Langage/langue
The Saussurian revolution took the form of extracting the system of langue
from the totality of linguistic phenomena, the remainder being excluded from
the field of scientific activity under the rubric of parole. Milner replaces the
original metaphysical question, ‘Why is there language rather than nothing?’,
by the question of the science of language: ‘Why is there languerather than
nothing?’. (In fact, the question being Lacanian, it takes the form: ‘Why is
there lalanguerather than nothing?’.)^10 This means that the linguist has nothing
to say about langage. On different bases (it has been argued that the Chomskyan
research programme is a systematic inversion of Saussurianism), Chomsky
arrives at the same conclusions, even going so far as to deny any scientific
existence to natural languages. Obviously, this is the sticking point. First
of all, because the word ‘language [langage], is insistent, even in the titles of
Chomsky’s scientific works. And next because to deny that the issue of
natural/maternal/national languages is of any interest is to preclude oneself
from saying anything about the crucial problems posed by linguistic praxis:
the problems of the history of languages, of social and regional variations
within languages, of the disappearance of languages on account of linguistic
imperialism, and hence of the politics of language. This is why the Marxist
philosophy of language, inspired on this score by Deleuze and Guattari, does
not consider the distinction between langueand langageto be essential. Firstly,
because it adopts the standpoint of the totality (against the fetishism of positive
science) and is, therefore, interested in language as a total human praxis, refusing
to exclude any linguistic phenomena whatsoever and interesting itself in the
interface between language and the world. Secondly, because it makes natural
languages the privileged object of its interest. Thus, we can contrast ‘English’ –
major system or language – with English – a linguistic formation – according
to the following correlation. ‘English’ is single; immanent (its speakers are
angels, it is separated from the world); reduced (by the exclusion of irrelevant
linguistic phenomena); systematic (it is a fixed code); stable (it is fixed at a
point in time and the system changes as a whole or not at all); outside time
(this is called synchrony); abstract (it principally exists in the grammars that
describe it and is only spoken by a tiny minority of speakers); and teachable
210 • Conclusion
(^10) Milner 1978, p. 26.