Rev Left Radio - V.N. Voloshinov: Philosophy of Language, Linguistics, and Ideology

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Matthew Furlong from our Dialectics Deep Dive series returns to the show to discuss Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov, a Russian Soviet linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology. Other links:   Vijay Prashad - "Looking Over the Horizon at Non-Alignment and Peace" (2022) https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-2-non-alignment-and-peace/   Vijay Prashad - "Why the United States Opposed the Historical Integration of Eurasia" (2022)  https://youtu.be/i1ukha-IphA   Vijay Prashad - "What Gives Imperialists the Right to Use the Word 'Democracy'?" (2022) https://youtu.be/efEdxJrBcIg   Breakthrough News - https://www.youtube.com/c/BreakThroughNews   Multipolarista - https://www.youtube.com/c/Multipolarista   Michael Brooks & Felix Biederman - "Alex Jones' Advice for Man Unwilling to Leave Parents' House" (2018) https://youtu.be/-65HmxjIzPI   Color Theory podcast w/ Ed Charbonneau - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1859353 Outro music:  "Human Language" by Aceyalone  Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show a fan favorite, Matthew Furlong, the Rev Leff's resident philosopher, to talk about the linguistic and Marxist theories of the Russian-Soviet linguist, Valentin N. Volusinov. And this is a really interesting sort of deep dive into philosophy of language, linguistics, and Marxist analysis, dialectical materialism in particular that is very interesting. And it's, as always, with these philosophical deep dive sort of episodes can be challenging. Certainly, if you don't have any orientation towards linguistics or the philosophy of language, this could be slightly more difficult than some of our other episodes. But people like the challenge. I know in some of these episodes, people that are really into it

and want to grasp it, listen to it a couple times to try to read it. wrestle with the stuff that they might not have missed or might have missed the first time. But in any case, I think it's a really fascinating episode if you can get into it. And it gives us a lot of food for thought. And it covers a sort of Soviet linguist and Marxist to that. Very few of you, if any of you, have probably heard about it. I know I hadn't heard about them until Matthew recommended diving into his work together on this episode. So that's what this episode is about.

Very interesting. Anybody interested in language in the Marxist concept of, of ideology, in linguistics in general, we talk about all of it. So without further ado, here is my conversation with Matthew Furlong

on the Russian-Soviet linguist and Marxist, Valentin Voloshenov. Enjoy. Hey, everyone. This is Matthew back again with Comrade Brett. This time, no longer from Halifax, but from St. John's, Newfoundland, where I've returned to my home. And today, we're going to speak about a Soviet thinker that we've talked about, or I brought up a couple of times, in the context of a sort of three-parter

about some Soviet thinkers that I'm interested in bringing to the show. And this individual's name is Valentin Nikolayevich Wolloshenov, a Soviet linguist and philosopher of language and literary critic, who is, I think, still not incredibly well known in the English-speaking world,

but hopefully we can help correct that with today's conversation. Absolutely. This is a historical figure that I did not know about before you brought it to my attention. And I assume that most people out there do not know about. Even when we get into some of the background of his life, we'll talk about how it's very difficult to find even basic information on some of the background. But just kind of set the table a little bit, and we'll do this as we always do up front. This is definitely a linguist.

So we're talking about a Russian-Soviet linguist who is really incorporating linguistics or applying linguistics. towards Marxist ends. So, you know, Marxist ideology, for example, and how that is related to verbal interaction, to the structure of language itself, and is kind of taking a Marxist ideology that we're all, you know, sort of comfortable with. We know how that works, and turning it in a different way and deepening it, perhaps, in the process. So that's kind of setting the table. Did I put that out there correctly, or did I get anything flagrantly wrong on that? No, that was spot on. And I just want to. want to say for the listener, uh, this episode is not a deep dive. Um, uh, I think I wouldn't

survive one right now. So we're trying to do this in 90 minutes or less. So this will be a much more sort of like impressionistic, uh, take on Velasianos work, um, rather than the really in-depth analyses we often do just to get people interested and to direct to direct them towards this thinker, um, and other thinkers that, um, have some adjacencies with his, his philosophy and may be said to be sort of inheritors of his philosophical thinking. And we've already sort of looked at one of those in his discussion about language and Marxism, who's Joseph Stalin in, what is it, the problems of linguistics and Marxism. I can't remember what that text is called exactly.

We discussed it, I think, at least once on the deep dives. And he takes over several of Voloshinov's sort of ways of looking at this, one of which is sort of his consists in Stalin's assertion that a language is not really quite the same thing as a superstructure and that languages serve everybody in the entire base and not just one class or another. So where that really comes from in Stalin in the Soviet context is from Voloshenov's work. And we're going to talk about, like Brett said, some of the difficulties in sort of putting together a coherent biography of Voloshenoff, but there do seem to be some questions,

given some accounts of what ended up happening to Voloshenov, that makes people, you sort of question, like, how could Stalin end up inheriting this or something like that? So, yeah, so, yeah, that's it. It's really, really quick, too, for those that might be new listeners, Matthew, when he's referring to the deep dive, is our series that we've done in the past, the last year or two called the Dialectics Deep Dive.

I think it was a five or six-parter where we just explored, you know, the real depths, the trenches of dialectical materialism and its evolution and human thought through the ages and all of that. So if you like this episode, if you like Matthew as a guest, which of course most of you should, most of you do, definitely go back and check out some of those episodes, especially if you're the sort of nerdy person who really likes to get into the weeds with philosophy in particular. That's what I think Matthew and I do best.

So check that out if you haven't already. All right. Well, let's get into it because we are going to try to, those episodes are monstrous, three, four hours sometimes. This is going to be a shorter version, of course, an orientation to a thinker that people don't know about. So if you are interested to go follow up and learn more. But a way to start this conversation is maybe just to ask you what you want to

accomplish today, given some of the time limits and the, you know, difficulty sometimes of some of the subject matter we're going to dive into. What do you hope to accomplish with this episode today? Well, the two major things I want to accomplish are to look at Voloshenov's concept of verbal interaction, which he puts at the heart of his account of the genesis of language and accordingly the genesis of the individual psyche or individual psychology. And in this, he says in his book that we're looking at Marxism and the philosophy of language from 1929, that he that Marxism still needs to develop what he calls a genuinely objective psychology on Marxism's own terms and for this he's going to argue we need to look at the human psyche is unthinkable without the concept of a sign or different kinds of signs and signs themselves are unthinkable without a socially structured verbal interactions in actual everyday life with each other so that's just that that side of it, which is, I think for many of us, will be a more or less sort of accessible topic.

And the second thing I want to accomplish is to look at stuff from the end of this book, Marxism and the philosophy of language about problems with what he calls reported speech. And so reported speech is kind of like, you know, it's very simple when you say something like, so-and-so said that, this, you're reporting what somebody else said. And Voloshinov is going to identify three kinds of. of reported speech, what he calls sort of direct reported speech or direct discourse in reported speech, which is to say, you know, like if you read Holy Scripture, you'll, Jesus said, comma, quote, and then there's a direct quote, right? So that's a direct form of direct discourse of

reported speech. Then you have indirect discourse in reported speech, which is, you might say, Jesus said that, and then without square quotes, you just sort of give a kind of, sort of a verbatim reconstruction of what he said or sort of a paraphrase of what he said. And then there comes this third kind of reported speech that Voloshenov identifies is what he calls direct speech. And in direct speech, which he thinks is, doesn't develop in all languages necessarily. And even in the, he looks at French, German, and Russian at different periods in each of their histories and tries to pin down with this thing when and where this thing called quasi-direct speech discourse comes about. And that's when, um,

The discourse of a narrator or the discourse of the reporter sort of blends with the discourse that they report in. And so one sort of instance of this is when you have like a third person omniscient narration in a novel where the narrator really digs into the inner thoughts of a character and the feelings of a character, the motivations of a character, but does it without sort of directly quoting them where it's hard to tell the difference between the character's own thoughts and the narrator's sort of reporting of those thoughts and the two sort of streams of discourse kind of blend together.

And so like someone who's really good at this who I've expressed admiration for who unfortunately is out there on Twitter making bonehead claims because he's been too rich and famous for too long and Stephen King. You should read your own books more often once you're done with them, Stephen.

And he's really good at this like in the novel It or something like that where, and there's, an audio book of it read by Stephen Weber, who was an actor on the 90s sitcom Wings, about two brothers who run like a Bush pilot operate, a Bush plane

operation thing, if I remember correctly. And he does a really good job of enunciating the kinds of fears and feelings that the characters are having without there being any direct statement of saying, like, this is how the person is actually

feeling. The narration itself conveys the feelings without their or the fears or the you know problems that the character is dealing with without it being a sort of a collection of things that the person has said um or without there being a clear um way of uh pointing out that the narrator is like commenting on that person's feelings or their thoughts of the problems they're dealing with psychologically and voloshinoff is concerned about this because as um quasi-direct discourse, in his time, he sees it as becoming more prevalent in various sort of

like European languages that he's looking at. He's like, we're getting to the point where because we are losing the ability to tell the difference between the reporter and the reported, we often mistake the intonation or the sort of manner in which a reporter delivers the reported speech as the sort of substance of the speech itself, right? And so you see this, I think, happening in our context with certain, you know,

like right deviationist Twitch streamers, for example, who claim to deliver a sort of comprehensive, coherent account of this or that theory or aspect of theory, but it's often not very good, and a lot of the young people sort of watching these guys,

I think they, Roshanov, would say they get taken in sort of by the manner in which it's delivered rather than what's actually being said. And I think that's a serious concern for all of us because when we look at sort of public discourse about this theory and the history, we're often forced into forms of reported speech, including quasi-direct speech because we're trying to convey very complicated stuff to people in an accessible, digestible way, but then we run into the problem of creating false aggregates that then need to be disentangled, if I can put it that way. So those are the two

things I want us to look at. And in order to sort of help set the table, I just wanted to return once again to the letters on historical materialism by angles, specifically the one to Joseph Block, where he says, there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces, which give rise to one resultant, the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power, which works as a whole, unconsciously, and without volition. For what each individual wills, and so he's here creating this opposition between individual wills and the parallelogram of social historical forces they find themselves in. So what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else. And what emerges is something that no one

willed. Thus, past history, proceeds in the manner of a natural process, and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that individual wills of which each desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external in the last resort economic circumstances, either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general, do not attain what they want, but are merged into a collective mean, a common resultant. It must not be concluded that their value is equal to zero. On the contrary, each will contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it. And I've used that passage before on the show as a kind of teaching tool and there's a problem in it. And the problem is sort of gestured up by Lenin in texts like on the

question of dialectics and but is really unfolded in an essay by Louis Altaxir from I think 1968 called contradiction and overdetermination. And the question is really like, where do the wills come from? Are you just positing this sort of metaphysical entity called the will? Are you going to be able to explain its own genesis? And if you explain its own genesis, then what becomes of the parallelogram of forces that it perceives? Because it is generated just like them and isn't just this sort of passive observer that is seeing what's going on and then making its own decisions. And this really gets into questions about the concept of the base and the superstructure. And what is the sort of causality there?

And Voloshinov is very concerned with this problem. And I think through looking at the question of verbal interaction and the question of quasi-direct discourse and stuff like that, we can try to suss out what's going on and sort of like contribute to these debates. Yeah. So just to summarize that quote, the main point of that quote is this idea that there's this individual will, but it's set inside of a context through which this parallelogram of four. they have no control over, and it's everybody's individual will clashing and intermingling and relating that produces an overall, I don't know what you call, like a general will or a general situation that no individual actually willed, but it was the combinator effect of, you know, an infinite or not an infinite, but a large amount of individual wills interacting together

that produces something that no individual willed. Is that a correct way to understand that quote. Yes, exactly. And so somebody like Lannon is going to say, although he really addresses this more to some of the stuff we looked in an anti-During in the section about the double negation in the last deep dive, I think.

