Two Routes To Concreteness in The Owrk of The Bakhtin Circle

Two Routes "To Concreteness" in the Work of the Bakhtin Circle
Author(s): Craig Brandist

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 521-537
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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Two Routes "to Concreteness" in
the Work of the Bakhtin Circle
Craig Brandist
In 1918 the young Georg Lukics published an obituary of the last major
Baden School neo-Kantian Emil Lask in which the latter's varied work was
commended for being "underlain by an essential common drive [Drang]: the
drive to concreteness."' This "drive" was especially problematic, however, in
the work of thinkers overtly committed to neo-Kantianism, a doctrine that was
in its own time a byword for abstruseness and academic abstraction. Just how
concrete could a neo-Kantian idealism become without abandoning its core
insistence that the world is "produced" by indwelling categories of mind? Lask
pursued this problem with a thoroughness unmatched by any other German
neo-Kantian, and in doing so he became an important influence on, among
others, Lukacs, Max Weber, and Martin Heidegger. This article discusses the
prevalence of the same "drive" in the varied work of those Russian champions
of neo-Kantianism, the Bakhtin Circle, where "concreteness" is invoked so
frequently that it almost begins to take on the character of a mantra. The case of
the Bakhtin Circle is especially illustrative because the "drive to concreteness,"
which all members of the Circle shared, resulted in a significant difference of
opinion about the extent to which the central theses of neo-Kantianism can be
salvaged. Like Lask, Bakhtin was particularly keen to maintain the core of neo-
Kantian ideas, while Voloshinov and, following behind him, Medvedev, were
much less averse to breaking with the central project of German idealism itself.
In each case the Brentanian notion of intentionality, the doctrine that conscious-
ness is always consciousness ofsomething, plays a central role. Consciousness
exists in acts directed towards objects, existent or otherwise, that are given to
consciousness. Brentano and his followers were invariably anti-Kantian, and
they were extremely hostile to the central tenet of neo-Kantian idealism, that
objects of consciousness are "produced" from categories dwelling in a tran-
'Georg Lukics, "Emil Lask. Ein Nachruf," Kant-Studien, 22 (1918), 349-70, 350.
521
Copyright 2002 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
522 Craig Brandist
scendental "consciousness in
from certain that Brentani
level, there is no doubt that
into neo-Kantianism was goin
As Gabriel Motzkin notes, L
logical conclusion ultimately
from within."3 The Bakhtin
article examines the way in
ultimately incompatible res
Revising neo-Kantianism
The abstract, or what Bak

Kantianism derived from tw
was a principled opposition
tion, and the second was an
objectifying functions that
cording to neo-Kantian prin
in an act of subjective spon
categories dwelling in "pur
project of Hermann Cohen
noted that "any appeal to a
supposed foundation in thing
ing, of willing, of artistic
Though seeking to broaden
Kantian Critiques," Cassire
wedded to the neo-Kantian
tions of the "formations" i
and dealt only with a unive
drew close to phenomenolo
project The Philosophy of S
forms of culture in which
linguistic, mythical, and sc
2 Liliana Albertazzi, "From Ka

Franz Brentano (Dordrecht, 199
3 Gabriel Motzkin, "Emil Lask
Primordial World," Revue de Mq
4 Quoted in Jiirgen Habermas,
sophical-Political Profiles tr. F.
The Critical Philosophy ofHerm
1 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosoph
edge, tr. Ralph Mannheim (Lond
Concreteness and the Bakhtin Circle 523
this work (1929) Cassirer argued that the "represe

comes to dominate the whole of language and
agreement with Karl Biihler's use of this term, w
on the notion of intentionality presented in Husse
(1900, 1913).6 Cassirer even praises Husserl's revi
intentionality in the Untersuchungen and the Id
works as a continuum inevitably leading to Husse
Cassirer, Brentano's dualism of physical and psy
required the replacement of a "real psychic subje
(Subjekt iiberhaupt) if it is not to fall into a "myt
goes much further toward re-establishing a neo-K
Husserl was to do even at his most Kantian mome
erbates the very monologic notion of meaning-confe
specifically criticized Husserl. As Fritz Kaufmann
Without annihilating altogether the duality inv

such, he [Cassirer] pushes it into the direction
where nothing happens to the soul that did not
and where the I and the Thou are poles of move
of them has the status of an independent value.
In place of a theory of intersubjectivity in langua

a neo-Kantian "consciousness in general," striving
knowable empirical world. This did not, however,
chologist and theorist of language Karl Biihler fr
poration of an intentional moment into his accoun
former this reform of neo-Kantianism simply did n
ality was swamped by an idealist "epistemologism
direct mediated coordinations" between lang
(Sachverhalte) subsisting in the extra discursive
translated both Biihler and Cassirer into Russian,
a new period of neo-Kantianism in which the wo
between the "cognising psycho-physical subject
surrounding him on the one hand, and the world
6 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol.

edge (hereafter PSF, III), tr. Charles Hendel (New Haven, C
7 PSF, III, 110n4, 196-98. This interpretation was, howev
Munich phenomenologists at the time; Karl Schuhmann an
Johannes Daubert vs. Husserl's Ideas I," Review of Metaph
8 Fritz Kaufmann, "Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Phen
The Philosophy ofErnst Cassirer (Evanston, Ill., 1949), 80
9 Karl Biihler, Theory ofLanguage, tr. D. F. Goodwin (A
524 Craig Brandist
formal being on the othe

further in a phenomenolo
nanced, at least at this tim
The Circle's debt to Cass
relationship to Lask is unc
S.A. Alekseev (Askol'dov)
philosophy and empiricism
1914, while the legal phil
had first hand knowledge
Bakhtin's close friend Ma
work in Germany at the
Lask's work on law as a st
Petrograd University. Bakht
Baden School, having occas
plunder Broder Christans
Kunst without acknowledg
of 1924.14 Whether Bakht
significant than the paral
thinkers in their respectiv
While maintaining the ne
departed from his forebea
psychic experience and a g
reinterprets the neo-Platoni
fact-value distinction thro
Lotze's fundamental oppos
arguing that the a priori co
that of existents, but it is
remain distinct but no lon
life and culture that so dist
10 V. N. Voloshinov, "Lichno
(1995), 70-99, 87.
1 See J. M. Krois, "Cassirer, N
Morale, 4 (1992), 437-53.
12 Craig Brandist, "Bakhtin, C
20-27; Brian Poole, "Bakhtin an
Messianism," South Atlantic Qu
13 S. A. Alekseev (Askol'dov)
"Prilozhenie" in Izbrannye soc
14 Ladislav Matejka, "Deconst
Fiction Updated: Theories of F
A. B. Muratov, Fenomenologi
Engel'gardt) (St. Petersburg, 19
'5 Motzkin, "Emil Lask," 178.
16 M. M. Bakhtin, "K filosofi
1994), 9-68, 11; Toward a Philos
2.
of experience yoked together in intentional act

followers consciousness is always intentional,
thing, for Lask "there is no validity that would no
a validity-in-respect-of, a validity-of [hingelte
tentional validating," which is trans-subjective
validity. Forms are meaningful only in relation to
(primal relation) of form and material, as Schu
To him [Lask], the two realms are rather two in

stand to each other as the "material" on the
stuff, substrate or carrier of properties-to an
or structure on the other. The two elements t
world, i.e. precisely that world which is give
The experienced world is thus always some com

(matter) and a posited form, but this form can
semi-Platonic "theoretical" realm of forms in isolation from matter:
Sense or meaning, therefore, is not radically and rigorously transcen-

dent to subjectivity as is the object of sensation. The world to which
judgments refer is no longer the transcendent realm of things as expe-
rienced, but rather a layer of "quasi-transcendence" founded thereon.
Validity is therefore also an object of experience, it is only when subjects turn

to matter that objective validity can be actualized, but at the same time validity
is irreducible to matter and may be detached from empirical acts. Lask was
now on the border of breaking with neo-Kantianism as such, as he recognized
in a letter to Husserl in December 1911:
When mentioning your influence upon me as to my view concerning

