GRAMSCI'S PRISION NOTEBOOKS: A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO CULTURE?
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
pietro.restaneo@gmail.com
Abstract
The present paper will discuss the relationship between culture and language in Gramsci's Prision Notebooks. The aim will be to determine wether Gramsci's approach to the topic of culture can be defined as “semiotic”. To guide us through the discussion, and to better understand the meaning of a “semiotic approach to culture”, we will take as a reference the theory of Juri Lotman, whose methodological and conceptual framework we will compare to Gramsci's reflections on language and culture not only to determine wether Gramsci's approach to culture could be defined “semiotic” (in Lotman's sense), but also to better understand his use of the word “culture”, and its complex, dynamic relatioship with language.
1. A semiotic approach
The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between culture and language in Gramsci's Prision Notebooks, through a critical comparison with Lotman's cultural semiotics and to determine wether is possible to speak of a “semiotic approach to culture” in Gramsci. Given the vastity and complexity of Gramsci's meditations, in this paper, for simplicity's sake, we will take into consideration only two of the four poles that, according to T. De Mauro, within the Notebooks the author considers as the main, different aspects of individual and collective experience: “(1) the economic-productive element pole; (2) […] the cultural pole; (3) the pole of politics [called elsewhere ‘the operative pole’], and; (4) the linguistic and communicative pole” (De Mauro 2010: 258).
For the sake of the analysis, also, our definition of a “semiotic approach to culture”, among the many possible, will be tailored around the specific conception of semiotics of culture in Juri M. Lotman.
Lotman's cultural semiotics see culture as “hierarchy of semiotic systems” (languages), structurally isomorphous to each other and constant interaction (Salupere, Torop and Kull 2013: 71).
The main function of culture is the production of new meanings, which is achieved through an act of translation of material from the ‘outside’ in a language of the ‘inside’. An act of translation is therefore also a creative act: new texts and meanings are produced, and external reality is reshaped and organised. We could go as far as to describe culture as a mechanism of creative “smysloporozhdenie” [meaning-generation] (Lotman 2010: 640).
The meaning-generation function can be carried out by culture only within specific conditions: new meanings can be produced only through the dialogue (translation) between two non-identical, or asymmetric, structures. Therefore one of the fundamental characteristics of culture is its “vnutrennej neravnomernost'” [internal irregularity] (Lotman 1984: 11); this also implies that no system of signs (language), or text, could exist in isolation, since it immediately implies other languages, through which can sustain it's meaning-generation function: “the ensemble of semiotic formations precedes (not heuristically but functionally) the singular isolated language and becomes a condition for the existence of the latter” (Lotman 1984: 19).
Finally we can define the “cultural semiotic approach” (in Lotman's sense) as an approach: (1) that regards culture as a hierarchically organised sign system; (2) whose object is “the functional correlation of different sign systems” (Torop 2009: xxvii); (3) and whose “fundamental problem” is the “meaning generation” (Lotman 2010: 640).
2. Culture
Throught the Prision Notebooks, the term “culture” is employed in a very wide array of contexts, with different meanings. Sometimes it is employed as ‘intellectual activity’, sometimes as ‘conception of the world’, sometimes as ‘intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a certain individual or nation’. As the anthropologist Kate Crehan points out, “given these complex and sometimes contradictory clusters of meaning, it is important to resist the temptation to fix on one of them as the ‘correct’ one. […] It is precisely this complex argument that is at the heart of Gramsci’s explorations of culture” (Crehan 2002: 41–42).
Culture intended as “conception of the world” can be explicit and critical, in which case Gramsci defines it as a “philosophy”; or it can be unconscious and incoherent, in which case the author refers to it as “senso comune” [common sense]: “ogni strato sociale ha il suo «senso comune» che è in fondo la concezione della vita e la morale più diffusa. Ogni corrente filosofica lascia una sedimentazione di «senso comune»” [every social layer has his own “common sense”, which is, in the end, the most widespread moral and conception of life. Every philosophy leaves a sedimentation of common sense] (Q1 §65)1. “Il senso comune è un aggregato incomposto di concezioni filosofiche” [common sense is a fragmented aggregate of philosophical conceptions] (Q8 §173).
The deep connection between language and culture is explicitly stated by Gramsci in many passages of his Notebooks: “ogni linguaggio contiene gli elementi di una concezione del mondo e di una cultura” [every language contains elements of a conception of the world and of a culture] (Q11 §12), “linguaggio significa anche cultura e filosofia (sia pure nel grado di senso comune)” [language also means culture and philosophy (be it at the level of commons sense)] (Q10 §44).
