zach gibson, a new look at rabelais and his world — review
whilst studying the carnival, gibson moves from bakthin's polyphony to zizek's politics as if their adjacency implies they are conceptually implicated
part 1: defense of the image of carnival
zach gibson isn’t an entirely knew author, but his public critical footprint seems pretty recent and sparse: a few theory-adjacent reviews in e-flux and larb on deleuze and serres, plus older thomas pynchon essays on medium. with those extensions, an essay on bakthin's rabelais still falls in line with that type of readership cluster. the writing itself doesn't feel amateur, and can be situated neatly within an existing academic canon.
the first part of the book doesnt even seem very relevant to the conceptual problematic since its presented as biographical scaffolding – before that, a lot of the text is basically atmospheric credentialing: proving bakhtin belongs inside a lineage of laughter theory, renaissance studies, folk humor, etc. yet once the piece does get to the problem, claims scatter from cosmic imagination to how productive vs destructive a carnival is ontologically to zizeks politicization of its function of enjoyment.
the very detached perspective of the commentatorial voice makes it so that a lot of the issues are delianted cleanly and infuzed into one another through thinkers and arranged in particular ways, but without much distinction or functional seperation, so that half the time the concepts make vaguely associable points around the topic rather than targetting the exact line of discourse. this is partially because gibson had to fuze topically related but argumentatively unrelated lines together, but its simply too hard to understand the stakes of the arguments since he doesnt develop enough distinctive nuance to hammer in exactly what the specific problem is half the time given that his authorship is much too heavily restricted
the conceptual inexcatitude is both likely a commentorial underdeliverance and a general discourse underdeliverance (discourses around laughter, dancing, festivality, pleasure joy and sex often appear looser than discourse around economic or epistemic conceptual clusters) transformative corporeal regeneration doesnt strictly connect with permeability in the carnival setting (the grotesque rarely appears, porousness is more a frame than an activity - a carnival must be an orgy or a food eating competition to truly enter this aesthetic realm and even then). in this work at the same time carnival function as an aesthetic form, an ontology of becoming, a theory of subjectivity, a debate around the anti-hierarchical social image and a proposed or supposedly enacted (at least in rabelais time) model of collective transformation, yet the argument itself has to trace these implications through six different conceptual clusters that dont always connect (regeneration -> permeability -> polyphony/porousness -> dissolution -> consciousness -> positivity). all of these concepts could be their own mini debates, but fuzing them together looks like a challenge gibson only manages to pass through associatively rather than conceptually.
gibson writes notes such as "on its face, rabelais and his world is ostensibly of a piece with mid-twentieth century historicist literary criticism. the compelling case that bakhtin makes for laughter’s place in the lives of ordinary renaissance peasants, laborers, and merchants makes his book as much a valuable contribution to the history of ideas...", "unlike the satirists of antiquity, whose parodic thrust was often geared toward negating or correcting social ills, laughter in rabelais, writes bakhtin, has a “positive, affirming character.” which look more like he's trying to coax the argument into existence or affirm an idea of carnivalism than give a biography. his notes are too pleasant and self-affirming to have any delineated or associative value, yet too short and unauthored to have any conceptually distinctive value.
the conceptual issue in the article's development has this exact pattern where every successive argument connects with the previous to lesser or extinguishing degrees, or switches the epistemic registers way too quickly between the points. permeability connects with polyphony even slightly less (it does enable easier connection, synchronicity and depoliticization of frames but dialogue, communication, thought process, bonding, assumptions and etc are all seperate processes which dont have to have a connected metaphysical tissue, a carnival has to prove not just that they all happen, not just that they all happen continously or respectively or symmetrically, but that their happening implies or generates one another, so that one can go from the idea that communication implies sharing which implies the movement of internal framing or guidance generated by the juxtaposition of a dialogic or dialectical convergence or reciprocity or synchronicity) and then once the political issue emerges the connection dwindles which surprisingly mostly rests on how exact zizek and groys were about their mechanical arrangement of the issue (which isnt stated in the piece beyond a brief note)
even more since ecstatic dissolution does not imply a necessary exhaustion of ecstatic or corporeal political ability (its unlikely carnival-esque events contain it more than they disperse it, and its unlikely that the possibility to enact them has anything to do with the ability to enact them in that place more than the disability to enact them in other cruical spheres?). the real question becomes, what exactly allows carnival discourse to move from aesthetics into politics? if you see it as a critique of a simulation of acts that satisfies internal need, desire or repression, then this is either a testament to repression more than its origin point, or an irrelevant general criticism of the politically shallow acceptance of carnival-goers to exercise their urges in a generally depoliticized manner rather than a manner that destroys politics itself.
