language, from Saussure and Chomsky to Habermas; positively, albeit implicitly
and in disorderly fashion, they are already present in the Marxist or para-
Marxist authors to whom I have referred. The fact that the grammatical subject
of my four theses is ‘language [langage]’, and not ‘the language-system [langue]’
or some other scientific construct (e.g. Chomsky’s ‘I-language’), signals this
shift. And readers should not take umbrage at the singular form of the predicate
‘is aphenomenon’: I am aware that if language is something, it is a set of
phenomena. The formulation has the function of indicating a characteristic
of language and a field in which we must account for linguistic phenomena.
Accordingly, we shall not be able to speak of language without referring to
history, society, bodies (among other material entities), and politics.
- Language is a form of praxis
This thesis is not original. It informs the work of Voloshinov and is explicit
in Raymond Williams’s book on Marxism and literature.^1 My Marxist
philosophy of language will therefore be situated in a tradition. But, if the
thesis is not original, its implications warrant development. In fact, to regard
language as a form of praxisis to change standpoints. It involves considering
language from the standpoint of process rather than outcome, social interaction
rather than the individual speaker, history rather than synchrony, the totality
rather than exclusion or separation (of what is, and what is not relevant, to
science), power relations rather than irenic co-operation.
So, the first implication of the main thesis – the first change of standpoint–
is that the study of language must adopt the standpoint of process, rather than
of ‘things’ or ‘facts’. (We can find in Roy Harris, a linguist who has already
been cited, a powerful critique of the notion of ‘linguistic fact’.^2 ) In other
words, the thesis involves a non-fetishistic view of language, which aims to
go beyond the fetishised objects that are ‘words’ and ‘sentences’, and the
fetishised facts that are statements and grammatical rules, in order to account
for the totality of linguistic phenomena in terms of processes. Obviously, it
is not a question of giving up the notions of words, sentences, utterances or
rules bequeathed to us by the linguistic tradition. However, it definitely is a
140 • Chapter Six
(^1) See Williams 1977.
(^2) See Harris 1998, Chapter 6.