Philosophical Thinking is Yoga for the Mind®

SUBWAY LINE, No. 13

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. provides apublication venue for original philosophicalthinking steeped in lived life, in line with ourmotto: philosophical living & lived philosophy.

Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky

ON LANGUAGE & POETRY

Three Essays

Translated from the Russian, edited and with an Introduction by Michael Eskin

Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.New York • 2018

Published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. P. O. Box 250645, New York, NY 10025, USA

www.westside-philosophers.com / www.yogaforthemind.us

English translation copyright © 2018 by Upper West SidePhilosophers, Inc.

Parts of “On Dialogic Speech” have previously appeared in PMLA112.2 (1997) and are used by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or oth-erwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Forall permissions inquiries for any of our titles, contact the publisheror Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Dan-vers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Yakubinsky, Lev Petrovich, 1892-1945 author. | Eskin,Michaeltranslator editor.

Title: On language & poetry : three essays / Lev Petrovich Yaku-binsky ; translated from the Russian, edited, and with an intro-duction by Michael Eskin.Other titles: On language and poetryDescription: New York : Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., |Series: Subway line ; no. 13 | Includes index.Identifiers: LCCN 2017015857 | ISBN 9781935830511 (pbk. :alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Poetics. | Language and languages--Philosophy. | Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1857-1913--Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC PN1042 .Y35 2017 | DDC 808.1--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015857

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CONTENTS

Introduction:The Forgotten Formalist 7

A Note on Translation 29

1. On the Sounds of Poetic Language 31

2. Where Do Poems Come from? 55

3. Ferdinand de Saussure on the Impossibility of Language Politics 61

Name Index 91

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IntroductionThe Forgotten Formalist

Even among the cognoscenti—linguists, literarycritics, and cultural theorists—the name ‘Yaku-binsky’ will not necessarily ring a bell. But itshould: for his significance for modern poeticsand criticism can hardly be overestimated. Oc-casionally mentioned in academic literature onearly twentieth-century Russian and Soviet lit-erary and linguistic scholarship, he has remainedvirtually unknown outside a small circle of spe-cialists. Eclipsed by such luminaries as ViktorShklovsky, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eikhenbuam,Roman Jakobson, and others who came to rep-resent the so-called ‘Russian formalist’ move-ment, which he co-founded and which revolu-tionized the way we look at and interpret liter-ature and culture to this day, Yakubinsky hasbeen relegated to the footnotes of modern in-tellectual history. Thus, the book you are nowholding in your hands can be viewed as a recov-ery mission of sorts, aiming to give a powerful,

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unduly forgotten thinker the historical credit hedeserves by making his work widely available inEnglish, and to broaden and enrich our overallperspective on and understanding of the va-garies of modern literary and cultural theory.Together with Yakubinsky’s book-length essayOn Dialogic Speech—originally published in theSoviet Union in 1923 and first published in Eng-lish in 2016—the present volume gathers someof Yakubinsky’s historically and critically mostrelevant writings, giving the non-Russian-speak-ing reader the opportunity to engage with thisinfluential mind first-hand.

*Born in Kiev in 1892, Lev Petrovich Yakubinskystudied philology and linguistics at Kiev and Pe-tersburg Universities from 1909 to 1915, dur-ing a period of change and renewal in Russianlinguistics, which had up to then been domi-nated by neogrammarian positivism and histori-cism. Originating in Leipzig, Germany, in the1870s, and subsequently making its way to Rus-sia, the neogrammarian school—represented,among others, by Eduard Sievers (1850-1932)

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and August Leskien (1840-1916) in Germany,and Fillip Fortunatov (1848-1914) in Russia—postulated the existence of a priori phonologicallaws and held that the description of the histor-ical transformations of language(s) should takeprecedence over the investigation of livingspeech in its concrete, dynamic and generative,aspects. This abstract, ‘de-humanized’ approachto our most important and ubiquitous social andcognitive medium was eagerly contested by agroup of young scholars and critics—no doubtinspired and fueled by the fermenting cultural-political atmosphere leading up to and sur-rounding the October Revolution of 1917—who were far more interested in the functionaland social diversity of language as an individualand collective activity.

