Marxism and linguistic communication - 3

Last week, I discussed in detail the importance of the book ‘Marxism and the Philosophy of Language’ by Valantin Voloshinov for the understanding of the notion of linguistic communication advocated by Marxism. Today, I wish to focus on the writings of one of the most important theorists of Marxism - the Italian thinker and social activist Antonio Gramsci. The eminent British historian Eric Hobsbawm said that Gramsci is probably the most original communist thinker produced in the twentieth century. And the well-known commentator James Joll says that he was the greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century. Gramsci’s thinking on language will enable us to extend in important directions the views on language expressed by Voloshinov that I discussed last week.

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a distinguished writer, philosopher, politician, linguist, social activist who has had a profound influence on the forward movement of Marxian thought in the twentieth century. In 1926 he was imprisoned by Mussolini and spent the next decade in prison.

He was given a conditional release, thanks to the determined representations made by several prominent European intellectuals, but by then his health had deteriorated so badly that he died at the age of forty six. It was in prison that he wrote some of his most important and path-breaking critical essays. Gramsci exerted a profound influence on such modern fields of study as Cultural Studies, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial studies. His analysis of state, history, role of intellectuals, popular culture, ways of exercising hegemony have had a deep and lasting impact on the age in which he lived and beyond. In terms of our immediate interest, namely, the examination of pathways to language endorsed by Marxist oriented thinkers, the writings of Gramsci can prove to be extremely fruitful.

Antonio Gramsci, who is generally regarded as the theoretician of the superstructure, as opposed to the base so heavily stressed by Marx, succeeded in breaking with the economic determinism of Marx and pointing out the supreme importance of ideas in the conduct of human societies.

One can legitimately say that in Gramsci’s writings, there is a double inversion occurring in relation to the generality of Marxist thought. First, the primacy of the ideological superstructure over the economic base is established; second, the primacy of the civil society (consensus) over the political society (force) is established. Both these inversions, as I shall demonstrate later, hold deep implications for verbal communication.

Antonio Gramsci’s body of writing can be divided into three main categories. First, there is the large volume of scattered essays, short and long, written as a journalist during the pre-prison period when he was in charge of the journal “New Order’ as well as frequent contributions on political and cultural and artistic issues that he wrote for various journals. Second his extended work, which was very close to his deeply held interests that dealt with figures such as Machiavelli and Croce.. These works are significant on account of his acute observations of the role of thinkers and intellectuals in human society. Third, the voluminous writings that he undertook from prison. His prison notebooks, letters to friends and relatives, fragmentary essays and observations are important in this regard.

Among them his ‘Prison Notebooks’ deserve careful study. Gramsci was not a systematic writer and thinker; others, after his death, had to collect these scattered writings and impose a pattern, thematic cohesion, on them.

One of the unmistakable ways in which ideas exert palpable power on society is through what he termed hegemony. This is indeed one of his pivotal concepts and one for which he has gained a wide reputation throughout the world. His concept of hegemony was formulated in order to demonstrate the proactive role played by ideas and the importance of the much-maligned superstructure in class struggle.

There are two forms of domination; the first is domination through force, through coercion. The second is domination through persuasion, through consensus. In his mind, the idea of hegemony belonged to the latter category. His aim was to point out that in bourgeois society as opposed to peasant society domination can be effectively enforced through the mediation of politics and ideology. The concept of hegemony is one of the central pillars of Gramsci’s thought; it holds deep implications for the understanding of his approach to linguistic communication. The term hegemony is used in common parlance to signify the domination of a group, nation, culture over another.

However, Gramsci employed this term in a more restricted and precise fashion. He saw domination consisting of two forms. One is the domination by force, by coercion. The other is domination through persuasion, through consensus. For him, hegemony signifies the latter; it is when the dominated agree to be subjugated. What is interesting about hegemony, as Gramsci perceived it, is the way in which the dominant class gets the subordinate class to see the preservation of status quo as being in its interests as well, and that it represents vogor of common sense.

It is evident that Gramsci has pressed into service his notion of hegemony as a useful term to characterize the relationship between a dominant social group or social class and the dominated group in terms of consent and persuasion rather then force. However, it needs to be pointed that he is not always consistent in his use of the term hegemony, thereby paving the way of ambivalences of meaning and diversities of interpretation.

Another important concept disseminated by Gramsci through his writings is that of the organic intellectual.