He's just going to say you know, Engels gestures at, and here I'm doing quasi quasi-direct discourse, angles gestures at the fact that the dialectic or the unity of opposite

and whatever sort of dynamic, you know, whether you go with the double negation or with Mao's version that we talked about last time, this is good as far as it goes. He does generate, he does, Engels does gesture at dialectus being a law of cognition or he just says a general law of thought, I believe, in this letter. And Lenin is going to say, well, it's good that you gestured at it, but you haven't done an actual articulation of the genesis of,

cognition of thinking itself through dialectics. And he's going to say, well, you know, you can't fully understand the examples that you're using like the, what is the barley seed or the different natural objects you're dealing with without also giving an account of how your mind came into being in the first place to be able to engage with those objects, which have been posited for you through the kind of social form of life we have in the context of a mode of production. Okay. So that is an opening salvo. That is a laying down of what we want to accomplish today. And that is a beginning to get into some of the weeds on this stuff. So let's move on to the next question, which is this. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were the heyday of linguistics, modern logic, and the philosophy of language throughout Europe. Many Russian thinkers were deeply interested in these developments, including the central figure of this episode, Voloshinov. So who was he? And how does his work fit into the broader context of the world in his time. Okay. Well, the question of who was, he is an

interesting one because I've actually found it rather hard to find out any real consistent information about him. We know that he was born on the 18th of June, 1895 in St. Petersburg, and he died on the 13th of June, 1936 in Leningrad, which is also St. Petersburg. And beyond that, there's not there's a lot about his life that isn't known um and it's it's actually he's kind of mysterious to the point that for a long time it seems like people were saying that he was in reality mctyle backton um who's another russian philosopher he was born in um 17th of november 1895 in orio and then he died on 7th of march 1975 in moscow and volashinoff did belong to uh what's called the backton circle which is sort of a group of thinkers uh that

sort of assembled around a back in where they dealt with, you know, issues of linguistic, the philosophy of language, and literary criticism and stuff like that. But other than that, it's hard to find out really who he was or what happened to him. And in particular, sort of what ended up happening to him. So I've read at least four different accounts of the outcomes for him. one from the Marxist Internet Archive, the little biography about him, two from the English translators of Marxism and the philosophy of language, a third one from Vijay Prashad in his book Red Star Over the Third World, and the fourth one is from an anthology of semiotics texts

that I had when I took a semiotics course in undergrad many, many years ago. And like when I first stumbled across his name again on the Marxist Internet Archive, I was like, I've seen that somewhere. and then I finally dug through my books and I found him in this collection. And so these accounts of one that ended up happening to him range from him dying in a sanatorium of tuberculosis, to him being relegated to some small-time teaching position in, you know, some place of nowhere, to being murdered in the purges,

to just being sort of kicked out of the party and disappearing. And so the Marxist Internet Archive offers no source for their claim, The translators of Marxism and the philosophy of language offer really no source for their claim. Vijay Prashad, in his book, offers no source for his claim, but that's okay because he doesn't offer any claims for anything or any sources for any claim in that book just to keep it really accessible as an introductory book and has his email address there and just says, if you want a citation, just email me, which I did, and I haven't heard back because I, you know, as I think anyone is following what he's doing right now, knows he's incredibly busy. So that makes sense. And I think also the one in the semiotics textbook I have also doesn't give a source for what I have to do. So the only really sourced claims about any part of his life that I've really been able to find is from a 2017 paper, which is titled Valentin Nikolayevich Voloshinov documented details of his life and works by two Brazilian scholars,

and I hope I'm pronouncing these correctly, Sheila Vieira de Camargo Grillo, and Ekaterina Volkova, Americo, and again, if I got those wrong, I apologize, that he did research and taught at the Institute of Comparative Histories and of Literatures and Languages of East and West. I'm not sure what city that was in, but the archives, it's like the Russian,

well, I think it's this the Academy of Sciences Archive, if I remember correctly, that's in St. Petersburg, and that's where all the documentation is held, that these two scholars went, they flew over and went through it all physically. And he was apparently quite prolific during his time at this institute, although in English, we only have one of his texts, which is Marxism and the philosophy of language.

So it's just sort of this kind of difficulty of piecing together the life of somebody who died within the last 100 years sort of is a helpful comment on the sort of difference between the impression that the World Wide Web and, you know, the modern Internet has given us that we have, we have access to all knowledge and that we could basically know anything while, and the reality that, you know, there were people who died within the last 200 years that had some sort of standing on all this, and now we're having to do the reconstructive work now of trying to figure out who this person actually was. I've mentioned someone like that from, you know,

almost 2,000 years ago, the Syrian philosopher pseudonisius, who for a long time, people, thought was this guy who was actually mentioned in, I think, the acts of the apostles as somebody who was witnessing Paul speaking. And then it turned out hundreds of years later that he wasn't from that time. He wasn't that guy. He was all made up and nobody knows who he is. But that sort of thing can still happen even now, which sort of should recall us to the fact that, you know, in the development of all, you know, these political trends and stuff, a lot of the people who did individual work, or sorry, important work still to this day and maybe forever will remain more or less anonymous and they're not less for that yeah yeah absolutely so then

the second part of that question how his work fits into the broader context of the world at that time yeah um so you know around um the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century people were really starting to look at at language in the same way um it's not like they were looking at language for the first time uh so a lot of say like plato's dialogues for example are all about language like where do names come from uh you know what's the relationship between this or that proposition and that kind of thing and then aristotle takes it up and gives it a more um you might say scientific character um but in um in uh in in the end of the 19th and early into the beginning of the 20th century uh like with the so surer we're going to talk about you start to get um for one

thing the uh you begin to appreciate the fact that you can learn a lot by languages by comparing them to each other and comparing, say, languages that have a lot of similarities at a certain point of their development and their relationships to languages that preceded them that also share similarities with them. So, like, for example, in one deep dive, we looked at commonalities between Greek and Latin and then sort of some of the antecedent sort of structures, as you want to call it, that they both seem to derive in some way. There's some relationship there between Sanskrit, that they're.

that they both have in common with, which is sort of like an older, older language. And through that, we started to get accounts of different kinds of linguistic structures, and then we started to get people interested in accounts of nonsense sentences.

So one that we've talked about in a prior deep dive is the famous sort of example sentence that analytic philosophers use, which is the present king of France is bald. And the question of whether or not that's a true or false statement. And on the face of it, you can't really answer that question, especially since, you know, there's no longer any King of France.

And so then the task becomes breaking down that sentence to find propositions that are implicit in it and then separating them and finding out, you know, does this sort of compound or complex proposition composed of these more simple propositions actually have a real object? Is it actually there? And if it's not actually either, then this is, in fact, not a real sentence because it has no object to which it correlates. So those are the kinds of debates and inquiries, modes of investigation that Voloshinoff finds himself within, both on the European continent, in Russia and developments in like England and then in North America around the same time as well. And in Austria is another big place. and so he finds almost all of these accounts to be sort of lacking something somewhere along the line

and his way of dealing with that is sort of critiquing them through the logic of Marxism or dialectical materialism. Beautiful. Okay, so we'll recap. Who he was? Hard to find good information. There's multiple sources with conflicting accounts, and it's hard to even find the sources for those sources, and so it is a bit of a shrouded in mystery as to the,

details of his actual lived life. But we know he was a figure. We know that he was operating at this time where although linguistics and the study of language goes back to Plato and Aristotle and perhaps even before them, it really started picking up a new spin in this time. And so there's these questions going around and there is of course Sassor who is somebody that Voloscianov is going to interact with, engage with and be sharpened by. So let's go ahead and move forward. So having set the table as far as his intellectual circumstances and his background, let's zero in on perhaps his most important influence, the Swiss linguist Ferdin de Sassor, whom we have discussed on the show before

and anybody who's ever studied philosophy of language or linguistics has at least heard of. But for those who haven't, who was Sassar and what in Sassur's linguistics motivated Volishinov to develop a dialectical materialist philosophy of language? Yeah, well, so, sir, as you said, he's a Swiss linguist. He was born in 1857, and he died in 1913. And from 1907 to 1913, he gave, I think over repeatedly through those years, he gave lecture series on sort of what's been come to be called, something like structural linguistics.

And in that work, he basically consolidates or brings together concepts that belong to what Voloshenov is going to call two major trends, as he sees them, in thinking about linguistics and the philosophy of language in European and the sort of like Russian context. And I think what Voloshenov sees, and we're going to talk about what these elements are in a second, he thinks that DeSosur doesn't integrate them. with each other properly and sort of leaves the question of their mutual relationship kind of open or left sort of relatively unexamined. And because of that, you kind of end up with a metaphysical dualism, sort of this opposition between these two aspects of language that end up forcing you into a kind of idealist mechanical causal scheme or logical scheme in which one of them sort of has to be the cause of the other, and then they can't both have a sort of causal efficacy in everyday life. And so Voloshinov is going to try to integrate those two

concepts in what he calls a dialectical synthesis, and we can talk about his use of this terminology because we've criticized it before. And although he says that there are many representatives of these two trends that we could talk about, and he does name them like this guy Humboldt, who's a very important figure in these sets of developments. So they're like Vossler, a whole bunch of other people. But the sosor sort of brings them together and the sort of problems with leaving these two sort of strains in thinking about language just to reside just as a pair without seeing how they sort of were both generated together or are constantly generated together. You can end up with like bad idealisms and that can end up being an impediment to, well, understanding, but and that

itself ends up having political consequences. So yeah, are you with me so far there? Yeah, just really quick to recap on the the two concepts that Sussure is sort of creating a metaphysical dualism by Volusinov's interpretation. Can you remind us

what those two concepts are that Volusinov is going to try to unite? Yeah, so in the sussure, this duality consists in what De Sosser in the course in general linguistics. And I should say, too, The course on general linguistics, the text itself, is compiled out of student lecture notes from his lectures.

So we ourselves don't necessarily know how he would have resolved these problems if he had lived like another 20 years because he died in the last year of giving these lectures. So it's not necessarily a complete testament of what he himself thought, but this is where his work sort of ended. And this is the kind of problem we're with. But in the lectures, he identifies what he calls synchronic linguistics and does. diachronic linguistics or diacronic linguistics. And so synchronic linguistics, and we'll get into this a little bit more in depth here, is language as a sort of social phenomenon, if you want to use that word, like taking in a snapshot of time.

So when, well, put it this way, if you were to go back, you know, 800 or 900 years and get dropped into England and to try to speak English to people in the English that we speak now, nobody would understand what you were saying. Correct. Yeah. And so at that time, there were certain sort of like typical formations, sort of patterns that were habitually repeated and sort of commonplace in terms of syntax, grammar, morphology, the acut, the phonology of it, that we don't have now. And so the Sosur says, you can analyze language in this way, or you can also analyze language

from what I call the diachronic point of view, which is sort of language in its development through the actual flow of everyday speech that people have with each other. And Voloshinov's criticism is that due to his prejudices, and I'll talk about those in a second, which come from philology, the SOSOAR ends up prioritizing the synchronic register, which is, ends up being sort of one of the dogmas of structuralism, which is a form of idealism, which states that these sort of abstract structures at any given time are sort of being instantiated through us and have a sort of prior causal efficacy that outstrips our sort of actual linguistic, sort of generative linguistic activity that we engage in with each other all the time,

wherein, you know, you might, in actual linguistic interaction with each other, we make mistakes all the time, there's malapropisms, there's, you know, weird, you know, you meant to say something and it came out as a brunt, like there's all kinds of really messy things. Like even, for example, and just I do it all the time in our episodes, like I was talking about this Canadian subreddit on Reddit called OnGuard for the, and I meant to say it was not totally a reactionary subreddit, but what I actually said it was totally not, which delivers the sort of opposite sense of what I intended. And I went back and reviewed it and I was like, oh, shit.

I just totally, I totally screwed this up. And now people are going to think it's an okay place to go look at when it's just so painfully Canadian and reactionary that you really don't want to look at it too much. But there are some sane voices sort of popping up here and there. And stuff like that happens all the time. Malopropisms are a really big thing in everyday discourse. When we did the episode on The Sopranos,

and you asked me, what is one thing, to recommend or a bunch of things maybe to recommend and I forgot to talk about the malapropisms which are hilarious especially coming from like little Carmine what's his name of Lupertazi where he says shit like they're really

bogged down I think in the war between New York and like Tony's like the DeMayo crew or crime family in New Jersey and they're like they're really sort of bogged down in this conflict and Carmine is so just exasperated and he goes we're in a fucking stagmaya and

he means to say we're caught in this sort of stagnation and we're in a quagmire and he gets the mixed up but you know what he means right or the other one I love that he says is gentlemen we stand at the precipice of an enormous crossroads which is just so ridiculous but you know what he means yeah great writing too is amazing right and it's just just roar when I hear that stuff or what's the one of Tony's telling off Bobby Baggleover he's like you just keep your antidotes to local color. They stopped telling stories. Like back then they stopped.

