Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

Originally posted: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 11:31:51

The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics

by P. N. Medvedev

Honestly, I have very little interest in poetics. But I do have a strong interest in language philosophy, and like the other works of the Bakhtin Circle, this 1928 book roots its exploration of its subject matter in a sociological understanding of language. A Marxist understanding? I'm not really an expert on Marxism, so I can't speak to the debate over whether Medvedev's book was genuinely Marxist or whether it used "protective coloration" to hide non-Marxist ideas. But at any rate, it thoroughly criticizes the Formalist school for ignoring society, culture, history, and dialogue -- just as Voloshinov criticized Freudianism in 1927 and linguistics in 1929 for the same sins. Put these books together with Bakhtin's 1929 book on Dostoyevsky and you get a central set of working assumptions about language philosophy with wide-ranging implications across the spectrum of language use.

So what are some of these working assumptions? One is that language is inherently ideological -- that is, inherently oriented to a particular sociocultural sphere of activity. I don't think that Medvedev uses the term dialogue, but clearly he's talking about the same phenomenon Voloshinov so brilliantly discusses in 1929. For Medvedev as for the other members of the circle, the ideological aspect of language is what makes it meaningful and alive; the utterance is material, social, historical, and every concrete utterance is a social act. Medvedev further postulates that utterances involve "social evaluations," evaluations that are multileveled (occurring at the level of the broad historical sweep but also on the order of days, minutes, and seconds). These social evaluations interpenetrate each other "dialectically" (and here I think we could use the term "dialogically," since Medvedev seems to be driving at that concept).

Another is that the social nature of language implies the social nature of human cognition. Anticipating Voloshinov's later argument, Medvedev says that social evaluation organizes the work of cognition itself; we think in "inner speech," he says, but that speech is not made up of the formal elements of words and sentences but rather in socio-ideological utterances couched in "inner genres." The ideological nature of genres -- seen themselves as ideologies or views on the world -- distinguishes them from the later notion of schema that was the rage in cognitive psychology for a time.

A little personal story: I bought this book at Half Price Books here in Austin in 1997, when I was interning at Schlumberger. The receipt, and my original notes, were still in the book. Back then I was very excited to read it; now, after reading Voloshinov's two books, I am indifferent. Medvedev does indeed take the insights from the Bakhtin Circle and apply them to poetics, but he doesn't seem to develop them further. If you're interested in looking at the Bakhtin Circle's works, honestly, I think you should start with Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky (which I'll be reading next), then work through Voloshinov's two books before coming to Medvedev. Unless you're interested in Formalism, I suppose.

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Reading:: The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship

Originally posted: Wed, 17 Mar 2004 11:31:51

The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics

by P. N. Medvedev

Honestly, I have very little interest in poetics. But I do have a strong interest in language philosophy, and like the other works of the Bakhtin Circle, this 1928 book roots its exploration of its subject matter in a sociological understanding of language. A Marxist understanding? I'm not really an expert on Marxism, so I can't speak to the debate over whether Medvedev's book was genuinely Marxist or whether it used "protective coloration" to hide non-Marxist ideas. But at any rate, it thoroughly criticizes the Formalist school for ignoring society, culture, history, and dialogue -- just as Voloshinov criticized Freudianism in 1927 and linguistics in 1929 for the same sins. Put these books together with Bakhtin's 1929 book on Dostoyevsky and you get a central set of working assumptions about language philosophy with wide-ranging implications across the spectrum of language use.

So what are some of these working assumptions? One is that language is inherently ideological -- that is, inherently oriented to a particular sociocultural sphere of activity. I don't think that Medvedev uses the term dialogue, but clearly he's talking about the same phenomenon Voloshinov so brilliantly discusses in 1929. For Medvedev as for the other members of the circle, the ideological aspect of language is what makes it meaningful and alive; the utterance is material, social, historical, and every concrete utterance is a social act. Medvedev further postulates that utterances involve "social evaluations," evaluations that are multileveled (occurring at the level of the broad historical sweep but also on the order of days, minutes, and seconds). These social evaluations interpenetrate each other "dialectically" (and here I think we could use the term "dialogically," since Medvedev seems to be driving at that concept).

