Note per una introduzione allo studio della grammatica

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This is the original text of Gramsci on normative and imminent grammar

http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ITA3066/_PA.HTM

http://www.nilalienum.com/Gramsci/Q29fnote.html

Quaderno 29

1935

§1 Saggio del Croce: Questa tavola rotonda è quadrata. Il saggio è sbagliato anche dal punto di vista crociano (della filosofia crociana). Lo stesso impiego che il Croce fa della proposizione mostra che essa è «espressiva» e quindi giustificata: si può dir lo stesso di ogni «proposizione», anche non «tecnicamente» grammaticale, che può essere espressiva e giustificata in quanto ha una funzione, sia pure negativa (per mostrare l’«errore» di grammatica si può impiegare una sgrammaticatura). Il problema va quindi posto in altro modo, nei termini di «disciplina alla storicità del linguaggio» nel caso delle «sgrammaticature» (che sono assenza di «disciplina mentale», neolalismo, particolarismo provinciale gergo, ecc.) o in altri termini (nel caso dato del saggio crociano l’errore è stabilito da ciò, che una tale proposizione può apparire nella rappresentazione di un «pazzo», di un anormale, ecc. ed acquistare valore espressivo assoluto; come rappresentare uno che non sia «logico» se non facendogli dire «cose illogiche»? ecc.). In realtà tutto ciò che non è «grammaticalmente esatto» può anche essere giustificato dal punto di vista estetico, logico, ecc., se lo si vede non nella particolare logica, ecc., dell’espressione immediatamente meccanica, ma come elemento di una rappresentazione più vasta e comprensiva.

La quistione che il Croce vuol porre: «Cosa è la grammatica?» non può avere soluzione nel suo saggio. La grammatica è «storia» o «documento storico»: essa è la «fotografia» di una fase determinata di un linguaggio nazionale (collettivo) formatosi storicamente e in continuo sviluppo, o i tratti fondamentali di una fotografia. La quistione pratica può essere: a che fine tale fotografia? Per fare la storia di un aspetto della civiltà o per modificare un aspetto della civiltà?

La pretesa del Croce porterebbe a negare ogni valore a un quadro rappresentante tra l’altro una… sirena, per esempio, cioè si dovrebbe concludere che ogni proposizione deve corrispondere al vero o al verosimile, ecc.

(La proposizione può essere non logica in sé, contradditoria, ma nello stesso tempo «coerente» in un quadro più vasto).

§2 Quante forme di grammatica possono esistere? Parecchie, certamente. C’è quella «immanente» nel linguaggio stesso, per cui uno parla «secondo grammatica» senza saperlo, come il personaggio di Molière faceva della prosa senza saperlo. Né sembri inutile questo richiamo, perché il Panzini (Guida alla Grammatica italiana, 18° migliaio) non pare distinguere tra questa «grammatica» e quella «normativa», scritta, di cui intende parlare e che per lui pare essere la sola grammatica possibile esistente. La prefazione alla prima edizione è piena di amenità, che d’altronde hanno il loro significato in uno scrittore (e ritenuto specialista) di cose grammaticali, come l’affermazione che «noi possiamo scrivere e parlare anche senza grammatica». In realtà oltre alla «grammatica immanente» in ogni linguaggio, esiste anche, di fatto, cioè anche se non scritta, una (o più) grammatica «normativa», ed è costituita dal controllo reciproco, dall’insegnamento reciproco, dalla «censura» reciproca, che si manifestano con le domande, «Cosa hai inteso, o vuoi dire?», «Spiegati meglio», ecc., con la caricatura e la presa in giro, ecc.; tutto questo complesso di azioni e reazioni confluiscono a determinare un conformismo grammaticale, cioè a stabilire «norme» o giudizi di correttezza o di scorrettezza, ecc. Ma questo manifestarsi «spontaneo» di un conformismo grammaticale, è necessariamente sconnesso, discontinuo, limitato a strati sociali locali o a centri locali, ecc. (Un contadino che si inurba, per la pressione dell’ambiente cittadino, finisce col conformarsi alla parlata della città; nella campagna si cerca di imitare la parlata della città; le classi subalterne cercano di parlare come le classi dominanti e gli intellettuali, ecc.).

Si potrebbe schizzare un quadro della «grammatica normativa» che opera spontaneamente in ogni società data, in quanto questa tende a unificarsi sia come territorio, sia come cultura, cioè in quanto vi esiste un ceto dirigente la cui funzione sia riconosciuta e seguita.

Il numero delle «grammatiche spontanee o immanenti» è incalcolabile e teoricamente si può dire che ognuno ha una sua grammatica. Tuttavia, accanto a questa «disgregazione» di fatto sono da rilevare i movimenti unificatori, di maggiore o minore ampiezza sia come area territoriale, sia come «volume linguistico». Le «grammatiche normative» scritte tendono ad abbracciare tutto un territorio nazionale e tutto il «volume linguistico» per creare un conformismo linguistico nazionale unitario, che d’altronde pone in un piano più alto l’«individualismo» espressivo, perché crea uno scheletro più robusto e omogeneo all’organismo linguistico nazionale di cui ogni individuo è il riflesso e l’interprete. (Sistema Taylor e autodidattismo).

Grammatiche storiche oltre che normative. – Ma è evidente che uno scrittore di grammatica normativa non può ignorare la storia della lingua di cui vuole proporre una «fase esemplare» come la «sola» degna di diventare, «organicamente» e «totalitariamente», la lingua «comune» di una nazione, in lotta e concorrenza con altre «fasi» e tipi o schemi che esistono già (collegati a sviluppi tradizionali o a tentativi inorganici e incoerenti delle forze che, come si è visto, operano continuamente sulle «grammatiche» spontanee e immanenti nel linguaggio). La grammatica storica non può non essere «comparativa»: espressione che, analizzata a fondo, indica la intima coscienza che il fatto linguistico, come ogni altro fatto storico, non può avere confini nazionali strettamente definiti, ma che la storia è sempre «storia mondiale» e che le storie particolari vivono solo nel quadro della storia mondiale. La grammatica normativa ha altri fini, anche se non si può immaginare la lingua nazionale fuori del quadro delle altre lingue, che influiscono per vie innumerevoli e spesso difficili da controllare su di essa (chi può controllare l’apporto di innovazioni linguistiche dovute agli emigrati rimpatriati, ai viaggiatori, ai lettori di giornali e lingue estere, ai traduttori, ecc.?)

La grammatica normativa scritta è quindi sempre una «scelta», un indirizzo culturale, è cioè sempre un atto di politica culturale‑nazionale. Potrà discutersi sul modo migliore di presentare la «scelta» e l’«indirizzo» per farli accettare volentieri, cioè potrà discutersi dei mezzi più opportuni per ottenere il fine; non può esserci dubbio che ci sia un fine da raggiungere che ha bisogno di mezzi idonei e conformi, cioè che si tratti di un atto politico.

Quistioni: di che natura è questo atto politico, e se debba sollevare opposizioni di «principio», una collaborazione di fatto, opposizioni nei particolari, ecc. Se si parte dal presupposto di centralizzare ciò che esiste già allo stato diffuso, disseminato, ma inorganico e incoerente, pare evidente che non è razionale una opposizione di principio, ma anzi una collaborazione di fatto e un accoglimento volenteroso di tutto ciò che possa servire a creare una lingua comune nazionale, la cui non esistenza determina attriti specialmente nelle masse popolari, in cui sono più tenaci di quanto non si creda i particolarismi locali e i fenomeni di psicologia ristretta e provinciale; si tratta insomma di un incremento della lotta contro l’analfabetismo ecc. L’opposizione di «fatto» esiste già nella resistenza delle masse a spogliarsi di abitudini e psicologie particolaristiche. Resistenza stupida determinata dai fautori fanatici delle lingue internazionali. È chiaro che in questo ordine di problemi non può essere discussa la quistione della lotta nazionale di una cultura egemone contro altre nazionalità o residui di nazionalità.

Il Panzini non si pone neanche lontanamente questo problema e perciò le sue pubblicazioni grammaticali sono incerte, contraddittorie, oscillanti. Non si pone per esempio il problema di quale oggi sia, dal basso, il centro di irradiazione delle innovazioni linguistiche; che pure non ha poca importanza pratica. Firenze, Roma, Milano. Ma d’altronde non si pone neanche il problema se esista (e quale sia) un centro di irradiazione spontanea dall’alto, cioè in forma relativamente organica, continua, efficiente, e se essa possa essere regolata e intensificata.

§3 Focolai di irradiazione di innovazioni linguistiche nella tradizione e di un conformismo nazionale linguistico nelle grandi masse nazionali. 1) La scuola; 2) i giornali; 3) gli scrittori d’arte e quelli popolari; 4) il teatro e il cinematografo sonoro; 5) la radio; 6) le riunioni pubbliche di ogni genere, comprese quelle religiose; 7) i rapporti di «conversazione» tra i vari strati della popolazione più colti e meno colti – (una quistione alla quale forse non si dà tutta l’importanza che si merita è costituita da quella parte di «parole» versificate che viene imparata a memoria sotto forma di canzonette, pezzi d’opera, ecc. È da notare come il popolo non si curi di imparare bene a memoria queste parole, che spesso sono strampalate, antiquate, barocche, ma le riduca a specie di filastrocche utili solo per ricordare il motivo musicale); 8) i dialetti locali, intesi in diversi sensi (dai dialetti più localizzati a quelli che abbracciano complessi regionali più o meno vasti: così il napoletano per l’Italia meridionale, il palermitano o il catanese per la Sicilia, ecc.).

Poiché il processo di formazione, di diffusione e di sviluppo di una lingua nazionale unitaria avviene attraverso tutto un complesso di processi molecolari, è utile avere consapevolezza di tutto il processo nel suo complesso, per essere in grado di intervenire attivamente in esso col massimo di risultato. Questo intervento non bisogna considerarlo come «decisivo» e immaginare che i fini proposti saranno tutti raggiunti nei loro particolari, che cioè si otterrà una determinata lingua unitaria: si otterrà una lingua unitaria, se essa è una necessità, e l’intervento organizzato accelererà i tempi del processo già esistente; quale sia per essere questa lingua non si può prevedere e stabilire: in ogni caso, se l’intervento è «razionale», essa sarà organicamente legata alla tradizione, ciò che non è di poca importanza nell’economia della cultura.

Manzoniani e «classicisti». Avevano un tipo di lingua da far prevalere. Non è giusto dire che queste discussioni siano state inutili e non abbiano lasciato tracce nella cultura moderna, anche se non molto grandi. In realtà in questo ultimo secolo la cultura unitaria si è estesa e quindi anche una lingua unitaria comune. Ma tutta la formazione storica della nazione italiana era a ritmo troppo lento. Ogni volta che affiora, in un modo o nell’altro, la quistione della lingua, significa che si sta imponendo una serie di altri problemi: la formazione e l’allargamento della classe dirigente, la necessità di stabilire rapporti più intimi e sicuri tra i gruppi dirigenti e la massa popolare‑nazionale, cioè di riorganizzare l’egemonia culturale. Oggi si sono verificati diversi fenomeni che indicano una rinascita di tali quistioni: pubblicazioni del Panzini, Trabalza‑Allodoli, Monelli, rubriche nei giornali, intervento delle direzioni sindacali, ecc.

§4 Diversi tipi di grammatica normativa. Per le scuole. Per le così dette persone colte. In realtà la differenza è dovuta al diverso grado di sviluppo intellettuale del lettore o studioso, e quindi alla tecnica diversa che occorre impiegare per fare apprendere o intensificare la conoscenza organica della lingua nazionale ai ragazzi, verso i quali non si può prescindere didatticamente da una certa rigidità autoritaria perentoria («bisogna dire così») e gli «altri» che invece bisogna «persuadere» per far loro accettare liberamente una determinata soluzione come la migliore (dimostrata la migliore per il raggiungimento del fine proposto e condiviso, quando è condiviso). Non bisogna inoltre dimenticare che nello studio tradizionale della grammatica normativa sono stati innestati altri elementi del programma didattico d’insegnamento generale, come quello di certi elementi della logica formale: si potrà discutere se questo innesto è opportuno o no, se lo studio della logica formale è giustificato o no (pare giustificato e pare anche giustificato che sia accompagnato a quello della grammatica, più che dell’aritmetica, ecc., per la somiglianza di natura e perché insieme alla grammatica la logica formale è relativamente vivificata e facilitata), ma non bisogna prescindere dalla quistione.

§5 Grammatica storica e grammatica normativa. Posto che la grammatica normativa è un atto politico, e che solo partendo da questo punto di vista si può giustificare «scientificamente» la sua esistenza, e l’enorme lavoro di pazienza che il suo apprendimento richiede (quanto lavoro occorre fare per ottenere che da centinaia di migliaia di reclute della più disparata origine e preparazione mentale risulti un esercito omogeneo e capace di muoversi e operare disciplinatamente e simultaneamente: quante «lezioni pratiche e teoriche» di regolamenti, ecc.) è da porre il suo rapporto con la grammatica storica. Il non aver definito questo rapporto spiega molte incongruenze delle grammatiche normative, fino a quella del Trabalza‑Allodoli. Si tratta di due cose distinte e in parte diverse, come la storia e la politica, ma che non possono essere pensate indipendentemente: come la politica dalla storia. D’altronde, poiché lo studio delle lingue come fenomeno culturale è nato da bisogni politici (più o meno consapevoli e consapevolmente espressi) le necessità della grammatica normativa hanno influito sulla grammatica storica e sulle «concezioni legislative» di essa (o almeno questo elemento tradizionale ha rafforzato nel secolo scorso l’applicazione del metodo naturalistico‑positivistico allo studio della storia delle lingue concepito come «scienza del linguaggio»). Dalla grammatica del Trabalza e anche dalla recensione stroncatoria dello Schiaffini (Nuova Antologia, 16 settembre 1934) appare come anche dai così detti «idealisti» non sia compreso il rinnovamento che nella scienza del linguaggio hanno portato le dottrine del Bartoli. La tendenza dell’«idealismo» ha trovato la sua espressione più compiuta nel Bertoni: si tratta di un ritorno a vecchie concezioni rettoriche, sulle parole «belle» e «brutte» in sé e per sé, concezioni riverniciate con un nuovo linguaggio pseudo‑scientifico. In realtà si cerca di trovare una giustificazione estrinseca della grammatica normativa, dopo averne altrettanto estrinsecamente «mostrato» la «inutilità» teoretica e anche pratica.

Il saggio del Trabalza sulla Storia della grammatica potrà fornire indicazioni utili sulle interferenze tra grammatica storica (o meglio storia del linguaggio) e grammatica normativa, sulla storia del problema, ecc.

§6 Grammatica e tecnica. Per la grammatica può porsi la quistione come per la «tecnica» in generale? La grammatica è solo la tecnica della lingua? In ogni caso, è giustificata la tesi degli idealisti, specialmente gentiliani, dell’inutilità della grammatica e della sua esclusione dall’insegnamento scolastico? Se si parla (ci si esprime con le parole) in un modo determinato storicamente per nazioni o per aree linguistiche, si può prescindere dall’insegnare questo «modo storicamente determinato»? Ammesso che la grammatica normativa tradizionale fosse insufficiente, è questa una buona ragione per non insegnare nessuna «grammatica», cioè per non preoccuparsi in nessun modo di accelerare l’apprendimento del modo determinato di parlare di una certa area linguistica, ma di lasciare che la «lingua si impari nel vivente linguaggio» o altra espressione del genere impiegata dal Gentile o dai gentiliani? Si tratta, in fondo, di una forma di «liberalismo» delle più bislacche e strampalate. Differenze tra il Croce e il Gentile. Al solito il Gentile si fonda sul Croce, esagerandone all’assurdo alcune posizioni teoretiche. Il Croce sostiene che la grammatica non rientra in nessuna delle attività spirituali teoretiche da lui elaborate, ma finisce col trovare nella «pratica» una giustificazione di molte attività negate in sede teoretica: il Gentile esclude anche dalla pratica, in un primo tempo, ciò che nega teoreticamente, salvo poi a trovare una giustificazione teoretica delle manifestazioni pratiche più superate e tecnicamente

Si deve apprendere «sistematicamente» la tecnica? È successo che alla tecnica di Ford si contrapponga quella dell’artigiano di villaggio. In quanti modi si apprende la «tecnica industriale»: artigiano, durante lo stesso lavoro di fabbrica, osservando come lavorano gli altri (e quindi con maggior perdita di tempo e di fatica e solo parzialmente); con le scuole professionali (in cui si impara sistematicamente tutto il mestiere, anche se alcune nozioni apprese dovranno servire poche volte in tutta la vita e anche mai); con le combinazioni di vari modi, col sistema Taylor-Ford che crea un nuovo tipo di qualifica e di mestiere ristretto a determinate fabbriche, e anche macchine o momenti del processo produttivo.

La grammatica normativa, che solo per astrazione può essere ritenuta scissa dal linguaggio vivente, tende a fare apprendere tutto l’organismo, della lingua determinata, e a creare un atteggiamento spirituale che renda capaci di orientarsi sempre nell’ambiente linguistico (vedi nota sullo studio del latino nelle scuole classiche). Se la grammatica è esclusa dalla scuola e non viene «scritta», non perciò può essere esclusa dalla «vita» reale, come è stato già detto in altra nota: si esclude solo l’intervento organizzato unitariamente nell’apprendimento della lingua e, in realtà, si esclude dall’apprendimento della lingua colta la massa popolare nazionale, poiché il ceto dirigente più alto, che tradizionalmente parla in «lingua», trasmette di generazione in generazione, attraverso un processo lento che incomincia coi primi balbettamenti del bambino sotto la guida dei genitori, e continua nella conversazione (coi suoi «si dice così», «deve dirsi così», ecc.) per tutta la vita: in realtà la grammatica si studia «sempre», ecc. (con l’imitazione dei modelli ammirati, ecc.). Nella posizione del Gentile c’è molta più politica di quanto si creda e molto reazionarismo inconscio, come del resto è stato notato altre volte e in altre occasioni: c’è tutto il reazionarismo della vecchia concezione liberale, c’è un «lasciar fare, lasciar passare» che non è giustificato, come era nel Rousseau (e il Gentile è più rousseauiano di quanto creda) dall’opposizione alla paralisi della scuola gesuitica, ma è diventato un’ideologia astratta, «astorica».

§7 La così detta «quistione della lingua». Pare chiaro che il De Vulgari Eloquio di Dante sia da considerare come essenzialmente un atto di politica culturale-nazionale (nel senso che nazionale aveva in quel tempo e in Dante), come un aspetto della lotta politica è stata sempre quella che viene chiamata «la quistione della lingua» che da questo punto di vista diventa interessante da studiare. Essa è stata una reazione degli intellettuali allo sfacelo dell’unità politica che esisté in Italia sotto il nome di «equilibrio degli Stati italiani», allo sfacelo e alla disintegrazione delle classi economiche e politiche che si erano venute formando dopo il Mille coi Comuni e rappresenta il tentativo, che in parte notevole può dirsi riuscito, di conservare e anzi di rafforzare un ceto intellettuale unitario, la cui esistenza doveva avere non piccolo significato nel Settecento e Ottocento (nel Risorgimento). Il libretto di Dante ha anch’esso non piccolo significato per il tempo in cui fu scritto; non solo di fatto, ma elevando il fatto a teoria, gli intellettuali italiani del periodo più rigoglioso dei Comuni, «rompono» col latino e giustificano il volgare, esaltandolo contro il «mandarinismo» latineggiante, nello stesso tempo in cui il volgare ha così grandi manifestazioni artistiche. Che il tentativo di Dante abbia avuto enorme importanza innovatrice, si vede più tardi col ritorno del latino a lingua delle persone colte (e qui può innestarsi la quistione del doppio aspetto dell’Umanesimo e del Rinascimento, che furono essenzialmente reazionari dal punto di vista nazionale‑popolare e progressivi come espressione dello sviluppo culturale dei gruppi intellettuali italiani e europei).

§8 Del Bartoli, Quistioni linguistiche e diritti nazionali, discorso tenuto all’inaugurazione dell’anno accademico torinese 1934, pubblicato nel 1935 (vedi nota in «Cultura» dell’aprile 1935). Pare dalla nota che il discorso sia molto discutibile per alcune parti generali: per esempio l’affermazione che «l’Italia dialettale è una e indivisibile».

Notizie sull’Atlante linguistico pubblicate in due numeri di un Bollettino.

§9 Il titolo dello studio potrebbe essere: «Lingua nazionale e grammatica».

Prospectus Rejigger Part II

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the novel as a product of language ideology, it condensed into a cultural object. Works have not considered the mechanics of how the novel works to confirm and promote linguistic imaginings of society.

rather than focusing on novelistic representations of “the people” and seeing how well they square up, this is a look at how authors imagine themselves cut-off or remote from them based on language ideology. The idea of radical incommensurability or inability to communicate or connect with the people arising from fractal recursivity. That the language was too official or ornate. Changes in literary stye and anxiety about its artificiality. Understanding petit-bourgeois anxiety as based in language ideology. The failure of populism based on the imagination of authors.

to what extent is “the people” or rural groups actually a mirage of fractal recursivity. But this isn’t a work about depictions of the countryside or workers and their accuracy, but the imagined linguistic barriers that authors themselves put up and imagined.

introduction – history of language reforms vis-a-vis the novel and literature. linguistic baggage, how literatis imagined their languages as elite and artificial from 1920-1950s, but how metalinguistic awareness of it often only made things worse. Salama Musa, Karaosmanoglu. Village novel as conflating linguistic difference with social difference. More about fantasies of diglossia than what the actual social field was like. the supremacy of language ideology in the 1950-80s, normative vs. imminent grammar.

fiction, dialogue, and the social real – what is actually representable in fiction, how being attendant to diglossia and the efforts to get at the real end up strengthening difference. mimesis and dialogue. direct discourse fallacy. relationship between narratology and sociolinguistics. the ideological linguistic inevitability of the novel form. yashar kemal – vs – Orhan kemal – vs – al-rihla (all are performative)

the failure of rhetoric and politics – phoenix and, one day all alone. seeing political marginalization as the inability to communicate, the relationship between party politics, slogans, political language, and the failure of leftist parties to articulate a legible discourse.

the search for understanding in performative language – khitat al-ghitani and Tutunamayanlar and deep dive into the artificiality and performance of the language, allegorical attempts to come to answers about the social field. looking for answers in normative grammar.

sarcasm, mocking the idealism – awbash and bozkirdaki cekirdek and indexical order. building “deep-seated affinity and community, across and athwart the social division of labour.” through a tone of sarcasm and acknowledgement of the universal ideological use of language.

 

  • focus on nationalism and populism and left politics through the lens of language ideology
  • focus on the state and its language policy has a huge influence on metalinguistic awareness in literature
    • in Egypt its the fusha/ammiya divide and the anxiety over authenticity, the idea that you aren’t accurately representing “the people,” this anxiety is only in literature since film and radio don’t have this metalinguistic awareness in the same way, but because of the prestige of the written language, people are tied up in knots.
    • In Turkey it’s the Kemalist reforms and the language as “engineered” or “artificial” or “restrictive.” A divide between the engineered language and the countryside or the uneducated. Often a sense of self-culpability, metalinguistic awareness of the constructedness of elite language, contrived when the language of “the people” is natural
    • Both cases are overstated. Normal imminent language in many ways carried on.
  • also the assumption that somehow ideology (meta-awareness of ideas as ideological resulting from matalinguistic awareness) is tied to intellectual forms of language, that their ideas and theories are somehow elevated beyond common sense, qualitatively different from popular beliefs
  • But in reality, the linguistic divides is more a product of the language-ideology imagination than it is an empirical fact. It is a function of fractal recursivity. It exists in literature and progressive populist ideas rather than in the social field. Actual people use language and develop and espouse beliefs in the same way. The particulars of the language may just be different.
  • In what ways did language ideology play into the neurotic “ikidegerlilik” of populism and in what ways do novel archive this metalinguistic awareness in a self-defeating way.
    • 1) Fractal Recursivity- as a fetishization of difference. portraying popular speech as marked, either positively or negatively, or as beyond commensurability. This is equally true of rural/urban divide as it is for “workers” or “the people” or other popular social groups. The exact same ideas refracted back in a marked dialect make them appear naive, or righteous, or simply unreachable. Will be countered by Ferguson et al.
    • 2) Normative Grammar- In the assumption that normative grammar is the only vehicle for ideology and that consciousness and ideology cannot be comprehended by those outside of the intellectual class, that they are beyond deciphering, that popular subjectivity is a black box, that the subaltern cannot speak. An overestimation in normative rather than imminant grammar and therefore a  belief that ideology can only be projected down and out. That only intellectuals have conscious ideological beliefs and that popular classes only have passive “common sense” Will be countered by Indexical order to show how ideology works the same way for both.
    • 3) Direct Discourse Fallacy – the idea that there is one kind of language that is performative and fictional, and another that is authentic and spontaneous.
  •  Language ideology creates artificial divides between popular and intellectual speech style, sees itself as performative or inauthentic as opposed to natural speech, and a divide between ideology and common sense. All three things cut off the “popular classes” from the forms of expression and representation available to the novel. But this divide is a figment of the imagination.
    • introduction to theory, history of language policy, literary populism, literature as the site par excellence of language ideology.
    • the
    • the writer trapped in language
    • The popular classes think for themselves – Fallah & bokkirdaki cekirdek

 

Prospectus Rejigger

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  • Spivak pisses me off.
  • the idea by Gramsci that the traditional intelligentsia commits all sorts of ideological errors and has myopic vision while the organic intellectual had direst access to a firm and discrete class perspective.
    • traditional intellectuals exist over time, less connected to immediate politics
    • “worker or proletarian, for example, is not specifically characterized by his manual or instrumental work, but by performing this work in specific conditions and in specific social relations”
    • all men are intellectuals, but not all men have the function in society as intellectuals, the distinction is for the social function of a professional category.
    • Keynesian as the end of the traditional intellectual?
    • “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer
      consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator”
    • “The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees,”mediated” by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures,of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the “functionaries.””
    • “There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded”
  •   fight over political ideology is conducted through an invisible fight over language ideology, with Turkish’s open war on vocab choice, and Arabic’s denial that there is any language problem at all. The problem gets summarized as though it’s state vs. openness (the Bakhtian contra Stalinism) and anxiety about state reforms in Turkey and Fusha in Arabic, rather than seeing how easily language registers move and shift, how little actual speech is disciplined by the type of state language policy that we typically think of as language ideology. The idea that language is taught in ideological state apparatuses and in Anderson’s print media, that an author’s fight for freedom and creativity is only against the state. Rather, everyone is constantly performing and enacting language ideology, a general cognitive-domain-general habit of thought, working through the indexical order in rural peasants as much as in language academies. Keynsianism was both the high water mark of state legitimacy, but also the period of its undoing in terms of linguistic dominance.
  • I want to pull these writers and their use of language away from an ideological clash with the state, and towards language practice in society, to see how they’re engaged just like anyone else in the practices of language ideology, which simultaneously exposes their distortions, but also enjoins them to rather than puts them above, society.
  • Language ideology is:
    • creating a social field and making judgements about it based on they way people speak and use language. The judgement is about language itself, as a reified object, so not just Bourdieu. They do it using Irvine and Gal.
    • thinking of language as langue and not parole, as a state project which regulates and determines everything, rather than a diverse “organic ideology”
    • imagining either that there is a stark distinction between dialects and registers rather than seeing it as a continuum. Imagining sharp epistemological breaks that come from national language projects. Overplaying peasant ignorance which is in fact just a different register.
    • imagining a site from which language practices emanate, that intellectuals produce slogans and language patterns (Silverstein and Bybee show us how we don’t need them for the model)
  • We stigmatize the way that leftist writers and intellectuals are stuck on one side of the divide from the “people”. That their efforts to speak for or represent the subaltern, or the working class, are hopelessly myopic. That subaltern consciousness is irretrievable or unknowable. That intellectuals and the state are the only ones parroting slogans. That those slogans, when repeated by the subaltern, are foreign and imported. But how much of this anxiety can actually be explained by language ideology? That is to say, to what extent are we projecting that divide based on the language divide we tell ourselves exists because of language ideology.
  • The subaltern doesn’t speak in a radically different way, sticking to MSA or using Ozturkce doesn’t get any farther away.
  • How much of the practices of the peasants described by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu are portrayed using language difference? How much of his project was plagues by language anxiety. Louis Awad writes his all dialect Plutoland as a bold statement, but then writes a novel where dialect and MSA are all mixed in together.
  • Doesn’t Bozkirdaki Cekirdek show us that the subaltern have their own agendas, and freely mix and match state discourses with their own priorities and power arrangements? Can’t we see how little bearing state language has on their speech, and yet how fully articulate it is, not at all restricted or unexpressive.
  • In the three Egyptian Kurosawa novels, what exactly do we think keeps us from seeing Zohra’s perspective, we see her speak don’t we?, when we finally get access to Yusif in man who lost his shadow, don’t we see him parroting the state?, the soldiar in war in the land of Egypt is actually dead, nothing to access. What I’m saying is imagining something irretrievable about silent or minor characters is to assume their language has a s radical alterity and is not socially constructed (reifies the speaking subject rather than their already social constructed consciousness)
  • There is no national language, no andersonian creation other than which is confirmed by media, and leftist writers wring their hands about it when they try to portray non-intellectuals, as though there is a chasm between their language and that of the people. They reify language difference through fractal recursivity and because of this create the gulf and feelings of guilt.
  • On the “other side” the exact same language practices and ideologies are going on, there is no hidden essence, just different language practices. In bozkirdaki Cekirdek the smugglers have their complete own language and discourse, mixed with elements of state propaganda and organic ideology, but it’s their autuonomous discourse, which itself makes exactly the same sorts of assumptions and stereotypes. Yasar Kemal would be a bad example of this for fetishizing peasnt consciousness as radically different.
  • The peasant in Sharqawi’s fallah is a whole jumble of propaganda and folk beliefs. They are not on the other side of a linguistic gulf, they are also mixing and matching beliefs, engaging with the indexical field not as passive subjects but as creative agents in the promulgation of ideology.
  • shukri’s al-rihla as somehow “authentic” or on the otherside of the divide, how does it think about language difference?

Part II

  • Turkey and Egypt have neurotic relationships with their national languages. Engineered official registers which apparently distance or cut off or reign in heteroglossia. The demands of Pan-Arabism, secularism, and modernity. This is even before considering minority languages. Just talking about the national language itself.
  • National language policy is treated as a boogeyman which retarded the “true” or “authentic” expression of vernacular speech. It is seen as “an untranscendable horizon governing thought –its forms, contents, modalities, and presuppositions so deeply and insidiously layered and patterned that they cannot be circumvented, only deconstructed.” (The Postcolonial Unconscious, Lazarus) This has much to do with seeing radical alterity in language practice. “People in the countryside add the ‘b’ prefix to their present tense verbs, or drop the r in present tense Turkish verbs, how could they possibly understand the stakes of national liberation.
  • But state intervention plays a fall smaller role in lived language practice, and even in the “ideological” transformations of language, than it is popularly understood. We can show using Silverstein how ideology can be propagated without a center. We can use Charles Ferguson to problematize the illusion of diglossia. Irvine and Gal to show how normative judgements overlay conceptualizations of linguistic difference. Sociolects and dialects are not state planned.
  • The period of Keynsianism when the state was supreme, when these battles were supposedly decided, show constant anxiety towards drawing out distinctions and difference as well as the growing efforts to celebrate the subaltern and advocate against their silencing.
  • But the divide between Fusha and dialect, and between Kemalist linguistic reforms, paint a picture of a great linguistic divide, but this more a projection of linguistic ideologies (particularly Fractal Recursivity). The differences perpetuate themselves. language difference is read as ignorance and gullibility. The obsession with language difference is not merely that of state agents and elites, but is internalized by even those on the left opposed to it, who want to elevate “subaltern speech” or have a special concern with reaching “the people”.
  • It’s not promoting vernacular forms of speech as much as it is reifying the distinctions, attempting to get at some authentic form of speech, some radically different consciousness, in these cases, is more trying to get to the other side of a linguistic border within one’s own language which is created through Fractal Recursivity.
  • Neil Lazarus on the subaltern “But I wonder whether the narrative, formal, and affective dimensions of The Hungry Tide do not cut against and in the end undermine this idea of incommensurability, and of the theoretical anti-humanism that underlies it. Ghosh’s self-conscious use here, as elsewhere in his work, of sentimentality and sensationalism (the novel’s very title is significant in this respect), of romance and narrative suspense, all point us in a quite different direction, towards the idea not of ‘fundamental alienness’ but of deep-seated affinity and community, across and athwart the social division of labour.”
  • Progressive novels from this period in both countries, concerned as they are with both attempting to accurately portray the masses, and expressing their remorse at not being able to do so, frame the question as reaching the people. This neurotic “two-faced populism” (hamlet Kuşağı pg. 60) is in many ways an effect of language ideology.
  • It is as though the more you attempt to imitate authentic speech, or to respect the relativity and radical difference of their consciousness, the farther they recede.
  • Novels are a great record of this, because
    • a) they are cultural/ideological products constructed using language
    • b) they are supposed to be linguistic/ideological interventions, but at their best are merely reflective of complex linguistic realities.
    • c) the use of dialogue vs narrative can be focused on as a way to underscore the fetishization of linguistic difference. (It’s not that differences don’t exist, it’s that they’re not a big deal). The dichotomies of fact/fiction and objective/subjective mirrors the dichotomy between official vs. vernacular speech.
  • these case studies show how
    • a) authors make a huge deal about diglossia, but don’t even follow their own rules, authenticity falls for the “direct discourse fallacy” = relationship between language ideology and narratology. authentic portrayals are not inaccessible beyond a linguistic/consciousness wall because that wall is largely imagined.
    • b) ideologies circulate through language via the indexical order, not unidirectionally from intellectual and authoritative centers, illiterate villagers are just as capable of creating and promoting ideologies through their daily use of language as intellectuals. “There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded” – Gramsci. The idea that intellectuals and writers are particularly guilty of ideological projections is bullshit.
    • c) the common theme of intellectual isolation from the people, while true politically for other very valid reasons, is framed a problem of language, as “finding the right words.” As though some magic combination would unlock their remote secrets. petty-bourgeois anxiety is turned inward, as a forensic investigation of their own language.
  • Chapter one: the subaltern is doing their own thang regardless of intellectuals and state language policy. Bozkirdaki Cekirdek and al-Fallah:  Get all into Gramsci on immminent language and indexical order.
  • Chapter two: Bir Gun tek basina and august star: the workers on the other side of a fake wall, the illusion of radical incommesurability
  • Chapter three: al-rihla, unmediated access to the real deal, vs. the kirosawa novels as all circling the character: not some consciousness or language separate from social discourse.
  • Chapter four: Orhan Kemal vs. Yaşar Kemal: language fiction and dialogue: what’s “real”

Prospectus Defense Notes

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KB

  • Are you claiming that there is an evolution of sophistication between these novels?
  • When looking at the difference between MSA and dialect, it will be more useful to focus on lexicon (look at corpus material), syntax may not provide enough material, you might want to focus on key vocabulary as a way to get at multivocality

SS

  • What precisely are you arguing against? (gave common historiography about committed literature, maybe even more played out than I thought). There are already recent work in the last 10 years working to recuperate socialist realism (seems like the narrative I am working against isn’t specific or unchallenged enough)
  • There seem to be two different possible tacts here, 1) there is just the updated conversation about the avant-garde vs. socialist realism that happened in 1920-1950 USSR, and all of the ways that that debate has been replayed over time.2) But then there is the idea of social formations changing syntax and the attempt to highlight these changes in the text i.o.w. the literary equivalent of economic changes. Which one is it? Sounds very much like the modernism/realism debate is way beyond played out, and should remain in the background.
  • If looking at the political economy, at least for Egypt, it is of special importance to focus on the central role of cotton. Is there a way to think about literary debates and changes in political economy simultaneously?
  • What is the actual intervention, what do you want to reshape?
  • Language changing to describe changes in the countryside, then the city (forensics in a linguistic sense).

