Voloshinov -- an introduction (written circa 1976-7)
David Musselwhite
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Seminar Press 1973
"Discourse in life and discourse in art" in Freudianism, A Marxist Critique Academic Press 1976.
Thus the printed verbal performance engages, as it were, in ideological colloquy of large scale: it responds to something, objects to something, affirms something, anticipates possible responses and objections, seeks support, and so on. (1)
It is perhaps, given the rapidity with which theory at the moment is received, "assimilated" and superseded, rather late in the day to offer an "introduction" to Voloshinov’s work. Already the name trips lightly off the tongue and even before being widely read the texts are the object of qualifications, critiques and diverse appropriations. To whom the texts should be attributed -- to Bakhtin or to Voloshinov (2) -- is itself symptomatic not only of a preoccupation with an "origin" which the texts themselves render redundant but also of the sort of squabbling for possession that any new and fascinating theory occasions: are the texts labelled "Voloshinov" to be reabsorbed within an orthodox Formalism (3) -- thereby aggravating and perpetuating a Cold War "Marxism versus Formalism" (4) -- or quickly cashed in for a rudimentary and taxonomic sociolinguistics (5) -- the dialectical thrust of the work ignored. At yet another level the work has already been subjected to a sophisticated critique where what one review has regarded as Voloshinov’s central category -- the sign (6) -- is considered by another commentator to be a damagingly residual concept (7).
Voloshinov’s central, revolutionary and liberating gesture was to identify and locate ideology and consciousness at the level discursive practice (8), at the level of the utterance (parole):
The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of implementation, but the social event of verb interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances. (p. 94)
By making -- that is theoretically constructing -- the utterance as his object of study Voloshinov could make the following four major strategic breaks:
(1) with an abstract and formal linguistics derived from nineteenth century philological research and textual exegesis based on the study of dead and "alien" languages. That is, a break with a linguistics concerned with the construction of synchronic grammars and the morphological and phonetic description of languages elaborated and finished elsewhere -- another country or culture, or a preceding, accepted authority. The political implications of such a linguistics is dramatically depicted by Voloshinov:
This grandiose organising role of the alien word, which always either entered upon the scene with alien force of arms and organisation or was found on the scene by the young conqueror-nations of an old and once mighty culture and captivated, from its grave, so to speak, the ideological consciousness of the new-comer nation -- this role of the alien word led to its coalescence in the depths of the historical consciousness of nations with the idea of authority, the idea of power, the idea of holiness, the idea of truth, and dictated that notions about the word be preminently oriented toward the alien word. (p. 75)
(2) with an individualistic-subjectivist theory of language as the spontaneous expression of the speaker. Voloshinov exposes the essentially dualistic premise of the subjectivist theory -- the "expressible’ and its subsequent "objectification" -- arguing, instead, that the "inner" moment itself is always already determined by, indeed rendered possible by, the available social modes of expression.
It is not experience that organises expression, but the other way round -- expression organises experience. Expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of expression.(p. 85)(9)
Even more radical is Voloshinov’s dispersal of the authority of the speaker:
In point of fact, word is a two sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant.
As word it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the "one in relation to the "other". (p. 86)
In other words, every utterance is mediated by socially available expressions –– the discursive repertoire ––and by the status and attitudes of those to whom it is addressed:
.(p. 87)The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine –– and determine from within, so to speak –– the structure of an utterance
We will have occasion to return to this seminal formulation later when we look at Voloshinov’s notion of the "scenario".
