The culturological school could, broadly speaking, be called Marxist-Bakhtinist. However, for some of its representatives, such as V. Bibler and A.Ya. Gurevich, Marx is perhaps given first place, whereas for L. Batkin the influence of Bakhtin is of central methodological importance. Very important in Gurevich’s development of new historical and culturological ideas was the thought of the French historian Marc Bloch, and for Bibler this role was played by Hegel’s philosophy. All these different sources can be brought into unity through an overall critical-dialectical and, above all, historical approach to culture. The special role of Marx is defined for the Moscow culturologists53 as, first and foremost, that he began ‘the transition to a historical science of a new type’.54 At the same time, despite the differences between individual writers, the whole school is clearly working for the enrichment of method.
It is one of the ironies of history that it should be the Christian Bakhtin, a deeply religious man quite alien to Marxism, who has had an immensely stimulating effect on the development and revival of Marxist dialectics in the USSR. In 1936 Trotsky wrote that although everyone in our country considers himself a Marxist, not a single Marxist book gets published. That was true also of the 1960s, at least as far as the first half of that decade was concerned. The presence of quotations and references in general schemas was in no way proof of the flourishing of Marxist thought, because the most important thing — namely, method — remained in oblivion.
In order to understand the methodological revolution brought about in the sphere of culturology one must compare Bakhtin with E.V. Il'enkov. Both men worked for the revival of dialectics, which had been reduced in the textbooks to a collection of examples (something to which Engels himself objected), and for its transformation into a way of thinking. Whereas Bakhtin’s dialectics were rooted in the New Testament, Il'enkov’s goes back to Marx’s Capital. The culturologists of the seventies — being of a different generation, a different education, a different training — did not share Bakhtin’s religious ideas, although they seized upon his scientific conclusions. A demand arose for a methodological ‘correction’ of Bakhtin’s philosophy ‘in accordance with Marx’. (Here a role was played by Il'enkov’s works, which were examples of serious scientific thinking.)
The new school, following Bakhtin, formulated the fundamental conclusions of the theory of dialogue. First and foremost they formed the view that ordinary dialectics — the universal theory of development of nature and society — is inadequate for the explanation of thought. Thinking is more than dialectical, it is dialogical. It is not enough to establish the presence of ‘two sides’ to every concept, its inner contradictoriness. The contradictions of thought are much more fundamental. Creative thinking is based not on conflict between a thesis and the antithesis that this engenders, but on conflict between two initial theses, resulting in a synthesis. Consequently, all cognition is dialogical, and the cognition of culture especially so. But for dialogue, as we know, two sides are needed. It is necessary to recognize the cultural sovereignty of the past. ‘Unless we realize that,’ said Batkin in his famous lectures on Leonardo de Vinci, ‘we cannot comprehend the originality and distinctiveness of our own epoch and our own method. The present is not the absolute criterion for history…’55
New tasks arise from this. We have to understand the culture of the past as a whole, as an independent system, and development not as a process of steady advance but as a more complex accumulation of historical experience through a dialogue of cultures. In his lecture on Leonardo, Batkin declared against the traditional academic idealizing of the past, against reverential ‘rounding off and excision of contradictions. For him it was important to know not only what people thought but also how they thought, and not only to establish this but also to understand it.
Here one finds oneself recalling Bertolt Brecht, the playwright — or rather the theoretician — with his ‘alienation effect’, looking from the side, objectivizing. The method of the Moscow culturologists is based on a threefold dialectical alienation. First, alienation of one’s view of the past, purging it of stereotyped ideas, those prejudices about it which come naturally to us. The second alienation happens when, after jettisoning the most banal of our schemas, we still remain people of our own epoch and alienate the past itself, and then we sometimes see things that contemporaries did not see — when, to use Bakhtin’s own phrase, ‘we put to an alien,culture questions which it did not put to itself.’56 In this way we manage, now and then, to perceive new features in the culture of a past epoch. Thus, for example, the tragic nature of Leonardo’s personality was clear to Batkin although he himself did not realize this. Lastly we have alienation of our own time: in studying the past we begin to look in a new way at the present. The ‘alien’ culture puts its own questions to us.
Here we perceive a manifest break with the official theory of culture and society. The writers of textbooks — and, of course, we have in mind here not only manuals for students but also some ‘serious’ works in the category of official ‘education in historical materialism’ — consider that investigation is complete when events have been reduced to a sociological-dialectical schema. Here we have everything — the productive forces, the relations of production, the social factors and even, sometimes, mention of cultural and religious traditions. One thing alone is missing: living interaction, movement, process: in other words, dialectics itself. M.Ya. Gefter noted that this whole schema is
a distorted representation of the structure and logic of Marxism, in which the materialist conception of history becomes something secondary, derived from the philosophy of nature according to ‘diamat’. The true picture of the genesis of materialist dialectics is distorted; but what is even more important is that this merely instructional schema, when implanted in people’s minds, maintains the isolation of contemporary historical materialism both from dialectics and from concrete study of society in past and present alike.57
The culturologists, on the contrary, address themselves both to dialectics and to concrete study. For them scientific work begins precisely where, for the dogmatists, it stops.
It is of major importance that from now on theoretical thinking is not only revealing afresh truths which had been ‘closed’ under Stalin but also creating something of its own, something new and original, carrying on scientific research in the full sense of the word. The preparatory period is past; philosophical science has reached maturity.
Batkin’s article ‘The Uncomfortableness of Culture’, published in the uncensored symposium Metropol', was a sort of manifesto of the philosophical ideas of the culturologists. It was written originally for the official journal Voprosy Filosofii and failed to be published there for quite accidental reasons. Nevertheless it was symbolic that this programmatic declaration of the culturological school should have appeared in an uncensored publication. Batkin insisted on regarding culture as a tragic process of self-negation and self-renewal, in constant conflict with the conservatism of official society and with itself: ‘Enclosure in itself as complete as possible, dialogue without limits, that is what is needed for culture: any mechanical reduction or exclusion from internal debate, that is what really emasculates culture. But how frightened we are to linger for a breath of air!’58 Culture constantly fights also against the ‘guardians’ of culture, who prove to be, in reality, prison warders protecting the official ideology, for culture is a challenge to dogmas, a revolt against tradition, against everything stagnant and immobile. ‘There is no way out except oblivion. Seriously to “rest” the whole weight of the present upon tradition means to refute it.’59