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Overview
This book places Gramsci’s ideas within the linguistically influenced social theory of the twentieth century. It summarizes some of the major ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, Ludwig Wittgenstein, language philosophy and post-structuralism in relation to Gramsci’s position. By paying great attention to the linguistic underpinnings of Gramsci's Marxism, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci shows how his theorization of power, language and politics address issues raised by post-modernism and the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783716623 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 07/20/2004 |
| Series: | Reading Gramsci |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Peter Ives is Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Winnipeg. He completed his PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto in 1998. He is the author of Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (2004).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Language and Social Theory: The Many Linguistic Turns
This chapter provides an overview of some of the most influential approaches to language that have greatly informed social, political and cultural theory in the last hundred years or so. Thorough accounts of any of the specific thinkers or movements discussed would constitute books in themselves. The goal here is to provide the theoretical background and context to Gramsci's ideas about language. This framework will create a basis of comparison to consider how Gramsci utilized language within his political analysis and especially when developing the concept of hegemony. After a brief discussion of the changing role of language in society, this chapter summarizes some of the central ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), who founded structuralist linguistics. The adoption of Saussure's ideas in anthropology and the other social sciences is often called the 'linguistic turn'. As will be explained below, while this label captures important trends, it can also obscure the extent to which such influence is as much a 'structuralist turn' (that is, a specific approach to language) as it is a turn towards language per se. After noting how Saussure's structuralism was adopted in the social sciences, the chapter considers the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, and especially the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1953). The chapter concludes with a brief examination of the enigmatic relationship between Marxism and language.
Language, production and politics in the twentieth century
The larger question of why ideas about language were so central to social theory and philosophy in the twentieth century is a fascinating one that we can only touch on here. It is essential to put this aspect of intellectual history in its social, economic and historical context. Karl Marx criticized German philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century for being mired in a world of words and ideas to the neglect of the real world of material production in factories. Marx noted that philosophy tended to be dominated by abstract thought and did not take enough heed of the important social and economic conditions and rapid changes taking place with the industrial revolution. But the twentieth century witnessed a trend in economic production processes and products that has eroded any such obvious opposition between the world of ideas, words and language on the one hand, and the world of manual labour, physical production and commodities on the other. Such erosion has not occurred, as Marx had hoped, because the proletarian struggle helped overcome the alienation of intellectual from manual labour. Rather, there have been drastic changes in the nature of important commodities and especially changes in the processes of the production of all commodities, brought about by computer technology, increased world-wide transportation and the globalization of many market places (as Marx argued, this was predictable, since capitalism demands a continual transformation of production processes). Changes in production processes including (but not limited to) technological innovations such as electronics and computerization blur the distinction between manual labour and mental activity. The end of the twentieth century witnessed sweatshop-like factories for 'offshore' workers whose products were the input of data into computer systems. Many occupations have been deskilled with the implementation of technology. For example, people employed in making food in restaurants instead of being skilled chefs became minimum-wage unskilled burger flippers. The labour processes in fast-food restaurants have been modelled on assembly lines, where technology is used as much for control of the workforce as for increased efficiency.
To take a very different example, the price of two pairs of running shoes produced in the same factory might vary five-fold if one has the Nike swoosh and the other does not. That Nike swoosh itself is the product of countless workers in advertising firms. But what we are buying is not so much the physical characteristics of that Nike symbol, but its symbolic effect, its meaning. Many of the workers who produced that meaning, including the secretaries and mailroom employees, are exploited in ways not altogether dissimilar from Marx's industrial working class or proletariat. They usually have little control over how they work and are at the mercy of their employers from whom they receive a wage. They fit several important aspects, although not all, of Marx's description of the proletariat as those who do not own the means of production and, thus, have to sell their labour power in order to survive. With the so-called 'feminization' of clerical work and many other occupations involving language skills, such as teaching, it is untenable simply to divide physical activity of the factory floor as being laborious and exploitable from mental activity of the office cubicle or schoolroom as being inherently thoughtful, uplifting and non-exploitative.
