Or again, what harm would it have done us to have remained uncreated?

—Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

Bakhtin is a broken thinker and the pieces of his thought are strewn in virtually every direction. It is ironic that as the early writings are becoming more widely known—texts that are, without exception, fragments of varying scope and length—interpretations are being proposed that purport to give the entire picture of Bakhtin or to read these fragments through the prism of his later works. Although his oeuvre begins in fragments rather than wholes, readers are often tempted to read such fragments in a Romantic framework, as if each one were a tiny mirror, a miniature reproduction, of a greater and mysterious whole. “To show that the totality is present as such in every part, and that the whole is not simply the sum but the co-presence of all the parts in terms of the co-presence of the whole in itself (since the whole is also the detachment or the closing off of the part)—this is the essential necessity that flows from the individuality of the fragment.”¹

What is fascinating, but no less problematic, when dealing with Bakhtin as a thinker and as a writer is that in his case there never is a whole, only broken pieces. For us, then, the whole is not a set, an eternally subsisting totality, of potentially replaceable parts. Many modern thinkers who address the problem of the fragmented life of the modern individual (e.g., Popper debating Lukács) seem to revert to this desire for a totality, which assumes various guises.² In terms of the part/whole relationship in Bakhtin's writing, I would not advocate a logic of stockpiling and accrual nor plead for the postmodern Western subject's right to pick and choose, wherever he likes, amongst the fragmentary spoils he has forcefully “acquired” in accordance with an illogical and “indifferent” set of consumer needs.³ I would warn, rather, against the logic of “replacement parts,”⁴ which, far from upholding the value of the fragment as a possible site of resistance to centripetal discursive forces, denies that fragment's worth by making it subordinate to something more important and—of course—more lasting. Contrary to these schemes of thought, Bakhtin's fragmentary thinking is not about replaceable parts. “To affirm definitively the fact of my unique and irreplaceable participation in Being is to enter Being precisely where it does not coincide with itself: to enter the ongoing event of Being.”⁵

In speaking of the fundamentally fragmentary nature of Bakhtin's thinking, however, let us not fall into the simplistic trap of opposing fragments as an image of relativism to notions of unity, but rather take to heart Michael Gardiner's warning against too enthusiastically adopting an overly individualistic “ethics of dialogism.”⁶ The fragment should be read not as a textual equivalent to the autonomous social individual (“as a self-enclosed and impervious fragment”⁷) but as a figure for the difficult relationships that exist on the edges of any human individuality. The question of the fragment's polyvalent edges is integral to Bakhtin's prosaics, which seeks to apprehend the varied means of the individual's entering into relationships of all sorts with concrete and abstract others.

Beginning with the early incomplete, fragmentary essays that led Bakhtin's “career” into several “false starts,” one is tempted to read beyond the surface content/sense of his thoughts to their unspoken but implicit fascination with the problematic relationship between parts and wholes. That these fragmentary essays, which are irreducibly incomplete, should evince a noticeable fascination with wholeness may be no accident on the part of a thinker whose writing so often contradicted itself and was wont to retell in a different light that which had already been told. While it is all too easy to write off the fragmentary nature of many early works as mere accidents in an otherwise carefully thought out philosophical program, the fact remains that Bakhtin completed few of his works and that the essays we are now reading from early in his career—those keen on wholeness and unity—are, significantly, the ones most hopelessly bereft of the very characteristics of which they dream. “This act is truly real (it participates in once-occurrent Being-as-event) only in its entirety. Only this whole act is alive, exists fully and inescapably—comes to be, is accomplished.”⁸

The difficulties associated with finding the appropriate mode for reading Bakhtin, the best tack for dealing with his fragmentary beginnings, are complicated by the incredible history of his works' editing. Not only can we discern numerous reading strategies whose principal aim is to create wholeness where there are fragments, but Bakhtin's editors have been especially guilty of “creating” seemingly unified texts out of a long series of notes or several disjointed papers. The essay entitled Toward a Philosophy of the Act is not the only example of such an editorial feat, as can be witnessed by the fact that what was published in Russian in 1986 as a single essay has been divided by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist between two different books, the small volume of the same title and the “Supplementary Section” appended to “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” in Art and Answerability,⁹ although, according to the essay's Russian editor, S. G. Bocharov, it actually formed part of a now lost preceding section of this essay. Art and Answerability is itself an example of a tentatively reconstituted whole, given Holquist's insistence on the essays therein as “part of a great untitled work Bakhtin never finished, a project we have called ‘The Architectonics of Answerability’ for reasons internal to the remaining fragments.”¹⁰ As always with Bakhtin, there are apparently many other fragments that his editors do not permit us to see or that have simply disappeared. Yet another, more interesting example is a work whose wholeness was not questioned until very recently; according to some oral accounts, the chronotope essay only became one when Bakhtin's editors began to work on it.

There are some obvious problems, therefore, in Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson's summary of Toward a Philosophy of the Act in their introduction to Rethinking Bakhtin, where the “third part” of the fragment (i.e., the “Supplementary Section” in Art and Answerability) is read as belonging to one and the same work, albeit with some skeptical questioning of the essay's treatment by “Soviet editors” such as Bocharov.¹¹ Furthermore, as Morson and Emerson go on to say, they do not see the sense of the “moments” in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, for on their reading the constituent moment becomes a mere “aspect” and the inherently chronotopic nature of the young Bakhtin's essay, which purports to think abstractly through the utterly individual nature of the singular event, loses its dynamic and contradictory dimension. In their reading of the “two-faced Janus,” they explicitly seek to eliminate everything theoretical, thereby eliminating one fundamental side of the “head,” claiming that all such doubling splits are inherently “dangerous.”¹² What Bakhtin means to show throughout his fragment, however, is the necessity of preserving at least two realms:

It is only the once-occurrent event of Being in the process of actualization that can constitute this unique unity; all that which is theoretical or aesthetic must be determined as a constituent moment in the once-occurrent event of Being, although no longer, of course, in theoretical or aesthetic terms. An act must acquire a single unitary plane to be able to reflect itself in both directions—in its sense or meaning and in its being; it must acquire the unity of two-sided answerability—both for its content (special answerability) and for its Being (moral answerability).¹³

My own approach to this text here will be to consider it part of Bakhtin's irreducibly fragmented “beginnings.” That he should have begun with fragments raises a question about the very conceiving of new and fresh beginnings within and beyond the discursive realm of cultural acts (a problem that would be explored by Michel Foucault¹⁴). But the undeniable presence of fragments from the very start also raises a question about the advisability of drawing any conclusions as to where Bakhtin was actually headed when he began to write in his early twenties. These initial fragments point to a curious indirectedness in his thinking, a term we can use to stress the impossibility of predicting on the basis of any given fragment where the thoughts expressed within it would actually lead. It is important to develop an anti-essentialist stance toward Bakhtin's work, in my view, in order to counter attempts to treat one or another of his early texts as if it contained all the parts that were missing when we previously read Bakhtin's later works. Such attempts yield, at best, reductive and stagnating readings, for they posit a fixed and immutable essence in Bakhtin's early thought that could only have developed with maturity. At their worst, they partake of a dehumanizing tendency to deny a given thinker the right to change, even to contradict himself, and they thus construe individuality in such a way as to claim an understanding of the whole from a single part. As Alfred Arteaga clearly shows, the basis of any such attitude toward another human being is the objectifying use of antithesis and synecdoche: “The rhetoric of antithesis restricts heterogeneity to the dominant Self, and the synecdoche acts to disallow individuation to the Other. To know one is to know all.”¹⁵

