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theory of ideology and its relationship to language. The crucial conceptual link was an encounter with the works of Saussure through the
neolinguistics of Gramscis research supervisor Matteo Bartoli and the
works of the Russian Formalists respectively. In each case language was
seen to be a social given which structured consciousness, demanding a
reconsideration of the idealist conception of consciousness common to
both neo-Hegelian and neo-Kantian philosophy.
Gramsci had become dissatisfied with the Crocean conception of language after the 1923 Education Act, following Croces contention that a
normative grammar was impossible, made no provision for the teaching
of normative Italian. The result was, according to Gramsci, the reinforcement of class divisions by leaving the subaltern classes illiterate and
trapped within provincial dialects: Thus we are going back to a division
into juridically fixed and crystallized estates rather than moving towards
the transcendence of class divisions.1 This was, however, quite the opposite of what Croce had intended. In his enormously influential Aesthetic as
Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902) Croce had slammed positivist social science and linguistics for their elitism, noting that among
the principal reasons which have prevented Aesthetic, the science of art,
from revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has
been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of it a
sort of special function or aristocratic club.2 Art and language needed to
be identified, they are the creative self expression of the individual and
the national-popular masses and as such cannot be subject to the abstract
schemas of grammarians, which serve to limit and restrict popular creativity. Language, for Croce, was the flow of unique intuition-expressions,
ceasing to exist outside works of art. Every utterance is a work of art, for
the limits of the expression-intuitions that are called art, as opposed to
those that are vulgarly called non-art, are empirical, and impossible to
define.3 Through the expressive objectivization of impressions, that is
artistic activity, mankind liberates itself, raising itself above those
impressions and driving away passivity. Grammar, on the other hand,
stresses language as isolated and combinable words, not in living discourse, in expressive organisms, rationally indivisible.4
A Historical Science
This combination of Romantic philosophy and egalitarian politics was
very attractive to those, like Gramsci, who sought to break out of the
deterministic laws of Social Darwinism and Second International Marxism, but the reactionary adoption of Croces philosophy now demanded a
significant reformulation of the problem. This was being undertaken by
Bartoli, who had developed a spatial analysis of language that owed a
lot to Saussures langue, and sought to trace how a dominant speech community exerted prestige over contiguous, subordinate communities.
With this move, Gramsci argued, linguistics became a historical science,
1
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith, eds,
London 1971, p. 41. See also Selections from Cultural Writings, Forgacs and Nowell-Smith,
eds, London 1985, pp. 1657.
2
B. Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, London 1953, p. 14.
3
Ibid., p. 13.
4
Ibid., p. 151.
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charting the flow of innovations from the prestigious langue to the receiving one. Bartoli was, however, unable to develop his observations beyond
the cataloguing of innovations, and turned to the intellectually repugnant idealist Bertoni to develop a methodology. Neolinguistics was, however, dependent only on historicism in general, with no special reliance
on Crocism, and was thus capable of being developed on a Marxist base.5
This had to be developed through a critical engagement with Crocism,
and particularly with reference to the works of the German philologist
Karl Vossler, who shared significant common ground with both Croce
and Bartoli.
Croces romantic populism was also very close to the dominant production aesthetic of the Russian avant-garde which, especially in the works
of Andre Bely and the Futurists, viewed art as the absolute adversary of
positivism. The so-called zaum (trans-rational) poetic movement in particular aspired to the creation of an absolute language in the making
that could never be fixed in print, hence the slogan of the Cubo-Futurists,
After reading tear to pieces.6 Aesthetic activity and cultural artefacts
were treated as antipodes that parallel the bifurcation of language into
energeia, vital, living discourse, and ergon, the static system of grammatical rules, now finding its modern expression in Saussures langue. In
developing this absolute poetic discourse, the poet would be able to raise
the speech of the masses to new heights, releasing their expressive potential and forging a new communal culture, what the Symbolist Ivanov
called sobornost. To some extent Bakhtins early work can be seen as a
phenomenological investigation of this process, examining how the
author recontextualizes the intention of the hero, and in so doing consecrates the existence of that hero. Without the aesthetic activity of the
author, the hero would be condemned to live in a stream of consciousness
the meaning and significance of which would remain shrouded in a thick
fog. By recontextualizing the intention of the hero, the author reveals the
connectedness of the utterance to the immediate situation or event and,
beyond this, the interconnectedness and open-endedness of human
development. When cultural products are isolated from the purposeful
activity of life then that culture will develop immanently according to
impersonal, logical laws reminiscent of Social Darwinism.7 Thus those
doctrines which treat the ergon of culture apart from the energeia of the
creative process are not only mistaken but also dangerous.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bakhtin school should react with
such hostility to the Saussurean system which stressed the autonomous
