Notes on BAKHTIN’S FOCUS ON “THE UTTERANCE” AS HIS UNIT OF INQUIRY:
Professor John Shotter
Department of Communication, UNH
Instead of “patterns or systems of already spoken words,” Bakhtin’s approach is an attempt to study “words in their speaking.” As far as he is concerned, all understanding takes place through a living response to an other person. It is not language-as-a-system that makes the utterance possible, but responsive utterances that makes language-as-a-system possible.
“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 its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances. Thus, verbal interaction is the basic reality of language” (Voloshinov, 1973, p.94).
“The idea of the conventionality, the arbitrariness of language, is a typical one for rationalism as a whole, and no less typical is the comparison of language to the system of mathematical signs. What interests the mathematically minded rationalist is not the relationship of the sign to the actual reality it reflects not to the individual who is its originator, but the relationship of sign to sign within a closed system already accepted and authorized. In other words, they are interested only in the inner logic of the system of signs itself, taken, as in algebra, completely independently of the ideological meanings that give the signs their content” (Voloshinov, 1973, pp.57-58).
There are at least these five features of Bakhtin’s approach: 1) The role of utterance; 2) voice and voices; 3) dialogicality and multivoicedness; 4) social languages; and 5) speech genres.
1) An utterance is a response to previous utterances:
The claim by such linguists as Saussure (followed by Chomsky, of course) that the single sentence, with all its individuality and creativity, can be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language, is not, Bakhtin (1986, p.81) feels, true of utterances. Actual utterances must take into account the (already linguistically shaped) context into which they are directed. Thus for him:
“Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere. The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects. Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another... Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account... Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.91).
In other words, an utterance has at least these four basic properties: 1) boundaries; 2) responsivity or dialogicality; 3) finalization; and 4) generic form (addressivity).
What is meant by the first two properties 1) and 2) is obvious from the quote above: an utterance is a real unit of dialogue in the sense that it comes to an end when an other speaker begins to respond to it. Number three 3) “finalization” is made clear in the following quote:
“This change [of speaking subjects] can only take place because the speaker has said (or written) everything he wishes to say at a particular moment or under particular circumstances. When hearing or reading, we clearly sense the end of the utterance, as if we hear the speaker’s concluding dixi. This finalization is specific and is determined by specific criteria” (1986, p.76).
Although a speaker may pause within an utterance, there is a recognizable pause at the end of it that elicits (expects) a response. It is that kind of pause that signals the desire for a response from the other. Further, it is what might be called a ‘hermeneutic pause’, in that it enables an interpretative understanding to occur between the communicants.
The final property - generic form, which v. imp. (and to do with ‘who’ is being addressed) - is described further in the next section. The choice of speech genre “is determined by the specific nature of the given sphere of speech communication, semantic (thematic) considerations, the concrete situation of the speech communication, the personal composition of its participants, and so on” (1986, p.78).
2) Social languages and ‘speech genres’:
For Bakhtin, the dialogical nature of language is manifested in a number of different spheres: “first, amid others’ utterances inside a single language (the primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other “social languages” within a single national language and finally amid different national languages within the same culture, that is, the same socio-ideological conceptual horizon” (1981, p.275).
“Language - like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives - is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms [constructed by linguists], taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language” (1981, p.288). “...language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life...” (1981, p.293).
1) Examples of different “social languages:”
“...an illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language (the official-literate language, ‘paper’ language). All these are different languages, even from the point of view of abstract socio-dialectical markers. But these languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic consciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to another without thinking, automatically: each was indisputably in its own place, and the place of each was indisputable. He was not yet able to regard one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the eyes of another language (that is, the language of everyday life and the everyday world with the language of prayer or song, or vice versa)” (1981, pp.295-6).
2) Speech genres: In contrast to “social languages”, in which the distinguishing feature is the social stratum of the speakers, “speech genres” are characterized in terms of typical situations of speech communication, e.g., “...genres of greetings, farewells, congratulations, all kinds of wishes, information about health, business, and so forth... These genres have high, strictly official, respectful forms as well as familiar ones” (1986, p.79)... “genres of salon conversations about everyday, social, aesthetic, and other subjects, genres of table conversations among friends, intimate conversations within the family, and so on” (p.80).
[[The two phenomena and the two sets of criteria may be viewed as analytically distinct, but in reality they are often thoroughly intertwined: speakers from certain social strata (for example, the military) are the ones who invoke the speech genre of military commands.]]
“Each speech genre in each area of speech communication has its own typical conception of the addressee, and this defines it as a genre” (1986, p.95).
Thus, by the different spheres in which we communicate, Bakhtin means nothing more than, say, our family, our work, in banks and post offices, in official documents, our intimate relations, and so on. All the spheres which, even before we come on the scene, are maintained in existence by an ongoing communicative process of a particular kind - that is what gives them their particular character as the spheres they are.
“A speech genre is not a form of language, but a typical form of utterance; as such the genre also includes a certain typical kind of expression that inheres in it. In the genre the word acquires a particular typical expression. Genres correspond to typical situations of speech communication, typical themes, and, consequently, also to particular contacts between the meanings of words and actual concrete reality under certain typical circumstances. Hence also the possibility of typical expressions that seem to adhere to words. Thus typical expression (and the typical intonation that corresponds to it) does not have the compulsoriness that language forms [the heteroglossia of “social languages” in the national language] have, the generic normative quality is freer” (1986, p.87).
Thus, if we are to participate in these spheres of talk, we must use the appropriate speech genre, the appropriate ways of talking, else those who are already members will not treat us as competent participants, as people able to maintain such institutions by reproducing them in our actions. In talking in a particular genre, one must imagine those to whom one is addressing one’s speech. “Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the utterance depend upon those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressees, and the force of their effect on the utterance” (p.95).
What Bakhtin calls a “genre”, when “understood as a way of seeing, is,” as Morson and Emerson (1990, p.282) say, “best described neither as a ‘form’ (in the usual sense) nor as an ideology (which could be phrased as a set of tenets) but as a ‘form-shaping ideology’ - a special kind of creative activity embodying a specific sense of experience.”
3) Voices: Responsivity = answerability + addressivity
An utterance is always an evaluation. Thus it works, not so much to express an already existing “point of view,” as, in the course of its utterance, to construct a point of view, a stance, and attitude toward what is being said. While the same words can mean different things, for Bakhtin (and Voloshinov), it is the intonation with which they are uttered in a specific context - their tone - that influences how they ‘bring off’ their evaluative work. Intonation is the sound valuing makes.
“There can be no such thing as an absolutely neutral utterance. The speaker’s evaluative attitude toward the subject of his speech (regardless of what his subject may be) also determines the choice of lexical, grammatical, and compositional means of the utterance” (1986, p.84).
Thus, what is constituted in the use of a particular speech genre is, among many other aspects of a ongoing social ‘world’, a particular set of interdependently related, but continually changing, evaluative speech ‘positions’, positions which on the one hand allow the use of various voices - in which we are answerable for the our ‘position’, our ‘stance’ - and on the other, which permit speakers certain forms of addressivity, aimed at certain addressees - it is in their allowing and permitting of some speech forms and their sanctioning of others, that institutions constituted by particular speech genres are repaired and maintained. For example, in an educational institution, I may speak with the voice of a teacher, a pupil, a researcher, a librarian, an administrator, and so on - and neither administrators, nor librarians, nor pupils, are not supposed to tell teachers how or what to teach; within each department, among the teachers within it, a particular speech genre will have currency also, and so on. Where the point to emphasize is how, in the never ending flow of communication in which this form of life is sustained, every utterance is a rejoinder in some way to previous utterances.
4) Utterances also expected to produce a response:
Listening too must be responsive, in that listeners must be preparing themselves to respond to what they are hearing. Indeed,
“...when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding, from the very beginning - sometimes literally from the speaker’s first word” (p.68).
And the speaker too is expecting such an active responsive understanding:
“[The speaker] does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his or her own idea in someone else’s mind (as in Saussure’s model of linguistic communication mentioned above). Rather, the speaker talks with an expectation of a response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth (with various speech genres presupposing various integral orientations and speech plans on the part of speakers or writers)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.69).
