A Dialectical Relationship of Hegemony and Language in Marxism: Gramsci, Voloshynov, Pasolini

The article deals with three patterns for interpretation of language in its relation to the cultural hegemony, i.e. Gramscian, Voloshinian, and Pasolinian. As was shown, the analysis of the language problem is the necessary precondition for justifying the unity of theoretical and practical elements within Marxist philosophy. A common feature for the aforementioned patterns was an attempt to answer a fundamental question: how it is possible to make explicit the relationship between ideology and relations of production by means of the materialist dialectics. A refusal to fetishize language as a particular essence, a revealing that any sign systems are mediated by ideologies, and elaboration of a nonSaussurian structure of language are the core results of the proposed analysis. The starting point for the reflections of the mentioned thinkers was a tenet that communication in the state is determined by how much the institutions of power are able to bring the interests of society under control without disturbing the balance between the political body and the existing social forces. Thus, an ideology plays in two guises: as a symbolic order of legitimation on the society’s part and as a framing the growth of cultural forms. A distinction between the written and the spoken language becomes a politically significant tool to undermine the hegemony, for a balance between the political and the social, between the coercion and the approval, is widely open to fluctuations. Hence is the problem Marxist theorists have tried to solve: how can it be found out, with an examination of statements in non-political contexts, what someone talks of is a part of her political interest. The Marxist thinkers solved it in various ways. For instance, Gramsci focused himself on the reasons of making of the Italian literary canon; Voloshinov considered the proposition that in linguistics a formalism, as well as psychologism, following from a claim that semantics and means of expression are politically independent; and Pasolini sketched the difference between the spoken language, the spoken-written language, and the purely oral language, with unequal subjects of them.