Mikhail Bakhtin

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Ethics of Difference: Bakhtin's Early Writings and Feminist Theories

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SOURCE: Adlam, Carol. “Ethics of Difference: Bakhtin's Early Writings and Feminist Theories.” In Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam, et al., pp. 142-59. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Adlam discusses the ways in which Bakhtin's concepts of carnival, double-voicing, heteroglossia, and polyphony have been employed in feminist literary criticism, arguing that Bakhtin was a precursor of feminist theories of language.]

I

The impact of Bakhtin on twentieth-century thought shows no signs of abating in his centenary year. The abundance of both exegetic and applied research testifies to the appeal of Bakhtinian concepts, and in many instances, reference to that abundance is structured by means of a barely acknowledged appeal to a hierarchy between the two forms of research. The splash made by Bakhtin's texts has produced ripples across the disciplines the world over, but there is dispute as to which ripples lie closest to the centre that is ‘Bakhtin’. In contexts that know no geo-political boundaries, some of those ripples are seen to so deviate from the spirit of Bakhtin as to be utterly negligible; ‘-isms’ (neo-Marxism, feminism, and multiculturalism) that, in the words of Caryl Emerson in a recent interview in the Russian journal Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, ‘in Bakhtin's vision of things, would never be assigned to the category of higher knowledge’ [v bakhtinskom videnii veshchei, nikogda ne bylo by otneseno k kategorii vysshego znaniia], or bear the hallmark of longevity that is bestowed by entering the process of ‘great time’.1 Feminists in particular have, despite extensive and rigorous work on Bakhtin, been vilified for muddying the allegedly clear blue waters of Bakhtin studies. What follows is an attempt to put forward in detail some reasons to support feminist appropriations—or perhaps what would be better termed recuperations—of Bakhtin's work, to examine some of the matches and mismatches between the two areas.

In the context of Bakhtin studies feminists face a burden of justification common to all those engaged in non-exegetic research. Bakhtin's own concept of the construction of meaning as a product of specific spatiotemporal placement, and of utterances and texts as correspondingly susceptible of new readings and fresh applications provides the loophole through which charges of misuse or misappropriation can be, and frequently are, pre-empted. Bakhtin's insistence on understanding meaning/activity as ineluctably partaking of ‘the unique unity of ongoing Being’ (TPA [Toward a Philosophy of the Act] 2) has been employed by pro- and anti-feminists alike, in the first instance to demonstrate his own lack of credentials as a proto-feminist thinker in his relationship to his wife Elena Nikolaevna Bersh-Okolovich (Bakhtina),2 and in the second to argue that the texts themselves have a certain sanctity that demands that the line be drawn somewhere to stem the tide of rampant, mechanical over-application. The issue of what is ‘misappropriated’ by Bakhtin researchers begs a definition of the criteria by which what is ‘appropriate’ to Bakhtin is agreed, and these criteria are themselves often formed as a result of an—at least implicit—appeal to the direct context in which Bakhtin was writing.3 Both arguments ignore to a certain extent the implications of the much-quoted continuation of the above citation from Toward a Philosophy of the Act: ‘The act of our existence, of our being, looks in different directions like the two-headed Janus: at the objective unity of our cultural field and at the ‘never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life’ (TPA 2). To contain Bakhtin's own work within its own ‘unreiterable’—and therefore evidently unattainable—‘singularity’ of existence is to read Bakhtin against himself, to ignore the potential carried by texts in ‘the objective unity’ of ever-altering cultural fields. In the broad context of twentieth-century Western thought in the humanities, the impact of feminism is so great that it cannot be denied a significance which enables the possibility of dialogue between it and Bakhtinian thought, seen with the ‘objective unity’ of our own cultural influences in mind. Bakhtinian thought has had an impact on a similar scale: therefore to invoke Bakhtin in the context of feminism, or vice versa, is to acknowledge that two such bodies of thought cannot run parallel without some attempts at cross-fertilization.

Beyond this broad appeal to Bakhtin's championing of ‘re-accentuation’, which could arguably be appropriate to any significant body of research, there are specific and already much-discussed arguments in favour of keeping an open mind to the possibilities arising from an interaction between Bakhtin and various strands of feminism. Bearing in mind the diversity of what is meant in specific instances by the term ‘feminist’ beyond a broad concern with analysing and attempting to propose means to rectify gender-based oppression, for my purposes here I draw a rough distinction between three areas of work engaging with Bakhtin (indeed a relatively negligible body of work within feminist research as a whole). Firstly, the categories of carnival, double-voicing, heteroglossia, and polyphony have all been variously and extensively deployed in feminist textual analyses aimed at indicating the suppression of other discourses in texts orthodoxically received as ‘monologic’.4 Secondly, and in an overlapping area, the Bakhtin Circle theories of discourse have been used both to challenge post-Lacanian notions of language systems as insuperable and determinist,5 and to criticize various feminist theorists who call for the slate to be ‘wiped clean’ and for new forms of particularly female/feminine language (écriture feminine; parler femme) to challenge or replace patriarchy's discourses.6 Of particular relevance to this paper is what I identify as a third, recent development in Bakhtinian feminist studies which presents Bakhtin as a precursor of the line of twentieth-century ‘iconoclasts of Sameness’ who have indirectly or directly inspired the ‘ethics of sexual difference’ of theorists such as Luce Irigaray.