(3) with subjectivist and functional theories of consciousness. Subjectivist theories err in supposing a consciousness prior to its expression in signs, that is in a semiotic material that is first and foremost social. Consciousness, to the extent that it is other than simply physiological reflex, is inner speech and to the extent that it is an internalisation of the "two sided" word it is rather an internalised dialogue (10). Functionalist theories, on the other hand, err in supposing a divorce, within consciousness itself, between an ideological content and a psychic mechanism which merely receives and processes that content. If, therefore, subjectivist theories give precedence to the psychic over the ideological, functionalist theories tend to give precedence to the ideological over the psyche. What Voloshinov proposes is a dialectical solution to the two based on the essential continuity of the discursive order that extends from the point at which consciousness distinguishes itself from biological and physiological determinism to a social discourse ever threatened with obsolescence i.e. the point at which it loses all contact with its "subjective" moment and becomes a "museum piece" (p. 39):
(4) with all idealist and reductionist –– whether the latter be crudely "reflectionist" or unmediated technicist (p. 18) theories of ideology. For Voloshinov the domain of ideology is the domain of the sign:
In the verbal medium, in each utterance, however trivial it may be, this living dialectical synthesis is constantly taking place again and again between the psyche and ideology, between the inner and the outer. In each speech act, subjective experience perishes in the objective fact of the enunciated word–utterance, and the enunciated word-utterance is subjectified in the act of responsive understanding in order to generate, sooner or later, a counter statement.(pp. 40–1)
"Individual consciousness", then, "is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs" (p. 13). Moreover, even at the preverbal level eg. "the feeling of hunger not outwardly expressed" (p. 87), there is a set and orientation towards another determined "by the whole aggregate of conditions of life and society" (p. 35).
Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, on stands for something lying outside itself. In other words it is a sign. Without signs there is no ideology........ Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.(pp. 9 & 10)
The sign is both material (any object –– a tool, a loaf of bread, a gesture –– can serve as a sign i.e. reflecting and refracting another reality) and inter–individual and social:
Sign can arise only on interindividual territory.... It is essential that ... two individuals be organised socially, that they compose a group (a social unit), only then can the medium of signs take shape between them.(p. 12)
Nevertheless, while any material object might serve as a sign, it is the word (parole) that is "the ideological phenomenon excellence" (p. 13) because of
(a) its semiotic purity:
The entire reality of the word is wholly absorbed in its function of being a sign.(p. 14)
(b) its ideological neutrality:
A word is neutral with respect to any specific ideological function. It can carry out ideological functions of any kind –– scientific, aesthetic, ethical, religious.
(c) its involvement in behavioural communication:
...on one side it links up directly with the processes of production; on the other, it is tangent to the spheres of the various specialised and fully fledged ideologies.p. 14)
(d) its ability to become an inner word i.e. consciousness -- see above
(e) its obligatory presence, as an accompanying phenomenon to any conscious act (p. 15).
(f) its social ubiquity:
The word is implicated in literally each and every act or contact between people –– in collaboration on the job, in ideological exchanges, in the chance contacts of ordinary life, in political relationships and so on.(p. 19)
(g) its sensitivity as an index of social change:
the word is the most sensitive index of social changes (p. 19)
At this stage, in fact, we have arrived at the starting point of Voloshinov’s project: the ideological nature of the sign/word and the semiotic nature of ideology. And it would be well for a moment to briefly note a number of ambiguities, if not contradictions, in Voloshinov’s theory of the sign –– these confusions are closely related to one another and derive in the main, as Raymond Williams has pointed out (12), from Voloshinov’s failure to dispense completely with the concept of the sign. What is basically debilitating about the notion of the sign is that, with its Saussurian heritage that Voloshinov is otherwise at such pains to challenge, it bears with it a radical dualism –– signifier/signified, sign/referent.
The least disturbing consequence of this dualism is the double sense in which Voloshinov speaks of the materiality of the sign: on the one hand he is at pains to stress its status as a material object:
Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow, of reality, but is also itself a material segment of that reality. Every phenomenon functioning as an ideological sign has some kind of material embodiment, whether in sound, physical mass, color, movements of the body, or the like ... A sign is a phenomenon of the external world. (p. 11)
On the other hand Voloshinov also seems to entertain the notion, though rarely with the emphasis which perhaps it warrants, of the material effect of the sign:
Both the sign itself and all the effects it produces (all those actions, reactions, and new signs it elicits in the surrounding social milieu) occur in outer experience. (p. 11)
On the one hand, then, the sign conceived of as an object standing apart –– reflecting and refracting ––; on the other the sign as an integral structuring process.
