APRIL FOOL BAKHTIN CARNIVAL & GROTESQUE

Rabelais and His World - Monoskop

When Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin's first book to be published in ... 

Bakhtin's carnival, surely the most productive concept in this book, is not only not .

Bakhtin and Carnival: Culture as Counter-Culture 

Author(s): Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman and Marc Davis Source: Cultural Critique, No. 11 (Winter, 1988-1989), pp. 115-152 

The Carnival in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

This essay will analyse the presence of Elements of the Carnival —such as the Grotesque, Church Criticism and Laughter— in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" through concepts of the Carnivalesque developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in "Rabelais and His World" and by Lillian Bisson in "Chaucer and the Late Medieval World".

Carnival and Dialogue in Bakhtin's Poetics of Folklore

Shanti Elliot

Images of reversal twist through many folklore traditions, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. For Mikhail Bakhtin, such reversals express the creative energy of "a carnival sense of the world." In carnival, laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and the hierarchies of "official" life. Carnival shakes up the authoritative version of language and values, making room for a multiplicity of voices and meanings. Bakhtin's theories of language emerge from this space of multiplicity. By discerning between different modes of discourse,Bakhtin shows how "dialogic" language disrupts uniformity of thought.

The Grotesque and Carnivalesque

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the original authors of the criticisms on the grotesque and the carnivalesque.  According to him, “the grotesque starts when the exaggeration reaches fantastic dimensions” (1984:315), for example the features that protrude from the body are changed and exaggerated. Exaggerated body parts would hide any normal parts, “there are men with disproportionate phalli […] and others with unusually large teste” (1984:328).  Noses, ears and head can be change into that of animals; the transformation of human to animal is a combination that is “one of the most ancient grotesque forms” (1984:316). The mouth also plays a big role in the grotesque, such as the ‘gaping mouth’, Bakhtin calls it a “wide-open bodily abyss” (1984:317), the hole can be viewed as an erotic image, as something to be filled, penetrated, even if it cannot be. The anus is like a ‘gaping mouth’. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as being unfinished, that it is still in the process of ‘becoming’, of procreating and conception. 

Carnivalesque 

For the literary theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin the carnival was not only liberating because - for that short period - the church and state had little or no control over the lives of the revelers, although Terry Eagleton points out this would probably be “licensed” transgression at best. But, its true liberating potential can be seen in the fact that set rules and beliefs were not immune to ridicule or reconception at carnival time; it “cleared the ground” for new ideas to enter into public discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest that the European Renaissance itself was made possible by the spirit of free thinking and impiety that the carnivals engendered. , the carnivalesque is both the description of a historical phenomenon and the name he gives to a certain literary tendency. Historically speaking, Bakhtin was interested in great carnivals of Medieval Europe. He saw them as occasions in which the political, legal and ideological authority of both the church and state were inverted — albeit temporarily — during the anarchic and liberating period of the carnival. Bakhtin recognizes that the tradition of carnival dwindled in Europe following the Renaissance and the eventual replacement of feudalism with capitalism. As a result, he says, the public spirit of the carnival metamorphosed into the “carnivalesque”: that is, the spirit of carnival rendered into literary form. The person who, existing on the cusp of this social upheaval, most fully represented this spirit was François Rabelais, and the book which holds the greatest purchase on Bakhtin’s imagination 1 Russian linguist and literary critic, whose writings, including Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929) and The Dialogic Imagination (1975), were very influential in 20th-century structuralism, poststructuralism, social theory, and the theory of the novel. is Rabelais” Gargantua and Pantagruel. The comic violence, bad language, exaggeration, satire, and shape-shifting which fill this book are, for Bakhtin, the greatest example of carnivalesque literature. Ever concerned with the liberation of the human spirit, Bakhtin claimed that carnivalesque literature — like the carnivals themselves — broke apart oppressive and moldy forms of thought and cleared the path for the imagination and the never-ending project of emancipation. Bakhtin suggests that carnivalesque literature also became less common as the increasingly privatized world of modern, individualistic capitalism took hold.

Volume 11 Issue 2 (June 2009) Article 7Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, 

"Nietzsche's Influence on Bakhtin's Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism" 

Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 11.2 (2009)  

Abstract: 
In her article "Nietzsche's Influence on Bakhtin's Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism" Yelena Mazour-Matusevich discusses Bakhtin's concept of grotesque realism in the light of Nietzsche's influence, particularly his notion of chaos and its expression of the Dionysian blended with and perceived through Russian religious thought and mythological consciousness. Mazour-Matusevich postulates that Nietzsche's influence on Bakhtin is most obvious in the latter's seminal work, Rabelais and His World.
In order to demonstrate Nietzsche's influence on Bakhtin, Mazour-Matusevich provides an overview of Nietzsche's reception in Russia during Bakhtin's formative years as well as of the current state of research concerning the correlation between the ideas of Nietzsche and Bakhtin. Unlike previous scholarship, Mazour-Matusevich explores the "Nietzschean connection" beyond Thus Spoke Zarathustra by including Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power, The Antichrist, and Twilight of the Idols. 

