Tag Archives: Language & Ideology

History of Language Policy in Turkey

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  • Cuceoglu, D., & Slobin, D. (1980). Effects of Turkish language reform on person perception. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 11(3), 297–326. – they investigated the attitudes of the audience towards the speakers with varying frequencies of different codes. They found that learners were able to identify the speakers as leftist and rightist, evaluating their speech, and thus favor or dismiss them depending on their own political orientation.
  • Turkey has seen different groups of leaders with different political orientations over the past 85 years.
  • The Historical and Linguistic Analysis of Turkish Politicians’ Speech – article using scientific analysis to understand lexical breakdown between languages.
  • After 1 December 1928, all newspapers, magazines, advertisements,
    film subtitles, and other signs had to be in the new letters. By 1 January 1929, all Turkish books had to be published in the new alphabet, and all government offices, banks, and other social and political associations and institutions were required to use the new letters in all their transactions. The law set June 1930 as the absolute deadline for all public and private transactions, including all printed matter such as laws and circulars, to be in the new letters.
  • increased literacy in the new alphabet, which was based on the Istanbul dialect, would work toward the elimination of regional dialects and the creation and standardization of a shared colloquial Turkish.
  • The army as an institution directly contributed to the dissemination of the new alpha-
    bet among the male population by offering literacy classes for conscripts during their
    mandatory military service.
  • In some instances, older citizens who were literate in Ottoman never learned the
    new letters, resulting in their functional or partial illiteracy for the rest of their lives.
  • Ottoman persisted into the 1940s.
  • On the literacy front, even though institutions such as the army, the press, and the schools cooperated with state officials, the state’s ability to reach all areas and all groups remained limited, and a majority of the population remained outside the impact of alphabet reform throughout the RPP period.
  • individual reactions to reforms, and in particular the alphabet transition, had much to do with cultural and habitual change at a very personal level and did not necessarily fit the categories of ideologically oriented resistance or opposition.
  • Cuceoglu, D., & Slobin, D. – political tone of language use changed in the 1960s, right-left spectrum, did a science experiment to match metalinguistic awareness to political persuasion.

 

 

Cüceloğlu, Doan, and Dan I. Slobin. “Effects of Turkish Language Reform on Person Perception.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol. 11, no. 3, 1980, pp. 297-326.

Uzum, Baburhan, and Melike Uzum. “The Historical and Linguistic Analysis of Turkish Politicians’ Speech.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 23, no. 4, 2010, pp. 213-224.

Yılmaz, Hale. “learning to Read (again): The Social Experiences of Turkey’s 1928 Alphabet Reform.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 43, no. 4, 2011, pp. 677-697.

The Politics of Written Language in the Arab World: Writing Change

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CHAPTER 9 The Politics of Pro-‘ammiyya Language Ideology in Egypt

Mariam Aboelezz

interviews with an Egyptologist pro-ammiya political party dude and the head of malamih publishers, who publish ammiya stuff, how both of them enact language ideology according to 6 topoi.

  • language politics in Egypt takes the form of a binary of Egyptian nationalism vs. pan-Arab nationalism: the former ideology favouring ʿāmmiyya and the latter favouring Standard Arabic or fuṣḥā (Suleiman1996)
  •  ʿāmmiyya might be used to counter the hegemonic discourse of the (language) authorities (Bassiouney 2014; Ibrahim 2010
  • Language change at two levels: 1) the structure of the language (lexicon, grammar, etc.); 2) use of the language, that is, “the functional allocations of the varieties of language used” in a speech community
  • As Kelsey (2014: 309) points out, “a myth is not a lie. Rather, it is a construction of meaning that serves a particular purpose through the confirmations and
    denials of its distortion”.
  • Eisle: 4 cultural tropes underlying value system of Arabic language –
    unity, purity, continuity and competition.
  • Eisle: Salama Musa’s aim was to subvert dominant beliefs about Arabic, “he never the less reflects the dominant Arab way of talking about language”
  • 3 more topoi: conspiracy, authenticity and superiority.
  • Mohamed El-Sharkawi editor of ‘Malamih’ publishing. has a ‘no-language-editing’ policy