It is not difficult to see how the second confusion derives from the same source: the distinction between what we might term the "reference" and the "referential" of the sign. More often than not Voloshinov seems to accept the classic formula of the sign as "standing for" that for which it is the sign but, again, there are frequent suggestions of an alternative account of the referential nature of the sign, where its reference and meaning is another sign:
The understanding of a sign is, after all, an act of reference between the sign apprehended and other, already known signs; in other words, understanding a response to signs with signs. (p. 11)
And, finally, it is this ambiguous status of the sign in Voloshinov’s work that accounts for the equivocation with which he addresses the problem of determination. On the one hand he seems to subscribe to the most rigorous determination of the semiotic and ideological by the base:
The reality of ideological phenomena is the objective reality of social signs. The laws of this reality are the laws of semiotic communication and are directly determined by the total aggregate of social and economic laws. Ideological reality is the immediate superstructure over the economic basis.(p. 13 –– my emphasis)
At other times, however, consideration is given to what, in effect, is the relative autonomy of the semiotic level and its capacity for reacting back on the base:
But once it (Voloshinov is here speaking of consciousness) passes through all the stages of social objectification and enters into the power system of science, art, ethics or law, it becomes a real force, capable even of exerting in turn an influence on the economic bases of social life. (p. 90)
To summarise, then: Voloshinov’s ambiguous handling of the residual concept of the sign places him –– if one might put it this way –– half way between a classic semiotics with its attendant binarism and dualism –– and a fully fledged theory of discursive effects such has been elaborated by Foucault (13).
To some extent, indeed, it is possible to see Voloshinov’s work as a sustained attempt to jettison and dispense with the notion of the sign and to see his semiotics as a "trans–semiotics" i.e. as an address to that area of signification which resides "above" the level of the sign itself. For this level Voloshinov offers a number of terms: evaluative accent, intonation, orientation, set. The most succinct illustration of the type of distinction he is trying to establish is in his distinguishing between "meaning" and "theme": Voloshinov draws attention to the fact that the purely lexical or semantic "meaning" of an utterance is in a sense "neutral" –– pure "meaning" in effect "means nothing" (p. 101). What gives an utterance its real significance –– what Voloshinov terms its "theme" –– is the evaluative accent with which any utterance is invested in any real speech act, the modality and orientation of its employment. A word like "strike" for example has a dictionary "meaning" but the meaning is insignificant compared with the difference of meaning (in the thematic sense) it has for a factory worker and a company director. "Meaning", writes Voloshinov, "is the technical apparatus for the implementation of theme" (p. 100). And we can see that at this trans–semiotic level of the theme and the evaluative accent the problems we have noted at the level of the sign are resolved:
(The) disjuncture between referential meaning and evaluation is totally inadmissable. It stems from a failure to note the more profound functions of evaluation in speech. Referential meaning is moulded by evaluation; it is evaluation, after all, which determines that a particular referential meaning may enter the purview of speakers –– both the immediate purview and the broader social purview of the particular social group. (p. 105)
In other words it is the evaluative modality of discourse which allows certain objects of reference to emerge or works for their repression and the motor of this evaluative dynamics Voloshinov locates in the class struggle –– the sign is "an arena of the class struggle" (p. 23):
Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently orientated accounts intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes the arena of the class struggle. (p. 23)
and it follows from this that
...it is the function of society to select and to make grammatical (adapt to the grammatical structure of its language) just those factors in the active and evaluative reception of utterances that are socially vital and constant and, hence, that are grounded in the economic existence of the particular community of speakers.(p. 117)
Without there being by any means enough space to elaborate the matter here it might be noted just how ambitious and suggestive a programme of research Voloshinov is here proposing: the effectivity of the modalities of discourse as a "surface of emergence" of objects looks forward to Foucalt; the notion of the imperative role of establishing a specific "grammaticality" looks forward to current concerns with the hegemonic function of discourse; finally, the notion of the sign as the arena ––better, probably to consider it as the object –– of class struggle looks forward to recent work on the need for any political practice to appropriate to its own purposes available mobilising discourses.
So far we have looked at (a) that with which Voloshinov breaks; (b) the problematic nature of his notion of the sign and (c) the importance of his shift of attention to the trans–semiotic level of evaluative accent and "theme". What remains to be done now is to look (necessarily briefly) at, first, Voloshinov’s description of a simple speech event and, secondly, at his highly suggestive model of a historical periodisation of discursive modalities.
