Vygotsky’s approach is a step to conceiving labour and communication not in a reductionist or determinist, but a dialectical manner. The dialectic is for Vygostky that work and communication have common and diferent aspects at the same time. Vygotsky however ascertains an overall dualist approach that keeps the realms of work and communication separate: labour is oriented on nature, on ‘mastering, and triumphing over, nature’ (55), and not also on culture. And sign production is for him not a specific form of work. Cultural work that produces information can on such foundations not be adequately understood.
6.5.2. Valentin Vološinov: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Valentin Vološinov11 (1895–1936) was a Russian linguist. He was interested in establishing foundations of the Marxist philosophy of language. The foundations of this approach have been formulated in his book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
Vološinov (1986, 9) argues that a sign is not part of the natural or social reality, but ‘reflects and refracts another reality outside itself’. The Leninist theory of reflection’s basic assumption is that there is a reflection of the outside reality in consciousness and knowledge. Vološinov argues in contrast that a sign ‘is also itself a material segment of that very reality’ (11), from which it is diferent and that it reflects and retracts. Vološinov (1986, chapter 2) explicitly asks the question about the relationship of base and superstructure in the context of his theory of signs and language. The basic argument is that the sign’s materiality are the social relations, in which humans communicate with the help of signs. The ‘forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction. When these forms change, so does sign’ (21).
Horst Holzer makes an argument similar to Vološinov by saying work is a form of social production in society and that by creating use-values, work also produces a social environment of meanings and for meaning-making: ‘Societal work (that takes place physically and mentally) creates a “meaningful” environment in so far as through the purposes that are objectified in societal labour with the goal of securing and developing life, meaning is realised’12 (Holzer 1987, 62).
In class-based societies, signs would also form an ‘arena of the class struggle (Vološinov 1986, 23) so that signs are contradictory. Vološinov distinguishes between inner and outer signs and argues that both are social in nature. Communication can, based on this distinction, be understood as the dialectic of the externalisation of inner signs (utterance) and the internalisation of outer signs (introspection) (36). For Vološinov, communication and language are therefore activity and ‘meaningful creativity’ (48). It also means a ‘we-experience’ that is based on an ‘I-experience’ (88).
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