of speakers); the state of the language (sedimentation of the history of the
community of speakers: taken together, the language and the encyclopaedia
form what Gramsci calls a ‘conception of the world’); and the potentialities
of interpellation and counter-interpellation that exist in the situation. An
interpretation is an intervention in the linguistic conjuncture: it is constrained
by it and transforms it, so that the ultimate meaning of the utterance is a
function of the interpretation that it embodies in the form of an order-word
and its intervention in the conjuncture which it transforms.
It seems clear that on the banks of Lake Razliv, a political leader who had
many other things to do with his time laid the bases for a philosophy of
language which avoids both Chomskyan naturalism and Habermasian irenism:
this is because the question of language, as the class enemy has always known
(but with varying degrees of success, as we have just seen), is a political issue
of the first importance.
Obviously, the tradition does not stop there. Contrary to what its detractors
would like to think, Marxism is a living tradition and the founding fathers
have had some successors.
104 • Chapter Four