Instead of papering over Bakhtin's fragmentary beginnings, it is perhaps time to think of what they might mean for us, his readers, to be faced with so many unfinished pieces, with what the young Bakhtin refers to as Janus-like signs: “An act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two-faced Janus.”¹⁶ The fragment can be seen as either a curious piece of something else or as part of a nonexistent whole. The indirectedness of Bakhtin's thinking seems to indicate the necessity of imagining, from any given piece, several simultaneously possible routes: “It is as if rays of light radiate from my uniqueness and, passing through time, they confirm historical mankind, they permeate with the light of value all possible time and temporality itself as such, for I myself actually partake in temporality.”¹⁷ The fragment seems to come from several different paths at once and to lead simultaneously in several different directions. The parts and pieces of Bakhtin's thinking are not simply details of a larger but temporarily indiscernible whole. There is no encyclopedic vision within his framework that would simulate totality in an incredible proliferation of detail or a systemic attachment to everything that seems peripheral.¹⁸ If Bakhtin's thought processes are to be examined along their edges, then these must be recognized as the edges of fragments, not of global concepts. If we are to respect the idea of “becoming” so crucial to Bakhtin's thought, if we are to understand meaning as stratified and multilinear, and, finally, if we are to construe his vision in terms of a prosaics of the world and its inhabitants, we need to consider most carefully the role that fragmentary texts play in Bakhtin's understanding of interpersonal behavior.

Speaking of “indirectedness” enables us to avoid the temptation to construe Bakhtin's fragmentary thinking in terms of staunchly opposed reflections on the difficulty of the social individual, on the one hand, and the impossibility of abstractions, on the other. Unfortunately, such an opposition seems to predominate in the commentary on Toward a Philosophy of the Act, as in this statement, for example: “Hostility to all forms of ‘theoretism’ … was one constant in Bakhtin's long career.”¹⁹ This is surely misleading in relation to a text which explicitly states that “an indifferent or hostile reaction is always a reaction that impoverishes and decomposes its object.”²⁰ My own reading of Toward a Philosophy of the Act here proposes neither that it “consists of a long attack on a style of thought Bakhtin calls ‘theoretism’” nor that it exhibits a “fundamental dislike of systems,”²¹ stressing instead the dynamic but complicated relationship between parts and wholes and the powerful forces of edges.

Just imagine that the Epicurean philosopher Lucretius had spoken in De rerum natura not about the atoms and celestial bodies of the universe, but instead about social bodies and the meanings they constitute by virtue of their place in the universe. Such an imaginary reading might yield someone rather like Mikhail Bakhtin, a materially minded philosopher who began, as did Lucretius, by concentrating upon bits and pieces and wondering about their relation to a hypothesized whole. Rather than reading a full-scale history of the fragment into Bakhtin's writings, therefore, it might be better to read his thoughts as fragments. For however we choose to explain Bakhtin's fragmentary beginnings—whether as indicating that he never wished to bring his early works to completion or perhaps that he just outgrew them—when we look at Bakhtin as a thinker, his thought looks back at us in broken pieces with varying degrees of similarity and disagreement. We come into contact with what David Lloyd attributes to hybridization: “an unevenness of incorporation within a developmental structure rather than an oscillation between or among identities.”²²

Fragmentary beginnings are not something that must be overcome. Broken pieces—an amputated limb, unfinished manuscripts, rotting pages, copious but disjointed notes, lost books, frequent moves and exile—provide no reason to be appalled by Bakhtin's unconventional intellectual career. Neither his unwillingness to forge an ultimate, overarching synthesis nor his willingness to speak about his own incompleteness is an aspect of his thought that should be cause for alarm. And why should we feel “shock” over a reference to Bakhtin's “incomplete” body or to the stump left after his leg's amputation?²³

Reading Bakhtin has often consisted in efforts to compensate for the fragmentary nature of his works, although there has been very little talk about fragments as such.²⁴ In all fairness, however, it must be acknowledged that the fragmentary nature of Bakhtin's work is something that shows rather than being explicitly discussed by him. It can be seen in the shifting pieces of his oeuvre as they proceed from note to essay form—and from collected volumes in Russian to different configurations in English, French, or German. The essays appear in forms and lengths that vary according to the whims of their editors, while very few finished monographs appear at all. We have just the Dostoevsky book, which he revised only after considerable nudging from his followers, and the Rabelais book, which must have left a bitter taste on Bakhtin's palate after its rejection as a doctoral thesis. And significantly, as a counterpart to the fragment Toward a Philosophy of the Act, which speaks at great length about wholeness, the Rabelais book—one of his few “whole” texts—speaks quite explicitly about membra disiecta.²⁵

Like the child who has virtually infinite possibilities in the future, the fragmentary beginning also speaks to an abstract possibility which must acquire “flesh and blood.” The child's future lies entirely in front of the presently lived moment, but which direction will that life take in the future? As a series of beginning moments in Bakhtin's intellectual career, his fragments prod us to think carefully about the question of how “progress” could ever occur in his work. And when we read the young Bakhtin's fragments after having read his later works, we encounter a curiously reversed temporal “progress” in his thought, sometimes with surprising or even grotesque effects. (“Even if the restitution of the past is a plus for our knowledge of a foregone era, it is above all a promise for the future in the eyes of creative persons.”²⁶) We must be careful to retain a certain sense of open-endedness with respect to these fragments, given the strong possibility that our reading of the young Bakhtin “back” from our own future and in terms of his may well cut away the open-ended nature of the fragment itself.

Just try to explain to a child crying over a recently broken toy that you, the complete adult, are unable to reassemble the broken pieces simply by pressing them together. The broken toy leads to the child's realization that time moves forward and, in so doing, often eliminates many possibilities during its passage. The broken toy will no longer be able to do all the interesting things it once could do, if only because its immortal status has been lost and its ultimate vulnerability exposed. It is material proof that accidents can happen which take on the form of “disastrous events,” or, in Lucretian terms: “So you may see that events cannot be said to be by themselves like matter or in the same sense as space. Rather, you should describe them as accidents of matter, or of the place in which things happen.”²⁷

So, too, do new configurations of matter and space remind us that it is forever impossible to restore broken pieces to the form in which they once belonged or to ever re-member them and reestablish the wholeness they once upheld. (As Nancy Miller writes, reading, for a woman, is often a reminder that “her identity is also re-membered in the stories of the body.”²⁸) In light of this context, it is not surprising to find the body at the center of the part/whole problematic in Bakhtin's thought. Moreover, a sort of symbiotic relationship between tone and body can be identified, with “tone” and “intonation” two other terms for a body that provides the link between individuality and the social world: “Everything that is actually experienced is experienced as something given and as something-yet-to-be-determined, is intonated, has an emotional-volitional tone, and enters into an effective relationship to me within the unity of the ongoing event encompassing us.”²⁹ The whole's ability to be broken down, the fact that it cannot remain intact forever, is a basic requirement of becoming. As Lucretius noted, “Partless objects cannot have the essential properties of generative matter—those varieties of attachment, weight, impetus, impact and movement on which everything depends.”³⁰ Or, in Bakhtin's terms, “An object that is absolutely indifferent, totally finished, cannot be something one becomes actually conscious of, something one experiences actually.”³¹

The times and places issuing forth from Bakhtin's scattered texts convey a temporal movement other than linear progression. His various pieces—books, jottings, fragments, notes, and essays—do not appear to be cumulative. Contradictions are always possible where memory does not seem to store or stockpile information for future use. Bakhtin was apparently always able and prepared to start again from another point of view, similar to Roland Barthes's self-described method: “Liking to find, to write beginnings, he tends to multiply this pleasure: that is why he writes fragments: so many fragments, so many pleasures.”³² The young Bakhtin's metaphorics of light can serve as a metaphor in turn for the indirectedness of his thought: multiple rays which “fan out” from multiple sources,³³ with each ray another fragmentary beginning. If the Bakhtinian fragment is seen in terms of advancing multiple lines, we can better understand why it is impossible to read Bakhtin's corpus backwards, that is, to read back innocently, even though he may have (as is often claimed) later revisited the questions left undeveloped in his early work. It is likewise impossible to patch up broken or amputated limbs and reattach them to the central body of Bakhtin's thought. His having “returned” to rethink what he had previously said, and often to contradict his earlier pronouncements, should not be viewed as intentional efforts to (re)establish a new and improved whole out of the imperfect parts of the past. It seems far more probable that these were actually fresh starts. When the older Bakhtin would revisit the younger, it was not simply to correct himself, to fill in the gaps or to be more precise, but more a matter of showing the infinite possibilities entailed by starting off in another direction from where you once stood. Like M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski, I have little use for readings based on positing two distinct intellectual personalities, the “young” and the “old” Bakhtin,³⁴ reminiscent of the manner in which Althusser cast his questions about Lukács's Marxism. The function of fragments in Bakhtin's thinking points most urgently toward the need to understand how the edges of any piece in a body of work make their multiple contacts with the other edges.

Let us not mistake Mikhail Bakhtin for a kind of philosophical Humpty-Dumpty whom we might somehow put back together if we could recruit enough king's horses and enough king's men to the task. Just as we could never be certain that what we had managed to reconstruct even resembled what it was before it fell to pieces, neither can we undo what the passage of time, the movement of matter and place, has done to what was subject to its forces. Those readings of Bakhtin which seek to reconstruct his lost thought from the scattered pieces of his work represent an unworkable enterprise that overestimates, or rather misconstrues, what cultural memory is all about. At the core of every memory operation lies a profound unpredictability, and this is the basis of the indirectedness of Bakhtin's thought as it unfolds over time. It is the same as the indirectedness that grounds semantics and the philosophical impossibility of expressing the irreducibly particular in a language built on generalizations. The workings of memory, both individual and collective, always strive to “embody” disparate elements from a given abstract system and to turn them into the event of their expression. Speaking, writing, and communicating in general are all modes for the embodiment of meaning—that which constitutes the eventness at the heart of every dialogic exchange. Among the countless examples of this image of incarnated meaning in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, consider the following pair:

Mathematical time and space guarantee the possible sense-unity of possible judgments (an actual judgment requires actual emotional-volitional interestedness), whereas my actual participation in time and space from my unique place in Being guarantees their inescapably compellent actuality and their valuative uniqueness—invests them, as it were, with flesh and blood.

Only the value of mortal man provides the standards for measuring the spatial and the temporal orders: space gains body as the possible horizon of mortal man and as his possible environment, and time possesses valuative weight and heaviness as the progression of mortal man's life.³⁵

The body of meaning and exchange is precisely that which escapes the predictability of any preestablished system. The body is always the event that interrupts the smooth unfolding of an abstract idea, a three-dimensional synchronicity appearing in a semantic space which is often inadequate for coping with it.³⁶ This is also the point of view taken by Michel de Certeau, who, in his work on everyday practices, discusses how people “cheat” the system not maliciously or dishonestly, but because in merely moving through space the body will always find shortcuts and will always adapt its surroundings to its own particular needs and habits.³⁷ As the site where unexpected encounters outwit predictions and where multiple bumps and openings outmaneuver any attempt to close off the outside world, the body as incarnated meaning enables Bakhtin to counteract, while thinking of the irreducible individuality of any act, any process that would render us “determined, predetermined, bygone, and finished, that is, essentially not living,” creatures.³⁸ The fragment, as the interruptive body, is based not on an overarching principle of wholeness but on an economy of regions where it operates (to borrow from Drew Leder) “according to indigenous principles” and where it incorporates “different parts of the world into its space.”³⁹

Toward a Philosophy of the Act is a profound statement on chronotopicity. In numerous passages, time and space are bundled together as essential components in the process of “embodying” meaning, that is, the transformation of abstract possibility into concrete, lived reality. “I exist in the world of inescapable actuality, and not in that of contingent possibility.”⁴⁰ With Bakhtin, open possibilities, understood as possibilities for comparison and juxtaposition, become a matter of asking how a given fragment links up with what precedes and follows it. Here, we can ask how, as a fragment, Toward a Philosophy of the Act compares with other fragments.

There is, no doubt, a certain usefulness to comparing, on the one hand, the way chronotopicity is expressed or manifested in terms of both an event and its irreducible indirectedness in this particular fragment with, on the other, its treatment elsewhere in Bakhtin's work. Given that in the early fragments the uniqueness of the event is described in almost desperate terms, it would be appropriate to see how space and time are woven together in Bakhtin's work during, say, the “sociological” period of the 1930s. There are, however, certain controversial aspects that such a comparison would have to take into account, not the least of which is the tendency to transform the fragmentary early writings into integral parts of a larger whole. For our own purposes here, such a comparison (its usefulness to understanding Bakhtin's intellectual career notwithstanding) should not be the means of attaining a global picture of his thought, which would be to treat it “as a whole.” Moreover, we should pay very careful attention to two nasty methodological traps that such comparisons can readily set even for a reading aimed at respecting the indirectedness of these early fragments from Bakhtin's oeuvre.

The first trap to be avoided is that of projecting a sort of 1990s Western-style fascination with ethics, through whatever insidious means, onto these most vaguely termed and furtively expressed ideas from Bakhtin's intellectual youth. Let us admit, as a starting point, that the things we say and feel about ethics at the end of the twentieth century are too often tainted by being steeped in individualistically centered or pragmatically oriented perspectives that are not necessarily consonant with the neo-Kantian enterprise pursued in the 1920s by the young Bakhtin. In other words, the question of ethics and its place in his early work is strongly suggestive of an impossible dream—explaining Bakhtin entirely on the basis of a single issue. A further problem is the fact that Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains a number of loosely expressed notions that Bakhtin may or may not have intended to explore later on. Any such movement toward a whole from a small piece would oblige us to employ a number of tools inappropriate to the task of reading a fragment; these tools, forged for the specific ideological needs of the late twentieth century, give us very little by way of any new means for grasping the complexities of Russia at the beginning of the century, where and when this fragmentary essay was written.

The second—and related—methodological trap would follow from a decision to read Toward a Philosophy of the Act primarily as a text stressing ethical questions and considerations contextualized by a set of ethical principles peculiar to the neo-Kantian project as Bakhtin saw it at the time. Such ethical questions are not universally expressible norms valid for any and every context. Here, the trap would consist in taking this particular ethical point of view (if that were indeed what must be read as primary in the fragment) and projecting it onto later or other (i.e., not neo-Kantian) theoretical frameworks developed by Bakhtin. The ethical framework in Toward a Philosophy of the Act to the extent that it can be deciphered, is in some ways radically different from the types of considerations developed in his essay on speech genres, for example, or in his readings of Rabelais and Gogol. Bakhtin's thinking would become quite different from what it was in the early fragments, and, even in those instances where he seems to have returned to some of the issues he explored earlier, how can we be certain that he was returning to precisely the same issues as before?

