distinction between base and superstructure, or between deep structure and
surface structure: all dimensions of the assemblage are flattened onto a single
plane of consistency. This concept of assemblage is crucial, including for a
Marxist philosophy of language: it definitively extricates us from liberal
individualism; it enables us to think the collective other than metaphorically.
It is not enough to adopt the Heideggerian metaphor ‘it is language that
speaks’, even if it offers views on the functioning of language that mainstream
linguistics precludes. We need to think this interpellation of the speaker as a
subject by language. And this is what Deleuze and Guattari do when they
denounce in the ‘system’ of languea fetishisation and proclaim the primacy
of the assemblage over langueand over utterances.
The sixthand final thesis likewise introduces an essential concept: minority.
This is the concept that enables us to understand how language is not only
a material, social and historical phenomenon, but also a political one. This
thesis is opposed to the structuralist thesis of the homogeneity of the language
system. It is not enough to decide that the ‘language’ (a given language) is
a set of heterogeneous phenomena in a state of continuous variation. We also
need to explain why linguists fetishise this heterogeneity into a homogeneous,
or, rather, homogenised, system. The answer is simple: there is a homology
between the scientific model of the language system and the political model
which makes the centralised national language a vector of power. Bourdieu
in Ce que parler veut dire, and Renée Balibar and Dominique Laporte in Le
Français national, have offered fine descriptions of this phenomenon in the
case of French. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, it involves wresting over the
proliferation of minor dialects, registers and language games a language of
power, major because dominant. On a world scale, this is called the language
of imperialism. And we understand why we need to argue with Chomsky,
albeit not for the same reasons, that English does not exist (or not in a way
relevant for science); and, paradoxically, against Chomsky that it has a massive,
inescapable existence. For the major language – ‘standard English’ – is an
artificial construct, imposed by ideological apparatuses for the purposes of
domination. So it is non-existent in the natural state (what exists is a multiplicity
of dialects), and yet only too existent, as a set of power markers. This is indeed
why it mainly, but not exclusively, exists in English grammars. But it will
also be recalled – as my first chapter sought to demonstrate – that this situation,
being contradictory, is not stable: that the language of imperialism is also the
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