The postulates of linguistics (Chapter 4) have sub-headings that at first sight are a little confusing. To begin with, all four of the postulates have sub-headings in quotation marks, which immediately makes one wonder who is speaking, which ‘position’ is being articulated. Next, the first of these – “Language is informational and communicational” – is something that is clearly not in line with much of what either Deleuze or Guattari say in many places. The first, hesitant, conclusion then is that the sub-headings of the postulates articulate positions that are to be opposed. This suggests that the ‘postulates of linguistics’ are targets of polemic and that this chapter offers a counter to a number of ‘accepted’ (one wonders by whom) postulates. During this counter-argument we may find some kind of ‘linguistic theory’ that we can attribute to D&G but if it is offered in the form of a counter-argument or polemic this does make it necessary to be cautious about positive content since anything that appears positive is so within this context of argument.
The first apparently positive content comes in the form of the ‘order word’. The example of the school teacher giving commands and orders in a scene of ‘compulsory education’ and the translation of le mot d’ordre as ‘order word’ gives a connotation in English that is odd, and perhaps a little disorientating. It produces a sense of ‘command and control’ and slips into the background someone, something, with power that issues orders. There is a translators note here (fn1 ATP 76) touching on the other connotation, that of the slogan and what is called the ‘military password’, or what is perhaps more colloquially called a ‘watchword’. Mot d’ordre was also one of the communards newspapers during the Paris Commune of 1871. The translators note this and go on to say that “Deleuze and Guattari are also using the term literally: ‘word of order’, in the double sense of a word or phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order” (ATP 523, emphasis added). This latter sense, being ‘creative of order’, strikes me as the stronger side of the concept.
Having said that it is worth saying that even if ‘command’ is perhaps problematic, obedience is not. ‘Obedience’ is at the heart of the Social and the Law, two structures that impose conditions of life on the subject. When it comes to a ‘mot d’ordre’ I find the work of someone like shepherd fairy to be cutting a line of subversion and so the connection between the deployment of ‘OBEY’ as a slogan, connected to the eyes of surveillance offers a potent articulation of the operations of the order word. It’s interesting, in this respect to hear fairy talk explicitly both about the connection to those surveillance images of ‘Big Brother’ that Orwell made famous as well as to recount how his own work arose as a re-territorialisation or re-organisation of graffiti, punk marketing and propaganda, in the midst of an attempt to escape the constraints of ‘art history’ as taught in the art school.
We find then that this first claim, that “the elementary unit of language – the statement – is the order word” (ATP 76) needs to be connected to the first ‘problem’, which is that “the hard part is to specify the status and scope of the order-word. It is not a question of the origin of language, since the order-word is only a language-function, a function coextensive with language.” (ibid). Thus language appears here as a constraining practice, organising and ordering and doing so with an implicit call to ‘obey’. Yet who is it that must be obeyed? The next move that D&G make seems important here. If we slip into transcendental conditions of ‘law’, such that language demands obedience as its condition of possibility, then we can become too quickly involved not in a constraining but in a constrained. We can become part of a discourse that claims that we ‘cannot escape’ language and it’s vital, in this regard, to orientate ourselves in terms of the drive to ‘exit language’. In contrast to this the next claim, that “the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor, but indirect discourse” (ATP 76-77) or what they call ‘hearsay’. The use an example here, that of the communication practices of bees. Here they argue that bees do not have language but not because they don’t have ‘tropes’ or coding but rather because they operate within a direct discourse, such that one bee might communicate what they have seen to another, but no bee can ‘pass on’ that transmission successfully. Language thus becomes a kind of ‘passing on’ and this ‘passing’ connects with the idea of the watchword or password in that language becomes that which needs to be said to pass through the social, as it is ordered, without disruption or arrest. Whilst this is both a pragmatics and a performance it is, at the same time, a policing.
One way of perhaps thinking this ‘policing’ function is to contrast the role of the performative and the illocutionary in two different situations. D&G sit unhappily in any analysis which tends to describe them offering a ‘performative’ account of language, or more exactly in any account of the order word which reads it as a performative function alone. After discussing speech acts and performativity (ATP 77) they go on to say the following:
“It is true that it is still difficult to see how speech acts or implicit presuppositions can be considered a function co-extensive with language. It is all the more difficult if one starts with the performative (that which one does by saying it) and moves by extension to the illocutionary (that which one does in speaking). For it is always possible to thwart that move.” (ATP 78)
They then go on to refine their definition of order words in the light of a comparison between Benveniste and Ducrot, who appear as though two sides of a similarly failing coin.
