doubtless not a good myth. (The Marxian myth of the constitution of the
social around the labour relationship has considerable advantages over it, to
which I shall return.) All the more so in that this myth of origins, while it
has the advantage over Chomsky’s philosophy of language of trying to think
language as a social phenomenon and therefore of attempting to think society,
paradoxically does not avoid a form of individualism, which it always risks
lapsing back into. Recourse to the phenomenological notion of the life-world
is typical. This life-world is certainly shared, but it nevertheless assumes an
individual subject as its starting-point: it is me whose experience this is, who
lives this world, and the community is built on the intersection of individual
life-worlds. This individualises and, if readers will allow me the expression,
biographises that which is of the order of language and the encyclopaedia,
and represents a regression by comparison with Popper’s ‘third world’, which
is constitutively situated at the level of the collective, like the system Saussure
calls langue. The problem is that Habermas conceives linguistic interaction
on the model of the legal contract – a marginal, complex language game that
belongs to the exclusive domain of the legal superstructure, and hence is not
conducive to explaining linguistic activity in general, of which it is a product
or effect at the end of the chain, rather than a constitutive relation. In order
to think language as a social phenomenon, we need to start from a much more
fundamental social relationship: what makes human groups societies is not
the formalisation of their relations by means of contracts, but the common
activity that unites and divides them, of which language is simultaneously
the product, the expression and the instrument. Readers will have recognised
labour as the Marxian myth of origins. And they will have understood how,
in order to reconstruct historical materialism, Habermas abandons any form
of Marxism: to found society on a contract (legal-linguistic) is to regress from
the collective to the individual (an individual multiplied by two does not
compose a collective); appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, it is to
practise a form of methodological individualism. This individualism leads
Habermas to re-state the old myth, originally formulated by Haeckel, that
ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis, and to set great store by Piaget’s
theory of learning, from which he extrapolates in order to explain social
evolution. For him, society evolves not by the accumulation of contradictions
and revolutionary upheaval, but by the teaching and accumulation of
knowledge (this point is, to say the least, open to challenge). We can see why
56 • Chapter Three