the relation between subject and object, I may perhaps specify this by
hinting at the fact that I make the type of intentionality you defend take
the place of all [neo-Kantian] notions of consciousness-in-general.
Subjectivity is itself a real part of the matter to which validity relates rather
than the transcendental principle still maintained by Cassirer, while meaning
and value depend upon acts which relate physical and psychic phenomena. "
17 Quoted in Steven Gait Crowell, "Emil Lask: Aletheiology and Ontology," Kant-Studien,
87 (1996), 69-88, 79. "Hingelten" literally means "to be valid, or to hold there."
18 Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, "Two Idealisms: Lask and Husserl," Kant-Studien, 83
(1993), 448-466, 455-56. It is important to note that the only book of Husserl with which Lask
was familiar was the Investigations, and so the theory of intentionality "adopted" by Lask is that
outlined there.
526 Craig Brandist
Bakhtin
The proximity of this dev

ture is quite uncanny. Like
Kantianism's detachment of t
the actual act-deed of its real
maintaining a fundamental sp
as comprising moments of
Kantianism, and psychic ex
realm of validity was rejec
content and objective valid
1920s Bakhtin describes liv
being," a "relationship to m
tionship does not change si
ethical to discursive acts as
notes Bakhtin wrote in 196
ing act:
The utterance is never a reflection or expression of something given

and already existing outside it. It always creates something that before
it never was, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, besides it
always has an attitude toward a value (towards the true, the good, the
beautiful etc). But something created is always created from some-
thing given (language, an observed phenomenon of actuality, an expe-
rienced feeling, the speaking subject himself, prepared in this world
view etc). Everything given is transformed into what is created.21
The "something given" is but the raw material out of which a new object of
knowledge (the world as meaningful) can be created, but in a public world it is
always already a compound of matter and validity. Both the realms of validity
and the given substrate are trans-subjective, but so, too, is the compound that is
the experienced world bequeathed to each subject. Each object of cognition is
created as "absolutely new and unrepeatable" since a new psycho-physical com-
pound is brought into being and bequeathed as the newly given for other sub-
jects. Thus, the world as a psycho-physical phenomenon in which the realms of
19 KFP, 15; TPA, 7.

20 M. M. Bakhtin, "Avtor i geroi v estetichekoi deiatel'nost" (hereafter AG), in Raboty, 69-
256, 180-81; "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (hereafter AH), in Art and Answerability,
tr. V. Liapunov (Austin, 1995), 4-256, 115-16.
21 M. M. Bakhtin, "1961 god. Zametki," in Sobranie sochinenii T.5 (Moscow, 1996), 329-
60, 330.
validity and "matter" are mutually involved (w

constantly being co-created through the incur
subjectivities. This allows Bakhtin to maint
Kantianism, in which religion is dissolved into e
world is an unending task of striving for a tra
anic Ursprungsprinzip, untouched by all subjec
Intentionality remains central to Bakhtin's theo
the Brentanian terminology is more oblique in the
Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, Bakhtin sp
tional word" that is "directed at its object [predme
word" which is also "an object [predmet] of an
terminology is, however, replaced in the 1963 e
translation is taken: the word "intentional" (in
"fully-signifying" (polnoznachnoe) and "intent
edness" (napravlennost').23 The terminological
the 1934 essay "Discourse in the Novel," where
"directedness of the word on its object" as the w
however, intentionality provides only "a concept o
allows us to see how logical meaning is present
The Novel in a "Fallen" World
For Bakhtin and Lask objects in themselves are a "lost paradise" from
which humanity was banished by the "original sin" of knowledge. The object
has always already been defined (in Lask's terms, it has already been made the
object of intentional acts and therefore transformed through the incursion of
subjectivity). It is therefore no longer what it originally was but a bequeathed
psycho-physical complex. Bakhtin makes a very similar statement:
Only the mythical Adam, approaching a still unspoken-about, virginal

