its own tendencies and the system consequently ignores human history – that
of the community of its speakers. For Voloshinov, beyond the attempt to
objectify language in order to make it an object of science (which is a way of
refusing to make language an individual creation: in Saussure, at least, the
object of science is a system and hence a collective object), this position has
nothing but drawbacks, because the theses it defends are largely false. Language
in fact is not an abstract system but a human practice, which emerges in social
interaction, is transformed by it, and transforms it in turn. Accordingly, it is
not possible to study language as an immanent phenomenon: it is inthe
world and ofthe world. Pragmatic maxims are to be preferred to the ‘laws’
of language (I am translating Voloshinov’s critique into anachronistic terms
here, but I do think that I am betraying it), which have the advantage of being
useable and defeasible for the purposes of social interaction (during the
establishment of a power relation). The ‘value’ of a linguistic unit is not
oppositional, but evaluative: it consists in the ideological content with which
social interaction invests the particular unit. Finally, there is no opposition
between paroleand langue(I would like to add between langueand langage),
but only a process of historical action in and through language.
This critique enables Voloshinov to propose a Marxist philosophy of language
in the form of positive theses. The aim is to abandon Saussure’s formalism,
which fetishises linguistic practice into an abstract system. We should, therefore,
stop treating linguistic material as a series of dead texts in the manner of
philologists (of whom Saussure is the direct inheritor) and take concrete
interlocution as the starting-point. In other words, and here we are also
referring to Bakhtin, the materials of language will be approached not in a
monological optic but a dialogical one – a ‘dialogue’ whose horizon is resolutely
social.
I propose to summarise this philosophy of language in the form of five theses.
The first thesisis negative: it maintains that language conceived as a system
is a mere scientific abstraction that does not make it possible to account for
concrete phenomena. In other words, langueis a bad abstraction, an example
of fetishism. This thesis rejects the construction of a scientific object through
separation and exclusion – which is precisely what the object of Saussurian
linguistics is.
Continuations • 113