prerequisite for, but rather a product of, the historical development of human
consciousness.’^8
This means that the myth of origins, in reality, refers us to the central role
of fetishism in capitalist societies. Myth projects onto the origin of language
its real functioning in conditions of capitalism, whereas the metaphors of
money, market and commodity applied to language indicate that language
furnishes us with a unique and archetypal example of fetishism, just as it is
a unique and archetypal form of praxis. For language is indeed the archetypal
form of praxis, in that it affects the core of human practice in the process of
subjectivation.
Perhaps it is time for me to indicate more precisely what I mean by praxis.
More precisely, what is the relationship between this Marxian concept and
the more usual Marxist concept of ‘practice’? For the idea that language is a
form of practiceis not obvious, if we accept the famous definition of practice
given by Althusser in For Marx:
By practicein general I shall mean any process of transformationof a
determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation
effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means (of
‘production’). In any practice thus conceived, the determinantmoment (or
element) is neither the raw material nor the product, but the practice in the
narrow sense: the moment of the labour of transformation itself, which sets to
work, in a specific structure, men, means and a technical method of utilizing
the means.^9It is difficult to subsume language under this definition of practice. Unless
we are prepared to say that language transforms ‘ideas’ into ‘words’, which
would involve a regression to an idealist conception of the relations between
thought and language where thought precedes language and uses it as an
instrument of expression – that is, unless we revert to the dominant philosophy
of language – I do not see how language can be characterised as a ‘practice’:
thought is not the ‘raw material’ of language and language is not the technical
means for its transformation into words.
150 • Chapter Six
(^8) Vysgotsky 1962, p. 119.
(^9) Althusser 1969, pp. 166–7.