those non-sciences, characterised as ‘literary’ by Althusser, which, not really
possessing an object in the scientific sense, have as their dominant function
not knowledge, but the definition and instruction of practical norms? For it
is not true that linguistics self-evidently has an object, the term ‘language’
being notoriously ambiguous and slippery. This is why I think that the external
linguistics which I defend pertains to a philosophy of language: because its
centre is constituted by a pragmatics – that is, the analysis of social relations,
of a praxis. To situate Chomsky’s position, we can compare his research
programme with that developed by Milner, in the tradition which runs from
Saussure to Jakobson and Benveniste via Meillet and the Paris school.^24 To
get straight to the point, this is the structuralist tradition, which seeks to
construct linguistics as a science by giving it a specific object, constructed by
excluding the non-pertinent phenomena encompassed under the necessarily
vague notion of ‘language’: languein the technical Saussurian sense. Milner’s
axioms, referred to at the beginning of this chapter, are intended to constitute
langueas an object of science, and to equip scientific linguistics with a method,
not only a system of concepts. And it is clear that the Chomskyan research
programme is constituted along parallel lines. But it is equally clear that the
differences are considerable. The first, and by no means the least, is that, for
the tradition running from Saussure to Milner, langueis a material object, a
system – but a collective, public object, a conventional object [thesei], not a
natural one [phusei]. This at least has the advantage of safeguarding this
tradition from the form of materialism practised by Chomsky, which is a
mechanistic reductionism. Chomsky would object that the term ‘matter’, when
applied to a system, a collective, conventional object, has no definite meaning.
But Marxists will not be troubled by this objection: the historical or dialectical
materialism they practise has precisely such objects – party, class, state, capital,
or language – for its field of application.
So, if it is agreed that Chomsky’s aim is to constitute a science, we still need
to ask what his linguistics aims to be the science of – that is, what its object
is. For the I-language does indeed possess all the characteristics of a scientific
object: it is presented as real – that is, as having a material existence in the
brain of the speaker; it is specific, constructed by purging irrelevant phenomena;
and it is abstract. But it is not obvious that this object is language, construed
42 • Chapter Two
(^24) See Milner 1978, 1989, and 2002.