The profound indirectedness of the original fragments means that it is hazardous to draw from the discussions in any given early piece a set of irreversible vectors that will inevitably lead to some conclusions at the expense of others. When we consider how intensely interested this young prosaist would become in such diverse writers and thinkers as Shakespeare, Saussure, Bergson, Kant, Freud, Buber, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Goethe, and Rabelais (diverse, that is, except in gender), then what becomes obvious is that a certain madness lies in believing it possible to envisage from Bakhtin's very first fragments all the twists and turns of his future work on dialogic thinking, as if the contours of this project had already been precisely delineated even before the project itself existed.

The important reasons why Bakhtin's thought is from the very start, or rather from each of its several starts, steeped in indirectedness all have to do with chronotopicity, the peculiar temporality and spatiality of any site which must make way for time and matter. We can imagine Bakhtin's career as constituted by a loose set of reflections that move back and forth across a number of theoretical fields but without appearing to lead in one particular direction. Niklas Luhmann's concept of communication is useful for understanding Bakhtin's movement from one idea to another, from one fragment to another.⁴¹ Luhmann sees communication as the permanently mobile process of achieving appropriate forms for a given medium of expression which functions within an always larger cultural environment. Like the early Bakhtin, he is concerned with the relationship between a larger whole and the smaller units within it. His conceptualization offers a useful way of seeing the process of giving form to communication as a transformation especially of time and space, each of which is applied to an originally formless meaning intention. This effectively chronotopic metamorphosis of thought into speech certainly describes what the young Bakhtin construed according to the parameters of a struggle between the tendency toward a fixed or systematized expression (what he would later call centripetal forces), on the one hand, and the need to account for the utterance or the event of meaning (what would later be termed the centrifugal forces of speech), on the other. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act these are presented concurrently not in a binary opposition, but as a framework for understanding the difficult relationship in which any given part is engaged with the larger parts to which it may or may not be well integrated. Luhmann expresses this problem by recourse to the term Anschlussfähigkeit: the ability of a given unit to enter into relations with other units, or, more literally, “the ability to make connections.” (Indeed, this view of the way signs can forge links with the extraverbal world of everyday practice is consonant with Vološinov's concept of the relationship between an utterance and the larger context, which he explains with reference to the notion of “enthymeme.”⁴²) Applied to Bakhtin's career, this “ability” of a given item “to make connections” is not so much a semiotic question of the individual sign's linking up with the next and that one with the third, and so on (i.e., the concatenation of otherwise independent signs), as it is a question of understanding how his various fragments, of different stature and scope, link up with one another. This question is undoubtedly linked to the fundamental problem of how we arrive at social structures starting from individual beings, themselves fractured in a world that makes multiple demands on them. For our purposes here, the question is what we can do with such pieces as Toward a Philosophy of the Act—or, more pertinently, what Bakhtin did with them.

In understanding Bakhtin not as a whole but as a variously disjointed and juxtaposed set of fragments, each engaged in heterogeneous relations with any and many others, we can retain the necessary element of risk embodied at the edges of any Bakhtinian fragment: “It is precisely doubt that forms the basis of our life as effective deed-performing, and it does so without coming into contradiction with theoretical cognition.”⁴³ (This doubt is precisely what is potentially closed off by readings of Bakhtin that seem proud to be proceeding “retrospectively.”⁴⁴) Risk is the fundamental element that Mary Russo develops with such elegance in her study of the “female grotesque.” She shows the necessity of allowing for chance, uncertainty, in any adequate understanding of how even the strangest social bits are assigned a place in their world: “Unlike the models of progress, rationality, and liberation which dissociate themselves from their ‘mistakes’—noise, dissonance, or monstrosity—this ‘room for chance’ emerges within the very constrained spaces of normalization.”⁴⁵ We know that, for Bakhtin, it was essential to keep possibilities open rather than closing them off—the same issue that would arise at different moments of his thinking in relation to prose read in silence.

Relative to the embodiment of meaning and to the event of expression as intimately linked to Bakhtin's chronotopic thinking, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship gives us a tool for conceptualizing his notion of “becoming.” There we find the “body-sign [telo-znak],”⁴⁶ a useful way of seeing “becoming” as bodily meaning-making within the linguistic systems available to us. In short, the body-sign is the incarnated communicational event. This problem is also broached, albeit from a different angle, in Michael Holquist's Dialogism. Holquist is intent on showing that we can best understand the chronotope in terms of an event, the material event of implicit meaning's taking on the precise contours of time and space in a given situation and in relation to a particular speech partner. Holquist's view is supported by the fact that for Dostoevsky (Bakhtin's favorite author) the greatest issues approached by philosophers, the ultimate questions of life, could never be understood as pure abstractions, but rather had to take on material contours in a particularized event of meaning. They had to be embodied in order to be adequately understood. This is precisely, according to Holquist, the role of the chronotope in Bakhtin's thinking. Any shared fable (fabula) in our culture is grasped only in the concrete forms with which a particular version (syuzhet) of the story endows it; in other words, it must be chronotopically transformed. The abstract fable cannot directly penetrate our consciousness, so it must be grasped indirectly through the “flesh and blood” situation provided by the event of its recasting in a particular form. “Stated in its most basic terms, a particular chronotope will be defined by the specific way in which the sequentiality of events is ‘deformed’ (always involving a segmentation, a spatialization) in any given account of those events. It is this necessary simultaneity of figure (in this case, plot) and ground (or story) that constitutes the dialogic element in the chronotope.”⁴⁷ Whether Holquist's Formalist-fable story of the chronotope is entirely consonant with Bakhtin's thinking in general is not the issue. What is important in our context is the connection between abstraction as never immediately available to consciousness and indirectedness as a basic necessity of human meaning-making in general. This indirectedness must always proceed through the real-life situation expressed by the chronotope.

However, one unfortunate consequence of Holquist's conception of the chronotope's “dialogism” is that his fable seems to confine it to narrative, whereas it may be more useful to step beyond the realm of artistic (literary) expression and see the act in the broader context of real-life situations. As Bakhtin notes, “Aesthetic activity is a participation of a special, objectified kind; from within an aesthetic architectonic there is no way out into the world of the performer of deeds, for he is located outside the field of objectified aesthetic seeing.”⁴⁸ Here we see the contours of a semiotic thinking which, not being limited to artistic expression per se, can use certain aesthetic forms to get a better handle on the complex, real-life situatedness of human beings interacting with one another. Bakhtin's fragmentary project calls for a radical rethinking of “prosaics,” which must not be understood in opposition to any theoretical construing of human eventness any more than it can be opposed to the poetic-aesthetic understanding of human situatedness. A study of how fragments interact with one another shows enormous differences in their respective degrees of autonomy. It is not always advisable to treat a fragmentary piece as “coherent” in itself, but often better to consider its inherent incompleteness as a call for help from the outside. In Judith Butler's words: “It is important to resist that theoretical gesture of pathos in which exclusions are simply affirmed as sad necessities of signification. The task is to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome.”⁴⁹ The relationship between any two given fragments is not necessarily dialogical but one that can be termed (borrowing from Lloyd) an example of “intercontamination.”⁵⁰ An interesting case in point is the relationship between the “Supplementary Section” appended to “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” in Art and Answerability and the title essay in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, two texts offering significant variants on similar ideas and analyses of the same poem. If we view an act as a sort of behavioral fragment, we can see how such “intercontamination” works, insofar as that act does not constitute an absolute contrast to all that is different from it. “An answerable deed,” says Bakhtin, “must not oppose itself to theory and thought, but must incorporate them into itself as necessary moments that are wholly answerable.”⁵¹

If Bakhtin's thinking from fragments does in fact point to the need to rethink the way we understand a prosaic vision of the world, there would also be a need to incorporate within that vision certain ideas on the prose du monde of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault. Of course, we must first agree on what we mean by “prosaic” and “prose” even if, as a preliminary move, we might say that the very terminological imprecision surrounding these notions is part and parcel of the indirectedness of communication we associate with Bakhtin's earliest fragments. It remains to be shown, nevertheless, that the most provocative questions touched on in Toward a Philosophy of the Act are less entrenched in classical ethics (as an autonomous philosophical discipline) than couched in terms of the problem of how a given part or fragment engages in potential relationships with other parts or larger wholes along its edges. It is from the angles of Luhmann's Anschlussfähigkeit and Bakhtin's fragments that we can attain the bases for understanding the energy of a prosaic world.

