RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 21 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2009) Ives and Gramsci in Dialogue: Vernacular Subalternity, Cultural Interferences, and the Word-Thing Interdependence Stefano Selenu Peter Ives’s Gramsci’s Politics of Language (2004) constitutes one of the most relevant and stimulating recent contributions on Gramsci. In this paper I will review the book, showing the relevance of placing Gramsci in dialogue with a constellation of numerous thinkers and ideas. Then, I will focus on three of Ives’s ideas in order to problematize them. First, considering Ives’s use of Gramsci’s statements on Sardinian, I will deal with the political significance of Gramsci’s claim that Sardinian is a language. Second, I will discuss the connection made by Ives between the nonparthenogenetic origins of languages and the idea that languages develop through cultural and linguistic conflicts. Finally, I will deal with Ives’s notion of vernacular materialism in Gramsci, and I will discuss his interpretation of Gramsci’s ideas on meaning production and metaphor. Key Words: Antonio Gramsci, Language, Subalternity, Materialism, Metaphor Peter Ives’s Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (2004) constitutes one of the most relevant and stimulating recent contributions on Gramsci. This book explores the connection of Gramsci’s political concepts*/such as hegemony and subalternity, consent and coercion, civil society and the state, active and passive revolution*/to his reflections on language. In so doing, Ives revitalizes and reinforces the scholarship and reflection on Gramsci’s linguistics conducted in particular by scholars such as Luigi Rosiello, Antonio Carrannante, Franco Lo Piparo, Tullio De Mauro, Derek Boothman, Stefano Gensini, Leonardo Salamini, Renate Holub, Craig Brandist, Niels Helsloot, and others. Ives not only shows a particular accuracy in his knowledge of the Sardinian linguistpolitician, but also a strong ability to bring a difficult author like Gramsci outside a narrow disciplinary dimension, casting his subject as a worthy speaker on contemporary debates about political theories on democracy and globalization, new social movements, poststructuralism, linguistics, translation theory, and gender studies. What Ives does in his work makes Gramsci very appealing for a broader audience and also stimulates Gramsci experts to reconsider several questions he opened in his multidirectional body of work. ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/09/030344-11 – 2009 Stefano Selenu DOI: 10.1080/08935690902955054 GRAMSCI’S POLITICS OF LANGUAGE 345 In this ambitious book, the author uses a comparative method and creates a rich, passionate, and thought-provoking discussion about how Gramsci’s political theory and praxis relate to his keen interest in languages and linguistics. Ives, extending some insights of Lo Piparo’s Lingua, Intellettuali, Egemonia in Gramsci (1979), puts Gramsci in dialogue with other influential thinkers on language like Alessandro Manzoni, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, Valentin Vološinov, P. N. Medvedev, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. In so doing, Ives explores Gramsci and Marxist approaches through several debates around language and social analysis in a manner that fosters Gramscian scholarship and enriches debates in political science and philosophy. In this paper I briefly review Ives’s book, showing the relevance of putting Gramsci in dialogue with a constellation of numerous thinkers and ideas. Then, I focus on three of Ives’s ideas in order to problematize them. First, considering Ives’s use of Gramsci’s statements on Sardinian, I will deal with the political significance of Gramsci’s claim that Sardinian is a language. Second, I will deal with the connection made by Ives between the nonparthenogenetic origins of languages and the idea that languages develop through social, cultural, and linguistic conflicts.1 Finally, I will discuss Ives’s reading of Gramsci’s materialism and his interpretation of Gramsci’s ideas on meaning production and metaphor. Gramsci in Dialogue Ives’s study on Gramsci introduces the term ‘‘vernacular materialism’’ in order to illuminate a complex problem in Gramsci’s thought. Ives clarifies that ‘‘‘vernacular materialism’ is a play on the term ‘vulgar materialism’’’ (2004, 4), and his aim in introducing this concept is to ‘‘recover’’ the connections between Marxist materialism, language, and the popularization of culture (4). In their arguments on Gramsci, according to Ives, such post-Marxist thinkers as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe present a separation between economy (i.e., the materially real) and language. As Ives highlights, Michel Foucault argued that Marx and Marxism had little interest in language and linguistic questions. Moreover, the role played by language in Jacques Derrida’s philosophy generated a division between those who think that Derridean deconstruction goes against Marxism and those who think that there is continuity between Marx’s and Derrida’s projects (5). Ives introduces the concept of ‘‘vernacular materialism’’ as an attempt to respond to the ‘‘need for a clearer investigation of possible Marxist approaches to language’’ (5). In the numerous dialogues that Ives builds among Gramsci, the Bakhtin circle, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt school, the concept of ‘‘vernacular’’ returns several times in a way that makes this term a working and productive concept for reading Gramsci. 