... language is pre-individual; it is the historical-natural language shared by all speakers of a certain community. Language belongs to everybody and to nobody. Also in the case of language, there is not an individual 'I' but a 'one': 'one' speaks. The use of the spoken word is, at first, something 'inter-psychic,' social, public. A 'private language' does not exist—in any individual case, an even less in the case of an infant. In this respect one comprehends the full extent of the concept of 'public intellect' or 'general intellect.' Language, however, unlike sensory perception, is a pre-individual sphere within which is rooted the process of individuation. The ontogenesis, that is, the developmental phases of the individual human being, consists in fact of the passage from language as public or inter-psychic experience to language as singularizing and intra-psychic experience. This process, in my opinion, takes place when the child understands the act of 'parole' does not exclusively depend on the determined 'langue' (which in many respects resembles an amniotic fluid or an anonymous zoological environment): rather, it stands in relation also to a generic 'faculty' for speaking, to an indeterminate 'capacity' for saying things (which is never resolved in one historical-natural language or another). The progressive clarification of the relation between 'faculty' (or capacity) for speaking and the particular act of 'parole': this is what enables us to surpass the pre-individual character of historical-natural language, pressing for the individuation of the speaker. In fact, while language belongs to everybody and to nobody, the passage from the pure and simple ability to say something to particular contingent utterance determines the space of an individual's notion of 'my own.'
Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude
