Article
Post-Romantic irony in
Bakhtin and Lefebvre
History of the Human Sciences
25(3) 51–69
ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0952695112439142
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Michael E. Gardiner
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Abstract
Although several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective
projects of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and
the French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91), to date there has not been a systematic comparison of them. This article seeks to redress this oversight, by exploring
some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to
the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism; and second, their respective
assessments of irony (including Romantic irony), and, more specifically, of the ironic
register as a potential vehicle for socio-cultural criticism. Although the positions Bakhtin
and Lefebvre stake out vis-à-vis these issues reveal many similarities – such as extensive
use of Socrates in the writings of each – there are also significant differences, not least
because Lefebvre’s understanding of Romanticism is more fully developed than Bakhtin’s.
Accordingly, the central argument advanced here is that Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging
account of Romanticism, together with his scattered and often contradictory remarks
on irony, can be subjected to re-envisioning and potential enrichment by reference to
Lefebvre’s more considered thoughts, especially the latter’s notions of ‘Revolutionary
romanticism’ and ‘Marxist irony’.
Keywords
Mikhail Bakhtin, carnival, irony, Henri Lefebvre, Marxism, Romanticism, utopia
Introduction
Several writers have noted significant complementary features in the respective projects
of Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) and the
French social thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) (see Elden, 2002; Nadal-Melsió,
Corresponding author:
Michael E. Gardiner, University of Western Ontario, Department of Sociology, 1151 Richmond Street N,
London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada
Email: [email protected]
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History of the Human Sciences 25(3)
2008). There is even a tantalizing suggestion, put forward by Rob Shields (1999: 2) in his
path-breaking intellectual biography of Lefebvre, that the latter was at least somewhat
familiar with Bakhtin’s writings. A partial list of such convergences might include: an
antipathy towards structuralist and formalist approaches to the human sciences, and to
instrumental reasoning and scientism in general; an emphasis on embodiment and the
everyday life-world, and of the act understood as an ‘event’ uniquely situated in time/
space; a view of human agency that, however shaped by material circumstances, is constitutively and irreducibly open-ended; a commitment to an ‘ethics of personalism’ and
the goal of a revivified, ‘dialogical’ humanism; and, finally, a considerable stress on the
subversive, utopian potentialities of art and the festival, or what Lefebvre calls poe¨sis.
Despite such thematic parallels, however, there has not been a systematic comparison
of these two thinkers. My central purpose here is to redress this oversight, by exploring
some of the more intriguing of these conceptual dovetailings: first, their relationship to
the intellectual and cultural legacy of Romanticism; and second, their respective assessments of irony, and, more specifically, of the ironic register as a potential vehicle for
socio-cultural criticism. These topics are, of course, not mutually exclusive, especially
since what is generally known as ‘Romantic irony’ is arguably one of the defining features of that movement (see Behler, 1990; Kolb, 2005). Although the positions Bakhtin
and Lefebvre stake out vis-à-vis these issues reveal many similarities – for instance, not
only does Socrates turn out to be a pivotal figure for each, they interpret the Greek philosopher in analogous ways – there are also significant differences, not least because
Lefebvre’s understanding of Romanticism is better developed than Bakhtin’s. This is not
surprising, given that Romanticism is more central to Lefebvre’s thought, but also
because the latter devoted considerable energy to the articulation of a post-Romantic
or ‘Marxist’ form of irony, primarily in his Introduction to Modernity written in the early
1960s. Bakhtin’s fairly disparaging account of Romanticism, together with his scattered
and often contradictory remarks on irony, can therefore be subjected to re-envisioning
and potential enrichment by reference to Lefebvre’s more considered thoughts. As such,
students of Bakhtin might well profit from closer attention to Lefebvre, a figure who is,
by comparison, relatively neglected in the literature on critical social and cultural theory.
Bakhtin: Romanticism and irony as ‘reduced’ carnival
Bakhtin did not have a great deal to say about Romanticism, and, on balance, he paints a
negative picture. Perhaps for these reasons, his ideas here have received little scholarly
attention (for noteworthy exceptions, see Tihanov, 1997 and 2000). There are a few stray
comments in Art and Answerability (Bakhtin, 1990), but most of his observations on the
Romantic idiom develop out of his broader discussion of the ‘carnivalesque’, and, more
specifically, of carnival laughter. As is well known, for Bakhtin the carnivalesque lost
considerable vitality following its high-water mark in late medieval and Renaissance
societies. The primary reason, of course, was the consolidation of modernity and its concomitant ideologies of legitimation, such as mechanical materialism, utilitarianism and
empiricism. Bakhtin is not implacably hostile towards all aspects of modernity or Enlightenment philosophy; on the contrary, together with such like-minded ‘fellow-travellers’
as Lefebvre or Walter Benjamin, he maintains an eminently dialectical view of the
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modern world. For instance, Bakhtin suggests that the Enlightenment was instrumental
in bringing about a ‘great awakening’ vis-à-vis a sense of historicity, promoted free and
open scholarly inquiry and was justifiably sceptical of the hoary metaphysics of the past
and the received truths of unquestioned tradition. Such gains in the formation of a critical
historical consciousness were, however, compromised by the Enlightenment’s abstract
morality, narrow rationalism and rarefied idealism. In construing the subject as an
autonomous and disembodied entity, and equating genuine knowledge with grandly
universalistic concepts garnered solely through ‘abstract negative criticism’,
Enlightenment thought failed to comprehend the living human being and the world as
‘contradictory, perpetually becoming and unfinished’ entities. Echoing Benjamin’s
‘atrophy of experience’, Bakhtin suggests that such a ‘cult of unified and exclusive
reason’ emphasized the immediately ‘given’ at the expense of a deeper creative
engagement with the world, thereby condensing and ‘purifying’ it (Bakhtin, 1984: 82).
Bakhtin asserts that the Romantic counter-Enlightenment developed a much broader
notion of reality than was made possible by a narrow, positivistic empiricism. As such,
the Romantic imagination, with its stress on reverie, intoxication, dreams and the fantastic, resisted effectively the modern drift towards a sterile rationalism, with the latter’s
mechanistic view of matter, reductive causalities, and penchant for rigid modes of scientific classification. Moreover, Romanticism better understood the intricacies of temporal change and historical becoming. For example, Bakhtin notes that the Romantics
wisely sought ‘the seed of the future in the past [and] appreciate[d] the past from the
point of view of that future which had it fertilized and generated’, thereby grasping the
essential point that the world is always imbued with ‘new tendencies, potentialities and
foresights’ (1984: 123–4). But, on the whole, Romanticism was as problematic as the
Enlightenment, because it was also burdened with a philosophical idealism that emphasized the importance of subjective consciousness to the virtual exclusion of all else. This
also explains Bakhtin’s rejection of what he takes to be the Romantic cult of the individual author-genius, a centrepiece of his dialogical view of culture and language. Interestingly, Bakhtin (1990: 146) refers to the Romantic aesthetic in his earlier work Art and
Answerabililty as ‘anthropomachic’, meaning unable to place oneself on a par with others, or accept the judgement of another. Ken Hirschkop (1999: 12) bolsters this impression when, in the course of a discussion of Bakhtin’s early work (specifically, ‘Author
and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’), he argues that the latter regards the notion of the
Romantic hero as problematic because there is insufficient attention played to the
co-creative role of both author and hero in the production of any literary text, and,
more precisely, the existence of what Bakhtin would later call a properly ‘dialogical’
relationship between them. Thus, for Bakhtin, Romanticism succumbed to a celebration
of irrationalism and mysticism that transformed the initially laudable concept of individual human freedom into a potentially destructive ‘supermaterial force’ (1984: 125).
Romantic art and literature created fantastical worlds that never existed, or could ever
hope to exist, severing the all-important connection to the material bodily principle.
Although the mechanical materialism of Enlightenment thought raised the ire of the
Romantics, the latter subscribed to an equally impoverished view of embodiment, in
which the regenerating and renewing qualities of the material bodily stratum were
ignored or reduced to purely literary symbols and tropes.
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History of the Human Sciences 25(3)
In reacting to Romanticism’s failure to comprehend the embodied and inherently
social subject, Bakhtin makes it clear that, in the annihilating and renewing dialectic
of the carnivalesque, there is ‘no trace of mysticism, no abstract-idealistic sublimation’
(Bakhtin, 1984: 285). The irrationalism celebrated by the Romantics can only proffer
ineffable, subjective truths, leading to a kind of ethical solipsism. Bakhtin’s discussion
of the ‘Romantic grotesque’ in Rabelais and His World is a good example of this line of
thinking. Here, he notes that the Romantic appropriation of the grotesque was an
important development in the history of world literature. It drew on many significant
writers who were firmly rooted in the carnivalesque tradition, such as Cervantes and
Shakespeare, as well as more anonymous popular cultural forms. Hence, Romanticism
constituted a significant challenge to the narrow intellectualism and ‘cold rationalism’
(ibid.: 37) of the Enlightenment, with the latter’s pompous self-regard and unironic,
relentless optimism. It also overcame the sterilities of classicism, which was completely
antithetical to the principles of grotesque realism. At the same time, the Romantic grotesque (here Bakhtin mentions Jean Paul, Victor Hugo and many others) was hobbled by
its reduction of genuine carnival, with its multifaceted and living connection to folk-festive
culture, to exclusively literary forms that were produced and understood only by a small,
educated elite. Although Romanticism tries to restore and revivify carnival images, it
interprets them ‘subjectively within the structure of personal destinies’ (ibid.: 236), and,
accordingly, the carnivalesque has only the tonality of a ‘minor key’ (ibid.) within the
genre of Romantic literature. The overarching result is that Romanticism is marked by a
‘private ‘‘chamber’’’ character. It became, as it were, an individual carnival, marked by
a vivid sense of isolation. The carnival spirit was transposed into a subjective, idealistic
philosophy. It ceased to be the concrete (one might say bodily) experience of the one,
inexhaustible being, as it was in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’ (ibid.: 37).
For Bakhtin, then, the main shortcoming of Romanticism is that it reduces genuine
carnival laughter to ‘cold’ irony and sarcasm, whereupon it loses its vital power, its status
as a positive, regenerating force. Tropes like madness, the Gothic, terror and the sublime,
which are pervasive in Romantic literature, lose their connection to the organic totality of
carnival, with its sinuous overlappings of praise and abuse, positivity and negativity,
birth and death. Any reconciliation with the sublime terrors of the natural world in
Romanticism can only take the form of mystical experience, which by its very nature
is incommunicable and subjective. In contrast to the ‘abstract and spiritual mastery
sought by Romanticism’, which portrayed the cosmos as remote, hostile and unknowable, carnival culture promoted an entirely different epistemology, one that, through folk
laughter and a process of symbolic degradation and renewal, ‘brought the world close to
man [sic, and passim], gave it a bodily form, and established a link through the body and
bodily life’ (1984: 39) – although, as Craig Brandist (2002: 141) has pointed out, his debt
to German idealism and especially neo-Kantianism meant that Bakhtin’s discussions of
the body generally occur within the context of his analyses of literary images, such as
those of Rabelais, which does admittedly complicate his ostensive ‘materialism’. At any
rate, depictions of madness in Romantic literature for Bakhtin invariably took on a tragic
and sombre hue, and were symptomatic of individual solitude and alienation. Carnival
images also allocated considerable importance to dreams, visions and even lunacy and
madness, but for the purpose of relativizing ideological boundaries, breaking down
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barriers between genres, worldviews and styles, and ultimately affirming the principle of
‘unity-in-difference’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 39). In a surprisingly Foucaultian move, Bakhtin
goes so far as to say that carnival laughter could be interpreted as a celebration of madness, a ‘gay parody of official reason’. With respect to its revitalization of an historical
consciousness, Romanticism was to be praised for realizing that the past was a living
presence evincing real possibilities of contemporary relevance. Yet, such references to
past ‘Golden Ages’ were subordinated to individual qualities of ‘abstract thought’ or
‘inner experience’. This is diametrically opposed to the logic of the carnivalesque,
wherein such bygone utopian elements are lived in a fully embodied sense by the ‘whole
man’, opening up a mode of ‘participation in the potentiality of another world’ that has
yet to be fully disclosed, and will come to complete fruition only at some unknowable
future time (ibid.: 48). Finally, in an intriguing side note, Bakhtin notes that, in
pre-modern eras, the Devil was typically seen as a ‘gay, ambivalent figure’, an iconic
Trickster who habitually called into question established conceptual boundaries and conventional moral distinctions. However, under Romanticism, Lucifer became ‘terrifying,
melancholy and tragic, and [his] infernal laughter sombre and sarcastic’ (ibid.: 41). (This
is doubly interesting because Lefebvre also focuses on the Devil and the ‘demonic’
element in history in his Introduction to Modernity.)
In light of the above discussion, Bakhtin’s treatment of Goethe is especially revealing.
During his analysis of different literary currents in European literature with respect to the
‘idyll’, Bakhtin suggests that Goethe took up many of the same themes as the Romantics,
including alienation, mechanization, the destruction of nature and the demise of organic
community, but articulated a more compelling and well-rounded response to them. The
primary reason for this, to Bakhtin’s way of thinking, is that Goethe had a profounder
sense of the totality of human existence, which unfolds within an overarching process
of continuous historical change and transformation. This constitutive wholeness of life
must be understood in relation to the complex matrices of birth, death and rebirth (in the
collective body), cosmic ebbs and flows, laughter, food and sex, and the pains and pleasures of the body. But, in Romanticism, these phenomena are subjected to an intellectual
and literary condensation in which such dynamic, even chaotic forces and interrelationships are reduced to ‘sharp, static contrasts and oxymorons’ that remain unresolved
within a ‘sealed-off individual life’ (or only ‘solved’ at the level of mystical insight)
(Bakhtin, 1981: 199). Here, death is final and absolute because entirely solitary, and the
boundaries of life are circumscribed narrowly by the subjective realm. Goethe, by contrast, aligns his philosophy of becoming, and hence his notion of the Bildungsroman,
with what he takes to be the open-ended dynamism of the world itself. Although there
are certainly regrets to be had with respect to the passing-away of the idyllic premodern world, Goethe stresses that we must understand its demise, not as a ‘natural fact’,
but as the result of specific socio-historical developments associated with modernity.
These throw up their own unique possibilities that we must strive to understand and ultimately realize. The world of the idyll, however charming and seemingly natural, was
also narrow, inward-looking and conservative. Rather than wallow in a de-enervating
nostalgia for a past ‘Golden Age’ that likely never existed (at least in its idealized form),
or make one’s peace with a status quo ruled by brutal economic calculation, mechanization and social anomie, Goethe felt the task that lies before us – as Marx also realized – is
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the full humanization of nature and the naturalization of humanity. In summing up his
reading of Goethe, it is worth quoting Bakhtin at length:
It is necessary to constitute this great [modern] world on a new basis, to render it familiar, to
humanize it. It is necessary to find a new relationship to nature, not to the little nature of
one’s own corner of the world but to the big nature of the great world, to all the phenomena
of the solar system, to the wealth excavated from the earth’s core, to a variety of geographical locations and continents. In place of the limited idyllic collective, a new collective must
be established capable of embracing all humanity. . . . Here the process of a man’s reeducation is interwoven with the process of society’s breakdown and reconstruction, that
is, with historical process. (1981: 234)
Our task now is to examine Bakhtin’s treatment of irony, which has received little close
attention (for a partial exception, see Meyler, 1997). Bakhtin uses the term ‘irony’
loosely, but a rough distinction can be made between negative versus positive assessments (see also Tihanov, 1997: 289). In his book on Rabelais and the reworked second
edition of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he locates the Russian novelist
within a wider cultural tradition of the carnivalesque, Bakhtin equates irony with a form
of ‘reduced’ or ‘cold’ laughter that represents a subjective, interiorized debasement of
carnival energies. Here, the figure of Socrates looms large. Socratic irony is, for Bakhtin,
always invested with carnival laughter and populist scepticism towards officialdom, and
promotes free and fearless philosophical investigation and unrestricted conceptual
invention. It provides an exemplar of an unpredetermined approach to the ‘testing’ of the
validity of ideas and viewpoints through the auspices of free and open debate. Socrates’
dialogical method provides, in Bakhtin’s eyes, a vital counterweight to the Enlightenment or rationalist version of truth, which negates the possibility of genuine difference
and subsumes all dialogue under a ‘single impersonal truth’. Furthermore, Socrates quite
literally embodied ironical wisdom, in that he lived every aspect of his philosophy, and
always in the public realm. He embraced without fear or cynicism all aspects of the
human condition, endorsing the ‘wholeness of a triumphant life’ that ultimately encompasses death itself. With the birth of the modern world we see the diminution of folkfestive culture and the consolidation of a ‘singular self-consciousness’, the emergence
of a veritable cult of domestic life and interior spaces, and an increasingly fraught
relationship between public and private life. Not all of these developments are entirely
negative – Bakhtin, for instance, notes that intimacy and domestic life do have their
redeeming qualities, as does the Romantic discovery of the ‘interior subjective man with
his depth, complexity, and inexhaustible resources’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 44). But they do
coincide with a form of ironic detachment that can veer into a corrosive cynicism that
is increasingly pervasive in the modern age, something that Søren Kierkegaard (1989)
also noted. This sort of mocking, ironic sarcasm is evasive and indirect; although Bakhtin notes that laughter can be expressed in circuitously ironic or comic forms, these seem
to lack the fearless, ‘free and familiar’ modes of engaging with society and the world at
large that he favours strongly.
By contrast, in several of the essays written between the mid-1930s and early 1940s
that comprise The Dialogic Imagination, as well as the fragmentary later writings
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anthologized in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Bakhtin develops a more affirmatory reading of irony. Here, the suggestion is that irony can be a poetical as much
as a rhetorical device, a mode of ‘double-voiced’ discourse dedicated not to cruel mockery but to the exposure and critique of (at least official) cynicism (see Sloterdijk, 1987).
Bakhtin understands this as a proto-Enlightenment strategy of distanciation and the
‘unmasking’ of errors and illusions that can help to undermine authoritarian social
forces. Irony, at least as embodied by such popular figures as the rogue, fool and clown,
helps to refract monologic authorial intentions through a process of the ‘making strange’
or defamiliarization of received wisdoms. This exposes the boundedness and relativity of
all discursive forms and belief systems: ‘Falsehood is illuminated by ironic consciousness and in the mouth of the happy rogue parodies itself’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 402). In his
later essay ‘From Notes Made in 1970–71’, Bakhtin asserts that, in the modern age,
‘Irony is everywhere – from the minimal and imperceptible, to the loud, which borders
on laughter’ (1986: 132). What he refers to as the ‘proclamatory genres’ – that is, the
language of such authority figures as priests, self-appointed prophets and leaders – exists
in ‘pure’ form only in the context of modern literary discourse, whereupon it is subject to
a process of stylization and parody, to anti-official ends. Literature, then, has become
ironic and ‘secularized’. For Bakhtin, the novel, which is the literary form of the modern
age par excellence, does not exist as a genre as such, but rather transcends such formal
restrictions by incorporating a multiplicity of extra-literary genres into its compositional
structure.
It is at this point in Bakhtin’s reasoning where the influence of Romanticism does
seem to leave a palpable mark. As Tzvetan Todorov notes in his influential book Mikhail
Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, there exists a considerable tension in Bakhtin’s historical account of the emergence of the modern novel. On the one hand, Bakhtin wishes
to portray the novel as something too compositionally heterodox and intertextually
complex to be able to constitute a recognizable literary ‘genre’ with clear boundaries,
essential qualities and canonical works. The novel is, for him, a veritable Frankenstein’s
monster, stitched together from a multiplicity of divergent texts, idioms and social languages. On the other, Bakhtin is motivated to claim for the novel a distinct and indeed
special status in the history of European literature. He did so mainly by reference to
Romantic aesthetics, especially that of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schlegel,
to the point where Bakhtin engaged in ‘massive and uncritical borrowing’ vis-à-vis the
latter, according to Todorov (1984: 86). The key here is not only Bakhtin’s supposition
that the novel evinces an ontology of ‘unity in difference’, but that it is the only literary
genre caught up in an endless process of ‘becoming’, and is hence intrinsically futureoriented. Other, more archaic genres (such as lyric poetry or the epic) are, by way of contrast, dead rather than living cultural entities, which explains why Bakhtin disagreed so
strongly with Georg Lukács’s preference for the epic form (see Tihanov, 1997; Brandist,
2002: 129). Burdened with dusty ‘word-mummies’, as Bakhtin calls them in his late
work ‘Towards a Methodology for the Human Sciences’, included in the Speech Genres
book, such archaic genres are now only of historical interest, whereas the novel remains
the crucial impetus for cultural and linguistic innovation in the context of the modern
world. The main difference is that whereas the Romantics were concerned mainly with
the diversity of languages or individual subjectivities, Bakhtin was interested keenly in
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social diversity and the immense dialogical possibilities that the dissolution of traditional
pre-modern communities brought in its wake (although this is often tinged with a trace of
regret), and his aesthetics reflects this very strongly (see Todorov, 1984: 59). This suggests that Bakhtin can perhaps be best understood as a ‘post-romantic’ figure, one who
vacillates ‘between subdued communitarian nostalgia and the recognition of the impossibility of restoring community life’ (Tihanov, 2005: 53). The net result, in any event, is
that language itself in the modern era becomes ‘sober’, democratic and expressive of
individual freedom. It no longer flows from officially sanctioned ‘high’ genres, but from
the language of the street, the public square and the market place (see Hirschkop, 1990).
Sounding positively Habermasian for once, Bakhtin implies that the development of
irony is central to the modern emergence of competing ideologies in the public sphere,
and the progressive de-legitimization of pre-modern forms of mythico-poetic, religious,
or abstractly metaphysical discourses. Perhaps this explains why Bakhtin cannot resist a
dig at Romanticism here: in so far as ‘Romantic irony’ retains ‘complete solidarity with
the parodied discourse’, it cannot develop the necessary degree of distanciation required
for the development of a genuinely critical, democratic consciousness (Bakhtin, 1981:
413).
Lefebvre’s ‘revolutionary Romanticism’
Thus far, we have examined Bakhtin’s interesting, if sketchy, position on the influence
and significance of Romanticism in modern culture, and, relatedly, his ambivalent reading of irony. This section will look at Lefebvre’s treatment of the same topics. As an
introductory note, Lefebvre is, without a doubt, an unabashedly Romantic thinker.
Indeed, if one was pressed to describe his philosophical outlook in a couple of words,
one could do considerably worse than evoke the title of his 1957 essay ‘Revolutionary
Romanticism’. Unlike Bakhtin, Lefebvre is acutely aware of the complex and multifarious nature of Romanticism. He identifies, for instance, far more closely with its earliest
manifestations, which, although preponderantly Germanic in origin, were strikingly cosmopolitan in outlook and less inclined to dispense with rationality and the Enlightenment
per se than later, more stridently nationalistic and irrationalist forms. But Lefebvre also
goes beyond the limitations of Romanticism in all its variants, so as to arrive at a heady
but constitutively open-ended synthesis of Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche – to which some,
such as Stuart Elden (2004), would add Heidegger.
Yet, although Romanticism is central to his thinking, the specificities of Lefebvre’s
relationship to this cultural and intellectual movement, much less how he strove to transform it, have received little scrutiny. The major exception is a relatively short discussion
of Lefebvre in Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, and it is worth briefly focusing on this work. Against widespread dismissals of
Romanticism as essentially reactionary or even proto-fascist, as merely a literary development of little or no socio-political import, or else as so variegated and contradictory as
to be an effectively meaningless term, Löwy and Sayre argue convincingly that it can be
understood as a relatively coherent constellation of elements, or what they describe as a
‘complex whole with multiple facets’. Fundamentally, of course, Romanticism is a critique of the modern world, a reaction to industrial capitalism, the commodification of
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social and cultural life, and the destruction of nature. Löwy and Sayre, however, take
pains to argue that it is equally a modern phenomenon, one that encapsulates ‘modernity’s self-criticism’ in its characteristic discursive operations and modes of subjective
reflection and expression. They identify five key preoccupations of Romanticism: disenchantment; quantification; mechanization; rationalist abstraction; and the dissolution of
social bonds (see Löwy and Sayre, 2001: 29–43). Of course, such broad elements were
handled differently by particular writers, and refracted further by divergent cultural, linguistic and national traditions. Furthermore, Romanticism had distinct and widespread
socio-political effects, precipitating a broad spectrum of social movements, ranging from
virulent racism and xenophobic nationalism through various shades of reformism to utopian and revolutionary socialism. It involved individual forms of mysticism or aesthetic
escape no less than the concerted political action of sweeping collectivities, fatalistic and
backwards-looking nostalgias as well as decidedly optimistic and future-oriented praxes.
(On balance, however, Löwy and Sayre assert the majority of social movements animated by Romanticism have been progressivist and universalistic in orientation.)
Finally, as part of their ‘sociology of Romanticism’, and in contradistinction to Bakhtin’s
thesis about the limited social backgrounds of the Romantics, Löwy and Sayre suggest
that this perspective was not merely the purview of educated elites or marginalized
bohemians, but was bound up with the very dynamics of modernity itself, and hence
‘exercise[d] a diffuse social influence going well beyond the classes or categories with
which they were once primarily associated’ (ibid.: 87). Indeed, in so far as capitalism and
industrial civilization are still with us, they argue that the Romantic spirit is alive and
well today, and can be located in such 20th- and 21st-century socio-cultural developments as Surrealism and the Situationist International, as well as more recent ecological
and so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movements.
It is, therefore, not entirely surprising to see Löwy and Sayre identify Lefebvre closely
with this contemporary stream of Romanticism. They characterize Lefebvre as someone
who thought against the grain of the dominant positivist and rationalist traditions in
French intellectual life, and who both confronted and embraced the Romanticism found
in such diverse figures as Schelling and Nietzsche, Musset and Stendhal. This orientation
can perhaps be seen most clearly in the highly idiosyncratic and open-ended brand of
Marxism he forged. Once he broke free from the intellectual straitjacket of the French
Communist Party (PCF), having been ‘invited to leave’ in 1958, Lefebvre never wavered
in his rejection of dogmatic, anti-humanist, or scientistic forms of Marxism, whether of
Stalinist or structuralist providence. In reacting against Lukács’ cack-handed dismissal
of Romanticism in The Destruction of Reason, for instance, Lefebvre affirms its ‘subversive antibourgeois character’ and ongoing status as the ‘fundamental ground base’ of
both individual rebellion and social revolution. Of all the myriad ideologies of the contemporary world, it is Romanticism that most assiduously grasps the crippling experience of alienation and isolation, and understands how the infinite range of human
potentialities is blocked or distorted by capitalist economics and the modern state,
thereby denying us even provisional access to the panoramic expanse of what he calls
the ‘total man’. At the same time, Lefebvre is aware, and wary of, the debilitating nostalgia of much conventional Romanticism, with its mix of fatalism, ennui and ‘restitutionalism’ (a term used by Löwy and Sayre to mean the quixotic wish to restore an
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irretrievably bygone state of affairs). Instead of being circumscribed by the latter,
although we may well continue to have our (legitimately) wistful regrets and longings
with respect to the ‘world we have lost’, what is needed today is a new, or ‘revolutionary’, Romanticism, one that is explicitly oriented towards the future and informed by the
project of total social transformation (see also Gardiner, 1995, 2004).
A more detailed investigation of Lefebvre’s notion of ‘revolutionary Romanticism’
here will, in turn, lead us to a consideration of his concept of ‘Marxist irony’. What is
particularly interesting in this context is that although his position is similar to Bakhtin’s
in some respects, Lefebvre stresses that the Romantic impulse has many different currents and manifestations, some palpably at odds with Bakhtin’s characterization. For
instance, Lefebvre agrees with many commentators that certain variants of Romanticism
have indeed been marked by a blinkered aestheticism and an extreme individualism and
self-absorbed subjectivism. These have often been complicit in all manner of reactionary
politics, or else a quietist withdrawal from political engagement, which can have similar
consequences. Nevertheless, this is not the whole story. For one thing, as mentioned,
Lefebvre aligns himself with early German Romanticism, which he views as panEuropean in scope and keenly interested in progressive social change, to the extent of
anticipating a later global cosmopolitanism, as opposed to subsequent, more nationalistic
and intolerant variants. The 19th-century French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known
as Stendhal, also represents a key figure for Lefebvre, especially in terms of the latter’s
anti-chauvinism and resistance to dogmatism.
Romantic revolt can oftentimes seem purely subjective, even nihilistic. But, for
Lefebvre this represents a rebellion against the absence of community in a world bound
together only by what Marx called the ‘cash nexus’. The Romantic attitude, argues
Lefebvre, was ‘a reaction against the social insecurity of the individual who had rejected
the dominant ideology, and of the vast but minority groups that had been marginalized,
tyrannized and bullied as deviants’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 300). What this implies is that the
type of Romanticism Lefebvre is concerned with was not a purely literary genre produced exclusively by lonely, tortured souls in dusty garrets, but was always groping
towards its own distinctive ‘way of living and communicating’. It was social through and
through, a participatory enterprise rather than a spectacle to be passively consumed; the
Romantic spirit was meant to be intricately woven into the rhythms and textures of
everyday life, not a subjective transcendence of it. Furthermore, Lefebvre insists on the
intimate connection between Romanticism and utopianism. The utopianism of Robert
Owen, Charles Fourier and others was not only concerned with the ‘social question’ and
the politics of the socialist movement. Inasmuch as the socialist utopia was conceived of
as a counterpoint to the myriad failings of bourgeois society, it projected an image of
what was possible onto the future. Many of the Romantics wanted to live that ideal,
in the here and now, as much they could. Hence, Romantic rebellion was to be lived, not
merely imagined – although of course the unfettered imagination was the crucial spark of
an anti-bourgeois consciousness. Romanticism therefore represented a kind of ‘secret
society’, with its own fashions, symbols and ways of speaking and acting. It brought
together diverse groups – rebels, exiles and intellectuals, but also the working classes,
who participated not so much as writers or cultural producers but as actors in myriad utopian movements and social experiments. All such Romantics wanted to live out their
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lives as concrete, embodied alternatives to an enforced bourgeois ‘normality’. ‘The
romantics lived the need for a community and a communion in a utopian way’, writes
Lefebvre. ‘The romantic attempted to live outside bourgeois society, yet within it, at its
very heart, in its kernel, like a maggot in a fruit’ (ibid.: 301).
In short, although the Romantics insisted they stood alone heroically against a homogenized and cravenly inauthentic society, in reality they led what Lefebvre calls an ‘indefatigable social life’. They also sought communion with nature, attempting to rediscover
a lost connection to a primitive spontaneity and organicism. The Romantic strives to
circumvent the mediation of language and civilization, intuiting a ‘hidden but profound
harmony’ between all things in the cosmos, which extends the Romantic spirit into limitless forms – the sublime or the oceanic, modes of intoxication and ecstasy. At its
extreme, this can involve the dissolution of a sense of coherent selfhood. Yet, Lefebvre
is adamant that Romanticism – or at least the variants he is interested in – insisted on
maintaining a connection to humanity’s rational capabilities. Although it rejects narrow
and moribund forms of bourgeois rationality, Romanticism still subscribes to an
Enlightenment-inspired and essentially modern form of rational introspection and selfdeliberation. As Elizabeth Goodstein argues convincingly in her Experience Without
Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, whatever their ostensive differences, Romanticism
and the Enlightenment both adhered to a conception of the subject understood as a
project of autonomous self-realization through reflexive understanding and perpetual
self-stylization. Whether the intellect or feeling was valued more is immaterial, in so far
as the ‘romantic cultivation of the heart paved the way for the historic triumph of the
head’ (Goodstein, 2005: 127).
However, what particularly interests Lefebvre is Romanticism’s quest to grasp the
‘absolute’ – that is, to embrace all facets of the human condition, in relation to the infinitely complex totality that is the universe, in the knowledge that such a task can never be
fully completed. Romantics seek to restore harmony and balance, but they also understand that there is always dissonance and negativity in the world, and an irreducibly tragic dimension to life. This is where the role of the imaginary comes into its own:
Romanticism envisages possibilities beyond the confines of present-day reality, but does
not remain there, because it also strives to incorporate these insights into praxis. This
generates ‘an alternative reality within the real world by making the imaginary real’
(Lefebvre, 1995: 331). As such, it is not merely a literary or even cultural phenomenon:
Romanticism identifies but also heightens conflicts, and tries to resolve them in the real
world, an approach that continually mediates art and lived experience. Central to this
strategy is an enhanced awareness of the historicity of all things, and, again, of the living
presence of the past in the present and its potential future implications. This type of
Romanticism is future-oriented because it seeks to embody a new style of life that has
yet to be invented, which helps to explain why it is at odds with classicism or neoclassicism. In cleaving to the epic form, as Bakhtin also noted, classicism destroys time,
or reduces temporal flux to purely spatial arrangements; further, it denies the negative
force of the dialectic, of the ineradicably creative element that inheres in destructive
energies. The Romantic notion of harmony strives to grapple with titanic, oppositional
cosmic forces that are barely held in check, and are ultimately responsible for all movement and dynamism in the world – think of Beethoven’s towering symphonic works, for
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instance. But this concept of ‘harmony’, in which negative and positive forces necessarily coexist in perpetuity and without resolution, was transformed in neo-classicism into
something ‘bland and vulgarized, a means of disguising conflicts and contradictions
[and] reduced to small-scale technicity’ (ibid.: 306). Classicism assumes unity a priori,
and hence revels in redundancy; Romanticism, by contrast, sees unity as a distant, and
possibly unreachable, goal, and its stock-in-trade is constant novelty and surprise. The
main objective of classicism is to ensure unity and cohesion between official ideologies
and social practices, accepting things as they are. The result is that artificial social hierarchies are internalized, passions are subordinated to abstract reason, the possible
reduced to the ‘real’. The epic mentality of classicism, which Lefebvre describes as pompous, mean-spirited and ascetic, strives to eliminate presence, to insulate us from the
realm of embodiment and sensuous experience. What is particularly valuable about
Romanticism, therefore, is that it returns us to an awareness of the centrality of the body,
its passions and pleasures; it is concerned profoundly with the unpredictabilities of lived
experience, as opposed to the mythical realm of the epic, with its redundantly static
archetypes and frozen, ahistorical tableaux. Yet, what is most significant about the
Romantic imagination is that it also allows us a certain distance from raw, inchoate
immediacy through self-reflection, but, in Goldilocksian fashion, without ‘losing intensity’ and becoming abstract – in other words, it intensifies rather than negates presence.
Although Romanticism is certainly vulnerable to cooption, as will be discussed presently, its stress on contradiction, dissonance and historicity places it firmly on the side
of revolt and revolution. Yet, if Lefebvre’s line of interpretation is defensible, one might
well ask: why did Romanticism acquire such subjectivist, individualistic and oftentimes
regressive qualities? Lefebvre anticipates this question, and his response is one that has
interesting parallels with Bakhtin’s account of the fate of carnival in the modern era. One
of the central contradictions in modern industrial civilization for Lefebvre concerns the
growing massification of society and culture, on the one hand, and increasing individualization and isolation, on the other. With everyday life increasingly vulnerable to the
pressures of a dreary utilitarianism, and religious notions of sin and salvation largely
discredited, the bourgeoisie sought a refuge for existential meaningfulness in art and culture. Yet, middle-class life was generally not deemed to be appropriate subject matter for
artistic depiction, given its predictability, insularity and suffocating domesticity – unless
it was intended to shed light on precisely such things, as in the novels of Gustave
Flaubert. Bourgeois society is inclined towards comfort, the elimination of tragedy and
the ‘absence of passions’. Accordingly, the bourgeoisie sought out vicarious excitement
in tales and images of outsiders, drop-outs, social marginals and so on – in the so-called
‘penny dreadfuls’, adventure stories, or detective fiction, to give a few examples. Mass
culture, infused with Romanticism, therefore embraced the opposite of conventional
middle-class life and revelled in ‘passionate values, violence, drama’. Put differently, the
bourgeoisie recuperated the aesthetic world created by Romanticism and turned it into a
diversion, as a cure, albeit unsuccessful, for the systemic boredom induced by a mechanized and disenchanted world. ‘On the fringes of the bourgeoisie’, writes Lefebvre, ‘life
becomes theatrical, an ideal stage’ (1995: 300). In this way, Romantic tropes and images
enter into the lived experience of the middle classes, but in an aesthetically mediated and
hence commodified or spectacularized fashion. Although the bourgeois appropriation of
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certain Romantic themes added just enough wine to the water of a soul-deadening instrumental rationality to make life subjectively palatable, it occurred at the cost of largely
jettisoning the social content of Romanticism and the revolutionary aspirations of the
‘total man’.
For all his ambivalence regarding modernity and the destruction of a cohesive and
unified experience of space-time it entails, Lefebvre acknowledges that the idea of a
return to the pre-modern communities of the past can only lead to the cul-de-sac of
anti-democratic, even fascist politics. What must be acknowledged is that, although
much has been lost in the undermining of the former stabilities of time, experience and
identity, genuinely new aesthetic and socio-political possibilities have been opened up in
the modern world and we must capitalize on them. The key here is to grasp and nurture
these promises without succumbing to a naive progressivism, or what Benjamin called
‘historicism’. This might help to explain why, in his Introduction to Modernity, Lefebvre
develops a useful distinction between ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’. The latter he
regards as self-congratulatory and triumphalist, blind to its own internal contradictions
and destructive tendencies. It is marked by a Panglossian, hubristic outlook that sees
things only through the rose-coloured spectacles of its own ideology. What Lefebvre
means by ‘modernity’, by contrast, expresses a far more circumspect mode of reflexivity,
one that is aware of the inescapably tragic character of human existence and the darker
movements of the dialectic. Modernity, by Lefebvre’s reckoning, is considerably more
attuned to the temporal and the conjunctural; it represents ‘the beginnings of a reflective
process, a more-or-less advanced attempt at critique and autocritique, a bid for knowledge’ (1995: 1). Lefebvre clearly favours the ‘constructive deconstruction’ implied in
such a notion of modernity. However, such a ‘bid for knowledge’ in the contemporary
world entails the cultivation of a profound sense of irony. But there are different manifestations of irony for Lefebvre, and this section will conclude with a discussion of his
idea of a specifically ‘Marxist’ form of ironical consciousness.
Modernity is above all an age of radical doubt and self-questioning. This pervasive
scepticism is an intrinsic component of the demise of the continuities and stabilities
wrought by tradition, the secular undermining of theological certitudes, transformations
in our most commonsensical ideas about the very fabric of time and space through relentless scientific inquiry and technological innovation, and the upsetting of class and gender
hierarchies via democratic reform, feminism, Enlightenment and Romantic ideals of
freedom and self-transcendence, to name only the most salient factors. Irony is a mode
of reflective consciousness that allows us to prise open the gap between appearance and
reality, ideology and actuality, falseness and authenticity. It is the enemy of dissembling,
fatuous self-regard and pomposity, and naively facile optimism. ‘Irony springs up with
dogmatism, watches it inflate, waits for it to burst’ (1995: 10). The truth that irony seeks
is not that of fixed certitudes, because it looks for a contingent or ‘possible’ truth, one
that raises ever-more questions, addressed to all and sundry, including the questioner.
The realization that we can always slip on the banana peel of irony gives us a necessary
humility in the face of momentous choices.
Lefebvre’s key argument here is that although irony and its cognates (such as sarcasm
or satire) have been around since time immemorial, what is different today is that irony is
not only the purview of the educated and leisured classes, but available to all social strata
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indiscriminately. In dialoguing with the citizens of Athens, Socrates made an appeal to
the sacred as a way of counteracting the corrosive effects of scepticism, at a time when
the commodity form and exchange-value had already begun to take hold in ancient
Greek society (see Sohn-Rethel, 1978). For Lefebvre, this prefigures the current situation
in some ways, but in a thoroughly secularized and disenchanted world, we moderns do
not have the luxury of making such gestures. Moreover, whereas Socrates addressed his
thoughts to educated, native-born males with sufficient property at their disposal, we live
in an era, as Goodstein also reminds us, of democratized scepticism (Goodstein, 2005:
26). And, in so far as modernity is the age of the common person, it is what Lefebvre
terms the ‘era of irony’ as well. ‘Maieutic’, the procedure of perpetual Socratic doubt
and questioning, which is the main vehicle of irony, has become generalized. In a passage that strongly echoes Bakhtin’s more affirmatory remarks about irony, Lefebvre
writes that irony now ‘belongs to everyone: writers, artists, architects, political activists,
the masses, the classes. Maieutic is broadening its spectrum. And it is precisely because
of this that we find ourselves in the Socratic situation once again, but on a much vaster
scale’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 15).
Whatever his historical limitations, what Socrates does teach us is the need to be
‘provocative, elusive, ironic’, and not to cleave to any completed system of knowledge
or belief. His masks, apparent evasions and dissimulations are necessary elements of a
process by which we can expose bad faith, painstakingly work through error, illusion and
failure, and grope towards the essential truth of a situation. This is why, contra Habermas,
even ‘ideal’ speech is not marked by pure transparency, inasmuch as language is a complex admixture of opacity and clarity, a ‘Dionysian dance’ in which we all participate.
Hence, there are no certainties or guarantees here; the ‘real’ Socrates, as opposed to
Plato’s post-facto concoction, did not know in advance where his search for knowledge
would lead. Maieutic, in other words, is not a sure-fire method for revealing pre-ordained
truths. It is equally a Janus-faced affair: the world is put to the test through perpetual
interrogation and questioning, but we are placed in the dock along with history. By working through errors and half-truths in the exchanges of Socratic dialogue, we are better
positioned to choose this or that, thereby going beyond abstract reflection to embrace
a more practical form of rationality. This is a risky process, because such opting cannot
be made on the basis of absolute certainty, which is a conceit only dogmatism can
provide – in an illusory and ultimately self-defeating form, of course.
We know the times are ripe and portentous, but we are uncertain as to where things
are headed – we are waiting, but we do not know what for. Not only are the opportunities
obscure, there is the distinct possibility of catastrophe, even total annihilation, in an age
of dirty bombs, mass terrorism and environmental collapse. To make choices, to opt for
this or that, requires a distancing, a standing-back and cool appraisal, of a sort that irony
provides. Irony is, accordingly, a more appropriate mode of reflection vis-à-vis an understanding of modernity than the ‘triumphant and triumphalist’ bombast of modernism.
Part of the reason for this is that irony operates to expose ‘the field of possibilities in the
modern world, of their multiplicity, of the necessity of opting and the risk every option
involves’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 3). As such, it is linked strongly to an awareness of the aleatory that, for Lefebvre, is one of the defining characteristics of modern experience. The
concept of the aleatory implicitly draws on Marx’s famous passage from the 18th
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Brumaire, which supposes that human action is neither rooted in ‘absolute contingency’,
disconnected from socio-historical factors, nor rigidly and blindly determined. Rather, it
represents a dialectical unity linking ‘necessity and chance, where chance expresses a
necessary and necessary expresses itself via a network of chances’ (ibid.: 203). Since
confronting the vicissitudes of the aleatory necessarily involves uncertainty and risk,
an ironical consciousness uses what Benjamin called the ‘sharpened axe of reason’ so
as to enhance our awareness of the ‘present moment of becoming’. Without the forms
of self-reflection and rational deliberation that irony makes possible, says Lefebvre,
we would be victims of unquestioned dogmatism and faith: ‘Blind trust is sometimes
associated with devotion, but mostly it goes hand in hand with stupidity’ (ibid.: 16). If
he thinks that the human capacity for reason is not the be- and end-all of our existence,
for Lefebvre it remains something of inestimable value, and it cannot be blithely
dismissed or ignored.
Irony does not sit well with completed systems, because it is always looking for logical cracks and fissures, contradictions and absurdities. Fanatics and fundamentalists of
all stripes, the condemners of Socrates no less than devotees of the Bush doctrine, are
clearly not fans of irony. Again, there have been many famous ironists in history, and
many varieties of irony. As is generally acknowledged, it was the early Romantics (notably Schlegel and Novalis) who mastered the use of irony as a reflective mode of textual
and socio-cultural criticism. For Lefebvre, however, Romantic irony has clear limits,
because in order to realize its full potential, irony must surpass purely subjective introspection. One of the risks of the latter is a pathological form of self-reflection that
becomes a vicious circle, of the sort exemplified by Dostoevsky’s ‘underground man’.
This narcissistic absorption can lead easily to the sort of existential dread and anxiety
that Sartre and others philosophized about. However, for Lefebvre this ‘perpetuum
mobile’ of reflexivity is not an inevitable consequence of a modern subjectivity that is
grounded in critical reflection. But, it does mean that we need to break out of this debilitating isolation and egocentricity, of which modern boredom is one of the most palpable
expressions, and which is the breeding ground for the widespread nihilism that we witness today. In the process of ideational ‘reduction’ that accompanies such a slide into a
corrosive cynicism, says Lefebvre,
. . . the serious becomes flippant and work becomes play, and soon irony is taking its own
jokes seriously. It finds itself trapped up a blind alley, facing a definitive dilemma, insoluble
because the conflict has been eliminated: in one corner the belle aˆme, in the other the cynic,
face to face in irony’s pure mirror, hating each other, complementing each other, destroying
each other. (1995: 18)
What is required, then, is a specifically Marxist form of ironical wisdom. What Marxism
does is to affirm the absolute reality of a physical world that pre-exists consciousness,
but also forces us to realize that consciousness itself is not a thing or an entity, but an
irreducibly social phenomenon, the outcome of a relation of alterity between self and
other – which of course is a hallmark of Bakhtin’s thinking as well. Again, the irony
exhibited in tragic forms of Romanticism fails to escape the gravitational orbit of the
self, and hence easily becomes overly introspective and quietistic. Because
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Romanticism seeks resolution and harmony primarily at the level of subjective experience, it often eschews the social and economic transformations that would be necessary to mitigate class antagonisms, and to end the more destructive aspects of the
human exploitation of the natural world, which are the real sources of our present
existential and subjective malaises. Romanticism ‘deludes itself, becomes whimsical
and complacent; it wants only to be charming, irritating (provocative, challenging),
pleasing. Once established in this way subjectivity cuts itself off from practical activity, and atrophies’ (1995: 18). In short, the distance between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ prised
open by an ironical consciousness must ultimately be bridged by praxis. We must
intervene in the world, change situations, develop specific objects and aims with
respect to either action or knowledge. A ‘Modern Socratism’ is now required because
Socrates himself was in essence a worldly figure, not a starry-eyed dreamer with his
head in the clouds – Aristophanes’ famous caricature notwithstanding. Socratic irony
is employed against the foibles of the world in order to judge and ultimately transform it, not merely to ‘affirm the inexhaustibility of subjectivity’ (ibid.: 8).
