"Language, as the performance of all language,is neither reactionary nor progressive;
it is quite simply fascist."
Rereading Roland Barthes' inaugural lecture at the Collège de France (7 January 1977)1
We would like to talk about the inaugural lecture given by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France on 7 January 19772.
It was in this communication that Roland Barthes described language, as the performance of all language, quite simply as "fascist", for fascism is not preventing you from saying, it's forcing you to say".
We will not be intellectually dishonest and stick to this wording by taking it out of its context.
Rather, it is an attempt to interpret, or reinterpret, this « paper », which contains some precious « nuggets », by showing how this iconoclastic, provocative and somewhat scandalous statement, in the light of the text which follows, means just about the opposite of what we understand when we take it out of its context, and why the inaugural lesson is interesting from the point of view of plurilingualism.
As usual, there will be a lot of talk about words and interpretation.
Let's start with "forcing".
The highway code in France and in many other countries requires drivers who take their car to drive on the right and not on the right or left, and possibly to stop at a stop sign before setting off. Will it be said that the highway code is "fascist"? If it is forbidden to forbid, then the prohibition on killing becomes manifestly abusive, despite the first of the Ten Commandments.
The problem is the rule. Barthes puts it bluntly. "Language is legislation, and a tongue is its code". We can still discuss the terms. In fact, again according to Barthes, the problem is power. "To speak, and all the more so to discourse, is not to communicate, as is too often repeated, it is to subjugate: every language is a generalised rection".
"As soon as it is uttered, even in the deepest intimacy of the subject, language enters into the service of a power. In it, two rubrics inevitably emerge: the authority of assertion and the gregariousness of repetition.[...] As soon as I enunciate, these two rubrics come together in me; I am both master and slave: I do not content myself with repeating what has been said, dwelling comfortably in the servitude of signs: I say, I assert, I assert what I repeat... In language, then, servility and power inevitably merge".
Without any effort at interpretation, it could easily be inferred that holding a chair at the Collège de France is also an enterprise of enslavement and that listeners constitute a gregarious crowd. And we might be surprised that Roland Barthes could have exposed himself to such a contradiction. If, in fact, "there can be freedom only outside language", the only philosophically tenable response would be silence.
As it does nothing of the sort, an effort of interpretation is required.
What impact can be given to a phrase which is contradicted as soon as it is uttered?
Power, a universal fact
Should we see it as a posture, a stylistic device, a knowing nod to the famous May 1968 slogan "il est interdit d'interdire" ("it is forbidden to forbid"), or on the contrary as a supremely clever way of demonstrating its vacuity?
When it comes to editorial marketing, we sometimes find nuggets like Why the World Doesn't Exist3 , the title of a book published in 2014 by the young German philosopher Markus Gabriel, who starts from a simple fundamental idea: the world doesn't exist. But "As you will see, [he says], this does not mean that absolutely nothing exists. Our planet exists, my dreams, evolution, toilets flushing, hair loss, hopes, elementary particles and even unicorns on the moon, to name but a few examples. The principle which states that the world does not exist implies that everything else does. So I can already hint that I'm going to say that everything exists except the world. To put it simply, the world exists, but it is not what is generally believed, which is easy to understand.
We are therefore dealing with a rhetorical and semantic manipulation which corresponds to the procedure used by Roland Barthes in his inaugural lesson.
This is what we need to examine in more details.
First, we need to clarify the concept of power.
That language confers power is a certainty. No one today can question this. Doesn't Barbara Cassin's latest book bear the beautiful title "Ce que peuvent les mots" (What words can do)4 .
A little reflection on the notion of power is in order.
We would like to better define the distinction between imperative strength, power, domination and oppression.
Power, in the Nietzschean sense, or the élan vital, according to Bergson, is the primary reality. A distant echo of this can be found in Leibniz's monad. If we are to move beyond the human, the tree is the very embodiment of power.
Power derives from the relationship between people and, like all living beings, between people and their environment. As man is a social being, which is hardly news, power never or almost never appears in its pure state. But it is truly universal.
Consider, for example, the fact that the tree, which is a beautiful manifestation of power, also exerts power over people. If you're not convinced, consider the importance of the myth of the tree and the forest in literature. And trees have power relationships with each other, some developing at the expense of others.
The power relationship is therefore universal, and systematically results in a domination effect which is implied by the asymmetry of power.
Domination, by construction, an asymmetrical phenomenon
Asymmetry is a plural and, in some respects, measurable property which gives domination effects all their characteristics.
No need for an detailed study here. A few comments will suffice.