Maroussia Hadjukowski-Ahmed, the main proponent of this last point of view, argues that while Bakhtin may share an iconoclastic approach to the basic precept of models of identity based on coincidence with any one of Foucault, Todorov, Derrida, or Lyotard, he is the only one of those theorists to allow for manifestations of difference roomy enough for feminist concerns.7 Briefly, this argument rests on an analysis of the values ascribed to otherness or ‘difference’ which understands past (and present) social relations as a series of ‘colonizing’ assumptions of, and impositions upon, otherness. In this schema, an assumption of otherness acts as a sentence of exile from significance. Similarly, an imposition upon otherness is synonymous with an assumption of the insignificance of otherness; it asserts the negligibility of difference through the privileging of similarity, stretched to the point of sameness. In this model of Sameness, what is assumed is not that we are all the same in (biological/physiological) essence, but that we are the same in the contextual detail of our existences. Since the problem facing those who assert the importance of difference is the inevitably ineffable nature of contextual difference, two options arise. The first is to recuperate this wilderness of alterity into the model of Sameness by arguing that its inexhaustibility is uniform, and therefore insignificant; an argument that is made possible only by confusing uniformity with inevitability. So if there is a nod to difference, it is only in order to assert its marginal or negligible status. The second is that chosen by Bakhtin, and by materialist-pragmatist feminists, among others. Since one of the very foundations of the Bakhtin Circle's thought on language is the context-bound, and context-defined, nature of signification, there can be no option but to recognize the differences arising from once-occurrent contexts. His later work on speech genres and dialogistic relationships in texts proffers a bridge between the ineffable context of past, present, future in which each individual is uniquely immersed, and the broader sphere of ‘history’, suggesting a means to account for, describe, understand, and perhaps change the particular circumstances of individual existence. In this light it is not surprising that feminist theorists have drawn on Bakhtin's later work in particular to formulate a ‘feminist dialogics’,8 given the imperative of overcoming the consequence of the postmodern condition, here glossed in representative terms by one feminist researcher, that ‘the fact of difference of experience makes it impossible to bring together perspectives to form a coherent whole […] different experiences can never challenge or mutually inform each other. They simply co-exist’.9 Bakhtin's aesthetics have been seen as offering a way to heal one of the crucial problems of many, if not all, forms of feminism: of how to account for the specifics of individual, socio-historic, material existence within an overarching, inevitably general principle, without effacing or privileging either.

Bakhtin posits his later theory of speech genres as the means by which infinitesimal contextual factors and the wider scope of ‘history’ can be drawn together. But since he avoids defining individual groups themselves, as opposed to the discourses used by various groups, he also avoids the charges of reductive hypostatization levelled at feminists. But such charges themselves may be based on false information, or misunderstandings of what such research, concerned with tracing the constituent features of identity and oppression, is about.10 Pragmatist or materialist theorists now take as their base line the assumption of the constituency of discourse in all analysis, so the argument that biological or essentialist features are needlessly prioritized becomes, in many instances, a straw target.11 Some forms of feminism, with Bakhtin, ask what happens to people not as they appear in the blurry contours of theory, but as real, individual, social bodies in the process of being, theoretically irreducible to a single model. Bakhtin's later work leads us to focus more on the status of otherness, as distinct from the answerable relation between two beings expounded in the early works ‘Art and Answerability’, Toward a Philosophy of the Act and ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’.

Nevertheless even in these early works the two are inextricably intertwined: the idea of a body's ontological singularity is dependent upon the pragmatic recognition of that particularity: indeed, may not even extend beyond that would-be pragmatic recognition. A distinction between ontology and performance/pragmatics lies at the core of Bakhtin's early work, i.e. he emphasizes that existence is located in the interactions of material, corporeal beings. It is acts, events, that produce the body, that reciprocate the body's effects. Clearly Bakhtin does not discuss the sexed body, or even less, sexual orientation, but he stresses that ‘the body’ is an effect of its social, positional interactions. In feminist theory, too, the body has come to be seen as the primary site of identity. The prolific feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is the pivot not only of identity, but of the mechanics of oppressive practices.

