It seems to me that these utterances perfectly illustrate Deleuze and Guattari’s
theses. They are, in fact, order-words. This is hardly surprising, since they
are advertising slogans. But I observe that they do not have the privileged
grammatical form of the order-word – the imperative (‘choose wisely, etc.’);
and do not contain the usual laudatory words. (Since we are talking about
the Paris metro, I cannot resist the nostalgic pleasure of recalling a slogan
from my childhood, for I have reached the age when, like Perec, I remember:
‘Dubo...Dubon... Dubonnet’.) The order-word here takes the form of a
declarative sentence, which is apparently constative. Even so, it is an order-
word. As such, it is the fourth thesis: it exercises an incorporeal transformation
on the spectator; it interpellates her in the fashion of a wink, but also by
identification. In as much as I belong by definition to the category of Mr.
Average, I find myself ironically flattered by this praise and, if I am sufficiently
cynical not to be impressed, I am nevertheless interpellated as an accomplice
in the mental exercise. (These slogans are based on the stylistic device called
‘dual syntax’, which offers a provisional meaning, in a sentence that is seemingly
complete but in fact unfinished, only to change it completely when the sentence
continues and concludes.) My smile, and my memory of a campaign that was
by its very nature ephemeral, attest to it. Unless, of course, I am a woman
and scarcely feel like smiling, the sexist allusion of the first slogan not being
in the best taste, and the interpellation (as in witticisms according to Freud)
putting me in the position of the victim of the joke. Moreover, I seem to have
observed that this poster disappeared more rapidly than the other two. These
utterances – and this is thesis five – have no individual author, but are produced
by a collective assemblage of enunciation. Not only in that such slogans are
commonly, if not written, then at least modified and finalised, by groups, but
in that they presuppose a whole assemblage, a whole machinery: the selection
of images, the choice of strategic positioning so that the slogans can be read
(they must first of all be seen from afar and hence head-on), but also the
market research – in short, the enormous social machinery that ends up
generating a successful slogan. And obviously – thesis two – these utterances
are in indirect speech, even if they bear no mark of it: in addition to resorting
to the device of dual syntax, they are part of a tradition, they operate on
presuppositions shared by the reader, who in order to understand the slogan
identifies two different discourses, the first of which – in upper case – rests
on clichés – that is, on the immediate recognition of what has already often
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