take hold of the masses draw their effectivity from this material existence as
words and order-words, from their insertion into a collective assemblage of
enunciation, whose main characteristic, as we know, is its ontological mixedness.
So ideas do not become ‘material forces’ by some process of transmutation:
from the outset, they are material, for they are the words which ‘express’
them (here, as usual, the metaphors of the dominant philosophy betray us).
We understand why Lenin, in a moment of extreme political urgency, found
the time to write a text on slogans: the correctness of a political line in a given
conjuncture is not an abstract theoretical question, but the practical outcome
of the linguistic selection of good slogans.
Fourth proposition: if the origin of language is to be sought in the exigencies
of the division of labour, and if this myth is effective, it is because language
is intimately involved in the division of society into antagonistic classes and
in the struggles that produce this division. For language is the source of the
illusory generalisation (i.e. ideology in its traditional pejorative sense) whereby
humanity conceals the real relations between the families, tribes and classes
that make up society and fetishises them in the form of the state (which is
due to disappear one day). But it is also the terrain on which the struggles
implied by these relations are conducted. The task of a revolutionary critique –
that of Marx and his successors – is, therefore, to make language descend from
its philosophical heights (Marx is especially virulent about the philosophical
pretensions of Max Stirner, whose post-Hegelian puns pass for concepts) to
the materiality of the real world. Thus we will pass, in the words of Marx’s
famous formula, from the language of philosophy to the ‘language of real life’.
Language is the terrain of the class struggle. This statement can be construed
in two ways. The first is obvious: the class struggle passes (in particular)
throughlanguage. The second is less clear: the class struggle is situated in
language. An example will permit me to impart a more positive sense to this
second formulation, which comes down to giving a meaning to the old Marxist
saw: ‘the dominant ideology dominates’. For the class struggle inlanguage
has one spectacular feature: its agents – I should say its spokespersons – do
not need to be conscious either of its existence or of the fact that they are
participants in it. The following utterance was to be heard on British TV news
a few years ago: ‘The dispute by the health workers in now in its third week’.
For us, English has an advantage over French in this respect: it does not
conceal the partisanship behind this seemingly factual and ‘objective’ news
196 • Chapter Seven