The other one is not even in the Sopranos. I think we talked about this before, but the Cohen brothers, and specifically in the Big Lobowski, the narrative, the script that they say is a perfect actual mirror of how language actually happens. As compared to most other movies where it's really cleaned up, people don't make these sorts of mistakes in movies often unless you have like a goofy character that's supposed to be portrayed as dumb. But in the Cohen brothers, everybody, everybody.

is constantly talking past each other, over each other, not fully understanding what the other person said, but responding anyway, et cetera. So I always thought that was fascinating, too. Yeah. And on top of that, so much of the dialogue is just a repetition of something somebody else said, but deployed in a slightly different context. And that really sort of, that really sort of captures something very true about everyday speech, right? And so, like, I'm sure it's happened to you. It happens, it's happened to me or I've done this where I just hear something someone said and be like, oh, that sounds kind of cool, and then get an opportunity to deploy it in a slightly different context and the meaning changes slightly, and then you use it, and it's

sort of fun, right? And this is why part of what is involved in, you know, a philosopher of language like Wittgenstein saying that language is sort of a game in a way. And as we go through the episode, I'm going to try to show that, get into that a little bit more when we do the comparison between something like what Voloshinov is doing and something like what an analytic philosopher in the English language like Donald Davidson is doing or someone like J. L. Austin is doing, which actually helps illuminate a lot of the stuff that Volognav is talking about. But go back to the main point. So I think one of Voloshenov's main problems with the socer is that it can't, like if if if if it is correct that de so sur ends up prioritizing these abstract

structures over actual speech, then there's a lot about because like as I said, despite these misunderstandings or despite these recontextualizations, communication still goes ahead somehow in most cases. And then there are misfires and stuff like that, but a lot of time it works. Donald Davidson refers to this as getting away with it, right? We sort of, we end up like sort of passing a baton to each other in discourse. It's sort of like dancing around and everything is jiggling, like atoms in Mollong and changing slightly, and the senses are constantly changing and diverging and all that kind of stuff.

And so Voloshinov is like, look, you can't actually. actually explain language with respect to these abstract structures, which are really just cleaned up from and extracted from the messiness of everyday speech. So you've got to be able to explain them both in order to give a coherent doctrine of linguistic communication and of the individual, the development of the individual psyche as well. And so just to give a little background here, let's see, the two more general trends that Voloshenov thinks are kind of consolidated in this dichotomy that the Socer sets up, he on, let's see, this is on page 48 in my translation of this book, which I think is the only translation available, so it's 48 in the book, where he says these two

trends can be termed individualistic subjectivism in the study of language, and the second can be termed abstract objectivism. And so individualistic subjectivism is in some way or other going to be bound up with the diachronic register, like the flow, the creative, generative flow of language, and abstract objectivism is going to be caught up in this account of language as consisting in abstract, more or less, relatively stable structures that can change over time, but aren't as variable and weird and messy as language taken from the deochronic, the trans temporal, the true temporal kind of standpoint.

But it's also worth saying, and every good dialectical materialist should always make these kinds of qualifications when appropriate. In a footnote, he says, neither of these terms individualistic subjectivism or abstract objectivism, as always happens with terms of this sort,

fully covers the breadth and complexity of the trend denoted. As we shall see, the designation of the first trend is particularly inadequate, we were unable to devise better whatsoever. And so he's sort of trying to keep a good scientifically responsible relationship to the terms that he's using because he knows that there are exceptions. He knows there are cross-pollinations. He knows there are creative projects that he's not able to fit into this, but he sees these as two broad generalities that are floating around and do have a relationship to each

other and do create problems. So he's going to go with these terms, but just be like, let's just remember we should become dogmatic about the terms that we use. So let's oppose word worship, as I've said before. And so the first trend, individualistic subjectivism, as he says on page 48, amounts to, therefore, quote, these four basic principles. One, language is activity. An unceasing process of creation comment in brackets. Here has the Greek word Energea, which is where we get the word energy from, but it's a compound of a prefix like on or N, E.N, or in Greek, epsilon new, with Ergon, which means work. And so the term where we get the word energy from in Greek

means something like, there's this cool, interesting translator of Aristotle named Joe Sachs. He translates Energea as being at work. And so when something is fully engaged in its own Energea, all of its capacities are being realized and its, it's sort of characters being fully developed. So language is an activity, an unceasing process of creation or Energea, realized an individual speech acts. Two, the laws of language creativity are the laws of individual psychology. So comment in the kind of bourgeois sort of psychology that we've been talking about, I think

since the beginning of the deep dives, all sort of societal. causality and the individual causality of, you know, myself or yourself in the world flows uniquely from this sort of inner, I've called it like the you particle, the me particle, this kind of inner metaphysical entity that just draws on the capacities available to them from these abstract structures and language, you might say, which are downplayed on this point and are subordinated to individual creativity. And like our own psyche as linguistically structured is not taken to have anything prior to it causing it to be what it is or multiplicity of things causing it to be what it is. So continuing. Three, the third characteristic of this

individualistic subjectivism, the creativity of language is meaningful creativity analogous to creative art. Four, language as a ready-made product, so Ergon, so the work that's already been none, not Energea, the being at work. As a stable system, lexicon, grammar, phonetics is, so to speak, the inner crust, the hardened lava of language creativity of which linguistics make makes an abstract construct in the interest of the practical teaching of language as a ready-made instrument, end quote. And so this trend called individualistic subjectivism, I would say, and I extend to be corrected on this, but really sort of reaches its peak in around the 18th century in, you know, where we now call Germany and France

and stuff like that. And it's sort of subjective type that appears with it is what's called the genius. And you can see this in stuff like works by like Schiller, for example, Friedrich Schiller, talking about education, which is ultimately for bourgeois elites. And the purpose of education is to foster the genius to let people tackle, like it's almost a precursor of these friggin entrepreneur bros and you know they just it's their creativity that brings all the value to economic reduction like all that kind of stuff and um the kind of ultimate expression of this which is satirical um and and quite ruthless is in mary shelley's novel frankenstein uh where you know victor frankenstein uh is so enamored of his own genius which has been put into him by

these educational forms because he's from elite um that he actually can't recognize things that are actually happening in front of him for what they are. And the real, have you read Frankenstein, by the way, Bres? I have not. Not in my adult life, at least. Everyone should read it. It's phenomenal. She literally wrote it in one night, if I remember correctly, at this writing contest that

her and a bunch of her friends and her husband, like Percy Bites Shelley, they had one night during a Thunderstorm or something, or at least she came up with the draft of it or like the basic core of it in one night. And the real tragedy of Frankenstein is that Victor Frankenstein goes into the creation of this creature on the assumption that this creature will have no agency, that it is merely the extension of Frankenstein's own genius and that its role in the world as this reanimated corpse with a reconstituted mind is simply to be a servant for him or like a servalbot or something like that. And then the horror comes when the creature comes to life and then acts in a very human way. And Frankenstein is not ready for it. And so he rejects the creature and that's what sort of turns it into a monster because all it wants is love and affection and affirmation. And Frankenstein can't come to terms with it because he's so ensconced in the creativity of his own genius.

And so this kind of trend that Voloshinov talks about does consist, this kind of, this sort of bourgeois metaphysics of the individual and its sort of causal efficacy in the world. Now, the second trend that he, that he discusses, abstract objectivism, and I think he gets into this on page 57, he says the outlook of the second trend can, on the whole, end quote, by the way, sorry, can be summarized in the following basic principles. One, language is a stable, immutable system of normatively identical linguistic forms, which the individual consciousness finds ready-made and which is incontestable for that consciousness. Two, the laws of language are the specifically linguistic laws of connection between linguistic signs

with a given closed linguistic system. Comments, so for an example, the alphabet is sort of one example of the relationship that an individual sign has with a larger closed system. Continuing, these laws are objective with respect to any subjective consciousness. Three, specifically linguistic connections have nothing in common with ideological values, artistic, cognitive, or other. Language phenomena are not grounded in ideological motives. No connection of a kind natural and comprehensible to the consciousness or of an artistic kind obtains between the word and its meaning. Four, individual acts of speaking are, from the viewpoint of language, merely fortuitous refractions and variations or plain and simple distortion. of normatively identical forms.

But precisely these acts of individual discourse explained the historical changeability of linguistic forms, a changeability that in itself, from the standpoint of the language system, is irrational and senseless. There is no connection, no sharing of motives between the system of language and its history,

they are alien to one another. And so while he sees both of these trends as having many representatives, they're sort of, again, consolidated in De Socer, and we've talked about the concept of the conceptual persona that DeLuze and Guateri talked about. And so DeSosur kind of becomes in Voloshenov, the conceptual persona of all the developments in these different trends, because it's accessible and sort of easier to deal with. They can be summed up in one person together. And so Voloshenov is going

to say, well, you can't leave these two things just hanging around on their own. That's not scientific. it ends up in incoherence and it ends up with some sort of metaphysical prioritization of one or the other. So we're going to have to dig in and do the dirty work of figuring out what their sort of connection, connecting point is, and how they develop in relationship to one another. All right. So let me try to hyper-simplify it for the recap. So you have Sassur being the top of the peak as far as, you know, modern linguistics

at this time, Voloshinov reacting to Sassur, breaking down. language into, I mean, we can put this a lot of different ways, but maybe, and correct me, step in if I'm wrong with any of this. So, Saur is kind of putting forward this idea of abstract structure behind language, and then also acknowledging that language is a concrete developing process, and these two things are not united in his work. And so in lieu of their uniting, that creates a problem. Well, if these two things do exist and they do make up our understanding of language we have to do the difficult work of trying to find in a dialectical way how they impact each other what their actual concrete relations are these abstract structures

that allow us to have language in the first place that are more or less universal and the concrete particular processes that give language its ability to evolve over time and so Voloshenov is stepping in saying these two things need to be brought together and understood in their relationship. Am I correct in that? Yeah, it's 100% correct. And just to jump in with a further sort of comment, Voloshinov identifies this prejudice in De Socer for prioritizing the abstract sort of systematic aspect of language, what he calls

the Synchronic, as deriving from the practice of philology. And philology, and, you know, people may hear, well, there's a sort of. some sort of analogy between this in philosophy. And so philology means something like the love of words or the love of discourse or something like that. And philology primarily consists in the kind of reconstructive work that I talked about a little bit earlier where we go back and look at the historical documentation available to us of various languages like Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and we're able to sort of make comparative remarks about them and then use those as teaching tools. But as Voloshinov points out, these are all inherently or

oriented towards dead languages. And so the living dimension of them is necessarily left out. And in the wake of 100 or whatever, 150 years, however many years, of this kind of, this form of inquiry and this form of systematization of linguistic understanding for the purposes of teaching and learning other languages, while it is often very useful, it's also kind of dangerous because it can't cope with the living dimension of language. And the thing is, is that it is really useful.

So when I learned Latin and Greek, I learned them according to the sort of categories that are made possible by philology. So I learned different gradical structures like a participle or a geron or all these different kinds of things. What are data cases? What an ablative cases? What an optative? All this kind of stuff. And you can learn a lot. But without the other perspective that language is always in this sort of process of, you know,

is Voloshen, obviously a dialectical generation, you may end up being left in the dark oftentimes. So you may not be able to, and this, you know, this happens to me where sometimes you'll go read a Latin or a Greek text. And there's a formulation in there that's very hard to understand. And there are so few examples of it that no one's actually. been able to assign a kind of a general concept to it because the examples are so few. And that can, you know, compound the illusion that languages are in the first instance, these sort of abstract structures before there are anything else. And so, like, one example of linguistic encounter that can be had on the basis of this

form of learning that can be very confusing is in the original or the, you know, the Greek, the Greek text of the Lord's Prayer. I think this is in the book of Matthew. I'm not saying that to be self-promotional. It's just, I think that's the one it's in. And it's this adjective in what in English is translated as Our Daily Bread. I'm sure you went to Catholic Church. We all know this.

Everyone knows this one. And in Greek, there's this weird word named Epiucion, which is tied to the Greek word for bread. which, oh, I was it, Artaon or something? I can't remember. I've lost it for the moment. And it's, to my knowledge, the only instance of this word in Greek in existence.

