the influence of Guattari, he had read and used a number of linguists, from
Hjelmslev to Benveniste and Gustave Guillaume.
But that is not the important thing. Behind these injustices and simplifications,
there is a critique of the dominant philosophy in linguistic matters and hence,
a contrario, proposals for a different philosophy of language. Deleuze had not
waited until Abécédaireto formulate it: it is the subject of the fourth plateau
in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics’.^4 These
postulates are four in number (and formulated in the conditional in the original
French): (1) language is informational and communicational; (2) there is an
abstract machine of language that does not appeal to any ‘extrinsic’ factor;
(3) there are constants or universals in language that permit us to define it
as a homogeneous system; and (4) language can only be scientifically studied
when it takes the form of a standard or major language.
We can see what these counter-postulates are opposed to: to the construction
of a linguistic science as proposed, for example, by Jean-Claude Milner in
L’amour de la langue^5 – a text Deleuze and Guattari do not cite, but which they
had possibly read (two years separate its publication from that of Mille
plateaux). Rather than postulates, Milner proposes axioms (there is a difference).
They are likewise four in number: (1) langueis to be constructed as its own
cause (this is called the arbitrariness of the sign); (2) it will be constructed as
formalisable, pertaining to a written form (this is inscribed in the Saussurian
concept of the sign); (3) as regards the speaking being, only that which makes
her the support of a calculation will be retained (in other words, the speaker,
or subject of the enunciation, will have neither past nor future, possess neither
an unconscious nor membership of a class, nation or race); and (4) as regards
the community of speaking beings, only what is required for the calculation
will be retained (this is called the schema of communication: sender/receiver).
There is no one-to-one correspondence between the four ‘postulates’ and
the four ‘axioms’ (although the first postulate is the exact equivalent of the
fourth axiom). But the overall opposition is clear. For Deleuze and Guattari,
it is a question of refusing a conception of language that makes it an instrument
of communication and information; of rejecting the ‘principle of immanence’,
foundation of the structuralist conception of language, which does not want
Critique of Linguistics • 17(^4) See Deleuze and Guattari 1988, pp. 75–110.
(^5) See Milner 1978.