The third principle is the principle of opacity. The transparency of language,
or of meaning, is an illusion. Language never makes itself invisible (a lapsus
is an example of this refusal of transparency). The speaker negotiates her
expression with her language: we say what our language allows us to say;
we speak with – but also against – our language; and the meaning of our
utterance is always a compromise between what we would like to have said
and what we discover (sometimes to our horror) that we actually did say.
This experience is likewise an everyday occurrence: it affects poets and English
students alike.
The fourth principle is the principle of materiality. Language is not separable
from its realisation in the form of speech or performance, in that an utterance
is always a vector of power– what Anglo-American pragmatists call
‘illocutionary force’, which they tend to understand in idealist fashion as a
mere indicator for classifying speech acts. Language is therefore never a mere
vector of information, the currency of the mind; and a language is not an
ideal system but (if it is a system) an embodied one, a material body acting on
other bodies and producing affects. Elsewhere, I have tried to describe this
situation under the generic title of ‘the violence of language’.^16 Readers will
understand why a Marxist is interested in this concept of power lodged at
the heart of language, why she recognises it as a concept with which she is
familiar – that of power relations – and will also understand why this principle
leads us, contraHabermas, to stress the agonistic aspect of linguistic exchange
rather than its irenic aspect.
The fifth principle is the principle of partial systematicity. A language is not
a system, except in the fetishistic abstraction imposed on it by the linguist,
but a set of sub-systems or partial systems in constant variation. This has two
consequences. The first is that language is not utterly chaotic, but not wholly
systematic either. Hence the countless examples of exceptions, of exploitation
in Grice’s sense (when the speaker infringes a ‘rule’ for expressive purposes –
such rules are thus eminently ‘defeasible’ and closer to moral maxims than
natural laws), of playful, deliberate non-grammaticality. (This experience is
not confined to poets, but is at the heart of our everyday lives.) The second
consequence is that language is not stable and that it cannot be fixed in the
frozen time of synchrony. The rules of grammar, even those most firmly
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 71(^16) See Lecercle 1991.