world, the solitary Adam, could actually and fully escape this inter-
orientation with alien discourses in the object. This is not available to
22 Emil Lask, "Die Logik der Philosophie und die Kagetorienlehre" in Gesamelte Schriften
(3 vols.; Tiibingen, 1923-24), II, 1-282, 69.
23 M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva/poetiki Dostoevskogo (Kiev, 1994), 87, 403 (here-
after PTD); Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Manchester, 1984), 188-89
(hereafter PDP). Given the problematic status of the existing translations of the work of the
Circle I will be using my own translations and indicating both the Russian and English editions.
24 M. M. Bakhtin, "Slovo v romane" (hereafter SR), Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow,
1975), 72-233, 91; "Discourse in the Novel" (hereafter DN), tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl
Emerson (Austin, 1981), 259-22, 277.
25 Steven Galt Crowell, "Lask, Heidegger, and the Homelessness of Logic," Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, 23 (1992), 222-39, 23 1.
528 Craig Brandist
the concrete historical hum

certain degree abstract from
It is important to note her

about [o] the object. Bakht
probably responding to th
literary debates of the tim
contradictions," while surr
social languages each of wh
truth," and each of which
contradictions permeate the o
forms are embodied each b
moment of the experienced
embodiment in the material
In so doing the word becom
material for future creation.
In this "post-lapsarian" wo
selves, and while words are
ers, the speaker or writer
reservation for oneself of t
of one's word."29 The object
as given but as intended, i.e.,
This is an operation that is
especially clear in Bakhtin'
Here, the novelist is a self
carries out a "comic operat
not foreground a comic ele
book on Dostoevsky of 1929
as but a subdivision of the
multaneously specific mod
knowledge. While there ar
typology, each in one way
into simpler and simpler sig
and more elementary stylis
26 SR, 92; DN, 279. Cf. Lask, "D

27 Michael Eskin, Ethics and Di
Celan (Oxford, 2000), 126-27.
28 SR, 92, 178; DN, 279, 367.
29 PTD, 136; PDP, 233.
30 M. M. Bakhtin, "Epos i roma
3-40, 24.
31 Eugeniusz Czaplejewicz, "AType of Reflection and the Literary Genre" in E. Czaplejewicz
and M. Melanowicz, Reflection on Literature in Eastern and Western Cultures (Warsaw, 1990),
7-50, 46.
argument is very close to Lask's account of in

up' of the original unity of the object and pieci
secondary meaning structures, or concepts."32 T
genres, which are not concerned with grasping
fitting forms precisely to the fragmented given.
is not the intact objects which become the 'mat
what enters into the judgment is only their disme
Such too are the objects of the aesthetic activi
posed to the epic poet in the "Epic and Novel"
Bakhtin's Ethics
While sharing much in the sphere of epistemology, in the sphere of ethics

Bakhtin and Lask are quite different thinkers. Bakhtin's ethics have their roots
in Cohen's messianic (and quasi-juridical) ethics of "co-creation" adapted in
accordance with his own Christian convictions. Like Cohen's "aesthetic of pure
feeling," Bakhtin's aesthetic activity is an act of love which elevates man above
the sensuous longing for particulars. Unlike empathy (Einflihlung), but "like
sympathy" (gleichsam Erflirlung), this pure feeling is "double-sided," and this
is perhaps what led Bakhtin to build his own modality of authorship on the
basis of another, more concrete and Christian account of sympathy, that of
Scheler.34 Bakhtin divided knowledge into reflection on the subject's turn to-
ward being (the natural sciences) on the one hand, and the subject's teleologi-
cal orientation toward other "juridical persons" and ultimately the semi-divine
"superaddressee" (nadadresat) on the other (the human sciences).35 Lask, on
the other hand, argued that all knowledge is knowledge of an objective and
transcendent psycho-physical substrate, and this is as true of ethical-juridical
knowledge as of any other type:
The specifically juridical attitude towards reality is made up of two

mutually pervading elements. The real substratum is transformed into
a spiritual world of pure meanings, under the guidance of teleological
relationships; at the same time the totality of what may be experienced
is unravelled into mere partial contents.36
32 Crowell, "Lask, Heidegger," 232.