1. With the expression ‘‘nonparthenogenetic origins of languages,’’ Ives refers to Gramsci’s idea that languages are not generated by other languages, as a human being is biologically created by another human being. Gramsci contended that languages are social productions and their origins are effects of social interactions. 346 SELENU The first chapter deals with the Italian language question (questione della lingua) in the first decades of the twentieth century and places Gramsci within the various debates in linguistics in this period. In Italian culture, the term ‘‘questione della lingua’’ refers to the problem of both unification and popularization of a national Italian language. Building on Lo Piparo’s work, Ives delineates Gramsci’s political project by putting Alessandro Manzoni as the starting point of the Italian language question. Ives discusses Gramsci’s passages on Esperanto and Manzoni’s idea of imposing an artificial Italian language from above. This conception of linguistic unification as imposition was contrasted by Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, who proposed a politics of language from below, in which the spontaneous linguistic forms and the local dialects of the people would have been used as means for diffusing and facilitating the people’s national language acquisition. Moreover, Ives argues that Matteo Bartoli and Gramsci derived from Ascoli their notion that linguistic change is generated by conflicts among linguistic forms, cultures, and social groups (24/37). Reinforcing Gramsci’s Marxist approach to language, which Lo Piparo had weakened in his book, Ives recasts Lo Piparo’s contention that the idea of hegemony in Gramsci is not of Leninist origins but is rooted in this debate on linguistic national unification, which preceded him and was introduced to Gramsci by Bartoli, his professor at the University of Turin. The second chapter deals with the question of hegemony and unity in Gramsci and the Bakhtin circle. Ives shows that the divergence between Gramsci’s and Bakhtin’s contentions on the unification of languages is related to different historical circumstances. Bakhtin’s criticism of the idea of a linguistic unifying process was rooted in his dramatic experience of Stalinism and the consequences of Stalin’s dictatorial imposition of a unified language. In contrast, Gramsci was in favor of the unification of the Italian language, since, according to him, ‘‘the non-existence of a national language creates friction among the popular masses’’ (Ives 2004, 47/8), which historically allowed the rise of Fascism in Italy. Ives also puts Gramsci in dialogue with Vološinov’s philosophy of language, which reveals several similarities with Gramsci’s critique of positivist and idealist philosophies of language, and shows how this critique related to his opposition to Manzoni’s view of language unification through state imposition. Ives claims that Gramsci’s positive view of Italian national language unification relates to the creation of a new progressive hegemony. According to him, linguistic unification and progressive hegemony were not aimed at erasing the differential and heteroglottic character of language, but, on the contrary, their aim was to create a more democratic society and culture in which subaltern groups, and not only the intellectual educated elites, would become active social subjects in the elaboration and use of a common language. In the third chapter Ives, putting Gramsci in dialogue with Benjamin, highlights the complex concept of translation. Ives shows that by stating the importance of ‘‘translating the Russian Revolution in Italy,’’ Gramsci did not intend to make Italy similar to Russia, but meant to bring the communist revolution in Italy in such a manner that the Russian way of overturning state and society would have been GRAMSCI’S POLITICS OF LANGUAGE 347 altered. Gramsci’s aim was to articulate a different kind of revolution that he saw as a ‘‘moral and intellectual reformation’’ of Italian society. Ives then discusses the relationship between Gramsci’s ideas on semantics as social production and those on ‘‘translation as a philosophical concept rather than a purely linguistic technique’’ (106). Indeed, translation is the philosophical concept that Ives