V. N. Volosinov (1895–1936)

No one could ever pull off a book's worth of the self-dismantling, self-imolating moments in his chapter on reported speech (the ways the author speaks through the character, the ways the character speaks through the author, the endless unfolding), but it turns out there's plenty to like here otherwise, even if Voloshinov recreates a redundant novel vocabulary for concepts and developments that didn't need it (I'll spare you). Basically he was doing for linguistics what, weirdly, at the same time, fellow belatedly major Russian Lev Vygotsky was doing in psychology: under a Marxist aegis, finding the obvious synthesis to the language-as-structure/language-as-communicative-act opposition, the dialectical one: language as interaction, as constant intersubjective orienting-to and recalibration. As dialectic! I'm quite fond of him for that, since it cuts through a lot of langue/parole or competence/performance blah blah and is a very prosocial philosophy.… (meer)

Yaaay! Language as the medium of ideology! Class struggle as the struggle to decide who gets to make your own (not their own) meanings! The ruling-class/oppressed-class dialectic as analogous to Bakhtin's centripetal/centrifugal thing, which it strikes me now is a good argument to say that Bakhtin didn't write Voloshinov: if he had been inclined to make the class connection that explicitly, why wouldn't he have done it in one of the essays in The Dialogic Imagination? Bakhtin is more magisterial on the issue of language, maybe, and of narrative certainly, but I'm not convinced he was ever a Marxist. (And no wonder; they were dicks to him, dude).

Anyway, this inspired (or just precursed?) half of Gramsci, and is so anti-formalist - language IS social interaction, and that's all that's ever made sense, and please to put that in your pipe, Saussurean lingistics. But then Voloshinov also fights hard for the good half of Saussure, the diachronic sign.

Finally, Voloshinov is freakier than you think. (Per "Flight of the Conchords," I think the opposite of "drinking the Kool-Aid" - believing in the unreal in a way that frees rather than subjugates you - should be referred to as "wearing the freaky freaky eyepatch.") “Quasi-direct discourse” – IS or FIS where, “clearly, it is the [character’s] own . . . thoughts that are being transmitted. It is his speech, but it is being formally delivered by the author.” Your books are speaking you! the hero escapes from the page!

And the thing where utterance can be "too colourful" for indirect speech. It's gnomic, but it comes close to locating the power of speech report in affect more than, or in preference to, authority (represented by verbatim). That is almost "I believe because it's absurd" - not the Tertullian, but the way it's often been misread: "I believe because it's cool and it empowers me." Voloshinov is the David Bowie of reported speech study. Read this and see yourself - on stage - inside out!… (meer)