Carnival against capital: a comparison of Bakhtin,Vaneigem and Bey
GAVIN GRINDON
Department of English and American Studies School of Arts, Histories and Cultures 

University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester M13 9PL

ABSTRACT

Since the mid 1990s, many anarchists and Marxists, drawing on the writings of Hakim Bey, the Situationist International and Mikhail Bakhtin, have increasingly articulated the concept of ‘carnival’ as a valuable form of resistance that merges the political and the aesthetic. This essay looks at these writings and the cases they make, and examines the extent to which they form a coherent body of thought.The central texts under discussion will be Mikhail Bakhtin’s

Rabelais and HisWorld , Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life

and Hakim Bey’s TAZ:The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism