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Posted on May 6, 2023 | 36 Comments
I recently reread Mikhail Bakhtin’s mind-blowing book Rabelais and His World. On the face of it, a book about the fantastical literary imaginings of a 16th century writer by a long-dead philosopher from Soviet Russia probably shouldn’t loom too large in the reading list of a contemporary blogger writing about farming, ecology and politics. And yet. Here, I’m going to lay down a few waymarks, and come back to them in future posts.
François Rabelais (d.1553) was, in more ways than one, a Renaissance man who along with Cervantes and Shakespeare pioneered modern literary culture. But – a key point, this – he wasn’t ‘modern’. So claims Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) in his aforementioned book, which on the one hand was a scholarly appraisal of the medieval culture out of which Rabelais emerged, and on the other was a veiled critique of Soviet communism.
For those of us who’ve quailed before the prospect of a viva for a higher degree, spare a thought for Bakhtin defending his thesis on Rabelais in front of Stalinist apparatchiks who could probably have had him shot if he’d put a foot wrong. In the event he wasn’t shot, but the powers that be deemed his work unworthy of the degree he sought, and Bakhtin sank into obscurity before being rediscovered in the 1960s. When his work was translated into English, it set the Anglophone literary world alight. So in a sense Bakhtin had the last laugh. Although I daresay he’d disagree, because one of his major arguments is that nobody ever gets the last laugh.
Let me try to precis those major arguments. Bakhtin says there was a folk culture of festive laughter in medieval Europe that mocked the power, pomposity and seriousness of political and ecclesiastical rule – a spirit of carnival opposed to everything fixed, stable, dogmatic and immortal that Rabelais drew on in his writing. I learned a new word from the book – ‘agelast’: one who doesn’t laugh, most of all at themselves, who sees their foes as enemies of eternal truths, who doesn’t place themselves in the melting pot of history and see the comedy of their own limitations. I think I have some agelast tendencies – actually, I think most people do, especially when it comes to cherished political or spiritual beliefs.
But the people’s laughter, says Bakhtin, is not simply negative and mocking. It’s not the laughter of the modern satirist, who elevates themselves above the object of their derision. It’s much more ambivalent, turning the laughter on itself, while affirming and regenerating that which it derides. Also, it’s a social, collective laughter in a way that’s hard for we moderns to comprehend – even (or perhaps especially) for those of us on the political left who pepper our speech with eulogies for community and collectivism that too often sound like we’re trying a bit too hard, toiling to transcend a culture of individualism and interiority that sticks to us all the more as we wave it away with supercilious dismissal.
Turning to another major focus of the people’s laughter, Bakhtin emphasizes what he calls grotesque realism and the lower bodily stratum. Folks, what we’re talking about here is birth and death, fecundity and decay, sex, genitals, wombs, defecation, urination, fat bellies, eating, feasting, and general hyperbolic excess in the more material, gross and animalistic aspects of human life.
Again, this lower bodily stratum has a collective and a political aspect. Modern conceptions of the individual body, of modesty and shame, and the vulgarity of the lower bodily stratum find no place in it. Politically, it’s the arena of reversal – the king as a fool or slave, the cleric as greedy or lustful, the death or dismemberment of the agelast, the fecund regeneration of the world out of decay and death. Bakhtin tells us that this abundant regeneration out of decay in the people’s laughter is in a sense anti-natural. Whereas kings and clerics invoke a fear of death and nature’s overmighty powers to frighten those they rule, the people’s laughter strips these high ups down to their grotesque, earthly bodies, celebrates human powers over nature and scorns death, out of which comes rebirth.
The arena for much of this carnival spirit, according to Bakhtin, is the marketplace. Markets, feasts, fairs and carnivals were closely related in medieval life. Unlike the seriousness and hierarchy of normal life, they were an arena of bawdy equality and billingsgate banter. Which is interesting in view of the dominance of ‘the market’ in contemporary economic spirituality as a kind of serious, implacable force of nature – the preserve of the agelast. Hence the importance that I’ve emphasized before of the difference between ‘the market’ and ‘the marketplace’.
