Conceived thus, language is the language of the polis, the repertoire of the
reasons people have for believing and for acting according to their beliefs. It
is the inscription and sedimentation of popular culture – hence Gramsci’s
interest in folklore, common sense, and popular religion. It is language that
causes the individual agent, with her idiosyncratic perspective on the world,
to be always-already preceded by a collective agent, which shares with the
rest of a linguistic and/or national community a ‘conception of the world’,
a form of common sense, a ‘natural’ philosophy (which is obviously a cultural
and historical construct), a religion. We see why Gramsci’s conception of
language is intimately bound up with the process that I have called
‘metaphorical drift’, to what Lakoff and Johnson (as we have also seen) call
‘metaphors we live by’. And we also understand why the concept of linguistic
imperialism is not simply a grandiloquent slogan or an insult: it expresses
the intricate links and state of mutual presupposition between language and
politics. A standard language – that historico-social construct – is at once the
vehicle of linguistic imperialism, which in its triumphal progress condemns
minor languages to disappear, and imposes its grammatical markers of power
(from modal auxiliaries to Lara Croft’s grunts) on speakers on the other side
of the planet; and also a dialect, which is constantly being rendered minoritarian,
always running the risk of devaluation (the metaphor of language as currency
is age-old), if not of degeneration. On these two points, the same is – or will
be – true of English as was true of Latin in its time. Hence the unexpected
importance that Marxists or para-Marxists – Voloshinov, Pasolini, Deleuze –
have attributed to the concept of style. For linguistic imperialism, like the
broader imperialism of which it is a component and the expression, provokes
resistance and this resistance, which the concept of minor dialect seeks to
conceptualise, is inscribed in the style of speech, conceived not as the
culmination of the speaker ’s creative originality, but as the inscription in the
utterance of the clash of contending dialects. This is what Voloshinov calls
the ‘multi-accentuality’ of the word. This is what the concept of polyphony
in Bakhtin is attempting to grasp: a way of describing the linguistic class
struggle. Here, we can leave the last word to Bakhtin:
Languages are philosophies – not abstract but concrete, social philosophies,
penetrated by a system of values inseparable from living practice and class
struggle. This is why every object, every concept, every point of view, as194 • Chapter Seven