language and superstructure. If a language is the vector of a conception of
the world (‘even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity
whatever, in “language”, there is contained a specific conception of the
world’),^22 it cannot be in the service of the ‘whole nation’, unless we conceive
a totally homogeneous society – that is, one not shot through with class
struggle and divided into the classes issued from it. Similarly, we cannot
conceive a language that is not subject to historical change – that is, not only
to the slow evolution of the structure. A different philosophy of language
emerges in outline here, at the antipodes of Chomskyan naturalism (‘the
nature of the human species is not given by the “biological nature” of
man...One could also say that the nature of man is “history”’);^23 but also
of structuralist langueunderstood as a system. In Gramsci, language – a word
often used between quotation marks – splits up, is transformed into a partially
organised multiplicity, in the dialectic of the collective (the linguistic-cultural
community) and the individual (‘every speaking being has a personal language
of his own’). And, of course, the boundaries between language and the world,
which are posited by linguists to make their lives simpler, become blurred.
It is precisely with the young Gramsci that Pasolini begins his notes. He
ponders the dreadfully pompous style of the early texts of Gramsci, a Sardinian
in whom schooling has inculcated a grandiloquent standard Italian; and he
tries to reconstruct Gramsci’s accent in the Turin years – probably a mixture
of a Sardinian accent and a Piedmontese petit-bourgeois accent. A polyphony
can be heard: the grandiloquence of a humanist literary education, the scientific
style inspired by French culture and by reading Hegel and Marx, the mixed
accents of two provinces. The speaking being does indeed have his own
language in the most literal sense: he is spoken by a Babel of languages. The
implicit philosophical point of this initial analysis is Gramscian and at the
antipodes of Stalin: Pasolini does not describe language as a neutral structure,
but as a structure in constant variation – historical and social variations which
interpellate the speaker to a place in the social totality.
Whence Pasolini’s main thesis: as speakers, we do not use a linguistic system
(language, the language that we speak) as an instrument of communication,
any more than we are determined – spoken – by it. We concretely live the
84 • Chapter Four
(^22) Gramsci 1971, p. 323.
(^23) Gramsci 1971, p. 355.