalist Oskar Walzel, in a series of articles that were translated into Russian after the Revolution on the initiative of the literary scholar Viktor Zhirmunskii. Medvedev who, like Bakhtin, had considerable respect for Zhirmunskii, was a specialist in precisely this area, and enthusiastically endorses the notion of Gestaltqualitt as understood in European formalism.48 Gestalt theory integrated a type of aesthetic vision into a scientific worldview without the connotations of organicism and nationalism that it had acquired in the work of, for example, Wundt and Spengler and indeed the philosophical anthropology of Scheler. The Frankfurt School Marxist Max Horkheimer welcomed the idea as an acceptable alternative to Schelers Platonistic and feudal vocabulary of order, while Khler, who was specifically praised by
Martin Kusch, Psychological Knowledge: A Social History and Philosophy (London, 1999), 89-91, 114-23. 47 See Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890-1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (Cambridge, 1998), 291-99; Eckart Scheerer, Gestalt Psychology in the Soviet Union: I. The Period of Enthusiasm, Psychological-Research, 41 (1980), 113-32; George Windholz, Pavlov and the demise of the influence of Gestalt psychology in the Soviet Union, Psychological Research, 46 (1984), 187-206. Ren van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis (Oxford, 1991), 155-80. 48 P. N. Medvedev, Formalnyi metod v literaturovedenii (hereafter FML) in M. M. Bakhtin, Tetralogiia (Moscow, 1998), 110-297, 160; P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (hereafter FMLS), tr. A.J. Wehrle (Baltimore, 1978), 49.
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Vygotskii in Russia, worked out a new basis for Schelers contention that the givenness of both ourselves and other people in experience requires no conclusion by analogy or mystical empathy feelings, but is as immediate as any perception we have.49 Thus, Gestalt theory made it possible to adopt an aesthetic orientation in science and a Schelerian typology of intersubjective relations without subscribing to Schelers Platonism, to a reactionary cultural pessimism or to the neo-Kantian principle of the unknowability of the empirical world. Central to a Gestalt is the principle that a certain articulated whole is grasped prior to any of its constituent parts, and that the whole is dependent upon a certain correlation between an autonomous formation and a percipient. This notion was developed in a number of different ways within Gestalt theory, some that had neo-Kantian inclinations and others that were resolutely antiKantian. In the first variant the autonomous formation is rendered an unknowable thing in itself and the Gestalt an intentional object. An exponent of this mode of thinking was Cassirers influential cousin and friend, the neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). Goldstein was heavily to influence Cassirers later philosophy of the basis phenomena of human experience, and his influence was apparent as early as the final volume of PSF, on which Bakhtin was to draw in later years.50 As Ash notes, the object to which Goldsteins language referred was not the organism-environment relation as an objective structure but the organism and its functioning alone.51 This was quite easily transposed into Cassirers philosophy of the universal subject. An opposed trend within the Gestalt tradition was that represented by the Berlin psychologists Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka who viewed Gestalten as naturally existing entitiesindeed as the primary and most straightforward objects of presentationin a way which would make them capable of investigation within a naturalistic framework.52 This philosophically realist aspect was specifically praised by A. R. Luria, in perhaps the most influential Marxist philosophical journal of the time, for ensuring a strictly determinist worldview and thus being quite acceptable to Marxism.53 Between these extremes was the type of Gestalt theory developed by the followers of Alexius Meinong and the so-called Graz School.54 In Marxism
Ash, Gestalt Psychology, 305, 258. Krois, Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism and Metaphysics, 437. Bakhtins familiarity with the third volume of PSF is clear from his 1973 conversation with Viktor Duvakin, but it is unclear exactly when he became acquainted with it. (See Besedy V.D. Duvakina s M.M. Bakhtina [Moscow, 1996], 42.) 51 Ash, Gestalt Psychology, 281. 52 Barry Smith, Gestalt Theory: An Essay in Philosophy, in Barry Smith (ed.), Foundations of Gestalt Theory (Munich, 1988), 11-81, 76. 53 A. R. Luria, Printsipalne voprosy sovremennoi psikhologii, Pod znamenem marksizma, 4-5 (1926), 129-39. 54 G.J. Boudewijnse, The rise and fall of the Graz school, Gestalt-Theory, 21 (1999), 140158; L. Albertazzi (ed.), The Philosophy of Alexius Meinong, Axiomathes 1-2 (1996).
