pragmatic struggle in which the ‘rules’ are at stake. This is why I propose to
place at the centre of the study of language pragmatics, which replaces the
language of Kant’s first critique – that of ‘pure’ or theoretical reason – the
language, principles and maxims of the second – i.e. that of practicalreason.
We thus pass from the formulation of a natural law (‘every’ sentence is
composed of a subject and a ‘predicate’) to that of a practical maxim (‘be
relevant’: such is the maxim of relation in Grice):^5 a transition that is scarcely
innocent, because it avoids the naturalism and fetishism of abstraction through
the exclusion of a major part of linguistic phenomena.
This implication of my main thesis – the transition from the standpoint of
fetishised ‘things’ to that of processes – has consequences, which are so many
changes of standpoint.
The second change of standpointleads to tackling language from the standpoint
of social interaction. For language is no more situated in the individual speaker
(in her mind/brain as in Chomsky, her faculties, her consciousness or
unconscious) than aesthetic creativity resides in the irrepressible individuality
of the artist. Obviously, this does not mean that I am denying that it is you
and me who speak; like every speaker, I am highly impressed by the profound
originality of what I say and write. What I mean is that this irreducible
individuality is not the source of my language, but its effect; and that the
language which is mine is such only because it is collective in the first instance.
Methodological individualism in the field of politics and economics has never
prevented multinationals from behaving like collective entities, rather than
as the democratic sum of individual choices. In the field of language, it feeds
the illusion of the subject’s mastery over her speech and of equality of
opportunity in the domain of communication.
People have a natural tendency to speak of ‘language’ or of ‘the English
language’ as if they were things, for reification is profoundly inscribed in our
common sense. But these ‘things’ are not things: they are processes of social
interaction; they are the object of learning processes within social practices,
like family life or relations at work. The subject becomes a speaker by
appropriating a language that is always-already collective – which means
that she is appropriated by it: she is captured by a language that is external
142 • Chapter Six
(^5) See Grice 1975.