Bakhtin: The Body Grotesque

The Gravity of the Grotesque

Galin Tihanov

Professor at Queen Mary, London University, London, London, United Kingdom; g.tihanov@qmul.ac.uk

---

ABSTRACT

I propose to take the grotesque, both as a discursive genre and a cultural attitude and practice, as a point of departure that allows us to comment more widely on Bakhtin's Rabelais book and its significance for current debates on subjectivity. In carnival, the epic reverberates in humanity's boundless memory "of cosmic perturbations in the distant past," while the novelistic lives in the grotesque fluctuation and removal of distance, and in the irreverent and joyful celebration of resilience through laughter. Like the epic, carnival is about the maintaining of traditional practices, but in an open and charitably insecure, "novelistic" way. The book on Rabelais seems to be the point where, on reconciling and synthesizing culture and life in the acts of the human body, reworking and redrawing the boundaries of cultural taboos, and championing a symbiosis between the epic and the novelistic, Bakhtin sponsors a new sense of tradition inscribed in the irreverent life of folk (community) culture. This celebration of the people re-opens the vexing question about the political implications of Bakhtin's pronouncements on the epic and the novelistic, on communitarian and individual culture, and on their desired synthesis. But it also enables us to locate Bakhtin's style of thinking and his specific brand of decentred, indeed dislocated, humanism.

Keywords: Grotesque; Body; Cultural value; Subjectivity; Humanism; Bakhtin

CULTURAL & SOCIAL THEORY, LITERARY THEORY, MARXISM, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

On Bakhtin’s "Carnival" and "Grotesque"

Date: 24/11/2008Author: Alparslan Nas

Mikhail Bakhtin begins his work, Rabelais and His World with an introductory essay. For him, Rabelais is the most difficult classical author of world literature and it is impossible to understand him with ongoing artistic and ideological conceptions. He intends to reconstruct a new method in order to evaluate his writings accordingly and therefore begins to define important characteristics of folk culture. He divides this main heading in three categories; ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, various genres of billingsgate, and tries to interpret the human behaviors in carnival activities. He states that the form of carnivals was distinct from the official ceremonies. Additionally there was a distinction between the two concepts; carnivals and theatrical performances. Carnivals were standing between art and life. Moreover, there was no distinction between spectators and actors. There were no footlights; everyone was participating. Carnivals, unlike official, feudal, political ceremonies, were offering a kind of nonofficial type of worldly experience. Thus there was a two world condition. According to him, the two world condition is crucial in the way that it enables us to fully understand Renaissance and Medieval cultural consciousness. Carnivals had a universal spirit. It was referring all humanity and the extra humane and earthly subjects such as planets as well. In the line between art and life, carnival people were experiencing both real and the ideal, and that was the reason why carnivals were second-life of people. The festivity had a practical content, also had spiritual and ideological ones, which evolves it into a position in which particular philosophical content occurs. One of the important aspects of the carnival activity is about hierarchy. In carnivals, ranks of people were no longer valid; every participant was equal, thus the true human experience was lived. Bakhtin describes this situation of lack of hierarchy as a temporary suspension. On the other hand, Bakhtin emphasizes the activity of laughter; it was freed from religious dogmatism, mysticism and piety, and from magic as well. Laughter turns its subjects into flesh, besides it degrades and materializes. First of all, laughter was not individual; people were laughing all together. Secondly, it was universal; entire world was seen by the participants and laughter was directed to everyone. Thirdly, it was ambivalent; on one hand it was gay, triumphant, but mocking and deriding on the other.

