Volosinov Notes from 1.31 class
Translation - written text - "transparent tool"
Interpretation - synchronous -

Repeating a joke - completely different from original -- take statement from one context, put it into another. You can't repeat it in a "simple"  transfer

Recontextualizing -- should we worry about "original meaning"?

context/ utterance - social situation and utterance

Yolo
What changes with the Livestrong bracelet

stereotype as social system:
You only live once (rallying cry)............stop and smell the roses
language structure
Saturday Night Live - group - makes fun of the group - not often heard

Volosinov - language can be built upon (constantly becoming) -- language changes by use of individuals (theoretical) -- change

29 IDEOLGOGY
Van Dyk coordinting - mental representations -  (verb vs. noun) shared group understanding - basis of social cognition and are derived from group membership
Possibility of many mental representations

Volosinov
idealist (ideologies systems of ideas located in individual consciousness) vs. materialist conceptions
hammer points beyond that -- John Henry
ideologies embedded in a pink hammer (gender) - reflects & refracts/ a kids hammer

tool as "means of production" - designated function OR - hammer/sickle - Soviet Union
tool to sign that has ideological value

bread and wine -instrumental & sign purpose

Reflect and refract
ideological signs -  are BOTH
without signs, there is not ideology & a sign is something that acquires meaning beyond its given area
PINK HAMMER -

physicality - design - reflective
pink - refracting (how ppl will respond) - many will respond to this - metacommentary
Hammer, for example, can also modify the "pink"

ideology in consciousness - sign us embedded in material conditions
materially/ ideology - coming together - interaction w/in society -- not purely in our head

Even if you don't see it as ideology - it still is! Buildings w/ histories...we don't often think of these

something is a sign when it acquires meaning beyond function/ particularity

signal  - different than sign
ideological - value beyond the material sign

individual consciousness - socially constructed - developed through social interactions

if you take Van D - ideologies only exist if you are in that group - so V says you also think of affect the ideology functions BEYOND the individual.

Ideology must be taken up in some manner.

Focus - what should study of language be? Looks to past frames - critique
 individualistic subjectivism.................................abstract objectivism
- language in psyche
- source of creativity comes soley from individual
- creativity about taste (indv.style) (50)
-48 - 4 principles of subjectivism
#4 language is inert "hardened crust" - ready made instrument - what speaker does is up to them.
Grammar - you LEARN how to manipulate English (individual as volcano - langauge is byproduct - emergent from what individual does - ATOMIZED individual
52
 abstract objectivism
language is a stationary trend -- rainbow (normative principles; phonetic / grammatical/ lexical/) over the everflowing stream (or ever spurting volcano).
rainbow is OVER the stream - controls...indivudals pronounce sounds differently...doesn't matter.
"correctness" NOT a conception of creativity
Violations of norms don't impact systems (examples - adverb ppl still can make sense of it)
stream - movement
rainbow - ephemeral - but described as stationary in class?

Saussure - structuralist semiotics
synchronous - looking at a particular moment in time (his preference)
lange (abstract language as a structure) = parole (individual usage within a system)
arbitrary vs. motivated

Volosinov instead says: diacrhonic - exists in time/ history - that we can look at change across time

* DOES NOT OFFER explanations as to why language changes
59
66
objectivity - if only looking at it from the ground (constantly moving/ changing) -
HOWEVER...it is not the case that the individual can do what they want to do (says Volosinov)

AGENCY - social semiotic; agent -- issue of "choice" - individual does have an impact on the system
we can make choices about a system appropriate to the situation
67
Individual subjective
"The speaker's subjective consciousness
does not in the least operate with language as a system of normatively
identical forms. That system is merely an abstraction arrived with a good deal of
trouble and with a definite cognitive and practical focus of attention. The system
of language is the product of deliberation on language, and deliberation of
a kind by no means carried out by the consciousness of the native speaker
himself and by no means carried out for the immediate purposes of speaking...
In point of fact, the speaker's focus of attention is brought about in line with
the particular, concrete utterance he is making. What matters to him is applying
a normatively identical form (let us grant there is such a thing for the time being)
in some particular, concrete context. For him, the center of gravity lies not in
the identity of the form but in that new and concrete meaning it acquires in the
} particular context. What the speaker values is not that aspect of the form which
1 is invariably identical in all instances of its usage, despite the nature of those
\ instances, but that aspect of the linguistic form because of which it can figure
\ in the given, concrete context, because of which it becomes a sign adequate to
~the conditions of the given, concrete situation." Language depends on situation.