A final, fascinating aspect of Bakhtin’s analysis was the vertical rather than horizontal conception of quality in medieval thought. Whereas nowadays we make ‘progress’, we move ‘forward’, we scorn ‘backwardness’ and we conceive ourselves as historical subjects moving on towards an improvable future, medieval conceptions emphasized a hierarchy of the ‘higher’ (closer to perfection) and the ‘lower’ (more gross or debased). It did, as discussed, invert this hierarchy in the carnival imagery and it welcomed the new, but it didn’t place humans outside the hierarchy as moving inexorably onwards collectively through history towards a perfection of form.
Now, it’s probably fair to say that Bakhtin’s account of this ‘second life’ of the people built by medieval folk culture is a bit idealized, though no more so than the idealization of the people’s march ‘forwards’ through history associated with the bourgeois individualism of Marxism and other modernist dogmas. Apart from the occasional and understandable nod to Marxist orthodoxy in his book, Bakhtin’s thinking is deeply and fundamentally non-Marxist, and – more broadly – non-modernist, with its refusal of completion, ultimate telos, and unmediated serious truth.I find it endlessly suggestive of the kind of recurrent populist culture of the everyday that I extolled in Chapter 20 of A Small Farm Future (a passage that – no coincidence! – was picked out by two Marxist critics for particular scorn. A little more on that presently).
Nevertheless, it’s quite challenging for me to let go of the horizontal frame and embrace verticality and hierarchy, emerging as I have from this same agelast culture of bourgeois modernist rationalism as Marxism. Particularly today of all days, when I gather that somewhere in London there’s a man on a big chair with a fancy hat that some people are getting very excited about. So whereas my most deeply-grained disposition is to an agelast rationalist republicanism that inclines me to greet this event thus…
…I’m beginning to embrace the notion that there are hierarchies we cannot simply transcend through history, and that they must be honoured. But, per Rabelais and Bakhtin, that doesn’t mean we can’t invert and relativize them, make fun of them and insist on keeping them at arm’s length while we get on with the more important business of the people’s life and livelihood.
Thus it is that I am prepared to swear obedience to King Charles, albeit only in a suitably Rabelaisian manner. And so, my liege lord, my poxy majesty, my big-eared people-eater of a rancid monarch, I raise a glass – nay, a veritable ocean – of wine to salute and pay obeisance to your ineffable superiority, your divine organic-ness, your architectural carbuncularity, your kingly royalness and your myriad excellences. Now get on your knees, you clown, and kiss my feet.
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Hmmm… poor Charlie (may I call him Charlie??) The subject of his subjects. Subsequently subjectified.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown. And so too the agelast among us.
The peasant philosophy of laughter, I like it. As my youthful energy and exuberance wanes, the more I realize how much we take ourselves too seriously. I mean, serious is good (including some serious partying at times), just not too serious.
I don’t necessarily object to formal hierarchies, partly because I think informal ones can be worse and harder to j the idea of a monarch as some kind of symbolic head of state, I just don’t think such a symbol should have so much more wealth and power than his subjects. What would it mean for Charles to turn up at the soup kitchen, not as a volunteer bestowing royal honour by doing good for the camera, but as a hungry guest in need?
There is a reason I find the kingship of Christ more compelling, and sit uneasily in my Anglicanism at times.
But tomorrow we may die. If I have a strong sense of my own transience, of the provisionality of my own plans and therefore their absurdity, do I escape the agelast label? Or do I have to add a fart joke too?
The tradition that springs to mind is that of the “holy fool”.
Coming back, I see that I managed to mangle the first part of this comment! It should have been something like:
“I don’t necessarily object to formal hierarchies, partly because I think informal ones can be worse and harder to navigate in ways that lead to just outcomes. I’m also not necessarily opposed to the idea of a monarch as some kind of symbolic head of state…”
It is interesting that the king’s qualifications consist of out living his mother.
Well I think Charlie is better than say President Blair or President Starmer , America picked the blowhard Trump then Alzheimer’s patient Biden , Macron in just rammed thru pension reform on presidential authority alone .
