Nikolai Bakhtin (alias: Nicolas Bachtin, Nikolas Bachtin), a Russian and British (Cambridge and Birmingham) philologist and cultural theorist, experimented in the field of philological methods, proposed on particular observations of the history of the Greek language and translations from the Greek language an original theory of cultural transfers. This theory is most closely associated with discussions about the status of the subject in phenomenology, from Edmund Husserl to Max Scheler, linking the status of the subject with the possibilities of linguistic expression of the subject and the construction of explicit consistent statements. Although the academic study of Plato's Cratylus dialogue belongs to the last years of Nikolai Bakhtin's activity, already in his articles of the 1920s, the main themes were related to the conflict between the etymological and situational substantiation of semantics. Nikolai Bakhtin, like his brother Mikhail Bakhtin, developed a dynamic model of culture, in which the position of the subject is not given in advance. But in the works of Nikolai Bakhtin the concepts of polyphony and dialogue 111 are not expressed, but there are concepts of tone and objectification, going back to the Russian religious philosophy. Rejecting some of the ambitions of Russian religious thinkers, he insisted, just as they did, on the totality of the sphere of beliefs, as opposed to the sphere of psychological reactions and to the sphere of verbal propositions. At the same time, criticism of ideologies, based on the recognition of the already existing sphere of beliefs as the stable horizon of cultural experience, brings Nikolai Bakhtin closer to leftist thought, which was most developed at the Birmingham School (Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies). Nikolai Bakhtin, like Mikhail Bakhtin, proceeded from the already completed semiotization of cultural decisions, but saw in this not any adaptive mechanisms of culture, but an autonomy of judgment, which never lends itself to the instrumentalization, which, in his opinion, was the focus of Plato's Cratylus. This autonomy of judgment predetermined Nikolai Bakhtin's acceptance of the left-wing agenda as opposed to any particular instrumentalization of culture, and his interpretation of cultural patterns, which was very close to the Birmingham School and to the standard of cultural studies.
|
