Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Discourse Studies on 28/03/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Language and critique
T2 - Some anticipations of critical discourse studies in Marx
AU - Jessop, Robert Douglas
AU - Sum, Ngai-Ling
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Critical Discourse Studies on 28/03/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - We examine Marx’s critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx’s work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.
AB - We examine Marx’s critiques of language, politics, and capitalist political economy and show how these anticipated critical discourse and argumentation analysis and ‘cultural political economy’. Marx studied philology and rhetoric at university and applied their lessons critically. We illustrate this from three texts. The German Ideology critically explores language as practical consciousness, the division of manual and mental labor, the state, hegemony, intellectuals, and specific ideologies. The Eighteenth Brumaire studies the semantics and pragmatics of political language and how it represents (or misrepresents) the class content of politics and contributes to social transformation. Capital deconstructs the categories of classical political economy and their constitutive role in capitalist social relations. This is one aspect of CPE. Capital also highlights the structural and agential aspects of these relations, their contradictory dynamic, and their crisis-prone character. We comment on this aspect too. This said, Marx held that social transformation is mediated through political imaginaries and highlighted the need for the proletariat to develop a ‘poetry’ of the future. We then consider the misleading ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor and note how, against the thrust of Marx’s work, it tends to reify culture. The article concludes that Marx contributed to the critique of semiotic as well as political economy.
KW - Marx
KW - Critical Discourse Analysis
KW - Semiosis
KW - Historical Materialism
KW - Eighteenth Brumaire
KW - Das Kapital
KW - German Ideology
KW - Rhetoric
KW - Language
KW - Base-superstructure metaphor
KW - capitalist mode of production
KW - critique
KW - cultural political economy
KW - intellectuals
KW - philology
U2 - 10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945
DO - 10.1080/17405904.2018.1456945
M3 - Journal article
VL - 15
SP - 325
EP - 337
JO - Critical Discourse Studies
JF - Critical Discourse Studies
SN - 1740-5904
IS - 4
ER -