Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

My poem dramatises and extrapolates upon key and passing ideas in the writings of the Soviet philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly his 1929 text Marxism and the Philosophy of Language . Part 1 explores Bakhtin's argument that experience only exists within signs, following his example of the discursive nature of experiences of extreme hunger. The poem suggests a likely implication of those necessarily guarded arguments: that the 1917 revolution was no more foundational than any other verbal experience. Parts 2 & 3 similarly extrapolate from Bakhtin's writings, particularly those that relate to his extraordinary assertion in Ch.1 of Marxism as to the dramatic nature of 'inner speech' (i.e. the thesis that…