3. Language
Save for a few exceptions (see for example Rosiello 1970), the theme of language in Gramsci was often overlooked by traditional Gramscian studies. In last three decades, instead, the importance of author's linguistics studies, and their influence on his theory of hegemony, has been extensively acknowledged, and a vast bibliography has been produced on this topic2.
Gramsci studied linguistics in Turin, under professor Bartoli, a prominent member of the so-called neolinguistic school. In one of his letters to Tania (Gramsci 1971: 19th March 1927), Gramsci confesses that one of his deepest regrets was to have disappointed his master (Bartoli), who saw in him “the arch-angel destined to annihilate the Neogrammarians once and for all”. Neolinguistics was in fact created to oppose the Neogrammarian School, the dominant trend in linguistics at the time.
The Neogrammarian School was movement in linguistics that sought to explain language only by means of natural laws and physiological mechanism, therefore excluding social factors and semantics. Bartoli and the Neolinguistics (deeply influenced by authors such as M. Bréal and G. I. Ascoli), in Gramsci's words, della linguistica, concepita grettamente come scienza naturale, ha fatto una scienza storica, le cui radici sono da cercare «nello spazio e nel tempo»” [made of linguistics, narrow-mindedly conceived as a natural science, an historical science, whose roots are to be found in «space and time»] (Q3 §74).
It's already clear, and should become clearer on a closer inspection, that Gramsci's notion of language seems to anticipate in many ways the structuralist movement (e.g. Rosiello 1970, Ives 2004a), despite the fact that he had no knowledge of Saussure's theories, as far as we know.
Gramsci distinguishes between linguaggio, language, and lingua, a specific historical language (e.g. German, English, etc.). Language, for Gramsci, is not a “single thing […], neither in time nor space”, but rather a “collective term (nome collettivo), […] a multiplicity of facts more or less organically coherent and coordinated” (Pare si possa dire che «linguaggio» è essenzialmente un nome collettivo, […] una molteplicità di fatti più o meno organicamente coerenti e coordinati). (Q10 §44).
To better understand what the author means by “collective term”, we can refer to another passage of the Notebooks, where Gramsci analyses an article by Italian writer Leo Ferrero. In the article, the author refers to the “ammirazione” (admiration) of the public as the main factor for the flourishing of a national literature. Gramsci points out that Ferrero is oversimplifying, and the term “ammirazione” is “una metafora e un «nome collettivo» per indicare il complesso sistema di rapporti” [a metaphor and a collective term to indicate a complex system of relations] (Q21 §4). If we were to generalise, we could say that language, being a collective term as well, is also a ʻcomplex system of relationsʼ.
In the Notebooks Gramsci constantly refers to different specific languages, e.g. to the “French military language” (Q26 §11), the “language of German classical philosophy” (Q11 §48), or the “language of physics” (Q10b §11). The reason, and also the relation between linguaggio and lingua, is clearly explained by Gramsci himself:
ogni corrente culturale crea un suo linguaggio, cioè partecipa allo sviluppo generale di una determinata lingua nazionale, introducendo termini nuovi, arricchendo di contenuto nuovo termini già in uso, creando metafore, servendosi di nomi storici per facilitare la comprensione e il giudizio su determinate situazioni attuali ecc. ecc.
[every cultural trend creates his own language (linguaggio), that takes part in the general development of a specific language (lingua), introducing new terms, enriching it with new contents terms already in use, creating metaphors, using historical names to ease the understanding and the judgement on specific contemporary situations, etc. etc.] (Q24 §3).
The passage should be understood bearing in mind the particular notion that Gramsci has of the term “metaphor”, which he intends not (or not only) as a rhetorical device but as a “mutazione semantica” [semantic shift] (Q11 §24): “quando da una concezione si passa ad un’altra, il linguaggio precedente rimane, ma viene usato metaforicamente. Tutto il linguaggio è diventato una metafora e la storia della semantica è anche un aspetto della storia della cultura” [when from a conception [of the world] we move to another, the previous language remains, but is used metaphorically. All the language has become a metaphor, and history of semantics is also an aspect of history of culture] (Q4 §17).
A conception of the world therefore determines the meanings of our language, so that “ogni lingua è una concezione del mondo integrale, e non solo un vestito che faccia indifferentemente da forma a ogni contenuto” [each language (lingua) is a whole conception of the world, not only a dress which can indifferently form any content] (Q5 §123). This last passage shows how, for Gramsci, linguaggio as well as lingua are not mere instruments, tools to be freely applied; every philosophy, every culture, “every intellectual activity” needs his own language to “manifest” itself (Q11 §12), and through this language becomes able influence the common sense by shaping the language (lingua) of a nation.
In this way the authors seems to be establishing a sort of privileged relation between the cultural pole and the linguistic and communicative pole.
4. A cultural semiotic approach?
Despite the author never openly defining it as such, culture as well could be regarded as a “collective term”, a “complex system of relations”, more than a stable and defined concept.
It is not possible to conclude that in the Notebooks culture is considered as system of signs, at least not in the sense of Lotman's cultural semiotics. Nevertheless, Gramsci puts the problem of the generation of meaning at the core of it's investigation, going as as far as subsuming the study of semantics under the study of culture, as one if it's aspects. This could be regarded as the first, strong analogy between Gramsci's and Lotman's theories of culture.
The analogies also are not limited to the aim of the study, but further extend to it's methodology: in the Notebooks the study of culture concerns mainly the functional correlation of different sign systems, i.e. the different languages (linguaggi), that comprise it. The study of literary texts, teather, folklore, newspaper magazines, etc. as expressions of a certain cultural system (with all it's contradictions and heterogeneity) is one of the main foci of Gramsci's investigation. Seven out of sixteen main research tasks that he sets to himself at the beginning of the first notebook, are dedicate to language and literature, including a study on “romanzi d'appendice” (or “Feuilleton”, popular, mass oriented serial novels, published on newspapers), a typology of “riviste di divulgazione” [mass educational journals] and on folklore (Q1, §Note e appunti). The author also sets on investigating the “implicit conception of the world of Pirandello's dramas”, and his influence on popular culture (see for example Q5 §40, Q6 §26, Q9 §134).
A similar methodology is followed by Lotman's cultural semiotics: “from a researcher point of view it is more correct to speak of culture as a mechanism generating an ensamble of texts, and of text as the realisation of a culture” (Lotman and Uspenskij 1971: 152). The text is the “fundamental concept of modern semiotics” (Salupere, Torop and Kull 2013: 57), and it is always considered “as the realisation of some system, as its material embodiment [voploshhenie]” (Lotman 1970: 67). This entails that the semiotic study of culture is always applied to some texts, which are studied through the relation with the culture they are expression of. For example, the study on the Slovo o polku Igoreve in the light of the opposition between “chest” [honour] and “ slava” [glory] in Slavic medieval culture (Lotman 1967b), or the study of Dante's Divine Comedy in the light of the medieval conception of space (Lotman 1990: 177–184).
5. Translation
In many paragraphs of his Notebooks Gramsci seems to sketch the dynamics of meaning generation in a manner very similar to Lotman's cultural semiotics.
According G. I. Ascoli, an Italian linguist who had a deep influence on the Neolinguistic School, the main device of linguistic (and semantic) change, rather than laws internal to each language, is the reciprocal influence among different languages. Employing a biological analogy, linguistic change through internal laws could be defined as a parthenogenic process, while Ascoli's description could be described as a non-parthenogenic process.
Gramsci retains Ascoli's explanation, and expands it to his own cultural and political theory (Ives 2004a: 55). Cultural change seems to be treated as an act of translation3 between different levels of cultural space: from philosophy to common sense, from common sense to philosophy, and from one philosophy to the other.
It has been argued that Gramsci's notion of “translation” has a double meaning: one one hand it is close to the modern concept of (linguistic) translation, one which “aims at changing both the languages involved, both the source language and the target language” (Ives 2004a: 133); on the other hand, it could be seen as a “metaphor for non-parthenogenic processes” (Ives 2004b: 99).
In the former, linguistic, meaning, “translation” for Gramsci does not mean a mechanical conversion of the signifiers of one language in those of another language (Q1 §152). Since each language is the expression of a culture, each act of translation implies a dialogue between two cultures, and two semantic histories, hence a process of reciprocal acquisition and reframing.
In the latter case, translation would be responsible for the creation of new philosophies or conceptions of the world, as for example the philosophy of praxis would be the result of the translation of the concept of “immanence”, offered by classical German philosophy, into historicist form, through French politics and classical English economy (Q10 §9).
Another consequence of translation in the latter sense would be the possibility of reciprocal influence between the different aspects of human experience (culture/language, politics and economy), through the reciprocal translation of their own languages (Q11 §65), making it the main device for their development.
In both cases, we can observe an analogy between Gramsci's and Lotman's approaches to culture. In the works of both Lotman and Gramsci the text is considered to be the expression of a certain language, therefore translating a text means to try to translate said language, and the whole conception of the world it is a manifestation of, into one's own. Moreover, an isolated text could be used in the attempt to reconstruct the language it originated in (“reconstructing the semiotic whole through its parts”) (Lotman 2005: 215). In this sense, for both authors text and culture have not only the function of meaning generation, but also serve as the structural memory of a whole culture: “il linguaggio è una cosa vivente e nello stesso tempo è un museo di fossili della vita passata” [language is a living thing, and at the same time it is a museum, full of fossils of the life past.] (Q4 §17) It is interesting to note that the metaphor of the “museum” is also employed by Lotman in his description of the semiosphere (Lotman 2005: 213).
Even more interesting is the common conception, between the two authors, of a “non-parthenogenic” mode of cultural development. The reasons for this similarity, in our opinion, connects to their philosophical and epistemological background, and especially to the epistemological fundaments of Marxism and Hegelianism, which they both shared: “the fundamental principle of structuralism is dialectic” (Lotman 1967a: 93); and especially in Marxist dialectic, “the main engine of history was contradiction [protivorechie]” (Gasparov 1996).
6. Structure and superstructure
As we said in the premise, in this paper we will avoid to discuss about the political and economic-productive poles, and focus only on the cultural and the linguistic aspects of Gramsci's research.
Despite this, we feel necessary, as the final part of this paper, to briefly mention the relation between the cultural and the economic-productive aspects of experience in Gramsci, and the possibility to find analogies, or strong differences, with Lotman.
The relationship between the cultural and the economical or, in marxist terminology, between superstructure and structure, is one of the most complex and debated topics of the whole Notebooks. It pertains mostly the epistemological position of “filosofia della praxis” (philosophy of praxis, the way Gramsci called marxism), which for the author is one of the most critical points of his enquiry (Q4 §38).
Some authors argue that in this respect Gramsci would fall in the trap of the so-called “naturalist prejudice”, where the economy, or what he calls “condizioni [oggettive] di vita” ([objective conditions of life] Q10 §48), is seen “as a homogeneous space unified by necessary laws” (Laclau and Moffe 2001: 89). If such were the case, the cultural and linguistic poles of life (as well as the political one) would be determined by the economic-productive pole; any semiotic activity would have it's origin in a non-semiotic space, and a “semiotic approach” would have it's foundation on a non-semiotic science, i.e. economy, and could be ultimately reduced to it. We argue that this is not the case for Gramsci. The notion of class in the Notebooks certainly has its foundation in the “economic” pole, but economy, as well as philosophy and politics, are all elements of a conception of the world (Q4 §46), and they do not belong to different realms. Even if Gramsci admits that economy, the “material element”, is “the less variable element of social development”, susceptible to quantitative measuring, it is still regarded as a “human relation”, socially and historically (and culturally) organised, as is the science that studies it (Q4 §25). Therefore, even if it's debatable wether in Gramsci culture is the foundation of economics, we think that the opposite is definitely not the case, and that economic laws are not different, in their nature, to the so-called “social laws”.
In this sense we could make an analogy with the notion of “reality” in Lotman: what we call “reality” is an already semiotised world (Lotman 1993: 30), since for man nothing exists which was not translated in one of it's languages.
7. Conclusions
Insofar as Gramsci did not possess the modern, and ultimately Saussurean, notion of “sign”, the approach to culture and language in the Notebooks can be regarded, in our opinion, as “semiotic”, and as such bears strong resemblance with Lotman's approach.
The attribution to Gramsci of the term “semiotic”, as it was for the term “structuralism”, is certainly anachronistic, but in our opinion appropriate. In this regard, we would like to quote a passage from Luigi Rosiello:
Queste intuizioni gramsciane, che possono apparire precorritrici delle moderne tesi strutturalistiche e instituzionalistiche, non devono però far pensare a meravigliose capacità intuitive di intelligenza preveggente; esse sono né più né meno lo sviluppo coerente dei presupposti oggettivistici di una considerazione sociologica dei fatti linguistici.
[Those gramscian intuitions, which might appear as forerunners of the modern structuralist and institutionalist theses, should not lead to think of some wonderful intuitive capacities of foreseeing intelligence; they are none other that the coherent development of the objectivist premises of a sociological consideration of linguistic facts] (Rosiello 1970: 358).
In our opinion this entails the possibility for that branch of semiotics called “political semiotics” to go back to the study of Gramsci, seen as a fundamental author whose reflection on power and culture from a semiotic point of view could offer an effective conceptual framework.
Notes
1. In the present paper all the quotes from Gramsci's Prision Notebooks are author's translations from the critical edition by the Gramsci Institute (Gramsci 1975), and will use the standard reference notation, where Q# is the notebook and §# is the paragraph number (e.g. Q1 §12 means twelfth paragraph of the first notebook).
2. The first influential work Gamsci's linguistics is definetly (Lo Piparo 1979). A very important English-speaking scholar in Gramscian linguistic is Peter Ives (e.g. Ives 2004a); for a collection of essays in English on Gramsci and language by international scholars see (Ives and Lacorte 2010).
3. For an overview on the concept of “translation” in Gramsci, see Part III of (Ives and R. Lacorte 2010).
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