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Bakhtin is not unsympathetic to an agenda that analyzes form. But he does criticize the formalists for their one-sided attentions to form. The formalists made a distinction between literary forms such as poetry, characterized by a catalogue of “devices,” and practical, communicative language without such formalisms. Formalist analysis focuses on the question of “literariness” – how a literary work is different from the vernacular, the everyday. But what about the “exceptionally complicated” patterning of practical language itself? Bakhtin asks.¹⁷ Why should form be just a question for literary and other high arts?

The formalists, Bakhtin goes on to say, neglect “the material presence of the work.” Material media and literary or artistic form work together in a process of mutual generation. “[O]nly by being realized in words, actions, clothing, and organizations of people and things – in a word, in some definite semiotic material.”¹⁸

Bakhtin also criticizes the formalists for their failure to attend to social content. Of formal devices: “Whatever plot or motif we choose, we always reveal the purely ideological values which shape its structure.” Analyzing an image, for instance, the question is not just of its form, but its capacity “to generalize, typify, symbolically widen its significance” with its “ideological meaning” – or what we would term its interest. “Every concrete utterance is a social act. At the same time that it is an individual material complex, a phonetic, articulatory, visual act, the utterance is also part of a social reality.” If we “tear the utterance out of social intercourse and … we lose the organic unity of all its elements. … Social evaluation always establishes an organic tie between the presence of the utterance and the generality of its meaning.”¹⁹

Bakhtin’s conclusion: in formalism, “[a]rt is reduced to empty combinations of forms.”²⁰ So, we must do analysis of form, but never separated from its materialization. Nor can form be separated from its social content.

Jakobson went on to be a founder of structuralist linguistics. When he moved from literary analysis to analysis of speech, his focus was on phonemic form rather than its social content or meaning. We might mount critiques of this and other structuralisms along the same lines as Bakhtin’s, including Saussure’s favoring of system over socio-historical expression,^§MS3d and Chomsky’s favoring a universal grammar over the social pragmatics of language.^§MS3.1.2f All of these systems require both sides of a form/content distinction, or what Halliday calls system/realization.²¹ The problem for formalisms and structuralisms, we would say in sympathy with Bakhtin, is to prioritize one side over the other.

In this grammar, our version of Bakhtin’s literary form/social content distinction is located in the contrast meaning-form/meaning-function. Form and function are integral to each other. Neither is prior.

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¹⁶ P.N. Medvedev, 1928 [1985], The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 87.

¹⁷ Ibid., pp. 110, 93.

¹⁸ Ibid., pp. 95, 7.

¹⁹ Ibid., pp. 17, 119, 118, 120, 121, 126.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 90.

²¹ David G. Butt, 2008, “The Robustness of Realizational Systems,” pp. 59–83 in Meaning in Context: Strategies for Implementing Intelligent Applications of Language Studies, edited by J.A. Webster, London: Continuum.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 7–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

M.M. Bakhtin’s “Formal Method of Literary Scholarship” §AS0.1a