comes to teaching). Finally, the concept has a direct political interest: it aims
to grasp the state of the linguistic class struggle within a linguistic formation;
it helps to define the moment of the linguistic conjuncture; it makes it possible
to separate the emergent from the old. In short, it facilitates not only a
description of the conjuncture, but also the intervention that it calls for.
Style
It is curious that so seemingly individualistic a concept (‘the style is the man’)
should figure in a glossary of Marxist philosophy of language, where the
main philosophical enemy is liberal individualism. Readers will recall that a
number of Marxist or para-Marxist thinkers (Voloshinov, Pasolini, Deleuze)
were fascinated by questions of style (in particular, by the problem of indirect
free speech). In fact, the concept is of great interest to us, in that it makes it
possible to think under the same term the collective (it is the language that
speaks) and the individual (I speak the language that speaks me). The term,
in fact, contains a happy ambiguity: it refers at once to aesthetic individuality
and to the chosen identity of the group: the style of Henry James and
expressionist style or rocker style. For style is not only a matter of language
and a stylist is not only a novelist: one of the important things about the
concept is that it speaks to us of linguistic praxisand non-linguistic cultural
practices in the same terms. It therefore strongly suggests, as against the
structuralist principle of immanence, that linguistic praxisis neither isolated
nor isolable. Finally, if we adopt Deleuze’s definition of style as a-grammaticality
and taking things to the limit, the concept enables us to think linguistic change
as a function of the historical conjuncture, which creates needs for identity
and translates them into fashions and styles, and of the linguistic conjuncture:
the counter-interpellation inscribed in the individual style is an intervention
in the linguistic conjuncture which alters it, however marginally.
- Short glossary of neoliberal philosophy of language
Communication
The sole thesis of the dominant philosophy of language in its quintessential
form is ‘language is an instrument of communication’. An ideology (in the
pejorative sense) of communication, its necessity and benefits, derives from
Contrasting Short Glossaries of Philosophy of Language • 213