Grosz identifies problems with both structuralist and humanist approaches to identity which will serve as a starting point for an examination of Bakhtin's views as expressed in the early works. For Grosz the problem of humanism is not only that it takes ‘as its standard of the human form the presumptions, perspectives, frameworks and interests of men’, but also the correlate that otherness is therefore already reducible, marginal, the negative of the positive of positivist thought, or, as she puts it:

When theories of oppression remained embedded in the framework of a universalizing, individualizing humanism […] difference disappeared into categories of the pre-, proto- or non-human. Otherness could enter at best, if at all, as a secondary modification of this basic human nature, a minor detail, and not as a fundamental dimension or defining characteristic.12

Here Grosz conflates two problems or characteristics of a general form of humanism with which Bakhtin was familiar, if not in the Russian context of neo-Kantianism and Formalism. Bakhtin undoubtedly unwittingly presumes ‘the perspectives, frameworks, and interests of men’ in his work on the manifestations of the subject-object/author-hero relationship, but it is imperative to disentangle his early work on socio-historic answerability from the ‘universalizing, individualizing humanism’ with which his theories have some points in common.

A brief exposition of Bakhtin's concept of selfhood based on mutual, and participative, alterity as developed in particular in his early philosophical writings may illustrate these problems. Bakhtin identifies a principle or given of existence in the fact that we all occupy a material, specific spatio-temporal location. Calling this our ‘non-alibi-in-being’ (in a direct challenge to Kant's universalizing imperative), he writes: ‘I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else […] The uniqueness or singularity of present-on-hand Being is compellingly obligatory’ (TPA 40). Since we are all ineluctably located in our once-occurrent spatial locations, we depend on the other to draw together those ‘scattered fragments, scraps dangling on the inner sensation of myself’ (‘AH’ [‘Author and Hero’] 109) into a coherent whole within a background of objects, time, place, and events to which only the other can have access. The classical, value-bestowing primacy of self-definition through self-vision is turned on its head; the Other possesses the privilege of ‘excess of seeing’ in relation to the self, setting up the threat of being held epistemological hostage to the other. This danger recedes as soon as we recognize another given of Bakhtin's thought: the vital role played by cognition. Since, as Ken Hirschkop argues, the conceptual is our necessary access to the real,13 this potential centrism or pluralism is always, potentially, undone. Bakhtin writes that:

Cognition surmounts this concrete outsideness of me myself and the outsideness-for-me of all other human beings […] For cognition, there is no absolutely inconvertible relationship of I and all others; for cognition, ‘I and the other’ constitute a relationship that is relative and convertible, since the cognitive subjectum as such does not occupy any determinate, concrete place in being.

(‘AH’ 105-106)

Before Bakhtin comes to the later conclusion that we all are in the position of speaking for the Other, but without that entailing universalizing assumptions of and about otherness, he makes the point that being is cognition, conceptualization, representation. But Bakhtin is at pains to clarify the fact that different forms of representation are the product of differently cognized relationships between self and other. In ‘Author and Hero’ he outlines in detail the effects of these varying relationships in literary works by using a typology of author-hero relationships. A scale of ‘dialogic’ practice is put into play: aesthetic activity proper is posited as the highest form of ethical practice, a model of ethics.

The act of cognition, or speculation on the literally inaccessible inner domain of the Other is itself only a part of the whole that for Bakhtin constitutes ‘aesthetic activity’, but it is this inner domain that in part makes us non-reducible individuals. In ‘Author and Hero’ he gives an admittedly extreme, but representative, example of the stages of an ‘ethical/aesthetic’ approach to the other:

Let us say that there is a human being before me who is suffering […] The first step in aesthetic activity is my projecting myself into him and experiencing my life from within him. I must experience—come to see and know—what he experiences; I must put myself in his place and coincide with him, as it were. […] During the time I project myself into him, I must detach myself from the independent significance of all those features that are merely transgredient to his consciousness. […] My projection of myself onto him must be followed by a return to my own place […] for only from this place can the material derived from my projecting myself into the other be rendered meaningful ethically, cognitively, or aesthetically. […] Aesthetic activity proper actually begins at the point when we return into ourselves.

(‘AH’ 107-108)

Peter Hitchcock has summed up the end-point given here of ‘aesthetic activity proper’ as ‘the I/Other beyond I or Other as discrete positions, the moment of a collective subjectivity’,14 an ideal state in which the ‘excess’ by which the other has priority is not relinquished, but is put to aesthetic use. However these ‘stages’, even the primary movement of ‘sympathetic co-experiencing’, are not guaranteed but exist as a choice, and not necessarily one of liberal ‘free choice’, on a scale of practice. As early as Toward a Philosophy of the Act Bakhtin emphasizes that various possible permutations of cognition can efface such thinking altogether, that such thinking does not inevitably hold sway over all others. For if, in common with many feminists, Bakhtin links subjectivity with embodiment, he is nonetheless aware of the perils such a principle allows:

Of course, this fact [of the non-alibi-in-being] may give rise to a rift, it may be impoverished: I can ignore my self-activity and live by my passivity alone. I can try to prove my alibi in Being, I can pretend to be someone I am not. I can abdicate from my obligative (ought-to-be) uniqueness.

