- Final thesis: the function of language is the production
of subjects
Language is not only a battlefield and one of the instruments of the class
struggle, but also the site and instrument of the transformation of individuals
into subjects. This is even – and this is the sense of my final thesis – its
principal function, which is, therefore, not that of being an instrument of
communication. And the link between linguistic agônand class struggle is
not metaphorical or merely analogical: just as classes emerge from the struggles
that oppose them (and in which they are constituted), so speakers emerge
from interlocution, from the linguistic agônthat unites and opposes them,
and which they do not pre-exist. My Marxist concepts form a system: the
linguistic conjuncture gives the state, or the moment, of the linguistic
agôn; linguistic imperialism describes the state of the power relations in this
agôn; linguistic class struggle is the Marxist name for the agôn; and interpellation
(and counter-interpellation) in and by language describe the outcome of the
agôn. Thus everything ends with the chain of interpellation that I have
described, and whose end product is a set of subjects. This is why
methodological individualism, which is the most widely shared conviction
in thinking about language, is, for me, the main philosophical enemy: in that,
by a classic operation of ideology as camera obscura, (i.e. in its traditional
pejorative sense), it turns things upside down, taking the end of the process
for its starting-point. To return the process to its correct order is precisely to
avoid the concomitant fetishism of language (as an abstract system) and of
the subject (as centre and user of words) and to treat the process in its totality –
i.e. as a process. It is to put language and the subject back in their place. The
place of language is that of a historical, social, material and political praxis.
The place of the subject is that of a becoming-subject interpellated by the
language that speaks it and counter-interpellating it in order to speak it.
198 • Chapter Seven