by two interlocutors, allowing for an egalitarian exchange of words, but a
linguistic formation – that is, the unstable outcome of a multitude of linguistic
contests, the image, in a given conjuncture, of a set of power relations which
are seemingly in temporary equilibrium but actually fluctuating.
Collectivism
The defining characteristic of the dominant philosophy of language is
individualism, hallowed in the two forms of liberal individualism (the essential
thing is the free choice of the individual, whose freedom of expression is
unlimited, politically and theoretically); and methodological individualism
(collective entities – say, state or class – have no existence apart from the
individuals that compose them; and the collective actions imputed to them
are simply the result of the composition of individual actions). The
overwhelming majority of linguistic theories and philosophies of language
share this individualism. It stands to reason that it is the individual who
speaks, that it is the individual who possesses the faculty of language, which
therefore has its seat in the individual. Biological, phenomenological and
enunciative versions of linguistics share this individualist position, which
has greatly contributed to the Chomskyan research programme becoming
dominant. The only exception (albeit sizeable) is Saussure’s system of langue,
which is external and prior to individual speakers and imposed on them. For
stubborn observation indicates that, when it comes to language at any rate,
methodological individualism does not work. The individual speaker ’s ability
to have an effect on her mother tongue or national language is strictly limited,
even in the most favourable case – that of the literary creator. To be thought
about adequately, what language needs is the collectivism of the assemblages,
order-words, institutions, rituals and practices which are the source of
utterances. The speaker is not the inventor of her language; she speaks a
language that she has not created, but into which she is integrated to find
her voice. The result is that, in an important sense, she is no longer the initiator
of her discourse, except through an illusion (fortunate and necessary), but
enters into a discourse that is always-already collective. Voloshinov calls this
collective effect the ‘multi-accentuality’ of words; Baktin, polyphony. And this
linguistic collectivism is not to be regarded as an intolerable determinism
that condemns the speaker to producing Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ in 1984 : we
are, instead, in the presence of what Judith Butler calls ‘enabling constraints’ –
202 • Conclusion