Bakhtin and Cassirer : The Event and the Machine / Bakhtin e Cassirer : o evento e a máquina

The influence of Cassirer’s work on Bakhtin’s writings from the 1930s has been studied in some detail but scholars have not examined Bakhtin’s early work, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (K filosofii postupka), in connection with Cassirer’s philosophy. The article first reveals how attuned Bakhtin was with the intellectual Zeitgeist not only of his own times, but also that of the 20 century. The uncanny intellectual harmony between the ideas of Bakhtin and Cassirer can be seen at the very beginning of Bakhtin’s career. The two thinkers are united in their reception, transformation, and attempt to reconcile two antithetical philosophical positions dominant at the beginning of the 20th century: the transcendental philosophy of Kant, Neo-Kantianism, and the Lebensphilosophie of Simmel, Bergson, and Heidegger. Bakhtin and Cassirer were alarmed by the cultural pessimism and potential nihilism inherent in the position of Lebensphilosophie. Next, the author shows ways in which Bakhtin’s and Cassirer’s ideas resonate with those of the later 20 century Jacques Derrida.


RESUMO
A influência da obra de Cassirer nos  In the last few years, a number of critics have drawn our attention to the important influence of Cassirer's philosophy to the Bakhtin Circle in general and to Bakhtin's own notions of laughter, the carnival, dialogue, and language in particular.
Many of the references are limited to statements of fact that are rarely followed up by any sustained systematic analysis of the core issues or tenets of Cassirer's philosophy and their relation to Bakhtin's thought. In his often quoted article Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin's Carnival Messianism (POOLE, 1998) What interests me here is not so much the degree of influence Cassirer may have exerted on the work of the later Bakhtin, as the uncanny intellectual harmony of their thinking right from the beginning, as well as the degree to which they have anticipated, as Derrida says, "a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of 'us' working for the last few decades" (DERRIDA, 2002, p.74). The primary goal of this article will be to demonstrate the uncanny harmony between Bakhtin and Cassirer's thought, especially in terms of their concern for the nature of subjectivity. This done, I would like to illustrate how their mutual interest for subjectivity can be seen to resonate with later twentieth century thinkers and in particular with the thought of Jacques Derrida.
But first, to Bakhtin and Cassirer. It is safe to say that by the early 20s, when Toward a Philosophy of the Act (TPA) is said to have been written, Bakhtin was well on his way to being a mature and original thinker in his own right. That said, in this 1921 text, we find the traces of a young philosopher hastily and passionately working in the thralls of the moment of inspiration, struggling to give objective form to his ephemeral ideas as they evaporate into the ether of time, disappearing forever into the nothingness from which they emerged. One can feel the frustration of its author as he is forced to fabricate, bricoler one might say, new modes of expression from old ones because he lacks an adequate technical vocabulary to articulate his lucid but elusive insights into the truth of his existence. Perhaps, in this text more than in any other by Bakhtin, we come closest to encountering Mikhail the individual giving birth to Bakhtin the author. As Holquist so eloquently notes in the introduction, we catch Bakhtin here in the very moment of the creative act itself: "we are here at the heart of the heart, at the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, 'the given' and 'the created' that will be at the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism as it latter evolves" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.ix) The central philosophical question for both Bakhtin and Cassirer was twofold: 1) how can we, as Cassirer puts it, "reconcile the immanence of life with the transcendence of spirit" (CASSIRER, 1958, p.42)  once-occurrent Being-as-event. Such a first philosophy," Bakhtin insists, "does not exist, and even the paths leading to its creation seem to be forgotten" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.19; author's italics).
The reader familiar with Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology will no doubt wonder at the similarity of Bakhtin's claim here, for Heidegger too will claim that the tradition has forgotten the question of being. Being and Time seeks to reawaken the question of the meaning of being before answering it concretely. Much, if not all, of Heidegger's thought can be understood as a sustained quest to uncover the "paths leading to" a thinking of being that seems to have always already been "forgotten." Heidegger, too, will claim that the neo-Kantian attempt to provide the transcendental structures of culture cannot be complete before its "ultimate foundations" have been established through a complete analytic of Dasein. The reader familiar with Heidegger's analytic of Dasein cannot help but feel that it would have been the ideal term for Bakhtin's view of the I that exists: I, too, exist actually -in the whole and assume the obligation to say this word. I, too, participate in Being in a once-occurrent and neverrepeatable manner: I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never repeatable, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else (BAKHTIN, 1993, p Bakhtin's language, not about the "once-occurrent event" but about the "actual-eventness of the once-occurrent event" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.1; my italics). Here too the "theoretical" and the "aesthetical" always already form "a constituent moment in the once-occurrent event of being" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.2) itself. "Aesthetic intuition" provides the once-occurrent event with its "image or configuration" and in this way is "objectified" into the actual-event-ness of the once-occurrent event (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.1). The split between "the historical actuality of its being, the actual and onceoccurrent experiencing of it" from the "content or sense of a giving act/activity" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.2) provided by the theoretical interpretation and aesthetic configuration proves, in the final analysis, to be untenable for Bakhtin.