33 Quoted in Schuhmann and Smith, "Two Idealisms," 459.
34 Asthetik des reinen Gefuihls (Berlin, 1923), 185-86.
35 See Craig Brandist, "The Hero at the Bar of Eternity: The Bakhtin Circle's Juridical
Theory of the Novel," Economy and Society, 30 (2001), 208-28.
36 Emil Lask, "Legal Philosophy" tr. Kurt Wiek in The Legal Philosophy ofLask, Radbruch,
and Dabin (Cambridge, 1950).
530 Craig Brandist
This "unravelling" is parad

cognition is ... irrevocably
to an atomization of the ori
Lask there is nothing akin
guides knowledge through
sciences. Instead, law is inte
the teleological web of the
Motzkin puts it:
Lask argued that the perv

inaccessibility of the obje
the Neoplatonist model, t
Lask meant access to the w
access ... was that of Intell
sion to Being. The other w
the One, was that of exper
world and not to God, exp
Even though Bakhtin follo

intuition, this "essence" is
the intentional act of love.40
nitive "will to formations"
facilitates a neo-Hegelian su
in the world leads the given
and for itself," to be "enrich
what can be known, is "som
In this supra-being there is
exists in it and for it." The
this is exclusively the jurid
change the "meaning [smys
the universe unchanged "m
that "remains in being and
[smysl]" that can become a
freedom" of witness and ju
37 Schuhmann and Smith, "Two

38 Gillian Rose, The Dialectic of
39 Motzkin, "Emil Lask," 177.
40 V. J. McGill, "Scheler's Theo
logical Research, 2 (1942), 267-9
41 PSF, I, 63-65.
42 M. M. Bakhtin "Iz zapiski 19
cow, 1979), 336-60, 341; "From
Essays, tr. Vern McGee (Austin,
Concreteness and the Bakhtin Circle 53 1
Cassirer's distinction between "efficient" and "

leading to the development of symbolic forms
"stream of life" and in so doing develops a sens
Science for Lask plays a similarly juridical role t
with the philosopher investigating the roots of
holding back the "stream of life."
As the most systematic and thorough literary
novel is undoubtedly the most fundamentally d
However, the novelist is engaged in "aesthetic ac
tion of an object of aesthetic knowledge from the f
through the "loving" imposition of form. The fr
by being enclosed in and "caressed" by intention
put it, in a truly problematic image, "it is in this a
and the naivet6 of available being becomes beau
project is ultimately the construction of a "syste
those images are but shards that can never reco
the novelist has dismembered let alone the extra
sought to grasp. Rather, they reflect but a "tiny co
pel us to "guess at and grasp for a world beyond
pects that is wider, more multi-planar and multi-pu
than would be available to a single language, a s
reflected in the shards is not, however, the tr
experienced. This is irrevocably lost. As it was fo
transcendence" founded thereon by intentional
Voloshinov and Medvedev
Bakhtin's colleagues and friends Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev

drew on different resources to concretize their thought and were much more
prepared to shift firmly into neo-Brentanian territory. This was perhaps partly
due to their Marxist conviction, but also because they specialized in areas then
more or less untouched by Bakhtin himself: contemporary psychology, the phi-
losophy of language and Germanr art scholarship. For these figures the prin-
cipled unknowability of objects themselves is by no means secure. The crucial
concept maintained by both of Bakhtin's colleagues, but absent from Bakhtin's
own work, is refraction, a concept which owes something to the reflection
theory of knowledge developed by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-Criti-
cism but which also draws heavily from Gestalt theory.
43 Ernst Cassirer, " 'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy," in P. A. Schlipp (ed.),
The Philosophy ofErnst Cassirer (Evanston, Ill., 1949), 857-80, 868-69.
44 AG, 197; AH, 136.
45 SR, 226; DN, 414-15.
532 Craig Brandist
Gestalt theory appealed to