(TPA 42)

Indeed, not only is the first principle of the non-alibi-in-being itself anti-dialogical, the next ‘stages’ of the cognition of experience are themselves always susceptible of a potentially infinite set of variations, only some of which would fall within the boundaries of ‘participative’ or ‘dialogical’ thinking/representation. More important than the first principle of our inevitable embodiedness is the task, or the struggle to cognize that relationship aesthetically, for ‘aesthetic empathizing into the participant of an event is not yet the attainment of a full comprehension of the event. Even if I know a given person thoroughly, and I also know myself, I still have to grasp the truth of our interrelationship, the truth of the unitary and unique event which links us and in which we are participants’ (TPA 17). Bakhtin spends a great deal of time emphasizing that the very movement of consciousness which expresses the emotional-volitional tone of the viewer/author toward the Other is not passive: it takes an immense effort to be true to this dialogic understanding of existence. Indeed Bakhtin changes the Russian word for unity—edinstvo (which perhaps implies too much of a wholeness seen from a transcendent position outside an object) to the word vernost': ‘faithfulness’, or even ‘loyalty’. With the struggle of aesthetic (dialogic) interaction encouraged by Bakhtin comes the existence, the possibility, even the likelihood of failure. Since all of us claim the right to subjecthood, interaction is bound, almost inevitably, to be conflictual, or at least frictional. Bakhtin is all too aware of the fact that the power-inscribed nature of the principle of self-other relations can lead to various sorts of ethical, and therefore, aesthetic failures.

It may be problematic to assume a coincidence both between Toward a Philosophy of the Act and ‘Author and Hero’, and between the creative act and existence per se, but if anything Bakhtin's detailed elaboration of relationships between individuals in particular roles in ‘Author and Hero’ is useful for demonstrating, as Peter Hitchcock writes, how Bakhtin's ‘early conception of exotopy […] is snarled in the more conventional drawbacks of Western philosophy’.15 Several questions arise from the focus on the ethical dependence of the subject on the Other in Bakhtin's early writings. This microcosmic subject-other relation, although surrounded by a sketchy contextual scaffolding (the sky above, the trees around), has a certain synchronic flavour to it. Indeed, Bakhtin's account of the given of material existence not only lends itself to, but demands, an extrapolation into a general plane. It is a short step from such a generalization to induce the bugbear of the transcendental subject, of a certain human given, or fact (and feminists have argued, rightly, that for human here read male masquerading as neutral). But while Bakhtin indisputably worked from a tradition which assumed a transcendent subject, and while he clearly believes there is something we have in common which defines us as ‘human’, he transfers that ghostly, ephemeral essence to the corporeal, social dimension, and bestows upon it several characteristics that rescue it from a sneaking introduction of Grosz's ‘framework of a universalizing, individualizing humanism’, which in fact bar us from taking that tempting step to generalizations about what we all have in common.16

Bakhtin emphasizes that to be human is to be a material being located in time and space; to be dependent on others for a coherent view of oneself; to have a view of oneself as never finalized, and non-coincident with ‘ideal images’; and to reciprocate that relation to others, who themselves are all subjects of the same paradigm. He suggests a means of analysing both the overt and more importantly the hidden limitations on our being, since he suggests that being is social, and social parameters are mutable. The picture of the subject we get is not the straw man (emphatically a man) of transcendentalism, but that of a living being in time and space, a subject with constantly fluctuating horizons and porous membranes, a subject who is capable of a contingent coherence of identity, but not of the finished polish of an impermeable, unaltering unit. The material being is not located in the body alone as a sort of essence in itself, but is only realized (in both senses of the word) through discursive representation. Like the novel later, Bakhtin encourages a view of the body as a mediated, porous entity, realized not in or by itself, but through the process of action, of being. It is the fact of the inevitably process-defined nature of existence which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to extrapolate a fixed systematizing model of existence from the early works.

But the formulation of ‘feminist dialogics’ has been at the price of collapsing the non-alibi-in-being into a loose ‘dialogic principle’, which ignores the problematic implications of Bakhtin's baggy humanism for ease of feminist recuperation. Without an acknowledgment of this, ‘feminist dialogics’ cannot proceed in its self-appointed task of ‘taking on rhetorical or dialogic authority […] that would reinvent a shared ethics within intersecting public and private worlds’.17 It cannot be enough to acknowledge that we share a uniting, although always already mediated, ontological principle of uniqueness and irreducibility in time and space: the ‘non-alibi-in-being’, but neither can this be entirely ignored, since it is the basis of Bakhtin's later theories of dialogism. This paradox seems once again to introduce a binary divide which leaves, in the best tradition of Western philosophy, no room for the middle ground. In order to be able to escape this double bind there must be a way of introducing larger classificatory groupings of experience which are nevertheless open to negotiation and to the effects of fluctuating individual experience. As far as feminists are concerned, as Clive Thomson has pointed out, the strategy of answerability is ineffective if it remains at an individual level; the whole process must be transferred to a collective level, but not a universal or transcendent plane.18 Similarly, the distinction between dialectical consensus and dialogism is important for feminists for whom focus on consensus effaces the possible imbalances of power by which it is brought about. Bakhtin therefore permits a re-evaluation of the interrelationship which is constituted by that power, rather than the teleological end product. In other words, Bakhtin helps us to see that to agree to something may be just as much a product of one's socio-historic locatedness as it is a measure of one's willing acquiescence to someone else's point of view, and that the endless possible manifestations of different readings of otherness can entail, and do generate, in actuality, acts of oppression with which feminists are so concerned.

