assume their meaning in the use made of them; they carry with them a history;
they have an ideological and political content). The essential task of the study
of language is not, as the dominant linguistic tradition from Chomsky to
enunciation analysts would have it, to study grammatical structures or
grammatical markers, but to account for the life of language – that is, language
as a human practice. We shall, therefore, find in Voloshinov a critique of
formalism in linguistics. It will be noted that, according to Voloshinov, the
word possesses a set of characteristics which make it a collective entity, not
an individual one. Words do no possess the meaning I wish to impart to
them; even if I have the impression of inventing them, they are always-already
collective; they are endowed with ‘semiotic purity’ (a word is an independent
element, separable from the discourse into which it is inserted); words are
‘ideologically neutral’ (in the sense that more than one content can lay hold
of them in the course of ideological struggles); they are involved in the
everyday use of language (here, we once again encounter the metaphor of
the coin, but this means that a word has a history, that it is engaged in the
history of its speakers); they can be internalised (and we shall soon importance
that internal discourse has in Voloshinov’s thinking). Finally, words are
necessarily present in every form of consciousness, and in any conscious
activity, for the psyche is composed of words. We can draw the conclusion
that the study of ideology is the same thing as the study of words.
The fourth concept is consciousness. In my view, this is Voloshinov’s most
interesting contribution: in him we find not only a critique of Saussure, but
also a critique of Freud (made explicit in his book on Freudianism). He stresses
the importance of conscious practice and takes seriously Marx and Engels’s
formula in The German Ideologyaccording to which ‘language is practical
consciousness’. Consciousness is thus defined as the effect of social practice:
it does not exist outside of its objectification in gestures, cries, words. But it
is a structured practice – structured by the word as a social entity. In other
words, consciousness is always-already interlocution. Here, we are definitely
in the ambiance of the Bakhtin circle, for we detect an echo of the Bakhtinian
concepts of dialogism and polyphony. What is derived from them is a
philosophical inversion of the utmost importance: ideology is not the product
of consciousness (it cannot therefore be a set of ‘ideas’), because consciousness
is the product of ideology. Consciousness is ideology made concrete and
individual. Whence three characteristics of consciousness, which render the
108 • Chapter Five