The asymmetry may not be lasting or permanent. In a political debate or a football match, asymmetries alternate and in the end, the winner is the one who has scored the most points. In economics, pure and perfect competition is purely theoretical; the reality of the market is inextricably linked to relations of domination that the law tries to correct, in very different ways depending on the situation. In the labour market, the company or entrepreneur is dominant by nature and the purpose of labour law is to compensate (more or less) for the imbalance, but the employee also needs the work on offer and has an interest in the company's success.
Asymmetry can be specific and partial. You may dominate in one area and be dominated in another. So-and-so will be a leader in his/her work, but a laggard in his/her relationship. So-and-so will be brilliant in mathematics but hopeless in literature. Asymmetries can be complementary and encourage cooperation. So-and-so will be an innovator, and so-and-so a good marketing man. Performers can't be improvised and need advisers and collaborators to win over (dominate) their audience.
In all cases, there is a balance between pure power or creativity, on the one hand, and pure domination, on the other. The true artist first seeks excellence in his art, such he sees it. The recognition of the audience may or may not come. But it is secondary to creation.
Asymmetry can become cumulative for the same person and a certain type of population, in positive and negative terms. The concept of intersectionality or intersectionalism (coined by the American Afrofeminist academic Kimberlé Williams Crensshaw in 1989) was known long before it crossed the Atlantic and is analysed as an accumulation of handicaps for a group in society. Domination can thus become toxic, exploitative or oppressive. But the important thing here is to deal with the phenomena of power as a whole.
Similarly, all linguistic facts are permeated by phenomena of power and authority.
Descartes' "I think therefore I am"5 can easily be transformed into "I speak therefore I am", Descartes making language, and more precisely speech, the distinguishing feature of man and the revelation of a thought within him. For Plato, as for Aristotle, "thought and discourse are one and same thing, except that the inner discourse that the soul holds in silence with itself has been given the special name of thought"6 . This means, first of all, that language is not only, nor primarily, a means of communication. Nor does it have exclusive rights to thought. Ernst Cassirer theorised language, the arts, science, technology and history as symbolic forms7 , all of which are partly mediated by language.
As soon as language appears as a means of communication, an asymmetrical relationship is established, at both individual and collective levels.
When analysing cross-linguistic exchanges in the form of borrowings, linguists would do well to get away from naivety.
Rethinking linguistic borrowing
We can unreservedly subscribe to Du Bellay's phrase: "It is not a vicious but highly commendable thing to borrow sentences and words from a foreign language and adapt them to one's own".
The trend towards more and more anglicisms is not new, but the covid period saw a surge of astonishing vocabulary. It's not possible to dissect it in this editorial, but some people took care of that otherwise. Let's just mention the emergence of the word cluster, which is simply due to the fact that scientists, who communicate mainly with each other in English, use this banal, all-purpose word to designate centres of contamination and think that everyone else should do the same. And educated people, ministers first and foremost, are quick to use it for fear of being seen as stupid, old-fashioned or not modern enough. Similarly, to monitor contact cases, the word tracing came in handy, and we have found only one scientific text on the subject written in French and using the word suivi. Traçage could have also done the trick.
In ideal situations, and probably the most frequent historically, borrowed words can be seen as a natural process of enrichment which takes place through different channels. Ferdinand Brunot and Charles Bruneau in their Précis de grammaire historique de la langue française8 drew a distinction between necessary borrowing and luxury borrowing. This idea of luxury borrowing generally has a positive connotation because luxury borrowing always originates in the language which receives it, that is to say that the speakers go looking for it, and this can appear as an enrichment. Except that the speaker who makes this 'luxury loan' is in fact trying to assert a superiority, which will be interpreted by others as snobbery and futile submission. Moreover, usage often ends up sorting out and discarding unnecessary borrowings. This is partly true, but it is a simplistic view.
Far too many linguists today take refuge in this idyllic vision of cross-linguistic exchanges. Alongside the borrowings of necessity and the borrowings of luxury, there is a third type, the borrowings of domination.
Tove Skutnabb-Kangas presented her theory of language exchange at the 1ers Assises européennes du plurilinguisme in Paris in 2005. "When "great" languages are learned subtractively (at the expense of the mother tongue) rather than additively (in addition to the mother tongue), they become killer languages. "Being a killer language is NOT a characteristic of a language. It is a mode of relationship: a question of how a language functions in relation to other languages. Any language can become a killer language in its relationship with other languages. But 'languages' do not kill every other language. It is the power relationship between the speakers of languages which are the decisive factors in the unequal relations between languages, which means that the populations of dominated groups learn other languages subtractively, to the detriment of their own". What applies to education obviously applies to communication.
To know whether the exchange is predominantly subtractive or predominantly additive would require in-depth studies and would justify dozens of theses.
To paraphrase Saussure, what we are talking about here is the dual essence of language, both power and power9 .
