Bakhtin and others during the course of the course-- the idea that language is social, that all of its deployments are interactive, derived from the speech acts of others, appropriated for oneself as one's own set of speech acts, and influential on yet other people as a speech act-- as long as we accept this, we say to ourselves, "Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to think of language as inseparable from speech, to think of language simply as the sum of all agencies so that no meaningful distinction between that sum of agencies and the individual agency of a speech act needs to be made." 