the conjuncture in which the utterance is produced: the meaning is the result
of a power relationship: not of a co-operative language game, but of a political
struggle (which has no hard and fast rules, but rather rules that are in a state
of constant variation, which need to be reformulated with each variation of
the conjuncture). (ii) As a result, an utterance is not the description of a state
of affairs within a conjuncture, but an interventionin the conjuncture: it reflects,
but also helps to alter, the balance of forces that gives it its meaning. We now
understand the importance of slogans or order-words: they – and not descriptive
or constative utterances – are the primary utterances on which discourses are
constructed. (iii) A good slogan is a correctslogan, one which corresponds to
the conjuncture in that it is adapted or relevant to it There is a reflexive
circularity between the slogan which names the moment of the conjuncture
and the conjuncture that allows it to make sense. The conjunctural character
of meaning is the content of the concept of correctness (an appropriate slogan
is not true but correct), whose utilisation by Althusser we have noted. (iv)
The word ‘truth’ is nevertheless used by Lenin: one ‘tells the truth’ to the
people. The people must know who really holds state power in the conjuncture
and that means the representatives of which class or class fraction. But this
‘truth’ is strictly dependent on the correctness of slogans; it is an effect, if not
an affect, of this correctness. To speak like the theoreticians of speech acts,
illocutionary correctness exercises a perlocutionary truth effect. It is this
hierarchical combination of correctness and truth that guarantees the
effectiveness of the meaning that is brought out in the conjuncture. (v) Finally,
the concept of discourse outlined here is politicalin kind: a discourse is an
intervention. Lenin’s text denounces the illusions of petty-bourgeois morality –
the blurring of the ‘essence of the situation’, which is political, by moral
questions. The problem is not to be kind to the Mensheviks and Socialist
Revolutionaries, to bring them to see the errors of their ways and reform
themselves, but to say to the masses that they have betrayed the revolution.
And this opposition between politics and morality is an opposition between
the concrete and the abstract. Hence another Leninist principle: in revolutionary
periods, the main danger facing the revolution is to prefer the abstract to the
concrete.
My rapid reading of this text, which provides me with the elements of a
Marxist philosophy of language, is not situated in a vacuum. It was preceded
by two readings, the first of which is famous, while the second has been
completely forgotten.
98 • Chapter Four