instrument of memory. And, in the current conjuncture, it does not merely
express the survivals of past conjunctures (in the form of metaphors, as we
have seen with Gramsci); it anticipates future conjunctures: language – an
old Hegelian theme – is also a receptacle of those provisional errors that are
future truths (let us call this the utopian aspect of language). Finally, in the
totality of the historical conjuncture, the linguistic instance possesses relative
autonomy: the different strata of language have their own times, just as (in
the Althusserian conception of the social structure) the different strata that
make up the social formation have their own times. This means that the
temporalities of language are caught up in the temporalities of change in the
social formation, but that they have their own rhythm (we can see why Marxist
determinism, which would have the social revolution revolutionise the
language at a stroke, is mistaken). This enables us (finally) to define what we
must understand by ‘langue’: neither a system, nor an ahistorical essence
(‘French’), but a linguistic formation, just as we refer to a social formation: a
set of speech acts and language games, the struggles and contradictions that
determine their relations in a given conjuncture.
Fetishism
I am not returning to the concept of fetishism in Marx and the metaphysical
subtleties of the language of commodities. I am more immediately interested
in the sense given to it by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness– a major
text in the Marxist tradition, which is unjustly neglected.^3 For Lukács moves
from the well-known Marxist thesis (fetishism is the reification of inter-human
relations, which assume the appearance of things) to its generalisation:
abstraction is the intellectual form that translates fetishism, an abstraction
which is not an eternal necessity of the human mind but a reflection of the
historical situation of capitalism. The forms of objectivity, the categories
through which we apprehend phenomena, are also historical phenomena.
The feature of fetishism in Lukács that interests me most is that it individualises
the subject as it reifies the object: the subject facing the commodity fetish or
the fetishised concept is aware only of a partial domain of reality (partial
fact, abstract partial law): it is this partial vision that individualises her by
204 • Conclusion
(^3) On Lukács, see the excellent Löwy 1979.