_

The notion of ambivalence is also very important in Bakhtin’s interpretation of the grotesque. According to him, grotesque image is something which represents an unfinished metamorphosis of death and birth, of growth and becoming. It is frightening and humorous at the same time. It is between the real and the imaginary. It is incomplete, and this aspect challenges Renaissance perception of body. Principal of human body in Renaissance realism regards body as one complete object. It is atomized, and designed mathematically as complete material body like Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”. Bakhtin’s one of the main arguments is that grotesque is highly related with carnival spirit and it remained till today, marginalized, turned and interpreted into other forms such like romantic or modernist grotesque, but it survived. Bakhtin also refers to Wolfgang Kayser’s ideas, in which he stresses the element of alienation in grotesque imagery. For him there is something alien, hostile in that imagery; the actual world becomes alien because in carnival spirit there is the possibility to experience an ideal, utopian world. People return into themselves and the world is destroyed. Kayser also introduces the concept of id in grotesque interpretation. It is not in Freudian sense; it is an “alien, inhuman power, governing the world, men, their life and behavior”. He talks about “puppets” and “madness”. For him, there is something alien in madmen, on the contrary in grotesque, madmen exists to escape the existing world, presenting different perceptions.

_

In grotesque image, death was associated with life. Bakhtin states that Renaissance saw the body as a complete whole, and a deathless one. I suggest that today, the carnival spirit is deeply hidden, because of the tendency of enlightenment to keep death hidden. Adorno and Horkheimer suggested the notion of “mimicking death”; that humans turned themselves into “things” because they were afraid of death. Bakhtin underlines that people in carnivals were not “things”; they were experiencing the two worlds all together. Besides, Adorno suggests the concept of “authentic art” which brings the element of knowledge and element of magic together. I think grotesque image is partially related with this concept; it is neither fully “knowable” nor fully “magical” but includes perceptions of both. It is fantastic in Tzvetan Todorov’s understanding. Adorno and Horkheimer in “Dialectic of Enlightenement” were suggesting that enlightenment was seeing in the animate what’s inanimate. It brings life into non-living mechanisms, by ultimate demythologization and disenchantment. There were no universal spirits and gods, everything were explainable with numbers and positivist knowledge, which later constituted the myth of enlightenment. Grotesque imagery at this sense seems something resisting against enlightenment. It is revolutionary and distorting; it seems to me like that while enlightenment tries to demythologize concepts, grotesque brings up new concepts that are between life and death, actuality and art. It is “demythologisable” to a certain degree, but not totally ever, or it is something as an escape route from demythologizing of enlightenment. Modern Grotesque is practiced in art today and maybe popular culture (or pop culture) can be said to include a kind of carnival spirit in itself.

_

Lastly, Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival spirit may be related with Karl Marx’s thoughts; in the way which proposes that it is in human’s nature to be social. In carnivals, human socialize, without any hierarchies. For Marx, being social is a fundamental human need, which approves Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnival spirit. Furthermore, Marx emphasizes labor, suggests that humans connect themselves to other people, and creates something which gives joy to other people. In other words; humans define themselves in relation to others. Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival may also be interpreted in Marxist methodology; in carnivals, people join together, regardless of their social ranks, they are both actors and spectators, they form some kind of labor relationship, create humor, speak in abusive tones with intimacy and give joy to each other. Alienation for Marx occurs because capitalism sets distance between laborer and the product s/he produces, thus the laborer cannot connect him/herself with other people. Carnival spirit, with its utopian realization and escapement from the official, seems to be actualizing a kind of model for human relations which Marx desires. For Bakhtin, carnival spirit includes “true human” experiences in its essence. But Bakhtin is not determinist like Marx, because he thinks that the carnival spirit only introduces temporary suspension of the official and hierarchical.

_

Thus, carnival spirit will never truly be fulfilled.

In Theory Bakhtin: Carnival against Capital, Carnival against Power

In the second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the Russian thinker's work: the Carnivalesque.

IN THEORY, NEW IN CEASEFIRE - Posted on Friday, September 9, 2011 8:51 - 28 Comments

Tags: carnival, in theory

  

On International Worker's Day , Saturday 1st May 2010, 

the Four Horsefolk of the Post-Capitalist Apocalypse.

By Andrew Robinson

In the second and final part of his essay on Mikhail Bakhtin, political theorist Andrew Robinson reviews, and critiques, one of the central concepts in the Russian thinker’s work: the Carnivalesque.

Carnival and carnivalesque

In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin discusses carnivalesque (or ‘folk-humour’,) a particular speech-genre which occurs across a variety of cultural sites, most notably in carnival itself.

A carnival is a moment when everything (except arguably violence) is permitted. It occurs on the border between art and life, and is a kind of life shaped according to a pattern of play. It is usually marked by displays of excess and grotesqueness. It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience. It creates a situation in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things, by showing the relative nature of all that exists.

The popular tradition of carnival was believed by Bakhtin to carry a particular wisdom which can be traced back to the ancient world. For Bakhtin, carnival and carnivalesque create an alternative social space, characterised by freedom, equality and abundance. During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self is also transgressed through practices such as masking.