Changing Norms, Concepts and Practices of Written Arabic A ‘Long Distance’ Perspective

Gunvor Mejdel
  • processes of standardisation and destandardisation, with shifting norms of use, have come in wave
  • A standard language norm is the product of a process of selection and
    codification of features and variants of a language to function as a model of
    correctness,defined by people who have become norm authorities, role models
    supported by official institutions (Bartsch1987:78). The standard language has
    validity in the language community in so far as speakers/writers perceive its
    norm to be valid, i.e. that they accept it as a model/measure of correctness
    – without necessarily having access to it.
  • Bartsch – the prescriptive standard as a normative concept of language planners, from the empirical standard as a descriptive concept of socio-linguistics.
  • Arabic at the dawn of Islam was a special register, a super-tribal variety of Arabic
  • Jabarti’s Mudda is characterized by negligence of literary usage and form in addition to a proliferation of colloquial terms, expressions, and linguistic patterns”. Moreh believes that the text may have been “a rough draft written without paying special attention to the rules and for this reason the text is especially interesting from a linguistic point of view” (1975: 25–26).
  • Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī  talkhīṣ bārīs was apparently composed mentally in vernacular and then translated into a still “error-ridden” version of standard. also corrected, like many things, is subsequent versions. in his dissertation on al-Ṭahṭāwī(1968) Karl Stowasser finds even the printed edition replete with deviating forms typical
    of many medieval texts, both syntactic and morphological, some reflecting
    vernacular features, other obvious hypercorrections.
  • Humphrey Davies puts it thus: “If the use of Middle Arabic is found to be
    widespread and consistent, a further implication would be that, had it not
    been for the linguistic self-consciousness and ‘reforms’ introduced during the
    nahḍa of the nineteenth century, Middle Arabic might well have become the
    standard form of written expression in Egypt (and no doubtelsewhere)”(2008:
    111)
  • Rather than a Dante or a Cervantes, pan-Arabism asserted the Nahdawi project
  • Think of the Nahda as a re-imposition of normative grammar rather than its return or recovery.
  • The “discovery” of dialects by orientalists see Pierre Larcher 2003.
  • Lahja is part of the native repertoire of metalinguistic concepts (“tip of the tongue; way of speaking”), and is adopted as the technical term for the new discipline of dialectology(ʿilmal-lahajāt) at some time around the turn of the century.
  • Campaigns calling for the promotion of the vernacular as the standard
    language towards the end of the century received very little support from native
    intellectuals; the fact that colonial officials were among the strongest and most
    active in the promotion campaign for ʿāmmiyya did not exactly help the cause.
  • The (semi-)colloquial press, which had been at its high in the 1890s and
    1900s, declined rapidly in the following decades, “until they disappeared com-
    pletely by the 1950s” (Fahmy 2011:76
  • I doubt that the language cultivators, now institutionalised authorities in
    academies and committees, or in ministries and Arabic departments at the
    universities, in fact exercised much control over writing in Egypt in the 20th
    century – apart from, of course, imposing and securing the position of nor-
    mative al-ʿarabiyya as target in the school system.Rather, the literary ‘ethics’ of
    the time,echoing the pan-Arabic political ethics, called fora certain normative
    self-discipline.The literary developmentof the novelandshortstoriestowards
    social realism, on the other hand, imposed the question of (appropriate) style
    to represent in writing the speech of common people. It became commonly
    accepted to use ʿāmmiyya in dialogue (reflecting direct speech), in a frame of
    fuṣḥā narrative; although a few prominent writers (notably Ṭāhā Ḥusayn and
    NagībMaḥfūẓ)stronglyobjectedtoacceptinganythingbut‘correct’formsinto
    the literary sphere. Some writers openly struggled with the dilemma: we have
    the popular writer Iḥsān ʿAbd al-Quddūs (1919–1990) arguing with himself in
    theintroductiontothesecondeditionof hisnovel Anāḥurra (“Iamfree”,n.d)–
    in the end finding peace and calm in the following solution: that a longer fictional work may well have ʿāmmiyya in the dialogue, whereas shorter stories
    may – or may not, according to the general ‘atmosphere’ of the story (Mejdell
    2006b: 205). The issue was never settled, but, from now on, it only occasionally
    flared up in heated debate.
  • Genre has a huge effect on the appropriateness of language choice (memoirs and sakhr adab in egypt vs. novels)

