Gustav Shpet's Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory

Semiotics in Voloshinov and Shpet

207 Semiotics in Voloshinov and Shpet Dušan Radunović The conceptual foundations of Gustav Shpet's general semasiology and Valentin Voloshinov's principle of dialogic speech interaction have rarely been considered from a comparative perspective. This article purports to draw critical attention to the partly convergent, partly divergent trajectories that these two thinkers followed in their approach to language. Whereas the two methodologies and discursive practices may not appear commensurable on the surface, there emerge beneath important philosophical convergences between Shpet and Voloshinov. Notwithstanding the fact that the two thinkers developed their views on language in different directions, coextensive philosophical concerns and common intellectual backgrounds provide a certain justification for a concise comparative study of their ideas. Shpet inherited a remarkably diverse intellectual baggage that comprised German classical idealism, Wilhelm von Humboldt's post-Romantic ideas of language, and Husserl's phenomenology . In Shpet’s works of the 1920s, most notably in his 1927 study The Inner Form of the Word, the author developed a complex theory of the mechanisms that generate meaning in language. Curiously, in his struggle against the objectivist concept of meaning that he had inherited from his philosophical predecessors, Shpet advocated in his general semasiology, tacitly rather than in an elaborate fashion, the outer, extra-linguistic (in Shpet's words, cultural) constitution of verbal meaning. Unlike Shpet's, Voloshinov's contribution to twentieth-century philosophy of language has been more widely acknowledged. Influenced by a similar intellectual tradition—the turn-of-the-century German philosophy of language and aesthetics, in the first place—Voloshinov promotes an approach to the phenomenon of verbal communication that takes into consideration the social reality of the speaking subject . Distancing himself from the European linguistic tradition, Voloshinov idiosyncratically defines discourse (an active, living word, rather than a dictionary entry) as a real social event, the unity of the speaking subject, the listener (who is, in fact, another speaking subject, a constituent of the chain of verbal interaction), and the object ("Discourse" 11). 208 Dušan Radunović I examine Shpet's and Voloshinov's theories with reference to their contribution to the articulation of certain issues that shaped the agenda of philosophy of language in Europe. Particular attention will be paid to the problem of meaning, which served as a benchmark in the study of language in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In conclusion, on the grounds of certain explicit, but more often implicit, correlations between the two theoretical orientations, I raise the question of the commensurability of Shpet's and Voloshinov's philosophical projects. Shpet on the Notion of Meaning and Its Philosophical Requisites Although captivated by Edmund Husserl's redefinition of philosophy as a strict science , Shpet did not adhere uncritically to all aspects and spheres of application of Göttingen phenomenology (epistemology, semantics, axiology, and formal ontology ). The problem of sense (Sinn) that reverberates most forcefully in Husserl's philosophy was significantly modified in its early Russian reception. Moreover, even in his initial appropriation of Husserl's ideas, in Appearance and Sense (finished in October 1913, in the midst of productive intellectual exchanges with Husserl), Shpet criticized Husserl's concept of intentionality as well as his view of noematic sense as the final objective of eidetic reduction. More precisely, Shpet argued that noematic sense—defined not only as the actual meaning, but as the only sense of an object that concerns phenomenological philosophy—appears to be the property of both the subject and the object. The noema is subjective inasmuch as it is achieved by the noetic act of the subject's consciousness; however, noematic sense is also objective, as the transcendental consciousness of the subject refers to, or intends, the ideal meaning of an object or a state of affairs. In Husserl's own words, "the Eidos of the noema points to the Eidos of the noetic consciousness" (241). Thus, we have an ambivalent situation in which the sense-bestowing act comes from the subject's consciousness, but the sense of the object, or the state of affairs, remains the primary property of that object. As he principally maintained that "the object is only possible as the unity of a noematic composition," that is, in the unity of the mind (noetic) and the object (noematic), Husserl had to find his way out of this overlap and bridge the chasm between the contents of the eidetic consciousness and the (ideal) sense. The crucial instrument that Husserl's phenomenology provided...