There is a lot to be said for a constitutional monarchy , it stands in the way of self serving political radicals
Here’s an interesting 10 minutes about the farming life of Charlie, who is described fondly by one of the farm managers who knows him best as “like ears, a head, of his time.” … Oh to be hamstrung by so much land, power and money. I wish him all the best.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001lr5f
Hmmmm Charlie’s farming. Yes he does do some great stuff on his little bit but his massive Duchy Estate wasn’t organic or small scale or farmed in a sustainable manner – big ag big money but that bit of his land holdings don’t make it into the documentaries (PR fluff). I know one of the gardener’s at Highgrove and she hasn’t much good to say about him.
I used to think that I’d rather have a constitutional monarchy than more politicians but now I’m not so sure ( I’d rather have neither). According to Norman Baker (who’s a Privy Counselor) two thirds of the UK is still owned by the direct descendants of the 200 odd barons who came over with William the conqueror in 1066. And our monarch is a direct descendant of William – so it seems that the constitutional bit is a fig leaf that hides the fact they’ve retained a great deal of very real power and influence.
Laughing at them seems good – turned the TV on so my young sons could see the coronation it being historic and all. My youngest (aged 6) looked at it for about 30 seconds and then said “it’s just people”. I particularly enjoyed Charlie putting on a plain linen tunic as a symbol of humility in the middle of a £100 million ceremony dwsigned to tell everyone how special he is ( he did cover it up very quickly with a gold jacket so all was well).
The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Rishi once told his students ” What we are doing here is so important that we mustn’t take it too seriously” I try and bring that to mind whenever I get too certain about things.
As one who sometimes has trouble keeping his agelast tendencies under control, I’m struck here how a discussion of medieval phenomena, and their contrast with elements of modernity, is used to shape a response to Charlieboy’s enhatment.
While the BBC, and no doubt other broadcasters, did its typical best to assert a kind of deferential attitude to a ‘timeless’ ritual, mystically discordant in our otherwise bland British present, I think it’s worth emphasising, better yet insisting upon, the fact that the coronation is thoroughly modern. Obviously its format is styled after older ritual, but the reasons for carrying it out in this day and age have nothing to do with the reasons kings in centuries past went through it.
Sure, we live in a ‘constitutional monarchy’ in a formal sense, but what that means practically is that we live within a capitalist state driven by the interests of competitive profit-making, in which concern over the resulting iniquities of authority, status and wealth can be deflected by appeal to ancient values of ‘deference’ and ‘service’.
So I’m all for the power of collective laughter in putting down the mighty from their seats. But it should be a thoroughly modern tactic directed at our thoroughly modern ‘betters’, not a medievalism directed at their royal scapegoat.
And so to the most uncomfortable part: ‘…I’m beginning to embrace the notion that there are hierarchies we cannot simply transcend through history, and that they must be honoured.’ I can imagine some general existential universals in which this holds, but what is it doing here, in a post otherwise concerned with very human hierarchies?
My wife has the ITV coverage on at the moment.
All this is really down to Bageheot and others who when the Victorians realised we ruled a quarter of the globe wanted us to look the part.
Pity really that they didnt give the job to Gilbert and Sullivan so ‘Poundland’ Penny Mourdant could come in singing ‘I am the Lord High Executioner’
Thanks for the comments. Much to agree with in them. Just a few points.
The difficulty as I see it with modern constitutional monarchies is that if the monarch has no power then they’re pointless, and if they do have power it’s hard to square it with modern conceptions of sovereignty. I agree with Kathryn that there can be a place for symbolic sovereignty, but the symbolism has to work widely within the society it represents – I’m not sure the British monarchy does.
I’ve seen a few anti-royalist folks invoking Graeber & Wengrow’s ‘Dawn of Everything’ to suggest that egalitarianism has historical primacy over (royal) hierarchy – not my reading of Graeber’s thinking at all!
To some of your points, Andrew – you persuaded me a few years back that we need to transcend modernism. So I’m not sure I agree on the need for thoroughly modern tactics, unless I’ve misunderstood your point. I think we need a different approach to sovereignty, and dropping the modernism better enables us to learn from past models, like medieval understandings of hierarchy – though not, I agree, simply trying to restore them in the present.
