LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY LANGUAGE, SEMANTICS AND IDEOLOGY Michel Pecheux St. Martin's Press New York © Fran�ois Maspero 1975 English Iranslation © Harban, N agpal 1982 References, bibliography and index by Ben Brewster All rights reserved. For information, write: St. Martin's Press, Inc" 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Printed in Hong Kong First published in the United States of America 1982 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pecheux, Michel, 1938- Language, semantics, and ideology. Translation of: Les verites de La Palice. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Languages-Philosophy. 2. Semantics. I. Title. PJ06. P3913 1981 401 81-5337 ISBN 0-312-46915-2 AAeR2 Contents Translators Noll VII Littl, Prejawry Nol< VIII AckMwl,dg'mrots x Introcluction I PART I LINGUISTICS, LOGIC AND PHIL­ OSOPHY OF LANGUAGE I A Glance at the Historical Develop­ ment of the Relationship between 'Theory of Knowledge' and Rhetoric in regard to the Problem of Determination 2 I 2 Metaphysical Realism and Logical Empiricism: Two Forms of Regressive Exploitation of the Sciences by Idealism 41 PART" FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE TO THE THEOR Y OF DISCOURSE 3 Lang"' and Ideology 55 4 Determination, Name Formation and Embedding 61 5 Articulation of U nerances, Impli- cation of Properties, Sustaining Effect 6g 6 Subject, Centre, Meaning 83 PART III DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY(IES) 7 On the Ideological Conditions of the ReproductionjTransformation of the Relations of Production 97 8 Ideology, Interpellation, 'Munchausen Effect' 103 9 The Subject-Form of Discourse 110 v v, Con/tntJ PART IV DISCURSIVE PROCESSES IN THE SCIENCES AND IN POLITICAL PRACTICE 10 Epistemological Break and Subject­ Form of Discourse: There is no Pure 'Scientific Discourse' 133 II Marxism-Leninism Transforms the Relationship between the Subject-Form of Discourse and Political Practice 143 12 The Subject-Form of Discourse in the Subjective Appropriation of Scien- tific Knowledges and Political Practice 155 Conclusion '7' Appendix, A Scientific Theory of Propaganda? 20' Appendix 2 Some Possible Repercussions on Lin- guistic Research 206 Appendix 3 The French Political Winter: Beginning of a Rectification (Postscript for English Readers) 2 , , Bibliography 22' Index 23' Translator's Note The publishers and I are grateful to all the publishers who have allowed the use of quotations from their publications. For this purpose I have used the standard English editions when these are available. Where no English translation is available or when the author's use of a quotation requires it, I have translated directly from the French or adapted the available English translation. For help with the translation, especially some difficult philo­ sophical passages,I am grateful to Dr Grahame Lock;and to Mr J ean­ Jacques Lecercle, especially for help with technical linguistic terms. I would also like to thank Mme Michele Guenoun. HARBANS NAGPAL Paris, '979 vu Little Prefatory Note The term semantics is often found today in the company of those of semiotics and semiology; in this connection, I should like to review a few of the characteristic aspects of these different disciplines. Semwlics, or the science of signs, introduced by John Locke in the context of an empiricist philosophy of language, was developed in the United States by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839- 1914), wi th his distinctions between the iconic, the indexical and the symbolic. [n their recent Dictionnaire encydopidique des sciences du langage (1972), from which I have taken the gist of this note, Oswald Ducrol and Tzvetan Todorov quote the following admission of Peirce himself as to the universal goals of semiotics as he underst<X><l it: '] t has never been in my power to study anything, - mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chem­ istry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology - except as astudyof semeiotic' (Peirce 1953, p. 3'2).This typically American empirical universality can paradoxically be linked however with Ernst Cassirer's 'philosophy of symbolic forms', in which the symbolic, the distinguishing feature of man as opposed to animals, constitutes the common spring of myth, religion, art and science, each of which is a 'language'. Next, the logician Charles Morris, basing himself on the notion of ideal language (Frege, Russell, Carnap), developed the relationship between logic and semiotics, notably by proposing a distinction between syntax (the relations between signs and other signs), semantics (the relation between signs and what they designate) and pragmatics (the relation between signs and their users). Note finally that, beginning in the 1960s, investigators in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries have started to develop research in semiotics. For this, they have drawn especially on the theory of dual signalling systems, and on cybernetics and information theory. Completely independently, the term semiology was introduced by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to define the