Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

74 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

case and pulled the door shut after it.... The abnormal clicking went on, 

beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical 

gate-openings"

32

—the Mechanosphere, or rhizosphere.

 

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4. November 20, 1923—Postulates of 

Linguistics

 

 

The Order-word Assemblage

 

I. "Language Is Informational and Communicationai"

 

When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or 

arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing her-

self when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as 

"insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external 

or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from primary 

significations or result from information: an order always and already con-

cerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The compulsory 

education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon 

the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of

 

75

 

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7

6 □ NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS

 

grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the 

statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary unit of language— 

the statement—is the order-word.

1

 Rather than common sense, a faculty 

for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable 

faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. 

Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedi-

ence. "The baroness has not the slightest intention of convincing me of her 

sincerity; she is simply indicating that she prefers to see me pretend to 

agree."

2

 We see this in police or government announcements, which often 

have little plausibility or truthfulness, but say very clearly what should be 

observed and retained. The indifference to any kind of credibility exhib-

ited by these announcements often verges on provocation. This is proof 

that the issue lies elsewhere. Let people say...: that is all language 

demands. Spengler notes that the fundamental forms of speech are not the 

statement of a judgment or the expression of a feeling, but "the command, 

the expression of obedience, the assertion, the question, the affirmation or 

negation," very short phrases that command life and are inseparable from 

enterprises and large-scale projects: "Ready?" "Yes." "Go ahead."

3

 Words 

are not tools, but we give children language, pens, and notebooks as we give 

workers shovels and pickaxes. A rule of grammar is a power marker before 

it is a syntactical marker. The order does not refer to prior significations or 

to a prior organization of distinctive units. Quite the opposite. Informa-

tion is only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission, 

and observation of orders as commands. One must be just informed 

enough not to confuse "Fire!" with "Fore!" or to avoid the unfortunate situ-

ation of the teacher and the student as described by Lewis Carroll (the 

teacher, at the top of the stairs, asks a question that is passed on by servants, 

who distort it at each step of the way, and the student, below in the court-

yard, returns an answer that is also distorted at each stage of the trip back). 

Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and 

waits.

4

 Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death 

sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it.

 

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. If language 

always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic 

point of departure, it is because language does not operate between some-

thing seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to say-

ing. We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has 

seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to 

you. Hearsay. It does not even suffice to invoke a vision distorted by pas-

sion. The "first" language, or rather the first determination of language, is

 

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NOVEMBER 20, 1923: POSTULATES OF LINGUISTICS □ 77

 

not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse. The importance some 

have accorded metaphor and metonymy proves disastrous for the study of 

language. Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of 

language only when they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many 

passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speak-

ing in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative 

movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse.

5

 Benveniste 

denies that the bee has language, even though it has an organic coding pro-

cess and even uses tropes. It has no language because it can communicate 

what it has seen but not transmit what has been communicated to it. A bee 

that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did 

not see it, but a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to oth-

ers that did not see it.

6

 Language is not content to go from a first party to a 

second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily 

goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in 

this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not 

the communication of a sign as information. Language is a map, not a trac-

ing. But how can the order-word be a function coextensive with language 

when the order, the command, seems tied to a restricted type of explicit 

proposition marked by the imperative?

 

Austin's famous theses clearly demonstrate that the various extrinsic 

relations between action and speech by which a statement can describe an 

action in an indicative mode or incite it in an imperative mode, etc., are not 

all there is. There are also intrinsic relations between speech and certain 

actions that are accomplished by sayingthem (the performative: I swear by 

saying "I swear"), and more generally between speech and certain actions 

that are accomplished in speaking (the illocutionary: I ask a question by 

saying "Is ... ?" I make a promise by saying "I love you ..."; I give a com-

mand by using the imperative, etc.). These acts internal to speech, these 

immanent relations between statements and acts, have been termed 

implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions, as opposed to the potentially 

explicit assumptions by which a statement refers to other statements or an 

external action (Ducrot). The theory of the performative sphere, and the 

broader sphere of the illocutionary, has had three important and immedi-

ate consequences: (1) It has made it impossible to conceive of language as a 

code, since a code is the condition of possibility for all explanation. It has 

also made it impossible to conceive of speech as the communication of 

information: to order, question, promise, or affirm is not to inform some-

one about a command, doubt, engagement, or assertion but to effectuate 

these specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts. (2) It has made it 

impossible to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scien-

tific zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics ceases to be

 

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