force and the performative character of language assume a new meaning. We
are dealing with a power that is collectively exercised, in political action, in
the establishment of power relations. Language is material not only in the
sense that it exercises a material power on bodies (this might be called the
Castafiore principle, after the character in Tintin), but because it has something
of the nature of the materiality of institutions. There exists a causal chain,
which I propose to call the Althusserian chain of interpellation, which runs
from institutions to rituals, from rituals to practices, from practices to linguistic
acts: each link has its own materiality and has something of the materiality
of the whole chain. We understand why, for Deleuze and Guattari, the basic
utterance is not a judgement, which contains and transmits a proposition,
but an order-word, which intervenes in the conjuncture. Lenin is indeed the
source of a different philosophy of language – an agonistic, as opposed to an
irenic or co-operative, one: neither Habermas nor Chomsky.
The second level of the communist programme is the concrete analysis of
social formations. In the field of language, this involves the analysis of natural
languages in as much as they are national languages. Here, again, we encounter
Chomsky and his negation of the pertinent existence of national languages:
give or take a few parameters, and we pass from German to English; the
universal grammar remains the same. As against this denial of history, what
Lenin enables us to conceive is the importance of natural-national languages
as objects of linguistics. If language is structured by power relations, as power
relations, the site of those relations is a national language; and the concepts
of major language (Deleuze and Guattari), glottophagy (Calvet), and external
linguistics (Bourdieu) become essential.
The third level of the communist programme is the level of strategic and
tactical analysis. This is the level that supplies the analyses which directly
guide day-to-day political action. If, as Althusser maintains, Lenin puts Marx
back on his feet by privileging the second and third levels of the communist
programme (concrete analysis of the social formation and political analysis
in terms of strategy and tactics), at the expense of the first (the general
principles of the theory), it follows that there is no possible analysis of the
moment of the conjuncture which is sufficiently stable, embodying verifiable
predictions and derived from general principles, to be characterised as true.
What we are dealing with is a series of political proposals, embodied in correct
slogans – in other words, an interpretation. Lenin is the master of the correct
102 • Chapter Four