Language features twice in this text. In its own right, first of all, as a term of
comparison: like value, it is a ‘social product’, created by productive activity
and social relations. But it also figures, in duly encrypted form, in the shape
of a ‘hieroglyph’, which is the effect that value has on each product and which,
as it were, transforms the product into a text that needs to be deciphered –
i.e. interpreted. Here, language is the channel through which fetishism produces
its effect. Language therefore has a dual character: it is the means of abstraction
that makes it possible to think real life and become conscious of it (it is this
very consciousness: the consciousness of social relations); and it is also what
freezes and veils this same consciousness, in the form of the bad abstraction
of fetishism. This dual character enables us to understand why we
spontaneously tend to conceive interlocution in terms of exchange and words
in terms of coins; and why the dominant philosophy of language makes this
‘structural metaphor’ (as Lakoff and Johnson call it) its basic thesis.
On this point we might reread the work of Sohn-Rethel,^39 for whom language
is generated out of labour in common and not exchange, which presupposes
private property and what he calls its ‘practical solipsism’: in fact, exchange
has no need of articulated language, for an indicative gesture will suffice and
a minimal semantics containing signs for ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and indications of
quantity. Commodity exchange is not a co-operative exchange of information
conducive to an ethics of discussion: it is based upon exclusion (from property:
I seek to acquire what I am deprived of) and separation (of the agents of
exchange, with their divergent interests), which are not apt to produce a
linguistic community.
We can, therefore, draw from the fragments of the founding fathers of
Marxism both a myth of origin of language that is more satisfying than its
competitors and an anticipatory inversion of the dominant philosophy of
language, which insists on the social and material nature of language, and
poses the question of the relations between abstraction and fetishism. For
fragmentary notations, that is not bad.
96 • Chapter Four
(^39) See Sohn-Rethel 1978.