Carnival is a kind of syncretic, ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom. It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder. Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.

Carnival is also taken to provide a positive alternative vision. It is not simply a deconstruction of dominant culture, but an alternative way of living based on a pattern of play. It prefigured a humanity constructed otherwise, as a utopia of abundance and freedom. It eliminated barriers among people created by hierarchies, replacing it with a vision of mutual cooperation and equality. Individuals are also subsumed into a kind of lived collective body which is constantly renewed.

On an affective level, it creates a particular intense feeling of immanence and unity – of being part of a historically immortal and uninterrupted process of becoming. It is a lived, bodily utopianism distinct from utopianisms of inner experience or abstract thought, a ‘bodily participation in the potentiality of another world’. The golden age is lived, not through inner thought or experience, but by the whole person, in thought and body.

An emphasis is placed on basic needs and the body, and on the sensual and the senses, counterposed perhaps to the commands of the will. It lowers the spiritual and abstract to the material level. It thus recognises embodiment, in contrast with dominant traditions which flee from it.

Prefiguring James Scott’s analysis of ‘hidden transcripts’, Bakhtin portrays carnival as an expression of a ‘second life’ of the people, against their subsumption in the dominant ideology. Ir replaces the false unity of the dominant system with a lived unity in contingency. It creates a zone in which new birth or emergence becomes possible, against the sterility of dominant norms (which in their tautology, cannot cretae the new). It also encourages the return of repressed creative energies. It is joyous in affirming that the norms, necessities and/or systems of the present are temporary, historically variable and relative, and one day will come to an end.

Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.

In carnival, everything is rendered ever-changing, playful and undefined. Hierarchies are overturned through inversions, debasements and profanations, performed by normally silenced voices and energies.

For instance, a jester might be crowned in place of a king. The authoritative voice of the dominant discourse loses its privilege. Humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom in such a way as to subvert it.

Carnival bridges the gap between holism (which necessarily absorbs its other) and the imperative to refuse authority (which necessarily restores exclusions): it absorbs its authoritarian other in a way which destroys the threat it poses. It is also simultaneously ecological and social, absorbing the self in a network of relations. Bakhtin insists that it opposes both ‘naturalism’, the idea of a fixed natural order, and ideas of fixed social hierarchies. It views ecology and social life as relational becoming. Perhaps a complete world cannot exist without carnival, for such a world would have no sense of its own contingency and relativity.

Although carnival succeeded in undermining the feudal worldview, it did not succeed in overthrowing it. Feudal repression was sufficient to prevent its full utopian potential from unfolding. But it is as if it created a space and bided its time. Bakhtin suggests that it took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this cultural revolution.

Bakhtin almost portrays this as a recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalised, and made available for other uses. Yet Bakhtin portrays this as a positive, creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bakhtin suggests that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth century.

Carnivals have turned into state-controlled parades or privatised holidays, humour and swearing have become merely negative, and the people’s ‘second life’ has almost ceased. However, Bakhtin believes that the carnival principle is indestructible. It continues to reappear as the inspiration for areas of life and culture. Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. Rabelais stands out here for a style which is irreducibly unofficial and unserious, and irrecuperable by authoritarianism.

Carnival and the Grotesque

Carnivalesque images often use an approach Bakhtin terms ‘grotesque realism’, drawing on the idea of the grotesque. This style transgresses the boundaries between bodily life and the field of art, bringing bodily functions into the field of art. It also celebrates incompleteness, transgression and the disruption of expectations. It often performs a kind of symbolic degradation aimed at bringing elevated phenomena ‘down to earth’ – to the material, bodily or sensuous level.

This was not conceived as an absolute destruction but as a return to the field of reproduction, regeneration and rebirth. The spirit of carnival was personified as a fat, boisterous man who consumed vast quantities of food and alcohol – similar to Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present.

The carnival body is seen as transgressing and outgrowing its own limits. This effect is achieved by emphasising the orifices and practices which connect the body to the world: eating, drinking, fucking, shitting, birth, and so on.

This is viewed as a kind of “materialism”. The “material” in this excessive, consumptive, reproductive and bodily sense must be contrasted with the material conceived in terms of privatisation and accumulation, as well as in contrast to its medieval adversary, the spiritual or ‘higher’ plane.

In capitalism, the body breaks away from the generating earth and people. Later uses of grotesque realism in literature tend to lose the universalist and holistic implications of the folk view of the body. Instead of finished forms, the different forms of life – animal, plant, human – are portrayed as incomplete and as passing into one another (think, for instance, of gargoyles with mixed human-animal features. This testifies to a view of being as incomplete).