uses to explain how Gramsci overcomes the idealist opposition between subject and object and also interprets Marx’s idea of revolution. ‘‘For Gramsci, the translation of subjectivity into objectivity is central to understanding Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach*/that is, that philosophy can go further than interpreting the world: philosophy can change the world’’ (130). The fourth chapter explores the role played by ideas on language in the Frankfurt school. Ives focuses on philosophical development and contrasts, on the one hand, Gramsci’s conception of language with the Enlightenment concept of ‘‘reason,’’ and, on the other hand, Gramsci’s work with that of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas. Ives shows that, similar to the Frankfurt school, Gramsci refuses the universalizing project of the Enlightenment and embraces a philosophical ‘‘intersubjective approach that overcomes the philosophical focus on subject/object relations’’ (171) and reveals the several practices through which human beings and social groups elaborate their world-views. However, unlike the Frankfurt school’s idealist tendencies in considering language, Gramsci’s philosophy is characterized by a vernacular approach that allows him to emphasize and revitalize ‘‘key elements within popular culture not as exhibited by the culture industry, but instead as evident in the cultural perspectives and products of various subordinated social groups’’ (171). Ives in Dialogue Ives, Lo Piparo, and Sardinian Gramsci In his exploration of Gramsci’s studies and writings on language, Ives follows the main pathway opened by Lo Piparo in his Lingua, Intellettuali, Egemonia in Gramsci, offering some clarifications that are insightful. However, he diverges from Lo Piparo in reading Gramsci’s ideas about the Sardinian language. On 26 March 1927, Gramsci wrote a letter to his sister Teresina. In it he states that ‘‘Sardinian is not a dialect, but a language in itself,’’ and heartily recommends that his sister and relatives let his young nephews speak Italian and Sardinian freely, arguing that ‘‘it is a good thing for children to learn several languages, if it is possible’’ (1994, 1:89). In order to demonstrate that Gramsci was ‘‘against prohibiting children from speaking local dialect in favour of standard Italian or more literary languages’’ (Ives 2004, 43), Ives turns Gramsci’s discourse on the Sardinian language into a consideration of the importance of learning and speaking local dialects. Considering Ives’s interest in language, his understanding of Sardinian as a dialect and not a language requires careful scrutiny. The letter to his sister Teresina recasts a passage of the Appunti di glottologia that Gramsci prepared for Bartoli’s course on glottology for the academic year 1912/3. In 348 SELENU this passage from the Appunti di glottologia, Gramsci clarified that, according to one of the most important Neogrammarian philologists, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, Sardinian and Dalmatic are Romance languages like Romanian, Italian, Ladin, French, Provençal, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. According to Gramsci and Bartoli, it is primarily because of their historical development and geographic position that Sardinian and Dalmatic are to be considered languages (Bartoli and Gramsci 1912/3, 2:74). Both languages are situated, indeed, in a peripheral area in respect of the Italian peninsular centers. As Lo Piparo clearly argued, in this letter, Gramsci did not claim for a generalized use of local dialects but praised the possibility of a plurilinguistic education. According to Lo Piparo, from the perspective of this letter, plurilingualism is not ‘‘the simultaneous acquisition and use of both languages and dialects,’’ but the acquisition and use only of languages (Lo Piparo 1979, 221). I agree, on the one hand, with Ives’s argument that Gramsci was against prohibiting people from speaking dialects and, on the other, with Lo Piparo’s idea that, in considering the Sardinian idiom as a language, what is at stake in this letter is the acquisition of more than one language. However, I also argue that this letter is a trace of Gramsci’s attention to the question of Sardinian language and of the importance for him of spontaneously cultivating both the Sardinian language (as a language) and Sardism.2 In fact, in this letter, Gramsci ties the emphasis on the status of Sardinian as ‘‘a language in itself’’ with the importance of absorbing ‘‘Sardism.’’ As he wrote to his sister, ‘‘I beg you, from my heart . . . to allow your children to absorb all the Sardinian spirit [sardismo] they wish and to develop spontaneously in the natural environment in which they were born: this will not be an impediment for their future, just the opposite’’ (89). Gramsci was thus aware that the Sardinian language was (and is), indeed, part of the Sardist critical experience and political consciousness against the condition of subalternity imposed by the colonial-style dominance perpetrated culturally, economically, and politically by Italian nationalist and imperialist politics from the late nineteenth century until Fascism. This letter reveals that Gramsci’s politics of language was at odds with the nationalist romantic conception of a monolingual national State, whose fundament is the equation among one state, one nation, and one language. Indeed, the letter shows that he was in favor of the right of plurilingual people to learn and use all the languages in which they were situated. According to Gramsci, it is a mistake to forbid 2. The word ‘‘Sardism’’ refers to the Sardinian movement and general conception that advocates autonomy and/or independence for Sardinia. In his youth Gramsci embraced independence; later he called for autonomy. Gramsci’s attention to Sardism is indeed testified by his 1925/6 exchange and political alliance with Emilio Lussu, the antifascist socialist leader of the Sardinian Action party. Gramsci saw the alliance with the party led by Lussu as particularly important in order to realize the alliance between peasants and workers he described in his 1926 essay on ‘‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question.’’ In that period, Gramsci was convinced that the Italian state should have been conceived as a federalist republic of peasants and workers in which different territorial, political, and cultural autonomies should have been recognized. See Fiori (1991, 141/95). GRAMSCI’S POLITICS OF LANGUAGE 349 children to do so because it can harm their ‘‘intellectual development’’ and put their ‘‘imagination in a straitjacket’’ (1994, 1:89). Therefore, I believe that Gramsci’s emphasis on Sardinian language mirrors his attention to the Sardinian language question3 and his willingness positively to recognize the autonomy of minority languages, cultures, peoples, and communities,4 which can provide the people with a freer imagination and more just conditions of life. It seems to me that ignoring Gramsci’s emphasis on the expression ‘‘lingua a sè’’ (language in itself) means not considering his never given up Sardism, which represented for him an anti-imperialist instance of social justice, democracy, and pluralism grounded in the recognition of territorial political autonomies, cultural specificities, and civic traditions. I wonder whether Ives agrees with this interpretation. Cultural Conflicts or Interferences? According to Ives, ‘‘language is a site of conflict among different social groups’’ (2004, 136). In different parts of his book, he uses Gramsci’s ideas about the origins of languages to support the argument that language is always a social praxis and to discuss the concepts of ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘innovation’’ (54/5, 93/5). Showing continuity between Ascoli, Bartoli, and Gramsci, Ives clearly explains that for Gramsci there is no parthenogenesis in language; in other words, there is no ‘‘language producing other language’’ (Gramsci in Ives 2004, 28). For instance, Latin does not produce Italian and Old German does not produce English. As Ives highlights, language historically changes through ‘‘conflicts’’ among cultures. Ives’s wide use of the term ‘‘conflict’’ not only constitutes a clarification but also an interpretation of Gramsci’s ideas. In fact, in the context of Gramsci’s discourse on the nonparthenogenetic origins of language, Gramsci argued that ‘‘innovations occur through the interference of different cultures, and this happens in very different ways’’ (in Ives 2004, 28; emphasis added). When Gramsci talked about cultural interferences, he was thinking about not only conflicts but also interferences and influences that are not necessarily hostile relationships among cultures and social groups. Even though relations among cultures are rarely relations among equals, one element of a language could enter in a different language and also coexist with other, synonymic terms without necessarily presenting any kind of conflict among linguistic forms or social groups. This is because languages, cultures, and social groups are not closed 3. Parallel and strictly connected to the Italian language question, various other language questions developed, such as those of the minor subaltern languages of Italy (e.g., Sardinian, Friulan, Ladin, and others). As for most minor languages, the Sardinian language question developed as a question on the definition of the status of the tongue. Is the Sardinian tongue an autonomous language in itself or a dialect of Italian? Only in 1997 and 1999 did regional and national laws put an end to this question, recognizing the Sardinian tongue as the co-official language with Italian of the Sardinian people. 