ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ambivalence of Mikhail Bakhtin's position between phenomenology and Marxism. The glaring deficiency in Bakhtin's work—other than the tensions between phenomenology and marxism—is that the materialism presented in the co-authored texts is far from fleshed out. The marxist strand becomes apparent in Bakhtin in his examination of the "characteristics" and "forms" of the social intercourse by which meaning is realized. Bakhtin notes that the principal result of Formalism's lack of a theory of general aesthetics is a confusion in defining the term "content". Bakhtin accomplished the latter by centering his theory of general aesthetics around a theory of cognition, in a sense beginning to construct a philosophy of language. The phenomenological version of Bakhtin's language theory suggests that it is virtually impossible to have access to the material conditions of language, since those material conditions are embedded linguistically.