Bakhtin’s point about medieval hierarchy is not that the king is a scapegoat, but that hierarchies must admit to (comic) reversal. The reversal is real, and the comedy is serious.
Regarding your querying of my sentence about honouring hierarchies, it’ll be easier to answer that after I’ve written what will probably be my next post, which draws on Bakhtin to criticize the modernist focus on historical progress, with a particular focus on Marxism. After that, I hope to write another one which draws on Bakhtin to criticize modern conservatism and its focus on stasis and tradition. So forgive me for not addressing your question now, but I will come back to it.
Also, Andrew, as a medieval historian, just wondering if you have any views on whether Bakhtin’s analysis of medieval folk culture and carnival stands up to current scholarship in the field?
What interests me is how Charlie’s land holdings are going to be distributed to those that need the land in a SFF.
I wonder/hope if people watched the ceremony with it heavy religious slant “defending the Protestant faith etc etc”, that they suddenly realise how outdated and unrepresentative, the monarchy is of modern Britain? I live in hope
As argued in both my recent books, the best case scenario is that Charlie’s and many other large landholdings will start to get distributed if and when people realise that access to the productive potential of local land is what’s going to keep them alive, and then make good political alliances to see that it happens. However, there are lots of less than best case scenarios in which that doesn’t happen.
Looking around the western world and the state of banks and government finances land will be the only thing of value soon , as it always has been , western history is riddled with battles for the control of land and it’s resource not for factories or power stations , land and it’s produce is the foundation of life no access means starvation .
I think the “no access means starvation” reality points toward a neo-feudal future. As I understand it the wealthy have been buying land for a while as an investment/hedge against an uncertain furutre – a farm on the edge of the village here sold for some millions, no one’s ever moved in and the land has been rented out. Around me there’s lots of Duchy land, my local MP owns several farms – not that he ever gets his hands dirty (well not that sort of dirt) but he did write a piece for the a local news site explaining how the coronation service had provided stability for the nation for more than 1000 years https://midsomernorton.nub.news/news/local-news/midsomer-norton-mp-jacob-rees-moggs-column-one-for-the-king-182468 so one can imagine the sort of future he might prefer.
My friend who works at Highgrove says the attitude of management toward those working there is that really they should be grateful to work there – the gardens are amazing and so yes its an interesting place to work but the pay isn’t special and nor are the expectations of them. Again, in the absence of serious land reform the “no access means starvation” reality will amplify that “you should be grateful” dynamic in nasty ways.
Rays of sunshine? We have a King called Charles and an heir called Louis – not auspicious names for Royalty 😉
Thanks for the response Chris. I was using ‘modern’ in a descriptive sense, simply to indicate the present rather than the past, not to invoke the ‘-ism’ – I need to be more careful with the word! My anxiety stems from too much time spent on social media seeing some of my fellow historians get excited about the medieval origins and echoes of the coronation service – I think that disguises the way such medievalisms are used in the present to support the established consitution (in a broad sense).
To your point about constititional monarchies (well, ours I suppose), I would say that the king himself doesn’t have much power personally, but the royal merry-go-round is certainly bound up with sovereignty as presently constituted. King as scapegoat wasn’t meant as a reference to Bakhtin, but as my own observation on his current role – again, not my best use of words, but it’s notable how what passes for public discourse in this country was full of the Tory crash in the local elections one day, then lauding Penny Mordaunt as a pious Athena the next. Despite the car-crash lives of most of is actual members, the royal family and its rites and rituals is made to act as a semi-mystical ethical foundation for the state itself.
I confess I’m not up to speed on carnival – I’m more of an early medievalist, and what you describe is largely found in studies of the late medieval and early modern periods (I’ve always found that c.1350 to c.1700 works as a pretty coherent period in European history, despite the conventional periodisation). I’d certainly accept the claim that ritualistic inversion of hierarchy was important during this period, and probably beyond (Ronald Hutton comes to mind as a contemporary scholar of the various ‘misrule’ customs). What it all meant back then though, is perhaps not as important as what you intend to make of the idea in our current situation – thanks for the preview of coming posts, I look forward to reading them!
