Judgments, Death Sentences, and Order-Words

“Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience…Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. Every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence – a judgment, as Kafka put it.” (76)

Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the order-word in “November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics” had interesting political implications. They write: “It must be observed thoroughly politics works language from within, causing not only the vocabulary but also the structure and all of the phrasal elements to vary as the order-words change” (83). But, what are and how do these order-words work exactly, how do they transform and enunciate meaning? Why do they carry a death sentence or judgment with them and what does that mean politically?

The basic unit, or “elementary unit of language” (76) is the statement otherwise known as the order-word. The order-word is a language-function. As “a function coextensive with language” (76) it thus extends over the same space or time of language. The “translative movement of language” (77) is indirect discourse. Indirect discourse is a factor of implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions. Implicit presuppositions involve order-words into the sphere of performative (that which one does by saying it) and illocutionary (that which one does in speaking) (78) language acts.

These features of language place the order-word into statements of ‘social obligation’” (79). The order-word is a relation between these implicit acts of language and the redundancy of statements. How the order-word is redundantly enunciated is a collective assemblage of how a society expresses that statement. Thus, significance is within a social field’s specific nature and transmission of enunciation. When these characteristics are taken up politically, the enunciations of a society are taken up and their incorporeal transformations (81) altered for a specific cause. Thus, “pragmatics is a politics of language” (82).

This explanation of political control and power seems to be a reasonable  argument. However, at the end of this explanation of the order-word and politics there is a point of tension: that of true intuition. “True intuition is not a judgment of grammaticality but an evaluation of internal variable of enunciation in relation to the aggregate of the circumstances” (83). It appears that rebellion or contestation of politics lies in those who have the ability for true intuition. Does true intuition imply a relationship with the order-word whereby both context and representation is understood, and thus a freeing from language’s control? Or does true intuition fall within the controlling regime by which language operates, and thus produce more “death sentences?”