“We call order words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word of every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a ‘social obligation’. Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly.” (ATP 79, emphasis added)
In this context, they argue, it is the collective assemblage of enunciation that then accounts for the social character of language. If we refer back to our notions of ‘performative’ and ‘illocutionary’ we can see that it is this collective assemblage of enunciation that offers a way to grasp how the performative can fail and yet, why there is always an illocutionary force. For example, struggles over gender pronouns are only struggles because they often fail, with people refusing to comply with requests or ‘tripping up’ in particular contexts. The performative role of the gender pronoun is distinct from the illocutionary force, since refusal or failure to use the appropriate pronoun can display variable illocutionary forces, from outright refusal to ‘innocent’ failure. On the other hand, the illocutionary force of speaking is always present, for example marking the child and woman’s voice, the immigrant and the working-class accent, as ‘Other’ to a dominant bourgeois social. There is no escaping illocutionary force whereas the condition of performativity is that it can always fail. It is the collective assemblage of enunciation, the policing function, that can enable this radical distinction to be understood, since this collective assemblage ascribes values to illocutionary forces and authority to performance sources via the function of policing.
The collective assemblage of enunciation polices a series of ‘acts immanent to language’ (ATP 80) and “these acts seem to be defined as the set of all incorporeal transformations current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society” (ibid). Body here is explicitly defined in the ‘broadest sense’. We are asked to distinguish between the “actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only non corporeal attributes or the ‘expressed’ of a statement” (ibid). (The use of ‘noncorporeal’ here might seem to be odd given that we’ve just been using ‘incorporeal’ but in looking at the French text it seems that it’s simply distinguishing between that which affects bodies and that which doesn’t.) They then use an example of a judge sentencing a convict to try and show what they’re referring to by these ‘incorporeal attributes’. The judges sentence transforms the accused into the convict and involves, in terms of bodies, that which took place beforehand (the crime), that which takes place after (the imprisonment or punishment) as well as the bodies involved (the person who is convicted, the victim, the prison etc). The sentence itself, however, takes place instantaneously and can be dated (if you ever wondered why the chapters of ATP have dates, this is one of the primary reasons it would appear, in that they ‘name’ incorporeal transformations). Moreover, it is the particular collective assemblage of enunciation and the order words that they constitute that produce the conditions for these instantaneous transformations. Only some things can be said, because the very function of a collective assemblage of enunciation is to police what can be said by whom with what effect. (Here I feel like offering as a slogan that ‘Language is a prison and the first rule of the prisoner is to escape‘.)
“We have gone from explicit commands to order-words as implicit presuppositions; from order-words to the immanent acts or incorporeal transformations they express; and from there to the assemblages of enunciation whose variables they are. To the extent these variables enter at a given moment into determinable relations, the assemblages combine in a regime of signs or a semiotic machine.” (ATP 83)
These regimes of signs are plural, mixed and changeable. Yet it is these collective assemblages, these regimes, are vital to the conception of language that D&G want to develop, not least because the last move in the first section of this chapter is to claim that these regimes are the condition of possibility of actual language. There is an attempt to produce something akin to a transcendental structure at this point (ATP 85). I’m not entirely clear how this structure is to be argued for but, very roughly, it seems that they claim the ‘pragmatic variables’ that constitute the collective assemblage / regime form this condition of possibility by forming the limits and conditions of effectiveness of language and it is this capacity to effect, to produce ‘incorporeal transformations’, that make language actual rather than virtual. Whilst this is still, clearly, a pragmatics, it is a pragmatics not of use but of the conditions of usability.
Moving to the second section of this chapter, the postulate of linguistics presented as “There is an abstract machine of language that does not appeal to any ‘extrinsic’ factor”, once again it seems that this is a postulate to be opposed. In particular we find, towards the end of this section, this highlighted claim:
“If the external pragmatics of non-linguistic factors must be taken into consideration, it is because linguistics itself is inseparable from an internal pragmatics involving its own factors.” (ATP 91)
There seems some ambiguity in the English here which may or may not be in the French. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s best to read ‘linguistics’ here as referring to a particular discipline of academic activity or to any account of language. One of the implications is that ‘linguistics’ as a specific object of investigation, or any study of language that takes it as an autonomous field with ‘immanent laws’ or something akin to such, is already on the wrong foot as it cannot take seriously the non-linguistic factors that are the condition of possibility for actual language. Here, on this reading, the implication is, effectively, that ‘linguistics should be abolished’ but there is also a strong implication for practices such as psychoanalysis where language is the primary mode of relation. The ‘talking cure’ might be though, for example, to rely upon the ‘talking’ when in fact it relies upon the conditions of ‘curing’. If this is the ‘strong’ reading of this passage I confess to be somewhat sympathetic but the weaker reading would only imply, perhaps, that linguistics must take account of non-linguistic factors.
It’s late and I’ll have to catch up on this a little later.
razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution 
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