a highly imperfect instrument, which betrays the speaker ’s intended meanings,
makes her say what she did not mean to say or did not know that she was
saying: when it comes to instruments, the great watch-maker could have
done better); and a valorisation of artificial languages, which have the
advantage over natural languages of logical coherence (we now understand
the metaphorical fantasy that leads people to think about language in terms
of computer programs).
We must, therefore, view the relations between collective linguistic processes
and a community of speakers in non-fetishistic fashion, understand the
processes of interpellation that make individuals speaker-subjects, who, in
turn, help the language change, develop and vary, through their linguistic
practice, which comes down to a form of counter-interpellation. As I speak, I
counter-interpellate the language that interpellates me to my place as a speaker,
which makes me what I am. I exploit the potentialities of meaning that it
provides me with, I play tricks with and on it, I accept or reject the names
with which it assigns me a place in the community of speakers or excludes
me from it (the study of insults offers an antidote to the dominant philosophy
of language). For the fact that language is a collective practice must not be
understood in a determinist sense: the speaker acts on and in language by
using it. Every speech act, no matter how humble or conventional, by virtue
of being an act, an action in a historical conjuncture, shifts the language,
makes it advance, millimetre by millimetre, on the path of its history – even
if the language in a global sense is out of the range of any individual action.
The same is true of language as of the whole of society: I am well aware that
my individual action will not change the capitalist social relations in which
I am caught, but there is no reason for this to induce resignation in me.
The fifth and final change of standpointleads to adopting the standpoint of
power relations– something I have often had occasion to characterise as the
standpoint of agonas opposed to eirene. This change of standpoint is the
natural consequence of the other four. Even if, as the most plausible myth
of origins would have it, language has its source in the exigencies of
communication, not in any circumstances whatsoever (but in social interaction
when, in the relations that govern labour in common, it is necessary to arrive
at an understanding about what to do and to indicate the objects on which
theses actions bear), this cannot be its only source. For affects also stand in
need of expression – for example, when expressive exclamations become
Propositions (1) • 145