Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 13, Issue 4, August 1989, Pages 547-566
Journal of Pragmatics

Linguists of all countries …!: On Gramsci's premise of coherence

https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(89)90040-4Get rights and content

Abstract

The Italian Marxist politician Antonio Gramsci deserves to be seen as a linguist and a philosopher of language. His casual remarks on language contain a compelling methodology, implying a view of society that permits a fruitful criticism of theories of knowledge by its inclusion of knowledge in the pursuit of social unity. This, in its turn, leads to a dissolution of the problematical distinction between objective and subjective meaning, similar to those concepts of language developed by Saussure and Wittgenstein, but more explicitly politicized. What is historically accepted as ‘linguistic unity’, ‘agreement’, or ‘understanding’, changes within social struggle. Therefore, Gramsci starts from difference, in order to strive towards unity. Up to this point, his linguistics is extremely useful. The impact of his work, however, is that to strive for unity is something one should always do (his ‘principle of coherence’). This claim (complemented by the linguistics of the Marxist Vološinov (Bakhtin)) leads to an elaboration on Gramsci that also allows for nonconformist political strategies (a ‘principle of translatability’).

References (62)

  • Louis Althusser

    Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (Notes towards an investigation)

  • Paul Atkinson

    Language, structure, and reproduction: An introduction to the sociology of Basil Bernstein

    (1985)
  • G.P. Baker et al.

    Language, sense and nonsense

    (1984)
  • Basil Bernstein
  • Giulio Bertoni et al.

    Breviario di Neolinguistica

  • Christine Buci-Glucksmann

    Gramsci and the State

    (1980)
  • Noam Chomsky

    Reflections on language

    (1976)
  • Katerina Clark et al.

    Mikhail Bakhtin

    (1984)
  • Benedetto Croce

    Aesthetic: As science of expression and general linguistic

    (1922)
  • Benedetto Croce

    Philosophy of the practical: Economic and ethic

    (1913)
  • Benedetto Croce

    The philosophy of language

  • CW = Gramsci...
  • Tullio De Mauro

    Une introduction à la sémantique

    (1969)
  • Tullio De Mauro

    Notes bibliographiques et critiques sur F. de Saussure

  • Jacques Derrida

    Of grammatology

    (1976)
  • Jacques Derrida

    Limited Inc.

    a b c … Glyph

    (1977)
  • Jacques Derrida

    Positions

    (1981)
  • Jacques Derrida

    Margins of philosophy

    (1982)
  • Jacques Derrida

    Des tours de Babel

  • Carlo De Simone

    Die Sprachphilosophie von Benedetto Croce

    Kratylos

    (1967)
  • Giacomo Devoto

    Matteo Bartoli

    Word

    (1947)
  • Harold Entwistle

    Antonio Gramsci: Conservative schooling for radical politics

    (1979)
  • Giuseppe Fiori

    Antonio Gramsci: Life of a revolutionary

    (1970)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Die Philosophie von Benedetto Croce

  • Antonio Gramsci

    Selections from the prison notebooks

    (1971)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Selections from political writings (1921–1926)

    (1978)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Letters from prison

    (1979)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Marxismus und Kultur: Ideologie, Alltag, Literatur

    (1983)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Notizen zur Sprache und Kultur

    (1984)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Notes on language

    Telos

    (1984)
  • Antonio Gramsci

    Selections from the cultural writings

    (1985)
  • Cited by (11)

    Author's address: N. Helsloot, Balistraat 39 II, 1094 JC Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

    ∗∗

    I would like to express my gratitude to Tieme van Dijk, Ernesto Laclau, Jacob Mey, Franco Lo Piparo, and Ido Weijers for their critical comments on earlier stages of this text.

    View full text