Page 195 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

184 IDEOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVITY

Vološinov and formalism
Vološinov, along with M.M.Bakhtin and P.N.Medvedev, was a member of the
Bakhtin group, constituted in the late twenties to produce an ‘immanent critique’
of formalism. Kristeva reviews Bakhtin’s work on literature in an important
article in which she shows that part of the breaking with formalism was
constituted around an inquiry into history, the history of meaning systems,
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genres of discourse. It is symptomatic that Woolfson’s analysis takes no
account of the particular form of conversation (as opposed to debate) which
‘frames’ the interchange he deals with. However, this is the least of the matter.
The real point of difference is that his whole reading of Vološinov excludes the
book’s fruitful concern with the subjective and ideology which is expressed in
such prevarications as this:

Anti-psychologism is correct in refusing to derive ideology from the
psyche. But even more than that is needed: the psyche must be derived
from ideology. Psychology must be grounded in ideological science.
Speech had first to come into being and develop in the process of the
social intercourse of organisms so that afterward it could enter within the
organism and become inner speech.
Psychologism is also correct, however. There is no outer sign without an
inner sign. An outer sign incapable of entering the context of inner signs,
i.e. incapable of being understood and experienced, ceases to be a sign and
reverts to the status of a physical object. 15

Here ideology is treated as a material force in the constitution of the social
subject in the first section; yet, in the second section there are distinct indications
that this subject could be considered relatively autonomous (with its own laws
and history) and is also in some sense constitutive of the social reality that
constructs it. There is, in other words, a sense in which Vološinov’s text tends to
treat the subjective moment as by no means entirely subservient to, dominated
by, objective forces. But it was not possible for him to go further. Already at
odds with Soviet orthodoxy, he also did not have the necessary linguistic
understanding of Freud (given by Lacan) in order to read him other than as a
biological determinist. As Kristeva puts it:

The formalists did not question the assumption that the work must be a
system of signs, an objectal surface on which pre-existing elements are
combined, a structure in which the transcendental sense is mirrored and
maintained by the transcendental consciousness of the ever-present
language-users. These were the necessary postulates of a reasoning
entrapped in representation. Could anyone go beyond such postulates at a
time when the Freudian breakthrough was not an accepted part of language
theory, and when linguistics, in the process of becoming structural, could