rocated, as in the famous diagram in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.
A singularly paradoxical mentality is required to deny that this diagram
corresponds to a daily – and essential – experience of linguistic activity.
It is only when we replace this formula by others, which are logically
possible and/or historically attested – for example, ‘language is an instrument
for expressing ideas’, ‘language is a weapon that enables us to convince and
persuade’, ‘language makes it possible to master the world by naming it’, or
‘language is derived from action in common, which it facilitates and develops’ –
that we realise what is partial (in both senses of the word) about this formula.
For it now appears that language is also something other than an instrument
of communication and that it is possibly not always even an ‘instrument’.
This doxahas three main characteristics: (i) it does not need to be explicitly
formulated, because it is lodged in the mind of each and every one of us; (ii)
when it is formulated, it is in the mode of a self-evident fact: it does not need
to be argued for, because it tells things as they are and there is nothing to
repeat or add; (iii) it is all the more effective in that it does not need to be
defended.
Its effectiveness, its power can be gauged by the extent of its investment
of society. It in fact possesses its sector of the economy (the public relations
industry, in which all forms of advertising can be included), its institutions,
and their countless agents (every kind of media, for whose existence it supplies
an intellectual and ethical justification). Today, communication is a key sector
of advanced capitalism.
We can note, in particular, two symptoms of this investment of the whole
of the social structure. The ideology of communication is the ideological
foundation of educational policies of language teaching: it therefore invests
the central ideological state apparatus of capitalism – schools. For to learn a
foreign language is to learn to communicate in this language. We shall therefore
not trouble ourselves with culture and literature and will develop the general
doxawith the following particular formula: ‘If you don’t know English, then
go to Berlitz rather than school or university’.
The second symptom is the increasing importance assumed by the doxaof
communication in the field of capitalist politics. Imperialist aggression is
always preceded by a communications campaign. It will be noted that here
we are no longer dealing with propaganda, which aims to persuade and
convince, even when it is not particular about the methods employed. What
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 65