In Search of Epistems, or the Scientific Reception of Some of M.M. Bakhtin’s Ideas

Abstract

The article examines the conceptual positions of M.M. Bakhtin in the context of further studies of laughter culture and comedy, including Soviet film comedy. Revising the tradition of universal application of Bakhtin’s ideas in the analysis of many artistic phenomena that has developed in science, the author emphasizes their ambiguity and significance only as one of the research approaches to the complex study of culture. And at the same time, the concept of ambivalence, which structured the theory of carnivality and Bakhtin’s philosophy, acquires special relevance in the conditions of the modern epistemological crisis and the paradigm of multivariance, uncertainty and nonlinearity of the world and man. It is M.M. Bakhtin’s ambiguous and incomplete philosophy that seems to be the mainstay in the development of a new methodology of cognition (also due to its “open form”).

Keywords

• m.m. bakhtin
• studies on laughter culture
• film comedy
• archetypes
• polymodality
• ambivalence
• epistems