The sociologization of the concept of the inner form of the word by Gustav Speth and Vladimir Bibikhin

Abstract

Speths (Gustav Spet/Speth/Spth) theory of language, which subjects W. von Humboldt's linguistics, rooted in the semantic production of Indo-European languages, to phenomenological criticism, problematizes the limits of linguistic expression. For Speth, the inner form of the word is not just a matter of etymological image, capable of generating other, more efficacious images, actualized in poetic invention. Speth understands the poetic already on the basis of the distinction between the content of consciousness and the object of consciousness in the school of F. Brentano, and therefore interprets poetic speech as a resource of constant interpretation of language data. Inner form then turns out to be the very content of consciousness that exists before interpretations - whereas interpretation is produced by the very energy of language, by its social existence itself, and the social being of language coincides with the making of stable images with a form of their own. Ways of writing, then, may not be limited to the familiar script, but may convey a sustained syntax of the imagination that differs from the school syntax that goes back to the Aristotelian understanding of predication. Speth's rejection of the doubling of consonants within a morpheme and V. Bibikhin's rejection of the comma as a separating rather than intonational sign belongs to the general line of rejection of the separation of the similar, which contradicts the new understanding of the sociality of language. Bibikhin sees Speth as an administrator, but of a new type, knowing the internal form as the basis of correct scientific production and giving ritual duty to the internal form, whereas Potebnya took ritual seriously. But this administrative experience is what allowed Spet to formulate all those prerequisites for a sociological understanding of internal form, which Bibikhin interprets in light of Speths biography. Understanding Speth as a virtuous administrator, Bibikhin reveals Speths doctrine of internal form as a doctrine of the creation of new disciplinary boundaries, as opposed to the avant-garde overcoming of boundaries. A close reading of Shpeths work shows that his particular apophatic approach to inner form was the source of the generation of new disciplines and practices within disciplines, which Bibikhin understood as the project of a new Renaissance, the rebirth of productive scholarship.