“To understand another person’s utterance means to orient oneself with respect to it, to find the proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words. the greater their number and weight, the deeper and more substantial our understanding will be... Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of dialogue is to the next” (mpl, p.102).
In other words, the utterance is not a conventional unit, like the sentence (in Saussure’s or Chomsky’s syntactical sense), but a real unit, in the sense that it marks out the boundaries of in the speech flow between different ‘voices’.
“The whole utterance is no longer a unit of language (and not a unit of the ‘speech flow’ or the ‘speech chain’), but a unit of speech communication that has not mere formal definition, but contextual meaning (that is, integrated meaning that relates to value - to truth, beauty, and so forth - and requires a responsive understanding, one that includes evaluation). The responsive understanding of a speech whole is always dialogic by nature” (1986, p.125).
5) Logical and dialogical relations:
“Two statements ‘Life is good’ and ‘Life is not good’, are connected through a certain logical relationship: one is the negation of the other. There are no dialogical relations between them, however. Bakhtin says, “They are not arguing with each other.” But if these two statements are attributed as utterances to two different subjects, a dialogical relationship will evolve between them - the relationship of disagreement. Two other statements, ‘Life is good’ and ‘Life is good’, are connected by a logical relationship of identity: in fact, they are one and the same statement. But if these statements are examined within the context of a communicative situation as sequential remarks of two communicating subjects, a completely different relationship develops between them - that of agreement. The first remark is a statement, an expression of a personal attitude toward a specified object (life). The second remark states that the partner’s position regarding this object is the same. In other words, although these phrases are identical as statements [sentences] (a logical relationship), they are different as utterances: the first one is a statement, the second, a confirmation. The relationship of agreement is established between them (a communicative dialogic relationship” (Vasil’eva, 1988, pp.29-30).
“Dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential object, [these are] relationships in and of themselves devoid of any dialogical element. They must clothe themselves in discourse, become utterances, become positions of various subjects expressed in discourse, in order that dialogic relations might arise among them” (Bakhtin, 1984, p.183, my addition).
“Dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to the purely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional-syntactic). They are possible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects (dialogue with oneself is secondary, and, in the majority of cases, already played through). We are not concerning ourselves here with the origin of the term ‘dialogue’.... ‘Hunger, cold!’ - one utterance of a single speaking subject. ‘Hunger!’ - ‘Cold!’ - two dialogically correlated utterances of two different subjects: here dialogic relations appear that did not exist in the former case. The same thing with two developed sentences (think of a cogent example)” (1986, pp.117-118).
“On the problem of dialogic relations. Theses relations are profoundly unique and cannot be reduced to logical, linguistic, mechanical, or any other natural relations. They constitute a special type of semantic relations, whose members can only be complete utterances (either regarded as complete or potentially complete), behind which stand (and in which are expressed) real or potentially real speech subjects, authors of given utterances. Real dialogue( daily conversation, scientific discussion, political debate, and so forth). The relations among rejoinders of such dialogues are simpler and more externally visible kind of dialogic relations. But dialogic relations, of course, do not in any way coincide with relations among rejoinders of real dialogue - they are much broader, more diverse, and more complex. Two utterances, separated from one another both in time and in space, knowing nothing of one another, when they are compared semantically, reveal dialogic relations if there is any kind of semantic convergence between them (if only a partially shared theme, point of view, and so forth)... One cannot... understand dialogic relations simplistically or unilaterally, reducing them to contradiction, conflict, polemics, or disagreement. Agreement is very rich in varieties and shadings. Two utterances that are identical in all respects (“Beautiful weather!” - “Beautiful weather!”), if they are really two utterances belonging to different voices and not one, are linked by dialogic relations of agreement. This is a definite dialogic event, agreement could also be lacking (“No, not veyr nice weather,” and so forth).
Dialogic relations are thus much broader than dialogic speech in the narrow sense of the word. And dialgic realtions are always present, even among profoundly monologic speech works” (1986, pp.124-125).
