of diachrony; it is that of the totality of a social process: it is interwoven with
the history of culture, of class struggle, and of the common sense which
conserves its traces and monuments (in clichés, dead metaphors, processes
of grammaticalisation).
Here, we can see how the concept of synchrony is deficient. It corresponds
to what Althusser ’s analyses under the name of ‘essential section’, which is,
once again, a form of fetishisation of language. Synchrony transforms dynamic
processes into things; it arbitrarily arrests the development and variation of
the different elements that make up a language (sounds, words, and sentences):
it pins them down the better to study them, rather as one does insects – which
implies making them expire. Above all, it crushes the differences of temporality
between the different strata of language (for each has its own time, like
the different layers of the social structure in Althusser), replacing them by the
fixed image of the pyramid of language (phonology, morphology, syntax: the
pyramid threatens to collapse when we reach semantics, because we do not
really know which level to assign it to). But language, as a historical process,
has its own dynamic and is oblivious of the stratifications imposed by science.
We are constantly dealing with shifts, rhizomatic dispersions, heavy mixtures,
when supra-segmental phenomena like intonation invade syntax, when
iconicity subverts the arbitrariness of the sign – i.e. the arbitrariness of dual
articulation. And we note with a smile that the model of stratification adopted
by most research programmes in linguistics shares the architectural metaphor
with the most deterministic version of Marxism.
The fourth change of standpointleads us to adopt the standpoint of the totality.
As is well known, this concept enables Lukács to criticise and avoid fetishism.
And we have seen that in the dominant philosophy of language this fetishism
took the form of the principle of immanence defining an internal linguistics,
in which language is separated from the rest of the phenomena that make
up the world. This reification of language is two-fold: it makes it a fixed object,
object of manipulation and contemplation on the part of the linguist, as the
etymology of the term has it (the linguist is an entomologist); and it posits a
reified subject– the speaker – who possesses her language and uses it like an
instrument. Hence the dominant metaphors (that of instrument is the most
frequent) and habitual dichotomies (langueand parole, competence and
performance). This entails certain consequences – especially a tradition of
mistrust of natural languages (for it must be acknowledged that language is
144 • Chapter Six