4. See also the letter to his sister-in-law Tania Schucht dated 12 October 1931, in which Gramsci discusses ‘‘the recognition of the right of the Jewish community to cultural autonomy (of language, schools, etc.) and also of national autonomy’’ (Gramsci 1994, 2:85). 350 SELENU structures. In fact, multiple phenomena and interactions among phenomena can always cause molecular changes in a language, not only social and cultural conflicts or, even, as Ives argues, conflicts among signs within the linguistic system (26). Since the concept of interference includes conflicts, nonhostile exchanges, interconnections, and influences among cultures and languages, can it provide us with a wider perspective on the history and politics of languages than the concept of conflict? For instance, in the case where a term, which does not exist in the territory and community of a language, is introduced from another language, would Gramsci argue that conflict is the only possible relationship between the two communities/ cultures/languages? Is the concept of linguistic conflict a theoretical term imposed on the effectual reality or is it a term that one should use only in light of an analysis of the historical facts? How could we explore relations among global English, national languages, minority languages, and dialects through the concepts of conflict and interference? Gramsci, Vernacular Materialism, and the Word-Thing Interdependence Ives proposes the term ‘‘vernacular materialism’’ in order both to highlight Gramsci’s linguistic and intersubjective approach to philosophy and politics, and to critique the notion of ‘‘vulgar materialism’’ and those several readings of Gramsci (such as those of Perry Anderson, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Esteve Morera) that underestimate his ideas on language. According to Ives, the theoretical framework of these readings as well as the vulgar materialistic world-view are grounded on a supposed distinction and opposition between two ‘‘realms’’: material and nonmaterial, human and nonhuman, linguistic and extralinguistic (4/7). By contrast, he argues that Gramsci’s theory does not posit two realms and makes the point that, for Gramsci, ‘‘‘objective’ means ‘humanly objective’*/that is, ‘historically subjective’’’ (7). In this final part of my contribution, I would like to discuss some aspects of Ives’s critique of the dualist world-view that divides the world into two distinct and opposed ‘‘realms,’’ and, consequently, to discuss Ives’s ‘‘structuralist’’ interpretation of Gramsci’s ideas on meaning and metaphor. Unlike Ives, I will contend that, according to Gramsci, there is a distinction between language and extralinguistic phenomena, and that the relationships between linguistic signs and extralinguistic objects participate in the processes of meaning production. In general, how Ives extends his use of Gramsci’s arguments presents, in my view, certain problems. Thus, a closer comparative reading of both Gramsci’s and Ives’s arguments can help us to understand some of the hermeneutic dynamics Ives employs. In the various notes on the ‘‘objectivity of the external world’’ and on vulgar materialism, by using a historicist perspective, Gramsci showed that the main error of every mechanical materialism/realism/positivism was to contend that reality can exist independently of the existence of human beings. Indeed, Gramsci critiqued both Bertrand Russell’s logical positivism and Nikolai Bukharin’s vulgar materialism, and argued that in these philosophies ‘‘the concept ‘objective’ appears to mean an objectivity that transcends man and can be known even apart from man . . . When it is GRAMSCI’S POLITICS OF LANGUAGE 351 said of a thing that it would exist even if man did not, one is either speaking metaphorically or falling into mysticism. We know phenomena in relation to man, and since man is a becoming, knowledge is a becoming’’ (Gramsci 2007, 337/8; emphasis in original). Ives derives his claim that Gramsci’s historical materialism does not distinguish two ‘‘realms’’ (i.e., the core of Ives’s critiques of Anderson, Morera, and Laclau and Mouffe) from Gramsci’s critique of the argument that reality is independent of the human being. In Ives’s intriguing claim, there are several aspects that I find problematic. First, a wide use of the term ‘‘realm’’ (or its synonymic term ‘‘world’’) can be troubling because it might contribute to hypostatizing the terminology and categories in use in our reasoning about Gramsci and his readers. Thus, it would be useful if Ives could clarify terms such as ‘‘realm’’ and ‘‘world’’ with regard to their meaning and semantic extensions. Second, in his attempt to criticize the dualist world-view that separates the world into two ontological realms (human and nonhuman, material and nonmaterial, linguistic and extralinguistic) and to highlight that Gramsci did not espouse such a world-view, Ives metaphorizes the concept of ‘‘transcendence’’*/that is, ‘‘independence’’ (which is the target concept in Gramsci’s critique), making it a