“The word is now dead,” proclaimed ViktorShklovsky, one of the group’s most vociferousmembers, as early as 1914 in his famous mani-festo “The Resurrection of the Word”: “We havelost our connection to the world, we no longerfeel it … Only the creation of new forms …will restore our lived experience of the world

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[oshshyushsheniye mira], resurrect things, andkill pessimism.” (Shklovsky, by the way, was notalone in issuing a clarion call in the name ofrestoring “our lived experience of the world” bymeans of language. At roughly the same time,another young literary formation, the so-calledAcmeists—in explicit opposition to the Sym-bolist doctrine of a realibus ad realiora [from thereal to the ideal]—campaigned for exactly thesame goal: “our lived experience of the world[oshshyushsheniye mira],” as Mandelstam fa-mously put it in his 1913 poetic manifesto “TheMorning of Acmeism.”)

What better way to make good onShklovsky’s ethical imperative, insofar as it ispremised on breathing new life into language,than to begin by investigating the most self-con-scious and self-reflexive form of linguistic activ-ity: poetry (and literature more generally). Thefounding by Shklovsky and a cluster of friendsand colleagues at Petersburg University of theSociety for the Study of Poetic Language [OPO-YAZ: Obshchestvo po Izucheniyu Poetichesko-goYazyka] in 1916—which, in dialogue with the

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so-called Moscow Linguistic Circle, developedwhat came to be known as ‘Russian formal-ism’—was designed to do just that: teach us tosee and feel the world anew—“as if for the firsttime,” as Shklovsky wrote in his seminal essay“Art as Device” (1917)—by teaching us to at-tend to language in a new way. And this new wayof looking at language, in turn, which would bedifferent from previous linguistic approaches,hinged on the categorical distinction betweenpoetic and practical language. More specifically:on the distinction between the two modes oflanguage not in respect to their what so much asin respect to their how; not in respect to contentand its variously conceived referential relationto the world (a question sufficiently dealt withby Aristotle and his followers) so much as in re-spect to form—in respect, that is, to the technicalways, the material, semiotic devices (phonologi-cal, morphological, syntactic, grammatical,rhetorical, etc.) that arguably distinguish literaryfrom ordinary or practical language (and, inturn, obviously impact content). “The method-ological distinction and juxtaposition of poetic

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and practical language,” Boris Eikhenbaumsummed up in his retrospective 1925 essay “TheTheory of the Formal Method,” “served as thefoundational principle underlying the formalistapproach as a whole.”

Enter Yakubinsky: for, as Eikhenbaum ob-serves in the same essay, it was none other than“Yakubinsky who introduced this distinction,”thus laying the methodological cornerstone forRussian formalism. Shklovsky, too, underscoresYakubinsky’s role as the movement’s method-ological progenitor: referencing his work mul-tiple times in “Art as Device,” Shklovsky creditsYakubinsky with the insight that “the two lan-guages [poetic and practical] do not coincide”and that “the laws governing poetic language arediametrically opposed to those governing prac-tical language.” The text in which Yakubinskyfirst posited and elaborated this signal di-chotomy appeared in OPOYAZ’s inaugural an-thology Essays on the Theory of Poetic Language in1916 and was titled “On the Sounds of PoeticLanguage.”

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*Given that Russian formalism constitutes a cen-tral historical-conceptual matrix and referencepoint for such later, historically imbricated,schools of thought as, among others, structural-ism (its immediate successor), post-structural-ism, deconstruction, and new historicism—allof which in one way or another appropriated,further developed, modified, critiqued, or de-parted from it—Yakubinsky must be considereda true “initiator of discursive practices,” to useMichel Foucault’s phrase. As Foucault explainsin “What Is an Author” (1969): what distin-guishes “initiators of discursive practices” fromother types of authorship—novelists, say—isthat they not only “make a certain number ofanalogies possible” by providing patterns thatcan be variously adopted by others; but, moreimportantly, that “they also make a certain num-ber of differences possible” by “opening up aspace for discourses different from theirs, yetbelonging to the field which they have initiated.”Precisely this kind of space was opened up, ifnot exclusively of course, by Yakubinsky’s “On

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the Sounds of Poetic Language”—a foundingdocument of modern poetics and literary the-ory—which is made available in English for thefirst time.

