interpretation of the text of the situation: this interpretation is correct because
it is adequate to the moment of the conjuncture that it succeeds in naming
in one or more slogans – an essentially fleeting moment. The essence of a
concrete analysis of a concrete situation consists in deciding that yesterday’s
slogan is no longer valid today. This does not mean, since it appears that the
main political task of the moment is to produce an interpretation, that there
are as many interpretations as there are interpreters; or that there is a choice
to be had between several, equally correct interpretations. We are not in the
aesthetic domain and each moment demands its correct analysis. This must
be imposed in political struggle, embodied in a slogan, in order to generate
an effective intervention which will produce truth-effects in the masses. In
matters of interpretation, what is correct logically and chronologically precedes
what is true. This insistence on the correctness of the naming of the moment
of the conjuncture by the slogan is what distinguishes good old ‘propaganda’,
in the Leninist sense of the term, from the ‘political communication’ that the
imperialists are so fond of, which aims to sell a policy in the same way that
an advertising slogan sells a product. The pathetic failure of the advertising
campaigns designed to restore America’s image among the Muslim masses
in the run-up to the imperialist war in Iraq is not attributable to the
backwardness of those masses, but to the fact that a ‘branding strategy’ is
incapable of producing a correct slogan in the conjuncture, because it does
not see its task as a political and historical analysis. It therefore ignores
everything that might produce a truth effect among these masses – to be
specific, analysis of American policy in the Middle East and its complex
history. Here, we reach the limits of the form of linguistic politics which
Anglo-Americans call ‘spin’: the facts, Lenin used to say, are stubborn and
no advertising slogan can make the American intervention in Iraq anything
other than an imperialist aggression. This is why the Americans fairly rapidly
abandoned their ambitions in the sphere of public relations and let the tanks
do the talking.
From all this we can draw two conclusions for constructing a Marxist
philosophy of language. The first is that the meaning of an utterance is given
in its interpretation – that is, in the struggle required to impose this
interpretation, in the power relationship that it establishes. The second is that
we need a concept of linguistic conjuncturewhich combines the state of the
encyclopaedia (the compendium of knowledge and beliefs of the community
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