For our purposes, the prosaic must be characterized over and against its etymological definition as oratio prosa (discourse which proceeds straight ahead), if for no other reason than that we are dealing with writers whose prose is capable of proceeding in a number of directions rather than merely straightforwardly.⁵² Prose, as the embodied expression of indirectedness, would therefore also need to be distinguished from the related ideal of the pro-position, with its similar etymology of “that which has been placed in front, that which has been set forth.” The indirectedness that lies at the heart of prosaic expression is intimately linked with the problem of smaller parts which must (or perhaps must never) fit into larger ones. In other words, this is the same problem as the disrupting influence of the time of utterance into the smooth space of what is being said or of apparitions of past history or even glimpses of the future within the time and space of an utterance act in the present. It is the unsettling arrival of social reality in the seemingly private realm of an individual's thinking. Thus prosaics, the study of any expression that takes form in prose, must be concerned with memory, both individual and cultural, as it too is steeped in the difficult arrivals of foreign times and places within the present unfolding of the utterance seeking to frame them. Intimately linked, prose and memory are two ways of approaching the problem of how any event of expression occurring between different persons and respecting all their differences in history and origin can ever come to be seen as a single whole.

From the very start, prosaics can be placed in a position where the directions in which it is headed are never steadfastly set out in advance. Prose is seen, even in Bakhtin's early fragments, in relation to double-faced phenomena, or the “two-faced Janus,” which cannot be reduced without irrecuperable loss to a single dimensionality. “If the ‘face’ of the event is determined from the unique place of a participative self, then there are as many different ‘faces’ as there are different unique places.”⁵³ Given that one of the distinguishing features of prose for Bakhtin, especially that of the novel, is its ability to carry more than one voice—indeed, a multiplicity of visions, moments, perspectives, and points of view—then the only way of getting at the heart of prose is through such multiplicity. Just as blood vessels branch out from the heart in every imaginable direction to feed every cell of the body, so too does prose, the vessel of le multiple,⁵⁴ redefine the space and time in which it evolves. Or, as Lucretius puts it, “Now, we see that water flows out in all directions from a broken vessel and the moisture is dissipated, and mist and smoke vanish into thin air.”⁵⁵ Time will no longer be adequately represented by the traditional image of a river flowing along a single riverbed or without twists and turns. The only river of time by which we could image the movement of prose would now have to be that of a delta, splitting into thousands of branches, changing direction according to the season, even backing up completely with tidal waters at unpredictable intervals.

From the very beginning, Bakhtin's prosaics would exhibit a similar pattern of branching out and changing direction in accordance with the strange logic of the multiple. It seems reasonable to assume that he himself did not know in which direction he was proceeding and into which intellectual quarters he was headed. When Bakhtin began writing those texts he never finished, he would have been hard put to say where everything was going to lead. How can we then claim that there was an implicitly coherent project in those fragments? And if Bakhtin truly believed (as Morson and Emerson seem to think) that the most important notions covered in Toward a Philosophy of the Act were those of ethical responsibility relating to the individual's engaged obligations, can we not say now, for more than one reason, that he was perhaps speaking about something very different? This would be consistent with prosaic indirectedness as leading in several directions at once, thus never proceeding as a straightforward proposition. Similarly, we could say in accordance with this fundamental indirectedness that Bakhtin's many projects are all disoriented: his many beginnings, in many fragments and under several names, were continually being launched without a particularly well-defined goal having been spelled out. Contrary to those who have claimed to see a clearly defined project in Bakhtin's early texts and those who have claimed that his fragments contain in nuce what he would develop in detail when he matured, the early fragments and certainly Toward a Philosophy of the Act leave us with a much more scattered impression. In what is supposed to be the start of a dialogic method in the human sciences, for example, there is a sense of profound insecurity, one that corresponds to the difficulty of thinking through the event of theoretical thought in the course of its very constitution as an event.

If by the bodily delivery of the word we necessarily understand the fundamental characteristics of a disruptive event—a rupture within an abstractly conceived life continuum—then the utterance is indeed an interruption that allows for the entry of everyday existence into the realm of potentially inert meaning. We are in the realm of the accident or rupture that we ourselves, as social and biological beings, bring into play in the otherwise smooth flow of abstract time. In the event of human meaning-making, there is always much stir and movement even when that movement is an undirected or misguided one.

Readings that stress the unbridled energy exuded by Bakhtin's broken thinking often convey some worry to do with its disquieting potential. “Because meaning can only be acquired by recourse to a global whole, one that is impossible to grasp within the magma of social discourses, it is undermined by doubts that are increasingly difficult to bear.”⁵⁶ We can accept these doubts as productive and see in them the sign of our necessary participation in, as opposed to our passive observation of, the unfolding of social discourses. “In this view, we are capable of knowing what is around us not because we are separated from it, subjects facing objects, but because we are part of it, order amid disorder.”⁵⁷ The reading of Bakhtin that I have been pursuing here finds it less worrisome than stimulating that his prosaic vision would contribute to seeing words alone as never adequate to expressing the eventful character of meaning in the making. Aided only by the philosophical vocabulary he knew, Bakhtin had great difficulty in dealing with the disruptive forces of the event; if the event seems disquieting, it is precisely because it never lets things be. The event of meaning-making interrupts the continuous illusion that wholeness seeks to maintain; it disrupts the even flow of words striving for a deceptively calm rhythm by its forceful insistence on meanings that move in every direction at once. Disorientation may ensue from this lack of direction, but this very indirectedness may itself be the trace of a broken thought in motion. If the aim is to speak to this thought, it would seem much less appropriate to try to capture it—while undoing its multiple facets—than to ask multiple questions of it as it moves.

