So we see that even the great Marxist leader does not avoid contradictions –
which is only natural. On the one hand, he seems to locate himself without
qualms in the dominant philosophy of language, whose watchword is the
instrumentalisation of language, neutral tool of communication, and whose
effect is its fetishisation, since language is thereby released from the class
struggle and from history. In Stalin’s text, readers will have recognised a
‘Marxist’ – i.e. slightly left-wing – version of the principles of immanence
(language is an object independent of classes engaged in struggle, its speakers
are angelic); functionality (language performs its function of communication
in the service of the whole society); transparency (language is a tool and hence
we are not going to examine it for the opacity entailed by its anchorage in
social contradictions); ideality (language is fetishised as an object independent
of the human beings who speak it: this is the Marxist equivalent of the linguists’
ideal abstract system); systematicity (in truth, Stalin expresses no opinion on
this point, his grammatical references being elementary); and synchrony
(language is not affected by historical developments). The most astonishing
thing about all this is that such a set of opinions did not give Marxists pause.
But who was in a position to say that the emperor had no clothes? On the
other hand, Stalin’s text possesses an undeniably Marxist style in that it
manifestly constitutes a political intervention, connected to a linguistic and
nationalities policy, whose complexity could only be unravelled by a historical
analysis of the ideological conjuncture of the USSR in the 1950s. In his practice,
the political leader therefore contradicts the principle of immanence or neutrality
proclaimed in his theory: this clearly resembles a SPL.
It is not therefore not surprising if a change of historical conjuncture should
have produced effects. In 1960s Italy, the Marxist response to questions of
language was formulated differently.
As is well known, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a scandalous film-maker, a
novelist of the slums of inner-city Rome, a poet, and a homosexual activist.
Less well-known is the fact that he was a communist. A collection of his
essays, Empirismo eretico, brought together texts published in the weekly paper
of the Italian Communist Party, Rinascita. One of them, written in 1965,
provoked a polemic in the Italian press. It was entitled ‘News from the
Laboratory: Poetic Notes for a Marxist Linguistics’. Pasolini’s desire to take
up the issue of Marxist thinking about language from a completely different
perspective is clear. And readers will appreciate the irony of scientific
82 • Chapter Four