But the sketch presented by Williams gives us an excellent idea of what
we need: a concept of linguistic conjunctureto replace the inadequate concepts
of synchrony and diachrony. The linguistic conjuncture is the context in which
meanings are formed, within the social practices of speakers (the expression
‘formation of meaning’ has an active sense here), and within which they are
reified into formations of meaning (here the expression no longer refers to a
process, but to its outcome), which form so many points or forces in a semantic
field. The operation of fetishism tends to fix or freeze these formations, to
give words a stable meaning, to isolate them from the processes in which
their meaning is active or living, in the way that we refer to a living metaphor
as opposed to a dead metaphor. This fixing of meaning, which transforms
the language into a cemetery of dead or forgotten meanings, cannot halt the
processes that constitute language. To arrest the language – which is what
the synchronic section tries to do – can only be an arbitrary coup de force,
of temporary interest at best. This is why we also need the Leninist concept
(Hegelian in origin) of momentof the conjuncture, which obliges us to regard
language as a series of processes in a state of constant variation.
To name the moment of the conjuncture and fix its temporal limits has
nothing arbitrary about it, as we have seen with the moment of the slogan
‘All power to the soviets!’. It depends on the situation of the one who names,
who constructs the theory of the situation; and this theory is an intervention
in the situation, not a contemplation or external observation. The theoretical
thesis does not emanate from a subject separated from its object, but from an
activist immersed in the object that she theorises – which means that the
formulations of the theory possess a performative aspect, that they are speech
acts which contribute to the constitution and, ultimately, the existence of their
referent. And because situations are multiple and diverse, there will be multiple,
diverse moments of the linguistic conjuncture: the moment of literature is
not the same as that of political interventions (the two types of language
game do not develop at the same pace); and the moment of political intervention
is not that of generations or social milieus. The upshot is that an analysis of
a linguistic conjuncture in its constitutive complexity will analyse tensions,
contradictions, power relations. It will involve not only an analysis of
institutions and their role (in so far as these institutions are collective
transmitters of discourse), their explicit linguistic policies (Deborah Cameron’s
book analyses the linguistic policies of enterprises or educational institutions:
Propositions (1) • 161