Centripetal – centripetus, from Latin centrum (see center) + –petus ‘seeking’ (from petere ‘seek’).
Centrifugal – centrifugus, from Latin centrum (see center) + –fugus ‘fleeing’ (from fugere ‘flee’).
Center – from Latin centrum, , from Greek kentron ‘sharp point, stationary point of a pair of compasses,’ related to kentein ‘to prick.’
Bakhtin uses two terms, centripetal and centrifugal forces, to elucidate his theory of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is the outcome when these two forces collide. In all languages, in all cultures there is a centralizing or centripetal force. It has a homogenizing and hierarchicizing influence. The ruling class and the high literary genres make use of this force. Its characteristics are high seriousness, totalization, domination, and authority. There always exists an undercurrent of a decentralizing or centrifugal force along with the other force. This decentralizing or centrifugal force is apparently subversive, anticanonical, carnivalesque, represented by the clowning, mimicry, decrowning, the ribaldries of the marketplace, parody, mimetic degradation and desecration, grotesque representation of the sublime, etc. . . .
. . . The Folk Grotesque and liberated, universal laughter are/ were indispensable tools for the process of carnivalization of the official rigidity. And it took place during the Renaissance. “True ambivalent and universal laughter” writes Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World:
“does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughter in the historical development of culture and literature” (123).
Borrowed from Lopa at:
http://an-author.blogspot.com/2006/04/literary-theories-of-mikhail-bakhtin.html
Howard, thanks for this thoughtful comment. I’m going to have to read Bakhtin. I actually wrote this in response to Heidegger’s discussion on authentic and inauthentic Being-in-the-world, so we’re thinking along the same lines.