Better hurry and get your book out. These guys are stealing your thunder-
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-05-03/crazy-town-episode-71-ecomodernism/
Adding a ‘yes’ to Diogenese (who I often disagree with) earlier comment, think on this:
if we’d had some sort of ‘democratically elected’ HoS, then with the usual low turnout and the usual badly-chosen rules and the usual social media crappage, plus the widespread disaffection with authority and consequent desire to show two fingers to it, then …. we could well have wound up with Nigel Farage.
There is something to be said for the randomness of a hereditary HoS – which, surprisingly, in this case seems to have delivered someone with genuine environmental awareness, however difficult that might be to implement fully in the context of his, errm, ‘job’.
Regarding the need for land access and the avoidance of a neo-feudal future, has any British monarch ever championed the well-being of the masses over the perceived rights of those with inherited estates?
Would the king be more likely to assist with land reform (leading by example), or hinder it?
I can’t answer for Charlie but my feeling is that power tends to believe in its own righteousness and is likely to see itself in the best possible light – I’m thinking colonialism recast as ‘the white man’s burden’.
I read “The Book of Trespass’ a while back – Downton Abbey is written by Julian Fellows aka Lord Fellowes of West Stafford. He’s talked about the terrible responsibility he feels to maintain his family’s estate – Its pretty natural to believe that what one does is natural/for the best/benign – so why would anyone with power/land vote for reforms that asked them to give that up.
The American John Addams spoke on this subject
https://anglophilicanglican.substack.com/p/a-warning-from-founding-father-john-adams
” Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. ”
The Anglophilic Anglican II
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A warning, from “Founding Father” John Adams
THE REV’D THOMAS H. HARBOLD
APR 1, 2017
John_Adams_Early_Years
“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either… Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation” ………..
Wise words. I guess there isn’t a perfect answer.
If we have to have a Monarchy, I would want the monarch to be housed in a guilded cage.
What struck me from listening in on the coronation (by accident whilst driving) was the glaring symbiosis of Monarchy and Church.
Each validating the other.
Monarchy providing the muscle.
Church providing the belief.
Church confirming the King’s role/right to rule as given by God.
In return the Monarch grants the Church rights and privileges.
Who is the most powerful???? Monarch or Church????
I think Henry VIII answered that one!
Yep, landownership is highly concentrated. But as discussed here previously, ownership involves agreed rules within a political community, and political communities can change the agreed rules. I think a neo-feudal society in Britain is unlikely. A neo-fascist one is likelier. But a neo-agrarian one is possible…if people can form a political community willing to change the rules, which might happen. Though I’m not holding my breath.
I’m not a great fan of monarchies or aristocracies, but historically ordinary people sometimes benefitted from them – especially from their internecine battles. Absolutist monarchies accorded people the forerunners of citizenship rights against seigneurial power. Aristocrats allied with ordinary people to create commons for joint economic benefit – a point that radical enthusiasts of the commons sometimes forget.
But now we face a different set of problems, and new questions about sovereignty.
I love a vulgar turn to bring it all into focus and laughing at myself is a daily ritual/humiliation! Festival for me is the 4th F of permaculture and I feel that medieval culture was super hi tech – being a stone carver by trade I have a sense of what it took to create the cathedrals and I love all colours and textiles folky madness, sign me up!
I’m curious as to why Marxism is particularly in your sights, and wait to see. I have no special love for Marx but I imagine it has something to with his domination of modern thought and on the ‘left’, some how masking a space that must emerge in a functioning SSF, for us to move beyond mechanistic and universal thinking into embodied and contextual.
I was most interested in the aristocratic part in the creation of the commons that you just mentioned, and would love to know more about that. I know from Neeson that aristocrats and certain parts of the church fought against enclosure and supported the peoples rights. I can imagine parts of our ruling class landowners offering land deals, perhaps as a form of protection as the shit starts going down, or folks taking back land in the hands of ‘foreign investors’. I should read Guy Shrubsole’s book to find out who owns what in this Island but I have a notion that the church owns some and surely some good pressure could be applied there. Test the theory.
