"The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure
and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during
carnival: what is suspended first of all is herarchical structure and all
the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with
it--that is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or
any other form of inequality among people (including age). All distance
between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into
effect: free and familiar contact among people...Carnival is the place
for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted
form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed
to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical relationships of noncarnival
life." (pp.122-123)
What carnival seems to allow is a "safe" place for reworking human
relationships apart from the conditions that divide us in everday life.
Isn't that what one would hope would happen in classrooms (at least
occasionally) so that teachers and students could geniunely connect and
learn from each other (in the most profound sense).
So while Bakhtin acknowledges the structural barriers to genuine
communication, he also recognizes that at times those barriers get
dropped. There are truly amazing scenes in Dostoevsky's work where this
does in fact happen and many scenes where it doesn't.
Ellice Forman
Department of Psychology in Education
University of Pittsburgh