3 The ability to grasp simultaneously the different senses of one word ( which is often measured by so-called intelligence tests) and* a fortiori. the ability to manipulate them practically (for example, by recovering the original sense of ordinary words, as philosophers like to do) are a good measure of the typically scholarly ability to remove oneself from a situation and to disrupt the practical relation which links a word to a practical context, restricting the word to one of its senses, in order to consider the word in itself and (or itself, that is, as the focus for all the possible relations with situations thus treated as so many ’particular instances of the possible*. If this ability to play on different linguistic varieties, successively and especially simultaneously* is without doubt among the most unevenly distributed, if is because the mastery of different linguistic varieties - and especially the relation to language which it presupposes - can only be acquired in certain conditions of existence that are capable of authorizing a detached and free relation io language (see, in P. Bourdieu and J-C. Passeron, Rapport p^dagogiqttc et communication (Paris and The Hague: Mouton* 1965)* the analysis of variations according to social origin of the breadth of linguistic register, i.e. the degree to which different linguistic varieties are mastered).
4 J. Vendry&i, Le langage. Introduction linguistique d THisioire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1950). p. 208.
5 The imperatives of production, and even of domination* impose a minimum of communication between classes; hence the access of the
most deprived (immigrants, for example) to a kind of vital minimum of linguistic competence.
1 The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language
1 A. Comte, Svjtfm of Positive Polity, 4 vols (London: Longmans Green and Co,. 1875-77), vol. 2. p. 213.
2 N. Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), p. 3 (my italics). See also N. Chomsky and M. Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 3.
3 Chomsky himself makes this identification explicitly, at least in so far as competence is ‘knowledge of grammar* (Chomsky and Halle. The Sound Pattern of English) or ‘generative grammar internalized by someone’ (N. Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (London and fhe Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 10),
4 The fact that Habermas crowns his pure theory of ‘communicative competence* - an essenfiahst analysis of the situation of communication - with a declaration of intentions regarding the degree of repression and the degree of development of the productive forces does not mean that he escapes from the ideological effect of absolutizing the relative which is inscribed in the silences of the Chomskyan theory of competence (J. Habermas, ‘Toward a theory of communicative competence*, in H. P. Dreitzel (ed.), Recent Sociology, no. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), pp, 114-48). Even if it is purely methodological and provisional, and intended only to ‘make possible* the study of 'the distortions of pure intersubjectivity*, idealization (which is clearly seen in the use of notions such ax ‘mastery of the dialogue-constitutive universals* or ‘speech situation determined by pure subjectivity') has the practical effect of removing from relations of communication the power relations which are implemented within them in a transfigured form. This is confirmed by the uncritical borrowing of concepts such as ‘illocutionary force*, which tends to locate the power of words in words themselves rather than in the institutional conditions of their use,
5 F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tn W. Baskin (Glasgow: Collins, 1974), pp. 199-203.
6 L. Bloomfield, Language (London: George Allen, 1958), p. 29. Just as Saussure*s theory of language forgets that a language does not impose itself by its own force but derives its geographical limits from a political act of institution, an arbitrary act misrecognized as such (and misrecognized by the science of language), so Bloomfield's theory of the 'linguistic community* ignores the political and institutional conditions of ‘intercomprehension*.
7 The adjective ‘formal’, which can be used to describe a language that is guarded, polished and tense, as opposed to one that is familiar and relaxed, or a person that is starchy, stiff and formalist, can also mean
the same as the French adjective officiel (as in ka formal dinner’), that is, conducted in full accordance with the rules, in due and proper order, by formal agreement,
