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to learn from it. At this stage we would indicate that a possible line of
development in the attempt to construct a materialist psychology would involve
rendering Freudian concepts historically specific. That is to say, what is needed
involves the task of tracing concretely specific structures of unconscious
subjectivity in their relation to concrete social and cultural practices and
institutions in a way that preserves the specificity of the psychoanalytic instance.
We would argue, however, that for our present purpose of understanding the
importance and effectivity of the structures of language and subjectivity within
social ideologies and practices, at the level both of the discourses emerging from
institutional sites and of popular consciousness and common sense, we do not
necessarily need to wait for the development of a materialist psychology. Thus,
while not disregarding the desirability and eventual importance of historically
specific analysis of the structures of unconscious subjectivity, we should not fall
into the trap of making a theorization of the structuring of unconscious and
conscious subjectivity and the process of internalization and resistance to
ideology the necessary starting-point in any consideration of language and
subject positionings within language. This would be to preclude a politically
useful analysis indefinitely.
Both the semiological and the psychoanalytic theoretical traditions which we
have explored in this chapter offer, as they stand, general theoretical frameworks
which have a universal rather than a historically specific status. However, the
questions which they embrace—the move away from transparent readings and a
concern for the specificity of signifying systems, as argued for by the
semiological tradition, plus, we would insist, their material location: the
importance of the construction of subjectivity within language and the effectivity
of subject positioning within ideologies—are those questions which we can and
must begin to address in a more adequate, historically specific way. It was with
this in mind that the Language Group turned to the work of Michel Foucault. We
saw Foucault’s work as forming a thematic continuity with the central questions
about language which emerged from the theoretical perspectives examined
above. It also provided a number of possible movements forward.

Foucault’s theory of discursive practices
Foucault outlines his position in relation to language in his most explicitly
theoretical text, The Archaeology of Knowledge. He constructs it through the
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historical location and critique of various dominant theories of language and
linguistics. Foucault groups and identifies these theories in terms of the
categories of formalization and interpretation, which are the two forms of
analysis with which he takes issue. Significantly for our own argument, both
these elements are central to the various theories of language and signification
which we have considered in this chapter, and there are ways in which
Foucault’s own critique has formalized certain of the problems encountered by
the Language Group in this area.