These provisos aside, what links Bakhtin and feminist theories is the importance placed on the ineluctable foundation of subjecthood as embodied, and in which an individuality inheres in a state of flux. In this sense Bakhtin's work sits neatly with the view taken up by so many French feminist philosophers in particular, insofar as self-other relations are based on a differentiated parity, and not on a model of either sameness or endless difference.

II

One of the most prolific feminists to go beyond poststructuralist notions of the self is Luce Irigaray. A brief discussion of Irigaray's work may demonstrate some of the problems with extending Bakhtin's view of the body as different, to a view of the body as sexually differentiated. Irigaray attacks neutralization of sexual difference, whereby Western philosophy generally has constructed the difference between the sexes as a thinly-veiled mirror image of a universal male (what she calls the repetition of the Selfsame), specifically writing out autonomous female desire. Asserting that it is specifically upon sexual difference that an ‘ethics of alterity’ must be based, much of her work has been in the form of deconstructions of Western philosophical texts to reveal elements of female sexuality hidden within. Sexual difference, she has said, is the issue of our age.19 As a result she proposes an alternative ‘ethics of alterity’, where the Other is irreducible to the self, and resists oppositional/complementary definitions of the relationship between self and Other. Like Bakhtin's non-alibi, the self/Other relationship is conceived in material, corporeal terms, with the important distinction that Irigaray sites as fundamental an unacknowledged sexual difference: individuals are (or should be) specifically differentiated by maleness or femaleness, and not by gendered attributes of that body; i.e. not what we describe as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ features or behaviours.

Irigaray seems to echo Bakhtin when she reworks Descartes's first element of wonder as the basis for her alternative ethics:

This passion has no opposite or contradiction and exists always as though for the first time. Thus man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted for the other. I will never be in a man's place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other. […] Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the other who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference.20

This moment of wonder sets up a paradigm of encounter with others as an encounter which, paradoxically, asserts difference/distance (the Other is irreducibly Other) at the same time as it implies a fascination with/attraction towards the Other. This attraction/repulsion paradigm has been constructed from the Medusa-figure onwards as a misogynist relationship of power, where the Other (female) has a mesmeric power over the (male) subject, causing paralysis and even literal petrifaction.21 Irigaray's return to Descartes's notion undoes this in that the encounter is, in her words, fecund: instead of fear and domination we get interrelation. She argues that the productivity of the sparks flying off from this state of being has in our culture been channelled into restrictive areas. One such of these is the figure of the child, which has been, she argues, troped as symbol of the synthesis between male and female: particularly since the (pre-Freudian) child until teenage years has largely been figured as androgynous, or sexless. We divert our attention from the moment of perfect union into figures which are presented as its products (God, child). These figures substitute for the process of wonder which is generated by an awareness of sexual difference: a re-awareness of the process of sexual difference which is present at every moment of the encounter with the Other is therefore necessary. The effects of this re-alignment of thought would be fecund in that they would extend beyond the personal into, in Irigaray's words, ‘the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language: the creation of a new poetics’.22 The mechanics of this encounter are to be brought about through the tactile: the specular tradition, which indeed problematizes Bakhtin's early works,23 reduces ‘the perpetual unfolding and becoming of the living being’. The caress, in Irigaray's terms, ‘seeks out […] that which cannot be anticipated because it is other. The unforeseeable nature of contact with otherness, beyond its own limits’.24 Irigaray therefore goes beyond assessments of the effects of ignoring difference to speculate explicitly upon the consequences of recognition of particular features which mark out otherness.

Yet some problems with Irigaray's project can be identified in the light of Bakhtin's work. Firstly, in the name of difference she advocates a form of sameness, or union, which effaces all these troubling, ‘messy’ non-coincidences by which we live. For Irigaray the recognition of sexual difference is only half of the story: it is the means by which a synthesis of body and soul is brought about. She writes, for instance: ‘A sexual or carnal ethics would require that both angel and body must be found together. […] This is a world that must be created or re-created so that man and woman may once again or at last live together, meet, and sometimes inhabit the same place’.25 Here Irigaray reveals that the ultimate aim of her ethics of sexual difference is something which seems to be curiously ill at ease with the rest of her agenda: ‘a remaking of immanence and transcendence’ in the here and now.26 Unlike Bakhtin her understanding of difference is dialectical, in that she focuses on the products of the encounter with the Other, rather than on the event as process.