system of signs as the key factor in structuring social consciousness. The
terms of the Saussurean claim to the ground occupied by phenomenology were diametrically opposed to the thrust of Bakhtins philosophy
and the expressive aesthetic of the avant-garde. The society described by
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processes were required for one social group to understand another in the
same city, for children to understand parents in the same family, for one
day to understand the next.20
The Presence of Contradiction
The picture of the linguistic environment presented by Vossler, and
adopted in modified form by Gramsci and Bakhtin, is not, however, as
untroubled as Emerson suggests. Translation involves the transferral of
the inner form of language, the tendency of mind towards a definite goal,
across the borders of outer form, where it becomes differently embodied in
the receiving language. Moreover, the surety of meaning is disrupted by
interest, that faithless and ever changing thing which comes between
words and objects, between poetry and truth and undermines the
whole permanence and the real value of languages. As style coincides
with world-view (style and form tendencies coincide with the sentiment
and meaning of the speakers) each language is threatened by the others,
compelling a language community to employ translation as a means of
self-preservation. Taste stands guard over the boundaries of the language, binding man aesthetically just as sentiment binds him ethically,
maintaining linguistic and thus ideological independence in the face of
attempts to throttle and dominate the community. While the inner form
of language is present in all languages, a unifying (one might say centripetal) force impelling the word towards the extralinguistic object, the
plurality of outer form and interest cuts across and interferes with this
directedness. As a result language becomes a field of force where different interests, ideologies and styles contend.21
The extent of Vosslers influence on Bakhtin and Gramsci is rarely
acknowledged. In shifting the Crocean identification of language and
world-view to an analysis of style, Vossler implicitly acknowledged ideologies as existing in social, semiotic forms and defined by their relation
to other competing ideologies. This is directly adopted by both Gramsci
and Bakhtins group in the late 1920s but reaccentuated so as to correlate
with the sociological stratification of society as defined by Marxism.
Vossler and the nineteenth-century philologist von Humboldt had
recognised the philosophical significance of the diversity of languages
but had seen language only as the expression of national spirit and the
utterance as the expression of individual spirit; Bakhtin and Gramsci
added the crucial extra dimension of social diversity. In doing this, however, both rejected the Marxian base and superstructure model in favour
of the Hegelian reduction of the social whole to the expressions of a
single essence interpreted, through Vossler (and ultimately von Humboldt), in terms of the inner form of language. For Gramsci, a determinate
social group, thereby, has a conception of the world implicit in its social
practice and which is manifested in the language it uses. In Bakhtins
mature work dialogism, the relation between discourses, is taken to be the
expression of this single essence, running throughout all social interaction and which the novel models. Heteroglossia, the socially stratified
19
Ibid., p. 182.
M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics, Manchester 1984, p. xxxi.
21
Vossler, The Spirit of Language, pp. 1726.
20
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national language, is, however, subject to the power relations and hierarchy of society in which a dominant discourse imposes itself on others,
presenting itself as universal and ideal. This skewing of the linguistic
environment imposes different types of interaction between discourses
such that within a single nation, as Gramsci noted, a new ruling class
brings about alterations as a mass, but the jargons of various professions, of specific societies, innovate in a molecular way.22
The Saussurean langue, the unitary and normative grammatical structure
of the national language, is therefore, as Bakhtin put it in 1934, not
something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan]and at
every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia.23 As Gramsci noted in rather different terminology:
Written normative grammars tend to embrace the entire territory of a nation
and its total linguistic volume, to create a unitary national linguistic conformism . . . But it is obvious that someone who writes a normative grammar
cannot ignore the history of the language of which he wishes to propose an
exemplary phase as the only one worthy to become, in an organic and totalitarian way, the common language of a nation in competition with other
phases and types or schemes that already exist (connected to traditional developments or to inorganic and incoherent attempts of forces which . . . act continuously on the spontaneous grammars immanent in the language).24
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existence. Bringing official discourse into contact with immediate reality, through narrative, facilitates its break-up into socially specific
dialects; as it enters the realm of recontextualization and experiment the
ideological structure, or in Vosslers terminology the spirit of the language, is revealed. Carnival culture is, however, not so much counterhegemonic as anti-hegemonic, at its extreme threatening the very
concept of discursive truth, but always orientated against the fear-inspiring official, ruling stratum. Maximally tied to material reality, the peasantry of medieval Europe were maximally imbued with becoming, with
the vital inner form of language, and thus spurned the crystallized official language in favour of a Dionysian anti-systematic revel. It takes the
novelist to organize and systematize this popular critical impulse into an
analytical organ that tests the validity of discourses against extra-discursive reality.
