Third positive thesis: language is a
material phenomenon
At first sight, this thesis seems to be caught in an
antinomy. Language is certainly a set of material
phenomena, in the sense that it consists in sounds
emitted by human organs (here, we might cite what
I have called the Castafiore principle: these sounds
have a material impact on bodies, those of listener
and speaker alike). And, when presented in written
form, it consists in a certain number of traces, marks
on a white page. But, in addition to the fact that
technological progress is leading to an increasing
immateriality of language (I am writing this text on
a computer screen: so its materiality is not the same
as that produced by the quill pen I used until last
year), language has always had an immaterial or
ideal aspect: phoneis insufficient to yield language
if there is not also logos. Language is not screaming.
The object of this section is to escape this antinomy
and to do so via materialism, which will not surprise
anyone.
I am going to do so in two stages: language
involves materialism in the strictest sense in that it
involves speaking bodies; and it involves a broader
materialism, with which Marxists are familiar – that
of institutions and apparatuses, in that they produce
discourses and speech acts. I have already broached
this issue in Chapter 5, when I referred to Deleuze