This concept of the organic intellectual is vitally linked to his notion of hegemony. He divided intellectuals into two main groups – traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals are those like writers and philosophers and church leaders who are conventionally regarded as intellectuals owing no allegiance to a particular class (Gramsci pointed out that this classlessness was a myth). Organic intellectuals are those who emerge from various social groups and collectivities and display powers of leadership and organization. He focused on the importance of organic intellectuals in ushering in social change. As I will show later, the concept of hegemony which is closely related to that of organic intellectual has deep implications for linguistic communication.

Another important concept enunciated by Gramsci is that of civil society as opposed to the political society.

The political society is characterized by force, by authoritarian rule whereas the civil society, in his judgment, allows room, and creates a space, for persuasion in argument and debate – marks of a democratic polity As in the case of hegemony and organic intellectuals, the concept of civil society has great implications for verbal communication.

Gramsci was also a great believer in the power and value of education in the broader sense of the term. It was his conviction that working class could be educated to take positions of intellectual and moral leadership that would eventually lead to social transformation. In many of his essays, he addresses the issue of education. This idea of education is closely related to the earlier concepts of hegemony, organic intellectuals and civil society that I alluded to earlier. And like these other concepts, his notion of education is inseparably linked to the nature and significance if verbal communication.

When one reads Antonio Gramsci’s writings carefully, it becomes evident that he was deeply wedded to the belief that politics and power permeate culture in complex ways and it is up to us, as social analysts to uncover these connections. Hence, when one adopts a Gramscian approach to texts, cultures, patterns of ideas, intellectual trends, one is always focusing on issues of politics and power plays. Equally important are his observations and commentaries on the intersections of ideas and institutions. How ideas are produced in society, how they circulate in society and how they acquire a sense of legitimacy came under his uncompromising and critical scrutiny. In order to understand the nature and dynamics of the civil society, and the role linguistic communication plays in it, we have to pay very close attention to the genealogy of ideas and how they arise within institutional structures.

Antoniuo Gramsci was clearly a theorist – but he was a theorist with a difference. As a journalist, a political organizer, once the leader of the communist party in Italy, he was keen to establish a vital connection between theory and practice. His idea of intellectual pursuits insisted on this union between theory and practice. Moreover, unlike many other theorists who were bent on constructing seamlessly unified and grand systems, Gramsci wrote in response to specific problems in Italy and elsewhere in terms of concrete situations. Hence his critical writings generate situated knowledges rather than general theories.

In this regard, Edward Said makes a perceptive comment. ‘The note, the article in a newspaper, the meditative fragment, the occasional essay, all have their generic constitutive nature gong in two opposed directions, so to speak. Fist, of course, the writings address an immediate problem at hand in all its situational complexity, as an uneven ensemble of relationships. But second, and going away from the situation out there to the situation of the writer, these occasional disjunctive acts dramatize the physical contingency of the writer himself, that that too is undercut by the momentary nature of is position, that he cannot write for all time but that he is in a situation compelling him to prismatic expression.’

Gramsci resisted the sight of his ideas being tuned into closed systems and dogmas – the fate suffered by many theorists. Hence, he adopted diverse strategies to make his critiques contingent, open-ended and never congealing into systems. This cast of mind has great implications for linguistic communication.

This line of thinking urged by Gramsci illuminates in an interesting way his attitude to philosophy. He perceived of philosophy as a cultural struggle initiated in order to bring about a transformation in popular mentality. He combined philosophical speculation and popular culture and common sense of the people in a way that few other thinkers have. His philosophical work, while being theoretically stimulating, is historically specific and politically relevant and resonant. His object of analysis was specific local struggles; that is why the idea of situated knowledge that I referred to earlier assumes a great importance in his theoretical imagination. For him, there is a mutually nurturing relationship between philosophy and common sense. According to him, the aim of philosophy was not to impose on the rest of the world by thought patterns and interests fashioned by elitist thinkers but to turn philosophy into a vital segment of social movements by relating to the desires and yearnings of the mass of people themselves and their ideas of common sense.

As Gramsci himself remarked, ‘Wht matters is that a new way of conceiving the world and man is born and that this conception is no longer reserved to the great intellectuals, to professional philosophers, but tends rather to become a popular, mass phenomenon, with a concretely world-wide character, capable of modifying (even if the result included hybrid combinations) popular thought and mummified popular culture.’ What Gramsci is emphasizing here is the need for philosophical inquiries to be related to the culture of the subjugated as a way of creating a common space for social reconstruction.