of reasons. Some of the ear
out by the Wiirzburg Scho
ceived by both main school
an experimental verificatio
acceptable to the more ideal
while the Wiirzburgers' ega
ating undoubtedly reinforc
predominated in the Circle
1931 Soviet psychologists w
"Marxist reform of psycho
promoted these ideas partic
dialectical, and "reactologic
mechanical materialism.47 L
ist psychology as a specific
materialistic monism, and i
psyche. In Freudianism, Vol
and Pavlov's "reflexology" a
ism and the Philosophy ofL
theory ("functional psych
theory had been introduced
ist" Oskar Walzel, in a serie
the Revolution on the initi
Medvedev who, like Bakhtin
specialist in precisely this
Gestaltqualitdt as understoo
Gestalt theory integrated a
without the connotations of
the work of, for example,
anthropology of Scheler. Th
comed the idea as an accept
dal' vocabulary of 'order,'
46 Martin Kusch, Psychologica

1999), 89-91, 114-23.
47 See Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt P
Quest for Objectivity (Cambridg
Soviet Union: I. The Period of En
Windholz, "Pavlov and the demise
Psychological Research, 46 (1984)
ing Vygotsky: A Quest for Synth
48 P. N. Medvedev, "Formal'nyi m
Tetralogiia (Moscow, 1998), 110
Method in Literary Scholarship (h
Vygotskii in Russia, worked out a new basis fo

givenness of both ourselves and other people in
sion by analogy or mystical empathy feelings,
ception we have."49 Thus, Gestalt theory made
orientation in science and a Schelerian typolog
without subscribing to Scheler's Platonism, to a
or to the neo-Kantian principle of the unknowa
Central to a Gestalt is the principle that a certai
prior to any of its constituent parts, and that
certain correlation between an autonomous fo
notion was developed in a number of differen
some that had neo-Kantian inclinations and ot
Kantian. In the first variant the autonomous form
able "thing in itself " and the Gestalt an intenti
mode of thinking was Cassirer's influential cou
and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965). G
ence Cassirer's later philosophy of the "basis p
ence, and his influence was apparent as early a
which Bakhtin was to draw in later years.50 As
Goldstein's language referred was not the organ
objective structure ... but the organism and its
quite easily transposed into Cassirer's philosoph
opposed trend within the Gestalt tradition was
psychologists Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka
rally existing entities-indeed as the primary an
of presentation-in a way which would make th
within a naturalistic framework."52 This philos
cifically praised by A. R. Luria, in perhaps the
sophical journal of the time, for ensuring a stri
thus being quite acceptable to Marxism."3
Between these extremes was the type of Gest
followers of Alexius Meinong and the so-cal
49 Ash, "Gestalt Psychology," 305, 258.

50 Krois, "Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism and Metaphysics,"
third volume of PSF is clear from his 1973 conversation
exactly when he became acquainted with it. (See Besedy
cow, 1996], 42.)
51 Ash, Gestalt Psychology, 281.
52 Barry Smith, "Gestalt Theory: An Essay in Philosop
tions of Gestalt Theory (Munich, 1988), 11-81, 76.
53A. R. Luria, "Printsipal'ne voprosy sovremennoi psik
4-5 (1926), 129-39.
54 G.J. Boudewijnse, "The rise and fall of the Graz sch
158; L. Albertazzi (ed.), The Philosophy ofAlexius Mein
534 Craig Brandist
and the Philosophy ofLan

a major representative of "
German psychological tho
yond their "classical form
tations are subjected to ce
the production of a Gesta
giving rise to a higher, int
a still higher Gestalt prese
biguous, but the grounds
given stimulus complex it
the mind produces Gestal
the empirical world itself
the potential for represen
note presently heard, hav
longer present but "stored"
vidual note but as a part-p
its foundational notes but
"whole" of the melody. T
calls
"a-modal completion,
not, in Kantian fashion, m
further stage in which pe
knowledge and integrated "b
cal principles.""' Acts of p
fore rigorously distinguis
distinct structures.
The tenability of the Vol

similar distinction between
upon but not reducible to
formed into perceptual Ge
level intentional activity (
reprocessed in accordance
place in the stratified w
ideologiia), where "our inn
our expression, its possible
inner and outer speech, ou
55 L. Albertazzi, "Forms of C
40, 334; G. Kanisza "Two ways
Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perce
56 Marxism and the Philosoph
1973), 91; Marksizm i filosofii
Petersburg, 1995), 307-8.
It is likely that Voloshinov's account of inner sp

