aesthetic practices that often masquerade as objective Universals. If in the process ofdecentering the 'high' stylistics of established linguistic powpr-structures Bakhtin risks the contradiction of privileging alternate styles and genres [such as the novel] this involves, to my mind, no loss either of the forthrightness or the historical/critical value of his enterprise. Bakhtin's whole view of languages/ forms is coloured without ambiguity by his perception of the ubiquitous meta-cultural fact of class-struggle. In a sense, therefore, the pre-given of Bakhtin's explorations is that aesthetic and formal contentions in literary/cultural debate are always the expressions of actual social contentions within specific historical contexts. Further, this involves Bakhtin's recognition that 'literature' as a specialized cultural practice makes appropriations of reality in methodologically self-conscious and interested ways. This recognition allows him to exceed the 'reflection' theory of the aesthetic act—one most commonly associated with Lukacs. Which is not to limit Lukacsian theorization merely to a naturalist realism, since we do know that in positing a divide within a capitalist/ mass society between the "hero" [with a 'soul' either larger or smaller than the 'world'] and the 'world', and in locating the enactment of that divide within the novel, Lukacs offers a historical [although romantic-historical] dynamics for the genre [within still a bourgeios aesthetics]. What does remain true, though, is that the radicalizing potential of the novelistic process—indeed, the force of the impulsion behind that process—tends to escape Lukacs. Thus, instead of viewing the novel as a necessary dislocation of a centralized/epical world-order [and, therefore, a force for the future], Lukacs' contemplation of the novel is tinged with tHe sadness of nostalgia. For Lukacs, then, the main virtue of the novel lies in mirroring revealing a historical malaise characterized by isolation and emptiness rather than by a productive jostling between the stabilizers of the past and the claimants of a world-in-the-making. It is perhaps such a shift in perspective that has tended to generate fresh theorization within Marxian aesthetics [Althusser, Macherey, Eagletonp which speaks to/of the dialectics of refracted and refracting ideologies [as between author/reader, text/context, protagonist/ milieu] within literary production. And, it would seem, that Bakhtin must have [in the actual writing] anticipated such theorization. In his analysis of genres [Epic. Tragedy, Lyric, Novel] Bakhtin is able to push those theoretical dynamics to revolutionary demonstrations as he shows how classical genres rest in suppressions of contentious, multi-languaged [heteroglot] ideologies while the novel thrives by admitting a plethora of competing, centrifugal voices—voices that denote concrete historical subjects. This short paper is proposed only as an outline of the connections of Bakhtin's full argument, of what seem the necessary coordinates of his cultural enquiry from the 1920s onwards. Even, preeminently as the spokesman for heterogeneity, there is an essential conceptual unity in Bakhtin's output: The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929, rpt, 1963), Rabelais and His World (1940, pub., 1965), and the four essays brought together in The Dialogic Imagination (1975, trans., 1981) all relate, as cultural arguments, in an inseparable way to the view that Volosinov/Bakhtin (one and the same?) take of language and 66 Number 9