creation is the psyche of the speaking individual. It thereby makes linguistic
creation an analogue of aesthetic creation. The result of this creation – language
as ergon, product and not creative process – is an inert sediment, captured
by the image of congealed lava. It is in this unhappy state that language
becomes a simple instrument of communication. Thus the opposition between
these two aspects of language – energeiaand ergon– is conceived like the
contrast between living metaphor and fixed or dead metaphor. This position
with respect to language has obvious advantages. It does not ignore the most
complex forms of language – encountered, above all, in literary texts – and
even makes them its starting-point. It enables us to understand why language
is so often conceived instrumentally and why this way of thinking soon
encounters its limits. But it is also open to criticism, in that it involves a form
of methodological individualism and makes the human psyche the source of
linguistic creation, taking us back to romantic conceptions of the speaker as
author-creator which are very dated. Finally, the Aristotelian concept of energeia
always ends up being conceived in biological terms, the central metaphor
enabling us to think language being that of the organism (in a sense, this is
the converse of the computer metaphor dear to cognitivists, which is also
mythical). In both cases – creationism and biologism – what disappears is
language as a social and historical phenomenon. Hence the inability of this
philosophy to account for the process of communication other than in terms
of dereliction.
The second aspect is abstract objectivism, which is mainly associated with
the name of Saussure (but, with a few modifications, Chomsky might be
included in this current). This philosophy possesses the converse characteristics
from the preceding one. It envisages language as a fixed system of linguistic
forms, which are supplied, in some sense with immediate effect, to the
individual consciousness of the speaker. It treats the rules of language as
objective laws and its ego ideal is the positive sciences – hence the principle
of immanence and the stress on internal linguistics. It has recourse to a concept
of ‘value’ (in Saussure, the linguistic unity has no intrinsic ‘meaning’, but
assumes a ‘value’ in opposition to all the other units with which it forms a
system), which has nothing to do with ideological value – that is, the active
creation of meaning. Paroleis nothing but individual variation on the norm
represented by langue, with the result that the ensemble evolves according to
112 • Chapter Five