And people have been trying to figure out what it means. And it seems like, just from me looking at it, it seems like a compound of the, of an adjectival form of the Greek term Usia, which is translated as something like essence or being, like actual being, being or essence inactivity, compounded with the Greek prefix epi,

which means like we use the term epiphenomenon before. It's like a side effect or something that occurs on top of a real phenomenon. And people haven't been able to conclusively figure out what it actually might have meant or what it actually means. I, you know, one way to look at it is it just means, you know, every day like our participation in, actual material being, is, you know, bread is just part of it. The whole act of being a being is a process of taking stuff in from the world and then, you know, expeling it from your body

and all that kind of stuff. And so it sort of ends up being like, you know, our share in the kind of being of the world is this sort of our portion that we receive every single day, something like that. And so it ends up getting translated into daily bread for a lack of a better possible interpretation or something like that. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, it's really interesting. It's a very weird word. And it's like certainly, you know, modern American sort of forms of Calvinism or that crazy evangelical Jolosteen or even the worst stuff like the Christian dominionists or something like that. They can't, like their theology can't possibly grapple with something like that. Absolutely not. And from the standpoint,

or the way that we tend to be learned we tend to be taught language through these grammatical like these syntactic structures and stuff like that as helpful as they can be as useful as they can be they inherently contain this pitfall because they're mainly meant to deal with dead languages that we have unearthed and reconstructed through our access to documentation and text basically yeah incredibly interesting stuff one thing i did want to say as a side before we move forward is the thing you said about Frankenstein was very interesting. But I think with the emergence of artificial intelligence, that whole Frankenstein story in a generation or two or three or four is going to have a very interesting resonance and a new reinterpretation in light

of generalized artificial intelligence if and when humans come up with it. Because there's so much of the motifs underlying it, especially if it comes out of, I mean, it's a lot of people working on it, but if it comes out of one lab led by one person, that whole genius idea that blocks you off to the subjectivity of the thing you created. It's very interesting how that will sort of have a new paradigm, a new context, that story, that age-old story will have a new context in the age of artificial intelligence. Yeah, I mean, in a way, this is what Battlestar Galactica is about. True. It's very similar to the Frankenstein story. It's when these artificially intelligent robots or whatever revealed to the human masters that they

themselves have interests, material interests and like not being just forced to work for them, the humans can't handle it. And instead of listening to them, there ends up being this war that, you know, down the road ends up destroying their entire civilization. And so there is kind of an echo of the Frankenstein tragedy even in Battlestar, Alaska. So I think, yeah, you're quite correct. Also interesting how underlying technologies really shape language. So like how many new words have just been generated from the internet age and are you know words that would not make sense to anybody in the 70s or 80s but are common parlance today simply because of the mass introduction of the internet as such or in the previous before the internet you had just the

invention of computers and then the computer metaphors people started to think in terms of computer metaphors and so even like the way that many humans think about the human brain as it is a computer is just ways in which the underlying technology of a society shapes and dictates that only generates new language, but shapes the metaphors and the frames in which human beings think about other things. I just think that's interesting and worth noting as well. Yeah. And here I find it's helpful, you know, because take for example the word empire. People really fight over pinning down what the word actually means because it's like, you can't call the United States an empire because it doesn't.

have these certain features of the Roman Empire, which we take to be sort of the archetypal features of any empire because maybe that's the most knowledge of an empire we have access to for a lot of us. And there ends up being this kind of metaphysical debate over whether this imperial formation or that imperial formation best instantiates the abstract concept of empire in the first place. When in reality, right, I think a better image for this comes from Volta Venue means on the concept of history where he's like, we're kind of like that angel in the Paul Clay painting

and we're being blown backwards. Like we go into the future where they're backs facing to it and we're just being blown away by the piled up sort of detritus and all the chaos and fucking tragedy. Oh, sorry, Mom, it's work. A tragedy of history.

And new things keep coming by, right? And they seem to have, you know, important similarities to things that went by before that we called by a certain name. So when they go by in the struggle to be like, what is that? We pick up the word we use for the other thing and throw it into the new thing like it's a dart with a string attached to it. And that way we can sort of keep a hold on it, right? Very interesting, yes. But sometimes that terminology, because it's been applied to more than one object, can seem to not fit the new object correctly.

We end up getting into a fight over the word as the more real thing than the thing we're trying to identify. by using the word, despite the divergences between them, right? Absolutely. And, yeah, we can fall into metaphysical dogmatism by not starting with the right disposition towards terminology relative to things that are actually, you know, flying out of the future into the past over our shoulders as we're going into the future backwards with our back to it. And this is really what, you know, we're Voloshinov is, like, really trying to dig in.

Yeah, a little bit of confusing the menu for the food, if you will. Yeah, 100%. All right. Well, now that we understand sort of Sassur's intervention, the emergence of structural linguistics, but then this metaphysical dualism that Voluschenov is trying to dialectically resolve, we can kind of get now into the crux of Voloshenov's theory itself. So what is the primary message or point of Voloshenov's completed theory? And what are its implications, importantly, for Marxist theory and praxis?

Okay. Okay. So I think the first thing that we should say is that for Voloshinov, there is no question of there being any human psyche whatsoever without the presence of signs. And the concept of a sign is a huge can of worms that, for time purposes, we're not going to dig into super deep right now. But basically, for Voloshinov and for other, like the socer, other, you know, semiologists, Charles Sanders Perce is an American one who's very, very, we could look at him sometime on an episode. His theory of semiotics is very, very interesting, but I won't go into it right now. But basically, a sign is some sort of, it's a material object that can consist in, you know, words written on a surface

or a sign like, you know, oh, this is not opportune right now, but I'll say, you know, like a nuclear hazard sign. Right. Oh, God. And can consist in, you have, visual things, audible things, even things like gestures, like there's a whole host of things

that contribute to a sign. And for DeSocer, sorry, for Voloshinov, the sign is the vehicle of ideology and of the cycle. And for him, the sort of ultimate sign for humanity is the word, or words, right? They're extremely versatile, flexible. They can be redeployed into different contexts, and they can mean very different things for very different purposes.

And sort of that's a starting point. And just to give an example, and I came up with this sample 20 years ago during my master's thesis. And you know that statement that says every life feed from the inside is a statement. failure. Yeah, yeah. Because I came up with this example, I can confidently be exempted from this because it's not a total failure because I came up with this example. So here's an example of how a word can be a sentence in the context of a bunch of gestures and mean two totally different things, even in almost the same moment, but also be useful. And so this comes from the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which is you watch that as a little kid,

and you're like, oh, it's wicked, knock the Nazis at it. And then you get a bit older and you see those movies, you're like, yeah, there's some problems going on here. But just to set those aside for a moment, like they're patronizing portrayal of India. To say the least, yes. Oh, my God. But you know in the scene when they do the mind car chase? Yes. Yeah, and he gets to the end and what happens?

To outrun the dudes in the weird death culture or whatever, he ends, indie snaps off the brake lever of the thing and they can't slow down. And just before he did this, he also knocked out this water reservoir with a shovel, which took out the dudes following them, but unfortunately released this, like, miniature tsunami inside of this mine tunnel. And to try to slow down the mine car before they fly out of the opening at the end, which just like leaves into this opening, there's like a 300-foot sheer drop out of this hole at the side of a mountain, he has to jump out and put his feet on the wheels. and uses shoes like in his feet as the brakes front of the mine car and they slow him they slow the car down to his stop but in doing so they almost like set his shoes on fire because of the friction the old fred flintstone what's that the old fred flintstone break yeah exactly and so he hops off the mine car and he's just limping around with his feet hurting and he's like water water he's like begging what's her name charlie and the little kid short round for some water to cool his feet off

and then he looks up and he sees the wall of water that he's released coming at them and his whole demeanor changes, all that his gestures change, instantly, it's like one second. So he goes from being like, water, water, to go like, water, water, and then they all have to run away, right? And so there's a one word sentence that means two totally different things in virtually the same moment of time and is useful in like two different ways. Nice, nice. And this is the kind of thing that he's talking about. And I'll give an example just from here in my hometown, because, you know, we have here in Newfoundland, historically a non-standard English that we, for the most part, don't really speak anymore, which, you know, was composed of loan words from like Irish, Mekma, Biafic, Portuguese, French,

all these different languages, and then there's some English in there, too, but, you know, it is what it is. And so where I come from growing up, or still today, people, instead of saying, where are you, or what are you doing? I'll say, what are you at? And my friends and I had this game over the years of sort of progressively abbreviating this question, what are you at?

Ended up being like, you at, when you text each other, when you come home for Christmas. And then I got shirt into just one word, which is a whole sentence and a question without a question mark and it's just the word YAT. Yes. And it's just sort of this progressive condensation of this full sentence, this fully articulated sentence

with a question mark at the end. of it. And when we say it out loud to each other, there's not even the upward intonation of a normal case, just, yeah. And that counts as a question, right? And so these kind of signs, they can differ wildly and sort of refer to the same thing, despite differences in intonation and stuff like that. So that's why what Voloshinoff is really interested in getting into is words as signs and their sort of genesis, their generativity, or their generation through the dialectic, their generativity of social interaction and the sort of changeability and the weird paradox of sort of sameness is coming through the variability, if I can put it that way.

Interesting. So, yeah, go ahead, sorry. So he's, and then, so therefore he says that the sign material of the psyche, because it's processed through our bodies in a socially, socially structured situation. The sign of the material of the psyche is any organic activity or process, breathing, blood circulation, movements of the body, articulation, inner speech, mimetic motions, reaction to external stimuli, for example, light stimuli, and so forth. In short, anything and everything occurring within the organism can become the material of experience, since everything can acquire semiotic significance and can become expressive, end quote.

And so this is important for his account of the relationship between base and superstructure because the sort of bridging phenomenon or whatever you want to call it, the bridging factor between the base and the superstructure is literally the organic body of the human being, which is a social being in a socially structured situation. Yeah. So that's heavy stuff. But let me summarize some of the key points. of his theory and let me know, like, you didn't necessarily say every single one of these,

but this is some stuff I got offline to try to condense it and help people understand. This idea that language allows consciousness to arise. Like language itself is fundamental to the experience of consciousness. Am I right about that? Yes. Language itself is a, as you were just talking about as an activity or a process, language itself is, it represents a material reality? Yes, that's correct.

And that we have to study verbal interaction if we want to. to understand social psychology? Yes, that's correct, yeah. Yeah. So those are some of the main pillars of his linguistic theory, right? Yeah, that's 100% correct. And so therefore where he kind of differs, for example, from, say, what he calls individualistic subjectivism, he says that instead of linguistic expression coming from this inward

almost like, you know, quasi-plotonic self that draws on the abstract realm of ideas in its own, you know, in the best case is genius and expressing the mat word in the world and this act of pure creativity, Voloshenov is saying, yeah, we do generate meaning sort of like that, but it's in the context of, again, a socially structured situation, which, again, or in turn, is itself a function of or occurs within a mode of production. And so he's, so verbal interaction is the sort of main concept of his account of language generation. And he's going to say that this accounts for both the internal experience of oneself as a self, which he calls an I experience, and also the quote unquote external experience of oneself as a social being, a social subject, which he calls the we experience.

