Kieran Miles’s Reviews > A Marxist Philosophy of Language > Status Update

sounds really interesting, tell me about it?

So I've only just started it, but he basically thinks Chomsky's theory of universal grammar is ahistorical and neglects that language is an evolving practice as much as something 'innate' in the brain.

"The first characteristic [of Chomsky's ideas] is methodological individualism - that is, the idea that the language faculty is inscribed in the brain (the mind/brain) of each individual speaker. As we have seen, this is a major regression compared with the Saussurian conception of langue... This characteristic signals the introduction of liberalism into the philosophy of language. Chomsky does to Saussure what the analytical Marxists (Elster and others) have tried to do to Marx. Against this position, I shall try to defend a conception of language not as a biological endowment of the human species, but as a social practice, which produces effects of inter-subjectivity by means of interlocution, creating subjects/speakers through interpellation. Chomsky defends an a-social conception of language which goes to extremes, since it denies that communication is the function/origin of language" (p.34).