Chapter 2: Diglossia as Ideology – Kristin Brustad

  • Categories such as register exist insofar as speakers imagine and create them.
  • We cannot know the scope of such “border crossings” just as we cannot
    know the reality of writing across society by the accident of what survives today,
    since most of it has been “corrected” by editors to adhere to contemporary
    norms before publication.
  • studies on Middle Arabic: Blau (2002), Doss and Davies (2013), and Lentin (2008, 2009), as well as Zack and Schippers (2012)
  • always have to be aware of the tashih for all literary texts as a metatextual factor which is CRITICAL to the language usage of the Arabic text
  • the 20th century is an aberration in the long history of Arabic
  • Diglossia named in the 1959 treatise by Ferguson.
  • Milroy defines a standard language ideology culture as one in which
    speakers believe their language exists in “a clearly delimited perfectly uniform and perfectly stable variety – a variety that is never perfectly and consistently realized in spoken use”
  • Calls to reform the Arabic writing system reached their peak from1944 to1947,when the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo put forth a call for proposals for the simplification of the Arabic writing system.
  • The ideology of diglossia obscures this deep and lasting relationship. More
    ʿāmmiyya and more fuṣḥā go hand-in-hand, and mean more written Arabic for all.

 

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».

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.

“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.

The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University – David Bleich

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Citation

 

  • Bleich, David. The Materiality of Language: Gender, Politics, and the University. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2013.

 

Contents

 

Introduction: The Contested Subject

Part One: The Materiality of Language

Chapter 1: Premises and Backgrounds

 

Chapter 2: Received Standards in the Study of Language

Chapter 3: Materiality and Genre

Chapter 4: The Unity of Language and Thought

 

Chapter 5: Materiality and the Contemporary Study of Language

Chapter 6: Recognizing Politics in the Study of Language

Part Two: Language in the University

Chapter 7: Frustrations of Academic Language

Chapter 8: The Protected Institution

 

Chapter 9: The Sacred Language

Chapter 10: Language Uses in Science, the Heir of Latin

Chapter 11: Language and Human Survival

 

Chapter 12: The Materiality of Literature and the Contested Subject

Works Cited and Consulted

 

Author

 

David Bleich is Professor of English at the University of Rochester and author of Know and Tell: A Pedagogy of Disclosure, Genre, and Membership and The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations, among other books.

 

Context

 

David Bleich sees the human body, its affective life, social life, and political functions as belonging to the study of language. In The Materiality of Language, Bleich addresses the need to end centuries of limiting access to language and its many contexts of use. To recognize language as material and treat it as such, argues Bleich, is to remove restrictions to language access due to historic patterns of academic censorship and unfair gender practices. Language is understood as a key path in the formation of all social and political relations, and becomes available for study by all speakers, who may regulate it, change it, and make it flexible like other material things.

 

Thesis

 

A clear and direct formulation of language ideology

 

The analysis of subject creation as an affective process of recognizing and sharing the same affective state and language as the means for materializing affective states

 

Methodology

Key Terms

 

Materiality of Language – all functions of speech and writing relative to the social, intersubjective scenes of their use. Language is material in the sense that it has tangible effects and that it matters all the time.

 

Criticisms and Questions

 

-The materiality of language is an axiom, a postulate, a fundamental assumption, a Kuhnian paradigm that leads to new approaches to the study and teaching of language, but is still not a part of our ordinary sense of what language is and does. It suspends the preoccupa- tion with the referential and communicative functions of language and tries to examine all functions of speech and writing relative to the social, intersubjective scenes of their of their use.

