embodies the social agon, for words are traces of the ideological struggles
that have been conducted by them and for them; it is therefore ‘multi-
accentuated’, for the sign, which does not exist prior to social interaction,
always bears the trace of the past discourses in which it was inserted; and
finally, it does not reflect the world of referents, but refracts it – meaning that
it intervenes in the situation in which it emerges and of which it is one of
the elements, and does not simply represent it. In short, the sign according
to Voloshinov is an element not of an abstract system, but of a social practice.
We can see how it differs from Saussure’s sign.
The second concept is ideology. This term is to be understood in the sense
it possessed in Russian at the time. Ideologiyareferred not to a system of ideas,
but to a human socio-cultural activity, construed in a very broad sense: for
Voloshinov, the arts, sciences, philosophy form part of the domain of ideology.
And ideology is what is conveyed by the linguistic sign: it does not exist
outside of its expression in the material signs of language. We can see how
this differs from the usual concept, including in its Marxist forms: an ideology
is not a set of ideas, not the mark of an illusion, or even of a necessary illu-
sion – i.e. an allusion. And we can also see what the concept offers: the idea
that language and ideology are inseparable, because, in Voloshinov, ideology
is signification in as much as it is collective, or rather social: it is a set not of
ideas but of signs, which form the content of consciousness.
The third concept is word. This term, more or less abandoned by structural
linguistics on account of its vagueness (the concepts of ‘morpheme’ or ‘moneme’
constructed by science are preferred) occupies a central place in Voloshinov.
For him, the word is the unit of analysis of discourse, it is the sign in that it
is a component part of a process of signification, in that it takes concrete
shape in social practice, in so far as it is the bearer of an ideological content:
it is the embodied, practical sign. Making the word, rather the sign, the basic
unit of discourse has at least one advantage: it underscores the crucial
importance of semantics in the analysis of language. And it will be recalled
that a striking feature of structuralist linguistics, and even of the original
Chomsky, is the exclusion of semantics from the field of the science of language,
as too vague to be formalised satisfactorily (only with the linguistics of
enunciation was semantics restored to its rightful place). Similarly, making
the word, rather than the sentence, the basic unit of linguistic analysis underlines
the fact that pragmatics cannot be excluded from the field of science (words
Continuations • 107