In an essay titled, the study of philosophy gathered in ‘Prison Notebooks’, Antonio Gramsci makes the following assertion. ‘It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all men are “philosophers”, by defining the limits and characteristics of the “spontaneous philosophy” which is proper to everybody.’ He then goes on to make the observation that, ‘This philosophy is contained in:

1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content;

2. common sense and good sense;

3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, way of seeing things and of acting which are collectively bundled together under the name of folk-lore.’

Anotonio Gramsci’s populist notion of philosopher, it seems to me, is critically linked to issues of linguistic communication at different levels of apprehension. As we seek to piece together Gramsci’s understanding of language and linguistic communication, it is of the utmost importance that we pay close attention to this compelling topic. What follows from his formulations on philosophy is that language needs to be understood in the context of people’s beliefs, imaginings, life-worlds, and that it has an inescapable political dimension to it.

Gramsci was of the opinion that language, which is a system of signs, cannot be meaningfully and reliably studied outside the demanding context of ideology. He was forceful in his assertion, in contradistinction to Marx, that language cannot be simply equated with the superstructure or domiciled within it. It was his considered judgment that language has to be rendered autonomous from both base and superstructure; in others we need to think of the nature and functioning of language in human society in a new way, through a new prism.

He maintained that within any given language, there existed two recognizably different entities, a form and content. By form he meant the linguistic system that is deemed proper and appropriate for the organization of signs. By content he meant the semantic values associated with any given language. The form evolves in accordance with its own internal laws, independent from the interdictions of the structure. He stressed that it is of the utmost importance that content be examined in relation to the regnant ideologies and political practices. It is apparent that Gramsci was clearly interested in the latter aspect. As he observed, no historical situation, however radical the change it had precipitated, completely transforms language, at least in its external formal aspects. However, he asserted that the content of language must be changed even if it is difficult to come by an exact awareness of that change in immediate terms. These beliefs of Gramci, in my judgment, are tied closely with issues of linguistic communication.

On the basis of his numerous and scattered pre-prison writings and the work he did while in prison, we can arrive at a just estimate of his approach to language and linguistic communication. In this regard, I wish to focus on seven important considerations. First is his firm belief that linguistics should concern itself with the history of language. In an age of structural linguistics and post-modernist linguistics, this statement might have the ring of the past and appearance of a nostalgic looking back toward a bygone age. Such a reading is clearly misleading; Gramsci was interested in the complex ways in which history inflects language, and this history, he submitted, is a combination of material and symbolic forces. Second, he saw the history of language as a history of semantics, itself an integral part of the history of culture. Gramsci was trained as a philologist and hence it is hardly surprising that he advocated this approach.

Third, he believed that the sources of meanings in language have to be located in history; more specifically, the political praxis of a given group has to be given due attention. The idea of political praxis guided much of his thinking, and hence it is only natural that he sought to apply it to language. Fourth, it was his deeply held, and eloquently articulated, belief that meanings are always ideological, they come to life within ideological contexts. Hence, they almost invariably reflect and give shape to the ideological investments of a given collectivity. Fifth, Gramsci expressed the view that linguistic meanings are inescapably critical in outlook in the sense that indicate the presence of elements derived from past and present conceptions of the world. This continual re-negotiation between the imperatives of the then and now are played out on the surface of words.

Sixth, he asserted that when we study the work of language we begin to discern a dialectics of meaning. This dialectics of meaning reflects the dialectics of diverse forces taking place in the wider society. Language both mimics and shapes this larger social dialectic. Seven, Gramsci believed that linguistic truths are established through the political praxis that marks the collective efforts of any human group. This is in keeping with his conviction that language operate both in the material and symbolic world. These seven considerations urged by Gramsci enable us to construct a Gramscian model of linguistic communication.

This Gramscian model could prove to be of great heuristic value for us in Sri Lanka as we begin to re-think the literary exegetical work needed to be undertaken in relation to Sinhala, Tamil and English writing. The point that I wish to emphasize here is the following: As Gramsci clearly elucidated, language has to be understood as a complex sign system that comes to life in ideological contexts, and it bears the burden of history and cultural memory that we need judiciously to make use of, not eradicate, as we address our minds to literary creativity. How language is implicated in cultural hegemony, civil society, and inflection of common sense are matters that should be of great relevance to us; as we explore more productive means of interpreting literary texts and as we struggle to shape a new vocabulary of analysis, a language of evaluation, suitable for our literary projects in Sri Lanka, Gramsci, (a name hardly mentioned by the generality of Sri Lankan literary critics), can emerge as our respected friend and guide.