it is consubstantial with it. Hence this famous formula: ‘A rule of grammar
is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker.’^27 We have already had a
similar experience with the most innocuous question – for example, ‘What
time is it?’ Every request for information is an assertion of the right to pose
the question and a demand for a response. And there is no need to imagine
a police interrogation to bring out the point: variations of intonation will
make my banal question express a polite query or a sign of irritation, a
sardonic commentary, an aggression, and so on. In short, ‘[l]anguage is made
not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.’^28 The recent
conjuncture of the run-up to the war in Iraq indicates that the imperialists
are fully aware of this maxim.
Accordingly, ‘order-word’ does not designate a type of utterance, but an
aspect of every utterance, just as for Anglo-American pragmatists illocutionary
force does not only consist in speech acts which, like insults, explicitly exercise
power, but is a component of every linguistic act:
We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for
example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or 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....The
only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit
presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment.^29
The second thesisfollows from the first. If language is nothing but the set
of order-words presupposed in a given conjuncture, it follows that there is
no direct speech, that every utterance is always-already an indirect utterance.
We see how Deleuze and Guattari converge on this point with Voloshinov,
whom they had possibly read (but do not cite): there is a link between the
polyphonic and dialogical conception of language and the stress on the priority
of indirect language, just as there is a link between the importance of order-
words as a constitutive component of utterances and the same stress on
indirect speech. An utterance is always-already in indirect speech because it
Continuations • 131(^27) Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 76.
(^28) Ibid.
(^29) Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 79.