In addition to such changes in production processes that complicate the relationship between language use and physical labour, the issue of ideology within the development of democratic societies has also put language at centre stage. Especially in his development of the concept of hegemony, Gramsci grappled with the advent of mass democracy, including mass political parties, which were still relatively young in his time. Since his death, the democratic phenomenon of increased suffrage and the legitimation of state power based on mass politics has continued. In a century that witnessed the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, both receiving substantial support from within societies that had been democratic, the question of ideology became paramount. Because many democratic governments are now at least formally accessible to all their citizens (over a certain age), the persistence of closed, elitist circles that control most of the economic and political power is a pressing and sometimes seemingly inexplicable fact. Gramsci's ideas have been useful for many attempting to analyse how power operates within these democratic societies. His notion of hegemony addresses some of the phenomena that the concept of ideology describes but adds to ideology a focus on institutions and daily practices as well as ideas and belief systems.
One cannot think about the developments of democracy relating to language and ideology in the twentieth century without keeping in mind that the European nation-state really came to the fore in the nineteenth century. That century saw the actual political unification of Italy and Germany. The previously unified nation-states of France, Britain and the United States embarked upon massive projects aimed at socially and economically consolidating their populations, including language 'standardization', national education systems, transport and communications networks. These all contributed to the confluence of the political state with the cultural nation, sometimes more effective, sometimes less. And while the simple equation of nation-state with language has rarely been successful, the role of language-related policies in nation building is a hallmark of nineteenth-century Europe.
The twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of the European-style nation-state throughout the globe. But it has also seen a dissolution of the assumptions upon which nation-states are founded. Now we are faced with many questions often discussed under the label of 'globalization'. Is the nation-state still capable of having an important impact on its citizens' lives in the face of multinational corporations, global stock markets and international trends in production and consumption? What is the role of non-state 'nations' such as Northern Ireland, Scotland and Quebec, or the Basques, Inuit, Cree, Mohawk, Maori and Laps? With the 'English only' movement in the United States, the increasing use of English by the global elite and the general failure of the equation of one nation-state, one language, what is the role of national or public languages in democratic societies? These questions facing us today are rooted to a large extent in the dynamics of language and community that Gramsci was dealing with in Italy between 1911 and 1937. For these reasons, to understand Gramsci's writings about hegemony and be able to use them to help us analyse and act in our world, it is best to focus on Gramsci's theory of language. The first step in such a process is a brief overview of various diverse intellectual trends that have all been labelled at one time or another 'the linguistic turn'.
The many 'linguistic turns'
It would be overly simple and reductionist to suggest that the political and technological changes discussed above directly caused the paradigm shifts in various disciplines that have been labelled 'the linguistic turn'. While the dadaist's 'sound poems' explicitly question whether life has meaning in the modern, disenchanted world, the impetus for changes in academic methods are more difficult to decipher. It is easy to understand that large numbers of women entering the work force would have a direct influence on our use of language, with terms such as 'chairman' and 'fireman' changing to 'chairperson' and 'firefighter'. But the increase of women's wage labour is not the only reason why academic feminists have examined the complex implications of masculine structures of language and masculine hegemonies. It is difficult to connect the political, social and economic changes directly to the different 'linguistic turns' that occurred in various academic disciplines.
Moreover, it is too simple to characterize the 'linguistic turns' in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, the social sciences, history and literary studies as all belonging to the very same movement or trend. Nevertheless, these paradigm shifts occurred within social, political and economic contexts, and there are clearly some similarities among them. Such commonalities include (1) an emphasis on the interrelated character of phenomena under investigation, (2) the idea that the source of knowledge is rarely to be found in the individual qualities of objects or elements themselves, but instead in the relationships among objects being studied, and (3) the emphasis on how language itself is not a passive representation of reality or our own lives but rather contributes to how we live and make choices.
Saussure's structural approach to language
In the social sciences, the 'linguistic turn' amounts to the impact of a paradigm first offered by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Near the end of his life, Saussure broke with the tradition of linguistics in which he had been trained and had conducted most of his career. In a series of lectures delivered between 1907 and 1911 (the year Gramsci entered university and began studying linguistics), Saussure proposed a new basis for the science of language. His death in February 1913 prevented him from presenting these ideas as a published work. Instead, The Course in General Linguistics was assembled posthumously, mostly culled from his students' lecture notes and a few of his own. It has become a central text and has had a dramatic impact on linguistics and the social sciences at large.