6) The unit of speech is not the sentence:
This is not the case with sentences: “...the boundaries of the sentence as a unit of language are never determined by a change of speaking subjects” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.72).
“The first and foremost criterion for the finalization of an utterance is the possibility of responding to it or, more precisely and broadly, of assuming a responsive attitude to it (for example, executing an order)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.76).
The trouble with the sentence is that has no capacity to determine directly the responsive position of the other speaker; that is, it cannot evoke a response.
“The sentence as a language unit lacks all these [following] properties; it is not demarcated on either side by a change in speaking subjects; it has neither direct contact with reality (with an extraverbal situation) nor a direct relation to others’ utterances; it does not have semantic fullness of value; and it has no capacity to determine directly the responsive position of the other speaker, that is, it cannot evoke a response. The sentence as a language unit is [only, not ethical] grammatical in nature” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.74).
7) One’s own words and the words of others:
This is not to say, however, that when one talks in this way, one’s speech is wholly one’s own, for, in the very nature of speech genres, they preexist the individual; furthermore, not all are equally conducive to reflecting the individuality of the speaker. As Bakhtin points out, there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms; they have all at one time or another belonged to, and been used by others, and carry with them the traces of those uses:
“A word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. Everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the ‘soul’ of the speaker and does not belong only to him [or her]. The word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. The author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one)” (Bakhtin, 1986, pp.121-122).
Indeed, as he adds later, a word becomes ‘one’s own’:
“... only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (1981, pp.293-4).
8) Hence speaking is an ethical act:
In their biography of Bakhtin, Clark and Holquist (1984) discuss a number of early, incomplete texts of Bakhtin’s - written between 1918 and 1924 - to which they assign the title The Architectonics of Answerability. In these early texts, Bakhtin outlined a concern with the ethics of everyday life activities which he never ceased to pursue throughout his whole career: His concern was not with the end product of an action, with what it results in, but with the “ethical deed in its making” (p.63), with how in the process of authoring, i.e., in crafting the complex, time-space relations between self and others, the self is also crafted. Where, what it is which makes a person as a ‘me’ unique, is the unique place or position I occupy in existence, and the degree to which, as already mentioned above, I am answerable for that position to the others around me. As Clark and Holquist (1984, pp.67-8) put it:
“In Bakhtin, the difference between humans and other forms of life is a form of authorship, since the means by which a specific ratio of self-to-other responsibility is achieved in any given action - a deed being understood as an answer - comes about as the result of efforts by the self to shape a meaning out of the encounter between them. What the self is answerable to is the social environment; what the self is answerable for is the authorship of its responses. The self creates itself in crafting an architectonic relation between the unique locus of life activity and the constantly changing natural and social environment which surrounds it. This is the meaning of Bakhtin’s dictum that the self is an act of grace, a gift of the other.”
But, it must be added that (as we have seen above), if we owe our being to how we are addressed, how I address the others around me in my ‘authoring’ of myself also raises ethical questions - for it is a part of the ethics of authoring that I must not in making my own being violate the being of others. How, if the others around me are unique beings whose nature cannot be predicted, can this be managed?
9) Ethics at the point of action (speaking):
It can only be managed at the point of action, so to speak, during the actual execution of the communicative act, the fashioning of an utterance. As we have already seen above, he rejects a formal, linguistic analyses in terms of sentences - an approach which seems to suggest that there must be a stage of passive, formal, nonresponsive understanding in the life of utterances (in terms of the sentence-syntax), before they are perceived as being in a context. Whereas, what matters for actual speakers, Bakhtin feels, is not that normatively identical forms exist in the ‘tool-box’ of language - just as normatively identical tools exist in the actual tool-boxes of carpenters, say - but that in different particular contexts (like the carpenter’s tools), such forms can be put to use in creative and novel ways. Thus:
“What the speaker values is not that aspect of the form which is invariably identical in all instances of its usage, despite the nature of those instances, but that aspect of the linguistic form because of which it can figure in the given, concrete context, because of which it becomes a sign adequate to the conditions of the given, concrete situation. We can express it this way: what is important for the speaker about the linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign” (Voloshinov, 1973, p.68).
