as we have seen with Engels, is not bereft of speech: but Marx is in the process
of defining the concept of ‘social relation’); and the inversion that makes
subjectivity an effect of social objectivity. The speaker is interpellated by the
linguistic relation she has with others; she does not use an instrument, does
not employ a faculty. The consequence of this position is an open anti-
intentionalism: language is not the translation and transmission of a thought
that pre-exists it (what some English linguists today call the myth of
‘telementation’^34 is rejected in advance).
I shall end with a short text, which occurs a few pages before the one
quoted above. This passage is equally celebrated, for it defines ideology as
a camera obscura. Here, I am interested in the beginning of the paragraph
and the curious expression: ‘The production of ideas, of conceptions, of
consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and
the material intercourse of men – the language of real life.’^35 I wonder whether
the expression ‘the language of real life’ is a simple metaphor, since ‘real
life’ is no more liable to possess its language than flowers. And I would like
to think that Marx’s formula goes further. At first sight, this text repeats the
materialist thesis that ideas have a material origin, in ‘real life’ understood
as a material activity – i.e. labour and production – and material relations –
i.e. social relations: language is the product of social relations which it
helps to fix and develop. But why characterise this real life as ‘language’ or
attribute a ‘language’ to it? Because the materialist thesis is, in fact, two-fold:
it affirms not only that ideas have a material origin, but also that they have
a material existence. And the material existence of ideas precisely takes the
form of language and of the institutions constructed around it. Here, language
plays a similar role to the imagination in Kant, which, as is well known,
serves as an intermediary, by means of its schemata, between intuition and
understanding: language serves as an intermediary between real life and the
ideas that derive from it. Because it has a material aspect, because it has a
‘sensory nature’, language does not merely represent or express material
existence (i.e. is not merely a tool of reference), but participates in this material
existence. But it is also what enables human society to achieve self-
consciousness, to abstract from relations with nature and social relations, and
94 • Chapter Four
(^34) See Harris 1998.
(^35) Marx and Engels 1976, p. 36.