Tag Archives: hegemony

“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)

Ideology and Inscription – Tom Cohen

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Citation:

Cohen, Tom. Ideology and Inscription: “cultural Studies” After Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

Contents:

Introduction: Webwork, or ‘That spot is bewitched’

Part I. Ciphers – Or Counter-Genealogies for a Critical ‘Present’:

  1. Reflections on post ‘post-mortem de Man’
  2. The ideology of dialogue: the de Man/Bakhtin connection
  3. Mnemotechnics: time of the seance, or the Mimetic blind of ‘cultural studies’

Part II. Expropriating ‘Cinema’ – Or, Hitchcock’s Mimetic War:

  1. Beyond ‘the Gaze’: Hitchcock, Zizek, and the ideological sublime
  2. Sabotaging the ocularist state

Part III. Tourings – Or, the Monadic Switchboard:

  1. Echotourism: Nietzschean Cyborgs, Anthropophagy, and the rhetoric of science in cultural studies
  2. Altered states: stoned in Marseilles, or the addiction to reference
  3. Contretemps: notes, on contemporary ‘travel’.

Author:

Tom Cohen’s work began in literary theory and cultural politics and traverses a number of disciplines—including critical theory, cinema studies, digital media, American studies, and more recently the contemporary shift of 21st century studies in the era of climate change.

Context:

late 90s attempt to retrieve the legacy of De Man after the accusations of apolitical solipsism on Derrida and deconstruction

Thesis:

“The argument of these essays is that, rather than being surpassed by the intervening “returns” to history, mimesis, humanism, and identity politics, the materiality of language lingers as a repressed trauma” (1)

Methodology:

each chapter pairs De Manian thinking with thinkers such as Bakhtin, Benjamin, Zizek, and Neitzsche

Key Terms:

“materiality” , the De Man equivalent of the real

mimetico-historicist reading of history

inscription as opposed to ideology

Related Texts and Ideas:

De Man “The Use of Theory”

Criticisms and Questions:

dense language, does not apply exactly how a use of materiality could lead to political readings, engaged more with theory than with an application on texts

 

Rather than a concept of history centered on interiorized and m

imetically conceived

models of the subject and community, Cohen proposes, following

such critics as de Man,

Benjamin, and Adorno, to refocus the understanding of history o

n a concept of “mate-

riality” that can not be empirically apprehended or mimetically

represented, and that

always lies in excess of all models of interiority. Historicist

and mimetic representations

that do not relinquish their claim to the concept of identity—e

ven those that attempt to

represent “alternate” histories or forms of identity—are not on

ly blind to this materiality,

but also border on a dangerous form of conservatism that would

block out the possibili-

ties that a non-interiorist history represents. De Man consider

ed mimetic representation

to be a form of ideology, one that is focused on anthropomorphi

sm and meaning at the

expense of a historical materiality that exceeds both. Cohen re

minds us that, even under

persecution from fascism, Benjamin identified “the enemy” as no

t the fascists themselves,

but a form of historicism that presumes to contain or comprehen

d its object. Both de

Man and Benjamin considered language to be intrinsically relate

d to historicity and

materiality, especially inasmuch as it represents the possibili

ty of intervening—or “in-

scribing” a different kind of history—into mimetic-historicist

structures.

 

Keywords:

theory, ideology, language

Notes:

Benjamin explicitly questions how an alternate practice of writing-reading to current epistemo-critical models — largely mimetico-historicist— is required to rupture the fixed and inherited narratives of a foreclosed notion of “history” (3)

De Man- movement beyond metaphor or mimesis raises issue of “materiality” (Adorno) irrecuperable to an overtly referential (Marxian) model of mimetic politics.

-a la Derrida, a critique of a hermeneutically or “ideological” invested positions is not only derivable but seems impossible to arrest.

-language is not interiority and so not apolitical

-what is overlooked is that politics within signifying practices is always also a politics of memory, of “inscriptions” and how they are managed, guarded, purged, restored, protected.

Althusser – ideology has no outside, but at the same time is nothing but outside.

De Man’s project – at attempt to use the model of reading to situate epistemology as the site of the political. Since representation at all times involves the ritualized backloop of memory, the prerecorded inscription, of the ritual apparatuses of ideologies, chiasmically dissimulating the incursion they represent.

Undecidability is not a moral paralysis or apolitical, but a technos of historical intervention — habitual chains of reaction or logic formed in circumstances no longer historically applicable. Things, after all, are only “decidable” due to a long installed habit of language. “Undecidability” is where a preinscribed historical value – narrative has been deprived of momentum open to renegotiation.

-opening up unprescribed futures- not mere close reading – is what De Man is all about

I have followed the insights of several theorists such as Tom Cohen who works in Ideology and Inscription to overcome the bind between the textualization of history in ‘Theory’ and the mimetic bias of Cultural Studies by returning to the materiality of language as a socially determined and historically situated practice. Language is only opposed to history if we imagine history as centered on interiorized and mimetically conceived models of the subject and community.  When we acknowledge instead that all forms of mimetic representation depend on the ways that language is used at a certain time and place—whether it be two rural workers or the presiding consciousness of the didactice novel—we can bring attention back to the political stakes of language itself.  As the medium that either offers a stable field upon which to project the ideology of mimetic representation or as a contested mechanism that offers up spaces of radical alterity, language is itself the terrain of political coercion and ideological transformation. Concentrating on the situatedness of speech and the pragmatics of dialogue reveals how the language of the novel is always contingent on class structures and that its politics are only intelligible against the movement of ideology in language. The political imagination of a novel, then, will be understood as the ways in which an author grasps class as overdetermined and socially invisible by working through the historicity and materiality of language.

Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces – Chantal Mouffe

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Citation:

Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces .” Art & Research : Chantal Mouffe, Arts & Research, 2007, www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html.

Relevance:

contemporary conversation about the relationship between language and political hegemony, update on Gramsci

Notes:

 

another way thinking about class, conflict, and art

 

-the dominant tendency in liberal thought is characterized by a rationalist and individualist approach which is unable to grasp adequately the pluralistic nature of the social world, with the conflicts that pluralism entails; conflicts for which no rational solution could ever exist, hence the dimension of antagonism that characterizes human societies.

-Indeed, one of the main tenets of this liberalism is the rationalist belief in the availability of a universal consensus based on reason. No wonder that the political constitutes its blind spot. Liberalism has to negate antagonism since, by bringing to the fore the inescapable moment of decision – in the strong sense of having to decide in an undecidable terrain – antagonism reveals the very limit of any rational consensus.

-every society is the product of a series of practices attempting at establishing order in a context of contingency.

-What is at a given moment considered as the ‘natural’ order – jointly with the ‘common sense’ which accompanies it – is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices; it is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity exterior to the practices that bring it into being.

An agonistic conception of democracy acknowledges the contingent character of the hegemonic politico-economic articulations which determine the specific configuration of a society at a given moment.