All utterances carry meaning shaped by irrecoverable social-historical context

Evidence

In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin intended to rewrite the history of the novel by challenging formalist, linguistic analyses of language that, in his view, denied “the problem of alterity in language.” As his translators note, for Bakhtin “there is no such thing as a ‘general language,’ a language that may be divorced from a specific saying, which is charged with particular overtones.” In this sense, heteroglossia means that “at any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have had under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve.” In other words, there can be no analysis of literary expression that truly separates the ideological from the formal, because such a separation denies the idea that “verbal discourse is a social phenomenon.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 102

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Bakhtin’s heteroglossia as the claim that no ‘general language’ independent of context exists.
• XREF: connects to: Word meanings are social facts no individual user can unilaterally change. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1471; Language is always metaphorical relative to past civilisations’ meanings — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1600; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”