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174 LANGUAGE

consciousness, the source of speech acts which are negotiated, in terms of
meaning, through social interaction with the other intentional conscious subjects.
Within the Marxist tradition the subject had been treated as an empty space, as
the bearer (Träger) of social relations and ideologies. The development by Lacan
of a psychoanalytic theory of language, which insisted on the importance of
unconscious as well as conscious meaning, and its appropriation by the ‘Tel
Quel’ group in its work on language and the politics of subjectivity (with its
strong Maoist and feminist tendencies), together with a shift away from
economistic models of ideology, primarily in the work of Althusser and in
feminist theory, had placed the question of ‘the speaking subject’ on the
theoretical and political agenda. It was a central question in the group’s work on
the various theoretical approaches to language. Both the question of how
meaning is fixed and the role of the speaking subject in language will be dealt
with in detail below.
Initially, however, different positions on language were defined in relation to
two distinct theoretical tendencies, which, it was argued, were mutually opposed.
The first derived from a ‘forgotten tradition’ of Marxist linguistics which had
surfaced in a new translation of V.N.Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of
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Language. The second was associated with the neo-semiology of the ‘Tel
Quel’ group in Paris. Vološinov, writing in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, had
developed his theory in opposition to Saussurean linguistics. He insisted on the
importance of actual utterances, not just the language system, and he conceived
of the sign as ‘multi-accentuated’, by which he meant that it is open to different
meanings when seen from different, class-based, subjective positions. In
Vǒlosinov’s theory linguistic meaning is negotiated through class-based, social
interaction and it reflects and refracts an underlying material reality: socio-
economic relations. Thus, while insisting on the study of language through
specific utterances, Vǒlosinov develops a social psychological approach to
language and social interaction in which he maintains a theoretical level of
denotation through his notion of the neutrality of the word vis-à-vis any
particular ideological field.
Work on the other important theoretical tendency, the ‘Tel Quel’ group
and psychoanalytical approaches to language, was developed initially within the
Language Group around the problematic of subjectivity. This work, which was
initiated by Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, is best represented by their book
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Language and Materialism. (It is represented here by John Ellis’s piece on
ideology and subjectivity, extracted below.) Theoretically, the ‘Tel Quel’ group
reject both a conception of subjectivity as rational consciousness and a
denotation/connotation model of language, which relies on a rationalist theory of
representation (the a priori fixing of meaning within the language system).
Drawing heavily on Lacan’s work, they retheorize language as unconscious
chains of signifiers, in which the ideological effect of meaning is achieved
retrospectively through the closing of the chain of signifiers by means of the