Sorry, I have only just seen this, Praxi. I hope it's Ok if I respond to what you say?
There are certainly superficial resemblances bewteen Voloshinov and Wittgenstein,
and one very clear echo of the former's work in the latter's:Quote:"These words, it seems to me, give a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in a language name objects -- sentences are combinations of such names. -- In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands....
"It is important to note that the word 'meaning' is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that 'corresponds' to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name. When Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies." [Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, second edition, §1, p.2e, and §40, p.20e.
Compare that with the following:
Quote:"Meaning is a function of the sign and is therefore inconceivable...outside the sign as some particular, independently existing thing. It would be just as absurd to maintain such a notion as to take the meaning of the word 'horse' to be this particular, live animal I am pointing to. Why if that were so, then I could claim, for instance, that having eaten an apple, I have consumed not an apple but the meaning of the word 'apple'." [Voloshinov Marxism And The Philosophy Of Language, p.28.]
I suspect Wittgenstein got some of these ideas from Piero Sraffa (whom I mentioned in a post in the Idealism thread) -- or possibly from Bakhtin (with whom he was friends) -- or even from his many other Marxist friends. In fact, the vast majority of his friends (in the 1930/40s) were Communists or Trotskyists.
Having said that, Voloshinov's ideas are far too confused to form any part of a Marxist account of language. I have covered this in extensive detail here:
http://anti-dialectics.co.uk/page_13_03.htm[Sections (3)-(5).]
I will try to summarise that argument later on this year.
[By the way, I subject that ISJ article to which you referred to extensive criticism at the above link.]