The novel opens up language and hence culture. The carnival performs the parodic function on the level of social life. Bakhtin's position consequently sorts well with poststructuralist conceptions of the de-centered self. It is material, historically located, performative. Ideas, expressed in language, are located as outcomes of social and historical processes.
Sign becomes and arena of class struggle.
This would revolutionize our reading of texts with which we 'disagree', for we could see them as a process of interaction with our own views, not as a simple embodiment of feelings or positions we find alienating. Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language . Democratic language is desacralized, leveled, built on a sort of parodic refusal of the higher languages, hence cannot generate the full parodic, in literary or social terms. Parody must be, in a sense, bilingual, speaking with and against that which it is parodying. The language of the prose writer, in Bakhtin's view,is precisely the opposite.