The text as an utterance:
“Two poles of the text. Each text presupposes a generally understood (that is, conventional within a given collective) system of signs, a language (if only the language of art). If there is no language behind the text, it is not a text, but a natural (not signifying phenomenon, for example, a complex of natural cries and moans devoid of any (signifying) repeatability... And so behind each text stands a language system... But at the same time each text (as an utterance) is individual, unique, and unrepeatable, and herein lies its entire significance (its plan, the purpose for which it was created)... With respect to this aspect, everything repeatable and reproducible proves to be material, a means to an end... The second aspect (pole) inheres in the text itself, but is revealed only in a particular situation and in a chain of texts (in the speech communication of a given area). This pole is linked not with elements (repeatable) in the system of the language (signs), but with other texts (unrepeatable) by special dialogic (and dialectical, when detached from the author) relations... This second pole is inseparably linked with the aspect of authorship and has nothing to do with natural, random, single units...” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.105).
“The event of the life of the text, that is, its true essence, always develops on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.106).
“But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: ... (Bakhtin, 1981, p.276).
10) Understanding in order to respond:
But if this is the case, how is a listener to understand what the speaker means? Doesn’t the listener first have to recognize the form used in order to understand its meaning? No, not at all. From a practical-moral point of view, what is involved in ‘making sense’ of words used in particular concrete communicative contexts, amounts, says Voloshinov (1973, p.68), “to understanding [a word’s] novelty and not to recognizing its identity.” Indeed, if we go along with Bakhtin and regard every utterance as primarily a response to preceding utterances, then the listener’s task (in understanding) is that of formulating what his or her response to a speaker’s utterance should be - they must decide whether they agree with it or want to reject it; whether they must comply with it; act upon it; or are insulted by it; and so on. In short: The listener’s two-part task is i) to grasp how the speaker’s (‘tool’-like) use of words has, so to speak, ‘moved’ or ‘repositioned’ him or her in the changing, intralinguistically specified situation between them, in order next ii) to ‘answer’ for their new position within it.
“The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning (the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it (completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its execution, and so on. And the listener adopts this responsive attitude for the entire duration of the process of listening and understanding...” (Bakhtin, 1986, p.68).
“To understand another person’s utterance means to orient yourself with respect to it, to find a proper place for it in the corresponding context. For each word of the utterance that we are in the process of understanding, we, as it were, lay down a set of our own answering words. The greater their number and weight, the deeper and more substantial our understanding will be... Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. Understanding is to utterance as one line of a dialogue is to the next. Understanding strives to match the speaker’s word with a counter word. Only in understanding a word in a foreign tongue is the attempt made to match it with the ‘same’ word in one’s own language” (mpl, p.102).
11) Checking an understanding for its appropriateness:
In this view then, the psychological ‘flow’ or ‘movement’ of dialogic speech consists in a sequence of utterances, where the boundaries of each particular utterance are determined by a change of speakers. And where each speaker in their utterances, in the ‘movement’ between their sense of what they want to achieve in their utterance and their use of particular words, attempts to ‘successively develop’ (Vygotsky) suitable expressions. But how is this possible? How can an expression be developmentally formulated in a more or less routine way, word by word, and checked in the course of its ‘construction’ for its appropriateness? Because, argues Bakhtin (1986):
“Neutral dictionary definitions of the words of a language ensure their common features and guarantee that all speakers of a given language will understand one another, but the use of words in live speech communication is always individual and contextual in nature. Therefore, one can say that any word exists for the speaker in three aspects: as a neutral word of a language, belonging to nobody; as an other’s word, which belongs to another person and is filled with echoes of the other’s utterance; and finally, as my word, for, since I am dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular speech plan, it is already imbued with my expression. In both the latter aspects, the word is expressive, but, we repeat, this expression does not inhere in the word itself. It originates at the point of contact between the word and actual reality, under the conditions of that real situation articulated by the individual utterance. In this case the word appears as an expression of some evaluative position of an individual person...” (p.88).
