the domination of the feudal model adapted to the new conjuncture. Pasolini’s
example is a classic one: the extension of the ‘vulgar’ pronunciation of roi,
which we have conserved, at the expense of its socially valorised pronunciation,
rouais. And this change in the language, which was determined by the change
in historical conjuncture (here Pasolini approximates to Marr, or, rather, to
Paul Lafargue), was due to a more fundamental change in the oral-written
languages of the superstructures. The new élites spoke the technical, philo-
sophical and industrial languages of the ascendant bourgeoisie – that is, adds
Pasolini, ‘the language of the infrastructure’. The economic and political
triumph of capitalism over feudalism was accompanied by a linguistic revo-
lution, which had direct effects on one of the levels of language – the ‘national
language’ – in that it substituted the language of the infrastructure for that
of the superstructure. PaceStalin, the bourgeois revolution is clearly inscribed
in the language.
Even if the conclusions are sometimes strange (one would like to know
more about this ‘language of the infrastructure’: does it simply involve technical
terminology adopted as a stylistic model or the does the infrastructure ‘speak’?),
we can see that we have left behind the dominant philosophy of language
in at least two respects. There is no longer any question of naturalism here:
human nature is simply the name given to the set of social relations – that
is, to a cultural and historical conjuncture. With naturalism disappears method-
ological individualism. The linguistic experience is obviously individual (it
is I who speak), but, in linguistic matters, this individuality is always-already
collective, in the sense that my statements, my language(s), are the historical
products of a collective conjuncture. At the moment when the speaker opts,
as the most profound expression of her personality, to say roiand not rouais,
she enters into a historical process of which she is not necessarily conscious:
she is spoken by the language she is convinced she speaks.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is the dissolution of the object langue–
that is, of the Saussurian system or Chomskyan universal grammar. For it
appears that, under the names of langueor langage, we fetishistically transform
a complex linguistic situation into a single object. The Pasolinian model of
three types of language, in the form of a hourglass or X, has the advantage
of not denying or excluding the majority of linguistic phenomena. The bottom
half of the X corresponds to spoken language, stable and sedimented, subject
to historical change through the accumulation of the ruins or monuments of
The Marxist Tradition • 87