[xmca] The "Inner Form" of the Word

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Martin and I have been puzzling over Vygotsky's occasional references to the "inner form" of a word: where did Vygotsky GET the idea? What did he DO with it? And above all why does it MATTER?
 
Well, I recently read two books that I think solve these questions, but introduce a whole slew of new ones. The two books are:
 
Tihanov, G. (2009) Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press.
 
Seifrid, T. (2005) The Word Made Self. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
 
>From the Tihanov volume (an edited text) we learn two important things about inner form. First of all, the idea of inner form of LANGUAGE does indeed go back to Humboldt and even further (the Port Royal Grammarians apparently used it!). But it's Potebnia who says that a WORD has inner form. 
 
This Potebnian formulation obviously begs to be qualified: a word like "of" or "the" or even "to be" wears its inner form on its sleeve, and may have less of it than a word like "hedgehog" or "God" or  even "to run". 
 
Well, Seifrid argues that this Potebnian interpretation of Humboldt came with a LOT of religious baggage. Potebnia believed that the "inner form" of a word was its "nearest psychological meaning", i.e. its sense. But he ALSO believed that this essence (or maybe "es-sense") was innate and stable, as opposed to the historically changing outer form. 
 
That idea, of a God-made word whose inner "self" is unchanging but which can manifest itself in "you" (Christ) and even in "he" (the Holy Spirit), was very attractive to Russian Orthodox philologists, including the Symbolists, later the Acmeists, Florensky, Bulgakov, and possibly Bakhtin.
 
Bakhtin, who Seifrid does not discuss much, is a VERY curious case. I used to think, along with Emerson and Morson, that there is no serious evidence that he was a deeply religious man, not even his early writings. But Seifrid points out that one of the conceits that Florensky and Bulgakov had was that the human body was basically SYMMETRICAL: not only along the head to crotch axis but even along a left hip right hip axis: the kidneys correspond to lungs, the asshole to the mouth and so on. Florensky and Bulgakov (and I think Bakhtin too) played with the idea that semen and language were equivalent effluvia, one from the upper and one from the lower bodily stratum. 
 
There are three reasons why I think Bakhtin might have been in on the joke: First, and worst, although Bakhtin claims to be interested in novels, he never expresses any sustained interest in the work of any woman novelist of any nationality whatsoever, and the novel is, at least in English and French, an overwhelming feminine mode of expression.  Secondly, in his Rabelais book he writes almost obsessively about the "lower bodily stratum" and its effusions and is particularly amused by the correspondance of flatulence to laughter, and other forms of inverting high and low. Thirdly, the Rabelais book was, as we know, rejected, when Bakhtin submitted it as a Ph.D. although to all appearances it is a very sound, even miraculous, work of medieval scholarship. If it was recognized as a work associated with Florensky and Bulgakov, that would explain it.
 
Shpet also signs up to this idea of an unchanging "inner form", and rejects "psychologism" on precisely these grounds. But it's EXACTLY the opposite of Vygotsky's view. Yesterday I pointed out that the Donizetti aria presents two DIFFERENT views of causation, both of which may be said to be "mechanical": Adina says her infidelity is caused by her inner essence, and Nemorino says her unchanging love is caused by an outer force. 
 
This is, I think, Vygotsky's view! Inner form is actually what CHANGES from moment to moment, flitting and fluttering, pattering and puttering. Outer form changes too, but more slowly, the way that the river, grieving and grooving the mountains, drags them down grain by grain to the sea.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
 
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