level of the concrete analysis of the social formation; and the level of the
tactical and strategic analysis that determines the tasks of revolutionaries on
a day-to-day basis. Lenin’s contribution to Marxism consists in displacing
the centre of the structure from the first level – that of the general theory (the
Marxian or Menshevik theory of the strongest link) – to the dialectical
relationship between the second and third levels – that of the concrete analysis
of the social formation and the determination of the tasks tabled by the
moment of the conjuncture. In other words, he replaces the Marxian theory
of the strongest link by that of the weakest link and of the complexity of the
structure of the social formation, implying that the road leading to revolution
is not the Nevsky Prospekt.
The scientistic language of Althusser’s reading has passed out of fashion
or conjuncture: to treat Lenin as a scientist, even as a scientist of politics,
hardly helps. And, compared with Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, we note
that the issue of language has passed to a secondary level – the ‘secondary
science’ of slogans. First comes the science of concrete analysis and next that
of its adaptation to political practice; first comes the theory of the conjuncture
and of the balance of forces between the classes in struggle, and then its
translation into a series of correct slogans. The production of the class by
means of the slogan that anticipates its constitution, which summons it into
being, has disappeared; and language is characterised by the representation
of a situation prior to discourse and not by the performative character of the
intervention. Nevertheless, I believe that the three levels on which theory and
practice are articulated provides us with the framework for a Marxist
philosophy of language.
Let us metaphorically take the three levels of the communist programme
for the levels of a research programme into the functioning of language, which
I scarcely dare characterise as scientific.
We start from the level of the general theory, that of principles. At this
level, in order to be faithful to Lenin, we need to ask what a materialist
philosophy of language might be: is not the task of the Marxist philosopher –
a task eminently performed by Lenin himself – to intervene in the philosophical
struggle to defend materialism? As we have seen, such a materialism cannot
be Chomskyan naturalism. But Lenin precisely enables us to conceive a form
of materialism that is not a physical reductionism or a naturalism: the
materialism of power relations, by which the vague concepts of illocutionary
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