ABSTRACT
A major concern in Bakhtin’s early work is architectonics. It is a topic to which he returned in his last essays. In Bakhtin’s work architectonics constantly takes on new meaning in the different contexts in which it is invoked. In general, architectonics concerns questions about building, questions about how something is put together. Architectonics provides the ground for Bakhtin’s discussion of two related problems. The first problem is how relations between living subjects organize themselves into the master categories of “I” and “another.” The second problem is how authors forge a tentative wholeness out of the relation they articulate with their heroes-the kind of wholeness we call a text. More particularly, architectonics helps provide a conceptual armature for Bakhtin’s more partial readings of specific works and authors, in all of which, in one way or another, the relation of parts to wholes figures prominently. In his disputations with other schools (such as Formalism and, in his last years, Structuralism), Bakhtin’s argument usually includes the charge that his opponents have not completely theorized their position. He criticizes their lack of philosophical thoroughness largely because they fail to provide a conceptual framework for their pronouncements of the kind he himself provided in his early works.
