language-production in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929), a work that offers the first considered Marxist theory of language. The occasion is provided by Saussure's attempt, at the turn of the century, to produce a scientific language theory, as well as by the Formalists attempt a little later to build on Saussure towards a scientific analysis of the 'literariness' of texts.4 Although Saussure admitted language to be a 'social' act and a system of relations his keenness to evolve a scientific theory obliged him effectively to deride and relegate the functional/social aspects of language use and formation.5 He chose instead to emphasize that all language use by the actual speaking individual (Ie parole) is made possible by an a priori scheme (structure) of what he thought to be invariant rules (la langue). Thus diachrony, or the historical process of the transformation/transmutation of languages (Saussure would say language) was to be subordinated as an object of study to the syn-chronic stabilities of a linguistic structure. Although Saussure's own all-important postulation about the arbitrary status of signifiers within the linguistic sign ought to have been for him the surest evidence of the contingent nature of language and hence a condition of its dissolution into history, Saussure dismissed the fact as being riddled with too many variables to be of any 'objective' and lasting value. La langue, on the other hand, stood as something autonomous (even though an abstraction), a reified and god-like structure of self-adjusting language elements above and beyond the reach of capricious human agencies. Two contradictions disable Sau;?sure's theorization: one, all so-called invariant structures are, in the first place, products, so that what seem like stable synchronic moments in cultural life are at bottom always at the mercy of a more assuredly continuous diachrony; (e.g., the BBC for some time now has accepted and admitted into language use vocabularies, phraseologies, and variant combinations of language elements that would earlier have been not only sacrilegious but inconceivable according to 'standard' practice). Two, it follows that structure is itself always being structured by a contaminating parole. It is at this level of the new linguistic problematic thatVolosinov/Bakhtin make their entry, just as later on Bakhtin will correct another major, though related and understandable, inadequacy of structuralist thought—its inability to provide a theory of the novel, a genre too diffuse to allow a rigorously centralized categorization (and diffuse because too insistently and embarrassingly inclusive of the cacophonies of the lived interaction of social languages—Bakhtin's term will be 'polyglossia'). In fact, what a structuralist bias would designate the novel's greatest weakness—the seemingly endless proliferation of voices within it— Bakhtin will see as its greatest strength, and so provide not merely a new aesthetic but a political insight of far-reaching import. He will also suggest that 'polyglossia'—the inundation of a centralized unitary (Saussure's 'structured') genre/style by opposing (and opposed) multiplicity ofactual social voices—will not possess merely a countering virtue but will indeed, in a truly polyphonic novel, produce a ne\^ structure characterized by a continuous, total and tension filled inter-texuality. The socially constitutive/creative play of such collision of Journal of Arts and Ideas ^