JO

  • Chapter 3 – seem to be taking on a lot, many novels, should the MSA debate be separated out?
  • Chapter 4 – no trauma studies included in the bibliography
  • I seem to be depending a lot on secondary sources for the lit crit aspect of things. Need to find more newspapers and correspondance, no good plan for 1st person research, read more and gender and language

NE

  • more systematic justification of what it is you are doing, are you looking at class or at power (the way you describe class seems to be closer to foucauldian power, need to be more explicit about the transformations both before and after the period 1950s-1980s
  • lot of people I am intervening against seem sort of like a strawman
  • maybe it’s a question of nationalist philology (not exactly sure what that meant)
  • need a more systematic map and survey of the fields looking at to see what’s actually missing
  • how do certain authors view their own work?
  • what are the breaks from the past pre-1950s, how is it different or unique from Soviet case
  • 50s-80s what new intervention what’s new about narration, what is revealed that is new, why this time period
  • J Dean stuff is a shift of theoretical approach and political belief
  • you should be looking more and country and city by WIlliams

final thoughts

  • the warrant must be much clearer and stronger
  • what is the state of the field that requires this intervention
  • is it changes to language?
  • is it changes in the political economy?
  • is it the modernism/postmodernism debate (it shouldn’t be)
  • what would you say to explain the importance of this work to someone not specifically interested in these novels, what would Jameson or Williams respond by saying “wow, I hadn’t thought of that”
  • The Arabic and Turkish each have different sides when it comes to experience with language, MSA vs. left/right language ideology
  • NATO vs. Soviet bloc as the global entry point for thinking about class and politics
  • “the NATO novel vs. the Pan-Arab novel”
  • These are Keynesian novels, state intervention as the framework, Soviet vs. NATO
  • politics different because of this
  • Keynesian era and its relationship to the state’s central role in policing language, there is this narrative that the state was the agent of linguistic change and that everything responded to it, that linguistic ideological rebellion was against the linguistic hegemony of the state, the state as producing a normative grammar to which everything else was a response, that there was standard language and then dialect, and that the novel was cast in this normative language. But these novels show language as imminant grammar, condensing all sorts of conflicts and power relationships, slipping between registers along a continuum, and that the line between fact and fiction is illusory.

conclusion

  • there is a concern about framing
  • thread language itself in the 1950s
  • different agents who all contribute to the changes in language, not just state project
  • one way to provide the historical background and context to the project could be the focus on changes in the language, make language change the historical object
  • perhaps reframe as political ideology and language ideology for which the novels are a case study
  • be precise about the intervention when you are saying something.
  • When you mention a thinker’s name, or drop a keyword, you are inviting in that entire debate and will need to respond to it, be well-versed in it, if you mention Gramsci, you have to be able to speak in-depth about it, it’s not a tactic of being aware of everything, it’s about being stragetic about which frameworks you choose and knowing them thoroughly
  • way to think of it what pisses you off? use that as a way to think about your intervention (mine so far have been strawmen)
  • state language policy does not equal language ideology

On August Star by Sonallah Ibrahim

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Sonallah Ibrahim: August Star

great article all about the novel with several academic sources.

Resources:

Politics, Discontent and the Everyday in Egyptian Arts, 1938–1966

Opaque and Transparent Discourse: A Contrastive Analysis of the «Star of August» and «The Man of the High Dam» by Son’ Allah Ibrahim — ﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﻌﺘﺎﻣﺔ ﻭﺣﺪﻳﺚ ﺍﻟﺸﻔﺎﻓﻴﺔ : ﺩﺭﺍﺳﺔ ﻣﻘﺎﺭﻧﺔ ﺑﻴﻦ ﺇﻧﺴﺎﻥ ﺍﻟﺴﺪ ﺍﻟﻌﺎﻟﻲ ﻭﻧﺠﻤﺔ ﺃﻏﺴﻄﺲ ﻟﺻﻨﻊ ﺍﷲ ﺇﺑﺮﺍﻫﻴﻢ
The Traumatic Subjectivity of Ṣunʿ Allāh Ibrāhīm’s DhātSonalla Ibrahim: Imagining stasisThe Experimental Arabic Novel: Postcolonial Literary Modernism in the LevantThe Imagination as Transitive Act: an Interview with Sonallah Ibrahim
Egypt in the Raw: Yasmine El Rashidi on Ibrahim’s novel The Smell of It
Profile: Egyptian Novelist Sonallah Ibrahim: Black Humor in Dark Times
Black, not Noir, review of ‘That Smell’ and ‘Notes from Prison’ by Adam Shatz
Ursula Lindsey: Egyptian writers and revolutions
Richard Jacquemond, Conscience of the nation

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

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http://strongreading.blogspot.com/2011/08/raymond-williams-marxism-and-literature.html

Chapter 4: “Ideology”

Ideology for Williams is an inherently problematic concept, which he thinks requires radical revision. He outlines three meanings the concept has had in Marxist theory:

  • (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;
  • (ii) a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;
  • (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined. (55)

Part 3: “Literary Theory”

Chapter 1: “The Multiplicity of Writing”

this identification of art with “imaginative” skill involves a reduction of art to a series of forms labeled the proper objects of aesthetic experience. In literature this has resulted in the reduction of “literature” to specialized forms that obscure the multiplicity in types of writing practices: literature is “fictional” and not “factual,” it is “imaginative” and not “practical,” and it is not “subjective” rather than “objective.” Literature’s association with these concepts is specific to the capitalist era, and a Marxist literary theory must attempt to recapture the multiplicity of forms of writing outside of the categories left to it by bourgeois critics.

Al-Zayni Barakat: Narrative as Strategy – Samia Mehrez

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Relevance:

good conversation on the political relevance of the narrative choices of al-Ghitani, specifically in Zayni Barakat, but not a deeper explanation of the social world.

Notes:

  • Gamal al-Ghitani was born in 1945 in Suhag, in Upper Egypt. The family then moved to Gammaliyah, in Old Cairo, where al-Ghitani remained until he married.
  • Two of the major events in al-Ghitani’s life have been the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, which culminated in peace with Israel. He describes these periods as being some of the blackest in his life. For him these two historical moments represented the erosion of principles and the destruction of an ideology that he had grown up with.
  • Al-Ghitani, who was one of the young writers imprisoned in 1966 because of “political activism,” spent six months in a detention camp. Thereafter he refrained from direct political involvement. The choice to remain silent on the open political front has been paralleled by a very strong political and ideolog- ical message delivered through his fiction.

the revolution). He probably started school advent of the 1952 revolution in Egypt. One of t Officers’ regime was to breed a new generation f rhetoric and a new self-image. Through a process and rewriting history in a manner that would do ary period, the new “democratic” regime succe that strongly believed in this newly forged im “strongest nation” of the “Arab world.”9 On regime fully realized the politically significant r pre-revolutionary period. Consequently, one of t revolution was cen

In other words, the war led to a reexamination of the ideology and the very language that expressed that ideology.

ng to destroy t hostile propaganda,” and “acting against the n writers had to face many challenges, among Arabic language) that had been robbed of its rich that medium, and the need to refashion “conven longer represented

  • pastiche and hypertextuality

The Cultural Economy of Development in Egypt: Economic Nationalism, Hidden Economy and the Emergence of Mass Consumer Society during Sadat’s Infitah

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ISI emerged gradually after the takeover of power, and it crystallized
fully only with the first five-year plan of 1960–61
From 1956 onward the pace of ISI quickened, partly as a result of the special and
unexpected conditions that the Suez War that year had created in transferring much
foreign economic enterprise into government hands when sequestration and later
nationalization of British, French and Jewish property took place.19 It also revealed
symptoms of impatience at the slow progress of economic development when left to
the ‘national bourgeoisie’, which pushed for radicalization of the Nasserist regime.
Having been so entrenched in local modernity,
national ideals, and group-turned-national identity, the standstill of ISI, and since
the early 1970s the retreat from state-led industrialization, placed a big question
mark on the notion of ‘Egyptianness’ as well.
The hidden
economy became a part of Egyptian daily life on every level in employment, housing,
shopping, or dealing with local and national government, and it impacted on
household politics and intimate family and gender relations as well as society and the
economy at large. Many small and medium-sized businesses, and the large informal housing sector,
were counted under such economic activity. Finances, whether of large-scale Islamic
companies, moneychangers, or neighbourhood women’s lending clubs (jam0
iyyat),
also operated with little interaction with the official, mostly state-owned, banking
system. Remittances from labour migrants too were siphoned back into the country
outside the official banking system, and they became the most significant
contributors to such informality in increasing both local spending and investment.
The multilayered presence of the hidden economy made it too significant to go
unnoticed. Nevertheless, it was kept concealed in the debate focusing almost
exclusively on the open-door aspect of the infitah,
28 and both government and
opposition grossly missed the revolutionary, long-term impact of the hidden
economy. Although this myopia was largely due to the ideological and identity
strings attached to economic nationalism in Egypt,
While the hidden economy did not fit easily into contemporary discourse and
economic orthodoxies, it did become an entrenched part of Egypt’s political
economy. Because the formal economic institutions would not allow a significant
enough transition to take place, they facilitated the alternative spread of informality.
This, however, did not mean a duality between formal and informal economies with
little contact between the two; it meant myriad synergies that served both sides. As
the 1977 food riots vividly demonstrated, political leadership would not or could not
push for the dramatic reform necessary fully to engage the economic downturn.
(Smuggling of things into the caves of al-khalawi as the informal economy and remittances? OMG WHATIF KHALAWIIS THE INFORMAL ECONOMY)
Consumption was indeed rampant during this period. It was manifested
everywhere, from entry points into the country, where returning migrant workers
brought back imported commodities, to the Free Zones and local markets where
imported goods were sold. Cityscapes were transformed further, with significant
investment in lucrative construction including high-rise buildings that served as
homes for the rich, business-space, and hotels. On the other hand, rapid
urbanization associated with informal settlements, pressures on physical resources,
and public services
Economic nationalism was still strong among infitah defenders and critics alike,
and both sides were taken by surprise at the sheer magnitude of the unleashed
events. Indeed, such surprise attested to an across-the-board myopia regarding the
nature of the economic transformations, associated with the rapid development of
the hidden economy and enhanced by the emergence of local consumer society.
So the economy which emerged was unrepresentable, unlike the national economy envisioned in past iterations, and so the khitat is unable to show it, tries with al-khalawi, projecting it out as another irrational space rather than part of al-khitat itself
All the best,

“Discourse in the Novel” – Bakhtin

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Essay notes

  • “There is a highly characteristic and widespread point of view that sees novelistic discourse as an extra-artistic medium, a discourse that is not worked into any special or unique style. After failure to find in novelistic discourse a purely poetic formulation (‘poetic’ in the narrow sense) as was expected, prose discourse is denied any artistic value at all; it is the same as practical speech for everyday life, or speech for scientific purposes, an artistically neutral means of communication” (260). I sort of disagree. I think all speech is rhetorical and, therefore, art. But this opens up dialectics between speech and utterance, rhetorics and poetics.
    • Significance: “Thus stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge the novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories” (267). One solution is turning to rhetoric and coding novels as rhetorical texts rather than as poetic art. “The novel is an extra-artistic rhetorical genre” (268). Tbh, I think this is a Cartesian split. “… the very reliance on rhetorical forms has a great heuristic significance. Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and not the philosophy of language“ (268-69).
    • Double-bind: “ The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists” (269).
  • “The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” and “These heterogeneous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it” (261, 62). Indeed, “The stylistics uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities (even at times comprised of different languages) into the higher unity of the work as a whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’” (262).
  • “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). And those compositional unities help heteroglossia enter the novel: “These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization–this is the basic distinguishing features of the stylistics of the novel” (263).
  • Raznorečie in Russian.
  • It’s symphonic, synergistic. Tower of Babel
  • “A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute and abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia” (271). But he’s not critiquing here a “common language” so much as a “language conceived as ideologically saturated” (271).
  • Significance: This is problematic because of essentialism and consensus… “The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems,” and so on (272). And as long as language is enslaved, so too then by extension, are the people who voice it.
  • I’m hoping someone will be able to explain the centripetal and centrifugal force metaphors to me. Oh wait… so centripetal means a unifying language that sucks everything in ad co-opts it. Centrifugal is like heteroglossia, flinging several valid options out (?)
  • “The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (272).
  • Heteroglossia can be a site of resistance (273, 303).
  • What is the difference between discourse and rhetoric?
  • Active and passive responsive understanding as a prerequisite for rhetoric (280-82)
  • “Language [. . .] is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it” (288).
  • Genres stratify language (288).
  • Mutual exclusion v. intersection of plural languages: “… languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways (the Ukranian language, the language of the epic poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a particular generation of children, of the run-of-the-mill intellectual, of the Nietzschean and so on)” (291).
  • Stratification of literary language: “… in their intentional dimension one finds and common plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed dialogically. The whole matter consists in the fact the there may be, between ‘languages,’ highly specific dialogic relations; no matter how these languages are conceived, they may all be taken as particular points of view on the world. However varied the social forces doing the work of stratification–a profession, a genre, a particular tendency, an individual personality–the work itself everywhere comes down to the (relatively) protracted and socially meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specific (and consequently limiting) intentions and accents. The longer this stratifying saturation goes on, the broader the social circle encompassed by it and consequently the more substantial the social force bringing about such a stratification of language, then the more sharply focused and stable will be those traces, the linguistic changes in the language markers (linguistic symbols), that are left behind in language as a result of this social force’s activity–from stable (and consequently social) semantic nuances to authentic dialectological markers (phonetic, morphological and others), which permit us to speak of particular social dialects. As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in language, there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms–words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is  not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world” (293). Each word has a “taste” of its influence (as the reading goes on to say). “The word in language is half someone else’s” (293). And it can only become “one’s own” when the speaker appropriates it by “populating it with his own intentions, his own accent” (293). And “Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language [. . .] but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (293-94).
  • This reminds me of ideographs: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated–overpopulated–with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (294). (is it?)
  • Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘language’” (295). This reminds me a lot of Discourse (Gee, Swales, etc.)!! Wait… THAT’S THE CODE I CRACKED IT YAS >>> languages are discourses. Heteroglossia is capital D Discourse.
  • “As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another–then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them began” (296). And that, I argue is rhetorical.
  • While the poet tries to reduce language to its purest form by stripping it of its heteroglossia, the novelist tries to leverage heteroglossia and language stratification to hir advantage (298): “The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate those socio-ideological cultural horizons (big and little worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages–rather, he welcomes them into his work” (299). Then, “Diversity of voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize themselves within it into a structured artistic system. This constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre” (300). Indeed, “When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating language, all its words and all its forms, which provide language with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch” (300).
  • Analysis of and application (of heteroglossia) to the comic novel and case study with Little Dorrit (Dickens)… Usually parodic.
    • “So it is throughout Dickens; whole novel. His entire text is, in fact, everywhere dotted with quotation marks that serve to separate out little islands of scattered direct speech and purely authorial speech, washed by heteroglot waves from all sides” (307).
    • But they’re not actual quotation marks because the other’s speech and author’s speech are “at none of these points clearly separated [. . .] the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single syntactic whole” (308).
  • Leads to a sort of refracting of authorial voice/identity and intentions: “Heterogossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author” (324). And this is rhetorical (354).
  • I’m thinking too about how the author brings heteroglot voices to the novel in the language coded into it, but the reader also brings heteroglot interpretations to the novel as we decode it. Together we perform the text together, contributing to heteroglossia by interpreting it.
  • Then examples from Turgenev (// the “Dickens” section)
  • Heteroglossia includes not just the different kinds of speech, but also the character zones and incorporated genres, luxuries afforded the novel: “A comic playing with languages, a story ‘not from the author’ (but from a narrator, posited author or character), character speech, character zones and lastly various introductory or framing genres are the basic forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel. All these forms permit languages to be used in ways that are indirect, conditional, distanced. They all signify relativizing of linguistic consciousness in the perception of language borders–borders created by history and society, and even the most fundamental borders (i.e., those between languages as such)–and permit expression of a feeling for the materiality of language that defines such a relativized consciousness” (323-24).
  • “Prose consciousness feels cramped when it is confined to only one out of a multitude of heteroglot languages, for one linguistic timbre is inadequate to it” (324).
  • Then there’s a section about the speaking character of the novel that I was completely spent while reading. I heteroglossed over it.
  • Contact zone (Pratt): “In the history of literary language, there is a struggle constantly being waged to overcome the official line with its tendency to distance itself from the zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority. In this process discourse gets drawn into the contact zone, which results in semantic and emotionally expressive (intonational) changes: there is a weakening and degradation of the capacity to generate metaphors, and discourse becomes more reified, more concrete, more filled with everyday elements and so forth” (345).
  • “Such mixing of two languages within the boundaries of a single utterance is, in the novel, an artistic device (or more accurately, a system of devices) that is deliberate. But unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization, by means of a mixing of various ‘languages’ co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages–but the crucible for this mixing always remains the utterance” (358-59).
  • “The novelistic plot serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds. What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system. There takes place within the novel an ideological translation of another’s language, and an overcoming of its otherness–an otherness that is only contingent, external, illusory. Characteristic for the historical novel is a positively weighted modernizing, an erasing of temporal boundaries, the recognition of an eternal present in the past. The primary stylistic project of the novel as a genre is to create images of languages” (365-66). Therefore, “Every novel, taken as the totality of all the languages and consciousnesses of language embodied in it, is a hybrid. But we emphasize once again: it is an intentional and conscious hybrid, one artistically organized, and not an opaque mechanistic mixture of languages (more precisely, a mixture of the brute elements of language)” (366).