it could then be conceived of a valid aesthetic criticism of festival going - which rests less on the total political possibility of a carnival and more about whether its very image or base practice negates or overrides the ability to enter political antagonisms, but this contemporary festival model is both not zizek's original concern when retrospected to actual historical carnivalism or dyionisianism, nor a concern that even seems very interested in the causal mechanics behind the events themselves. most importantly, the frame of criticism judges its objects from the perspective of something requiring the frame to validate the event, so all events that have ambigous frames naturally fail to pass this test, which doesnt invalidate the social organization or uselessness of the event as a totality, only targetting its aesthetic impression (which in and of itself is a valid albiet non related concern).
the image of porous participation in the bahktinian cosmic imagination revival is stronger in gibson, but leaves a cruical concern, pourousness is not elevated to political concern outside of its ability to be a mode of being, and modes of being are not politically pre-built totalities. a subject relating in a certain mode of being like a porous one where intruige, imitation, gimmick-play, mirroring, or corporeal connectivity dominates doesnt suddenly metaphysicize communication or give a stronger politically emancipable or actional character to subjects outside of the questions surrounding the actual political character of events. this is not a materialist problem as much as it is a functional one, the freedoms of a category functionally depend on the exact generative qualities of an act, which are likelier to cause a shift in the political mode of something then a sudden political revalatory character.
the conceptual issue stated exactly is that: 1) grotesque regeneration does not automatically imply permeability because - bodily excess can renew perception without producing an open social ontology. 2) permeability does not automatically imply dialogue because - porousness permits contact and imitation, yet this doesnt necessarily translate into communication or reciprocal thought. 3) dialogue does not automatically imply politics because - communication can intensify collectivity without producing organization. 4) ecstatic suspension does not automatically imply emancipation or containment because - enjoyment is not ever necessarily politically exhausted since as a capacity its tied to functions not possible actions 5) positive aesthetic intensity does not guarantee positive political function - since political consequences require political relevancy rather than the enactment of corporeal acts.
for example, a society where carnivals necessitate a highly sexually liberated energy between parties could predict that that cluster of attendees would be less likely to participate in marriage or monogamy as a construct in those limited temporal circumstances, but cant feasibly predict their future general standpoint on the matter outside of the wider ideology that surrounds them. if that ideology happens to treat corporeal sharing as a natural state, you can assume that fidelity as a concept is lacking in that society, but nothing about marriage as an economic reality or about how strict certain sexual standards are, or non-carnival related political realities and how strongly they contradict that current character.
or in another example being able to freely defecate or drink alcohol could point to a political disavowal of hygiene or to a genuine belief in communal sharing of bodily excretion or public image, but simultaneously not be able to predict how common those occurances would be on a general basis, or how common it is to see those elements outside of a particular carneval, or even how society generally views those acts in terms of virtues or images of influence outside of that specific realm where their justification predicates the status quo. all in all to say, it is true that the negative aesthetic image of something doesnt correspond to a negative political function, but in much the same way, a positive aesthetic goal doesnt correspond to a positive political reality (positive and negative meant and applied in the diffuse way of permission, enactment, availability, realization, intensity and political valor)
whats important to note at this point in the review is that the club vs. carnival framework came from this review rather than arising from zizek, bakthin or even gibson, and it arrived because in the beginning of the essay gibson is associatively and implicatively debating against invisible ghosts that are supposedly arguing about carnival's political illusions in scholarship (carnival as liberation, pleasure, anti-hierarchy, ecstatic collectivity, political release, festivality) - which obviously he doesnt manage to state through zizek, marcuse or groys. stabilizing the modern function of the carnival is important because it seems from the reader's perspective that gibson himself is more interested in defending the image of the carnival than its concept, and this has implications for the development of the argument itself.
part 2: investigation of the concept of carnival
now let's take a look at the details behind the scholarship. from an already redundant biography of rabelais, gibson essentially becomes the mouthpiece for bakthin, neither extending his narrative outwards nor even expanding on the conceptual particularities of his research. gibson essentially rehashes the contents of bakthin's piece and a few general quotable remarks and then threads them lightly with narrative scaffolding, even though his actual commentary on the carnival is almost fifty pages from page 125 to 175 in his work on dostoevsky's poetics which is only quoted twice in the article. not only is it only quoted twice, but the absence of particular mechanizations outside of the poelmic that were noted earlier as lacking in gibson actually do appear in bakthin, who explains exactly in which ways the carnival functionally produces interrelational logics.
