established and strictly imposed for paedagogical purposes, only last for a
period of time and the language is constantly changing. And French readers
will understand here why I cheerfully pass from langue to langageand seem
to confuse the two notions: la langue, embodied in the form of a ‘natural
language’ like English, is only the temporary, variable materialisation, in an
ideological and cultural conjuncture, of the activity of langage. It is not an
ideal system, an independent and stable object. Hence my final principle.
The sixth principle is the principle of historicity. Partially systematic, language
is also partially chaotic – not because it is naturally disorganised or partially
organised, but because it is the trace of a process of historical sedimentation
of rules, conventions, maxims, and meanings. The synchronic value of a
grammatical marker (e.g. a modal auxiliary in English or French) is never
independent of its history, any more than the meaning of the utterance ‘she
painted the house brown’ is independent of its cultural context and the history
of the culture in question.
As the names of my six counter-principles indicate (they are designated
negatively for the most part), they are still dependent on the dominant
philosophy of language with which they seek to break. The enterprise of
reconstruction has only just begun. It involves exploring a different tradition
of thinking about language: an explicitly Marxist tradition.
72 • Chapter Three