Rather than discounting it as mess or counting it out of any serious theoretical discussion, we should set ourselves toward understanding this indirectedness in terms of its basic refusal to remain still. In his thinking, Bakhtin jumps from fragment to fragment and from topic to topic. It is doubtful that he ever had any master game plan in mind as he proceeded in this way. Toward a Philosophy of the Act conveys a sense of continually stirred ideas which come back, over and over again, to the linkages between wholes and parts and between time and space. Those who insist on reading it in terms of the texts Bakhtin would write later on—as if this one were already leading in a well-defined direction—can point to a number of similarities, superficial or profound, between what the young Bakhtin says here and what the more mature Bakhtin would later say. Such readings can point to his Baron Münchhausen figure who tries to raise himself up by his own hair,⁵⁸ the heavy stress on tones and intonation informing Bakhtin's understanding of meaning as embodied utterances and responsibilities. This emphasis, furthermore, points toward obvious parallels between Bakhtin and Vološinov (which Morson and Emerson, for obvious reasons, fail to underscore). Then there is the idea of the rough draft, which would reappear in Bakhtin's writing as scaffolding that is no longer visible, but still significant, once the building has been completed.⁵⁹ In de Certeau's terms, this stressing of similarities over time is based on a reading of strategies, while Bakhtin proceeded more on the basis of tactics:

What I call a strategy is the calculation (or the manipulation) of power relationships which becomes possible once a site for the will or a capability (a private enterprise, an army, a municipality, a scientific institution) can be isolated. A strategy presupposes a particular site which can be described as separate and which forms the basis from which relationships with an outside, expressed in terms of goals and threats, can be managed. … I call a tactic an action calculated with reference to the absence of any separate site. In this case, there is no outside which delimits its scope or conditions its automony.⁶⁰

It should be clear, therefore, why the possibilities in Bakhtin's cursus are necessary, given the absence of any overarching set of superconcepts capable of anticipating all future possibilities even before they have arisen, such as a military strategist would deploy from the very start in accordance with whatever outcome he was planning every step of the way. In Bakhtin's case, his moves from one fragment to the next, from one piece to another, can best be conceptualized as “risk-taking tactics.”⁶¹ For every striking similarity we find between the young and the older Bakhtin, there is surely an even more important dissimilarity: think of his language of light, of fullness, unity, and truth. This plethora of likenesses and differences between the Bakhtin we already know and the younger one whom we are only now discovering should lead us to resist any temptation to select only those elements from the work of the young Bakhtin that parallel what he wrote later (thereby disregarding his basic thesis that an utterance as such is unrepeatable). By accepting the fragmentary nature of the greater part of Bakhtin's writing, however, we come to see every textual utterance as a highly significant threshold, an in-between zone marking off the here of a given text from the theres of prior texts and those to come. Such a liminal space, surrounding the fragment on all sides, allows us to appreciate the productive nature of the fragmentation at the heart of Bakhtin's events.

Of course, an emphasis on the undirected fragment is not incompatible with seeing ethics as an important component of Toward a Philosophy of the Act. It does seem ill-advised, however, to project anything Bakhtin said about ethics in an early fragment onto all his later writings. It would be more fruitful, at the very least, to incorporate his ethics of the individual act into a framework which can accommodate the productivity of those thresholds or cracks that lie between the various fragments. This mode of reading is certainly preferable to attempts to paper over the profound differences among Bakhtin's various pieces, moves that make the cracks invisible. These cracks between the texts in Bakhtin's corpus are possibly seen as the sites where the marks of his individuality can be identified. In them we witness the strange temporality of a present that would be repeatedly and variously reactivated and thereby constituting an excellent illustration of the in-between. As both the here and the now of an event at the heart of the early Bakhtin's thinking, this in-between starkly contrasts with the purely taxonomic and literary chronotopes, lying outside the personal purview of the writer himself, that dominate the later fragmentary essay on the chronotope.

In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin does not use the terms “chronotope” and “threshold,” but he nevertheless formulates his descriptions of eventness in terms of a time and a space that are inextricably linked. Among the numerous examples here of this entanglement, I shall limit myself for now to two. In the first, Bakhtin speaks of the unique place (space) and of a beginning (time) in such a manner as to indicate that time is certainly no more powerful than space, but rather that both are mixed in a sort of solution: “It is only the acknowledgment of my unique participation in Being from my own unique place in Being that provides an actual center from which my act or deed can issue and renders a beginning non-fortuitous.” The second example is perhaps more obvious: “This actual participating from a concretely unique point in Being engenders the real heaviness of time and the intuitable-palpable value of space, makes all boundaries heavy, non-fortuitous.” Without one or the other ingredient, the character of becoming would be lost for Bakhtin. It is also instructive to note where they are treated separately, particularly in the early sections of this fragment, where the emphasis is on space: “In relation to everything, whatever it might be and in whatever circumstances it might be given to me, I must act from my own unique place, even if I do so only inwardly”; “for, after all, my performed act (and my feeling—as a performed act) orients itself precisely with reference to that which is conditioned by the uniqueness and unrepeatability of my own place.”⁶² Such pronouncements surely do not bode well for interpretations of Bakhtin's chronotope as inherently more temporal than spatial. The chronotopicity of Toward a Philosophy of the Act certainly takes space as well as time to be an indispensable component of its dynamism.

Regardless of the validity of this last observation, Bakhtin seems to have been intent on strewing his methodological path with contradictions; his efforts to use the impossible tools of general philosophical abstractions to address irreducible individuality rendered the fragment, in and of itself, part of the eventness about which he could speak only with great difficulty. The problem is the essential “impossibility of positing novelty and of conceptualizing it.”⁶³ Bakhtin's attempts to do so within his abstract language in statements such as the following one seem hopelessly inadequate, perhaps grotesque: “The moment of what is absolutely new, what has never existed before and can never be repeated, is in the foreground here and constitutes an answerable continuation in the spirit of that whole which was acknowledged at one time.”⁶⁴ The impossibility of speaking of eventness can only be comprehended (Kierkegaard's term referring to the existential paradoxes that are exacerbated by language⁶⁵), that is, this impossibility can only be approximated by oblique reference to particular aporiatic or inexplicable situations. In Bakhtin's case, the paradox consists in dreaming about totality within a fragment. A contradiction appears in the eventful clash between his tools and his explicit aims, a situation reminiscent of a paradox with which the ancient Greeks were most fascinated: the paradox of movement. As we remember, they understood something that moved to be simultaneously here and not here, sensing as they did the impossibility of separating time and space analytically in order to explain an intrinsically chronotopic phenomenon. When we abstractly dissect movement, we see an infinite sequence of tiny thresholds, each a fragment of the larger whole and each recasting the problem of a present time and a present space that repeatedly renew themselves and allow for further division. “In one perceptible instant of time, that is, the time required to utter a single syllable, there are many unperceived units of time whose existence is recognized by reason.”⁶⁶ Each fragment of movement is caught between the space of its past and the space of its future, with its contradictory directedness assembled from out of the conflicting elements present in both.

Toward a Philosophy of the Act provides certain indispensable tools for understanding the indelibly chronotopic energy on the edges of any fragment. As we move between Bakhtin's fragments, we cannot predict with any degree of reliability whether we are beginning something new or continuing on with something old, whether we are setting off in a new direction or doubling back in our tracks. From the very start, a possible trajectory is conceivable in virtually any direction, and this virtuality is itself inhabited by the infinite configurations of the times and spaces which constitute possible events. The complicated and convoluted relationships between the parts and the dreamt-of whole in Bakhtin's fragment reproduce the difficulties of understanding how the autonomous individual is related to the larger social group of which he is a member (or in terms of which he is an outsider). “One should remember that to live from within myself, from my own unique place in Being, does not yet mean at all that I live only for my own sake.” Let us not be fooled by the fact that Bakhtin uses spatializing metaphorics to speak of individuality, nor assume on the basis of such imagery that we are dealing with an impregnable fortress: “I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that … cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else.”⁶⁷ In certain passages of his early writing, this utopic realm of wholeness is given the name of “aesthetics”: “The mere fact that a cognitive-ethical determination relates to the whole human being, that it encompasses all of him, already constitutes a moment that is aesthetic”; or it is approached from the angle of architectonics: “the intuitionally necessary, nonfortuitous disposition and integration of concrete, unique parts and moments into a consummated whole.”⁶⁸ In all instances, we see in Bakhtin's thought a tense relationship between the nonexistent wholeness of his philosophical aspirations and the hard reality of his fragmentary thought, as in this statement: “My active unique place is not just an abstract geometrical center, but constitutes an answerable, emotional-volitional, concrete center of the concrete manifoldness of the world, in which the spatial and temporal moment—the actual unique place and the actual, once-occurrent, historical day and hour of accomplishment—is a necessary but not exhaustive moment of my actual centrality—my centrality for myself.”⁶⁹