synonym of more general concepts such as opposition, distinction, separation, and others. What I find confusing in Ives’s reasoning is the logic at the basis of his argument, because he blurs the very different meanings of key terms such as ‘‘distinction’’ and ‘‘opposition’’ and employs an analogical reasoning that requires careful scrutiny.5 In fact, from Gramsci’s critique of those philosophies that (pre)suppose the independence of the real from the human, Ives constructs a more general discourse against the distinction (or opposition, separation, etc.) between a human and a nonhuman realm. Then, by means of analogy, he extends this discourse to several couples of opposing terms (linguistic versus nonlinguistic, material versus nonmaterial) and hypostatizes these linguistic terms into ontological realms. Finally, claiming that Gramsci did not espouse the world-view that separates the world into two realms, he argues that many misreadings of Gramsci (such as those that underestimate his ideas about language) are conditioned by this dualist, metaphysical world-view. Even if Ives is absolutely right to claim that Gramsci did not espouse such a dualist world-view, I contend that this claim is not sufficient to argue that for Gramsci there is no distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena.6 Indeed, from the argument that two logical elements are not independent, it does not necessarily follow that they are not distinct. They can be distinct and interdependent. This last point can also provide us with a helpful perspective for discussing Ives’s claims that ‘‘for Gramsci, meaning is not created through the relationship between words and the external (non-linguistic) world to which they supposedly refer. Rather, 5. See, for instance, Ives (2004, 4/7). After Croce’s renovation of dialectics, for Gramsci it is of paramount importance to differentiate ‘‘distinction’’ and ‘‘opposition.’’ 6. With ‘‘distinction’’ I mean ‘‘difference,’’ ‘‘nonidentity’’ between signs and things, linguistic discourses and historical events, facts, and bodies. This does not imply that I espouse the dualist metaphysical belief according to which the world is divided into two independent and/or opposed realms. 352 SELENU meaning is produced from the differences and relations among signs within language’’ (99; for a similar argument, see 14, 27, 72, 157). In so arguing, Ives himself seems to restate a kind of separation between language and the extralinguistic similar to that he criticizes throughout his book. Considering that Gramsci never provides us with a systematic theory of meaning that explicitly and thoroughly explains what he meant by the concept of ‘‘meaning’’ and/or how meaning is created, his ideas on language do not prove that meaning is created only through the relations among linguistic signs. Thus, Ives’s important attempt to clarify Gramsci’s notion of meaning requires specific inquiry. In fact, a narrowing ‘‘structuralist’’ interpretation, which excludes the relations between words and things from the processes of meaning production, might contribute to obscure the trend in linguistics whose center was the periodical Wörter und Sachen (Words and things) and that contributed toward creating the monumental Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (Linguistic- and thing-atlas of Italy and southern Switzerland) (1928/40). In the Appunti di glottologia (1:9), Gramsci wrote that the innovation in the method used by Wörter und Sachen was to give importance not only to words but also to things. Gramsci also added that, before this scholarship, the objects and their diffusion in time and space were not much studied. However, Gramsci commented, linguists should not exaggerate in the opposite direction, in order not to miss the goal of their research. This concern with how material objects are distributed in space and time and how these objects are related to linguistic variations in space and time surely complicates Ives’s interpretation that, for Gramsci, meaning is produced only by relationships within language. Unlike Ives’s claim, arguably for Gramsci meaning is produced by complex interactions among linguistic forms as well as among ‘‘words and things’’ in space and time. This question should also be examined in light of Gramsci’s discussion of the metaphoric nature of language, to which Ives pays keen attention throughout his book and which he employs to interpret Gramsci’s notion of meaning production. In notebook 11, note 24, Gramsci argues that we cannot say that every discourse is metaphoric in respect to the material and empiric object or the abstract concept to which the words refer; current language is metaphoric only in respect to the meanings and ideological content that the words had in the past. Ives turns Gramsci’s discourse on the metaphoric nature of language into a discourse in which he confirms that Gramsci rejected the notion of language as