Another is that the social nature of language implies the social nature of human cognition. Anticipating Voloshinov's later argument, Medvedev says that social evaluation organizes the work of cognition itself; we think in "inner speech," he says, but that speech is not made up of the formal elements of words and sentences but rather in socio-ideological utterances couched in "inner genres." The ideological nature of genres -- seen themselves as ideologies or views on the world -- distinguishes them from the later notion of schema that was the rage in cognitive psychology for a time.

A little personal story: I bought this book at Half Price Books here in Austin in 1997, when I was interning at Schlumberger. The receipt, and my original notes, were still in the book. Back then I was very excited to read it; now, after reading Voloshinov's two books, I am indifferent. Medvedev does indeed take the insights from the Bakhtin Circle and apply them to poetics, but he doesn't seem to develop them further. If you're interested in looking at the Bakhtin Circle's works, honestly, I think you should start with Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky (which I'll be reading next), then work through Voloshinov's two books before coming to Medvedev. Unless you're interested in Formalism, I suppose.

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Sunday, March 14, 2004

Reading:: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Originally posted: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:45:06

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

What a difference two years makes. Voloshinov's Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927) had some interesting things to say about a Marxist-dialogic understanding of psychology, but it was not terribly sophisticated. But Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) is. I can scarcely believe it's written by the same person. (Some would say it wasn't, but let's leave that alone for now.) Marxism develops the dialogic approach in far more detail and sophistication than the first book or Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), and in clearer detail than Bakhtin's own Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. And wheras the other books deal with the realms of psychoanalysis, poetics, and literary criticism, Marxism deals with sociolinguistics, a more general topic that touches directly on quotidian lived experiences.

Some readers have commented that Marxism isn't really Marxist and that the references to dialectical materialism, etc. were intended more to placate the censors than to develop Marxism. Certainly they're the thickest just at the beginning and the end of each chapter. I'm sure that these references do indeed serve to show allegiance to Soviet Marxism (just as contemporary academics, myself included, use gender-neutral language to demonstrate allegiance to feminist principles). But in either case, the conscious inclusion doesn't necessarily mean subterfuge! My (unschooled) take is that the Bakhtin circle did indeed want to develop Marxism and did indeed see value in the materialist monism that it described. But they wanted to develop it further, faster, and in different ways than would be permissible under Stalinism. (Vygotsky had the same problem: after his death, his works were banned for a time.) I wouldn't call the Bakhtin Circle's works Marxist, especially not Bakhtin's, but at the least it was the result of an earnest dialogue with Marxism.

Speaking of dialogue, Marxism is full of the term and its explications. I've gone over some of this in the review of Freudianism, so let me restrict myself to the high points. (My copy of the book has sticky notes on nearly every page, that's how rich the book is.)

First, consciousness is discussed in detail as a dialogue, one that takes shape in material signs. Dialogism is material monism. Those familiar with Vygotsky will see essentially the same argument here. Along with this point, Voloshinov notes that

consciousness has become the asylum ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs. It has been made the place where all unresolved problems, all objectively irreducible residues have been stored away. Instead of trying to find an objective definition of consciousness, thinkers have begun using it as a means for rendering all hard and fast objective definitions subjective and fluid (p.13).

This passage could have been written by Latour, who complained in one of his books that we assign too much importance to cognition and calls for a ten-year ban on cognitive explanations! Latour is a monist too, and he is impatient with the dualism that so often shows up in cognitive research and theory. But he later "repealed" his ban in his review of Edwin Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild, which presented a monist, symmetrical understanding of cognition as distributed across the material environment. Latour and Hutchins, I'm sure, would nod approvingly when reading Voloshinov's take on distributed cognition: "Cognition with respect to books and to other people's words and cognition inside one's head belong to the same sphere of reality, and such differences as do exist between the head and the book do not affect the content of cognition" (p.34). But Hutchins might disagree with what Voloshinov says two pages later: that psychology must be grounded in ideological science (p.36).

Ideology, again, is a major theme in the book. And Voloshinov's discussion of it, though it sometimes goes under the name of "dialectic," is definitely dialogical. He even anticipates Bakhtin's discussion of the utterance, of words as two-sided acts shared by speaker and addressee, and of genre -- and he talks about "behavioral genres" (p.96), stabilized forms of behavioral interchange.

