that it can take on in my utterance. Things are clear when it is a question of
ideologically charged signs; and everyone knows that the word ‘freedom’
does not have the same meaning in Eluard’s poem and Berlusconi’s mouth.
But everyone also knows that each occurrence of this word summons up its
whole history, even if only to deny it. Hence the importance in the Marxist
tradition of thinking about language of the outline of a historical semantics
proposed by Raymond Williams in Keywords.^8
The second concept is refraction– the refraction of social being in language.
The term is obviously intended to avoid and replace the traditional Marxist
concept of ‘reflection’ (notoriously, this concept has poisoned Marxist aesthetics
and its concept of realism). For Voloshinov, language does not ‘reflect’ social
being; it ‘refracts’ it. The obvious difference between the two terms is that
refraction implies distortion, meaning that language cannot be a mere
representation of a reality external to it. We must therefore think outside of
any separation between language and the world. And, manifestly, if there is
no divide, language can scarcely be an instrument at everyone’s disposal,
given that it is caught up in the social interaction – i.e. the class struggle –
in which it intervenes. Voloshinov thus demarcates himself in advance from
Stalin’s good sense. Moreover, in his work there are some positive references
to Marr, in which we should not simply read a declaration of allegiance to
the then dominant linguistics in the Soviet Union, but a form of convergence.
For Voloshinov actually does what Marr only claimed to do: he elaborates a
Marxist theory of language. Refraction is not a simple image, mere
representation; and the action of language is a mixture of representation and
intervention: the image of the world conveyed by language is not only
deformed, it is transformed and, in return, transformative. And this applies
not only to slogans, but to all utterances in that, according to Deleuze and
Guattari (as we shall see shortly), they are always also order-words. The
innocent question ‘What time is it?’ clearly has the aim of obtaining information
about the world and I would like the response to reflect the state of affairs
accurately (if not, I risk missing my train). But it can also express an affect
(if I pose the question twelve times in five minutes, my interlocutor will be
justified in regarding this as a symptom); or convey an indirect request, if
the slowness of my interlocutor in finishing her preparations risks making
110 • Chapter Five
(^8) See Williams 1976.