We can already see the proximity of these theses to those that have been
extracted from the Marxist tradition: the stress on order-words, inspired by
a reading of Lenin; on the political nature of pragmatics; on the effectivity of
speech acts; and on the contradictions that constitute what is understood by
a language and make language a set of social, historical and political
phenomena. The negative principles heralding abandonment of the dominant
philosophy of language (non-immanence, dysfunctionality, opacity, materiality,
partial systematicity, and historicity) are employed in these theses (the
incorporeal character of the transformations takes nothing away from the
material character of their effectivity: as we know, slogans exercise a material
force when they seize hold of the masses).
I am going to comment briefly on five of these six theses (thesis three – on
the political character of Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatics – will be discussed
in Chapter 7).
The first thesisstates that the basic utterance is the order-word. This is to
be regarded not as an origin (in the sense that Chomsky’s declarative sentences
yielded, via transformation, interrogative sentences, etc.), but as a co-substantial
relationship: in a crucial regard, every utterance, whatever its form, is an
order-word. This is obvious in the case of political utterances, even when
they are couched in the form of ‘information’ (when the prime minister, for
example, ‘informs’ the French people about pensions), and advertising slogans.
But Deleuze and Guattari generalise the thesis to the whole set of utterances:
the most innocuous utterance, the most simple example of a declarative
sentence – in the canonical example of the early Chomsky, ‘the man hit the
ball’ – must be regarded as an order-word. In truth, the point is not difficult
to appreciate, since it involves an example of grammar. Barthes’s example
will be recalled: quia ego nominor leo– a Latin sentence that tells us by denotation
‘because my name is lion’, but which also informs us by connotation: ‘I am
a grammatical example meant to illustrate the rule about the agreement of
the predicate’.^26 The order-word in a grammatical utterance functions like a
connotation: it signals that every utterance of this type exercises power, marks
a form of power. The schoolmaster does not inform, he teaches – that is, he
commands the pupil, commands her to respect and apply the rule. And this
command is not added on to a piece of information, is not its consequence:
130 • Chapter Five
(^26) See Barthes 1972, p. 116.