Empathy and Form: The Bakhtin Circle and the Perspective of Architectonics
Zachary King, University of Chicago
This paper is the first chapter of my dissertation, in which I examine conceptions of empathy in critical and cultural production in the first two decades of the Soviet Union. My central hypothesis is that cultural responses, spanning the conflicts of the post-war years, represented a set of aesthetic and critical attempts to envision a radical empathy that could bridge socio-economic and cultural divides. Some of these attempts are rooted in a mistaken, even pathological, focus on the object and its texture, even while most propose a new symbiosis of humanity, nature and machine. In this chapter I investigate the concept and treatment of the term architectonics in the early essays of Mikhail Bakhtin alongside Pavel Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and Valentin Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. I argue that this cold, structural term in fact works to negotiate empathetic relationships found in literary and philosophical language. The chapter begins by historicizing Bakhtin’s polemical appropriation of the Kantian term architectonics in his essays of 1918-1924. Bakhtin, turning Kant’s logical term to philological use, describes how the perspectives of protagonist, author and reader are held together by an act of empathetic contemplation. His sense of reading as encounter underlies his critique of Formalist aesthetics and aligns, I argue, with contemporary criticism that sees artistic perspective as a device for cultivating empathy. I then trace the ways in which this concept falls out of explicit usage in the work of his colleagues, to be replaced by ideology, and yet continues to shape their thinking about structure and literary reception. I will argue that in the work of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov, architectonics and ideology describe a process through which meaningful empathetic recognition becomes possible.
Discussant: Austin Jung
May 12, 2017
11am-12:20pm in Classics, Room 113
University of Chicago
Tea and cookies will be served. You are welcome to bring your lunch.
The paper is available on our website under the ‘Papers’ tab. Password: reeca17king
Please contact me (christymonet@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions about this workshop or if you believe you may need assistance.
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The remaining schedule for this quarter is:
June 5
“Finding a Light in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt contra Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons”
Chris Chambers, MAPH Student (UChicago)