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and the Philosophy of Language Voloshinov specifically identifies Meinong as a major representative of functional psychology, the dominant movement in German psychological thought, but notes that these ideas have developed beyond their classical form. For Meinongs followers, given stimulus-presentations are subjected to certain activity by the perceiving subject, resulting in the production of a Gestalt quality. The contents are collected and ordered, giving rise to a higher, intentional object which may itself become the object of a still higher Gestalt presentation. Gestalt presentations are consequently ambiguous, but the grounds of that ambiguity lie firmly in the structure of the given stimulus complex itself. For the Graz School, the functional activity of the mind produces Gestalten by aesthetically realising what is pregnant in the empirical world itself. What is presented to consciousness as sensation is the potential for representation. To use von Ehrenfelss famous example, a note presently heard, having been preceded by a series of other notes (now no longer present but stored in the short-term memory), is not heard as an individual note but as a part-process of a melody. The melody is produced from its foundational notes but, reciprocally, the notes-as-heard are founded on the whole of the melody. This is what Gaetano Kanisza, following Michotte, calls a-modal completion, the melody is heard, experienced as present; it is not, in Kantian fashion, mentally completed and thought. This last requires a further stage in which perceptual data are identified on the basis of previous knowledge and integrated by means of inferential operations governed by logical principles.55 Acts of perception, which have specific structures, are therefore rigorously distinguished from acts of judgment, which have their own distinct structures. The tenability of the Voloshinov-Medvedev notion of refraction relies on a similar distinction between perceiving and cognizing, with the latter being based upon but not reducible to the former. Certain given configurations are transformed into perceptual Gestalten in accordance with specific species of lowerlevel intentional activity (presentation or direct awareness) and are only then reprocessed in accordance with ideological principles. This reprocessing takes place in the stratified world of Voloshinovs life ideology (zhiznennaia ideologiia), where our inner world accommodates itself to the possibilities of our expression, its possible paths and directions. Here, in the fluid medium of inner and outer speech, our conscious states and acts acquire meaning (smysl).56

L. Albertazzi, Forms of Completion, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 50 (1995), 32140, 334; G. Kanisza Two ways of Going Beyond the Information Given, in Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception (New York, 1979), 1-24. 56 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. I.R. Titunik and L. Matejka (Cambridge, 1973), 91; Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka, in Filosofiia i sotsiologiia gumanitarnykh nauk (St. Petersburg, 1995), 307-8.

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It is likely that Voloshinovs account of inner speech, like that of Vygotskii a few years later, derives from that of Goldstein, who was well known in German scholarship by this time.57 Goldstein argues that inner speech relates, on the one hand, to non language mental processes and, on the other, to external instrumentalities (external speech.) Ones inner speech is governed by an inner speechform, that is, a system of forms that constitutes the special attitude with which the group or individual looks at the facts of life, the special interest and communicative behaviour in general, finds expression in peculiarities in the structure of their means of communication, in their language. The inner speechform is thus a mental set on intentional objects. This is expressed in a special organisation of the forms, by which general communication with other people takes place (the special way how tenses, flexions, articles, are used, the preference which is given to words of general character or words for concrete experience, the difference in rhythm, sentence formation, etc.).58 We are here only a step away from Voloshinovs notion that style embodies a socio-specific refraction of being, and his notion of discursive genres. Voloshinov transformed Bakhtins early intersubjective phenomenology into discursive interaction by drawing on a phenomenology of language-use developed chiefly by Karl Bhler, who adopted the Graz School Gestalt model and maintained that a given structural context decides the significance of both perceptual and linguistic components.59 Bhlers theory presumes certain natural lines, constellations of the stimulus complex that perception must follow even though perception is guided by the set [Einstellung] of the perceiving and acting subject who is intentionally oriented toward experience.60 This is close to the notion of Prgnanz, which suggests both the tendencies towards regularity in perceptual experience and the features inherent in objects to which experience tends to conform.61 Bhler pioneered the application of Gestalt structures to types of activity as well as the objects of that activity, leading him to develop the notion of speech acts (Sprechakt). The culmination was his organon model of the utterance. This is a Gestalt unit with three functions (representation, intimation, and triggering) and three relational foundations (object, subject, and addressee) and it finds its fullest exposition in the 1934 Sprachtheorie.
Van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 179. Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances (New York, 1948), 91-94. 59 Ash, Gestalt Psychology, 315. 60 Robert Innis, The Thread of Subjectivity: Philosophical Remarks on Bhlers Language Theory, in A. Eschbach, Karl Bhlers Theory of Language (Amsterdam, 1988), 77-106, 90. 61 See Smith, Gestalt Theory, 61-65.