An act of our activity, of our actual experiencing, is like a two-faced Janus. It looks in two opposite directions: it looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experience life (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.2).
Thus, Bakhtin does not speak of experience (Erlebnis) per se but of the "active experience of experience" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.34) -the Erfahrung of an Erlebnis.
Experience (Erfahrung) is, in the language of transcendental philosophy, the product of a process of transfiguration that transforms and organizes a particular lived experience (Erlebnis) of particularity (in fact by means of a synthesis of a series of lived experience of particularities) into a unified, stable, and meaningful experience (an Erfahrung) of a given object (Gegenstand) standing over and against a subject. Through the process of configuration (Gestaltung) and formation (Bildung) of "discursive theoretical thinking," the radically particular actual eventness of the once-occurrent event is transformed into the general occurrence of a thing that is understood as being this or that -that is to say, that has a self-identical, unchanging, and enduring Wesen -essence or being. As such, constitution. "Symbolic pregnance" is "the way (die Art) in which a perception as a sensory experience contains a meaning which it immediately and concretely presents" (CASSIRER, 1957b, p.202). It is interesting to note that for both Bakhtin and Cassirer, language and the aesthetic imagination are the two primordial modes of meaning constitution. While language can provide a conceptual configuration of the world, this remains a purely logical framework of relational structures. In order for this system of conceptual classifications to manifest itself, it requires the aesthetic imagination that provides the differential-relational logic of language with its αισθητικός (aisthetikos) presence (Darstellung). Experience, be it the experience of the self, an object or a word, is thus the synthetic product of the work of language and aesthetic imagination.
However, it is here that the proponents of through this objective presence that we can become an object of consciousness, become, that is, self-conscious. However, on the other hand, this process of articulation leads to a limitation and burden on the I that endangers its liveliness, its free spontaneous movement. Spirit invests itself in its work, and in fact must invest itself in its work, but this work stands before it as something foreign, as something fixed and stable, something external and objective, as something dead. "It is," as Simmel writes, "as if the creative motion of the soul were to die in its own products" (CASSIRER, 2000, p.106  a conclusion, the thing-become (das Gewordene) succeeding the thing-becoming (dem Werden), death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual old-age and the stone-build, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again (SPENGLER, 1991, p.24).

Ernst Jünger, the author of the Die Arbeiter and Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis
(1926) echoes Spengler and Simmel's views: [T]here is still much of the animal in man who slumbers on the comfortable woven carpets of a polished, honed, and silently intricate civilization […] and yet when the point of the dial of life swings back to the red line of the primitive, the mask falls, and he emerges, naked as ever before, the original man [Urmensch]. Whenever life reverts to its primal functions, his blood, which up until then has flowed coolly and regularly through his veins in the mechanistic activity of his stony, urban skeleton, foams up, and the ancient rock which has lain for long ages, cold and rigid, in hidden depths, melts once again into white-hot lava (JÜNGER, 1922, pp.17-18 apud BEASELY-MURRAY, 2007).

If I have quoted Spengler and Jünger at length, it is to remind us -Bakhtin and
Cassirer needed no such reminder -that words and ideas are never just words and ideas as opposed to real life: words and ideas are the life blood of spirit and, as such, they constitute and pre-figure our very understanding of ourselves, others, and reality. In the end they are productive, in that their meanings "are so woven into the reality of action (Realität des Wirkens) as to form an indispensable part of it" (CASSIRER, 1957a, p.39) -they produce that which they name. These quotes and the cultural pessimism to which they gave expression must be situated in their proper historical context, for Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis was published in the same year as Mein Kampf and the Nüremberg Rallies announced and gave form, and thus reality, to a direction of concrete events that would lead to unspeakable horrors: words are never just words.
While both Bakhtin and Cassirer acknowledge the existence of a certain tragedy of culture, this alienation is for them not the whole story. Both counter by arguing that we need to follow the creative process to its logical conclusion in an ethical act. We need, as Cassirer notes, to "return here from the forma formata to the forma formans, from the became (Gewordenen) to the principle of becoming (Werdens)" (CASSIRER, 1985, p.43). For Bakhtin and Cassirer, culture is comprised of two antithetical but interrelated and equiprimordial forces: a "centripetal force" that seeks the conservation of the traditional status quo and a "centrifugal force" that seeks the renewal of the creative act: the former they call "mythical consciousness" and the later is termed "critical consciousness." 4 The thing created [therefore] does not simply stand […] over against the creative process; on the contrary, new life continually pours into these 'molded forms,' preserving them and preventing their rigidification (CASSIRER, 2000, p.113).