– The materiality of language suggests that, socially, language has been separated from “actualities” and treated as simply as an instrument of reference or conveyance. This approach to language has enabled the continued stable existence of the “intelligentsia,” that is, the overwhelmingly unbalanced population of the well-educated.

– The political movement for the enfranchisement of women and other subaltern constituencies has tried to counter this assumption of the pri- macy of the mind in isolation from material things. Thinking about “the body” is also an attempt to materialize the sense of what a human mind is, to recognize it in the “context” in which it must exist: living bodies.

– Christine Iwanick: Her (taken-from-Zola) figure of “living out loud” presents the use of language as an essential ingredient in subjective and intersubjective experience. But it also refers to the ability of language to bring our emotional lives into public places. Her discussion of theoretical formulations in the work of Bakhtin and Derrida also notes their struggle, especially Derrida’s, to recognize the emotional potential of all language use (“the play of language”), and somehow to reconcile this potential with the severe, even imperious, strictures called for by the conventions of academic writ- ing. She traces some of the history of the idea of the materiality of language, and she presents statements and explanations of the view that language is a “thing,” rather than an insubstantial or spiritual entity. At the same time her juxtaposition of views of modern and postmodern thought also implies some of the achievement of the postmodern wish to cultivate awareness of the living context of our uses of language.

– Because language and genres are material, research into their manifestations, uses, variations, and details does matter, and the members of established professions know this, if only intuitively. Certainly politicians have always known it. This brings us to the underlying rationale for taking the materiality and genres of language seri- ously: they give all (rather than just “expert”) language users the means to interact with every other aspect of society in which what is said carries weight or is binding on people in some way. It provides yet another explanation of why totalitarian social systems have prevented people-slaves and women, for example-from acquiring literacy at all, why they have always found ways to appropriate the public language (that is, to lie) for purposes of regulating mass psychology. The nonviolent response to this trope of political domination is now, and has always been, the bringing of language to those who don’t have it. Yet if the language is always thought of as “only words,” it has been already deauthorized. What MacKinnon maintains about por- nography I think is true of any use of language: it affects our bodies, our communi ties, and our “mass” identities. I think we should teach language with this in mind.

 

Introduction: The Contested Subject

 

-the materiality of language is a ground for desacrilizing texts, no reason to automatically consider written texts more permanent.

 

Part One: The Materiality of Language

 

Chapter 1: Premises and Backgrounds

-Lorenzo valla was actually chill about vernacular and saw language as living

Chapter 2: Received Standards in the Study of Language

Chapter 3: Materiality and Genre

-it could be political sedition or heresy when the reference to a gengre is challened of rejected.

-Witgennstein’s ideas: language game sprachespiel, form of life lebensformen (cannot take out the heart to understand its function), family resemblence, description instead of explananation “if language functions ideally, it’s transparent” language is simultaneously referential and gestural

-if phenomena are hidden in plain sight, the materiality of languageis repressed.

J.L. Austin: speech acts and locutionism dude. “How to do things with words”

Bakhtin: -various viewpoints and worldviews cross and converge in all speech

-addressivity: words and sentences belong to nobody – language is not living language until it appears in a genre which defines its context and social situation -Russian formalists: something particular about literary language. -different national language are different speech genres -national speech is a reference to national culture.

–

Chapter 4: The Unity of Language and Thought

Language and Symbolic Power – Pierre Bourdieu

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Citation

Language and Symbolic Power, Harvard University Press, 1991.

