Mikhail Bakhtin: Art and Answerability

Bakhtin, Mikail. “Art and Answerability” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.'

Keywords: dynamic pairs, art's contiguity with life,

Four themes in particular structure “Art and Answerability, ” Russian philosopher and sociolinguist Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895-1975) shortest and earliest extant work. The first part of this discussion considers three of these themes; the second part concentrates on the relevance of the fourth theme to my research.

Three dynamic pairs comprise the first theme of this essay: (1) the whole and the parts, (2) interiority and exteriority and (3) art and life. Bakhtin begins with the assertion: “A whole is called ‘mechanical’ when its constituent elements are united only in space and time by some external connection and not imbued with the internal unity of meaning” (1990a, 1). To address human culture (comprising of science, art and life) and its embodiment in the individual, Bakhtin segues into discussion about the consequences of this embodiment borne of the contiguity between culture’s three parts. Art, argues Bakhtin, is othered in the individual through its relationship with life and science because art emerges as something touching but not merged. Through this relationship art becomes “high-flown…in no way bound to answer to life” as it is internalized by the individual artist-as-individual, the artist-as-subject. Ensconced in the subject’s psyche, art transcends life and vice versa: “When a human being is in art, he is not in life and conversely.”

Bakhtin’s argument can be read as an attempt to conceptualize art making as a complex ethical gesture. While step one involves the act of internalization described above, step two includes incubating the creative act in potentia. Bearing in mind Bakhtin’s literary literature, it is during this phase that the artist/author conceptualizes the work. Materializing the art takes place in step three; the artwork is externalized as a creative, ethical and subjective act. All this anticipates an idea that would preoccupy Bakhtin’s work on Dostoevsky’s authorship: through art making as a multi-step process, the artist imbues his or her art-as-an-act with an ego—an ego, moreover, that is often concerned more with its own self-aggrandizement than with its relationship to the world beyond its existence. The result of this navel gazing, argues Bakhtin, is art’s tendency to be idealistic and immaterial. The real is anathema to art when art encounters life. The real, for its part, is also too “real”—too “vulgar,” too base—to be interested in art. Therefore, art and life repel one another within the subject’s psyche.

How to overcome this opposition? For Bakthin, this takes place at the level of perception. The question for him is not, interestingly enough, akin to the historical Avant-Garde’s preoccupation with merging art and life through praxis. Rather, Bakhtin is concerned with the “interpenetration” of these realms as mental rather than material activity. He asks the question: “But what guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person?” And his response: “I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood as art…”. In other words, art as a creative process is not only a responsive act in and of itself. It also conditions responsive acts of interpretation. Creative expression is ethical insofar as, “Art and Life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability” (1990a, 2).

In sum, the internal interplay between (1) the whole and the parts, (2) interiority and exteriority, and (3) art and life is the first theme in the essay. And if the second theme concerns art’s simultaneous contiguity with life and alienation from it, Bakthin’s sense of the artwork as evolving an ego as it coalesces into a creative act is the third theme of this essay. Fourth, finally, and perhaps most importantly is the theme of responsibility, which Bakthin frames by way of answerability.

Significance to my research: I say the fourth theme is perhaps the most important because it concerns responsibility, an action/ideal reverberating through my research. The second part of this discussion therefore considers two kinds of responsibility as lines of force in my project. Either fortunately or unfortunately, this identification anticipates subsequent discussions around the aesthetic significance of ethical considerations (specifically lines of responsibility in collaboration) in relation to Bakthin’s theory of architectonics, developed in his essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” For the moment, however, a few comments by Michel Holquist will suffice to introduce architectonics as an approach for conceptualizing the parts (including lines of responsibility) in relationship to the whole (which is the practice of collaboration in the context of my work). The interplay of dynamic pairs identified as the first theme in “Art and Answerability” clearly anticipates Bakhtin’s subsequent theory of architectonics. Consider the following:

…aesthetics is treated by Bakhtin as a subset of architectonics:… architectonics is the general study of how entities relate to each other, whereas aesthetics concerns itself with the problem of consummation, or how parts are shaped into wholes. Wholeness, or consummation, is always to be understood here as a relative term: In Bakhtin, consummation is almost literally in the eye of the beholder…wholeness is a kind of fiction that can be created only form a particular point of view….wholeness can never be absolute (Holquist, 1990, x).

Wholeness can never be absolute for Bakhtin because the parts are never merged into a whole. They exist instead in tension with the whole and in tension with one another. So what are the implications of this relationship for responsibilities in collaboration?

On the one hand, there is the question of the collaborators’ responsibility to one another. Indeed, collaborative practice necessarily entails the exchange of responsibility (and by extension trust) among all those involved. As Karolle Wall observes in her Masters thesis, Is Not Outside Seeming Real as Substance Inside: A Bakhtinian Reading of the Relationship Between Art and life in Robert Browning’s Dramatic Monologues, “Bakhtin’s notion of answerability or ‘responsibility’ is inherently connected to his earliest beliefs that it is during the actual moment of consummation that the aesthetic process, or the aesthetic struggle begins” (1995, 10). For Bakhtin, responsibility as a means of consummating rather than synthesizing difference sits at the heart of his ethical project. Similarly, my own interest in dialogic art emerged from the possibility of preserving the agonism implicit in discourse at the level of its representation—of creating a model for discursive art practice that avoids coopting the voices of interlocutors, that instead affords necessary structures and/or conditions for their voices to be heard.

These objectives introduce the second kind of responsibility at play here: my strong sense of answerability to the work itself. With dialogue constituting both the macro-method and a micro-method of my research, I am engaged in an ongoing conversation with the work itself, with the leading this practice-led research. I understand the practice component of this project as an “actor” in the Actor Network Theory (ANT) sense of the term: “as something that acts or to which activity is granted by others,” to use Bruno Latour’s definition (1998). And as an actor, the practice can “talk back,” insofar as its performance impacts the project's development. And, in the same way that Bakhtin sees art and life as distinct in the individual but unified through his or her answerability as an ethical, creative, and subjective act, so do I see my answerability to the work as entailing the development of some kind of structure/method/sensibility where utterances of both collective and individual subjectivities coexist in productive tension. To do any less would be to shirk my responsibility as an art researcher and to fail the work by ineffectively bringing it into being.

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