*What was it about Yakubinsky’s categorical dis-tinction between poetic and practical languagethat made “On the Sounds of Poetic Language”such a key text? After all, the conception of lit-erature as different or deviating from ordinarylanguage in itself would certainly not have beennews given its long tradition from Aristotlethrough the modern period.

What made Yakubinsky’s particular take onthis subject arguably so transformative, was theprism through which he chose to refract it—linguistics coupled with psychology and episte-mology:

In practical verbal thinking, we don’t focus onthe sounds of words; we don’t consciously payattention to them, they don’t possess independ-ent value, merely serving communication. It isprecisely this lack of conscious attention to

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sounds in practical language that explains whymany slips of the tongue go unnoticed, and whywe can easily get away with sloppy articulation,slurring endings or entire syllables … When itcomes to poetic language, the situation is re-versed: we do become consciously aware of thematerial texture of words, we are enjoined tofocus on their sounds above all … A poetic ut-terance’s rhythmicality, for instance, bespeaksthe conscious experiencing of sound in theprocess of poetic creation (poetic verbal think-ing) … rhythm in verse depends on the syllables’specific phonic make-up, for example on theirconsonant count. Consequently, our perceptionof and attention to rhythm in poetry is insepara-ble from our conscious awareness of its soundpatterns.

Yakubinsky’s explanation as to why poetic andpractical language—which he characterizes astypes of verbal thinking—need to be considereddistinct modes communication sets the stage forat least two of formalism’s and structuralism’sdefining claims about language and art: it pre-figures Shklovsky’s immensely influential notionof “demamiliarization” as the most basic aes-

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thetic “device”; and it also anticipates RomanJakobson’s key structuralist concept of the “po-etic function” as the dominant linguistic functionin literature.

Taking his cue from Yakubinsky’s discussionof the psychological-cognitive dimension of ourengagement with literature—which emphasizesconscious experiencing and awareness, as wellas our focus on the words’ very materiality—Shklovsky writes in “Art as Device” (in arguablyone of the most well-known paragraphs in mod-ern aesthetic theory):

In order to restore our lived experience of theworld and feel things again, in order to make astone a stone again, we have something calledart. The goal of art is to transform our experi-ence of things from [simply] recognizing themto [consciously] seeing them; the device of artconsists in the ‘defamiliarization’ of things andin the complication of forms, which slows downperception and makes it more difficult … [Ishould note that Shklovsky also mentions an-other, highly technical, essay by Yakubinsky as aconceptual reference point: “The Accumulation

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of Identical Liquids in Practical and Poetic Lan-guage,” published in 1917. Because this piecepresupposes the reader’s ability to follow intri-cate linguistic description in several languages,including German and Russian, however, it is notincluded in the present volume.]

If it is the process of slowing down percep-tion—which means taking the time to con-sciously and attentively look at what is beforeus—that makes the familiar, the “unnoticed,”unfamiliar and noteworthy, then Yakubinsky canplausibly be said to have implicitly adumbratedthe principle of “defamiliarization.”

Concomitantly, if what distinguishes poeticfrom practical language above all is the former’sability to draw our attention to itself in its verymateriality, then Yakubinsky can be said to haveanticipated Jakobson’s famous definition in “Lin-guistics and Poetics” (1960) of the “poetic func-tion” as “the set (Einstellung [Germ.: attitude])toward the message as such, focus on the mes-sage for its own sake.”

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After the Russian Revolution, Yakubinsky grad-ually moved away from his fellow formalists’preoccupation with poetry and literature. Align-ing himself with the new Communist regime,which frowned upon the formalists’ lack of in-terest in the ideological and political aspects ofliterature and art, Yakubinsky turned to explor-ing the social dimension of language in its “phe-nomenal immediacy,” as he puts it in his ground-breaking 1923 essay “On Dialogic Speech.”

