CHAPTER 1

THE ARCHITECTONICS OF SUBJECTIVITY

The search for the ultimate foundation is as much anunremovable part of human culture as is the denial ofthe legitimacy of this search.

Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror

ONE OF BAKHTIN'S EARLIEST SURVIVING FRAGMENTS, translatedand published in the West as Toward a Philosophy of the Act, readslike the beginning of a monumental project. What is announced at theoutset is a sense of disillusionment with what Bakhtin calls "fatal theoreticism",the Cartesian legacy of formal rationalism, objectivism,and abstraction, which has set the direction for Western philosophy:

It is an unfortunate misunderstanding (a legacy of rationalism) tothink that truth [pravda] can only be the truth [istina] that is composedof universal moments; that the truth of a situation is preciselythat which is repeatable and constant in it. Moreover, that what isuniversal and identical (logically identical) is fundamental and essential,whereas individual truth [pravda] is artistic and irresponsible,i.e., it isolates the given individuality. (TPA, 37)

It is this legacy, Bakhtin says, "that leads philosophical thinking, whichseeks to be on principle purely theoretical, to [the] peculiar state of sterility,in which it, undoubtedly, finds itself at the present time".

Bakhtin's point of departure appears to be epistemological, buthis view of the sterility of philosophy is most evident in what he describesas the failure of formal Kantian ethics with its "essential andfundamental abstraction from the fact of my unique being and fromthe moral sense of that fact—'as if I did not exist'". His critique ofphilosophy focuses explicitly on its inability to address the question ofthe concrete ethical event, the moment of actual choice, the singularityand uniqueness of the context:

Formal ethics (which developed exclusively within the bounds ofKantianism) ... theorizes the ought, and, as a result, loses the individualact or deed. And yet the ought is precisely a category ofthe individual act; even more than that—it is a category of the individuality,of the uniqueness of a performed act, of its once-occurrentcompelledness, of its historicity, of the impossibility to replace itwith anything else, or to provide a substitute for it.

Rather than a structure of normativity, Bakhtin proposes to study the"moral subiectum," the concrete and unique individual facing a momentof ethical choice and answerability. Like some of his continentalcontemporaries, to whom we shall turn later on, Bakhtin setsout to replace the formal, abstract, and universalist Kantian systemwith an alternative phenomenological conception of ethics, to explorethe actual "ethical moment," both in the sense of a vector within adynamic event and as that point in time when the encounter with theother takes place.

In defiance of what he calls "epistemologism," that is, the Cartesianpostulate of generalization and abstraction, Bakhtin claims: "Man-in-generaldoes not exist; I exist and a particular concrete other exists—myintimate, my contemporary (social mankind), the past and future ofactual human beings (of actual historical mankind)". Rather than a"system" or a "systematic inventory of values," he proposes to provide"a description of the actual, concrete architectonic of value-governedexperiencing of the world—not with an analytical foundation at thehead, but with that actual, concrete center (both spatial and temporal)from which valuations, assertions, and deeds come forth". Ratherthan a normative model or an ethical system, he offers an "architectonics,"a dynamic conception of the embodied subject in the ethical event.Notwithstanding the use of the Kantian term, Bakhtin's project is, infact, a new departure. The ambitious task outlined in this fragment isthe beginning of an alternative "first philosophy," which proceeds, notby "constructing universal concepts, propositions, and laws," but byoffering "a phenomenology" of the "answerably performed act," takingthe experience of the concrete, historically situated and fully embodiedsubject as its point of departure.

The Bakhtinian architectonics of the subject is thus profoundlyanti-Cartesian in that it offers a view of the human subject as fullyembodied, singular rather than generic, and always in the process ofbecoming, taking the experience of the concrete, historically situatedperson as its point of departure. But, though much closer to Montaignein this sense, Bakhtin, as we shall see, can neither fully revert to norremain content with the open-endedness of Montaigne's quest. Beingboth temperamentally religious and deeply concerned about the dangerof ethical relativism, so closely attendant on the loss of metaphysicalmoorings, Bakhtin must struggle to produce his own version ofsubjectivity. His "architectonics," however, is not a structure made upof the building blocks of theory: it is a relational process, a "meeting oftwo movements on the surface of a human being that consolidates orgives body to his axiological boundaries" (AH, 91). The precise natureand the dynamics of these "two movements" are not explicitlyarticulated in Bakhtin's subsequent work, but it is arguable that theycorrespond to what he elsewhere called the "centripetal" and the"centrifugal" forces (DN, 270–73) in reference to historical formationsof language and culture. I suggest that these forces are just as activewithin the human psyche as they are in the socio-linguistic sphere, andthe dynamics of this architectonic conception may be troped as thevisual puzzle of a Mobius strip, where the two sides of the band areclearly distinguishable, yet seem to fold back and reverse their positionsas they intersect.