Contents

  • General Introduction
  • Part I. The Economy of Linguistic Exchanges
    • Introduction
    • 1. The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
    • 2. Price Formation and the Anticipation of Profits
    • Appendix: Did You Say ‘Popular’?
  • Part II. The Social Institution of Symbolic Power
    • Introduction
    • 3. Authorized Language: The Social Conditions for the Effectiveness of Ritual Discourse
    • 4. Rites of Institution
    • 5. Description and Prescription: The Conditions of Possibility and the Limits of Political Effectiveness
    • 6. Censorship and the Imposition of Form
  • Part III. Symbolic Power and the Political Field
    • 7. On Symbolic Power
    • 8. Political Representation: Elements for a Theory of the Political Field
    • 9. Delegation and Political Fetishism
    • 10. Identity and Representation: Elements for a Critical Reflection on the Idea of Region
    • 11. Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’

Author

 

Bourdieu’s work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, and especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics.

Context

Thesis

linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a “linguistic market” and a “linguistic habitus.” When individuals use language in particular ways, they deploy their accumulated linguistic resources and implicitly adapt their words to the demands of the social field or market that is their audience. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal or insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce.

Methodology

Key Terms

 

field – A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field, agent’s habitus and agent’s capital (social, economic and cultural).[40] Fields interact with each other, and are hierarchical: Most are subordinate to the larger field of power and class relations.

 

Habitus–  can be defined as a system of dispositions(lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action).  a central aspect of the habitus is its embodiment: Habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness. The internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical and often pre-reflexive way. An illustrative example might be the ‘muscle memory’ cultivated in many areas of physical education.

 

Doxa – Doxa refers to the learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent’s actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable.

 

Language – Bourdieu takes language to be not merely a method of communication, but also a mechanism of power. The language one uses is designated by one’s relational position in a field or social space. Different uses of language tend to reiterate the respective positions of each participant. Linguistic interactions are manifestations of the participants’ respective positions in social space and categories of understanding, and thus tend to reproduce the objective structures of the social field. This determines who has a “right” to be listened to, to interrupt, to ask questions, and to lecture, and to what degree.

 

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

from Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton (Doxa and Common life)

-language is as much and instrument of power and action than of communication

-Problems with Marxists conception of ideology

-“enlightened false consciousness” too simple, people more shrewd and cynical than suggested

– what keeps system going is less rhetoric and discourse than the system’s own logic (does not need to pass through consciousness to be validated)

-ideology as false consciousness remains Cartesian the social world works in terms of practices, mechanisms, etc.

-By using the term ‘Doxa’ we accept many things without knowing them, and that is what is called ideology

-It operates through language, through the body, through attitudes below level of consciousness

-emancipation is therefore a work of mental gymnastics as much as consciousness-raising

-Althusser, whatever the limits of his thought, was trying to shift the concept of ideology to a much less conscious, more practical, institutional place

-“very often the persons who are able to speak about the social world know nothing about the social world and those who do know cannot speak”

-you mystify people when you say “look, rap is great” the question is: does this music really change the structure of the culture?

-you are reacting to economism by lifting economic imagery into the cultural sphere rather than by registering the weight of the material and economic within culture.

-Doxic submission does not mean happiness, it means bodily submission, which includes a lot of internalized tension.

 

  1. i. conceptual problems with structuralism – focus on internal mechanisms, attempt to distill structure from social world

ii- ignores pragmatics

iii – the application of structural linguistics to other kinds of behavior (anthropology)

  1. i – encourage sociolinguists to supplement structural, pragmatic studies with consideration of socio-historical context

language- instrument of action and power we use language to do things (speech act theory) create reality, constrain, intimidate, set boundaries.

a – constrained by institutions which defines the relatively stable social relations between agents in a conversation.

b- field/market – structured spaces of positions, site of struggle for power and prestige.

-ascribes a particular value to a language, ascribed by dominant group to our goods always and determines access that others can have to language of institution comparison to value of legit. language.

-assigns capital and (resources and honor and prestige ascribed to resources)

  1.    a) economic – material wealth
  2.    b) cultural  knowledge and skills
  3.     c) symbolic- accumulated prestige
  4. Habitus i. set of dispositions ingrained in the body, habits, behaviors, comportment.
  5. linguistic habitus: hypercorrection, censorship, silencing we/they are committing symbolic violence against ourselves

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.