The very first study devoted entirely to theforms of speech in their concrete intersubjectivemanifestations, “On Dialogic Speech” is also thefirst study addressing the linguistic, psycho-physiological, pragmatic, semantic and socio-political aspects of dialogue, which Yakubinskyimplicitly credits with the weakening of author-ity and power (as opposed to the natural “al-liance that monologue has with authority”). AsI have suggested in my foreword to the first Eng-lish edition of “On Dialogic Speech” (2016),Yakubinsky’s essay can thus be said to anticipatethe Bakhtin circle’s seminal writings on thetransformative power of dialogue, as well as

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such disciplines as socio-linguistics, pragmatics,and cultural and postcolonial studies, insofar asthe latter appropriate and strategically imple-ment the concept and potential of dialogue as aliberating force. (Ironically, in coming down onthe side of dialogue as opposed to monologue,“On Dialogic Speech” ostensibly undermines itsauthor’s own ideological position.)

“On Dialogic Speech” can also be said to de-scribe and theorize, avant la lettre, our contem-porary culture of texting, tweeting, messagingand emailing—the twenty-first-century equiv-alents of “passing notes” (in class, meetings, andso on), whichYakubinsky singles out as a uniquehybrid “between mediated (written) and un-mediated (properly dialogic) communication.”

*For the remainder of his life, until his death in1945, Yakubinsky worked mainly on problemsin linguistics sanctioned by the powers that be.Expertly navigating the political waters ofLeninism and Stalinism, Yakubinsky became asuccessful, highly respected professor of linguis-

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tics at a number of Soviet institutions—includ-ing the Volodarsky Institute for Agitation—andpenned essays such as “Lenin on the ‘Revolution-ary Phrase’” (1926), “The Language of the Pro-letariat” (1931), “The Russian Language in theAge of Proletarian Dictatorship” (1931), “Onthe Language of the Classes” (1932), and “SovietLinguistics” (1934), to name only a few.

Among these later works, all of which toethe Communist Party line, one stands out, how-ever: “Ferdinand de Saussure on the Impossibil-ity of Language Politics” (1931). And eventhough this essay, too, is written from an ideo-logically invested position, and could thus be ac-cused of tendentiousness, the critique it bringsto bear on Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913)posthumously published Course in General Lin-guistics (1916)—one of the most influential the-oretical works of the modern era—is not in anyway vitiated by Yakubinsky’s political views. Forin his close reading of Saussure these views arerelevant only insofar as they are premised on thefundamental notion that political change can beeffected through language; and since this notion

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is certainly not unique to Communism—farfrom it: one could argue that all political changebegins with and in language, and depends onit—the critique Yakubinsky levels against Saus-sure reveals itself as issuing, above all, from alogically and factually plausible vantage pointthat could be—and indeed has been—occupiedby other critics wishing to address Saussure’svexing inconsistencies.

What Yakubinsky takes exception to in par-ticular is Saussure’s postulate that language“eludes our will” and is thus beyond our control,which, in turn, entails the “impossibility of arevolution in language.” For “if Saussure is right,”Yakubinsky notes, “then any organized interven-tion in the linguistic [and, by extension, politi-cal] process, any organized societal attempt atimpacting the direction of this process, that is,any language politics become impossible.” Andthat’s something, it is safe to say, that not onlyYakubinsky disagrees with: over half a centuryafter Yakubinsky’s critique of Saussure’s per-ceived ‘quietism’, Derek Attridge—in one ofthe most insightful and subtle readings of Saus-

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sure, titled “Language as History/History asLanguage: Saussure and the Romance of Ety-mology” (1987)—would speak precisely to thisissue. After citing the same passage from theCourse as Yakubinsky—“Not only would an in-dividual, even if he wanted to, be utterly inca-pable of changing the choice that has been madeby language, but the social mass, too, has nopower over a single word”—Attridge com-ments: “There is, in fact, plenty of evidence thatlanguages do change as a result of … interven-tion: one example is the existence of spellingsand often pronunciations which reflect ‘re-forms’ …”

Yakubinsky doesn’t stop here, though. Intenton understanding how Saussure could have pos-sibly arrived at such a “misguided” view, he pro-ceeds—in a radical about-face in his ownthinking—to a full-scale deconstruction of thebasic tenets of Saussure’s linguistic enterprise asa whole (and thus, by implication, of some ofthe conceptual underpinnings of much subse-quent theory), attacking each of Saussure’s four“most essential” arguments, “on which all others

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depend,” concerning our “powerlessness” vis-à-vis language, namely:

(1) the “arbitrary character of the sign” (which,by the way—as Saussure, a great connoisseur ofthe Romantic tradition, certainly knew—Wil-helm von Humboldt had already adumbrated inOn the Structural Differences of Human Languagesand Their Influence on the Intellectual Evolution ofHumankind [1836], when analyzing the ostensiblyarbitrary “articulation” of “thought” and “sound”); (2) the “multitude of signs necessary for the con-stitution any language”;(3) the “overly complex character of the system”;(4) the “resistance of collective inertia to all lin-guistic innovation.”

