Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher and literary critic who is best known for his concept of the carnival. In his work, Bakhtin argued that the carnival was a key aspect of popular culture and that it played a significant role in the formation of social identity.
According to Bakhtin, the carnival was a time when the normal rules of society were suspended and people were free to let go of their inhibitions and participate in a celebration of life. The carnival was a place where people could express themselves freely, engage in revelry and laughter, and participate in a temporary leveling of social hierarchy.
Bakhtin argued that the carnival was an important form of social critique and that it allowed people to challenge and subvert the dominant ideologies of their time. Through their participation in the carnival, people were able to critique and satirize the values and beliefs of the ruling class, and to assert their own identity and agency.
The carnival was also a key site of cultural exchange, as people from different social groups and regions came together to participate in the festivities. This cross-cultural interaction allowed for the exchange of ideas and the emergence of new forms of cultural expression.
Overall, Bakhtin's concept of the carnival highlights the importance of popular culture in shaping social identity and the role of cultural exchange in the development of new ideas and forms of expression. It is a powerful reminder of the potential for cultural celebration and social critique to challenge and transform the status quo.
Cultural Reader: Mikhail Bakhtin: "Carnival and Carnivalesque"
The establishment of order occurs with the decision, the master-signifier and so on. People gather at fires and perform traditional dances e. The experience of lived immediacy and joy is constructed through a movement orientation to the enacted event with no separation between actor and audience. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. In carnivals, human socialize, without any hierarchies. It creates a situation in which diverse voices are heard and interact, breaking down conventions and enabling genuine dialogue.
Carnivalization/Carnivalesque, according to Mikhail Bakhtin
Humour is counterposed to the seriousness of officialdom in such a way as to subvert it. He made an important contribution to science. From the standpoint of the excluded, it just makes things worse: the excluded are left with both disorder and repression. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. It ultimately sustains and is functional for the dominant system.
THE PLACE OF CARNIVAL IN THE CONTEXT OF MIKHAIL BAKHTIN’S PHILOSOPHY
In distinctive ways, Rickles employed carnivalesque humour to create a public site for inverting social hierarchies, sensibilities, and value systems. Every voice in Bakhtinian is an autonomous being which is always in interface with other voices for the dialogue creating a scenario where every voice could be heard concurrently , which means that everyone has equal chance to speak himself or herself out. It was referring all humanity and the extra humane and earthly subjects such as planets as well. Carnival, in this sense is categorized as a folk festivity by Bakhtin. Billingsgate and devout phrases change each other. Introduction Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian philosopher who wrote on a variety of subjects, including his famous work Rabelais and his World, on the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, where he discusses carnivalesque and Carnival.
For example, on Ashura, in Iraq, bare-chested men march around the shrine. Accompanied by the rhythmic beating of drums, hundreds of men hit their chests and wound their bodies with sharp tools. But his concept is not universal. Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42 6 : 12—49. In its excess, the identities of actor and spectator fall away, giving birth to a new reality, to new, ecstatic forms of life: a utopia of freedom and equality.
Celebrating a carnival of insults: Don Rickles meets Mikhail Bakhtin — University of Kentucky
There is a need to recompose such powers to resist, in order recreating spaces where alternatives can proliferate. This approach to comedy not only allowed Rickles to undermine social conventions, but also allowed Rickles to encourage audience involvement in these carnivalesque antics. The less use value is present in the time of modern survival, the more highly it is exalted in the spectacle. 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. Carnival must not be confused with mere holiday or, least of all, with self-serving festivals fostered by governments, secular or theocratic.
But it is as if it created a space and bided its time. Freedom is only possible in fearlessness. It is a kind of liberating influence and he sees it as part of the subversion of the sacred word in Renaissance culture. 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. The suspension of distance between people encouraged free interaction and free individual expression. According to Reich, active force becomes threatening through being associated, as a result of authoritarian conditioning, with repressed desires and fear of authority.
These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin. . The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology. Things are reversed; cloths are worn upside down, household items serve as weapons, and the clown is a king, and the king becomes the clown. Bakhtin adopted these categories and proposed the concept of carnivalesque.
How Useful Is Bakhtin'S Concept Of Carnival? Summary Example
But in Stalin epoch his dissertation was rejected Bakhtin received the degree of candidate of science the lowest scientific degree in Russia only in 1952 and they prohibited publishing the text of the dissertation about Rabelais. The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. The University of Western Ontario Journal of Anthropology. It is a type of performance, but this performance is communal, with no boundary between performers and audience. He states that the form of carnivals was distinct from the official ceremonies. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. Carnivalization and its generic counterpart— polyphonic novel. In the case, fools become wise, king becomes begger. Carnival is the ethical space of anarchy; a space that engenders no fixed orders or institutions, a space where all that is made can be unmade.