[L]iving consciousness finds cultural values to be already on hand as given to it, and its whole self-activity amounts to acknowledging their validity for itself (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.35).
For the work, in whose enduring existence the creative process congeals, does not stand at the end of this path, but rather the 'you,' the other subject who receives this work in order to incorporate it into his own life and thus transform it back into the medium from which it originates (CASSIRER, 2000, p.110).
[A]n answerable deed […] must not oppose itself to theory and thought, but must incorporate them into itself as necessary moments that are wholly answerable (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.56).
Thus, the recipient does not take the gift as he would a stamped coin. For he takes it up only by using it, and in this use he imprints upon it a new shape (CASSIRER, 2000, p.114).
An act must acquire a single unitary plane to be able to reflect itself in both directions -in its sense or meaning and in its being; it must acquire the unity of two-sided answerability -both for its content […] and for its Being (BAKHTIN, 1993, pp.2-3).
A poem is but ink on a page until someone breathes life into it, and by doing so participates in the creative act that brings it into existence. Thus, for Bakhtin and Cassirer, no act of speech, however small, does not transform in some way language itself.
In other words, their response to the cultural pessimism of Spengler and Lebensphilosophie is to argue that the creative spontaneity of life is always already a form of re-naissance, a renewal of life through responsible participation in the creative process of the event of life itself, where the responsibility stems from the ability to respond to the work (the utterance) of the other. For both Bakhtin and Cassirer the I's relation to the other is always already mediated by the work, the product of the creative act-or perhaps better, the I, the work, and the other form the "modes of mediation itself" (CASSIRER, 1995, p.132). Cassirer calls these the Urphänomene of the symbolic function, whereas Bakhtin calls them "the architectonic of an event." (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.75). But, as we have seen, the event is always a symbolic-event, a textual-event. By taking the givenness of the word as the end of the creative process, the other to whom one speaks is negated entirely from the creative process of meaning; it becomes enough to be a solipsistic subject standing alone in the abyss speaking to oneself about another who is never more than a This is what happens in the mythical consciousness which is ruled by a logic of fusion, establishing an imaginary identification between the act and the meaning of the act. The result is a homogeneous, enclosed and mono-logical sphere of meaning that is blind to the heterogeneous existence of another centre of life beyond its own, that sees in the other only the reflection of its own narcissistic unity. In the end, as there is no nonmediated experience, be it an experience of the self or an experience of the other, we are always already enveloped within the self-identical existence of the narcissism of the same. However, Bakhtin and Cassirer would agree with Derrida that, while there is no narcissism and non-narcissism, there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming and hospitable narcissism. One that is much more open to the experience of the other as other (DERRIDA, 1995, p.199).
The individual cannot remain within itself, as a being-in-itself, but must express itself by articulating itself, externalizing itself in an objective form not only in order to become a being-for-itself, but also in order to become a being-for-and-with-others. Only in this way can the individual experience itself as a being that is, which is what we mean when we say a being is self-consciousness: For the 'conversation of the soul with itself' is only possible if the soul, as it were, splits itself […]. In soliloquy the soul ceases to be a mere particular, an 'individual.' It becomes a 'person' in the basic etymological meaning of the word, which goes back to the mask and the role of the actor (CASSIRER, 2000, p.54).
But Cassirer recognizes that, here too, every initial expression is already the beginning of an alienation" that can never be overcome or be resolved, for "the life of spirit consists in this very act of severing what is so that it can, in turn, even more securely unite what has been severed" (CASSIRER, 2000, p.134).
Thus, Bakhtin concludes I shall not find myself in that life [the life of objective expression]; I shall find only a double of myself, only someone pretending to be me. All I can do is play a role, i.e., assume, like a mask, the flesh of another-someone deceased (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.18).