Secondly, Irigaray offers no way out of this principle of dependence on the Other. Underlying Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference is the work of Levinas, for whom, as Elizabeth Grosz writes, ‘the other is the irreducible and non-reciprocal material support of the subject’.27 Levinas uses a metaphor of a hostage to demonstrate the absolute reliance of the subject on the Other, and the subject's utter responsibility for the Other's behaviour, even when that behaviour is beyond their control. As Grosz suggests, Irigaray's ethics ‘requires recognition of alterity, an acceptance of the alterity of each to the other, an acceptance of the externality and indeed priority of the other for the subject’.28 In contrast to this, another feminist stance is that argued by Joan Copjec, who writes, ‘it is only when the sovereign incalculability of the subject is acknowledged that perceptions of difference will no longer nourish demands for the surrender of difference to processes of “homogenization”, “purification”, or any of the other crimes against otherness’.29 Bakhtin's work at once embraces the ‘incalculability’ of the subject while interrogating the notion of ‘sovereignty’ by implying the notion of dependence—although not absolute—upon others for our very existence as ineluctably social beings, falling not synthetically between the two, but by emphasizing the importance of cognition. If Irigaray can enrich Bakhtin's concept of otherness by introducing the stratum of sexual difference, Bakhtin offers Irigaray, through the principle of ethical (aesthetic) cognition, an additional means for potentially overcoming that centrism which she locates in the Western tradition of the visual, and which she combats by focusing on other senses for elaborating an expression of female sexuality.

Perhaps the most crucial point to be considered is Irigaray's assertion that all difference can be subsumed under two categories of sex-based characteristics. Since for Irigaray the marker of effectiveness is reproduction (of children as well as texts) perhaps we can understand why she has been accused of a biological determinism. Irigaray's stance may be explicable if we view it as strategic, and descriptive of a social situation (and hence not determinist/essentialist): yet her vision is also undoubtedly prescriptive. The ethics of sexual difference she advocates models itself as a heterosexual version of Plato's republic.30 Instead of an alchemic transformation of reality which comes about as a result of an encounter between a young man and an older one, leading to the attainment of what she calls ‘a sensible transcendental’, this now takes place in the heterosexual encounter. This begs the question of a possible heterocentric essentialism in her work, for, while criticizing the drive to synthesis in Western philosophy which has toppled over into a model of the selfsame, and in asserting sexual difference as the ultimate foundation of identity, Irigaray measures the encounter of wonder by an index of productivity, in which the sexual act between men and women is valorized as it ‘gives the seed of life and eternity’.31 While this rewrites the excluded and denied feminine back into the equation, it also produces an equation based on a surprisingly reductive understanding of difference as the difference between men and women. There seems to be a certain aporia of those who claim to be pushing back the frontiers of ‘an ethics of sexual difference’, and yet who still see homosexual relations as a threat to the parameters of alterity (Irigaray writes, for instance, in her essay ‘Love of Self’ that ‘one of the dangers of love between women is the confusion in their identities, the lack of respect for or perception of differences’).32 So long as alterity is understood as marked ultimately by gender, then there will be no escaping the abstracted conflation of homosexuality with androgyny made by Irigaray, leading her to conclude that anything other than a tactical advocation of a ‘homosexual’ economy sounds the death knell of the human race.33

Bakhtin's view of difference as a difference which bears the imprint of myriad contextual factors can be said to permit, if not exactly encourage, consideration of other factors in the constitution of identity. It is a truism for Bakhtin that we are all different: by extending the early work on the ‘non-alibi-in-being’ to a spectrum of ‘participative/dialogic’ interactions he encourages us to consider the consequences of our difference. In examining cultural products and revealing their male-centred bias, Irigaray is doing just that. But in setting up sexual difference as not only the issue of our age, but also as the answer to our age, as an unaltering fact which must needs be asserted, Irigaray conflates the mechanics of oppression with the solution. Sexual difference is undoubtedly one social and pragmatic distinction by which various forms of oppression are fuelled, and on which attempts to subvert those practices must be founded, but it may also be an ontological nonsense that cannot support metaphysical prescription. Rather than advocate a replacement of the view that sex or gender are significant signifiers of identity in our time and culture, an extension of Bakhtin's work may be carried out to remind us that identity is made up of an infinite number of strata. For any analysis to take place these must be classified generically, but Irigaray's subtle and extensive work on sexual difference teeters on the brink of privileging markers of sex as the ultimate signifiers of alterity, rather than allowing, as Bakhtin might perhaps, self-other relations to be taken as represented in a multiplicity of ways, with varying effects.

