Normative Grammar, Language Ideology and the Political Novel in Turkey and Egypt

• What is the effect of metalinguistic awareness and language ideology on the political novel? How do authors work as one point in networks of beliefs
• From a linguistic standpoint, what are the actual differences between normative and imminent grammar? What makes it different isn’t something qualitative within its structure itself, but in the way it’s imagined and treated by speakers. Not only is dialect not a deficient form of normative language, but the two really aren’t that different from one another.
• How does a novel have to grapple with language ideology in a way that film or radio do not? How does a novel create metalinguistic awareness? How does dialogue work as a vehicle for representing speech? How is it used as a barrier between normative and imminent grammar?
• How have authors been judged according to their fidelity to vernacular speech? What is the discourse surrounding this? How is vernacular speech marked and made different? What is the history of iconizing vernacular speech as ignorant, and the subsequent shift to valorize (fetishize) it instead.
• How did authors understand and project anxiety about diglossia and normative grammar? What were the conversations about language in literary circles?
• How role does fractal discursivity play in creating and sustaining the anxiety of vertretung in writing? How is difference dramatized through attention to dialect? How are social distinctions imagined for dialect difference? Does imagined difference create its own barrier?
• Why is normative grammar seen as the vehicle for ideology while imminent grammar is not? How do the politics of the novel move around questions of language ideology?
• What is the relationship between language ideology and mimesis in the novel, how is fact and fiction judged according to the perceived value and communicability of forms of language? How does the novel form complicate notions of accuracy, authenticity, and representation?

Intervention: using field of language ideology to reframe the history of the T/E political novel, seeing how much questions of representation and form are a reflection of anxiety over the perceived divide between normative and imminent grammar.

Chapters:

1. The history of language ideology in modern Egyptian and Turkish literature – intervention against the state language ideology narrative, also against literary histories which use oversimplified history of language
   1. language reforms and the post-war period
   2. the myth of diglossia and normative grammar
   3. literature and its linguistic ideological baggage
2. Fiction, Vetretung, and language ideology – an sociolinguistic intervention into the vertretung debate. You have to look at how language itself works as a form of representation. village novel histories have noted it without analyzing it and the paradox it creates.
   1. the direct discourse fallacy and the stakes of mimesis
   2. novels as opposed to film and radio
   3. The receding subaltern as a function of fractal discursivity
      1. why metalinguistic awareness is a trap
   4. various strategies for representing popular speech and their reception
      1. the Kemal’s – earnestness, mythology, irony
      2. something from Egypt
3. The Left and its failure to communicate – an intervention on how ideology travels in language, the relationship between linguistic and political ideology
   1. leftist parties and their efforts to reach the masses
   2. The Roman a These and normative grammar
   3. the ikidegerlilik of populism, petit bourgeois anxiety as a focus on the failures of normative grammar to communicate
   4. ideology is only something that normative grammar does.
   5. Phoenix and one day all alone
4.  Lost in normative grammar – intervention showing relationship between language politics and literary formalism
   1. Looking at language used in novels as a material/historical object, historicizing a retroactive fiction.
   2. reacting to state censorship, cultural policy and lexical politicization (left/right)
   3. postmodernity as a deep dive into the artificiality and performance of the language
   4. searching for the real in artificial language, getting nowhere: khitat and tutunamayanlar
   5. 1980s shift in language hegemony and rise of the marketplace of imminent grammars.

Interventions:

Chapter one intervenes in the narrative of the pervasiveness and effectiveness of state language policy in Turkey and Egypt, as well as the historical rhetoric surrounding the ‘problem’ of diglossia. It also challenges the emphasis on the state and institutions in perpetuating language ideologies, showing how important micro-contextual interactions are to the movement of normative perceptions of language difference and just how autonomous imminent language actually is.

Chapter two a sociolinguistic intervention into the vertretung/dartellung subaltern debate. I will argue that writers like Samah Selim in The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt have worked from a concept of textuality that does not adequately account for the material sociolinguistic dynamic at work in the village novel. Unlike other studies of the village novel in Egypt and Turkey, I will maintain my focus on the language ideology of writers themselves and show how various textual attempts to capture authentic speech are premised on an illusory distinction between fictional and spontaneous language.

Chapter three is an intervention on the relationship between political ideology and language ideology, and the ways in which they interact dialectically. It looks in the rhetoric of the left for evidence of the language-ideological belief that normative grammar is capable of self-aware political thought whereas imminent grammars are reflexive and passive. It also gives a sociolinguistic account of how slogans and other forms of political language actually travel in speech, and the ways that left-wing novels have misunderstood this.

Chapter Four is an intervention into work like “the Wounded Tongue” by Jale Parla which have conflated the interplay of language politics between the state and canonical literature with the Turkish and Arabic language as a whole. The rhetoric of normative grammar, and the literary rebellions against it, both take place within the sphere of elite language practice, dramatizing the impact that either the state or literature has over the development of imminent grammars which continue to hum along. Their impact, rather, is restricted to a normative grammar which is always, by its very nature, the product of coercion and political interventions.

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

• 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”