that is, constraints which enable the speaker to speak, and to speak in her
own right, to find her voice, which is not a given for the individual, but the
result of a struggle, of the counter-interpellation that answers the interpellation
of the subject by language.
Conjuncture
Selecting order-words as the basic utterance, as the quintessential utterance,
has two advantages. It underscores the fact that language is a form of praxis,
that its constitutive elements are speech acts, which, in the physical sense of
the term, communicate power and therefore have an effectivity. But it also
stresses the historically determinate character of these acts. A speech act takes
on meaning in a conjuncture, which is not only a historical conjuncture in
the broad sense, but a linguisticconjuncture – a set of speech acts that furnish
the act with its context and determine its meaning. The meaning of an utterance
is, therefore, the momentof the conjuncture that this utterance captures (which
means, not only expresses but actively helps to constitute: in the moment of
the conjuncture in which it is correct, the order-word is determinant). In other
words, every utterance is an event, not in that it combines pre-constituted
linguistic elements in an original way (this is the definition of rule-governed
creativity in Chomsky), but in that it intervenes in the conjuncture from which
it is derived and contributes to determining its moment. Here, incidentally,
we have a possible definition of realism in literature, a concept of which
Marxists are, as we know, fond: a literary text is realist not in as much it
produces a faithful image of an already constituted reality, but in that it
captures the moment of the conjuncture in which it is inserted and thus helps
to alter it. Here, we need to re-read Lukács’s texts on Balzac. But why posit
the existence of a linguistic conjuncture and not make do with the more
general term of historical conjuncture? Because language is endowed with a
specific effectivity. First of all, an utterance is effectively caught up in a historical
conjuncture; it expresses and therefore ‘reflects’ it (the quotation marks are
due to the notoriously problematic character of this concept: but it is possible
to conceive an active reflection, even a reflection without a mirror).^2 Next, in
this historical conjuncture it sediments its past: language is famously an
Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 203(^2) See Lecourt 1973.