HEGEMONIC LANGUAGE Towards a Historical-Materialist Theory of Language Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie im Fachbereich Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaften der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität zu Frankfurt am Main vorgelegt von Alen Sućeska aus: Zagreb, Kroatien 1. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Axel Honneth 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Peter Thomas Table of Contents Preface.........................................................................................................................................6 Introduction.................................................................................................................................7 Chapter I: The Fetishisation of Language.................................................................................10 1.1. The Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.............................................................12 1.1.1. “The Science of Language”.....................................................................12 1.1.2. “Linguistic Value”: The Word-Money Analogy.....................................14 1.1.3. Historicizing Saussure.............................................................................17 1.1.4. On the “Similarities” between Saussure and Gramsci............................19 1.1.5. Voloshinov and Bakhtin on Saussurean Linguistics...............................24 1.1.6. Final Remarks..........................................................................................26 1.2. The Methodological Individualism of Noam Chomsky.........................................27 1.2.1. The Consequences of Chomsky’s “Biolinguistics”.................................27 1.2.2. Final Remarks..........................................................................................30 1.3. The Idealism of Habermas’ Communicative Theory of Language........................32 1.3.1. Cooperative Language.............................................................................32 1.3.2. Reading Habermas with his Critics.........................................................34 1.3.3. Final Remarks..........................................................................................37 1.4. Totalizing Language...............................................................................................38 Chapter II: Language as Social Practice...................................................................................41 2.1. Introduction: The Social Variation of Languages..................................................41 2.2. The “Speculative Myth” of the Evolution of Language.........................................44 2.2.1. Tran Duc Thao.........................................................................................45 2.2.2. David McNally: The Corporeality of Language.....................................47 2.3. The Social Elements of Language..........................................................................51 2.3.1. History.....................................................................................................51 2.3.2. Dialogue or the Social Practice of Language..........................................53 2.3.3. Non-contemporaneous Temporality........................................................56 Chapter III: Language, Consciousness and Ideology................................................................59 3.1. Lev Vygotsky’s Difficult Task...............................................................................59 3.1.1. Contra Piaget...........................................................................................59 3.1.2. The Interdependent Autonomy of Language and Consciousness...........62 3.2. The Historicity of Sense Perception.......................................................................65 3 3.3. Valentin Voloshinov, the Dialectician...................................................................68 3.3.1. An Unfinished Dialectic..........................................................................68 3.3.2. The Ideological Sign................................................................................71 3.4. Language as World-View.......................................................................................75 Chapter IV: The Class Dialectics of Language.........................................................................78 4.1. The Prospects of the Bakhtin Circle.......................................................................78 4.1.1. Heteroglossia and Speech Genres...........................................................79 4.1.2. Multiaccentuality and Refracturing.........................................................83 4.1.3. Intra-Dynamics........................................................................................86 4.1.4. Inter-Dynamics........................................................................................92 4.2. The Limits of the Bakhtin Circle............................................................................94 4.2.1. Influences................................................................................................94 4.2.2. Ethics Instead of Social Theory...............................................................96 4.2.3. Idealized Carnival..................................................................................101 4.2.4. Beyond Bakhtin: Authoritative and Internally Persuasive Hegemonic Principles.........................................................................................................105 4.3. Language and Power in Bourdieu........................................................................107 4.4. The Gramscian Point of View..............................................................................112 Chapter V: Language and Social Structure.............................................................................116 5.1. The Problem of Ideology......................................................................................117 5.2. The Integral State: The Materiality of the Ideological.........................................123 5.3. National Language and Dialects..........................................................................130 5.3.1. The Historical Formation of National Language...................................130 5.3.2. A Critique of Political Naivety: Why Standard Language Matters.......133 5.4. Hegemonizing “Common Sense”: The Production of Consent...........................139 5.4.1. Traditional and Organic Intellectuals....................................................139 5.4.2. The Struggle for “Common Sense”.......................................................143 5.4.3. “Centres of Irradiation”.........................................................................151 Chapter VI: The Linguistic Constitution of the Person..........................................................157 6.1. Why “Person” and not “Subject”?.......................................................................157 6.2. The Struggle for Objectivity................................................................................160 6.3. Breaking the Spell of the Structure: From Passive to Active Persona................163 References...............................................................................................................................167 4 5 Preface The following text is the result of my 3-year long stay in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, from 2011 to 2014, where I was a postgraduate student at the Institut für Philosophie at Goethe-Universität, under the supervision of prof. Axel Honneth (primary supervisor) and prof. Peter Thomas (second supervisor), as part of a scholarship granted to me jointly by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst and the Open Society Foundations. This PhD thesis will be primarily a personal reminder of how many things can be done in a short time span and how much more I could have done, had I perhaps been more prudent in certain matters. I thank my supervisors, professors Axel Honneth in Frankfurt and Peter Thomas in London, for giving me valuable feedback during my studies, and for agreeing to supervise me at all in the first place. I received open-minded and extremely knowledgeable scholarly advice, without which this text would be of a much poorer quality. Of course, all of the potential faults one finds in this work are to be ascribed to myself only. I thank both DAAD and OSI for giving me the opportunity to live and study in Germany, and, more importantly, to do what I find interesting and stimulating. There is no greater joy in life than being able to love the thing you do for “work”. I am very grateful to Anna Wolfart at DAAD for helping in all formal matters during my scholarship and for always being very pleasant in our correspondences. Finally, I thank my family for being supportive, but also, and especially, my partner Paula, for the love and understanding without which it would have been much more difficult to endure the years that have passed, and without which the years that are to come would be much more grim. 6 Introduction The practical aim of this work is twofold. Firstly, it is to construct a theory of language based on historical-materialist premises, i.e. a theory which stresses the sociality and historicity of language, and finds in them the fundamental characteristics which make language one of the central phenomena of human life. Such a theory is inherently counterposed to the dominant theories and philosophies of language in the