nomenclature and argues that ‘‘it is misleading to say that all discourse is metaphorical if metaphor means that a word refers to*/or represents*/an object in the sensible world but outside of language’’ (2004, 35). Even if Gramsci did not conceive of language as a simple list of labels for things (i.e., nomenclature), it is not arguable that he believed that meaning is produced only through relations among signs. If so, this would bring us to think that, for Gramsci, the several communicative acts we perform in order to refer to things do not participate in the processes of meaning creation. When Gramsci argued that language is metaphorical, in order to avoid the possibility of extending the concept of ‘‘metaphor’’ too far (and making it too general and omni-comprehensive), Gramsci emphasized and clarified the point that GRAMSCI’S POLITICS OF LANGUAGE 353 language is not metaphorical with respect to the referential play that connects it to the sensible world. According to Gramsci, we can, however, say that language is metaphorical in the sense that ‘‘present language is metaphorical with respect to the meanings and the ideological content which the words used had in preceding periods of civilisation’’ (Gramsci in Ives 2004, 35). In other words, according to this Gramsci’s note, the referential relationship of a word to a thing or concept is not to be considered a metaphor. However, this concern does not mean that the referential relationships between words and things or ideas do not participate in the processes of meaning production. In fact, if I say ‘‘This is a disaster!’’ in referring to something in the sensible world that we ordinary people in our present language call ‘‘disaster,’’ nobody can think that this sentence deals with astrology, even if the etymology of the word ‘‘dis-aster’’ testifies that the word is ‘‘metaphorically’’ (i.e., diachronically) connected to the terms dis ‘bad’ and astrum ‘star’. This means that the meaning of the sentence is not only created by the diachronic relationship between the signs ‘‘disaster’’ and ‘‘disastrum,’’ but also by the referential relations between the linguistic signs and the extralinguistic facts. Moreover, it is to be noted that, in an earlier note (notebook 7, §36), Gramsci employed a larger notion about the metaphoric nature of language. This notion is at odds both with Gramsci’s own later conception and with Ives’s interpretation of Gramsci’s idea of metaphor, according to which ‘‘metaphor’’ does not mean that a word refers to a material object. By contrast, in this note Gramsci argues that ‘‘all language is metaphor, and it is metaphorical in two senses: it is a metaphor of the ‘thing’ or ‘material and sensible object’ referred to, and it is a metaphor of the ideological meanings attached to words in the preceding periods of civilization’’ (2007, 187). Finally, although Gramsci’s change of thought from notebook 7 to notebook 11 is certainly meaningful, we can in any case conclude that, for him, there is a distinction between (linguistic) words and (extralinguistic) things and that the interdependence and complex interactions between them play a significant role in the global functioning and metaphoric dispositive of language through which human beings linguistically act and produce meaning in society. Acknowledgments I thank Peter Ives and Jacinda Swanson for inviting me to write this article and for their comments. I also thank Joseph Buttigieg, Ronald Martinez, Caroline Castiglione, Monica Facchini, and Stephen Marth for their helpful comments. I had the pleasure and opportunity to discuss part of the ideas on Gramsci and Sardinian language, which I am presenting here, with Barnaba Maj, Antonio Santucci, Derek Boothman, Giorgio Baratta, and, more recently, Gayatri Spivak at the 2007 School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University and, in 2003 in Bologna, with Timothy Brennan, who, in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (2006), embraced the idea that Gramsci’s interests in linguistics had a particular focus on minority languages. I thank all of them for stimulating me to continue following this line of inquiry. 354 SELENU References Downloaded By: [Brown University] At: 18:10 2 October 2009 Bartoli, M. G., and A. Gramsci. 1912/3. Appunti di glottologia: Anno accademico 1912-1913. Rome: Archive Fondazione Istituto Gramsci. Fiori, G. 1991. Gramsci, Togliatti, Stalin. Rome-Bari: Laterza. Gramsci, A. 1991/2007. Prison notebooks. Vol. 2/3. Trans. and ed. J. A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia University Press. */ /*/. 1994. Letters from prison. 2 vols. Trans. R. Rosenthal, ed. F. Rosengarten. New * York: Columbia University Press. Ives, P. 2004. Gramsci’s politics of language: Engaging the Bakhtin circle and the Frankfurt school. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lo Piparo, F. 1979. Lingua, intellettuali, egemonia in Gramsci. Rome: Laterza.