LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 6 : 3 March 2006

Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Associate Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.

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    Central Institute of Indian Languages,
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M. S. Thirumalai


 
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H E G E M O N Y C-SEMIOLOGICALLY
Ranjit Singh Rangila


SOURCE OF HEGEMONY

This writing stems from a realization that the source of hegemony in the case of a fact of human life and of experience is not always the fact itself.

  • Hegemony is a force external to an experiential fact. It is directed toward the experience.
  • The seat of hegemony is human consciousness. More specifically it arises out of the creative consciousness of people.
  • It is created like any other fact, and it joins the rest of the facts to make the existential universe of human beings.
  • Hegemony is a force as well as the life-making material that directs and, many a time, distorts the lived experience of man. This double-edged identity of it distinguishes hegemony from other facts of human world.
  • Like any other facts. literature is also a fact of human creativity, and there seems no reason that hegemony, the force, may not target it.

This writing, therefore, is addressed to more than one level of human consciousness. The problem of hegemony and the problem of literature get worked out into a single problematic of human creative behavior, as they arise from the same source.

PROBLEMATICS SEEN IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF LITERATURE

This is where the vision of C-semiology walks in and receives the problematics by placing it into the depths of human civilization. Seen from the perspective of literature, the problematics localizes itself into that of a literature and the literature (source of the distinction in Rangila 1989: 11-16), given the essential placement of the fact in civilization, space for comparative analysis surfaces rather clearly.

INTO THE CREATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS – THE UTOPIAN STATE AS IT WERE

At the level of creative consciousness, human beings are the creative personalities who enjoy their sovereign right to express themselves in most illuminative and aesthetically sensuous artifacts. This reflexive illumination gives rise to a whole field of universal possibilities of creating, expressing and value negotiation that enrich experience, andenthuse people to develop charm for life.

Such a vision of the universal possibilities – placed in the Universe of freedom as it is – may be designated as the vision of sovereignty. Or, if Kuhn’s idiom is found better, then within the Kuhn (1970) style it could as well be identified as a paradigm of sovereignty. Irrespective of the fact as to whether it can be realized in existential conditions, the vision has a sovereign state of becoming, an ideational possibility that can be grasped, received, and realized as desirable for human beings. As a category of human experience it belongs to those mental constructs that are visible to mind’s eye, becomes a reference point and guides conceptualization of infinite number of other constructs.

The constructs thus conceptualized have their reality within the conceptual vision that every human being creates. Literature is such a vision, a construct and category. And, if there is anything that can be characterized as a utopian state, it is literature, because it may enjoy, at least in principle an absolute ideational freedom. In other words the state of becoming in the case of literature is called utopia because it offers the absolute ideational freedom and it has its reality as it does happen in creative consciousness.

REAL LIFE CATEGORIES

Human beings in this universe are real life categories like man, woman and so on. They are social persons as they form some society; belong to some locality of value called culture; and they engage them selves in life making practices. And, importantly so, that they are just not half an ear phenomenon.

PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR A PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION OF THE ENTIRE PAPER.

Ranjit Singh Rangila


Attitudes Toward Hindi | A Survey of Language Preferences in Education in India | News Translation and the Concept of Equivalence - A Discourse Analysis Perspective | Who Is the Indigenous Sri Lankan? | An Overview of Orwell's Animal Farm | Speaking Versus Communicating in Business English | Linguistic Manipulation in Political Advertising | Some Limitations of Corpus-based Language Study | Hegemony, C-Semiologically | The Evolution of Language Policy in the Constituent Assembly of India | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR


Ranjit Singh Rangila
Central Institute of Indian Languages
Mysore 570006
India
rangila@ciil.stpmy.soft.net
 
Web www.languageinindia.com
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