My thesis has its converse, which states that not only is ideology linguistic,
but language is ideological. What are we to understand by this?
At its simplest level, it means that there is no neutral language
uncontaminated by ideology (in its trivial sense). Ideology here is declined
in the plural, allowing Lenin to defend the idea that there is a ‘socialist
ideology’. His contribution to the tradition, with the concept of slogan,
especially as generalised by Deleuze and Guattari, says nothing else: the most
innocent grammatical markers are power markers. (In reality, it also says
something else, which was the subject of the previous paragraphs: the link
between ideology, construed in the Althusserian sense, and language is much
deeper and much closer than is assumed by the fact that ‘ideas’ need ‘words’
in order to be expressed.)
The linguistic tradition has not always ignored this state of affairs. Take,
for example, the work of Roland Barthes, who in his youth was more than
somewhat Marxist,^33 and especially two of his concepts: connotation and
ideosphere.
Connotation – a term adopted from Hjelmslev – is at the heart of the concrete
analyses contained in Mythologiesand the theorisation undertaken in the
concluding essay, ‘Myth Today’.^34 Barthes wants to show that in natural
languages (in contrast to artificial languages) there is no denotation without
connotation. His two canonical examples are well known. The first is an
example of Latin grammar, quia ego nominor leo(‘because my name is lion’)
The translation indicates the denotation of the phrase, whose connotative
meaning is: ‘I am a grammatical example meant to illustrate the rule about
the agreement of the predicate.’ To which, having read Deleuze and Guattari
and Renée Balibar, we can add:^35 ‘and if you do not obey my implicit
commands, you will get a bad mark for Latin translation’. The other, still
more famous, example is a Paris Matchcover which, in 1956, represented a
Senegalese infantryman saluting the French flag. The meaning of the denotation
of the image is given by the sentence describing its content. Barthes shows
that its connotative meaning, which is the real reason for the choice of this
Propositions (1) • 169(^33) On Barthes’s relationship to Marxism and his abandonment of it in favour of
semiotics, readers are referred to Milner 2003. 34
35 See Barthes 1972.
See Balibar 1974.