Prestige, Faith, and Dialect: Expanding Gramsci's Engagement

摘要

This essay attempts to respond to and advance the dialogue initiated by contributions to this symposium by Jacinda Swanson, Kerim Friedman, and Stefano Selenu concerning my book, Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. It emphasizes the importance of all three authors in creating further space for interaction between Gramscian scholarship and other areas of Marxism and social theory, specifically the work of the Association for Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), political theory generally, Pierre Bourdieu, sociolinguistics, and philosophy. I discuss the concepts of prestige, labor, faith, conflict, interference, and dialect, as presented by the other contributions. One of the links that ties together these discussions is my emphasis on Gramsci's insistence that language is not approached as a topic or type of activity that can be divorced or sharply distinguished from other human activity: it does not constitute a separate or separable realm.