In his brief essay on "Discourse in life and discourse in art" Voloshinov takes as his exemplary speech event the uttering of "Well!" by a speaker sitting in a room with another person. Voloshinov asks what is involved in this minimal speech event and notes the following:
(a) the speaker
(b) the listener
(c) the topic –– Voloshinov curiously also terms this as the"hero" i.e. it can be personalised to the extent it is the object of different attitudes and evaluations
(d) the "extra–verbal context" which will consist of
(i) the common spatial purview of the interlocuters
(ii) their common knowledge
(iii) their common evaluation
For Voloshinov a speech event is –– to bring together the two central notions of his essay –– an "enthymemic scenario": that is, any speech event, spoken or written, has a realised or actualised component and an assumed component –– it is the assumed component that makes the utterance like an enthymeme i.e. a syllogism one of whose premises is not expressed. But this assumed component nevertheless structures the utterance from within: shared attitudes, knowledge, experience etc. will be implicit in the tonality of the utterance. Furthermore, even with a minimal utterance like "well!", the intonation will indicate a whole range of attitudes and relationships: it might be deferential and questioning vis á vis the listener, or it may be coercive and heckling –– the point being that the utterance itself is never the simple property of the speaker but is ever conditioned by its addressee. Similarly the varying attitudes towards the "topic" or "hero" will also structure the utterance from within. In this sense every word of an utterance has at least a double accent or orientation or even a multiplicity of accents and orientations: the "well!" might simultaneously enquire of the listener and condemn the topic –– for example it might be suggesting a walk in a thunder-storm: the listener is invited and the weather condemned. The basic point that Voloshinov is making is that all participants (and they could be increased in number if, for example, one of the participants were to report this conversation to someone else later) in a dialogue structure the dialogue from within. As the title of the essay suggests, Voloshinov is proposing to distinguish between discourse in life and in art but he does not manage this for to say that "a poetic work is a powerful condenser of unarticulated social evaluations"(14) is to say no more than can be said of any utterance –– thus his central paragraph on the structure of a literary work may be taken as applying to all utterances:
The author, hero (i.e. topic D.M.), and listener that we have been talking about all this time are to be understood not as entities outside the artistic event but only as entities of the very perception of an artistic work, entities that are essential constitutive factors of the work. They are the living forces that determine form and style and are distinctly detectable by any competent contemplator. This means that all those definitions that a historian of literature and society might apply to the author and his heroes –– the author’s biography, the precise qualifications of heroes in chronological and sociological terms and so on –– are excluded here: They do not enter directly into the structure of the work but remain outside it. The listener, too, is taken here as the listener whom the author himself takes into account, the one toward whom the work is oriented and who, consequently, intrinsically determines the work’s structure. Therefore we do not all mean the actual people who in fact made up the reading public of the author in question. (15)
What is being proposed, then, is an immanent sociology of discourse which would eschew a positivist compilation of sources and readership in favour of the multi-accented scenario of the text. Lack of space prevents extensive illustration here but Virginia Woolf’s The Waves –– with its play of voices, its restless pursuit of a reader, above all its dominant obsession with, precisely, a "hero" –– offers almost too neat an opportunity to "test" Voloshinov’s theory and discover just how much more information it generates than, say, even a meticulous account of the Bloomsbury milieu.
The example of the minimal speech act given in the essay on "Discourse in life and discourse in art" is little more than an illustration of how one might approach an analysis of what Voloshinov terms "behavioural genres" –– such, for example, as the "genre" of domestic discourse, of on the job exchanges, board meetings etc. What Voloshinov proposes, in fact, is that a typology of such "behavioural genres" be compiled. In the last section of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, however, Voloshinov addresses himself to an even more ambitious project: a sketch of the shifting historical modalities of "reported speech". He defines this last as follows
Reported speech is speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time also speech about speech, utterance about utterance.(p. 115)
Though Voloshinov seems to be implying that a typology of the modes of reported speech is only one of many that might be constructed, to the extent that all speech acts involve the procedures of reported speech –– i.e. implicit response and comment on what has gone before and implicit anticipation and invitation of a further response ––then such a typology is perhaps peculiarly central.