But, although Marx himself revitalized irony by making it materialist, which is to say social
and historical (see Wessell, 1979), Marxism has since become dogmatic, devoid of irony . . .
and boring (Lefebvre, 1991: 84–5). To a large extent, this is because at least Stalinist versions
of Marxism, marked by what Jairus Banaji calls a ‘Newtonian conception of history’ (2010:
61), subscribe to the linear, progressivist view of historical time that its erstwhile Enlightenment and positivist competitors have clung to, and hence can no longer grasp the negative, the
tragic. Marxism has to be ironical enough to realize that, although it started out as a debunker
of religious and metaphysical illusions, it eventually became something of a pseudo-religion
itself. Stalinism promoted the ideal of the new ‘Communist man’, a concocted personage of
robust good cheer, oodles of ‘decency’ and deadpan earnestness, and who harboured no trace
of subjective depth or self-doubt: ‘This twentieth-century stereotype oozes ennui like a damp
wall. His very being is a denial of dialectic’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 85). What is just as lamentable in
the modern age as the cynic or beer-hall existentialist, says Lefebvre, is the ‘good’ person who
lacks any sense of irony: ‘Among all of the rotten farces and festivities our era has to offer,
there is one which never closes: the festival of the ‘‘decent’’ fellow’ (ibid.: 34). Decency has
become a meaningless profession of faith in facile optimism and stick-to-itiveness, a watchword for banality and insipidness. This is why we need to articulate a critical and selfcorrecting Marxism that cleaves neither to the subjectivism of Romantic irony, nor to the brutal, unironic necessitarianism of Hegelian-inspired Reason. In its gadfly role, the ironic reason
of such a heretical Marxism poses questions and problems, and imagines the outcomes of historical forces and contradictions. It cannot necessarily ‘resolve’ the problems of history, but
can pose them in an acute and compelling way; it knows that history is not the unstoppable
march of the World-Spirit, but moves through crab-like circumlocutions and digressions, fits
and starts, steps both backwards and forwards. Irony also allows us to recognize that in each
situation there is an element of ‘give’, of play and open-endedness, and it sensitizes us to the
limitations of language, its inadequacy vis-à-vis the fulsomeness of the world. An ironical consciousness enables us to make judgements and choices, but is also cognizant of the aleatory,
and knows that failure is always a possible, sometimes even a likely, outcome. Or, put differently, history is ironic because replete with both tragedy and comedy, the unexpected, and the
farce of avoidably recurring catastrophe. Irony thinks ahead, in the longer term, aspiring to
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totality but without ever fully attaining it. This explains why the Socratic metaphor of philosophy as midwife, of easing the pains by which a new world and a new way of thinking are
brought into being, has for Lefebvre an inescapably utopian resonance. Finally, Marxist irony
is not a licence for arrogance or superiority, a debilitating cynicism without real answers, and it
‘gives the coup de grâce – on the theoretical level – to false and mystified consciousness’
(ibid.: 45).
To conclude, Marxist irony is not a ‘melancholy science’ because it permits a corrective to a ‘one-sided seriousness’ that is hopelessly inadequate to reality. But, although it
has its playful qualities, Lefebvre suggests the laughter made possible by an ironical wisdom is not akin to what Bakhtin would call ‘carnival laughter’. It is not the hearty and
spontaneous belly-laugh of the wine-soaked, ribald feast, but rather something more
sober-minded, reflective and wiser, evincing a laugh that is ‘subdued and somewhat bitter’ (1995: 38). On the subject of laughter, there are indeed interesting differences
between Bakhtin and Lefebvre. As has been frequently remarked on, Bakhtin implies
that laughter is necessarily liberatory and anti-official, and says it can ‘never [be] used
by violence and authority’ (Bakhtin, 1984: 90). Indeed, much of Rabelais and His World
is given over to a lyrical, almost chiliastic celebration of the liberating potential of carnival laughter. Bakhtin thereby ignores the potential for laughter and humour to reinforce
social stereotypes and support ingrained hierarchies (such as patriarchy or racism), and
thus it cannot be considered as ipso facto emancipatory – a good example being Nazism’s penchant for vulgar jokes in the mobilization of anti-Semitic feeling. Lefebvre has
a better grasp of this point, because he discriminates between different manifestations of
laughter and understands they have divergent social effects. For instance, he suggests
that what he terms ‘classical’ laughter is a sarcastic and cynical form that never questions
the established order. But there is an altogether different laughter that would seem to be
much closer to what Bakhtin has in mind, what Lefebvre describes as ‘the free laughter
of liberation, subversive, the laughter of Shakespeare, Rabelais, Aristophanes’. This is a
type of laughter that is, moreover, congruent with the nature of revolutionary Romanticism, expressing ‘the seeds of a new comic mode’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 245).
Conclusion
As suggested in the introduction, even a cursory glance at the respective projects of
Bakhtin and Lefebvre reveals remarkable parallels and similarities, ranging from an
‘anti-utopian utopianism’, to a pronounced stress on an embodied, sensuous engagement
with the world, and an emphasis on untrammelled dialogue as the basis for the production of non-dogmatic knowledges, to name but a few. On the narrower subject of their
respective treatments of Romanticism and irony, however, there are telling differences.
The utopian energies of carnival might not be as dissipated or sublimated in modernity as
Bakhtin thought, because, if Lefebvre is correct, at least certain currents of Romanticism
have more of an ‘elective affinity’ with the carnivalesque – perhaps even in the tonality
of a major key – than many have suspected hitherto. Arguably, what Bakhtin often
equates with Romanticism per se – subjectivism and hyper-individualism, a narrow,
often mystified aestheticism and an obsessively hermetic mode of self-reflection,
together with an ironical consciousness that he regards mostly as a ‘reduced’ and hence
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debased form of carnival laughter – only refers to ‘recuperated’, commodified and hence
compromised currents of the Romantic impulse. Consequently, Lefebvre’s clarion call
for a passionate ‘revolutionary Romanticism’, albeit one that must be leavened with a
sobering, clear-eyed dose of Marxist irony, can help to supersede certain limitations and
lacunae vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s hermeneutic. It does so by ‘defamiliarizing’ a reified and
commodified everyday life, revealing some of the usually obscured promises of bygone
forms of life, and thereby permitting ‘us to illuminate the present in the name of the
future’ (Lefebvre, 1995: 357). If so, we may well choose to heed more closely Löwy and
Sayre’s remarkable assertion that ‘utopia will be Romantic or it will not be’ (2001: 255).
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Bakhtin, M. M. (1990) Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed.
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Biographical note
Michael E. Gardiner is a professor in Sociology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
His books include The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words, coedited with Michael M. Bell (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), Critiques of Everyday
Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), the edited four-volume collection Mikhail Bakhtin
(‘Masters of Modern Social Thought’ series, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2003), and
Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (Oxford and Berne: Peter Lang, 2012), as well
as numerous articles dedicated to dialogical social theory, ethics, everyday life and utopianism in
such journals as History of the Human Sciences, Theory, Culture and Society, Theory and Society
and Utopian Studies.
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