Much of European linguistics at the time of Saussure's death focused on tracing the history of word forms and attempting to determine the patterns in these changes. This is called diachronic change. To overly simplify one example, diachronic or historical linguists noted that many incidences of the 'f' sound in English and German are conversions of the 'p' sound in Latin (pater as in paternity changed to 'f' as in 'father'). In short, linguistics was a historical science aimed at understanding how word forms had arisen and how they were related to one another across different languages and over time.
In his lectures, Saussure argued that such an approach could never be truly scientific because it could never isolate language as a decisive object of study. There were not clear enough boundaries between individual utterances or acts of speech, which might be idiosyncratic, and the actual patterned nature of language that enables people to produce meaning. Instead, he proposed a clear division between the historical development of a given language and the actual structure of how a language operates as a system. He argued that because we can use language without knowing anything about its historical development, the scientific study of language must primarily investigate how language operates at any given time, not a language's history. He called this idea of language as a system of signs its synchronic dimension to distinguish it from the diachronic, or historical, dimension.
Saussure's other major contention for linguistics was that in order for it to be a science it had to analyse not individual utterances of language, that is speech (or what he called parole), but the system of language (what he called langue). While Saussure understood that speech was an inherent aspect of language itself (and even language as a synchronic system), he argued that for linguistics to separate itself from other sciences such as psychology, anthropology and philology, it must take the systemic element of language as its primary focus. In other words, there must be an analytic separation between how language is used in practice – parole – and its structure, that is how its elements are related to one another – langue. (One of the little ironies of history is that linguistic structuralism based on this demarcation of 'objects of study' was incorporated into anthropology and the other social sciences whose domains are not language.)
Saussure's analysis of language as a system consisted of breaking down that system into signs each of which was made up of two parts: the sound pattern and the concept. The sound pattern, or what he called the 'signifier', is the actual sound as it is heard. The concept, or what he called the 'signified', is what is meant by that signifier, or that idea denoted by the sound pattern. A sign is the union of a signifier and signified.
One of his most important, and controversial, points is that there is no necessary or natural relation between the signifier and the signified. Instead, the signifier is only conventionally or arbitrarily related to the signified. The words 'dog' in English, Hund in German and chien in French are all signifiers with the same (or similar) signifieds. There is nothing, he argued, about the concept of 'dog' itself that relates to why we call it a 'dog', Hund or chien. Even the examples of onomatopoeia do not contravene Saussure's notion of arbitrariness. The English signifier for a dog's bark may be 'bow-wow' or 'arf-arf', whereas in French it is ouâ-ouâ and in German vau-vau. Saussure did not deny that many words or signs have a non-arbitrary nature within a given language system. Some are motivated, to use the linguistic term, or related (i.e. non-arbitrary) partially in their relation to other words or signs. For example, the American English word, 'flashlight' is not totally arbitrary in its relation to 'flash' and 'light'. While the word 'torch' could easily suffice, as it does in England, its 'motivation' or the causes for whether it successfully signifies must contain some way to distinguish it from a non-electric 'torch'. The German Taschen–lampe meaning flashlight or torch is more closely motivated by Tasche meaning pocket and Lampe meaning lamp. In short, signifiers are motivated by their relations with other signifiers, not by the relations within the sign between signifier and signified.
Saussure did not explicitly discuss how signs are related to what is often called the referent, or the objects in the 'real' world that correspond to the signified. It is important to realize that for Saussure, the signified 'dog' is the concept, idea or meaning 'dog', not an actual dog that is being referred to. He clearly rejected the notion that a sign or word simply corresponded to an object, idea or referent. But his unambiguous rejection of this idea of language as nomenclature – language as a collection of words (primarily nouns) that stood for things (objects) – was not replaced by a theory of the link between the term 'dog' and those objects designated by that term outside of the sign system. He did not give an explanation for the philosophical process of relating different objects, individual dogs, or breeds of dogs, to general categories such as 'dog'. This omission is reasonable given his attempt to distinguish linguistics as a science from philosophy. But it has created much controversy over the philosophical and political implications of the structuralism that he inaugurated.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Language and Hegemony in Gramsci"
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Copyright © 2004 Peter Ives.
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Table of Contents
Introduction1. Language And Social Theory: The Many Linguistic Turns
2. Linguistics And Politics In Gramsci's Italy
3. Language And Hegemony In The Prison Notebooks
4. Gramsci's Key Concepts With Linguistic Enrichment
5. Postmodernism, New Social Movements And Globalization: Implications For Social And Political Theory
Bibliography
index