Gramsci’s Politics of Language

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Gramsci’s Politics of Language – Peter Ives

  • The last section of the prison notebooks it Is dedicated to grammar hey there is substantial evidence that the concept of hegemony it’s fundamentally rooted in Italian linguistics.
  • Gramsci’s approach to language and ‘matter’ does not assume that these two things are inimical nor does it  privilege one at the others expense.
  • Vernacular materialism is a version of linguistic materialism that invokes oxymoron to illustrate the assumed opposition between language and ‘matter’.
  • Gramsci in line with Louis Dupre and Raymond Williams, seeing language as cultural and material product of human activity rather than rarified thought.
  • Do not equate Progressive with consent and regressive with coercion. Coercsion and consent are dialectically related.
  • CHAPTER ONE
  • the manner in which a proposition functions must be placed in broad context, its ‘global signification’.
  • Imminent Grammar – Gramsci’s term for spontaneous grammar in popular use; parole.Normative Grammar – Gramsi’s term for standardized hegemonic language use; langue.
  • For Gramsci, normative grammar cannot be delinked from philosophy. Normative Grammar amounts to the exercise of power and law, it operates molecularly at that which creates the spontanous of imminent grammar. (i.e. The Indexical Order)
  • The normative grammar is the historical product of these pressures and struggles because ‘in language too, there is no parthenogenesis.’
  • Gramsci’s problem of hegemony: it is not a  relationship  between coercion and consent rather it is a question of the formation of consent and the role of coercion. It is impossible to separate those forces which act from above externally as a force from the movements of spontaneous organic formation of collective will.
  • CHAPTER TWO: BAKHTIN CIRCLE
  • Volosinov’s description of language as a site of class struggle analyzed as signs with various possible ‘accents’, meanings, and nuances.

Volosinov’s five basic propositions about language:

  1. language as a stable system of normatively identical forms is merely a scientific abstraction, productive only in connection with certain particular practical and theoretical goals. (common sense)
  2. Language is a continuous generative process implements in the social-verbal interaction of speakers.
  3. The laws of the generative process of language are not at all the laws of individual psychology, but neither can they be divorced from the activity of speakers. The laws of language generation are sociological laws.
  4. Linguistic creativity does not coincide with artistic creativity nor with any other type of specialized ideological creativity. But at the same time, linguistic creativity cannot be understood apart from the ideological meanings and values that fill it.
  5. The structure of the utterance is a purely sociological structure.
  • Bakhtin contra Stalin and centralization = heteroglossia
  • Gramsci contra facism and disorder = national progressive language
  • “A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought… What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization”
  • defining heteroglossia as the manifestation of social diversity in language has two advantages 1) does not divorce language from everyday life 2) does not reduce heteroglossia as good democratic and monoglossia as bad and antidemocractic.
  • the sign exists in itself and also reflects (refracts) reality, ‘various classes will use one and the same language’, malleability or multiaccentual aspect of the sign is central to its capacity for further development: “The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.”
  • The naturalization of language works in the interests of those who wish to maintain a national language—by methods Gramsci rejects— since it makes opposition to this language impossible to imagine.
  • The most significant difference between Gramsci and Bakhtin is that Gramsci believes in the possibility of an actual progressive unified language in which differences are held intact and not obliterated, in which different voices exist. Four Bakhtin, this type of unity and organization is certainly found in the field of literature with the unity of the novel. But it is an open question whether Bakhtin thinks we should place our faith in constructing such an open unity Internation or community of people.

Gramsci on Language and Grammar

  • imminent grammar means the grammar rules which naturally occur in any language regardless of its being regimented (Gramsci Reader 354)
  • normative grammar also functions simultaneously in society through reciprocal monitoring, teaching, and censorship (the indexical order)
  • written normative grammar always entails a political choice (there is no neutral promotion of Fusha that is not at the same time political, every lexical choice in Turkish is political)
  • “the idealist current… involves a return to old rhetorical conceptions, to words which are ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ in and by themselves, conceptions which have been glossed over with a new psuedo-scientific language. What these people are really looking for is an extrinsic justification of normative grammar.” SCW 184-5 (Q29-5)
  • “in reality one is ‘always’ studying grammar (by imitating the model one admires)