The truth of my existence, of the once-occurrent event, which Bakhtin calls pravda, can only be thought of in terms of "the truth (istina) that is composed of universal moments; that the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable and constant in it" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.37). The act can only be understood in terms of its meaning or sense of the act. And in fact, "we act confidently only when we do not act as ourselves, but as those possessed by the immanent necessity of the meaning of some domain of culture" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.21). In other words, we act most confidently when we have an alibi for our actions, an alibi that unburdens and distances us from the site of the crime, from our responsibility for this happening, an alibi that determines a priori the raison d'être and thus the meaning of both our actions and our being; as a once-occurrent event, I cannot be responsible for what has been done, nor for what is being done, as it is not I myself who determines the meaning of my action; the act is done in the name of meaning, for the sake of a system of meaning, as an expression of its existence and not mine. I am but an agent, a representative, of this linguistic machine that operates through us. In this sense, George Bush is not the President of the United States -it was the President of the United States and not George Bush who began the Iraq war. The soldiers in Goya's "The Third of May, 1808" have no faces; they are not responsible for the event that takes place before them, through them, and ultimately to them, for they are only automatons executing their orders to execute the revolting peasants: their alibi will be that they were just following orders.
But to act with alibi, to act not as ourselves, means to act with impunity, to have reduced one's being to a function of meaning, to a cog in a machine that is, as Derrida says, "destined to repetition […] to reproduce impassively, imperceptibly […] received commands" (DERRIDA, 2002, p.72) -in other words, it is to act 'as if' we did not act, as if we did not exist -and yet, we exist -no, I exist! "It is not the content of an obligation that obligates me, but my signature below it -the fact that at one time I acknowledge or undersigned the given acknowledgement" (BAKHTIN, 1993, p.38). To act without alibi is to give one's life, to assume one's once-occurrent event by being it, by saying yes, and this goes to the heart of what we would like to call a 'response' or a 'responsibility,' be it ethical, juridical, or political. This responsibility, [however] will never be able to avoid appealing to someone who would dare say, 'Here I am, without alibi, and here is the first decision that I sign' (DERRIDA, 2002, p.xxxiv).
However, after all that has been said: How can one continue to say, 'Here I am'? How can one reaffirm the ineffaceable passivity of a heteronomy and a decision of the other in me? How can one do it without giving in to the alibi? (DERRIDA, 2002, pp.xxxiv-xxxv).
You cannot -but nor can you ever "acquit yourself" -"The impossibility of acquitting oneself, the duty not to want to acquit oneself"-that is what you attest to at the "moment of signing without alibi" (DERRIDA, 2002, p.xxxv But "pure performativity" is impossible. Derrida, as Bakhtin and Cassirer before him, recognize what we might call the "tragedy of performativity," its ultimate failure.
Within speech-act theory, a performative is a discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names. But Derrida makes clear that the power of the subject to bring forward, to express itself relies upon the formative power of the language spoken and is therefore always derivative of it: Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a 'coded' or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a 'citation'? […] in such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene of the system of utterance (l'énonciation) (DERRIDA, 1988, p.18).
Thus, performativity is never pure performativity, it is never a radically unique act or a pure event, for it is always pregnant with the normative structures that provide it with iterable presence and being. The problem of reconciling the immanence of life with the transcendence of spirit without reducing the one to the other brought Bakhtin and Cassirer to consider, as Derrida latter puts it, "the dynamics of the borderline between the work and life, between the system and the subject of the system" (DERRIDA, 1985, p.5). The subject for Bakhtin, Cassirer, and Derrida can no longer be a modern autonomous pre-existing agent of meaning, a pure transcendental ego. Nor can it be understood à la structuralisme, as a mere effect of discourse, as the effect of the machinery of language: there can be, for them, no question of the death of the authorrather the contrary. If the rift -if one can still speak of a separation at all between life and the work -between the act and the meaning of the act can no longer be located, if it can be located, between the once-occurrent event of life and the machine of cultural configuration, because "an oeuvre is an event […] there is no oeuvre without singular event, without textual event," (DERRIDA, 2002, p.133) then it must now be located within the subject as the locus of the work-life-event, producing a split-being that is both author and authored, spectator and spectacle. Thus Bakhtin and Cassirer can ask with Derrida: Who is it that is addressing you? Since it is not another, a narrator, or a deus ex machina, it is an 'I' that is both part of the spectacle and part of the audience, an 'I' that, a bit like you, undergoes its own incessant violent re-inscriptions within the arithmetical machinery. An 'I' that functioning as a pure passageway for operations of substitution is not some singular and irreplaceable existence, some subject or life, but, rather, moves between life and death, between reality and fiction (DERRIDA, 2004, p.357 rethinking what it means to be a subject after the linguistic turn. While recognizing that our very sense of self is always already constituted by the normative cultural structures of language, that we can never be that autonomous Cartesian subject, they do not abandon us to the impersonal sphere of the "they" of Heidegger or the alienated worker of Marx. Their unity of project is not accidental; it is, as Derrida says, "a concern of thinking that has kept a certain number of 'us' working for the last few decades" (DERRIDA, 2002, p.74).