Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

Why did Marxism need a philosophy of language?

Marxism explains society as an economic base with a superstructure above it. The superstructure, law, morality, religion, science and art, in a word ideology, changes as the base changes. But how the base "passes over" into ideology, and where and in what form ideology actually exists, remained vague. Voloshinov set out to fill this gap with language. The book opens: "The problems of the philosophy of language have now acquired exceptional urgency and importance for Marxism", because the foundations of the Marxist study of ideological creation, from the study of science and literature to religion and morality, are bound up with them.

Проблемы философии языка приобретают для марксизма в настоящее время исключительную актуальность и важность

Voloshinov's starting point is to treat ideology as signs. A physical body, a tool of production or a consumer good means nothing in itself, yet any thing can become a sign. The hammer and sickle on the Soviet coat of arms are no longer tools but carry a purely ideological meaning; bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament of communion. Voloshinov sums up: "Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, stands for something lying outside it, that is, it is a sign." And: "The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs."

Все идеологическое обладает значением : оно представляет, замещает нечто вне его находящееся, т.е. является знаком.

Where is consciousness?

The edge of the argument lies in its view of consciousness. Idealist philosophy and psychologistic cultural studies put ideology inside consciousness: the sign is a mere shell and the real thing is understanding in the head. Voloshinov replied that understanding itself takes place only in the material of signs, in inner speech. To understand a sign is to relate it to other signs already known, and this chain from sign to sign never breaks off into an immaterial inner being. Since signs arise only in interaction between individuals, "consciousness becomes consciousness only once it is filled with ideological, that is, sign content, and therefore only in the process of social interaction".

Сознание становится сознанием, только наполняясь идеологическим, resp. знаковым содержанием, следовательно, только в процессе социального взаимодействия.

Of all signs the word is special: "the word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence". It has no function other than being a sign, and so is the purest and finest medium of social intercourse. Voloshinov's example is hunger. Even a vague awareness of hunger, never spoken aloud, cannot do without inner speech and intonation; one can be aware of one's hunger pleadingly, irritably or indignantly, and that intonation depends on one's social situation. Consciousness does not sit alone in the head; it is social from the start.

How did it criticise Saussure and Humboldt?

The second part of the book divides the philosophy of language of its time into two currents. One is "individualistic subjectivism", running from Wilhelm von Humboldt to the German school of Karl Vossler, which treats language as an individual's creative act of expression. The other is "abstract objectivism", whose clearest expression is the Geneva school of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Bally. Saussure proposed to separate language (langue) from individual speech (parole) and study it as a synchronic system of fixed norms.

Voloshinov argued that both currents start from the monologue of a single speaker. His conclusion: the true reality of language is neither an abstract system of forms, nor an isolated monologue, nor the speaker's physiological act, but "the social event of verbal interaction, carried out in an utterance or utterances". "All understanding is dialogic": the listener understands by finding a counter-word to the speaker's word. Every utterance is above all "an evaluative orientation", so the same word means quite different things in different intonations. He illustrated this with an anecdote from Dostoevsky's A Writer's Diary, in which six drunken workmen conduct a whole conversation with a single unprintable word, varying only its intonation.

Всякое понимание диалогично.

What does "the sign becomes an arena of class struggle" mean?

The most quoted passage comes in chapter 2 of part one, on base and superstructure. Being reflected in a sign is not simply reflected but refracted. What refracts it? The intersection of differently oriented social interests within one sign community, that is, class struggle. Class does not coincide with the sign community: different classes use one and the same language, so differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign, and "the sign becomes an arena of class struggle".

Знак становится ареною классовой борьбы.

Voloshinov held that this "social multi-accentuality" is what keeps the sign alive, mobile and capable of development; a sign withdrawn from the struggle withers into allegory and becomes an object for philologists. The same quality makes the sign a medium that refracts and distorts being. "The ruling class strives to give the ideological sign a supra-class, eternal character, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle of social evaluations taking place in it, to make it uni-accentual." Living abuse can become praise, and a living truth must sound to many others like the greatest lie. This inner dialectic of the sign is fully revealed only in times of social crisis and revolutionary change. The idea is often set beside that of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who saw struggles over language as questions of hegemony.

The third part of the book analyses the forms of reported speech in French, German and Russian literature, direct and indirect speech and the free indirect discourse in which author's and character's voices mix, to show that social and temporal relations between utterances are inscribed in the structure of language itself.

Who wrote it? The Bakhtin authorship dispute

Valentin Voloshinov (1895–1936) was a close friend of the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin from before the revolution, and in Nevel, Vitebsk and Leningrad belonged to the "Bakhtin Circle", which included the literary scholar Pavel Medvedev. From the early 1970s it was claimed that Freudianism (1927) and this book, published under Voloshinov's name, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, under Medvedev's, were really Bakhtin's; Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin first set this out fully in English. Bakhtin was arrested in December 1928 and exiled to Kustanai in Kazakhstan, so the explanation ran that, unable to publish, he borrowed his friends' names.

These claims originated in the early 1970s and received their earliest full articulation in English in Clark and Holquist's 1984 biography of Bakhtin.

The objections are serious. Voloshinov studied linguistics at Leningrad University and worked as a linguist at a research institute, and studies have produced evidence of his authorship. Some scholars point out that attributing the books to Bakhtin let Western criticism take up their dialogism while setting aside the Marxist, historical-materialist commitments Voloshinov had made explicit. Many researchers now hold that ideas circulated intensely within the Bakhtin Circle, that both Bakhtin and Voloshinov took part in the works published under Voloshinov's name, and that Voloshinov gave them their final written form. The debate continues in Russia and the West.

What became of the book?

In the early 1930s the book was harshly criticised by the Marrists, followers of Nikolai Marr's linguistics, and Voloshinov published nothing more. He died of tuberculosis in 1936 in a sanatorium at Detskoye Selo near Leningrad. Sources disagree on whether he was arrested: one states he was imprisoned in the 1930s, another that he was not repressed and his books were not removed from libraries. Either way, the book was long forgotten in the Soviet Union.

Rediscovery came from the West. In the 1970s the linguist Roman Jakobson drew attention to it, and an English translation appeared in 1973. Jakobson took up its analysis of reported speech in "Shifters and Verbal Categories", and the book influenced the functional linguistics of the Prague School, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies and discourse analysis. In treating ideology not as false consciousness in the head but as the social practice of material signs, it is credited with prefiguring many concerns of poststructuralism. In Russia it was republished in the 1990s, several times under Bakhtin's name.

The book was an early systematic challenge to the view that Marxism had no interest in language, and its insistence that language be seen within class relations and social interaction remains a starting point for analysts of media and political language. Since Lev Vygotsky was exploring inner speech and the social origin of consciousness at the same time, the book also belongs to a broader current in early Soviet Marxism that sought a social account of consciousness and language.