The key moments which should be of interest to Marxism, in the development
of thinking about language, are, first, the emphasis on language as activity
and, second, the emphasis on the historyof the language.
Thus we can add to the necessary definition of the biological faculty of
language as constitutivean equally necessary definition of language
development – at once individual and social – as historically and socially
constituting. What we can then define is a dialectical process: the changing
practical consciousness of human beings, in which both the evolutionary and
the historical processes can be given full weight, but also within which they
can be distinguished....^21The first quotation confirms my positive theses, which therefore belong to a
tradition starting with Marx and passing via Williams. The second seems to
me to be unduly motivated by a desire to compromise. In conceding the
necessity of conceiving language as a ‘biological faculty’, Williams reverts to
the dominant philosophy of language; and his position must be taken as a
symptom of the respect too rapidly accorded to positive science by literary
critics. However, since I do not want to deny the facts, and according to the
gradient set out in Chapter 2, I am prepared to grant him the opposition
between language as constitutive(chimpanzees do not speak) and language
as constituting(i.e. as interpellating individuals as subjects), provided that we
are also aware of the fact that language is constitutedin historical praxis.
What is interesting about Williams’s position is that he did not merely
theorise the historical constitution of language, but practised what he preached –
a practice that anticipates the Marxist theory which I have just evoked – in,
for example, his best-known book Culture and Society.^22 This practice culminates
in Keywords, a book that is presented as a vocabulary, but an untypical one
in that it is concerned not only to give the current meanings of words, but
also and especially their history and the metaphorical slippage to which they
have been subject, which has produced their contemporary meaning. So what
Williams analyses are not words or meanings, but formations of meaning.
Originally, the work was to be a glossary attached to Culture and Society, but
it rapidly became an independent text: ‘Every word which I have included
Propositions (1) • 159(^21) Williams 1977, pp. 21, 43–4.
(^22) See Williams 1958.