a few years later, derives from that of Goldstein,
man scholarship by this time.57 Goldstein argues
the one hand, to "non language mental processes"
nal instrumentalities (external speech.)" One's inn
"inner speechform," that is, a "system of forms"
attitude with which the group or individual looks at
interest and communicative behaviour in genera
liarities in the structure of their means of comm
The inner speechform is thus a mental "set" on in
This is expressed in a special organisation of the

eral communication with other people takes pl
how tenses, flexions, articles, are used, the pre
to words of general character or words for co
difference in rhythm, sentence formation, etc.).58
We are here only a step away from Voloshinov's n

socio-specific refraction of being, and his notion
Voloshinov transformed Bakhtin's early intersub

discursive interaction by drawing on a phenomen
oped chiefly by Karl Biihler, who adopted the G
maintained that "a given structural context deci
perceptual and linguistic components."59 Biihler
'natural lines,' constellations of the stimulus com
follow" even though perception is guided by the
perceiving and acting subject who is intentionally or
This is close to the notion of Prdgnanz, which s
towards regularity in perceptual experience and th
to which experience tends to conform.61 Biihler
Gestalt structures to types of activity as well as
leading him to develop the notion of speech acts
was his "organon model" of the utterance. This i
functions (representation, intimation, and triggering
dations (object, subject, and addressee) and it find
1934 Sprachtheorie.
57 Van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 17

58 Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbance
59 Ash, Gestalt Psychology, 315.
60 Robert Innis, "The Thread of Subjectivity: Philosophica
Theory," in A. Eschbach, Karl Biihler s Theory ofLanguag
6' See Smith, "Gestalt Theory," 61-65.
536 Craig Brandist
I have shown elsewhere t

model in both the 1926 ar
1929 Marxism and the Phi
this also leads to Medvede
Medvedev's definition of g
is oriented toward the listen
the other.63 Following Os
Gestalt model of the utter
on the world, dependent
authorities as well as the d
able that for Medvedev th
intentional object in art, fo
representation."64 One of
European Formalism is the
a Gestalt notion of genre.
tion of accidental devices"
artistic utterance, more
whole."65 The genre as a w
a whole, the parts of whi
whole. This is quite unlik
"compositional" form that
Bakhtin integrates many
history and discursive gen
dropped.
Conclusions
What then can we conclude about the two routes toward concreteness, via
intentionality, that we charted in the work of the Circle? In the case of Bakhtin
we have seen that, as for Lask, the attempt fully to integrate intentionality into
a neo-Kantian framework ultimately led to a break with the neo-Kantian con-
tention that nothing is given but is posited by the universal subject. While the
substratum of the given is thus a precondition for consciousness, however, the
empirical world remains unknowable. Cognition dismembers the given com-
plex of matter and validity only to piece it together through secondary meaning
structures in the act ofjudgment. For Bakhtin this act is productive only thanks
to the ethical centrality of love in aesthetic activity, a contention that arises
62 See Craig Brandist, "Voloshinov's Dilemma: On the Philosophical Roots of the Dialogic
Theory of the Utterance," in Brandist et al. (eds.), In The Master 's Absence. The Unknown Bakh-
tin Circle (Manchester, forthcoming).
63 FML, 250-51; FMLS, 130-31.
64 FML, 157; FMLS, 47.
65 FML, 255, 248; FMLS, 135, 129.
from an original combination of motifs taken

