Finally, there is the history of the language as whole, of what is called
‘English’. As we have seen, this name is an ontological metaphor, which
transforms a chaotic variety of phenomena into an object and is therefore a
historical and political construct – a historical process of unification of different
dialects and registers. (Striking traces of it remain in the importance of regional,
class, and even generational accents in contemporary British English.) In
Chapter 1, I referred to the centripetal and centrifugal forces affecting the
language of imperialism: to study these processes is a more important and
more urgent task for linguists than to produce the umpteenth explanation of
the contrast between the deictics ‘this’ and ‘that’. If, for example, we read
Paul Fussell’s admirable book on the language and literature of the Great
War, we will appreciate the direct influence of a historical event (in truth, not
any event) on the language of its actors.^14
Here we can see the origin – and the sole interest – of the architectural model
of language as a pile of strata (phonetic, morphological, syntactical, etc.) to
which linguistics is attached: in the form of an essential section, it fetishises
the different temporalities of language. A language changes at different speeds
according to its different regions or sectors. Here the same is true of language
as of the whole of society, at least according to Althusser ’s image of it – the
image of a structure each of whose elements develops according to its specific
time, thereby generating phenomena of survivals (of a previous mode of
production within the new mode of production), but also of anticipation (of
the mode of production nascent within the one that is still dominant). We
therefore have linguistic survivals (words and constructions sediment former
states of the language: what are called exceptions and archaisms) and linguistic
anticipations (one of the main function of the language games grouped under
the name of literature is to be attentive to linguistic change – i.e. to the new
language that is being born within the old one). And this also enables us to
understand the relationship between language in general and a particular
language, which we will no longer conceive as the relationship of a faculty
(inscribed in our genetic programme) to its embodiment in a particular system,
but as the relationship between a human praxisand the variety of forms it
takes in determinate conjunctures. Marxists describe a particular society (say,
Propositions (1) • 155(^14) See Fussell 2000.