A Marxist Philosophy of Language (Historical Materialism)

egalitarian, their intentions toward one another are basically good and their

interests are basically shared. If those conditions are fulfilled, co-operation

may well be rational and rewarding. If they are not fulfilled, however, the

norm of co-operation is likely, in practice, to favour the more powerful party.

As many commentators have noted, the existence of systemic power

inequalities is difficult to accommodate within a liberal individualist

framework. The liberal axiom that we are all positioned similarly and

possessed of ‘equal rights’ leads to a view of conflict as essentially a local

disturbance of the ideal, harmonious relation between individuals rather

than as one instance of some more global contest between social collectivities

over power. This view is one of the elements underpinning the idea that all

kinds of conflicts can be resolved by helping the parties to communicate

with one another better. Lack of consensus is taken to imply a failure of

mutual understanding; conversely, it is often supposed that if people truly

understood one another, they would not find themselves in conflict.^13

And this is how she describes the reality of the social relations in
communications enterprises:

Discourse about communication at work is...a locus where we may observe

some of the contradictions of ‘enterprise culture’. The rhetoric of

‘empowerment’ is in tension with a reality in which the minutiae of linguistic

behaviour are obsessively regulated. There is also a contradiction between

the rhetoric and the reality of ‘skills’....It is evident, too, that what many

employers want, and what they mainly train their employees in, is not

communication skillsbut rather a communication style.^14

It is no accident if the word ‘style’ appears here: it is in questions of style
that the linguistic dialectic of the individual and the collective, interpellation
and counter-interpellation, is played out. The ‘style’ targeted here is ‘house
style’ – that is, the most deterministic interpellation of the speaker de-subjectified
by the institution.

216 • Conclusion

(^13) Cameron 2000, pp. 163–4.
(^14) Cameron 2000, p. 89.