Contra philologiam: Лингвистическое и идеологическое в книге М. М. Бахтина и В. Н. Волошинова Марксизм и философия языка 1⁎

Maksim Shapir was preparing this paper for the present issue of Russian Literature at the time of his death. The text was fully conceived, but he did not finish writing it. Only his working materials were preserved, and are published here.Shapir's approach is as follows. Bakhtin/Voloshinov's book expresses totalitarian, anti-philological, postmodernist ideology. For them, the sign is social: there is no ideology without the sign, nor any sign without social ideology. Language is considered as superstructure and an arena of class struggle; thus, they are close to Marr. They envisage every word as ideologically charged and evaluative: just as, for Lenin, any literature expresses party affiliation. Consciousness is realized in semiotic, socially oriented form: personal space is suppressed by social space.For Bakhtin/Voloshinov, understanding is a dialogue, while philology is a monologue: dialogism (as adaptation of the text to new needs) is preferred to philologism (as understanding of the work in the context of its creation). Such anti-philologism makes this book the earliest expression of postmodernist ideology.