unitary language "THE language"

heteroglossia - no such thing as "the language" - distinct varieties

- gets into accounts/ constructions of meaning "the meaning" - heteroglossia - different ways of knowing which should be embraced
-WWII - "The Great War" vs. Studs Terkel
- utterances - unitary (English) - but variation and contradiction in the ways that we do that
-penny novel - what is "literacy" - heteroglossia - centrifugal/ centripetal forces
Language policy - "English Only"

Bakhtin - Unitary Language
unitary vs. individual
"Basic Content"
"This basic content is conditioned by the specific sociohistorical
destinies of European languages and by the destinies of ideological discourse,
and by those particular historical tasks that ideological discourse has
fulfilled in specific social spheres and at specific stages in its own historical
development."
Style:
"These tasks and destinies of discourse conditioned specific verbal-ideological
movements, as well as various specific genres of ideological discourse, and ultimately
the specific philosophical concept of discourse itself in particular, the
concept"
Unifying forces  (reminds me of power - last week)
270
" Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical
processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal
forces of language."
(how did language get started in the first place?)
From wikipedia:
"Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author. He defines heteroglossia as "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way." Bakhtin identifies the direct narrative of the author, rather than dialogue between characters, as the primary location of this conflict."
 "correct language"
"
A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms
do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of
linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language,
forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot
national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized
literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the
pressure of growing heteroglossia.

Language as world view "insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of
ideological life."

"Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval
church, of "the one language of truth," the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, the
abstract grammatical universalism of Leibniz (the idea of a "universal grammar"),
Humboldt's insistence on the concrete all whatever their differences in
nuance, give expression to the same centripetal forces in socio-linguistic and ideological
life; they serve one and the same project of centralizing and unifying the
European languages."
..."Indo-European linguistics with its
focus of attention, directed away from language plurality to a single protolanguage"
271
"Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where
centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of
centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in
the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own language
as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the
requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such
speech diversity. And this active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia
determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less
a degree than its inclusion in any normative-centralizing system of a unitary
language."
...
"Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre,
a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of
any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled
unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language."
This is so cool:
"The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives
and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language,
but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual
utterance.
At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under
tht' influence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbal-ideological
life, the novel and those artistic-prose genres that gravitate toward it was
being historically shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces."
Makes me think of what Mark Twain was doing in Huck Finn
fascinating - heteroglossia and the novel -- against the "official" poetic language
272
Think of Deborah Brandt - literacies - I don't think these intricacies were covered
" current of centralizing tendencies in the life of language have
ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal forces
in the life of language. For this very reason could make no provision for the
dialogic nature of language, which was a struggle among socio-linguistic points of
not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions.
Moreover, even intra-language dialogue (dramatic, rhetorical, cognitive
or merely casual) has hardly been studied linguistically or stylistically up to the
present day."
Stylistics/ dialogue/ closed systems - 
"Should we imagine the work as a rejoinder in a given dialogue,
whose style is determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in
the same dialogue(gn the totality of the conversation -- then traditional stylistics
does not offer an adequate means for approaching such a dialogizcd style."
Stylistics locking effect

Linguistics - unify diversity
273
" has remained outside its field of
vision. It is precisely this orientation toward unity that has compelled scholars to
ignore all the verbal genres (quotidian, rhetorical, artistic-prose) that were the carriers
of the decentralizing tendencies in the life of language, or that were in any
case too fundamentally implicated in heteroglossia."

lots of fun
"and in the more complex artistic forms for the organization of contradiction,
forms that orchestrate their themes by means of languages - in all characteristic
and profound models of novelistic prose, in Grimmelshausen, Cervantes,
Rabelais, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and others."
"...that is, we must
deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multilanguaged
world."
Fascinating - makes me think of "redneck": used differently by individuals
" The linguistic significance of a given utterance is understood against the background
of language, while its actual meaning is understood against the background
of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory
opinions, points of view and value judgments that is, precisely that
background that, as we see, complicates the path of any word toward its object."

passive use of word - merely mirroring word (world view)
274
Makes me think of Malcolm X- learning to read:
"Indeed the purely negative
demands, such as could only emerge from a passive understanding (for
instance, a need for greater clarity, more persuasiveness, more vividness and so
forth), leave the speaker in his own personal context, within his own boundaries;
such negative demands are completely immanent in the speaker's own discourse
and do not go beyond his semantic or expressive self-sufficiency."