The authorial function, always endowed with a political significance, has
now begun to sound like a fully-fledged political function. When the
source of ideological difference has been located within the matrix of
productive relations (which Voloshinov had established in the 1929
study of the philosophy of language), then attempts to complete and
organize those ideologies into a whole looks very like political organization. Indeed the relations between author and hero, artist and society
become distinctly reminiscent of the relation between the vanguard
party and the working class in Lenins formulation. This was certainly
not overlooked by Gramsci, who applied the terms of Croces aesthetics
to the workings of the revolutionary party, and could scarcely have been
overlooked by any members of the Bakhtin school:
Political intuition is not expressed through the artist, but through the leader;
and intuition must be understood to mean not knowledge of men, but swiftness in connecting seemingly disparate facts, and in conceiving the means adequate to particular endsthus discovering the interests involved and arousing
the passions of men and directing them towards a particular action. The
expression of the leader is his action.32
32
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between discourses but in reality are only providing the means by which
his own direct or refracted word might ring out all the more energetically.34 This Gramsci sees as constitutive of bureaucratic centralism in
which the organization is technically a policing organism, and its name
of political party is simply a metaphor of a mythological character.35
In each case here, any apparent dialogue and debate is merely a means for
the acceptance of the perspective emanating from the centre; the result is
known in advance, all accents are gathered into a single voice. In
Dostoyevskys polyphonic novel, however, the authorial design is the
most extreme activization of vari-directional accents in double voiced
discourse rather than the subordination of these to the verbal and
semantic dictatorship of a monologic, unified style and unified tone.36
For Gramsci, similarly, a party is progressive when it functions according to democratic centralism, keeping previously dominant forces
within the bounds of legality and [raising] the backward masses toward
the level of the new legality.37 Voices usually drowned beneath louder,
authoritative voices, are raised to an equal level where all compete freely
according to their intrinsic merits rather than the authority they wield.
If each discourse articulates a world-view and discourses struggle to
establish their superiority as a necessary corollary of the class struggle,
then a discourse becomes hegemonic when one social classs world-view
is accepted as kindred by other social classes. This does not mean the
struggle for hegemony consists merely of a conflict between two preformed ideologies but a conflict of hegemonic principles. Discourses seek to
bind other discourses to themselves according to two basic principles:
either by establishing a relation of authority between the enclosing and
target discourses or by facilitating the further advancement of the target
discourse through the enclosing discourse. In Discourse in the Novel
Bakhtin terms these hegemonic principles authoritative discourse and
internally persuasive discourse respectively. The former:
[D]emands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite
independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we
encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is
located in the distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to
be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers.38
This is termed the monologic and the poetic approach to another discourse. Behind the enclosing discourse lies a power that is is impossible
34
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Thus the interaction of discourses in the novel is but the most thoroughgoing manifestation of the interactions within the language community
itself. The polyphonic novel is the artistically heightened expression of
the progressive hegemonic principle which is always present within society, while the monologic principle is akin to the workings of authoritarian social forces.