Some concluding points about feminist research and Bakhtin. Feminist Bakhtinians have tended to privilege the dialogical practice (or dialogism itself) over the principle of existence outlined in the early works, often without accounting for the fact that Bakhtin's ‘ecstatic’ model recognizes that cognized manifestations (i.e. transformations) of our shared embodiedness (in discourse, writing) are always susceptible of a distortion of this ideal model. Secondly, this has been accompanied by a creeping distortion of the old feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’, so that an oppositional hierarchy of textual representation versus ‘life’ is set up. This ‘the personal becomes political’ model carries Bakhtin's early injunction that ‘an analysis of [the world of aesthetic seeing] should help us come closer to an understanding of the architectonic structure of the actual world-as-event’ (TPA 61) to an extreme, unwittingly pointing out Bakhtin's own inconsistent hierarchizing of the two ‘spheres’. Taken with the later concept of ‘the dialogic consciousness’, a non-evolutionary/progressive model of the two as distinct, yet imbricated spheres on the same level must be reasserted in acknowledgment of the difficulty of achieving dialogism given the in-built disparity of the self-other relationship. Most importantly for feminist theory the question arises of whether a ‘dialogics’ of living might not in fact be detrimental to various forms of political praxis.

Since feminism's common concern is social transformation of widespread, gender-based injustices, it may be that the attraction of dialogism suits a certain stage of feminism, as the elision of different specific experience has been, and continues to be, an intractable problem of feminist research. ‘Feminist dialogics’ responds to this problem in providing the opportunity to supplement the common denominator of gender with race, class, and sexuality, and more, so that ‘we are thinking of Hispanics, lesbians and gay men, African and Native Americans, and other marginalized peoples whose voices have been and, unfortunately, continue to be, devalued and silenced’.34 Nevertheless this runs the risk of subsuming all different situational values of the individuals within those groups under a general category of ‘the marginalized’, and may also gloss over the positive aspects of having a coherent, assimilated identity. A liberal pluralism falls short of accounting for the specific, socio-historic need for a coherence of definition which many groups still rightly have recourse to, resisting a diversity of definition which could lead to oppressive assimilation. In the same way that Michael Holquist has noted that ‘the dark side of double-voiced discourse is duplicity’, the dark side of dialogism may be a politically damaging fragmentation.

Bakhtin's insistence on the unfragmented, socio-historic, material self nevertheless enriches feminist theories which have become trapped in views of language systems which ultimately deny the subject any sort of autonomy, or simply deny the subject. Bakhtin's views allow an analysis of the mechanics of specific oppressions, coupled with an awareness of the possibility of altering those oppressive tactics. Since difference is registered in infinitely variable ways, the need still to group differences under general categories such as gender/sexual difference, is understandable. Bakhtin offers feminism a theory of subjectivity which allows autonomy; an autonomy which is not ‘made in heaven’, but which is rather always in a process of negotiation through an aesthetic cognition of the other's inner and outer specificity, repeated endlessly in the world and history, in existence, and transformed and potentially heightened in artistic creation.

Notes

  1. ‘Anketa “DKKh”: Professor Prinstonskogo universiteta (SShA) K. Emerson otvechaet na voprosy redaktsii’ [The ‘D.K.Kh.’ Questionnaire: Professor Caryl Emerson of Princeton University (USA) Replies to Questions from the Editorial Board], Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, 2 (1994), p. 7.

  2. For a thinker so attentive to the existence of ‘the other’, Bakhtin's silence on gender may seem both surprising and disappointing, but cannot preclude speculative research. For an example of research that deals directly with Bakhtin's relationships with women, see Maroussia Hadjukowski-Ahmed, ‘Bakhtin and Feminism: Two Solitudes?’, in Critical Studies 2.1-2 (1990) (Mikhail Bakhtin and the Epistemology of Discourse), pp. 153-63. Hadjukowski-Ahmed's point about Katerina Clark's and Michael Holquist's gradual linguistically-produced effacement of Elena Nikolaevna Bakhtina in their biography Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would be even more pertinent to the other eminent Western biography: in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson compound the sense of the invisibility of this figure in Bakhtin's life by referring to her in both index and text exclusively as either ‘B's wife’ or ‘his wife’. Wayne C. Booth, ‘Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism’, in Critical Inquiry, 9.1 (1982), pp. 45-76, was the earliest example of the line of argument which seeks to demonstrate a detrimental evasion of the subject in general terms in Bakhtin's work.

  3. See A. V. Bosenko, ‘Vlast’ vremeni, ili ostav'te Bakhtina v pokoe’ [The Power of Time, or Leave Bakhtin in Peace], in M. M. Bakhtin i perspektivy gumanitarnykh nauk: materialy nauchnoi konferentsii (Moskva, RGGU, 1-3 fevralia 1993 goda) (Vitebsk, 1994), pp. 83-85.

  4. See, for instance, the following collections: Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry (eds.), Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic (SUNY Series in Feminist Criticism, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1991); Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow (eds.), A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (London; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

  5. See Corinne Chénier, ‘Language, Gender, Bakhtin, and Feminism’ [abstract], in Mijail Baxtin: Sexto Encuentro Internacional Mijail Baxtin: Sinopsis de Ponencias (Mexico: Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, 1993), unpaginated; and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, ‘Bakhtin, Discourse and Feminist Theories’, in Critical Studies 1.2 (1989) (The Bakhtin Circle Today), pp. 121-39.