Bakhtin believes that the grotesque is counterposed to the classical aesthetic of ready-made, completed being. The carnivalesque body in contrast expressed ideas of simultaneous death and rebirth. It is counterposed to the classicist idea of art as the pursuit of the sublime.

In medieval times, Bakhtin believes, carnival expressed an entire folk cosmology or perspective which was usually hidden. In this worldview, the earth itself is a kind of grotesque, fertile body. Laughter, counterposed to the monolithically serious official world, is also part of this phenomenon. There is also a vision of time involved, which treats the new and the future as sites of regeneration and abundance.

This contrasts with official ideas of a past ideal time or a timeless order.
The dominant worldview of medieval Europe was of a natural order which is hierarchical, stable, monolithic and immutable, but poised on the brink of disaster or ‘cosmic terror’, and hence in need of constant maintenance of order. This is similar to Aristotle’s view. For Bakhtin, such a view is oppressive and intolerant. It closes language to change.

The fear of ‘cosmic terror’, the pending collapse of order if things got out of control (or the threat posed by the Real to the master-signifier), was used by elites to justify hierarchy and to subdue popular revolt and critical consciousness. Today, we might think of this vision of monolithic order in terms of fantasies of ‘broken Britain’, of civilisation under siege from extremists, and a discourse of risk-management (and the crisis-management of ‘ungovernability’) in which ‘terrorism’, disease, protest, deviance and natural disaster fuse into a secularised vision of cosmic collapse.

This vision of collapse has infiltrated legal and political discourse to such a degree that any excess of state power seems ‘proportionate’ against this greater evil.

The folk view expressed in carnival and carnivalesque, and related speech-genres such as swearing and popular humour, opposes and subverts this vision. For Bakhtin, cosmic terror and the awe induced by the system’s violent power are the mainstays of its affective domination. Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.

The celebration of the immortal collective body in carnival bolsters fearlessness. The amorphous fears are brought ‘down to earth’ through parody and degradation, turned into something worldly which can be overcome, stripped of its metaphysical pretensions. It tends to produce a complete liberty conditioned on complete fearlessness.

Against the timeless force of becoming, the pretensions of serious officials and rulers, and even of one’s own serious self and ego, seem irrelevant and comical. Laughter overcomes fear because it is uninhibited and limitless. Carnival is differentiated from other kinds of humour because the crowd also includes itself in the world which is mocked, and which is reborn.

According to Bakhtin, the grotesque is widespread in folk culture, from the giants and demons of myth to colloquial swearing and insults.

Curses, parody and debasing are used to subvert the stabilising tendencies of dominant speech-genres. Today’s swearing retains only the remainders of this culture, since it keeps only the destructive and not the reproductive elements. Still, its continuing attraction shows that it carries the remnants of the energy of folk culture and carnival.

The culture of the ‘marketplace’ also figures in Bakhtin’s account of carnival. In contrast to today’s use of the ‘market’ to signify official discourse, the medieval market was a site of transgressive discourse. This may explain how the rising capitalists were able to use references to the market to hegemonise popular strata.

Today, a genre similar to carnivalesque appears in shows such as South Park and Monty Python. The grotesque also remains widespread in various fields of art, and many examples can be found.

It is, however, against Bakhtin’s method to treat all instances of carnivalesque or grotesque as equivalent to their historical precedents. Everything must be re-examined as a product of its own context. Today’s Bakhtinians often read such phenomena in directly Bakhtinian terms. It is likely, however, that Bakhtin would have seen in them a pale, individualised and spectacularised shadow of the original culture of carnival. He would nevertheless recognise that they contain some of the energy of the original.

Carnival and Contingency: Bakhtin’s Place in Critical Theory

Carnival in Bakhtin’s account is a kind of de-transcendence of the world, the replacement of the fixed order of language – held in place by a master-signifier or ‘trunk’ – with a free slippage of signifiers in a space of immanence. The contingency of being/becoming can be embraced as an ecstatic potential, but it can also figure in literature as a horrifying monstrosity, as in the works of HP Lovecraft, and more broadly in the horror genre.

Does this express an unconscious longing for carnival which is at the same time disturbing to other layers of the psyche? We are here in the field of the dispute between affirmative theories of contingency (such as Bakhtin, Nietzsche, Negri, Deleuze, and Bey) against negative theories of contingency for which the openness of the ‘Real’ or the finitude and contingency of existence is always threatening (a repetition of the ‘cosmic terror’ Bakhtin critiques, ranging from Schmitt, Burke and Hobbes to Heidegger, Lacan and Laclau).

