But where did our philosopher find this sentence, which he did not invent?
In a primary school manual, where its simplicity and clarity are paedagogical
virtues. They are also good examples of the reification of processes into things:
this coloured, purring mass is indeed a cat and this rectangular, brown shape
is, in fact, a mat. And this reification extends to the perceiving subject whom
the language absents – if readers will forgive me the term – from her utterance,
in order to transform a process of perception into a series of things, i.e. objects
and positive facts. For this sentence in the third person contains no indication
of its subject of enunciation: seemingly limiting itself to the registration of a
fact, without indicating any standpoint, it affects not to have one. And it
possesses another glaring characteristic which, following Antoine Culioli, I
shall formulate as follows: the likelihood of it occurring in real interlocution
is virtually nil. For, in a real dialogue, no one will pronounce a sentence of
this kind, not because it is singularly trivial, but because it is artificial. The
example Culioli likes to use is ‘the dog barks’ – a sentence likewise innocently
grammatical, but which it suffices to compare with ‘there’s the dog barking’,
‘dogs, they bark’, or any other real sentence, to appreciate that it does not
exist outside of a teaching situation, outside of the grammar that provides
an elementary syntactical analysis of it, or of the philosophical work that
takes it as a pretext for discoursing abstractly on the supposed functioning
of language. To adopt the language that I have just been using, my sentence
is rich in connotations, setting its speaker and listener within an institution –
i.e. a relationship of places (‘we lay down the rules of grammar here’, just as
elsewhere they say ‘we ask the questions here’) and hence a power relation.
It imposes on both of them the self-evidence of its transparency (which is a
symptom of ideology in the traditional pejorative sense of the term), starting
with the child who must copy it, illustrate it, and learn it by heart at school.
This sentence clearly illustrates that ideology is language and language
ideology; it is the product of a collective assemblage of enunciation (it does
not – and never will – have an author); it has served to interpellate generations
of school kids as speakers. Finally, it illustrates the two aspects of linguistic
fetishism: its necessity – that of naming and abstraction – which makes it
possible for the sign to stand in for the referent in its absence; and that of
the imposition of a power relation through the reification of processes into
nameable things.
172 • Chapter Six