And he's actually going to say that in a very real way, the I experience. is itself a specialized form of the we experience. And so even the personal individual self is a collective production in a way. And he's going to get an interesting little sort of not quite a case study, but a sort of thought experiment or an account that he gives to try to explain what he means here

comes between page 88 and I think page 90 of the Marxism and the philosophy of language. And if you don't mind, I'll just read from it, if that's okay. Go ahead. Okay. So let's start a little bit more. So he says, with regard to the potential and sometimes evenly distinct addressee, so if you comment, what he's saying is that, you know, when we're engaged in the eye experience,

in a way we address ourselves as another in a way, when you're engaged in internal discourse with yourself. And then when you're speaking in a social situation, the addressee is the other person there with you. Continuing, a distinction can be made between two poles, two extremes between which an experience can be apprehended and ideologically structured tending now toward the one, now toward the other. Let us label these two extremes, the eye experience and the we experience. The eye experience actually tends toward extermination. The nearer it approaches this extreme limit, comment. So he means the nearer it approaches what Wittgenstein might call say a perfectly private

language, a language which you have created just for yourself, which has no relationship to any other language whatsoever or no relationship to your social embeddedness and the mode of production or which gives rise to a certain form of life, as Wittgenstein would say, continuing. So the more the nearer it approaches its extreme limit, the more it loses its ideological structuredness and hence its apprehensible quality, reverting to the physiological reaction of the animal. In its course towards this extreme, the experience relinquishes all its potentialities, all outcroppings of social orientation, and therefore also loses its verbal delineation. Single experiences or whole groups of experiences can approach this extreme, relinquishing in doing

so their ideological clarity and structuredness and testifying to the inner ability of the consciousness to strike social roots. The we experience is not by any means a nebulous herd experience. It is differentiated. Moreover, ideological differentiation, the growth of consciousness is in direct proportion to the firmness and reliability of the social orientation. The stronger, the more organized, the more differentiated the collective in which an individual orients himself, the more vivid and complex his inner world will be, a comment. And this is, for example, do you have an increasing amount of socialist media going on in which people are offering their different takes about this or that concept or whatever in theory that may differ from each

other or be at odds with each other because it sort of gives us an example or gives us a means to sort of strengthen ourselves as people all approaching this from different angles and finding different things that we encounter when we get into it. Continuing, the we experience allows of different degrees and different types of ideological structuring. The comments, and now he's going to give you a concrete example in three different instances. Continuing, let us suppose a case where hunger is apprehended by one of a disparate set of persons, hungry persons, whose hunger is a matter of chance, the man down in his luck, the beggar, or the like.

The experience of such a day-class-A loner will be colored in some specific way and will gravitate towards certain particular ideological forms with a range, potentially, potentially quite broad. Humility, shame, enviousness, and other evaluative tones will color his experience. The ideological forms along the lines of which the experience would develop would be either the individualistic protest of a vagabond or a repentant mystical resignation. Let us now consider suppose a case, rather, in which the hungry person belongs to a collective where hunger is not haphazard and does not bear a collective character, but the collective of these hungry people is not itself, or sorry, and does bear a collective character, pardon me,

but the collective of these hungry people is not itself tightly bound together by material ties, each of its members experiencing hunger on his own. This is the situation both peasants are in. Hunger is experienced, quote, unquote, at large, but under conditions of material disparateness, in the absence of a unifying economic coalition, each person suffers hunger in the small, enclosed world of his own individual economy. Such a collective lacks the unitary material frame necessary for united action. A resigned but unashamed and undemining apprehension of one's hunger will be the rule under such conditions.

Quote, everyone bears it, you must bear it too, end of course. Here grounds are furnished for the development of the philosophical and religious systems of the non-resister or fatalist type early Christianity or Tolstoyanism. A completely different experience of hunger applies to a member of an objectively and materially aligned and united collective, a regiment of soldiers, workers in their association within the walls of a factory, hired hands on a large-scale capitalist farm, finally a whole class once it is matured to the point of class unto itself. The experience of hunger this time will be marked predominantly by overtones of active and self-confident protest with no basis for humble and submissive intonation. These are the most favorable grounds for an experience to achieve ideological clarity and structuredness. All of these types of expression, each with his basic intonations, come rife with corresponding terms and corresponding forms of possible utterances. The social situation in all cases determines which term, which metaphor, and which form may develop in an utterance expressing hunger out of the particular intonational bearings of the experience, end quote.

So what he's saying here is that, and he uses this term a lot, is that language doesn't simply reflect, reflect reality in the way that many Borswa philosophers have assumed, which is that they don't understand the genesis of the categories that they rely upon and just assume that all the attitudes that they bring to the table just reflect like what's already there. And here what he's saying is that not all hungers are the same. different kinds of hungers belong to express different material realities that involve different forms of organization of the people having that experience. And so in the case of just people who've been thrown into pure chaos, just say in like the novel I've talked about, The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, where these people, you know, find them thrown into this crazy world, well, that we're basically going into now because of climate change, where people, you know, people find themselves thrown into this crazy world, well, that we're basically going into now because of climate change, where people. people will be taken out of all different circumstances and put to the test, right, is very different than hunger experienced in a situation where people recognize their class or become class conscious, recognize their common interests, and organize around dealing with that hunger as a social problem that comes out of capitalism. And so he's saying

that language isn't a reflective medium. It's a refractory medium. And therefore, it just doesn't bounce back what's out there. It also kind of bends it. And it also discovered, is that what is out there isn't solely out there. It's also in here inside each of us. And what is inside each of us is not just solely inside of each of us. It's also coming in from out there. And then it sort of starts to break down the distinction between the inside and the outside, which is something I pointed out multiple times as a sort of feature of the

insights of dialectical materialism. It's more of a prism than a mirror. Yeah, exactly. And so basically like metaphysical schemes consist in the idea of, idea that thoughts in reality are perfectly isomorphic to each other. And then when you cognize something, you're just activating an abstract linguistic category or like a platonic form that was just inside you that got activated and actualized because it ran into the object that it corresponds to. But what someone like Voloshinov is going to say that it's much, much more complicated

than that, and is bound up with class struggle and is bound up with material conditions, without being just reducible to them. And like a economist sort of like base reductionist. sort of way right right right yeah so like yeah just to kind of revisit that idea very quickly i brett am hungry i'm hungry because i was hiking in the woods by myself i got lost so now my hunger means a certain thing in that context me completely isolated in a situation in which you know my hunger is just like an animalistic individual situation then there's me in a broader society we're going through the second great depression in four years or whatever and uh all of many Americans, working Americans, are hungry, but we're all kind of doing the stiff upper lip thing.

We all have to deal with it, you know, buck up and get through it. And then there's the other element of actually there's a socialist movement in my country. The capitalist government has completely failed. The same exact hunger pain that I felt in the forest or in the Great Depression 2.0 is present, the same perceptual sensation. but its meaning and it's linguistic articulation and even the way I understand it ideologically is going to radically transform based on the fact that there is a robust socialist movement

of which I'm a part and we can actually be aware of ourselves as a class take class action to confront those causing our hunger in the first place. And so the same hunger is present in all three scenarios but all of the experience of that hunger is changed through the prism of language to have new meanings. Is that a good summary?

Yeah, and sort of the key point is that, yeah, there's not just differences in sort of like your perceptions or your sort of take on what's happening. It actually grows out of actual material changes that are actually happening. Like you said, like it's much different to be alone in the Great Depression 2.0 than it is to be actually coordinated with other people. who share interest with you and or be like actively working towards different ways of trying to address the problem, whether it's through the development of policies in your party line,

if you're involved in an organization or forms of direct action you might take in response to a particular problem that's facing you in your community at this or that time. So it is, it breaks down the idea that like I've said before, language is something that's over here on this sort of categorical divide that fundamentally bifurcates all of reality and the objects which language talks about are something over there in a sort of nature that exists in and of itself totally separately from our consciousness. And so Voloshenov really makes an advancement, I think, in the late 20s in Marxist theory by attending to exactly what someone like Lenin says, like Engels didn't attend to quite enough in terms of articulating, not just the same,

that dialectics accounts for the laws of, you know, thought or cognitive genesis or psychological genesis, but he doesn't actually analyze it and therefore ends up prioritizing a sort of consciousness that's taken in the aggregate as just a self-containing thing. And the only kind of place where like real change and transformation or dialectical genesis is really happening is on the side of things, for example. And Voloshinov, I think, Yeah, he sort of is blazing the trail here, and he sets up the possibility of somebody like Louis Althasier in that essay that I've mentioned, contradiction and interpretation. He really takes this logic as far as it can go or tries to push it as far as it can go and comes up with a lot of really interesting insights that itself come out of Engels' observation, even though, as Lenin says, he doesn't analyze it as fully as he could have or should have maybe in the works that Lenin is discussing. Yeah, so Al-Azer really gets into the problem of, the effectivity of the superstructure,

that it's not just an inner thing that is just merely a reflection of the base. And like Stalin in that paper, we read a deep diver two ago, talks about it too. And he says, you know, the superstructure is very interested in maintaining its base. And there may be a new superstructural productions that are very interested in getting rid of that base and promoting another kind of economic base. And, you know, just we talked about this yesterday. There was an interesting video that just came out by Prolacult about this, and they try to do a certain analysis of the superstructure,

and there's an assertion in there or an argument in there that by saying, you know, Engels and Alterser follows him in this. He's just, like Engels says, all we're trying to say is that in the last, instance, the economic base is what prevails. And in the proletcolophilio, and again, I don't want to, I had to read the book that they talk about for the sort of the final resolution of this problem and have to read, I think there's another article. So I don't want to say too much about that because no investigation, no right to speak. But just in the simple claim that Engels's point doesn't really clarify anything, like the whole thing about the base in the last

instance, I think is actually quite clarifying in a pretty simple way. And all he's trying to say is that, look, if these organic, socially structured economic situations that were in, and remember for like Marx and Engels, the concept of the economy in the first place means our sort of metabolic interaction with the earth that we keep, you know, we come out of and we keep drawing on it to keep living, you know, and capitalism doesn't understand that. If we, that stops, everything else stops. There is no more super structural production going on because there's no more, we don't have, there's no more eardrums, there's no more brains, you know, there's no more lungs, there's no more tongues, there's no more, there's no more skulls, which are sort of like

a resonance chamber for all this, there's no more eyes, there's no more hands, there's no more nothing, right? And it's sort of like if our life, as we know it on this earth stops, there's no more question of the superstructure. And I think that's kind of what, what angles means. And if, you know, anyone still finds that confusing, here's an experiment to try. Try not breathing for the whole rest of the day and engaging in super structural production. See how it goes. Right. So, yeah, there's just a very elegant sort of solution to that problem, which is really just, and this is why you and I both recommend meditative practices and things like that.

It's just turning back to the actual situation that you're in and paying attention to what's actually going on in and outside of your body, I guess. Absolutely. And for that pro cult or prolecult video you mentioned, this will actually come out right after we play that audio on our show. So I reached out to them. I really like what they do. I think it's very interesting. It's really principled. It's really in depth.

So I was like, you know, I'd love to promote your channel. And so that base superstructure little video essay they did, we got the audio for it. We've probably already put it out by the time you're hearing this. And it's only like 15 minutes long or anything. So if you want to go check that out, you absolutely can. My take on it is what they're trying to do is complicate this idea of base and superstructure such that Marxists don't fall into an overly simplistic, undern nuanced interpretation of what exactly that means. And so by complicating the picture and offering these different takes on it, we can deepen our relationship to the actual problems that the base superstructure scheme can throw up for us to deal with as Marxists. So if you're interested, check that out.

Is there anything else you want to say on this front before we move on? Well, just to follow up on that, even though I just stated that I'm not sure if there are, there are some, I think there are some claims that I might not be able to sign on to or sign on with pending future investigation. I think it's really good what they did. I think that's a really cool video and the way that they ended the video, but you're saying the whole point of this is to foster further discussion. And I think that that is one sort of indication of potentially a maturing socialist media environment, getting away from. the kind of bloodthirsty attitude that people have to each other about these matters on Twitter or on Reddit or whatever, where it's a more charitable way of dealing with possible disagreements. So I really salute them for putting out that video.

Totally, totally agree. Totally agree. All right. So let me ask you this before we move on, because I saw this in some of the summaries of Voloshinov's work, and we're talking about what the crux of his theory is. Is one way to put it in very simple terms or one aspect of his theory? is that, and we've gotten at this in so many different ways, but that, you know, language is the medium of ideology. So this is where he takes linguistics and combines it with Marxism, because

the idea of, you know, the notion of ideology, how we understand it, is a Marxist concept. And so he's combining these two things, and thus you get something like a Marxist, you know, linguistics. And so that combination, I think, is important to understand his overall theory as well. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and move on. we're coming up on 90 minutes we can go a little over it's fine there's a couple more questions here we want to definitely address so some listeners may know that the philosophy of language especially the variety known as analytic philosophy of language was extreme or analytic philosophy in general was extremely influential in anglo-american academia throughout the 20th century and to some

extent into the 21st figures like ludwig vittgenstein and donald davidson certainly come to mind here. So can you comment on various similarities and various differences between Voloshinov's work and the philosophies of language taught in Western academia today and for the last several decades? Yeah. So I think early, early in its development, as I've said a few times now, analytic philosophy consisted first and foremost in the analysis of verbal propositions, sentences, which for many thinkers really break down to concatenations of what are called, some people call existence statements, which basically consist in the proposition. There is an X.