Why is contingency not universally celebrated, in a carnivalesque spirit? According to Reich, active force becomes threatening through being associated, as a result of authoritarian conditioning, with repressed desires and fear of authority. There are also questions of the effects of carnivalesque decomposition on one’s own ego or sense of self, on identities, and on habitual social practices or familiar spaces.

Theories with an affirmative view of contingency tend to share with Bakhtinian carnival a belief in an eternal creative force which unfolds in difference – active force in Deleuze and Nietzsche, constitutive power in Negri, the instituting imaginary in Castoriadis and so on. Theories with a negative view, in contrast, believe in an eternal need for order which is constantly threatened by the contingent nature of existence. The establishment of order occurs with the decision, the master-signifier and so on.

Between these positions, a lot depends on whether the ‘evil’ of disorder is sufficient to outweigh the effects of repression. It seems to do so only from the standpoint of the privileged. From the standpoint of the excluded, it just makes things worse: the excluded are left with both disorder and repression.

Bakhtin’s challenge is deeper than this, however. Bakhtin believes ‘disorder’ can be affirmative. For Bakhtin, immanence is non-threatening because it is associated with the dialogical nature of language. Because networks and connections continue to be performed in a space of dialogical immanence, the loss of transcendence is not a loss of meaning, life, or social being.

This reverses the Hobbesian account: rather than social death ensuing from the chaos of the collapse of meaning, social death is an effect of the artificial separation, rigidity and silencing which result from transcendence. As Benjamin has argued, disaster is not waiting on the edge of existence; the present is the disaster.

Authors such as Michael Holquist reduce the radicalism of Bakhtin’s immanence by suggesting that monologue remains necessary to his thought, as the point against which transgression occurs. Bakhtin certainly takes aspects of language-use such as speech-genres and the self-other gap to be universal, but he affirms the possibility of a radically different type of genre which is open to its own deconstruction.

Each person necessarily has a perspective or frame, but these frames do not need to be unified, nor are they necessarily unchanging. A rhizomatic world such as carnival has its perspectives, frame, and patterns. It does not engender an existentialist ‘lightness of being’.

But, precisely because these patterns are dissensual, holistic, reflexive, consciously relative and situated, they create a kind of freedom. This is neither a repetition of monologue, nor its redemption through recognition of its own contingency. It is an entirely different perspective in which dialogue and immanence are actualised.

Bakhtin’s account of carnival is criticised by some authors, such as Max Gluckman, Victor Turner and Roger Sales, for ignoring carnival’s temporary character. For such critics, carnival is a kind of safety-valve through which people let off steam. It ultimately sustains and is functional for the dominant system. It might even reinforce dominant values by contrasting them with their opposites. James Scott responds that, if this were the case, the powerful would be more sympathetic to carnival than was actually the case. Also, carnivals did, in fact, sometimes pass over into rebellion. And rebellions often used symbolism borrowed from carnival.

It should be added, however, that not every carnivalesque act is emancipatory, because sometimes, it can disinhibit reactive desires arising from the system. Bakhtinian theory is sometimes used to defend texts which arguably reproduce dominant values, but do so in an ‘ironic’ or ‘humorous’ way. This happens because of the layers of prohibitions: the system often promotes something (such as sexism), then inhibits its unconstrained expression.

Hierarchies were perhaps simpler in medieval times. We get into complexities today around the distinction between ‘true’ transgressions and those which repeat dynamics of the system at a deeper level. The system can use such ‘false’ transgressions to channel the carnivalesque into its own reproduction. Consider, for instance, how the transgressiveness of football culture has been displaced into the fascism of the EDL.

The tendencally resistant space of fan culture, by being displaced through repression, is turned into the pseudo-transgression of performative racism. At one level, racial abuse is transgressive (of liberal norms), but on another, it reproduces dominant structures (of underlying racism).

Such displays are similar to true carnival in their excess and expressiveness, but they ultimately uphold the transcendentalism of the in-group through transgressions which reinforce their privilege at the expense of an out-group. This is especially clear from Theweleit’s work: reactionaries and fascists are terrified of being overwhelmed by the ‘floods’ and ‘bodies’ of interpenetration with the other, though they must constantly return to the point of the threat of interpenetration so as to ward it off.

If carnival brings down to earth, its rightist transmutation plants heads firmly in clouds, making the self feel secure in its place by putting the other in her/his place. It belittles the other and not the self; or it belittles both, but in such a way as to keep the gap between them.

