The Official and the Popular in Gramsci and Bakhtin

Brandist, Craig

doi:10.1177/026327696013002004

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Metaphors are also entities that are rich in rhetorical capital and can potentially be utilized by rhetorically minded politicians (on metaphors in the study of International Relations, see, for example, Drulak, 2006; Kornprobst et al, 2008). The symbolic substance of metaphor and how it links different ideas and objects are both robust resources of persuasion, rendering metaphor a useful tool in the struggle to capture the commonsense, and, as social semiotics teaches us, symbols, signs, icons, and images that can also be very useful rhetorically in the struggle over the commonsense (see, for example, Brandist, 1996; Peoples, 2008). However, this article focuses on defining and naming, arguing that: 1) both are efficient political tools in the struggle over the commonsense; 2) of the two, defining is the more obvious arena and tool in the struggle over the commonsense as it is more formal and publicly-oriented; and 3) in unsettled, contested political events, parties can use naming as an indirect and subtle act of defining.…”

Section: Naming and Definingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining by naming: Israeli civic warring over the Second Lebanon War

Ish-Shalom

2010

European Journal of International Relations

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Politics is a public effort directed at the allocation of resources, both material and symbolic. Quite often it involves conflict in the form of a public struggle over the allocation of resources. Informed by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this article offers a political reading of constructivism (a theoretical perspective here called Political Constructivism). It maintains that politics is guided by a conscious effort by political agents to control the commonsensical understanding of social reality using the media of political concepts, metaphors, symbols, and — the focus of this article — names and definitions. Political agents regard controlling the commonsense as one of the most effective political tools. They understand that it can be controlled by attaching meanings to political concepts, by linking metaphors and symbols to ideas, and by linking events to classes of events through naming and defining. This article examines the civic warring in Israel over the defining and naming of the Second Lebanon War as a case in point. Defining and naming the event involved a political struggle to frame the commonsense, gain the upper hand in the political process of constructing socio-political reality, and reap the political gains. The article argues that the political struggle was resolved by what I call a weak Kripkean-like defining, in other words, defining by naming.

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Section: Naming and Definingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Defining by naming: Israeli civic warring over the Second Lebanon War

Ish-Shalom

2010

European Journal of International Relations

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“…This shared agenda among the ILIaZV-GIRK scholars, and the formulations that resulted from following it, bear a striking resemblance to the Italian Communist Party leader Antonio Gramsci's attempt to restructure the work of Italian linguistic geographers according to the principles of Marxism. As Franco Lo Piparo (1979;Brandist 1996) has shown, Gramsci's writing on hegemony was deeply indebted to the`neo-linguistics' of Matteo Bartoli who, according to Gramsci, had established linguistics as an historical discipline. In fact Gramsci's attitude towards Bartoli was very similar to that of the Leningrad linguists towards Baudouin.…”

Section: Component One: Dialect Geographymentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of Soviet sociolinguistics

Brandist¹

2003

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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The work of Lev Iakubinskii, Boris Larin and Viktor Zhirmunskii working at the Institute of Discursive Culture in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s deserves to be recognised as an early version of sociolinguistics. These thinkers combined dialect geography with Marxist sociological thought and contemporary work on linguistic con¯icts and planning to produce very sophisticated sociological re¯ections on language. The in¯uence of their teacher, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, was crucial to their work, as was the tradition of Russian dialect research carried out by Aleksei Shakhmatov and others. However, the sociopolitical conditions for linguistic research brought about by the 1917 revolution were decisive. The historical signi®cance of the reception and reinterpretation of these ideas is considerable, leading to a reconsideration of the origins of sociolinguistics and of the relationship between Marxism and the language sciences in the early years of the Soviet Union.

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“…What Bakhtin variously terms monologism, authoritative discourse and the poetic, as I have argued elsewhere (Brandist, 1996), describes an authoritarian relationship between discourses, or an authoritarian hegemonic principle rather than a type of discourse. This principle closely resembles a discursive manifestation of the process of the homogenization of the individual in the organic development of society elaborated by Mikhailovskii.…”

Section: Bakhtin and The Populistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conflict and Cooperation in Sino-British Business, 1860–1911: The Impact of the Pro-British Commercial Network in Shanghai. By Eiichi Motono. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ix, 229 pp. $69.95.

Bickers

2002

J of Asian Stud

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The Official and the Popular in Gramsci and Bakhtin

Cited by 14 publications

References 5 publications

Defining by naming: Israeli civic warring over the Second Lebanon War

Defining by naming: Israeli civic warring over the Second Lebanon War

The origins of Soviet sociolinguistics

Conflict and Cooperation in Sino-British Business, 1860–1911: The Impact of the Pro-British Commercial Network in Shanghai. By Eiichi Motono. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ix, 229 pp. $69.95.

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