Presidium Podium

For quite some time now, I have hypothesised that the comparatively high prevalence of passive voice-reliant formulation in common Russian observational language is an indication of underlying cultural differences in worldview and cultural outlook.

Years after first synthesising this observation, I stick by it, despite little empirical or scientifically admissible data to mine or research — and even less time to comb the landscape for credible supporting evidence.

This may mean that my idea is baseless, especially if one is to proceed from my mom’s dictum regarding my attempts to help teach Lisa Russian — that I, a person of no formal Russian education or pedagogical training, ought to write a book, “Novel approaches to the Russian language.”

I have always had problems — or rather, problems were always encountered by me — with what appeared to my English teachers as an excessive fondness for passive voice constructions. Passive voice, as you probably know, is a configuration of sentence in which the grammatical subject is the receiver of the action of the verb, as opposed to an explicitly identified agent that performs an action — a transitive verb — unto a subject.

For instance:

• Active voice: The flying ball hit Billy squarely in the face.
• Passive voice: Billy was hit by the flying ball squarely in the face.

In the sort of writing technique generally disseminated in American public education and introductory university composition courses, passive voice is discouraged in rather ebullient terms as a stylistic device. Nobody ever bothered to give me satisfyingly explicit reasons for this; in fact, now that I think about it, there really aren’t any memorable answers at all. Something about obscuring and/or confounding the actor in a sentence, and so on and so forth.

One day, having thought about it, it hit me that my motivation in using it in many of the situations under my active consideration was a very deliberate one, rather than a fact of syntactical or grammatical happenstance or some form of aesthetic willy-nilly. It conveyed precisely that which I intended to convey about an action — usually a complex action with a multitude of causal links and conceptual dependencies — that resulted in a certain state of affairs by transpiring in a self-contained way, participating unto itself, in and of itself.

Notwithstanding any role that the highly bureaucratic, intensely ideological and rather technocratic Soviet regime may play in contributing to this effect through its presentation of press releases, newspaper articles and communiques to the polity, there is something about the prominence of passive voice in Russian that I think indicates differences in how the incumbent culture of its native speakers sees the world.

Those differences strike me as being almost ontological in scope and significance.

Orthodox and mainstream Anglo-American formulation of thoughts tends to grant very generous emphasis to the agency and, where applicable, individuality associated with the carrying-out of actions. I am fairly certain some of the foundation for this ideological; the mythos of English liberal values, of socio-economic orders that in their official exhortation give prominence to free agency and private enterprise, and other things making frequent appearance in the common intellectual inheritance of American and English thinking seem to demand that the agent be underscored.

This orientation engenders a clearer and more distinct sense of individual responsibility and accountability for actions, as well as giving credit where credit is due to individual initiative or assigning blame in case of error. That is the optimistic appraisal, anyway; all of these dominant features of the language we use to describe our world have representational connection to the underlying power structure, and the interests of empowered constituencies in telling a certain story about the world’s structure, organisation, operation, and justifying the roles that some people play in it and others don’t.

The Eastern European mind has always had a more collective psychology, even prior to the advent of socialist revolution. For the majority of the population, conditions created a greater atmosphere of community - more specifically, communality - as it related to the appropriation of the social product. Individual accomplishment was not as significant; individual contributions were often seen more as parts of a distributed endeavour than unique and distinctive, and often anonymised or played down in popular culture.

Furthermore, Russians do not really have a democratic tradition in their history, either in some degree of fact or the illusion of such. For as long as Russia has existed hitherto, it has essentially been autocratically ruled to one degree or another. This leads to a different perception of personal and popular empowerment, and the displacement of individual actions upon macroscopic events.

In much the same way as people chalk up anonymous and unpredictable natural disasters to the whims of “Mother Nature,” in a tone of resignation at their powerlessness before it, I feel that Eastern Europeans are more inclined to view political and macro-historical events in a similar vein. Not merely the account of history, but indeed its content, has a more contrived, “manufactured” and “official” character to it, executed (if not necessarily, but possibly dictated) by a strong and ever-present bureaucratic outfit — an apparatus, a nomenklatura.

It is not an unparsimonious leap to suggest that the perception of day-to-day events can be shaped by this paradigmatic idiosyncrasy. It is more often the case, it seems to me, that it would seem gratuitous, unbecoming, or simplistic to dwell on the importance of the assignment of an actor to events. It may even seem like a gratuitous semantic fetish. Situations often simply “arise,” facts “come into being,” considerations “obtain” and events “take place” to engender a certain outcome.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Language, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.