this is what gibson says about zizek: "slavoj žižek devotes considerable space to dismissing the progressive potential that bakhtin saw in the carnivalesque." then this is what zizek gives as an example to bakthinian carnivalism in stalinism: "therein resides the true greatness of eisenstein: that he detected (and depicted) the fundamental shift in the status of political violence, from the "leninist" liberating outburst of destructive energy to the "stalinist" obscene underside of the law."
besides the curiosity of how gibson was even able to intentionally locate a single brief subchapter about the carnival in a random zizek book that doesnt bare its title (unless by accident of course), the difficult part of the text is that this line doesn't mention neither bakthin nor the carnival, largely because unlike what gibson says, zizek spends absolutely zero time on actually evaluating bakhtin and that's both zizek's slight weak side that he is relying on bakthin associatively rather than conceptually, but an even greater weak side for gibson, who doesn't seem to include the very important footnote that by carnival and bakthinian zizek clearly means "a literal reversal of hierarchies" rather than what gibson notes about bakhtin's view of hierarchies: "bakhtin became fascinated by the ecstatic atmosphere and dionysiac revelry of folk holidays (such as roman bacchanalia), which he viewed as liberated from social barriers and class hierarchy."
in this same way, by carnival zizek clearly means the act of music culturally being associated with the spectacle of an orgy that is related to political antagonism rather than class liberation. whilst gibson notes that bakthin's views on soveregnity were vaguely egalitarian, "… while the usual world order is canceled, the new utopian order that has come to replace it is sovereign and applies to everyone.” zizek is analyzing sovereignity as a discourse about power inside of existing hierarchies rather than their dissolution. in that sense, the carnival is not a communal festivity but an aristocratic event for power, something closer to monarchs chasing around the crown in a russian context than about peasants liberating themselves from class rigidity. zizek writes: " in contrast to ivan, who wants total power, but perceives it as a "heavy load," exercising it as a means to an end (the creation of a great and powerful russian state), euphrosyna is the subject of a morbid passion. for her, power is an end in itself."
there is also one extra element to zizek's otherwise loose and unfair use of "bakhtinianism". gibson notes: "beginning in the 1920s, bakhtin became fascinated by the ecstatic atmosphere and dionysiac revelry of folk holidays (such as roman bacchanalia), which he viewed as liberated from social barriers and class hierarchy. in an inversion of the mundane, carnival, for bakhtin, is “life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent ‘life turned inside out.’ zizek doesn't just imply the hierarchical inversion, but the "turning life inside out" where stalin turns the law inside out when retrospected with lenin's supposed justified logic of violence.
zizek's examination of law is the moment where power attempts to justify itself, the exact opposite of rabelais logic of festivity where power's justification itself is exhausted or extinguished. this movement is not the same dialogic event but a dialectically asymmetrical temporal consequence. in much the same way that aristocrats fight for power within their communities, in much the same way the peasants on the streets deny and invert those struggles so that they don't become posessed by their running logic.
this cleansing ritual that zizek is supposedly against is a ritual that attempts to deny certain running logics. in much the same way, the modern club and boiler room, or the 20th century genocidal camp is the execution of a certain logic of visibility and concentration and justification, one that is functionally seperate from the running logic of the carnival at its peak reinessance mode. zizek notes this himself: “the ‘carnival’ is here no longer a liberating experience, but the flash of thwarted and repressed aggression” – the carnival turns into a managed or explosive eruption of enjoyment rather than a bakthinian anti-hierarchical temporality.
the issue is essentially that the functional conflation of carnival with all these modes simultaneously (medieval folk ritual -> grotesque embodiment -> fascist frenzy -> stalinist terror -> contemporary festivals) don't actually cohere the concept or situate rabelais historical process. the argument itself then becomes a narrative polemic about supporting an image of the carnival as having to be a certain way that seems seperate from anyone's stakes, from bakthins, from rabelais, from zizeks and groys.