object of linguistics VIII Little Prefatory Note IX inside a much larger field; he wrote: Langue is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore com­ parable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, sym­ bolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems. A scienu that studies tht life of signs within socitty is conceivable; it would be part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology (Saussure 1974, p. 123)' Asis well known, with the help of the celebrated distinction between signifier and signified and other linguistic oppositions such as paradigm and syntagm, a series of semiological studies of the systems of fashion, advertising, road signs, kinship relations, myths, etc., have been developed under the aegis of this statement of Saussure's. Whether or not semiotics and semiology designate one and the same discipline - a point that is still in dispute - it remains the case that they are both concerned with all signs, whether they be by nature linguistic or extra-linguistic (images, sounds, etc.). By contrast, semantics, most generally definedas concerning meaning or sense,1 seems to refer especially to linguistics and logic; the word semantics emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, but what it designates concerns both very ancient preoccupations of philos­ ophers and grammarians, and recent linguistic research; there was a period (roughly the first half of the twentieth century) when linguists were reluctant to recognise semantics as 'a part of linguistics'. Since the advent of Chomskyism, semantics (,interpretative' or 'generative') has been at the centre of linguistic controversy, especially in respect to its relationship with syntax (is the deep structure exclusively syntactic, or is it both syntactic and semantic?). These controversies depend, as we shall see, on philosophical questions which themselves involve the problem of universality and ideal language. Finally, some authors (such as Adam Schaff) identify semantics with semiology, a clear sign of the theoretical proximity of the three disciplines. I. The straightforward tTarulation of'snu' into English is 'meaning'. However, the French word is also used in contexts where the normal English word would be 'sense' or, in the negative form 'non-snu', 'nonserue'. Moreover, in their trarulatioru of the writings of Frege, Black and Geach adopted 'sense' for Frese's 'SiM' in the opposition SiM/Btdndung (serue/reference), which French tTarulations of Frese render snu/dIno14tio",. In this trarulation 'sms' has mostly been trarulated by 'meaning'; sometimes, when the context seemed to demand it or a Frese translation was concemed, as 'sense', and occasionally, at the risk of a certain clunuiness, as here with both English words [Translator's Note). Acknowledgements The author and publishers wish to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: George Allen & Unwin Ltd and Basic Books Inc., for the extract from 'Interpretation of Dreams' in Til. Standard Edition of til. Works if Sigmund Freud, vols IV and v; Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd, for the extracts from Translations from til. Philosophical Writings ifColliob Frege (ed. Peter T. Geach and Max Black), and from Logical Investigations by Gottlob Frege, translated by PeterT. Geach and R. H. Sloothoff; Editions Gallimard, Paris, for the extract from Uibni<:: Critique de Descarus by Yvon Belaval (1960); Walter de Gruyter and Co., Berlin, for the extract from Wilhelm von Humbo/Is Werke, vol. v (1g68); Harper & Row Publishers Inc., for the extract from Til. Hiswry if Rationalist Thought by N. Chomsky (1g66); Editions Klincksieck, Paris, for the extracts from LtMauvais outil by Paul Henry (1977); Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, for the extracts from Marx and Engels: Selected Works in 3 Volumes, vol. III, and Collected Works ofLenin, vol. XIV; Editions Fran.;ois Maspero, Paris, for the extracts from Une Crist et son enjou by Dominique Lecourt (1973); Philosophic tI Philosophic sponllJnie us savants by Louis Aithusser (1g67); Cahins Marxisus-Leninisus (1966) and Cinq ituus du materialisme hiswrique by Etienne Balibar (1972); Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, for the extract from L'Blabli by Robert Linhart (1978); New Left Books, for the extracts from Reading CapillJI by Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, translated by B. Brewster (1g65); Lenin and Philosophy and otlur Essays (1g64) and Politics and History: Montesquitu, Rousstau, Hegel and Mar% by Louis Althusser, translated B. Brewster (1g68), and Essays in Self Criticism by Louis Althusser, translated by Grahame Lock (1972); Open Court Publishing Co., for the extract from Til. Sciente of Mechanics by Ernest Mach, translated by T. J. McCormack (1960); Pergamon Press Ltd, for the extract from Introduetion w Semantics by A. Schaff (1g62); Presses Universitaires dr. France, for the extract from l'Empirisme Logique by Louis Vax (1970); Routledge & Kegan Paul x Acknowledgements Xl Ltd and Humanities Press Inc., for the extracts from Logical Investigationsby E. Husserl, translated by J. N. Findlay, and with W.