It is in a speaker’s particular use of a particular word at a particular point in time - like, say, the carpenter’s particular use of a chisel stroke to slice off a wood sliver at a particular point in a piece of joinery - that the speaker can sense what its use achieves in the construction desired. To repeat Bakhtin’s comments above, a word’s meaning does not inhere in the word itself, but originates at the point of contact between the words used, and the ‘movements’ they achieve in the conditions of their use.
12) Politics (evaluative accent) in the ‘combat zone of the word’:
“There is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. In essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding... meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex” (Voloshinov, 1973, pp.102-3).
“Every stage in the development of a society has its own circle of items which alone have access to a society’s attention and which are endowed with an evaluative accentuation by that attention [positive or negative]... Accent as such is interindividual... [But] different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle... This multiaccentuality of the ideological sign is a very crucial aspect” (mpl, pp.21-23).
Thus also, it is precisely here, in this zone of uncertainty as to who can do what in the construction of a word’s significance, at the point of contact between my creative use of it in an attempt to reshape the social reality between myself and another, that I can exert my power, and the other can exert theirs. It is in what Holquist (1983, p.307) very aptly calls “the combat zone of the word,” that the struggle over the question of the speaker’s rights and privileges compared with those of the listener takes place. And the importance of these rights and duties should not be underestimated, for even apparently simple situations, objects, events, states of affairs, remain in principle enigmatic and undetermined as social realities until they are talked about - where what is enigmatic is essentially the question: who should live in whose reality?
“In actual fact, each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many other people the greatest lie. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes. In the ordinary conditions of life, the contradiction embedded in every ideological sign cannot emerge fully because the ideological sign in an established, dominant ideology is always reactionary and tries, as it were, to stabilize the preceding factor in the dialectical flux of the social generative process, so accentuating yesterday’s truth as to make it appear today’s” (mpl, pp.23-24).
13) Notes on F. de Saussure [1857-1913]:
For Saussure, Language (la langue: the system of forms) and speech (parole) are constituents of language-speech (langage) - which contains the sum total of all the phenomena - physical, physiological, and psychological - involved in the realization of verbal activity. Because of this, it [he claims] cannot be the point of departure for linguistic analysis.
“Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogeneous; straddling several areas simultaneously - physical, physiological and psychological - it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.
Language, on the contrary, is a self-contained whole and a principle of classification. As soon as we give language first place among the facts of speech, we introduce a natural (sic) order into a mass that lends itself to no other classification” (p.9).
“...what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language, i.e., a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas” (p.10).
“If we could embrace the sum of word-images stored in the minds of all individuals, we could identity the social bond that constitutes language. It is a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivist” (pp.13-14).
“In separating language from speech we are at the same time separating: 1) what is social from what is individual; and 2) what is essential from what is accessory and more of less accidental.
Language is not a function of the speaker; it is a product that is passively assimilated by the individual. it never requires premeditation, and reflection enters in only for the purposes of classification...
Speaking, on the contrary, is an individual act. it is wilful and intellectual” (p.14).
“Language, once its boundaries have been marked off within the speech data, can be classified among human phenomena, whereas speech cannot” (p.15).
“The concrete object of linguistic science is the social product deposited in the brain of each individual, i.e., language...But we generally only learn about language through writing” (p.23).
Usefulness, dangers and shortcomings of writing:
“The linguistic object is not the written word and the spoken forms of words; the spoken form alone constitutes the object. But the spoken word is so intimately bound to its written image that the latter manages to usurp the main role” (pp.23-4).
“This illusion, which has always existed, is reflected in many of the notions that are currently bandied about on the subject of language... Thus language does have a definite and stable and oral tradition that is independent of writing, but the influence of writing prevents our seeing this” (p.24).
“...in language there are only differences. even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure, 1960, p.120).
References:
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M. Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.
Clark, K. and Holquist, M. (1984) Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Saussurea, F. de (1960) Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin, London: Peter Owen.
Vasil’eva, I.I. (1988) The importance of M.M. Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue and dialogic relations for the psychology of communication. Soviet Psychology, 26, 17-31
Voloshinov, V.N. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.