speaking about seperated conceptual stakes, other than the fact that zizek and marcuse show up in the paragraph in a way unrelated to the topic at large, the biggest mistake gibson makes is actually this one, where he writes: "in some ways, bakhtin—or at least the difficult publishing atmosphere in which he worked—is to blame for obscuring the throughline that connects his monographs. a reading of rabelais that is not informed by problems is likely to yield a similar conclusion to žižek or groys. however, among sandler’s achievements in his revised edition is the supporting context he provides to curb some of the most common misreadings the book has provoked."
even though on scholarly grounds hes completely correct that zizke and groys likely do have bad associations about bakthin, its a kind of funny irony that even in this very article, bakthin's "rabelais" is cited three times more than his "problems" even when gibson himself notes that the latter is far more valuable for a theory of the carnival. but even more than that, the biggest actual mistake is that instead of actually helping elucidate or add to bakthin's concept, he uses an unrelated reading, sandler's reading, to hammer in the explanation. as noted earlier, the jump to cosmic consciousness which arises due to his reliance on sandler instead of bakthin himself here obscures the total progression of the work and doesn't actually expand on what bakthin thought valuable in this discourse or how he even expands on the concept of the carnival. it does help to lock in the dialogical or polyphonic reading, but this doesn't connect to his earlier issue of dissolution and exhaustion, nor to porousness or the grotesque, which are metaphysically seperate categories only loosely related to the main carnival problem (unless strongly tied together by figures such as bakhtin himself – not even to mention that bakthin's own focus is more literary than ontological)
returning to the earlier issue of conceptual delienation, the improtant parts in bakthin are precisely those where the carnival does retain its ontological shape. bakhtin gives four clean categories for the mechanisms that actually allow the carnival to proliferate metaphysically: free familiar contact, eccentricity, mesalliances, profanation. for familiar contact, he says: “free and familiar contact among people: carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”
you can notice how already, this category remains seperate but connected to zizek's critique. the great can only experience the dehierarchization of the carnival's function if he's within its ontic constraints, when in ivan's example its quite the opposite – vladimir is the opposite of ivan, but yet they are both aristocrats, which in a sense indicates that zizek is speaking about a dark carnival, a function where the concept of the carnival itself becomes entirely divorced from its own image but still retains its operations. ivan and vladimir are the lofty and low, the wise and stupid, but their carnival is not a liberatory one, because this condition doesn't liberate actual economic differences, it only targets the virtues and ambitions of characters within a fixed economic zone.
similarly, what is precisely needed to exercise an ontological act on that very supposed virtue and ambition of character also found in the dark carnival. bakthin writes “eccentricity permits—in concretely sensuous form—the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves.” a non-politically weaponized zone - rabelais carnival - would allow for ivan to express his ego, and for his mother to express her small town thirst for ambitions devoid of universal prospect. the carnival, as gibson correctly notes about bakthin "was communal rather than individual; it was universally directed at “everything and everyone,” including its participants" and this characteristic would allow the zone itself to excuse its political audaciousness, to allow ivan and vladimir to laugh at their own character not at the expense of other's status, but as a total city-wide comedy about human nature.
admittedly, zizek's dark carnival does retain the entire value of the third function, mesalliance, defined by bakthin as “carnivalistic mesalliances are characterized by a logic of things ‘inside out,’ ‘vice versa,’ a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear.” zizek himself notes this reversal as previously mentioned in the distinction between stalin and lenin. in the same way, bakthin defines profanities as: "carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic de basings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings". zizek's use of the "bakthinian carnivalesque" is the exact parody of the obscenity within the stalinist political ritual than outside of it, unlike the carnival-zone which should assumably have a universal ideological function.
of course, all of this is well and clear to gibson himself, who unfortunately argues that zizek drags the value of the carnival down entirely due to his failure to explicitly deliante which parts of bakthin he borrows, rather than the reading that shows that he is in fact expounding on the very abuses of the concept of the carnival itself rather than commiting that abuse onto it (even if accidentally) whilst also arguing about the image of the carnival rather than its concept, which dilutes the very explanatory value that could belong to somebody retrsopecting on the carnival itself
it just so happens that gibson's sense for locating obscure hinges, triangulating bakhtin through a variation of unrelated thinkers, and intuiting a hidden continuity problem inside carnival discourse itself is far more valuable as a hinge in this essay than what he actually ends up serving on the plate, so that in some sense his ability to compress and locate the discourse and find a pocket for its argument is the most academically valuable part in his piece. in many ways the work is more a new very well-manifested promotion of existing rabelais issues than any "new point" about said issues.