In Gramscis prison writings the above divergent hegemonic principles
coincide with the exercise of hegemony by the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In bourgeois society the active man-in-the-mass has a practical
activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, having for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination
adopted the conception of the dominant class. While theoretical consciousness and practical activity may be historically contradictory, this
does not make itself apparent in normal times when the dominant conception is inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. The hegemonic conception, like authoritative discourse, serves to conceal and
subjugate the conception implicit in his social practice to produce a
state in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit of
any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral
and political passivity. When the subordinate social group begins to act
in a unified fashion, however, the implicit conception begins to appear
39
40
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The status of the social discourses of the peasantry and other intermediate groups is akin to that of dialects in relation to a national language
with universal aspirations. In a modern context we could mention the
spontaneous discourses of different oppressed groups like gay liberation, feminism and black nationalism which remain limited to their own
group concerns. Those discourses which are unable to develop beyond
this stage must seek alliances with other, potentially hegemonic discourses:
[A] language that is merely individual, merely ornamental and national, and
remains fixed in its particular provincialism, will degenerate into a mere
dialect. Above all, in the iron grip with which the language would try to retain
its national aspect, the language itself would crumble.46
Thus identification with or rejection of anothers viewpoint is an aesthetic action. Gramsci, following Bartolis development of this point,
termed this fascino-prestigio (attraction-prestige). The proletariat and
bourgeoisie have the ability to become hegemonic and generate prestige
enough to win the leadership of other social groups. Aligned to each of
these classes is a group of intellectuals who articulate the most systematic and advanced version of the hegemonic discourse, winning leadership of the class to which they are aligned. While the relations of
intellectuals and social group, party and class, are dialectically reciprocal, the positions are not interchangeable; thus Gramsci can write that it
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reintegrate art into a transformed social life by creating a special language of poetry. This, as Nikolai Bachtin noted some years later, was
not a poetic gesture in Bakhtins terms but an intensely novelistic attempt
to release and gather the latent powers of folk-poetry and popular speech
and, investing them with new functions, build up a new medium of
poetic communication.55 It was precisely the absence of social transformation, dependent on the internationalization of the revolution, that left
the artists as simply artists and transformed their project into a typical
utopian philosopheme.56 The degeneration of the mass popular festivals
of 191819 in which the avant-gardistes had organized huge carnivalesque pageants and public performances, was typical of the bureaucratization of the institutional and social orders that left the avant garde
beached. The Stalinist eulogization of Mayakovsky and demand for tendentious literature deliberately obscured the changes in the context of
poetic production between the 1930s and the revolutionary era, and
Bakhtins ambiguity over the poetic as type of discourse and stance
towards other discourses is undoubtedly a symptom of this. As a result
the generic in itself appeared reactionary rather than the specific conditions of performance that imbued poetry with its social value. The novel
thereby often appears an anti-genre concerned with the purely anti-hegemonic work of the carnivalesque rather than a counter-genre.57
The meeting of Bakhtin and Gramsci alerts us to these problems in
Bakhtins analysis but also shows the incompatibility of Bakhtins work
with that of the liberal establishments literary critics who have tried to
enlist his work in their struggle against the more radical versions of poststructuralism. From the work of the post-marxist idealists of the first
twenty years of the century both Bakhtin and Gramsci fashioned a political aesthetics which aimed to organize the deconstructive impulses of the
subaltern classes into a force for revolutionary change. Furthermore,
Bakhtin, at his best, supplies a welcome corrective to some aspects of
Gramscis work which led the latter into a partial accommodation with
Stalinism and moreover does so without sliding into the void of the poststructualist hors texte. This chiefly refers to Gramscis relatively undeveloped understanding of the systematic nature of language which has
allowed writers to advocate the complete separation of the notion of
hegemony from classism, based on a post-structuralist philosophy of
language in which meaning is solely the unstable effect of shifting relations of difference.58
Croce believed that the subject could intuit reality before its translation
into the linguistic terms which became its social embodiment. Gramsci
similarly believed that through the synthesizing activity of social practice workers could have a pre-verbal, semi-consciousness of their position
in productive relations which could then be translated into discourse
given favourable historical conditions. Reminiscent of Lukcs, Gramsci
seems to be suggesting that the standpoint of the proletariat is the basis of a
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class consciousness that is synonymous with truth and that the revolutionary party, in providing the highest expression of that consciousness
would have extra-discursive access to reality. Hence his comment that
the party takes the place of the divinity or the categorical imperative.59
It is, however, left unexplained as to exactly how a conception of the
world can be implicit in the practice of a given social group, especially
when we consider language as the articulated structure which makes
contact with reality only at the periphery60 which Saussures work
demands. While Gramscis anti-realist epistemology allowed him to
break with then dominant false consciousness Marxist theories of ideology, facilitating the development of an account of ideology as something
continually reorganized in the face of the struggle between classes, it
often led him to reduce the social to the subjects consciousness of it.
While Bakhtins failure to account for the material determinants of
heteroglossia frequently led him into the same reduction, he did more satisfactorily examine this weak area than did Gramsci.
In rejecting Gramscis suggestion of an unmediated link between economic class interest and political ideology, some have gone on to argue
that there is no correlation at all between discursive meaning and the
economic organization of society. As Ann Jefferson notes:
[D]ialogism is positively activated by intensifying mimesis at every turn . . .
whether one begins with reference or with dialogism, the two concepts prove
to be inextricably linked . . . There is a kind of complementarity whereby representation necessarily entails the active heteroglossia of dialogism, and dialogism necessarily leads back again to questions of representation.61
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