So an American, I think he's American. Yeah, J.L. Austin, I'm going to talk about in a second. And he says that this kind of statement is a con-stative statement is just sort of like, yeah, they're positing the existence of something. And for this sort of more early analytic philosophy for some of these thinkers, inside every descriptive statement about something is implicitly the statement that that thing exists in the first place. And then they get into, like the example I used earlier with the present king of Francis Bald, they get into the question of whether or not the objects being talked about actually exist. But then, and I think this really starts to kick into gear with Wittgenstein, the whole theory of the proposition as being fundamental to all language starts to get called into question, right? So Gottlob Frege, who's sort of considered maybe the first analytic philosopher, it's also a horrible anti-Semite, apparently. So, you know, that sucks.

he said that all thoughts are basically sentences and all sentences are basically sort of existence statements fundamentally which is there is an ax and then we build up all descriptions out of these sort of existence statements. But then, you know, in Dickenstein, his first book The Tractatus Logical Philosophicus from I think 1920 or 21, if I remember correctly, he writes sort of, you know, Birchon and Russell says this is the apotheosis of all these investigations

And he even said, you know, Wittgenstein has solved all the problems of philosophy, and that's, it's over. Philosophy's over. And Wittgenstein was talking to his friend. I think it was, I think his name was Mario Sri Rafa or something. I think he was a Marxist economist or something or had something to do with Gramsci. I can't remember quite the whole story. It's been so long. And they were arguing over whether the fundamental form of all linguistic expression is that of the proposition, which is based on the existence statement there as an X.

and seraphah he did that thing where you like he kind of I think it's where you bite your thumbnail at someone and sort of an early like early modern kind of way of giving some of the finger if you want to put it that way

and he asked Vickenstein what's the propositional form of that and Vickenstein was like shit and then he had to go back and redo his whole philosophy and we've talked about his sort of mental health struggles

his buddy didn't do him too many favors I don't think. And it ended up being like, oh, shit, well, that means that language, and I've said before, it's more than just propositional. It's also gestural. And if that's the case, then it has to be bound up in these forms of prior coordination, which must have an evolutionary history in which even gestures have some sort of signification for us, right? Or as we talked about in the documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, even leaving behind a mark of your handprint can be some sort of signification for somebody else. And with that kind of turning point,

Wittgenstein creates a trajectory with analytic philosophy. The other sort of major trajectory I think is represented by this guy, Rudolph Carnap, and that's a can of worms. I'm not going to get into right now, but it's very interesting. He starts to, yeah, like getting into the question of language as something that's generated out of or out of an inconsistency with or in conjunction with or as part of or whatever you want to call it, with a form of life. And then that calls into question in its own way the idea that language can possibly be based on these abstract structures, which are more or less immutable,

which are taken up in the 20th century and sort of referred to as conventions as a way of making the concession to the fact that they, too, are temporal phenomena, but doesn't go into, don't go into the same depth of the question of their generation like Voloshanov does. And out of that, you get somebody like Donald Davidson, who I, to me, he's my favorite in this whole trajectory, I would say, because he's just, he's really charitable towards other philosophers, other philosophical styles and ways of doing things. And he's a very good listener. And it's also pretty funny and very, very creative. And he ends up in this essay called a nice derangement of epitaphs. I can remember what you hear this is from. He ends up saying that my argument is that there is that there really.

is no such thing as a language if a language is what many linguists and philosophers have imagined them to be. And so jumping back to Milashinov, we might say either the individualistic subjectivism of saying that language is just purely an unmoored, purely self-generative, creative thing that comes out of each individual self, which the view of which itself, I think, is tied up in what we called postmodernism, for example, or that language, humans well or poorly instantiate these abstract kind of quasi-flatonic ideal structures and objects that underpin the messiness of everyday language that we live in every single day and that we see reflected in forms of art, such as the Big Lebowski. And so Davidson then gets called out by his buddy Michael

Dummeth, who's an interesting, an English philosophy, a philosopher of language. And this is another one of those cases in philosophers talking past each other, where he says, Davidson said there's no such thing as a language. What the hell is up with that? And then Davidson has the right of rebuttal being like, that's not what I said. I said, there's no such thing as a language if it means these sorts of things. And then he gets to do an examination of how it is that people do actually interpret each other. And he, you know, you might look at the big Lobowski as an or sort of a curated artistic example of this, it's like, despite all the misunderstandings and re-contextualizations and weird linguistic screw-ups that happen, communication still has

happened somehow. And, like, are we really going to overburden our understanding of these interactions with the idea that speakers bring to them this abstract sort of comprehensive theory of interpretation, which itself is based on an implementation. or explicit understanding or theory about the abstract linguistic structures that we instantiate in speech. He's like, that's just way too top-heavy. So we need to come up with a much more light theory of how interpretation takes place. And then so Voloshin, I'm sorry, Davidson then has recourse to what you might call the triangulation theory, which is that there is no question of the language without at minimum two speakers and sort of a domain of practical interaction.

that we call the world in which they find themselves in respect of which they have to coordinate based on their own socially structured, biologically structured sort of being that they share together. And he's like, we really need to disburden ourselves of all of this top-heavy abstraction. And even in the idea that we bring a sort of comprehensive theory of understanding to the table with us whether or not we know it and just come up with a more like on the fly kind of way of thinking about how we strategically interpret each other. And I find it very, very interesting because this comes very, very close to what Voloshenov is saying. And now as for the differences, I think that, you know, for a lot of Marxists on the surface

of it, you might run into someone like Davidson and be like, well, he's not talking about the mode of production, so therefore this isn't really worth looking at. And it's true that they don't really talk about the mode of production per se. But I think the interesting thing that they really do, that Voloshinov doesn't do, and this is neither, this is not a knock-on Velasianoff or anything, is that someone like Davidson is trying to account for linguistic activity or speech activity, verbal interaction that can account not for just all the major modes of production that Marx identifies, but also, you know, societies that existed before class struggle, before class distinctions and the mode of the productions that are based on that, like, you know,

hunter-gatherer societies. So he's trying to come up with a theory of interpretation that can apply to any kind of society, whether it's class-based or not, which is very interesting and worth thinking about and can enhance the understanding that you can gain out of some like Velaschinov. Absolutely. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Before, we're going to move on next to some Soviet thinkers that carried forward Velaschino's legacy. Before we do that, just as, again, to kind of like toss a little, you know, buoy

out into the ocean for our listeners who might feel like they're getting further and further away from the boat if you could uh can you boil down um having said all everything that you've said kind of boil down volishinov's main contribution to the philosophy of language to linguistics into marxism in like a sentence or a sentence or two like what were what made him different what what new thing if you could boil it

all down into a simple sentence or two was voloshinov's main contribution uh to the realm of linguistics um I think that maybe the main one is the contribution that he's made to the debate about the relationship between base and superstructure, and he locates it, you know, just jumping off of stuff that I read earlier, in the actual concrete, everyday life of us as organic bodies as part of a social species. And in doing so, and while it's not bad to find what you might call a bridging, like an abstract bridging concept. that in verbal concepts can try to explain the relationship between base and superstructure, but he offers you the avenue to looking at it another way, which is simply to return to practice itself, and through practice itself, think about the relationship between base and superstructure, because one of the complicated things about the concept of the base superstructure relationship

is that depending on how restricted you want your scope of the superstructure to actually be, the base superstructure distinction itself is a superstructural item. And so you can end up inadvertently, if you don't maintain that the base, if I can use it that way, of your own actual everyday practice of being a social being, you can end up having to resort solely to verbal formulations, and that can end you up in sort of infinite regress of trying to make the right distinction. Oh, this is the wrong word, this is that. Whereas what Voloshinov does is sort of bring you back to your body, which is itself kind of a social artifact

and just get you to think to actively think about that stuff just in itself by paying attention to what's actually going on around you. So while it's good, like what Prolacult, for example, seem to be trying to do is come up with verbal bridging concepts for people to help understand this stuff.

And as I've said, that's a great contribution. What Voloshenov offers is a different kind of bridge which involves going back to yourself in a way, if I can put it that way. Okay. So, as I was saying before that, Velaschinov's work definitely has echoes in later Soviet philosophy. So which key Soviet thinkers carried forward of Voloshenov's legacy and how exactly did they carry it forward? Mm-hmm. Well, bearing in mind that, you know, I'm still learning about this whole sphere of Soviet thinking, and here I'm thinking of stuff from more the later 20th century. Two names that really jump out for me are V.A. Lectorski and this other

guy, Aval Dili Enkov, and VA Lectorski put out a book in 1980 called Subject Object Cognition, and he really fully takes up to the question of the philosophy of language and directly gets into Anglo-American analytic philosophy from a Marxist standpoint. So he talks about like W.V. O'Kline, who was Donald Davidson's teacher. I don't know if he gets into Davidson. I don't know if he had access to that stuff by 1980. and he assesses the good things and the sort of short from a Marxist standpoint, the sort of shortcomings of like, for example, Quine's account of language and in a systematic

principled way shows what, you know, we might be able to accept about it and what we might be able to or what we might have to criticize and not accept about it. And he gets really into the philosophy of science and the question of specifics, what he calls the special sciences, so like chemistry, biology, physically. like that, all the different particular scientific spheres of the quote-unquote hard sciences. And it comes up with a really compelling account of what the relationship is between Marxist philosophy, between the idea of Marxism as a kind of scientific project, and between what most people would basically accept as these sciences, as actual scientificity,

because, you know, the question of whether our Marxism as scientific has often been disputed by people. And Ilyenkoff has a really interesting thing that I think, you know, can be ultimately in some way or other trace back to what Voloshenov is trying to do, which is where he then tries to come up with a non-idealist concept of ideal objects. And I'll just repeat that, a non-idealist concept of ideal objects. So what he means is sort of more abstract objects. And what he really shares with someone like Voloshenov is that he locates the genesis of abstract ideal objects in concrete, social practice in the kind of dynamic that Voloshenov talks about. And what I find really interesting about that is that it kind of, again, for people who might be prone to, and many Western Marxists are prone to this, getting into a sort of base, like a base reductionism or

an economism where they just say, well, these things just aren't real. Ilyenko says, well, they are real, but they're material. And this touches on the stuff I've said before about a materialism of the incorporeal. And he says, and Lectorski does, he calls them non-observables. What I call incorporeals, he calls non-observables. And he and Eli Enkov provide a materialist account of incorporeal objects that they, that they call ideal and end up being able to, like mathematical objects, for example, like the concept of a triangle or the concept of a mathematical set or something like that. So it kind of makes ideal objects safe for Marxist analysis without and giving us ways to avoid becoming idealist about ideal concepts. So ideal things, ideal objects are generated through

social practice. They do have a degree of abstraction and sort of portability because of that, but they are nonetheless material phenomena is kind of a clumsy word, but they are material phenomena. And they are constantly every single day, all the time, generated by us and everyone around us through social practice, through the residence chambers that are our heads and the sinus cavities and the eardrums and the vocal chords and the you know all the rest of it the voice box um and they're constantly being reproduced every way but there are constant divergences and convergences going on like we may spend all of our time with people we know and you have a pretty stable vocabulary for each other but then you might meet a new person they may say something

that you've never heard before and you've got to scramble to catch up and try to suss out what it means and that may involve asking them what they mean or you may be able to sort of like you get a glean on what they mean. And this is where I think like this sort of trajectory in the Marxist way of dealing with the questions of philosophy of language actually become quite close to the analytic, Anglo-American questions about philosophy of language and linguistics. I see, interesting. So in summary, and also, go ahead. Sorry to interrupt, but Ily Ankoff puts that stuff to really good use in developing theories about pedagogy and education. And so if and when we eventually talk about Nadeezda Kuzkaya's theories of education,

I'm going to probably bring in Ilyenko, because he sort of picks up some ends of that, which are quite interesting. Nice. Okay, so Ily Enkov is really rooting his analysis in concrete social practice and develops a materialist account of incomporial objects, ideal objects, as you said earlier. And that is how he takes forward Volusinov's contribution. And then Lectorski is engaging with, you know, Quine and other analytics. philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition from a Marxist perspective and seeing what we can

pull from them and what we have to dismiss from them. And in that way, carries forward the Marxism of Voloshenov when it comes to linguistics and the philosophy of language. Is that fair? Yeah, that's 100%. Absolutely. All right. Very interesting stuff. And I think the best way to conclude, as we always do with these difficult, often heady, cerebral, philosophical deep dives is some reflections on what it all means for us in terms of both formal organizing and everyday life with other people and perhaps even with ourselves when we are in solitude. So, you know, the way that I would sum up this is what can we take away from Voloshenov's thinking as revolutionaries and human beings today? Yeah, I think, well, I mean, one thing, you know, like I had some friends over the other night. I hadn't seen him many years since I moved home.

