which the speaker can engage with the language for her pleasure. But she
can only do so within the limits of what is furnished by her language – that
is, the linguistic conjuncture she finds herself in. Her linguistic freedom is,
therefore, as limited as the chimerical imagination in Plato: for a chimera –
e.g. the Socratic goat-stag – is a mad creation of the free imagination, but
its elements belong to reality. The griffin is constructed out of the eagle and
the lion.
With the speech act we have thus reached the end of the chain, the moment
of full subjectivity: the moment of expression in its infinite variety and whose
name is style– a term that has the great advantage of containing the two
poles of this dialectical relationship between the collective and the individual.
For the style is the man in what is most unique and inimitable about him:
every artist has a style that makes it possible to identify him and we speak
unreservedly of Cézanne’s style. But the history of painting shows that this
inimitable style makes forgers happy precisely in so far as it is all too readily
open to imitation. And it is not only imitated by forgers, for it can characterise
a group or a school. We therefore do not hesitate to refer to a post-impressionist
style. Accordingly, style is at once individual and collective, a sign of
interpellation of the individual by the group and of her emancipation from
the group in the process of counter-interpellation. The chain of interpellation
tells us that one does not escape the collective (of the language, of ideology
in as much as it is language), which is simultaneously liberating and oppressive;
it also tells us that at the end of the chain, one does not escape the individuality
of the speaker become a subject.
Ideology is therefore language – by which is to be understood more than
the trivial assertion that, since ideology manifests itself in discourse, language
is always involved in it: in this sense, every practice involves language. I do
not practise bungee jumping by launching myself into the void before the
order ‘go!’ has been uttered. But this does not make bungee jumping a linguistic
practice. I am postulating a stronger bond, a constitutive link, between ideology
and language, which means that the distinction between the two terms is an
effect of theory. The whole chain of interpellation, not only the speech act
that crowns it, is linguistic: institutions are collective assemblages of enunciation;
at the heart of the ritual is the performative utterance that it stages; and
practices are shot through with language in that they are social and language
is the medium and motor of social interaction.
168 • Chapter Six