have seen that they lead to excluding a fair few linguistic phenomena from
the field of study (everything that comes under ‘external linguistics’ – language
as a social, historical, political and material phenomenon); and to relegating
language games that are essential for an understanding of language – e.g.
literary language games – to the margins. To reconstruct the philosophy of
language that has just been criticised is, first of all, to formulate the converse
principles of what might be a different philosophy of language. Obviously, this
inversion is insufficient: to invert is to remain in the universe of what is
inverted and under the domination of what is inverted. But it is a start: there
is no deconstruction without destruction. I am therefore going to state the
six converse principles.
The first principle is the principle of non-immanence. Naturally, in this context
the converse of immanence cannot be transcendence: despite my admiration
for Walter Benjamin, I am not seeking to defend a mystical conception of
language. This principle affirms that it is impossible to separate language
from the world in which it emerges and of which it is an integral part. Hence
the need for an external linguistics, which studies language as it is inand of
the world: there is no radical separation between language, the society of
speakers, the bodies of individual speakers, and the institutions that interpellate
them as subjects. There is, therefore, no separation between language and the
rest of human action.
The second principle is the principle of dysfunctionality. Language is not an
instrument at the speaker’s disposal. It is an experience and an activity; it is
not an object distinct from speakers and manipulated by them. One enters
into language, one slips into language, one inhabits language (to use the old
Heideggerian metaphor). As a result, sometimes I speak the language (which
gives me the impression of using it like a tool); and sometimes it is the lan-
guage that speaks through my mouth and guides my statement or imposes
it on me. We have this experience on a daily basis: it is called lapsus, cliché,
echo or quotation. Consequently, communication cannot be the sole function
of language (independently of the fact that the term ‘function’ proves
inadequate, in that it slices up the totality of experience into tranches and
thereby transforms it into an object); and Jakobson was right to distinguish
between several functions. It is arguably not even the most important of them:
language is also the site of the expression of affect, a terrain of play and
learning about the world, and so on.
70 • Chapter Three