Reminds me of movements in reading (Rosenblatt):
"In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: it
assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system filled with
specific objects and emotional expressions, and is indissolubly merged with the
response, with a motivated agreement or disagreement. To some extent, primacy
belongs to the response, as the activating principle: it creates the ground for
understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and engaged understanding.
Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Understanding and
response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is
impossible without the other."
Really cool:
" Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration
into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes
a series of complex inter-relationships, consonances and dissonances with
the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding
that the speaker counts on. Therefore his orientation toward the listener is
an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of
the listener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse; it is in this
way, after all, that various different points of view..."
different ways of language come to interact with each other

"The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual
horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against
his, the listener's,  apperceptive background."
275
genres -
"This stratification is accomplished first of all by the specific organisms called
genres. Certain features of language (lexicological, semantic, syntactic) will knit
together with the intentional aim, and with the overall accentual system inherent
in one or another genre: oratorical, publicistic, newspaper and journalistic genres,
the genres of low literature (penny dreadfuls, for instance) or, flnally, the
various genres of high literature. Certain features of language take on the specific
flavor of a given genre: they knit together with specific points of view, speciflc
approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given
genre."

-professional stratefication
- intentional dimensions
"these possibilities are realized in specific directions, filled
with specific content, they are made concrete, particular, and are permeated with
concrete value judgments; they knit together with specific objects and with the
belief systems of certain genres of expression and points of view peculiar to particular
professions. Within these points of view, that is, for the speakers of the
language themselves, these generic languages and p·ofessional jargons are directly
intentional - they denote and express directly and fully, and are capable of
expressing themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for those not participating
in the given purview, these languages may be treated as objects, as typifactions,
as local color."
- mediums
-"Every socially significant verbal performance has the ability sometimes for
a long period of time, and for a wide circle of persons - to infect with its own
intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its semantic and
expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological
overtones; thus, it can create slogan-words, curse-words, praise-words
and so forth."
"In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each generation at
each social level has its own language; moreover, every age group has as a matter
of fact its own language, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system
that, in their turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution (the
language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school student are all
different languages) and other stratifying factors."
"And finally, at any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods
of socio-ideological life cohabit with one another. Even languages of the day exist:
one could say that today' s and yesterday's socio-ideological and political "day" do
not, in a certain sense, share the same language;"

"Each of these "languages" of heteroglossia requires a methodology very different
from the others; each is grounded in a completely different principle for
marking differences and for establishing units (for some this principle is functional,
in other it is the principle of theme and content...
277
... "Therefore, languages do not
exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways
(the Ukrainian language, the language of the epic poem, of early Syrnbulism, of
the student, of a particular generation of children, of the run-of-the-mill intellectual,
of the Nietzschean and so on). It might even seern that the very word
"language" loses all meaning in this process - for apparently there is no single..."
NOVEL
--"referential and expressive....INTENTIONAL...that stratifies and differentieates the common literary language, and not the linguistic markers"
- "external markers, linguistically observable and fixable, cannot in themselves be understood or studied without understanding the specific conceptualization they have been given by an intention"

"study the word at such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it,s just as seneseless at to study psychological experience outside the context of that real life"

Intentional
278
"the work itself everywhere comes down to the relatively protracted and socially meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specifics (and consequently limiting) intentions and accents.

denies language is nuetral...instead a "concrete hetereglot conception of the world"
Music/ Visual?
Really good description of individual!!! - words populated by intentions of others - dialogic between what you want to express and the words you have to express it!

- How does the complicate Brandt?
 279
"Concrete socio-ideological language consciousness, as it becomes creative -
that is, as it becomes active as literature - discovers itself already surrounded by
heteroglossia and not at all a single, unitary language, inviolable and indisputable.
The actively literary linguistic consciousness at all times and everywhere (that is,
in all epochs of literature historically available to us) comes upon "languages," and
not language. Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to
choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must
actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position
for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a "language." Only by remaining
in a closed environment, one without writing or thought, completely off the
maps of socio-ideological becoming, could a man fail to sense this activity of
selecting a language and rest assured in the inviolability of his own language, the
conviction that his language is predetermined."