This first chapter focuses on the two texts that most explicitly articulatethe "centripetal" and the "centrifugal" modalities of subjectivity,but it is important to note at the outset that, notwithstanding the apparentpredominance of the former in "Author and Hero in AestheticActivity" and the latter in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, it is not thetransition between these texts and their respective modalities of subjectivity,but the internal contradictions, the irreducible ambivalenceand equivocation within these texts, that generate the "architectonics"of the subject: the tensile relation between the "centripetal" and the"centrifugal"—between Descartes and Montaigne, as it were—is translatedin Bakhtin's work into a tug-of-war between a critique of thetranscendental subject and an equally compelling recognition of metaphysicsas a constitutive vector of subjectivity.

HOMESICKNESS:THE CENTRIPETAL VECTOR OF SUBJECTIVITY

"Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," probably written in 1922–24,offers an oddly anachronistic prescription for the "relationship" betweenthe author and the fictional hero (both invariably designated asmasculine). Within the aesthetic framework, the relationship is predicatedon the author's "outsideness," his "transgredient" position beyondand above the characters, which allows for an "excess of seeing"and, thus, of knowledge: the author can contain the hero in a field ofvision far wider than that of any of the characters themselves; he canknow what the hero is in principle incapable of knowing. This excess ofknowledge enables the author to "consummate" the hero, to see him inhis wholeness, to gather the hero's moment of birth, the moment of hisdeath, his background, the environment against which he acts (which,from the hero's vantage point, is a mere "horizon"), and the axiological"rhythm," the pattern of his life, which can only be perceived againstits totality: "The organizing power in all aesthetic forms is the axiologicalcategory of the other, the relationship to the other, enriched by anaxiological 'excess' of seeing for the purpose of achieving transgredientconsummation" (AH, 189).

Oddly, though, this thesis, which seems almost trivial when we bearin mind the different ontological status of author and character (the"real" and the "fictional" are, after all, ontologically distinct at the mostcommonsensical level), evolves into a treatise on human subjectivityin blatant disregard of ontological distinctions, conceptual boundarylines, and fundamental categories of philosophical conceptualization.The essay is premised on an analogy between the fictional "hero" andan "I-for-myself" mode of being (that is, the lived experience of thephenomenal, embodied subject)—terms used interchangeably throughoutthe text, as if there were no distinction to be made between a characterin a work of fiction and the living subject. Conversely, the term"author" is often replaced by "other" with the same disregard for ontologicalor epistemological distinctions.

Dispensing with all forms of rhetorical or logical mediation, establishingan unproblematic continuum between the real and the fictional,Bakhtin moves back and forth between these two sets of conceptualcategories with alarming ease. The essay, which relegates itself to thesafety of aesthetic theory and reads like an apologia for authorial omniscience,is thus also—primarily, perhaps—a thesis on the constitutionof human subjectivity, premised on a constant slippage and extrapolationbetween these two conceptual sets. There is no recognition ofboundaries or seam lines; no attempt to mediate the shift either logicallyor rhetorically. The aesthetic theory seems to blend into a philosophicaltheory of the subject, and vice versa. Bakhtin himself is notunaware of his own engagement in philosophical contraband: "It istrue," he blandly admits, "that the boundary between a human being(the condition for aesthetic vision) and a hero (the object of aesthetic vision)often becomes unstable" (AH, 228). There is not a shade of apologyin this admission.

What enables this slippage is the analogy of relational structures.True to his programmatic statement in Toward a Philosophy of the Act,Bakhtin sets out from the experiential situatedness of the human subject.There is, he argues, an essential asymmetry between the perceptualexperience of "I-for-myself" and "I-for-the-other." Experiencingmyself from within, I cannot produce an autonomous and whole representationof my self; my own boundaries are structurally inaccessibleto my perception and consciousness: I cannot directly perceive the topof my head, see myself from behind, observe myself as fully positionedwithin my surroundings, or consciously experience the moment of myown birth and my death. This phenomenological observation of theperspectival finitude and limitations of the embodied subject, who cannotperceive its own spatial and temporal boundary lines is, as MichaelHolquist points out ("The Role of Chronotope in Dialog"), directly relatedto Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and does not offer a new insightin and of itself. But the perceptual experience of being invisible to oneselfis also translated in this early essay—far less trivially, I contend—intoaxiological terms:

A human being experiencing life in the category of his own I is incapableof gathering himself by himself into an outward whole thatwould be even relatively finished. The point here is ... the absence inprinciple of any unitary axiological approach from within a humanbeing himself to his own outward expressedness. (AH, 35; see also

Hence, says Bakhtin, "a human being's absolute need for the other,for the other's seeing, remembering, gathering, and unifying self-activity—theonly self-activity capable of producing his outwardly finishedpersonality. This outward personality could not exist, if the otherdid not create it". The other—whether fully internalized or externalto the subject—is analogous to the author, "the living bearer andsustainer of this unity of consummation," who is transgredient to thehero and therefore able to "collect the hero and his life and to completehim to the point where he forms a whole by supplying all those momentswhich are inaccessible to the hero himself from within himself". Justlike a hero authored by a writer of fictional narratives, the living humansubject is "authored," configured, contained, and rendered whole by aninternalized other. In precisely the same way, the human subject's senseof itself is always confined to a partial "internal" perspective, which canonly be transcended through an external vantage point. "I myself cannotbe the author of my own value, just as I cannot lift myself by my ownhair", or, as we might say, by my own bootstraps.

NARRATIVE IDENTITY ANDTHE IMPOSSIBILITY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The cultural and temporal remoteness of the Bakhtinian vocabulary,compounded by his partiality for idiosyncratic word formations,should not obscure the relevance of this early essay to the "narrativityparadigm" that has informed so much of the work done in the humanitiesand the social sciences during the last two decades of the twentiethcentury. Translated into the philosophical frames of reference offeredby thinkers such as Paul Ricceur (1992), David Carr (1986, 1991), orAlasdair MacIntyre (1981), for instance, Bakhtin's views of the aestheticrelationship and the concomitant conception of subjectivity are clearlyassociated with the same human need for emplotment, configuration,and narrativization of life into a coherent whole. It is the same needfor a unifying "transgredient" perspective, a definable structure, a plot,as it were, that generates the narrative coherence we call the self, sincethe "aesthetic validity" of the subject can only be obtained through theframing gaze of the authorial other (AH, 59, 188–89).

No other moment of writing so clearly brings out this questionof boundary lines as the moment when the living subject tries to becomeboth author and character in his/her own narrative. It is hardlysurprising, therefore, that Bakhtin should be interested in the genericdistinctiveness of autobiography, which is a point of intersection betweennarrative framing and the constitution of subjectivity. One of thebooks known to have been in Bakhtin's possession is the first volumeof Georg Misch's A History of Autobiography in Antiquity (1907), a veryearly and forward-looking study of the genre as an interpretation of experiencethat is, to a large extent, culturally, socially, and ideologicallyconstructed. The challenge of discerning a pattern in the diversity ofautobiographical writings, Misch writes, is not only related to "the infinitenatural multiplicity of individual life but also [to] the historicallydetermined multiplicity in its forms of presentation". Misch seemsto anticipate much later studies of the genre when he allows for thepresence of "unconscious" elements in the narrative of self-consciousness,or when he concedes that the self-possession implied in theautobiographical act may well be illusory:

A skeptical observer of the world of men will ... smile at the way mentalk as a matter of course of their "self" or "ego." He recognizes thatit is owing to the self-awareness peculiar to man that the individualwith his bodily frame feels himself and is felt by others to be a person;but he smiles at the naive idea that places an ego at the back of thatpsychic phenomenon, as a solid and concrete thing that remains constantin spite of the changes of life from birth to death.

However, for all his historicist sensibility and his nod toward skepticism,Misch is still very much the Enlightenment scholar in his insistenceon the ultimate possibility of self-knowledge and the "truth"that emerges from the "creative objectification of the autobiographer'smind". The "philosophical dignity" of autobiography derives fromthe full and panoramic vantage point available to the autobiographeralone:

The man who sets out to write the story of his own life has it inview as a whole, with unity and direction and a significance of itsown. In this single whole the facts and feelings, actions and reactions,recalled by the author, the incidents that excited him, thepersons he met, and the transactions or movements in which hewas concerned, all have their definite place, thanks to their significancein relation to the whole. He himself knows the significanceof his experiences, whether he mentions it or not; he only understandshis life through the significance he attaches to them. Thisknowledge, which enables the writer to conceive his life as a singlewhole, has grown in the course of his life out of his actual experience,whereas we have the life of any other person before us as awhole only ex post facto; the man is dead, or at all events it is allpast history.