I’m not sure that aristocrats played a role in creating the commons – I have limited knowledge – I do know King Charles I opposed some enclosures but I also know he supported others – I suspect his support or opposition had more to do with politics than principles. I’d imagine that the commons existed before what we’d think of as an aristocracy and were retained due to custom and because they provided a reasonable means of sustaining the local population upon whom the aristocracy relied for their own livelihood – until they didn’t at which point the commons were fairly quickly dissolved with scant regard for the dispossessed.
Cobbett opposed the abolition of the slave trade because he thought it hypocritical to care about the well being of slaves while caring so little for the rural poor at home.
” I think a neo-feudal society in Britain is unlikely. A neo-fascist one is likelier. ”
Is there any difference seen thru the eyes of the pesantry ?
A few quick responses:
I’ve written quite a bit about commons over the years on this blog. Broadly, I’m supportive of them, especially with good usage protocols directed to appropriate ends, but they’re not a panacea and they’re not some natural state of human society that existed prior to monarchies or other kinds of state hierarchy, except in the most general sense that people are political creatures who create collective arrangements.
The history of commons is vast and complex from place to place, but often enough in European history they involved agreements between lords and/or monarchs and cultivators to increase access to and returns from land nominally within the control of the lord. The Tudors and Stuarts and their courts played a part in this in England, and there were similar processes in mainland Europe. Also, in some places people with common rights were typically the better off cultivators, and lowlier folk lacked common rights. Enclosure was often top down, but sometimes bottom up.
I’ve found the writings of Tine De Moor, Robert Allen, J.M. Neeson, J. Yelling and Elinor Ostrom quite informative regarding all this – Ostrom in particular is often misrepresented in my view, and doesn’t quite claim for the commons what people think she does.
Regarding Marxism, well maybe part of it is an Oedipal thing about rejecting the framework that raised me, and another part of it was piqued by Heron & Heffron’s absurd Marxist criticisms of my book, but more generally I think Marxism’s dislike of peasantries and agrarian populism and its liking for energy and capital intensive ‘progress’, its sense of its own scientific correctness and its mechanistic rationalism all kind of rub me up the wrong way. But more on that soon, I hope.
Regarding neo-fascism and neo-feudalism, it depends a bit on how you define terms. I don’t think there would be many peasants or petty cultivators in a future neo-fascist Britain. And I can’t really see a feudal warrior aristocracy grounded in local landownership taking root here any time soon. But then I couldn’t really see Liz Truss being prime minister…
I was probably misusing the term ‘neo-feudalism’ in my ranting above. I simply see that in an energy constrained future ownership of and the granting of access to land will once again confer significant power – I don’t think such a future is imminent but possibly where we’re heading over a few generations. Ownership of land probably won’t be organised in a strictly feudal way but for those without access to land, or for those for whom access is at the whim of the landowner (as, I beleive was the case on Scottish estates until recently) I think it’ll certainly feel that way.
Don’t know about Scotland but in England there were tenancy agreements from before the reformation .
Yes, certainly agree that access rights over farmland will confer political and economic power in a way that’s less the case in industrial societies. So the challenge is to try to make that power distributed.
NETHERLANDS – Mark Rutte PM, makes it clear where food will come from. 4 global Food Hubs. Controlled by the largest farming corporates on the planet.
Mark Rutte PM,
His policy to bankrupt small farmers and forcibly buy the rest out, is well under way
https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1655881605590728705/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1655881605590728705¤tTweetUser=BernieSpofforth
[…] and long historic time (an idea also developed by thinkers such as the two Davids, and Mikhail Bakhtin). There are no shortcuts, and there will be plenty of obstacles. My optimism lies in thinking that […]
As someone who pored over the works of Mikhail Bakhtin for 8 years in the 1990s, I would have to say that I think you’ve read Rabelais and His World well. You’ve captured the sense of Bakhtin’s (and Rabelais’s) mischief well. Indeed, mischief may well be the key opposing trope to the agelast in “Rabelais and His World”.
Thanks Rob. I’m glad to get a seal of approval from an expert!