And just as a side note, or maybe this will become a main note, it's, you know, these are all people, we're all around the same age, so like early 40s. And all of a sudden, because shit is going so crazy, they're interested in hearing for me about socialism and communism and organizations and stuff like this. And up until now, you know, like I said to my friend Dominic the other night, If you had told me 20 years ago that there would be an increasingly healthy and robust socialist media environment started, you know, in 20, not starting, but like, you know, in this year of our lower of 2022, I would have told you you're nuts.

I wasn't a dumer back then, but I was like, I just can't see it. It just, you know, it just seems so overwhelming. American Empire seems so just incontestable. What's that? Hegemonic, internally and external. Hegemonic. It just seems like, you know, I believe that. things will will be worked out of but I just right now I can't see it and you know for a long time

now most of what's been going on in the developing so-called you know what a quote-unquote left or whatever in North America has been on the internet a lot of it I don't know if you would you agree with that or that most of what's happened in the recent years of the development of the US left has been on the internet yeah and like in the last year or two it seems like you know we're here there's more unionization actions there's more talking about these things in person. There's more, you know, different, interesting outlets like multipolarista or breakthrough news or whatever.

And but to the extent that a lot of left discourse has been on Twitter, been on discussion boards or been on Facebook or whatever, a lot of the conflicts consist in fights over the meanings of words and people become very antagonistic with each other. based on these differences around words. And because so much of the discourse has taken place online, people, it seems you see more and more of this attitude, or maybe I should say now, it seems like hopefully there's like less and less of this attitude,

people being like, well, you know, there's this theoretical contradiction, therefore there's no possibility of working with each other, and we can't work, you know, I'm not going to work with them, screw it, you know. And we end up because there's a perceived, or perceptible theoretical contradiction, which is antagonistic, from our standpoint, we automatically assume that any practical relationship will also automatically consistent in antagonistic contradiction. And what Voloshinop can help you with is sort of loosening that perception,

which loosens like anxieties that we have. And a concept that he uses here that's very helpful is that every word in actual social practice has sort of revolving around it, if I can put it that way, what he calls a theme. And he says a theme is sort of depending on the different kind of sphere of social interaction that you're in is kind of like the more or less explicitly stipulated contents of the word in the context of that social practice. And he's like, once you actually start to understand that every word is infused with an I call theme, which is bigger than the particular content of the word in the way that you're using it, you can start to analyze the theme, and then you can try to

work out the meaning that a person from a different kind of tendency might be bringing to the usage of that word. So it can offer you, like the sort of logic of dealing with the stuff that Voloshinoff can offer you, I think can actually help with organizing because it can help sort of draw down some of the tendencies that we see in the Western left of people that's really touchy and really like, oh, bouncing off each other because of misunderstandings that can, I think, be resolved if we have the techniques for being patient and well that you know we have the techniques uh analytical techniques that allow us to be patient to allow us to cultivate patients to allow us to cultivate humility about our own tendencies and prejudices in language and to try to be better

listeners i guess and through that be better organizers yeah very well said i i think with your to your point about the left and its relationship with online in the last decade or so is i think there's like ebbs and flows i think like um like in 2020 for example or even around trump when trump first got elected there was a real spilling offline onto the streets real people getting involved in organizing etc these moments where that becomes possible and people uh jump for it but then there's also these moments that we've had over the last several years of like reaction of of you know anti left wing shit of of fascists taking the streets or reaching a high point or taking over the discourse and I feel like when those things happen when it gets tough out there

there is like a sort of retreat um by people on the left to online you know like when we feel like the the the the winds are no longer at our back but in our face um and you know organizing becomes harder in that context there can be a retreat onto the internet where you know these differences then get over emphasized and the dysfunction and errors and distortions can propound. And I think in this like right, rightest deviationist stuff that we've been talking about lately, a lot of that is the cultural winds have shifted in favor of reaction, especially during the Biden, you know, period. That is where the, the winds seem to be going. And people who are online completely divorced from on the ground organizing or any sort of embeddedness within a community or actual material in the real world political project, you retreat on, you know, back to the online. environment where you're much more easily, I think, swayed, convinced of different ideas, prone to various deviations and errors, because you're just in the free-floating algorithmically structured space of the internet with no accountability to any community

or organization. And so I think this ebb and flow of when the left feels like it's on its back foot, more presence on the internet, you know, and less presence in the streets. Whereas when the left feels these brief and, you know, rare, moments of being able to put our feet forward, there is a more robust engagement with like actual organizing, more people are looking for opportunities to get involved in their communities, et cetera. So I think that's interesting. And it's only going to continue to be the case, I think, in the years, because the internet is, is such a ubiquitous part of all of

our lives. And young lefties right now, you know, 18, 19, 20 year olds who are getting introduced to leftist politics have almost completely engaged with it through the prison. of the internet for better or worse, and that might create interesting problems or issues or things we have to deal with going forward for an entire generation whose entire political identity in some cases have been constructed solely from their engagement online and not from any real world practice and what that does to a movement over time. You know, it's an interesting thing we're going to have to keep our eye on for sure. Yeah, and it's not just the nature of how people interact. So like, you know, Twitter, as I've said, you know, Marshall, include the medium

as the message, right? Twitter is all about these little, like, da-da-da-da-da, like, you know, very just little snipey, right? It's not the same thing as an articulate, you know, like a meeting where like, you know, communists in the CPC in Mao's era, like sitting around tables with like huge piles of paper and all these books and everyone's working assidually through the tax, assiduously through the tax and conferring with each other and all that kind of stuff. It kind of forces you into inarticulateness. But then there's also, concepts you know just slang that gets thrown around on the internet that sometimes starts out as a joke and then ends up being misused as a tool of analysis and i've heard you complain about this before

it's the word based right where it's like based right yeah yeah and people you know and i think that started with with trump supporters being like the based orange meme i didn't call him or they wouldn't do that but like the based me man uh you know coming to you know do whatever i think it started with uh the based stick man this this fascist street fighter who had a stick and he would fuck up leftist and then that word based caught on from there and became like a right wing catch-all term is like the right-wing's version of epic you know and then of course then the left and center takes it and now it's not solely a right-wing word but i feel like it came out of those those areas and it and it ends up i found it ended up being used to or the way that it is used confuses

uh agreements you have with people on a principal theoretical basis and agreements you have with people by accident right so like that john meersheimer lecture that came out at the beginning of the Russia, the U.S. proxy war through Russia with Ukraine, or through Ukraine with Russia. And, you know, you go online and I'll say, Mirschimer based. And it's like, well, not really. He does believe, he is correct about what he's saying here. But he is also a firm believer in Pax Americana in Empire. And his take is that this whole thing of pushing, provoking Russia into this conflict is a serious miscalculation that stands to on. or Mayan Empire, right?

So he's not a Marxist-Leninist or a DEMC, he's nothing like that at all. Absolutely. And we use these clumsy concepts that are very poorly defined and started out as kind of a, you know, a joke like appropriating it from the right wingers to sort of like the own the righties or whatever. It can end up confusing us more than anything, right? Because if like, yeah, like if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, Prasad and John Mearsheimer are brought together under the umbrella of the concept based because you both shared a point of agreement with them. That's less understanding, not more understanding. Yeah, yeah. And that itself gives an opening for these right opportunities to come in and then screw you over. Absolutely. So, yeah. Yeah, and I think I said that I made that point in a Patreon episode in the context of Marjorie Taylor Green tweeting out, abolished the FBI. And then, you know, I'm sure some of it was ironic, but some of it was kind of taken up unironically almost or turned into, you know, post irony where you embrace.

something originally ironically, but then you actually come around to doing it unironically. But it's like my point there is like, you know, if there's a real fascist move, like Nazi Germany type fascist movement in the United States, do we all not think that Marjorie Taylor Green would be on the front lines of that movie? Like if Marjorie Taylor Green was put into Nazi Germany with the rise of, you know, Hitler and the Nazi party, she would 100% in a way that maybe other conservatives like Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney or whatever would not. necessarily embrace would 100% be on the front lines of that thing. And so

despite one point that she said that was good and then this is based, this is a base to take. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Green herself is base. You know what? She is kind of going against the establishment. She is calling out the deep state. Maybe she is. Or she has a better line than the, you know, centrist Democrat on the Russia-Ukraine war. Maybe she is. But we all know that, you know, Marjorie Taylor-Green is a complete opportunist and a reactionary to the core. and so her clock being right twice a day says nothing about that clock the other 24 hours of the day or whatever so yeah it's just interesting stuff it's just stuff worth thinking about and diving into even if we don't have solid conclusions right off right off the take yeah if if there were a real Nazi movement in america marjorie taylorine would be like Kate winslet on the bow of the titan exactly just the arms like yeah like yeah that's that's where she'd be that she's not based at all now is there any before we wrap up is there anything else you wanted to say about the

rush of ukraine war i know you had a recommendation about something you oh yeah um yeah so it's it's scary um uh brandon is off the hook uh slanski's off the hook uh in a bad way what i've heard is a little bit into the to the nose candy um interesting and it's it's terrifying right Like I, you know, for anyone listening who is not old enough to remember the immediate aftermath of 9-11, this is a lot like that except there's this kind of like suicidal kind of nature to it where the kind of media strategy that the U.S. establishment is adopted is kind of enforcing the sort of fatalism about this whole thing amongst people. Or you just like, yeah, do the strike. Fuck it. Well, you know, like we'll figure something to take the iodine pills, like whatever, you know. There's this sort of fantastical Hollywood ideas about what's going to happen if the shit does pop off like that.

And, you know, I think it's, you know, aside from the material consequences of this, you know, global economic crisis that they're fomending with the sanctions and just the disruption of everything, there's also everyone's mental health is being destroyed, run into the ground by this small cattle of total maniacs. So I just wanted to offer something just as a little token of hope, not again, not Barack Obama's hope, but something to allow your will to remain connected to the good that you seek, right? And it's this pamphlet that Vijay Prashad and others have circulated called Looking Over the Horizon at Non-Alignment and Peace, and it features a lot of authors from the Global South who are talking about their take on this war from their perspective

and their interests, and they're trying to promote a reactivation of the older non-alignment movement, which basically entails through whatever formal or informal structures that we can avail of, like, and for many countries, you know, a lot of people in the West might be very cynical about the United Nations, who for a lot of countries in the global South, like, it's one of the major platforms they have to try to voice their grievances despite the U.S. domination of that institution. And I think it's, I would encourage everyone to read this pamphlet for one reason, because, you know, a lot of us out there have been trying to get into organizations or are involved in

organizations and we're looking for concrete issues that we can organize around and build coalitions with other organizations. And I think kind of like an anti-war non-aligned movement is something that pretty much all of us can support and try to, you know, you read this pamphlet, bring it back to your organization, see if you can develop a policy about it that's consistent with your party line, and then try to see who other groups you can reach out to to actually concretely work on this, right? And another interesting thing is that, you know, Prashad is, you know, he often puts himself out there as a Marxist Leninist. And one other author he has in this with him is Jeremy Corbyn, right? And on, you know, when we're being internet leftists,

we might be like, well, he's a sock them and he's just like Bernie and blah, blah, blah, blah, and from a theoretical standpoint, that may actually be true. And that may actually leave to, you know, if you're working with someone like that or an organization like that on a specific concrete issue may down the road lead to places where you've got to be like, no, can't go there with you. You know, I think, you know, and this is something that Lenin consistently is like thinking about it, like, how do we deal with that kind of stuff? Mao is like thinking about how do we deal with that kind of stuff without starting from a place of prior sort of metaphysical dogmatism where it's like, well, that guy, what I understand of his theory is totally at odds of mind,

therefore, screw, I don't care if the world could be incinerated. I'm not working with this guy. And at the same time, I think there are good reasons why someone like Corbin is there as opposed to someone like Bernie. Because regardless of what we think about him, Jeremy, or what we perceive to be his underlying theory or whatever, one thing he has shown, which I think people do need to admit is a pretty high degree of personal integrity in the work that he's done, even if we don't agree with the underpinnings of it or what we think are the outcomes of pursuing what we perceive to be his theory to what we think of as its logical conclusions, where at Bernie is just, well, I mean, for example, where is he now? Right, right. It's generally.

