Politics of Carnivals

Carnival is a kind of a transcendence of the world where the fixed language is replaced and the contingency of being can be perceived as the ecstatic potential.

Mikhail Bakhtin on Carnivals

Discourse theory suggests that the way we speak and write is shaped by the structures of power in our society and that our society is defined by struggles and the conflicts our discourses create. Mikhail Bakhtin was one of the best theorists of discourse during the twentieth century. He appears to be a system builder in which he refuses to view issues in isolation.

The term ‘carnival’ has been a controversial issue playing an important role during the Middle Ages. During the carnivals, people feast, dance and dress the way they want, without thinking about the class differences or the hierarchies. The atmosphere of equality occurs, where the poor can make fun of the rich. Carnivals are the only times where members of the society interact as equals. Bakhtin identified the carnivals as a grotesque realism full of parody.

Carnival is an event where all the rules and restrictions that determine the everyday life are suspended. Bakhtin offers four different categories in which he explores the carnivalistic sense of the world and in which he explores the notions of freedom; Free and familiar interaction of the people, eccentric behavior, which is unacceptable outside the carnivals and peoples’ hidden feelings are revealed, carnivalistic misalliances in which the separated is connected. Sacrilegious, for which the Bakhtin suggests as carnivals being a parody of the sacred. The act that gives the inception of a reversed world is the carnival king, dressed opposite of a real king, with different colors. This part of the carnivals is the core of the carnivalesque world.

Bakhtin further suggests that the medieval people lived a double life, in which they have this hierarchic order with dogmatism and on another level, a life of carnivalesque filled with laughter and humiliations. But he also shares the fact of them being separated by harsh borders. Carnival is a kind of a transcendence of the world where the fixed language is replaced and the contingency of being can be perceived as the ecstatic potential. The idea of grotesque, thus transgresses the boundaries of life and the field of art, which can be translated as bodily functions being brought into the field of art. It also suggests transgression of expectations. It has a role to bring elevated phenomena down to earth to the sensuous level.