Keeping the Self Intact During the Culture Wars: A Centennial Essay for Mikhail Bakhtin

In November 1995, Mikhail Bakhtin turned one hundred. His international fame, the overuse and dilution of his terms, the embarrassment we now feel upon hearing the words "dialogue" or "carnival" dropped once too often in academic conversation, all speak to his status as a classic, still richly generative of ideas but already ripe for parody. This essay will address one aspect of Bakhtin's legacy that has received somewhat less attention in the West (except where it overlaps with the ever-popular carnivalesque): his contribution to an academic field known in Russia as "culturology."1 I will suggest that Bakhtin was concerned with broad questions of culture from the very beginning of his intellectual career, but that these questions, in his peculiar formula tion, have resisted easy or accessible treatment. To focus the issue we must turn to Bakhtin's early essays and his final writings; the famous, familiar dialogic and carnivalesque structures of the middle years will be less in evidence.