Having subscribed, in “On the Sounds of Po-etic Language,” to “the common view of con-temporary linguistics,” namely, that “we have noreason at all to assume that there is an internalconnection between the sound of a word and itsmeaning” and that this “connection is deter-mined through association by contiguity, and [is]merely factual, rather than natural”—in other

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words, that it is “arbitrary”—Yakubinsky nowargues the opposite: the “true nature of the con-nection” between a word and its meaning is“completely different from Saussure’s descrip-tion of it”; “the formula of the ‘arbitrariness ofthe sign’ … as well as Saussure’s theory … as awhole are misguided,” for the “connection be-tween a word and its meaning is historicallyconditioned” and, thus, not at all “arbitrary.”

Saussure’s second error, according to Yaku-binsky, consists in positing a functional (and fac-tual) link between the (potentially) infinitequantity of signs in a language and its amenabil-ity to displacement by its speakers. Why shoulda “multitude of signs” in itself prevent the latter?It might require effort, certainly, but effort doesnot necessarily translate into impossibility. Why,Yakubinsky asks, should “a partial transforma-tion of language by its speakers” be impossible,for instance?

Saussure commits a related error in suggest-ing that the complexity of language as a systemrepresents an impenetrable bulwark against userintervention. Why, though, should systemic

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complexity and innovation be mutually exclu-sive? Mainly, Saussure argues—and Yakubinskydoesn’t fail to swiftly eviscerate this dubiousclaim—due to the majority of speakers’ “igno-rance”and presumed lackof interest(and where-withal) to engage in sustained “reflection” on theworkings of language, which Saussure adducesas a precondition for its transformation. (Here,too, by the way, the degree of potential difficultyand effort involved does not at all entail the im-possibility of the project, or doom it to failure.)

Finally, claiming that a community’s collec-tive resistant inertia presents an insurmountableobstacle to linguistic initiative is historically (andlogically) untenable—resistance, after all, isknown to have been broken on occasion, asYakubinsky amply documents with particular at-tention to the language reforms that createdcontemporary Czech.

*What makes Yakubinsky’s take on Saussure sosignificant today, however, I believe, is not hiscritique per se so much as its ‘prescience’—its‘foreshadowing’ of similar or related criticisms

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brought to bear on the Swiss linguist decadeslater. “… let us ask,” Derek Attridge enjoins, im-plicitly articulating the concerns of an entiregeneration of post-Saussurean critics, “how wemight acknowledge the feedback of history intothe here and now, and the determination of lan-guage not by ‘blind’ forces [as Saussure suggests]but by human, social, and political agency, bothconscious and unconscious. To do so wouldmean regarding language as inherently unstable,internally (and eternally) shifting …”Yakubin-sky, it would appear, had already accomplishedthis task of “regarding language as inherently un-stable” half a century earlier.

*One can’t help but wonder whether the trajec-tory of modern poetics and cultural theorymight have been different (if ever so slightly)—and if so, how?—hadYakubinsky’s writings beenpart of the global critical conversation all along?We will never know, of course. But at least, nowthat they are finally available in English, we canrevisit some of the stops along the way and re-

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examine them in the new light provided byYakubinsky’s pioneering work.

*A final remark on the third text featured in thisbook, “Where Do Poems Come from?”: thisshort companion piece to “On the Sounds of Po-etic Language” shows a side of Yakubinsky thatdoesn’t come out in his other writings—playful,humorous, tongue-in-cheek. Its heavy relianceon Freud is especially noteworthy given its his-torical-political context in the early years of theSoviet Union: soon enough psychoanalysiswould be routed as bourgeois anathema.