WITH  "ABSTRACT OBJECTIVISM:" LEADING TO VOLOSHINOV'S OWN VIEW

VOLOSHINOV begins with question:

-           What is, or should be, is the subject matter of linguistics?

-           Where are we to find it?

-           What is its concrete material existence like?

What is a word?

-           We must get a 'feel' of it somehow

-           Quandary: nothing to see... nothing for the hands

-           There is a temptation to give purely 'phonetic' account

-           But:

Not a purely 'acoustic' phenomenon

Adding physiological processes: no help

-           Join these to experience (inner signs) of the speaker and the listener, and we have two separate, psychophysical processes, in two separate beings, and one physical sound complex.

-           Language, as speech communication, still eludes us: we have merely parts of a disjoined collection.

What needs to be added to the complex?

-           Put all the elements of the complex into a larger, more comprehensive complex: organized, social intercourse/interaction.

i) Speaker and listener must both belong to the same speech community;

ii) both encompassed by the 'same' unity: the unity of the immediate social situation ("joint action") B Athe interactive moment.@

"So, we may say that the unity of the social milieu and the unity of the immediate social event of communication are the conditions absolutely essential for bringing our physico-psycho-physiological complex in relation to language, with speech, so that it can become a language-speech fact" (mpl, p.47).

-           But these demands have not made the problem any easier: more complicated in fact:

i) What is the "organized social milieu," the 'hurly-burly' of everyday life?

ii) and what is "the immediate communication situation"?

Specifying these is not easy; they are both very complicated.

-           VOLOSHINOV now approaches the problem by outlining and comparing past efforts to account for our linguistic abilities: two major trends:

1: Individualistic subjectivism:

-           "The source of language is the individual psyche" (48).

-           Linguist is meant "only to prepare the ground for the true explanation of the linguistic phenomenon in terms of the individual creative act (or to serve the practical aims of language teaching)" (48).

-           The "organizing center" of the utterance is in the deep interior of the individual

Four basic principles:

1. Language is activity, an unceasing process of creation (energia) realized in individual acts;

2. The laws of language creativity are the laws of individual psychology;

3. Creativity of language is meaningful creativity, analogous to creative art;

4. Language as a ready-made product (ergon), as a stable system (lexicon, grammar, phonetics), is, so to speak, the inert crust, the hardened lava of language creativity, of which linguistics makes an abstract construct in the interests of practical teaching language as a ready-made instrument.

2: Abstract objectivism:

-           "The organizing center of all linguistic phenomena, that which makes them the specific object of a special science of language, shifts in the case of the second trend [abstract objectivism] to an entirely different factor - the linguistic system as a system of the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical forms of language.

If, for the first trend, language is an ever-flowing stream of speech acts in which nothing remains fixed and identical to itself, then, for the second trend, language is the stationary rainbow arched over that stream" (52).

Features in the knowing of the nature of alien words in abstract objectivism:   

-           1. Stable, immutable system of normatively identical linguistic forms which the individual finds ready-made and which is incontestable for that consciousness.

-           2. The laws of language are the specifically linguistic laws of connection between linguistic signs within a given closed linguistic system. These laws are objective with respect to any subjective consciousness.

-           3. Specifically linguistic connections have nothing in common with ideological values (artistic, cognitive, or other). Language phenomena are not grounded in ideological motives. No connection of any kind obtains between the word and its meaning.

-           4. Individual acts of speaking are, from the point of view of language, merely fortuitious refractions and variations or plain and simple distortions of normatively identical forms; precisely these acts of individual discourse explain the historical changeability of linguistic forms, a changeability that in itself, from the standpoint of the language system, is irrational and senseless. There is no connection, no sharing of motives, between the system of language and its history. They are alien to one another.

*"True creators - the initiators of new ideological trends - are never formalistic systematizers. Systematization comes upon the scene during an age which feels itself in command of a ready-made and handed down body of authoritative thought" (78).

VOLOSHINOV'S OWN POINT OF VIEW (gained by putting IS and AO in dialogue with each other):

"The organizing center of any utterance, of any experience, is not within but outside - in the social milieu surrounding the individual being" (p.93).

1.         Language as a stable system of normatively self-identical forms is merely a scientific abstraction, productive only in connection with certain particular practical and theoretical goals. This abstraction is not adequate to the concrete reality of [living] language.

2.         Language is a continuous generative or formative process implemented in the social-verbal interaction of speakers.

3.         The laws of the generative process of language are not at all the laws of individual psychology, but neither can they be divorced from the activity of speakers. The laws of language are sociciological [and historical] laws.

4.         Linguistic creativity does not coincide with artistic creativity nor with any other type of specialized ideological creativity. But, at the same time, linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it. The generative process of language, as is true of any historical generative process, can be perceived as blind mechanical necessity, but it can also become 'free necessity' once it has reached the position of a conscious and desired necessity.

5.         The structure of the utterance is a purely sociological structure. The utterance, as such, obtains between speakers. The individual act (in the strict sense of the word 'individual') is a 'contradicto in adjecto'.

V.N. Voloshinov (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. (Trans. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,