The various modalities of the relationship between the reporting speech and the reported speech will depend on a number of factors eg:
on whether the reported speech is treated with absolute reverence and incorporated with scrupulous respect for its integrity or whether the reporting speech treats the reported element with scant respect, subjecting it to ironic twists and parodic perversions.
or, again, whether reporting and reported speeches might be accorded equal rights i.e. balanced against each other, with neither assuming a dominant role
or, even, whether the reported speech might succeed in taking over or imposing its orientation or set on the reporting speech
Clearly with such variables there are a great number of permutations that might be made and while, of course, all are possible at any one moment it is interesting to note how Voloshinov envisages the varying dominance of one or other modality in particular historical epochs:
1. Authoritarian dogmatism, characterised by the linear, impersonal, monumental style of reported speech transmission in the Middle Ages (i.e. where the reported speech would have been quoted in full, alongside, the reporting speech D.M.);
2. Rationalistic dogmatism, with its even more pronounced linear style in the 17th. and 18th centuries (i.e. the well balanced, laid out discourse of rational argument where the other’s point of view would be clearly presented before the rejoinder is framed D.M.);
3. Realistic and critical individualism, with its pictorial style and its tendency to permeate reported speech with authorial retort and commentary (end of the 18th. century and early 19th. century) (i.e. where the reported elements is worked upon for parodic or evaluative purposes by the reporting element D.M.); and finally
4 Relativistic individualism, with its decomposition of the authorial context (the present period). (p. 123)
This scheme, as it stands, is, of course relatively unsophisticated, but it is worth noting to what extent is being anticipated here the sort of "archival" history of discourses that has been more recently undertaken by Foucault. Moreover, Voloshinov himself suggests many ways in which this simple scheme might be made more flexible –– eg. two other variables that might be fed into the model are those of "referent–analysis" and "texture–analysis" i.e. whether attention is paid either to the "what" or the "how" of the reported element.
[Cf. Bakhtin's diagram of "double-voiced" speech]
A final, brief, point: as he works towards the end of his study, producing and demonstrating ever more complex effects in language, Voloshinov, in a stunningly modest, even casual, moment announces the "silencing" of prose:
In most cases, however, and especially in that area where quasi–direct discourse has become a massively used device –– the area of modern prose fiction ––transmission by voice of evaluative interference would be impossible. Furthermore, the very kind of development quasi–direct discourse has undergone is bound up with the transposition of the larger prose genres into a silent register. i.e. for silent reading. Only this "silencing" of prose could have made possible the multileveledness and voice–defying complexity of intonational structures that are so characteristic for modern literature. (p. 156)
Here, as so often in Voloshinov, there is the first glimmer of a rich possibility: it would be too much to claim that "écriture" is being announced, but would it not be a generous way to gloss that "voice–defying complexity"?
(written c. 1976-7 D.M.)
Notes:
1. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Seminar Press 1973 p. 95. All references will be to this edition.
2. See, for example, the Preface and Introduction to the French edition of Marxism and the Philosophy of Langauge, Editions de Minuit 1977.
3. See the study by I.R. Titunik "Formal and Sociological Methods" included as an appendix to Marxism and the Philosophy of Language esp.p. 200
4. V. Erlich’s classic chapter heading in Russian Formalism, Mouton, 1969.
5. See, for example, Charles Woolfson’s "The semiotics of working class speech" in WPCS 9, Spring 1976 and the further comment on it by Andrew Tolson in the same volume.
6. See the Review of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language in Ideology and Consciousness No. 1. May 1977 pp. 93–6.
7. See R. Williams Marxism and Literature O.U.P. 1977 pp. 35 ff.
8. This is only one of the many times in what follows I have felt the need to resort to Foucaultian terminology. It seems to me that much of The Archeology of Knowledge goes over ground covered by Voloshinov.
9. All italics unless otherwise specified are Voloshinov’s.
10. See the work of L.S. Vygotsky Thought and Language M.I.T. 1962.
11. J. Kristeva La Révolution du Langage Poétique Du Seuil 1974.
12. op. cit. pp. 36 ff.
13. see note 8 above.
14. "Discourse in life and discourse in art" in Freudianism: a Marxist Critique, Academic Press 1976 p. 107.
15. ibid. pp. 109–110.