These times and spaces are anything but inert and immutable, and they can be grasped as dynamic components of events endowed with energy and significance by the endless flux of social interaction. Social times and spaces allow us to come to grips with the eventful nature of extra-aesthetic human life in general. In those instances where he speaks of their possible combinations, Bakhtin provides tools for rethinking the rules of such combinations, social and material. Every event is actually a false start of the sort we have already seen here, particularly due to the impossibility of fitting it neatly in with everything that precedes and follows it. Stuck between preceding and succeeding, while proposing infinitely varied inroads into both, the fragment is an event which partakes of the indirectedness of every temporal and spatial configuration of what is becoming. When Bakhtin speaks in his early texts of the movement inherent in every authentic act, therefore, he does not hesitate to work toward an activity that, as we have noted, “is like a two-faced Janus.” In this particular instance, it would seem promising to understand his reference to the Roman god quite literally.

It is possible, then, to read Bakhtin's own work according to his proposals for reading the prose of the world. We can, for example, read Bakhtin as a writer of “artistic prose”—to take a term intelligently exploited by Emily Schultz⁷⁰—accordingly reading his intellectual life as a prosaic one full of indirected and disoriented fragments. In striving to make room for a boundless supply of surprises, we would resist predictable series. “Having acknowledged once the value of scientific truth in all the deeds or achievements of scientific thinking, I am henceforth subjected to its immanent law: the one who says a must also say b and c, and thus all the way to the end of the alphabet. The one who said one, must say two: he is drawn by the immanent necessity of a series (the law of series).”⁷¹ When dealing with Bakhtin's career of fragments, it is not long before we discover his Freud, who might have described the problem of Bakhtin's fragmentary life trajectory as that of someone who did not know where to find his beginnings or his ends. Freud and Bakhtin had a shared fascination with the idea that it is pragmatically impossible for us to know our beginning or our end (i.e., our birth or our death). This irremediable lack of acquaintance with the two most important “events” of our lives is what makes the idea of orienting life in relation to them a hazardous operation. The problematic presence/absence of birth and death within conscious life preoccupied Bakhtin throughout his career and was undoubtedly related to his profound belief in the fundamental unfinalizability of the human being. In Elisheva Rosen's terms: “The attractive elements of fantastic depiction, one expressed through incompletion and by broken pieces, wins out against those of coherent representation, something which conforms and is expected.”⁷² Curiously, in another early fragment, this impossibility of knowing is construed by Bakhtin in terms of an indispensable knowledge: “The only important thing is that a life and its horizon have terminal limits—birth and death.”⁷³ (This is surely an instance of Kierkegaard's way of approaching a paradox by “comprehending its incomprehensibility.”⁷⁴) The contemporary thinker Peter Sloterdijk, in describing our own period as suffering from an inability to speak of its origins and its end, refers provocatively to a “poetics of the beginning [Poetik des Anfangens].”⁷⁵ When everything we do and say is oriented in relation to events we cannot know, we are likely to encounter existential difficulties, which is all the more reason to recognize that, whatever the young Bakhtin might have said in his early fragments, he did not necessarily know what he would say later on the very same topic.

It is as if we were trapped in the unenviable situation of having totally lost our defense mechanisms—as if some frightful virus had destroyed our sense of orientation. Talk of viruses is an interesting component of medieval historian Aaron Gurjewitsch's reading of Bakhtin's carnival. Gurjewitsch says, for example, that our modern viruses play essentially the same ideological role in our lives as evil spirits and demons played during the Middle Ages. Not coincidentally for the indirectedness presumed to be at the heart of Bakhtin's prosaic world, one of the most striking characteristics of the devil is precisely his ability to trick us by forever giving us the impression that he is moving forward when in reality he is moving backwards: “When the devil has taken on human form, it is impossible to view him from behind, since evil spirits have no back and they always move in a way similar to crustaceans.”⁷⁶

The indirectedness of an incomplete body is the same as that of a fragment pointing simultaneously toward a thousand other pieces; any one of these may be the one toward which it will eventually head. There is an inherent multiplicity, since any given element can indeed be represented as belonging to several possible directions at the same time. In this respect, it is very different from the sort of bilingualism described by Tzvetan Todorov, who cannot imagine the simultaneous action of two cultural identities appearing together.⁷⁷ In the dynamic chronotopicity by which Bakhtin's pieces together construct provisionary new wholes, we begin to perceive a basic mechanism of human memory, perhaps the best of models for studying the prose of the world. Memory, like a changing configuration of fragments, always operates on the basis of reconstitutions that can never be totally successful. It is the process, without beginning or end, by which heterogeneous elements from every imaginable time and place are rearranged in a new, temporary whole and are thereby given a new temporality and a new spatiality—that of uttering a memory. Like myths of social harmony and cohesion, memory gives the illusion that the profound differences among all the heterogeneous elements it has recently appropriated have disappeared in the process (“hegemony envisions so contiguous a discourse that the troping collapses from consciousness and the power of discursive representation is rewritten as the power of literal presentation”⁷⁸). Something inside us, our need to believe in a greater whole, pushes us to reject the validity of fragmentary meaning. To “re-member” pieces or broken bodies—the verb's derivation from the Latin rememorare notwithstanding—suggests to readers of Bakhtin the folly of trying to put lost members back in place. If memories are etymologically lost in too many members, everything seems to point toward a problematic reconstitution of the members that have been strewn in every which direction. In the prose of the world, any one of these members or fragments of an apparently lost, coherent body can be seen as its back or front, as its tail or head. With the loss of any functional distinction between before and behind in a world without head or tail, we begin to appreciate the untenability of a nostalgic yearning for a return to that wholeness in time and in space prior to this bewildering dismemberment. Nostalgia, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, is the impossible desire to return to one's beginning by erasing all traces of the passage of time and the transformations of space. Appearing when any reader or interpreter of the world's prose hoists himself into the position of a universal and eternal reader capable of transcending both moving time and changing place, it is “nostalgia for the universal position occupied by the intellectual in the narrative of representation.”⁷⁹

Interrupting these desired smooth junctures as a pimple interrupts the smooth texture of our skin, the body's members represent an inexhaustible source of unexpected semantic-somatic events: bodies without backs, bodies with two faces, bodies with too many tails. Likely to break off at any time in any and every direction, the fragments of the dismemberable body provide the basic ingredients of the prose of the world. The price of meaning is insecurity or risk: when fragments are re-membered, when meaning is “embodied,” the reverse operation of dismemberment is always just as easily accomplished, since no glue can ever put the pieces back together again just as they were. Any re-memberment of the various fragments is no more and no less permanent than the members who constitute a given social group. Re-memberment is played out in a drama where authority and illusions are the principal actors. Every utterance is an attempted re-memberment, which always proceeds through the desire to master its pieces. Re-memberment and dismemberment are two names for the to-and-fro movement that underscores the impossibility of knowing what direction a fragment will take. In the very attempt to control the prose of this world we are taken in by its indirectedness.

