Re: [xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

Dear Michael:
   
  Good to read you again. Yes, you are right; Volosinov (not Bakhtin) makes the same point, only his example is not sadness or anger but HUNGER.
   
  VNVolosinov's point of departure is not the "I-you" dichotomy, not the journeying forth to the other's moccassins or mucklucks and then return to one's own exact footprints. Instead, it is the journeying forth to a generalized "we hunger". (That alone makes me think that VNV is NOT Bakhtin, but there are other more compelling reasons.)
   
  I at first found this example far-fetched, by my wife, who grew up in the teeth of China's great famine and for whom meat was a memorable occasion, found it very confusing. VNV would nod here; involuntary hunger is an experience that he, LSV, and my wife have all shared, but I have never known.
   
  Perhaps I do complicate things. But it seems to me that VNV's position on foreign language learning is highly nuanced. As you say, he disliked philology. But he also disliked the "philology of living languages" associated with the Romantics, and the direct language teaching movement of Gouin, and particularly with Husserl. And he saw before anybody else that Saussure's structuralism was really a form of philology without history.
   
  In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, he has a lot to say about foreign language learning and teaching and its relationship to consciousness. For example:
   
  "In the process of mastering a foreign language, signality and recognition still make themselves felt, so to speak, and still remain to be surmounted, the language not yet fully having become language. The ideal of mastering a language is absorption of signality by pure semiocity and of recognition by pure understanding. (69)"
   
  Signality as OPPOSED to semiocity. And recognition as OPPOSED to understanding! In a footnote, he explains like this:
   
  "A word extracted from context, written down in an exercise book, and then memorized together with its Russian translation undergoes signalization, so to speak. It becomes a particular hard-and-fast thing, and a factor of recognition intensifies in the process of understanding it. To put it briefly, under a sound and sensible method of practical instruction, a form should be assimilated not in its relations to the abstract system of the language, i.e., as a self-identical form, but in the concrete structure of the utterance, i.e. as a mutable and pliable sign. (69)"
   
   This idea of "self-identical forms" which he associates with Saussure and structuralism then becomes his concept of "meaning" ("znachenie" of course), which he sees as only the technical apparatus for implementing "theme" (which is what Vygotsky calls "sense").
   
  I think this unnatural separation, a naturally occurring experiment, a form of spontaneous analysis, is REALLY why VNV was so fascinated with foreign languages (Bakhtin is another story; when he says "other languages", he usually means other idiolects and other dialects, and not languages that are actually foreign).
   
  VNV then says:
   
  "¡¦(I)t is even impossible to convey the meaning of a particular word (say, in the course of teaching another person a foreign language) without having made it an element of theme, i.e. without having constructed an 'example' utterance. On the other hand, a theme must base itself on some kind of fixity of meaning; otherwise it loses its conncection with what came before and what comes after—i.e., it altogether loses its significance (100)."
   
  And he argues that trying to make meaning with only the technical means of "meaning" and without two people actually trying to mean something is essentially a process of trying to make a light bulb illuminate after you've shut off the current.
   
  The other day I was asking myself if the REVERSE is possible; that is, if it is possible to communicate without any fixity of meaning. The answer, of course, is YES, and not just in the banal sense of intimacy (which can be explained away as "me-meaning", and that is precisely how Bakhtin explains away sex).
   
  VNV was apparently a MUSICOLOGIST before he was a linguist. In the (Manchester) Guardian today there was a letter from a deaf person (5% hearing and that only in one ear) who enjoys Beethoven, because he can feel the vibrations and he reconstructs the underlying patterns, just as you can "see" the body of a loved one in the dark.
   
  He may not "hear" the music the same way I do (although the way he hears is it is probably very close to the way Beethoven did!) But it is undoubtedly the same musical consciousness, quite independent of signalization (though not independent of semiocity).
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education

       
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Received on Wed Mar 12 01:05 PDT 2008