But Althusser ’s definition of practice is not faithful to the Aristotelian origin
of the concept; in other words, Althusserian ‘practice’ is not praxis. Aristotle
does not simply contrast praxisand theoria, as Althusser opposes practice and
theory (as we know, he adds that theory is a specific form of practice): a
distinction is made in Aristotle between three terms – praxis, theoria, and
poiesis. What corresponds to Althusser ’s definition of practice is poiesis, not
praxis. It is poiesisthat transforms a raw material into a product, which
‘fabricates’, whereas praxisis not fabrication but action in common, whose
canonical example is political action. And it will be recalled that, on the first
page of his Politics, Aristotle defines man as a political animal in that he is a
speaking animal.
In the Aristotelian sense, then, language is indeed a form of praxis: it is the
medium of political action (programmes, slogans, pamphlets, laws and decrees,
but also, in the classical definition of democracy, debates). It is language that
imparts material force to the ideas that it embodies and which have no
existence aside from the words that formulate them, which enable them to
persuade the masses and rouse them to action.
We find a contemporary version of this idea in the Italian philosopher Paolo
Virno, who makes the intervention of language in production a characteristic
of the phase of the capitalism he calls ‘post-Fordism’ (he thus assimilates
Althusserian ‘practice’ to Aristotelian praxis). In this stage, he tells us, which
is the current stage, language is no longer a mere instrument of communication
or stock of signs that are so many tools. In the post-Fordist stage, language
is directly involved in the process of production. The worker is also, as a
worker, a speaker and an important part of her labour is devoted to
communication with complex machines, with the complex structure of the
production process. This means that the role of the worker is not confined to
traditional poiesis, but involves praxis. The labour process becomes a process
of open, public interlocution, whose direct analogue is political action. In
short, Virno tells us, the worker is no longer a simple producer but in a way
a virtuoso, whose production is inseparably an interpretation in the musical
sense of the word. Virno encourages us to re-read the Nicomachean Ethics,
where the distinction between poiesisand praxisis explicit; he even encourages
us to re-read this opposition in the light of the Saussurian opposition between
langueand parole, or of the concept of enunciation in Benveniste, in that it
marks a transition from the standpoint of the result (the utterance as product)
Propositions (1) • 151