us miss the train. And we can finish by observing, with Canetti,^9 that questions
are never innocent: in as much as they demand a response, they are markers
of power; they display the right of the speaker to pose a question and expect
a response. A power relation takes shape in the most innocuous of ques-
tions, which finds its culmination in the police interlocution: ‘We ask the
questions here!’.
The third concept is internal monologue. This is a phenomenon which
fascinated the ancients, but which the moderns have almost completely
neglected – at least, the linguists and philosophers (as is well known, the
question has greatly preoccupied writers and literary critics). The question
is simple: what happens in my head when I ‘speak’ to myself? Is what expresses
me to myself formulated in a natural language or a mental language – what
the Anglo-Americans calls ‘mentalese’, which is only metaphorically a
language? This question of the logos endiathetos, with its two contrasting
solutions, has a long tradition in ancient and scholastic philosophy behind
it.^10 Among contemporary thinkers, it has been tackled virtually only by
Voloshinov, Vygotsky, George Steiner in After Babel,^11 and a few cognitivists
who firmly opt for ‘mentalese’.^12 Like Vygotsky, Voloshinov is in the other camp:
for him, internal discourse is the internalisation of external discourse – that
is, social public discourse. As it were, he stands the definition of The German
Ideologyback on its feet: language is practical consciousness because
consciousness is internalised, subjectified, and subjectifying discourse. For
what is called consciousness is nothing other than internal discourse.
On these bases, Voloshinov engages in an uncompromising critique of the
dominant way of thinking about language in his time. It has two aspects.
The first is what he calls subjective idealism. We find it in romantic philosophies
of language, in German thinkers like Herder and Humboldt. But we might
anachronistically bring the critique to bear on contemporary linguists of
enunciation. This linguistics is characterised by a set of positions: it conceives
language as energeia– that is, as an uninterrupted creative process, which is
materialised in the discourse of each individual speaker. It therefore conceives
the laws of linguistic creation as psychological laws, in that the site of linguistic
Continuations • 111(^9) See Canetti 1960.
(^10) See Panaccio 1999.
(^11) See Steiner 1976.
(^12) See Fodor 1975 and 1994.