I could go on and on about this book, which I remembered fondly from my studies at Iowa State and which I find to be even richer now. In many ways I think it's the clearest expression of the Bakhtin Circle's work on dialogism. We usually think of The Dialogic Imagination as the authoritive text on this, but Marxism is the better bet for my money. Check it out.

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Reading:: &lt;em&gt;Marxism and the Philosophy of Language</em>

Originally posted: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 10:45:06

Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

by V.N. Voloshinov

What a difference two years makes. Voloshinov's Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927) had some interesting things to say about a Marxist-dialogic understanding of psychology, but it was not terribly sophisticated. But Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) is. I can scarcely believe it's written by the same person. (Some would say it wasn't, but let's leave that alone for now.) Marxism develops the dialogic approach in far more detail and sophistication than the first book or Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928), and in clearer detail than Bakhtin's own Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics. And wheras the other books deal with the realms of psychoanalysis, poetics, and literary criticism, Marxism deals with sociolinguistics, a more general topic that touches directly on quotidian lived experiences.

Some readers have commented that Marxism isn't really Marxist and that the references to dialectical materialism, etc. were intended more to placate the censors than to develop Marxism. Certainly they're the thickest just at the beginning and the end of each chapter. I'm sure that these references do indeed serve to show allegiance to Soviet Marxism (just as contemporary academics, myself included, use gender-neutral language to demonstrate allegiance to feminist principles). But in either case, the conscious inclusion doesn't necessarily mean subterfuge! My (unschooled) take is that the Bakhtin circle did indeed want to develop Marxism and did indeed see value in the materialist monism that it described. But they wanted to develop it further, faster, and in different ways than would be permissible under Stalinism. (Vygotsky had the same problem: after his death, his works were banned for a time.) I wouldn't call the Bakhtin Circle's works Marxist, especially not Bakhtin's, but at the least it was the result of an earnest dialogue with Marxism.

Speaking of dialogue, Marxism is full of the term and its explications. I've gone over some of this in the review of Freudianism, so let me restrict myself to the high points. (My copy of the book has sticky notes on nearly every page, that's how rich the book is.)

First, consciousness is discussed in detail as a dialogue, one that takes shape in material signs. Dialogism is material monism. Those familiar with Vygotsky will see essentially the same argument here. Along with this point, Voloshinov notes that

consciousness has become the asylum ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs. It has been made the place where all unresolved problems, all objectively irreducible residues have been stored away. Instead of trying to find an objective definition of consciousness, thinkers have begun using it as a means for rendering all hard and fast objective definitions subjective and fluid (p.13).

This passage could have been written by Latour, who complained in one of his books that we assign too much importance to cognition and calls for a ten-year ban on cognitive explanations! Latour is a monist too, and he is impatient with the dualism that so often shows up in cognitive research and theory. But he later "repealed" his ban in his review of Edwin Hutchins' Cognition in the Wild, which presented a monist, symmetrical understanding of cognition as distributed across the material environment. Latour and Hutchins, I'm sure, would nod approvingly when reading Voloshinov's take on distributed cognition: "Cognition with respect to books and to other people's words and cognition inside one's head belong to the same sphere of reality, and such differences as do exist between the head and the book do not affect the content of cognition" (p.34). But Hutchins might disagree with what Voloshinov says two pages later: that psychology must be grounded in ideological science (p.36).

Ideology, again, is a major theme in the book. And Voloshinov's discussion of it, though it sometimes goes under the name of "dialectic," is definitely dialogical. He even anticipates Bakhtin's discussion of the utterance, of words as two-sided acts shared by speaker and addressee, and of genre -- and he talks about "behavioral genres" (p.96), stabilized forms of behavioral interchange.

I could go on and on about this book, which I remembered fondly from my studies at Iowa State and which I find to be even richer now. In many ways I think it's the clearest expression of the Bakhtin Circle's work on dialogism. We usually think of The Dialogic Imagination as the authoritive text on this, but Marxism is the better bet for my money. Check it out.

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