So the wholesale condemnation of power as power in order to condemn the language that is its primary expression (in the beginning was the verb!) is rather puzzling, but all the developments that follow in the inaugural lesson seem to take the opposite view. And that's where the lesson really comes into its own.
First of all, we should note that Roland Barthes is aware of his own contradiction in evoking "discourse [his own] caught in the fatality of its power", and the arguments he finds, evoking the child playing and coming and going around his mother, are quite touching if not convincing. For us, the explanation is simple. In every discourse, every work, every action, there is a 'power' component, and a 'pouvoir' component. Creation doesn't need 'power'; it only comes in addition, and often without even having sought it.
We still don't understand how it is possible to condemn language in the absolute, and at the same time praise literature and give it a major role in the life of the mind.
The question of the code
For some, and even many people, the doxa or common sense, language is a code. There exist even sophisticated formulations
If a natural language (we are only talking about natural language here, i.e. a language spoken by people) were a code, we could say that the highway code is a language. We speak of mathematical language rather than mathematical tongue for the simple reason that mathematics cannot define itself. It needs a natural language to define itself. This is also why the 2015 "Common Base of Knowledge, Skills and Culture" which defines the major challenges for education during compulsory schooling, refers in its first domain to "languages for thinking and communicating" rather than "languages", and gives a list of them: "this domain aims to teach French, foreign and, where appropriate, regional languages, scientific languages, computer and media languages, as well as languages of the arts and the body".
However, it is regrettable that the mother tongue (or the language of schooling for students whose mother tongue is not French) is included in a non-hierarchical list of languages. It should go without saying that in order to teach and learn mathematics and all the subjects which will be taught in junior high school, you need to have acquired a fairly good command of the French language in France. The opposite is not true. You can't learn French with mathematics.
It is therefore clear that the mother tongue (or the language of schooling) must occupy a specific position in the core knowledge and skills which is not recognised in the 2015 base. Moreover, the Base is careful not to define what is meant by language.
The reality is that a language does not exist without a corpus, which is all that has been said and written, and what is said and written in that language. Language is a living environment that bears the mark of the countless individual and collective experiences that make up the history of a society. Languages are not essences, but social realities.
This distinction between code and language is absolutely fundamental.
Can you imagine music being reduced to music theory? Yet music would hardly exist without music theory, like a language without grammar.
It is because we believe that language is a code that we believe that a single language can exist. We use the verb "to believe" because what we are dealing with here is pure belief and not a scientific concept. It is a "mythology" in the sense of Roland Barthes.
We cannot deny that Roland Barthes wrote: "Language is legislation and the tongue is its code" and that he wrote "words are no longer illusorily conceived as mere instruments, they are launched like projections, explosions, vibrations, machinery, flavours: writing turns knowledge into a feast".10
Long live literature!
These two assertions are in fact contradictory, and this contradiction must be unravelled. It is all but clear that Barthes is not attacking language per se, but a certain conception or way of approaching or using language. And when he goes on to say that "the text contains within itself the strength to flee the gregarious word (the one which aggregates) even as it seeks to reconstitute itself within it"11 , he is dealing with another conception that he doesn't want to name, because he wants to escape the constraints of classification. But he can't really. Thus "the object of linguistics," he says, "is limitless: language, according to Benveniste's intuition, is the social itself".12
Since the text cannot exist outside language, the matter is settled: languages are a feast!
1The idea for this editorial came from an exchange with a member of the public at a conference held in Blois on 26 September 2023.
2Leçon, Roland Barthes, Ed. Du Seuil, Points, 1978, 46 p.
3Pourquoi le monde n'existe pas, Markus Gabriel, French translation Lattès, 2014, 302 p.
4Ce que peuvent les mots, Barbara Cassin, Bouquins éditions, 2022.
5Which gives an individual dimension to "Everything that must be established by language belongs to thought" (Poetics 1456b), quoted by Julia Kristeva (Le langage cet inconnu, Le Seuil, Essais, 1981, p. 115).
6Sophist, 263rd
7Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, T.1, Language, Ernst Cassirer, Common Sense, 1972
8Masson, 1949 (3e edition).
9For Saussure, the profound dualism that divides language does not lie in the dualism of sound and idea. This dualism resides in the vocal phenomenon AS SUCH (physical, objective fact) and the vocal phenomenon AS SIGN (physical-mental (subjective) fact), the two being inseparable. Cf. Les écrits de linguistique générale, by Ferdinand de Saussure, text compiled and edited by Simon Bouquet and Rudolf Engler, Gallimard 2002, p. 20.
10Leçon, Roland Barthes, Ed. Du Seuil, Points, 1978, p. 20.
11Ibid, p. 34.
12Ibid. p. 29.