Like, you're not hearing from an oral-like squad or any people like that for the most part, right? And so it gives us, that's another way to sort of break out of the online mode, which is like, yeah, in actual reality, we are going to have to make coalitions with people who have very different tendencies than us, even some of which may fall into liberalism. but when it comes to a situation as dire as this like we kind of have to spend that and just deal with it and deal with the practical contradictions if they become antagonistic when we arrive at them rather than refusing to do anything because we've already worked them all out theoretically before you even met a person do you know what I'm saying yeah absolutely I always like to say like people that treat non antagonistic contradictions as antagonistic often fall into the realms of sectarian dogmatism and those who treat antagonistic contradictions as not antagonistic fall into the realm of opportunism, revisionism, unprincipled unity, or even right deviation, where there's this attempt to, you know, make solidarity or alliances with elements of the far right who are brutally and ideologically committed to a violent anti-communism. So you're treating what is genuinely an antagonistic contradiction, the far fascist right versus the communist left. You're treating it as if it's

non-antagonistic, and that's a problem on the other side. So, you know, to have that as a helpful orientation is meaningful. And then I also wanted to say about the possibility of a new non-aligned movement is in the context of multipolarity. So we have, and we've lived in a unipolar world where U.S. and its allies have complete hegemony over the global order. And now that is certainly breaking down. And America knows it. But what America would prefer, if we can't have unipolar domination is to recreate the Cold War, to have a bipolar situation in which everybody else has to pick aside. And the U.S. feels more comfortable in that situation than a true multi-polar world.

And so what a new non-aligned movement could do is act as a mechanism that at least attempts to prevent the movement from unipolar to bipolar, which is in the American Empire's interest, I think, and push more towards or at least help lay one more pillar and foundational or foundation down for a multipolar world, which is certainly, I think, you know, preferable to a bipolar Cold War 2.0, a sort of situation. So I think that new non-aligned movement or the possibilities of it or the curiosity about it, I think should be understood in that context.

Yeah, and it's also not to say that any multipolarity whatsoever is automatically good. Sure. The point is to use this material from people in these countries who do not want to align, with one or other, one or the other of these powers, you know, in this conflict, for example, it's to try to seek a good multipolarity through understanding these claims and these demands. And so, yeah, we're not just, you know, affirming multipolarity in the abstract, because you can have shitty multipolarities big time. But we want to, like, if we are transitioning to a multipolar world,

it seems like the idea, the project being signaled in this pamphlet is to try to see. a good multipolarity as far as that's possible. And that, you know, for our purposes, that is, that should be part and parcel of trying to build socialism as well. And a multipolarity that can actually push for peace instead of a multi-polarity that is so chaotic, it inevitably, you know, precipitates conflict and more war. Yeah. And, you know, and oftentimes that ends up with, you know, more subordinate powers lining up

with one or two big powers in the end and reproducing a bipolarity or something like that. Exactly. And just, yeah, and just, and that, he mentions this pamphlet in a video on YouTube, a talk that he gave, I think just maybe a month, within the last month or so sometime, maybe, called why the United States opposed Eurasian integration. And it's just an interesting historical analysis of the sort of broader developments that have brought us to this point. And just, yeah, just to close up, I just have a whole list of recommendations in general, because you always ask me, and I never have any. Sure. And so there are basically three tiers. One is more serious.

One is slightly more enjoyable. And the third tier is more funny and silly, but still useful and has some degree of seriousness. So just in general, VJ Prashad's 2017 book, Red Star, Over the Third World, for anyone who's trying to really understand communism, socialism, and how it's actually played out in the Global South, it's a good introductory text. And it's meant to give you the means to just go seek out other resources. to read more, to find out more, and to dive in deeper to drill down further. Breakthrough news, the channel as a whole, the reporting it's been doing about the Russia-Ukraine thing and other issues, especially Rania Kaleck showed dispatches and pretty much anything Eugene Perrier appears on.

Those two guys, I mean, both of them, they're monsters, they're amazing. Ben Norton's reporting on multipolarista has been very, very good. One thing I watched recently was his analysis of his account of, his account of Japanese fascism, which is something that kind of flies under the radar a little bit and its relationship to U.S. imperialism. That's just one among many interesting analyses that he's been doing lately. I think he's really blossomed since he left the gray zone. He's getting more focused, more on point all the time, and he's really powerful.

His frequent guest, the historian Aaron Good, has been a major contributor and their stuff together is really good. So that's the main sort of serious recommendations. The slightly more fun recommendations are a podcast called Color Theory by Ed Charbonneau, which is very informative and enjoyable and gets you thinking about the actual material reality around you. N.K. Jemison's Broken Earth novels, I just read the first one of those recently, and it really is, it's like a, there are some overlaps with Butler in terms of the thinking about our relationship to the Earth, but it has

I don't want to say too much about it but it's a really fun the first one is really fun and it's very thoughtful and it is about our relationship to the earth specifically like through minerals and geology and stuff like that

so that's just something you know it's thoughtful and it's enjoyable something I've been digging lately is Maggie Rogers his new album Surrender which is slaps like crazy so if you need some new music

that's enjoyable check it out if you're into that sort of thing and now the third tier this is just stuff that's made me laugh recently but it's also of substance. Well, some of it is. The first is YouTube video.

Michael Brooks and Felix Biederman commenting on the title is Alex Jones' advice for man on willing to leave parents' house. And I've watched this video a lot when I'm feeling sort of anxious and sort of clogged up because Michael Brooks's laugh is really infectious and it kind of helps get some of the bad mojo out. If you let it infect you and you laugh along with it, RIP, Michael. V.J. Prashad's talk from September 29th, 2020 at the International People's Assembly, which I think was in New York, called what gives imperialists the right to use the word democracy. Really inspiring, uplifting talk, really funny, features a hilarious joke about Liz Truss and the late Queen Elizabeth the Second,

which I won't tell you, just go there and just let them sock it to you, it's really funny. And then this interview between Ronnie, or dialogue between Ronnie Akalek and Matt Christman called Culture Wars, fake populism and the reactionary rabbit hole where Crispin delivers a really good analysis I think where a lot of people are at psychologically right now with the kind of strictures that being really online has imposed upon them

and I just wanted to say I said this to you on the phone earlier like I actually never really was exposed to any material from anyone associated with Chapo Trap House until this interview really other than Felix Beaterman laughing at Alex Jones and I always avoided them because I just heard shitty things

about them, like the whole dirt bag, you know, based on what I heard, I was like, I don't really have the time for this right now. But his analysis, I don't know much about those guys personally or anything at all, but like his analysis in this interview was really good. Um, very articulate, very in depth, very incisive. Um, and I think it can actually, you know, maybe it's, and also really, really, really funny and can help supplement maybe some of the stuff we've talked about today. It's food for thought there. Um, and Randy Akalak is actually fantastic and just brings the best out of him. So there's like three tiers of recommendations of varying degrees of fun and seriousness that I just wanted to offer to people

in this time. Cool. Yeah, great recommendations. I'm actually thinking about inviting Matt Christman on this show because I kind of have this idea for an episode where we talk, his strong point is American history, but where we talk about like, he also has a podcast called hinge points, I think, but these crucial moments and history because like trying to explain how did we get where we are today, right? And it's very interesting. Go back through the entirety of American history and see like how reconstruction went and how that feeds into where. what happened next and how it leads to where we are today right like that would be an interesting concept for an episode so um i might i might reach out to him and see if we can get that

happening but yeah although i'll link to as much of that as possible probably not every single thing you mentioned there but uh well we'll have a nice uh you know a bunch of links in the show notes for people that want to find as much of that as possible and just as usual man this is really fun you know me and you we do these deep philosophical in the weeds dives into all this different stuff and this is no different from what we do and i really appreciate these sorts of episodes. And we definitely have an aspect of our audience that really looks forward to these sorts of episodes with you. So thank you so much for coming on and talking about Voloshinov and philosophy of language and Marxist ideology. It was really fascinating. And you'll be back on.

It's just a matter of time and just a matter of what topic we decided to tackle next. Yeah, for sure. And I was thinking we talked about this before because I do have the Soviet three-parter. But following on what we discussed today, maybe for the next one we could do that reading of on the correct handling of contradictions among the people that we talked about. And that would give us a chance to do something a little different where we both work through a text together and comment on it. That would be a blast, yeah.

Yeah, maybe we could bring Allison in or something. I was about to say, yeah, that's a Red Mets, Red Menace territory for sure. Yeah, so, you know, maybe we could make that happen. That would be super fun. The org that I'm in, we've been turning to those texts to try to figure out how to implement them in practice to help avoid some pitfalls and stuff like that. So that could be a really good thing that gets more

to the practical and can maybe give people who are from the core segment of this stuff that listens to like this kind of stuff that we do to see the sort of uh this the the gradation or the you know the um what am i trying to pull it the i don't want to say spectrum uh the relationship between theory and practice um and and how that can actually play out so yeah that's something and i got lots of material for other stuff too hell yeah let's do it my friend i'll talk to you soon all right you again peace Every time I flow, I get this vision, and I know, every time I know I manifest it, then I go, then everywhere I go off, man, a seat I hope it grows. But every sea planet ain't always brand in life, though.

Some grow flowing, then they flourish in the end. Then again, some go fast, then they die out as soon as it begins. Throw my seed planet Into my eyes To feed Yes indeed I cut off bleed I sweat in tears

Until I'm free My sex To the 2-1-3 But my text To the EY E Just soaking in Like Mother Earth Just burn

But once this jewel It's just this test Fool for fools Truly well There's another chapter Until I never in Captured your I tap your mental

And stroke your mind So gentle I'm the sunshine Not star Now I'm irregular And bazaar But I know Exactly who I are

Yeah And I love Keep it true And I'm vanguard Because if nobody likes to be a water for it forever or never, seeing the field, and you got it together playing foolsball in the street, it's your game with it's fake concrete, and it's my ball, this my treat, this my world is mine.

I live in a hell hole in the wall, and I'll never see the light of day. So flip nose controlling all y'all, but they won't take minds away where there's that it stink, to react before you think, and I make that thought complete. Tell it to Louis, smell before you eat. See, I never try to mislead, and I walk this planet key, just indeed I cut off lead, I swear the tears until I'm free by sex to the 213 but protector to the EY

Just soak it in despite all this anguish for a book of human land A book of human language It's a black human language A book for reading And read is fundamental And it's forevental It's a human

Unimensional Unintentional, yet Uncompetional Get to a Jets the book You can't read And this is a book of Human Lensens

Oh, go, give me a second. The lion will never, ever lie down with the lambs. That's how I was taught when I saw it out to tell them who I am. I exam. I look for the bank and swam, change my program, but they hold me back like water in the dam, but I won't be held. Even though I'm trailed with breadcrumbs, I'll take her to the max head drum. You need more than they said, join the codina.

Morphina, nicotina, nicotine in your canteen and your bloodstream. I'm a well-oil-oil-oil machine. Keep my area of quarantine from the gardens of Florentine to the shores of Tripoli. Scientifically ain't no river me I'm terrifically well-smoking See many attempts to get a glimpse to see what the hell I'm smoking, but it ain't no pamela I just master this bastard grammar

I go outside my parameter And stretch all my diameter It gets bigger the camera So picture that witch's your camera I got some designat's this eye My stiserie has a child They're much more harsh than yours I just express my eyes a little different

Because life ain't fair But who really cares I know some people that's over here But they want to be over there I know some real cool cats yet, but they want to be bears And when I see them chasing chickens I get heated like a player

On your face looks scared Your space suits got a tear You're a square And I'm beyond comparing I'm rare, yeah And I'm sick I'm turning apples in the past Soon as I get a little bit of it

I'm a shed See I never try to mislead And I walk this planet key Yes indeed I cut off lead I sweat and tears until I'm free My sex to the 213 My Secretary to the EY Just soaking in

Despite all this anguish For a book of human length I'm going to be able to say. Thank you. Thank you.