reading diary/STRATEGIES

Things don’t exist ‘in themselves’, but only in their relations.

Polyphony literally means multiple voices.

The dialogical word is always in an intense relationship with another’s word, being addressed to a listener and anticipating a response. Because it is designed to produce a response, it has a combative quality (e.g. parody or polemic). It resists closure or unambiguous expression, and fails to produce a ‘whole’. It is a consciousness lived constantly on the borders of other consciousnesses.

dialogism characterises the entire social world. Authentic human life is an open-ended dialogue.

In many ways, the police are the epitome of monologism.

 a fundamental refusal of dialogue and creativity.

the author performs a particular syncretic expression of social heteroglossia. The originality is in the combination, not the elements.

The social and historical world is also characterised by heteroglossia and discursive struggle.

One undergoes ‘becoming’ or maturation by selectively assimilating others’ perspectives.

Epics and poetry create fatalistic and closed worlds, whereas novels create open worlds.

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anguages and cultures are always unfinished. Similarly, nothing is ever absolutely dead, since it is connected to everything else by the chain of meanings.

The emergence of dialogism at particular points produces cultural revolutions

A Bakhtinian utopia would be a space of abundance of dialogue, of coexistence of differences, of the absence of any overarching regulation of the free self-actualisation of different perspectives. It would be something like a permanent carnival.

In sociological terms, Bakhtin is closer to interactionist and poststructuralist approaches based on meaning and discourse than to Marxist approaches with their usual emphasis on economics.

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A carnival is a moment when everything (except arguably violence) is permitted.

 It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience.

Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body.

 It lowers the spiritual and abstract to the material level. It thus recognises embodiment, in contrast with dominant traditions which flee from it.

‘second life’

Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. 

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.

Folk culture combats the fear created by cosmic terror.

destabilize everything, especially social structures, especially the market place.

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.

A rhizomatic world such as carnival has its perspectives, frame, and patterns. It does not engender an existentialist ‘lightness of being’.

dialogue and immanence are actualised.

The carnivalesque style of activism emphasises the deconstruction of relations, including those between activists and police, to create an uncontrollable space.

Zapatista tactics are often carnivalesque - the paper airplanes that is the zapatista air force, for example, and even the wooden guns and the masks (making visible by using masks that make apparent the invisibility of the Maya people in the real political imaginary), and the dissolution of self and other, audience and performer, todos somos Marcos. 

recreate spaces where alternatives can proliferate.