Carnivalesque Activism

Carnival has become an underpinning for activist initiatives such as the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, the Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination and Reclaim the Streets, particularly the Carnival against Capital. The free party movement can also be seen as a reclamation of the spirit of carnival.

The carnivalesque style of activism emphasises the deconstruction of relations, including those between activists and police, to create an uncontrollable space. Such tactics can be remarkably successful in disorienting and repelling the monologists of state power.

Abby Peterson’s studies of the ethnography of militant social movements emphasise an affective structure similar to Bakhtin’s carnival. The experience of lived immediacy and joy is constructed through a movement orientation to the enacted event with no separation between actor and audience. This serves as a means to integrate movements without reference to standard techniques of master-signification, though it does require ‘action spaces’ and in many cases adversaries. Peterson echoes Bakhtin’s idea of the immediacy of activist ‘rituals’ as something distinct from theatre or spectacle. David Graeber makes similar reference to puppetry and creativity in protets movements.

Figures of carnivalesque immediacy can also be found in authors such as Hakim Bey and Feral Faun. One can also liken Bakhtin’s view of creating new combinations with Situationist practices of derive and detournement.

Similar strategies can also be seen in social movements such as La Ruta Pacifica, who use techniques of ‘social weaving’ to recompose a sense of empowerment against the fear caused by civil war and state terror. Much of the state’s power is based on anxiety. The Bakhtinian hypothesis is that anxiety can be neutralised through joyous experiences of collective festivity.

These occasions strip power of its performed mystification, breaking into its ideological reproduction. They show its contingency by exposing it to ridicule and distortion. And they create a sense of counter-power through the permanence of the creative force of becoming, counterposed to the fixed order of being. It doesn’t so much confront state power as render it irrelevant and ineffectual.

Whether this is effective may depend on the tools the two sides have available to actualise their ideologies in spaces and practices. State tactics such as kettling are specifically designed to instil terror, as an antidote to joy. The popular culture which provided the basis for carnival is, in the most harshly capitalist countries, being destroyed by the penetration of the state into everyday life.

It persists, of course, in many marginal settings. We should remember here that the Europe Bakhtin discusses was itself a periphery in a world-economy focused on the Mediterranean. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that its modes of resistance look like those of marginal sites today.

Reclaiming contingency and carnival in the dead heartlands of the core, where people are strongly invested in their official identities and the preservation of an order which they believe protects them, is a more difficult task.

Traditional carnivals continue to exist in places ranging from Germany and Notting Hill, London to the Caribbean and Brazil. Other related phenomena, such as holi in India, also persist. While state regulation is a problem, such events still provide platforms for alternative visions and for political critique.

One can also point to carnivalesque aspects in practices such as graffiti, which may bring ‘down to earth’ such contemporary sacred as police cars, banks, or corporate logos. And why do children so often add giant willies, sex-acts, or swear-words to street-signs?

The grotesque, exaggerated body and the bringing down-to-earth of systemic abstractions are present even in such small, apparently apolitical gestures. They signify what is missing in the official picture – much as those who perform such acts are often excluded from the official world. They create a full reality in which the world is restored to its fullness and creativity.

Overall, therefore, carnivalesque remains a potential counter-power in everyday life and activism, but is ‘cramped’ in its potential by the repressive construction of spaces of monologue. Medieval carnival was possible because the spaces it inhabited could be carved-out and defended through the ‘arts of resistance’ and the power of the weak. There is a need to recompose such powers to resist, in order to recreate spaces where alternatives can proliferate.

Click here for part one of this essay.
Andrew Robinson is a political theorist and activist based in the UK. His book Power, Resistance and Conflict in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies (co-authored with Athina Karatzogianni) was published in Sep 2009 by Routledge. His ‘In Theory’ column appears every other Friday.

Prehistoric Vaudville

Yoiks the Flintstones had it right.

OL' JOKE: CAVEMEN WERE CRACK-UPS

---

November 25, 2005 -- Take my loincloth — please! Cavemen invented slapstick — predating the Stooges and Groucho by a mere 2 million years.

Our ancestors laughed to relieve stress from continuous hunting and gathering, say Binghamton State University biologists David Sloan Wilson and Matthew Gervais.

A study of cranial evidence found that cavemen communicated through slapstick before language evolved.

Scientists from Binghamton University, New York, have revealed that cavemen invented slapstick humour two million years ago, with their funniest visual gag being something like 'tripping over a rock'.

Nearly four million years ago they turned to humour to relieve stress from all that hunting and gathering - and were grunt-like 'play panting'. It took another two million years before their face muscles developed enough for laughter. They perfected slapstick to communicate feelings before proper language evolved.

