Carnevalesque Postmodern Provocations from Boris Groy’s Argument

Abstract

MarekTesar is a senior lecturer in childhood studies and early childhood education at the University of Auckland. He is Editor-in-Chief of Policy Futures in Education published by SAGE, and is engaged in different editorial capacities with a number of other journals and book series. His focus is on childhood, philosophy of education, policy and methodology.Boris Groys' essay "Between Stalin and Dionysus: Bakhtin's Theory of the Carnival" is an important contribution to the interpretation of Bakhtin's scholarship and to the growing number of positionings of Bakhtin's work in relation to the power, ideology and constitution of the human subject. Groys' genealogical, and largely provocative thinking, processes what we could mean, and understand, as postmodern, in relation to the human subject. Groys' thinking about the discipline provides grounding for other thoughts, for other types of thinking. My contribution to ponder through these questions is by introducing Havel into the mix, to both understand and elevate what may be seen as the complex characteristic of creative thinking within the whirlpool of ideology, in order to contribute to the colourful polyphony of discourses.For the Czech thinker Havel, substantial changes in the power relations within any ideologically driven society, but particularly society that is determined and subjugated by the communist regime, is to justify the shift from the traditional terminology associated with communism in the Eastern Bloc, such as totalitarianism or a dictatorship. For Havel (1985), this has become a question of a concern, of a discourse. While these traditional terms -perceiving communism as a dictatorship, as a total sum of totalitarian practices, is what and why they detract from the meaning of power relations, as they focus only on a description of the traditional form of a dictatorship. These dictatorship-like models of governance are usually connected with the cult of leaders, local lives, cultures and experiences, and are not dependent on any particular ideology, and are well depicted in the Stalinist era. On the other hand, Havel's term post-totalitarianism is bound by an extremely multifaceted "network of manipulatory instruments" (p. 24) that is supported by a "precise, logical, structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology" (p. 25), that responds to the scientific model of post-totalitarian society that is more cunningly structured. As Havel explains, the post-totalitarian system "… offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world