Scheler.
Medvedev and Voloshinov are less willing to

ability of the empirical world. Instead, they d
variety of Gestalt theory developed by the foll
Biihler. The result is the notion of refraction
different species of productive activity on the "m
structured sensory complex. The results are struct
become the material for potential, higher comp
is reordered under concepts. This productive activ
"set" on the given, a phenomenon that finds its m
which are themselves also Gestalten. However,
by the neo-Kantianism Kagan and Bakhtin brought
unable to follow their realist predilections thro
clusion. Instead, one finds equivocation on imp
tinction between perceptual and judgmental str
and pragmatic meaning. One can only speculate
have taken had the political and ideological env
rated in Russia at the end of the 1920s.
From the end of the 1920s Bakhtin begins to integrate genre into his phi-
losophy of aesthetic activity. Now genres are socially embedded objects of
experienced validity (Hingelten) which guide the cognitive process of dismem-
berment and reconstitution of other objects. Perhaps the clearest formulation
of this is the "chronotope," specific varieties of which are explicitly described
as "forms of the most real actuality" that guide "artistic vision [videnie]."66
Bakhtin is thus able to find a common position between the anti-Kantian neo-
Brentanians and neo-Kantianism, which he is then able to inflect in a populist
direction by identifying pre-critical culture with officialdom and proto-critical
culture with the forces of popular skepticism. It is, however, only by raising
this critical impulse to the level of validity in literature that its influence can
restructure the cultural world in general. There is, however, a high price for all
this: the knowability of the empirical world. Like Lask and Cassirer, Bakhtin
ultimately collapses structures of things (presentations) into structures of thought
(judgment).67 Instead of being composed of "pregnant" but transcendent com-
plexes, the perceptual world is what Cassirer called "symbolically pregnant,"68
that is, able to be invested with more and more secondary meaning structures
and made into a constantly forming, quasi-transcendent whole.
University of Sheffield.
66 M. M. Bakhtin, "Formy vremeni i khronotopa v rotfane" in Voprosy, 234-407, 235; "Forms

of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" in Dialogic, 84-258, 85.
67 See Karl Schuhmann and Barry Smith, "Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology: The Case
of Emil Lask and Johannes Daubert," Kant-Studien, 82 (1991), 303-18.
68 PSF, III, 191-204.

Two Routes To Concreteness in The Owrk of The Bakhtin Circle

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Two Routes "To Concreteness" in the Work of the Bakhtin Circle

Author(s): Craig Brandist

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

Copyright 2002 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

The abstract, or what Bak

2 Liliana Albertazzi, "From Ka

this work (1929) Cassirer argued that the "represe

Without annihilating altogether the duality inv

In place of a theory of intersubjectivity in langua

6 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol.

formal being on the othe

of experience yoked together in intentional act

To him [Lask], the two realms are rather two in

The experienced world is thus always some com

Sense or meaning, therefore, is not radically and rigorously transcen-

Validity is therefore also an object of experience, it is only when subjects turn

When mentioning your influence upon me as to my view concerning

The proximity of this dev

The utterance is never a reflection or expression of something given

19 KFP, 15; TPA, 7.

validity and "matter" are mutually involved (w

The Novel in a "Fallen" World

Only the mythical Adam, approaching a still unspoken-about, virginal

the concrete historical hum

It is important to note her

26 SR, 92; DN, 279. Cf. Lask, "D

argument is very close to Lask's account of in

While sharing much in the sphere of epistemology, in the sphere of ethics

The specifically juridical attitude towards reality is made up of two

32 Crowell, "Lask, Heidegger," 232.

This "unravelling" is parad

Lask argued that the perv

Even though Bakhtin follo

37 Schuhmann and Smith, "Two

Cassirer's distinction between "efficient" and "

Voloshinov and Medvedev

Bakhtin's colleagues and friends Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev

Gestalt theory appealed to

46 Martin Kusch, Psychologica

Vygotskii in Russia, worked out a new basis fo

49 Ash, "Gestalt Psychology," 305, 258.

and the Philosophy ofLan

The tenability of the Vol

It is likely that Voloshinov's account of inner sp

This is expressed in a special organisation of the

We are here only a step away from Voloshinov's n

Voloshinov transformed Bakhtin's early intersub

57 Van der Veer and Valsiner, Understanding Vygotsky, 17

I have shown elsewhere t

from an original combination of motifs taken

Medvedev and Voloshinov are less willing to

66 M. M. Bakhtin, "Formy vremeni i khronotopa v rotfane" in Voprosy, 234-407, 235; "Forms

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