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he would be the image of appliances that no longer need him in order to produce themselves,
the reproduction of a "celibate machine."3
In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is
confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called "consumption" and
characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of the circumstances), its poaching, its
clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it
shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those
imposed on it.
The cautious yet fundamental inversions brought about by consumption in other societies
have long been studied. Thus the spectacular victory of Spanish colonization over the
indigenous Indian cultures was diverted from its intended aims by the use made of it: even
when they
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were subjected, indeed even when they accepted their subjection, the Indians often used the
laws, practices, and representations that were imposed on them by force or by fascination to
ends other than those of their conquerors; they made something else out of them; they
subverted them from within not by rejecting them or by transforming them (though that
occurred as well), but by many different ways of using them in the service of rules, customs
or convictions foreign to the colonization which they could not escape.4 They metaphorized
the dominant order: they made it function in another register. They remained other within the
system which they assimilated and which assimilated them externally. They diverted it
without leaving it. Procedures of consumption maintained their difference in the very space
that the occupier was organizing.
Is this an extreme example? No, even if the resistance of the Indians was founded on a
memory tattooed by oppression, a past inscribed on their body.' To a lesser degree, the same
process can be found in the use made in "popular" milieus of the cultures diffused by the
"elites" that produce language. The imposed knowledge and symbolisms become objects
manipulated by practitioners who have not produced them. The language produced by a
certain social category has the power to extend its conquests into vast areas surrounding it,
"deserts" where nothing equally articulated seems to exist, but in doing so it is caught in the
trap of its assimilation by a jungle of procedures rendered invisible to the conqueror by the
very victories he seems to have won. However spectacular it may be, his privilege is likely to
be only apparent if it merely serves as a framework for the stubborn, guileful, everyday
practices that make use of it. What is called "popularization" or "degradation" of a culture is
from this point of view a partial and caricatural aspect of the revenge that utilizing tactics take
on the power that dominates production. In any case, the consumer cannot be identified or
qualified by the newspapers or commercial products he assimilates: between the person (who
uses them) and these products (indexes of the "order" which is imposed on him), there is a
gap of varying proportions opened by the use that he makes of them.
Use must thus be analyzed in itself. There is no lack of models, especially so far as language
is concerned; language is indeed the privileged terrain on which to discern the formal rules
proper to such practices. Gilbert Ryle, borrowing Saussure's distinction between "langue" (a
system) and "parole" (an act), compared the former to a fund of capital
L
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and the latter to the operations it makes possible: on the one hand, a stock of materials, on the
other, transactions and uses.6 In the case of consumption, one could almost say that
production furnishes the capital and that users, like renters, acquire the right to operate on and
with this fund without owning it. But the comparison is valid only for the relation between the
knowledge of a language and "speech acts." From this alone can be derived a series of
questions and categories which have permitted us, especially since Bar-Hillel's work, to open
up within the study of language (semiosis or semiotics) a particular area (called pragmatics)
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