to the process (enunciation as public praxisof interlocution). In this theoretical
framework, language is indeed a form of praxisand the best way of accounting
for it is a version of pragmatics. The following quotation, in which he criticises
Hannah Arendt, is typical:
I am claiming that in today’s work we rediscover ‘exposition to the gaze of
the other ’, a relation with the presence of others, the beginning of original
processes, a constitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen, the
possible. I am arguing that post-Fordist labour, labour productive of surplus-
value, subordinate labour, involves qualities and exigencies which, for an
age-old tradition, belong instead to political action.^10Virno bases his interpretation on a passage in the Grundrissewhere Marx
develops the concept of the ‘general intellect’. And we find similar conceptions
in Marazzi, the Swiss economist on whom Hardt and Negri draw.^11 I have
some serious doubts about the ‘linguistic turn’ of the economic and the
politicisation of the workplace through the virtuoso use of language by the
set of worker-speakers. To read Deborah Cameron’s book on the standardisation
and control of workers’ language in enterprises, and not only in service
enterprises, is salutary here.^12 But it clearly demonstrates, a contrario, the
strategic importance of linguistic praxisand the acute awareness of this on
the part of the class enemy. I am therefore going to develop my central thesis
in the form of four positive theses.
- First positive thesis: language is a historical phenomenon
My thesis has two aspects: language (a determinate natural language) has a
history, which the theory of language is not entitled to ignore or treat as a
marginal phenomenon; and language is history.
Contrary to what might be said of it by a positivism which describes the
development, the expansion, the convergence, the corruption, and the retreat
of a language which ends up being transformed into a different language,
the history of language, such as it can be grasped through the history of
natural languages, is not a long, tranquil stream. (One might take as an
152 • Chapter Six
(^10) Virno 2002, p. 44.
(^11) See Marazzi 1997.
(^12) See Cameron 2000.