"Laughter was used for a number of things including conveying embarrassment," The Sun quoted Professor David Sloan Wilson as saying.

And after that humour became a subversive antinomonialistic activity of humans facing oppression, thus the creation of the carnival, the Saturnalia, and April Fools. To embarass and make fools of self appointed leaders.

Which is why the Marx Brothers are a sheer anarchist delight. Surrealism itself is found in the art of humour and silliness of the Marx brothers, especially in there word play which was based on the very real immigrant experience that they portrayed on screen.

I sent the club a wire stating,
PLEASE ACCEPT MY RESIGNATION.
I DON'T WANT TO BELONG TO ANY CLUB
THAT WILL ACCEPT ME AS A MEMBER.

Groucho Marx

"Don't you know what duplicates are?"
"Sure. There's five kids up in Canada."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that.
I haven't been to Canada in years."

Groucho and Chico Marx in A Night at the Opera

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas.
How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.
Then we tried to remove the tusks. The tusks.
That's not so easy to say. Tusks.
You try it some time.
As I say, we tried to remove the tusks.
But they were embedded so firmly we couldn't budge them.
Of course, in Alabama the Tuscaloosa,
but that is entirely ir-elephant
to what I was talking about.

Groucho in Animal crackers (Movie)

Minister: "We need to take up the tax"
Groucho: "I'd like to take up the carpet."
Minister: "I still insist we take up the tax."
Groucho: "He's right -
you've gotta take up the tacks
before you can take up the carpet."

Groucho in Duck Soup (movie)

Coming out of Vaudville onto the Silver Screen the mayhem and disorder of the Marx Brothers with their disrespect for all authority reminds us of the Rennisance Carnivales that Mikhail Bakhtin deconstructed and revealed their lusty subversive nature. Not merely a bazaar or market place, the carnivale was the topsy turvy world of rebellion against the established order.

Rabelais and His World

Bakhtin highlights the happy activities of the commoners during the Renaissance - a subject matter and time period as intriguing as it is unexamined in popular literature. Few books can claim to be more captivating than one that describes the intimate details of the folk carnivals during the Renaissance. The Renaissance was a time of rebirth for much of Europe. The carnival culture that surrounded the Renaissance rebirth externalized this gaiety.

Bakhtin's point of departure is François Rabelais, a French writer in the 16th Century. Pre-Bakhtinian writers previously dismissed Rabelais' work as vulgar. Bakhtin has dusted off the pages of Rabelais' long misunderstood novels and transformed them into the most illuminating works the study of folk culture has seen. Bakhtin insists that within the scatological writing of Rabelais exist the necessary evidence to discover the history of folk humor, as well as the shocking practices of the Renaissance carnival.
Rabelais wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel between 1532 and 1552

The immediate goal of Rabelais and His World is to uncover the peculiar language and practices of the carnival environment. Bakhtin is quick to distinguish the carnival culture of old from the holiday culture that exists now. The carnivals that exist today pale in comparison to the unbridled lusting, crazed bingeing, and even physical mutilation that occurred in the carnival environment of days past. The carnival that Rabelais wrote about is quite unlike the modern carnival. In fact, so distinct are they that they share little more then just their common name. The Renaissance carnival culture involves the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of the prohibitions of usual life." (p15) Those that lived the carnival immersed themselves in the frolicking physical mutilation, bingeing and primordial gaiety that was the carnival.

Bakhtin divides the carnivalesque into three forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of billingsgate or abusive language. Although Bakhtin separates the forms of the carnivalesque, they are often conjoined within the carnival.

Mikhail Bakhtin analyzes the folk culture using an immense array of evidence from both historical and literary sources. Literary references that express the emotive and descriptive aspects of the carnival are legitimized by historical accounts that document carnival events, such as the marketplace cries of street salesmen. Because the material Bakhtin deals with is both unusual and often offensive to modern demands of literary taste, historical sources serve to legitimize Bakhtin's scholarship to those who might otherwise doubt Bakhtin's scrupulousness. Bakhtin surely recognized the risk that many people would disrespect his work. Undaunted by this worry, Bakhtin published this book to further the study of a crucial part of human social development, namely the development of humor and sarcasm; a study that has been mostly ignored by both literary and historical scholars.

George Orwell maintained we didn't know when humour began but he identified it as social embarassment, as upsetting the social order. With the discovery of prehistoric humour, we can say that he was right, and it was as true then as it is now.

George Orwell

Funny, but not Vulgar

A thing is funny when — in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening — it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate. With this general principle in mind, one can, I think, begin to see what has been wrong with English comic writing during the present century.