It would seem that Merleau-Ponty's prose du monde and Bakhtin's intonation both speak to how we put our world together by re-membering its broken-off pieces. If, in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, our body, as the site of gesticulation, is that which allows us to participate in the world's unfolding,⁸⁰ then the indirectedness of this world's prose gives us to understand the price of any such participation. The fragments that we re-member, the pieces we string together, can, by virtue of their ambivalent nature as back and front, turn against us. In Merleau-Ponty's view, we should understand ourselves philosophically as the objects of our own questions: “Philosophy is the entire set of questions by which the person who asks these questions is himself put into question by what he asks.”⁸¹

In the conceptual framework provided by Bakhtin's early fragments, where meaning is manifested in the chronotopically dynamic incarnation of multiple possibilities, the significant links between re-membering and fragmentation cannot be ignored. Since every fragment can potentially turn in any direction on its way to the next or the prior one, what is attained is a prosaic world in which “the living word, the full word, does not know an object as something totally given.” The world of prose is inhabited by indirectedness, and all those who participate do so without any permanent knowledge of the line to be followed or of the birth they prolong. The prose of this world must ultimately be understood as the domain of Bakhtin's two-faced Janus, the god of indirectedness who, living in a zone between a beginning and an end, makes of us, its pieces, not insignificant pieces “washed on all sides by the waves of empty possibility,”⁸² but living and re-membering palimpsests whose fragmented meanings remain to be discovered in an onslaught from many sides.

Notes

1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L'Absolu littéraire (Paris, 1978), 64.

2. See Hans-Robert Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a.M., 1982), 677-78.

3. David Lloyd. “Adulteration and the Nation: Monologic Nationalism and the Colonial Hybrid,” in An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham, 1994), 53-92; quotations from 77.

4. See Cecil Helman, Body Myths (London, 1991).

5. M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin, 1993 [1986]), 42.

6. Michael Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique (New York, 1992), 75.

7. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 33.

8. Ibid., 2.

9. See M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin, 1990), 208-31.

10. Michael Holquist, “Introduction: The Architectonics of Answerability,” in ibid., xix.

11. Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, 1989), 264-65 n. 25.

12. Ibid., 13.

13. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 2-3.

14. “Instead of beginning to speak, I should have preferred to surround myself in speech, and to travel well beyond any possible beginning”; Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris, 1971), 7.

15. Alfred Arteaga, “An Other Tongue,” in Arteaga, ed., An Other Tongue, 9-33; quotation from 19.

16. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 2.

17. Ibid., 60.

18. See Georges Benrekassa, Le Langage des Lumières: Concepts et savoir de la langue (Paris, 1995), 11.

19. Morson and Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin, 29.

20. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 64.

21. Morson and Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin, 7, 14.

22. Lloyd, “Adulteration and the Nation,” 91.

23. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, “Imputations and Amputations: Reply to Wall and Thomson,” diacritics 23 (1993): 93-99.

24. See, for example, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990), where reference is made only to “Dostoevsky's deliberate fragment,” The Brothers Karamazov (253).

25. Renate Lachmann's recent work on Russian modernism takes an insightful look at the issue of broken and dispersed bodies relative to Bakhtin's carnival and in Jan Kott's Eating of the Gods: see, especially, her discussion of sparagmos in Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall (Minneapolis, 1997 [1990]), 155, 309.

26. Elisheva Rosen, Sur le grotesque: L'ancien et le nouveau dans la réflexion esthétique (Paris, 1991), 12.

27. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (London, 1951), 41.

28. Nancy K. Miller, French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction (New York, 1995), 47.

29. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 33.

30. Lucretius, Nature of the Universe, 45.

31. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 32.

32. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1977 [1975]), 94.

33. Cf. Morson and Emerson's useful translation “fan out” (Rethinking Bakhtin, 24) and Liapunov's “radiate” (Philosophy of the Act, 60).

34. See M.-Pierrette Malcuzynski, Entre-dialogues avec Bakhtin: Ou, Sociocritique de la (dé)raison polyphonique (Amsterdam, 1992), 73.

35. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 59, 65.

36. See Anne Deneys-Tunney, Ecritures du corps (Paris, 1992), 7.

37. Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien (Paris, 1990), 48.

38. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 9.

39. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago, 1990), 2.

40. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 44.

41. See Niklas Luhmann and Peter Fuchs, Reden und Schweigen (Frankfurt a.M., 1989).

42. See Antonio Gómez-Moriana, Discourse Analysis as Sociocriticism: The Spanish Golden Age (Minneapolis, 1993): “Since any statement presupposes more than it says, Voloshinov calls the use of language an enthymeme” (138).

43. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 45.

44. Morson and Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin, 23; see also “in hindsight” (22) and “keeping in mind Bakhtin's other writings in his first and second periods” (26).

45. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque (New York, 1995), 11.

46. P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, MA, 1985 [1928]), 12.

47. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York, 1990), 114.

48. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 73.

49. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 53.

50. Lloyd, “Adulteration and the Nation,” 74.

51. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 56.

52. “Etymologies of the modern term begin with the Latin prosa, from prorsus, ‘straightforward,’ ‘direct,’ making prorsa oratio or prosa oratio or prosa, which means ‘a straightforward speaking without diversion or interruption, right through to the end of the period’”; Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis, 1987), 193.

53. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 45.

54. See André Belleau, Notre Rabelais (Montreal, 1990).

55. Lucretius, Nature of the Universe, 109.

56. Jean-François Chassay, L'Ambiguïté américaine (Montreal, 1995), 60.

57. William Paulson, The Noise of Culture (Ithaca, 1988), 49.

58. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 7.

59. Ibid., 44.

60. De Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, 59-60.

61. Russo, Female Grotesque, 189.

62. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 43, 57-58, 41-42, 46.

63. Rosen, Sur le grotesque, 14.

64. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 40.

65. See Peter Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford, 1993), 153.

66. Lucretius, Nature of the Universe, 155.

67. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 48, 40.

68. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 226, 209.

69. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 57.

70. Emily Schultz, Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf, Bakhtin and Linguistic Relativity (Madison, 1990).

71. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 35.

72. Rosen, Sur le grotesque, 21.

73. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 209.

74. As quoted in Fenves, “Chatter,” 153.

75. Peter Sloterdijk, Zur Welt kommen—Zur Sprache kommen: Frankfurter Vorlesungen (Frankfurt a.M., 1988), 31-59.

76. Aaron J. Gurjewitsch, “Höhen und Tiefen: Die mittelalterliche Grotesque,” in Mittelalterliche Volkskultur, trans. Mathias Springer (Munich, 1987), 277, 280.

77. Tzvetan Todorov, “Dialogism and Schizophrenia,” in Arteaga, ed., An Other Tongue, 203-14, esp. 211.

78. Arteaga, “An Other Tongue,” 20.

79. Lloyd, “Adulteration and the Nation,” 92.

80. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Prose du monde (Paris, 1969), 193.

81. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris, 1964), 47.

82. Bakhtin, Philosophy of the Act, 32, 50.

This essay takes several ideas from a paper presented at the August 1995 international conference “Bakhtine: La pensée dialogique” held in Cerisy-la-Salle, France. Those ideas, which at the time seemed quite reasonably expressed, are developed beyond recognition here.

All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.