  6. See Lisa Gasbarrone, ‘“The Locus for the Other”: Cixous, Bakhtin and Women's Writing’, in A Dialogue of Voices, pp. 1-19. Gasbarrone argues that Bakhtin demystifies the idea of language as ‘unitary and timeless, exclusive and transcendent’, while Cixous replaces the myth of seamlessness supporting patriarchal language with another, ‘feminine’, monolithic language, thereby establishing its own centre, and hence, its own excluded zones.

  7. Maroussia Hadjukowksi-Ahmed, ‘Ethique de l'altérité, éthique de la différence sexuelle: Bakhtine et les théories féministes’, in Discours social/Social Discourse, 3.1-2 (1990) (Bakhtin and Otherness), pp. 251-70.

  8. The term was brought to the fore in Dale M. Bauer and Susan Jaret McKinstry's ‘Introduction’ to Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 1-6, and used throughout the collection (see, for instance, Diane Price Herndl, ‘The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic’, pp. 7-24).

  9. Oshadi Mangena, ‘Against Fragmentation: The Need for Holism’, in Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (eds.), Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology (London and New York, 1994), p. 281.

  10. The literature is extensive, but see, for instance, Nancy Fraser, ‘The Uses and Abuses of French Discourse Theories for Feminist Politics’, in Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Barsky (eds.), Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency and Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 177-91, for a useful analysis of feminist research in this area.

  11. There are of course exceptions to this. See Hélène Cixous, and, as my own argument emphasizes, Luce Irigaray.

  12. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity’, in Joan Copjec (ed.), Supposing the Subject (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 137.

  13. Ken Hirschkop, ‘On Value and Responsibility’, in Critical Studies, 2.1-2 (1990) (Mikhail Bakhtin and the Epistemology of Discourse), pp. 13-27.

  14. Peter Hitchcock, ‘Exotopy and Feminist Critique’, in Critical Studies, 3.2-4.1-2 (1993) (Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects), p. 207.

  15. Hitchcock, ‘Exotopy and Feminist Critique’, pp. 203-204.

  16. See Etienne Balibar, ‘Subjection and Subjectivation’, in Joan Copjec (ed.), Supposing the Subject, pp. 1-15. Balibar identifies a problem with Western philosophy's use of the term ‘subject’ in general as arising from two distinct sources. He writes that before Kant's introduction of the term ‘subject’ (Subjekt) to mean ‘that universal aspect of human consciousness and conscience […] which provides any philosophy with its foundation and measure’ (pp. 4-5), the Aristotelian term subjectum was current. Subjectum as Balibar describes it to signify ‘an individual bearer of the formal properties of “the substance”’ (p. 6) is also a term that Bakhtin uses at several points in TPA, perhaps as a deliberate reminder of the distance between his social/humanist and Kant's universal/humanist ‘subject’. Balibar goes on to say that ‘subject’ is itself a word-play arising from translations of subjectum (subject of) and subjectus (subject to) (p. 8), which may also be used to reflect upon Bakhtin's ‘subject’ who is both ‘sovereign’ and ‘citizen’.

  17. Bauer and McKinstry, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1-2.

  18. Clive Thomson, ‘Bakhtin and Feminist Projects: Judith Butler's “Gender Trouble”’, in Critical Studies, 3.2-4.1-2 (1993) (Bakhtin: Carnival and Other Subjects), p. 227.

  19. Luce Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), p. 5.

  20. Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, pp. 12-13.

  21. My thanks to David Miller for this suggestion.

  22. Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, p 5.

  23. See Ann Jefferson, ‘Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes’, in Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (eds.), Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 152-77.

  24. Irigaray, ‘The Fecundity of the Caress’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 211.

  25. Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, p. 17.

  26. Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, p. 18.

  27. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Kristeva, Irigaray, le Doeuff) (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), p. 143.

  28. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, p. 176.

  29. Joan Copjec, ‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’, in Supposing the Subject, p. 21.

  30. Irigaray, ‘Sorcerer Love’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, pp. 21-33.

  31. Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, p. 14.

  32. Irigaray, ‘Love of Self’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 63.

  33. Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Routledge, 1993). This tendency in both feminist and Bakhtin studies to perpetuate the silence shrouding what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin Books, 1994), has called ‘the open secret’, ‘in a culture where same-sex desire is still structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once marginal and central’ (p. 22), forces a ‘marriage of convenience’ at the unlikeliest of junctures, problematizing both the celebration of dialogistic respect for, and engagement with, otherness in Bakhtin studies, and claims of feminist theorists of self/other relations to be pushing back ethical, political, and theoretical frontiers with ‘an ethics of sexual difference’. It is worth noting, incidentally, that some Western contributors who mentioned gay and lesbian studies and/or queer theory in their papers at the Seventh International Bakhtin Conference (Moscow State Pedagogical University, July 1995) were surprised to find that something was lost in the simultaneous translation: namely, the terms ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’. Although there is no received equivalent of ‘lesbian and gay studies’ in Russia, a paraphrase or literal translation is possible.

  34. Hohne and Wussow, ‘Introduction’, in A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin, pp. xi-xii.

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