and Guattari’s concept of collective assemblage of enunciation, which (it will
be remembered) is characterised by an ontological mix of bodies (agents and
instruments), institutions (buildings, decrees and rituals), and texts (literature,
etc.). And I broached it in Chapter 6, when I evoked the Althusserian chain
of interpellation, which involves the same kind of ontological mix and the
same type of materiality. Here, I am, therefore, going to concentrate on the
problem of the body which, as we saw when referring to Anti-Oedipus, has
been largely ignored by Marxists.
We still need to agree on the concept of the body, by posing the question:
what concept of body do I need in order to understand the functioning of
language? For there are several candidates.
The most obvious is the biological body. After all, language is physically
produced by our physiological organs, even if we at once add that it is also
the ideal product of the functioning of our brain. But even this aspect can be
reduced, as is the tendency in Chomsky’s phrase ‘the mind/brain’, which
aims to reduce the difference (hence the solidus) while denying this reduction
(hence the preservation of the term ‘mind’ alongside that of ‘brain’). After
the First World War, reference used to be made to regions of the brain; today’s
cognitive science talks in terms of neuron circuits and – soon – of genes. Even
the ‘embodied language’ of the West-Coast linguists Lakoff and Johnson does
not wholly escape this physicalism, which Marxists will tend to regard as
a return to the mechanistic materialism of the age of Enlightenment. We
have seen where the problem lies. By reducing language, in the form of a
faculty, to the body of the individual speaker, these conceptions lapse into
methodological individualism and preclude themselves from understanding
how language is a historical phenomenon and a social phenomenon. By
comparison with Saussure’s system, this is a regression.
Let us consider a second candidate: the phenomenological body. Here, the
body is the body of the speaker, in as much as it is the site of enunciative or
cognitive operations. I am referring here to various linguistic theories – those
of Benveniste and Culioli in France, or Langacker and Lakoff and Johnson in
the USA – which are closely or remotely influenced by phenomenology (a
philosophical field in which, from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty, we find extremely
interesting reflections on language).^1 I am doing a partial injustice to Lakoff
176 • Chapter Seven
(^1) See Benveniste 1966 and 1974; Culioli 1990, 1999a, 1999b and 2002; Langacker
1987 and 1991; Lakoff and Johnson 1999.