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I have shown elsewhere that Voloshinov was heavily influenced by Bhlers model in both the 1926 article about discourse in life and poetry and in the 1929 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.62 Here I would like to add that this also leads to Medvedevs account of literary genre. It is significant that Medvedevs definition of genre is of a typical form of utterance, and as such it is oriented toward the listener or perceiver on the one hand and within life on the other.63 Following Oskar Walzel, as amended by Voloshinovs Bhlerian Gestalt model of the utterance, genre becomes an intentionally oriented set on the world, dependent on social factors such as language, institutions, and authorities as well as the determinate knowledge of the artist. It is also noticeable that for Medvedev the represented object is seen as synonymous with the intentional object in art, for the object cannot be thought outside the means of representation.64 One of Medvedevs key criticisms of Russian as opposed to European Formalism is the latters adherence to an associationist rather than a Gestalt notion of genre. The Russians view genre as an accidental combination of accidental devices where in actual fact genre is a typical whole of an artistic utterance, moreover an essential whole, a complete and resolved whole.65 The genre as a whole is no agglomeration of atomic elements, but a whole, the parts of which are defined and selected in accordance with that whole. This is quite unlike the clear distinction between architectonic and compositional form that Bakhtin outlines in his early work. Later, however, Bakhtin integrates many of these features into his own accounts of literary history and discursive genres, but the realist notion of refraction has been dropped. Conclusions What then can we conclude about the two routes toward concreteness, via intentionality, that we charted in the work of the Circle? In the case of Bakhtin we have seen that, as for Lask, the attempt fully to integrate intentionality into a neo-Kantian framework ultimately led to a break with the neo-Kantian contention that nothing is given but is posited by the universal subject. While the substratum of the given is thus a precondition for consciousness, however, the empirical world remains unknowable. Cognition dismembers the given complex of matter and validity only to piece it together through secondary meaning structures in the act of judgment. For Bakhtin this act is productive only thanks to the ethical centrality of love in aesthetic activity, a contention that arises
See Craig Brandist, Voloshinovs Dilemma: On the Philosophical Roots of the Dialogic Theory of the Utterance, in Brandist et al. (eds.), In The Masters Absence: The Unknown Bakhtin Circle (Manchester, forthcoming). 63 FML, 250-51; FMLS, 130-31. 64 FML, 157; FMLS, 47. 65 FML, 255, 248; FMLS, 135, 129.
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from an original combination of motifs taken from the work of Cohen and Scheler. Medvedev and Voloshinov are less willing to acknowledge the unknowability of the empirical world. Instead, they draw on the configurationist variety of Gestalt theory developed by the followers of Meinong, among them Bhler. The result is the notion of refraction. Intentional acts now comprise different species of productive activity on the material of a given and already structured sensory complex. The results are structured wholes, Gestalten, which become the material for potential, higher complex wholes as perceived reality is reordered under concepts. This productive activity is guided by the percipients set on the given, a phenomenon that finds its most stable expression in genres, which are themselves also Gestalten. However, both thinkers were influenced by the neo-Kantianism Kagan and Bakhtin brought to the Circle and were thereby unable to follow their realist predilections through to a more systematic conclusion. Instead, one finds equivocation on important issues such as the distinction between perceptual and judgmental structures and between linguistic and pragmatic meaning. One can only speculate about the direction this might have taken had the political and ideological environment not sharply deteriorated in Russia at the end of the 1920s. From the end of the 1920s Bakhtin begins to integrate genre into his philosophy of aesthetic activity. Now genres are socially embedded objects of experienced validity (Hingelten) which guide the cognitive process of dismemberment and reconstitution of other objects. Perhaps the clearest formulation of this is the chronotope, specific varieties of which are explicitly described as forms of the most real actuality that guide artistic vision [vdenie].66 Bakhtin is thus able to find a common position between the anti-Kantian neoBrentanians and neo-Kantianism, which he is then able to inflect in a populist direction by identifying pre-critical culture with officialdom and proto-critical culture with the forces of popular skepticism. It is, however, only by raising this critical impulse to the level of validity in literature that its influence can restructure the cultural world in general. There is, however, a high price for all this: the knowability of the empirical world. Like Lask and Cassirer, Bakhtin ultimately collapses structures of things (presentations) into structures of thought (judgment).67 Instead of being composed of pregnant but transcendent complexes, the perceptual world is what Cassirer called symbolically pregnant,68 that is, able to be invested with more and more secondary meaning structures and made into a constantly forming, quasi-transcendent whole. University of Sheffield.
M. M. Bakhtin, Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane in Voprosy, 234-407, 235; Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel in Dialogic, 84-258, 85. 67 See Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology: The Case of Emil Lask and Johannes Daubert, Kant-Studien, 82 (1991), 303-18. 68 PSF, III, 191-204.
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