appearances (the linguist in a white coat in his laboratory) combined with
literary and poetic reality: our linguist is, first and foremost, a poet.
The Marxist tradition within which Pasolini writes is very different from
that of Stalinist ‘diamat’. It is dominated by the thought of Gramsci, who was
interested in language in a quasi-professional way, having been trained as a
philologist at university, and who had very different positions on the relations
between language and culture from those of Stalin. The following two
quotations will suffice to make it clear that we are in a different mental
universe:
If it is true that every language contains the elements of a conception of the
world and of a culture, it could also be true that from anyone’s language
one can assess the greater or lesser complexity of his conception of the
world. Someone who only speaks dialect, or understands the standard
language incompletely, necessarily has an intuition of the world which is
more or less limited and provincial, which is fossilised and anachronistic
in relation to the major currents of thought which dominate world history....
A great culture can be translated into the language of another great culture,
that is to say a great national language with historic richness and complexity,
and it can translate any other great culture and can be a world-wide means
of expression. But a dialect cannot do this.
It seems that one can say that ‘language’ is essentially a collective term
which does not presuppose any single thing existing in time and space.
Language also means culture and philosophy (if only at the level of common
sense) and therefore the fact of ‘language’ is in reality a multiplicity of facts
more or less organically coherent and co-ordinated. At the limit it could be
said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is
his own way of thinking and feeling.^21We can see the difference of historical and political conjuncture: the question
which, for Stalin, is posed in terms of national language(s) is posed, for Gramsci,
in terms of dialects. And Gramsci, who was Sardinian and knew what a
dialect was, is hard on them: we find in him a form of linguistic Jacobinism.
But we can also see what this difference implies in terms of philosophy of
language: here there is no longer a distinction between language and culture,
The Marxist Tradition • 83(^21) Gramsci 1971, pp. 325, 349.