| BETWEEN THE
SEEN AND THE SAID Deleuze-Guattari's Pragmatics of the Order-Word Bruce McClure |
Contents Abstract Abbreviations |
8. Conclusion
The central claim of this thesis has been that in investigating
the role of language in life, language is best considered in terms of the
order-word. This concept concentrates our attention on the moment of utterance
or emission, its circumstances and particular variables, and its effects,
the transformations in which it results — or rather, of which it simultaneously
consists. On a sub-personal or preindividual level, order-words were shown
to populate the constantly changing field of unmediated context-fixation or
orientation between larval selves and environment. Rather than there being
an integrated subject that arrives from on high, there is instead the precarious
‘metastability’ of this field of ‘contractions-contemplations’, this Grand
Central Station of comings and goings between body and world. In this respect
at least, there is no difference of essence between a single person and a
collective; both have shifting boundaries which are at each moment traversed
by different kinds of flows. The order-word/password lies between this field
of larval selves and preindividual singularities, and the persons and blocky
things of the strata.
It
is not the grammar of rule-books that is important, so much as the grammar
of stratification, i.e. the constraints on bodies and on thought that are
in effect in a particular assemblage. It could well be protested that this
all-encompassing approach is completely unworkable, and, as Chomsky argued,
we should instead begin with idealisations (for example, a homogenous speech
community). But idealisations, whether considered as hypotheses to be tested
or generalisations to start an investigation going, are simplifications from this world, classes
of things with their differentiating characteristics stripped away. Instead
the present method abstracts from
the strata, from the seen and said, to the level where the disparate communicates,
where semiotic and energetic components circulate on the same Plane — precisely
because of their differences. This is not a reduction; it deals with the complexity
of how things are rather than with a notion of how they should be. For as
we have stressed, the Plane of Consistency or Abstract Machine is not an object,
origin, or goal; it is not a common property of things but that which things
with no property in common have in common. This allows us to see words as things, lines or arrows on
a multidimensional map, and to speak
things (or gestures, or roads, trees, stars...). It is all real, but the
interactions and outcomes are no longer determined in advance. Instead of
simplified idealisations, then, our apparatus (machinic and collective assemblage,
abstract machine, strata, order-word) are, like the terms of Hjelmslev’s net,
ready to interact with concrete situations.
It
is no doubt the case that the pragmatics we have proposed can sometimes look
like dualism. Each of its pairs of terms (actual/virtual, stratified/destratified,
order-word/password, extension/intensity and so on) at times appears to conform
to a respective evaluation of ‘bad/good’. But what makes this instead a ‘monistic
pluralism’ is that in each case, the relations between the paired terms is
rooted at different levels in our singular, open-ended construal of the Real.
A good example is the pair content and expression, which as we saw, stand
in a noncorresponding but mutually presupposing relationship with one another
(as, say, non-discursive and discursive multiplicities respectively), where
the boundaries are extremely porous and only the abstract forms (matters and
functions respectively) are truly distinct.
Hence the same bodies are worked upon on either level, and it is the
cumulative effect of the whole apparatus in action that must always be our
starting point. Just as Hjelmslev proposed a process of
division, so we propose the initial pragmatic delimiting of an assemblage,
which is then subdivided (or analysed)
into the various levels of content and expression.
The order-word holds two places in this apparatus;
firstly as an entity belonging to the plane of expression. The command is a product of the collective
assemblage of enunciation; emerging from the anonymous murmur to ring out
between ordered, disciplined bodies.
It both depends for its effect on a machinic assemblage, and also serves
to reinforce that assemblage. Secondly,
and more profoundly, the order-word/password appears at the very point of
division into content and expression, double articulation: indeed, it moves
or pulls in both directions (as its twin name suggests). Rather than simply emerging on the level
of expression (as, say, a particular utterance, memo or graffito
[1]
), and as such both arising out of and inserted into the
flows of bodies of the machinic assemblage, the order-word/password is a decisive
moment in the very relation between the visible and the articulable — as articulation, it is a moment of determination,
defining one or many utterers, one or many recipients, and their relations
to machines, animals, money and so on: in short, it stratifies, it creates truth or knowledge, it enforces or reinforces a
particular regime of power.
However, this articulation is doubled by the simultaneous pull by the
password-side in the other direction.
Whereas the order or command need not be linguistic but is undoubtedly
a matter of expression, the password throws even content and expression into
disarray, making it impossible to determine what can and cannot happen. The password unleashes difference in itself,
which as the continuous immanence of production, will have none of the ordered,
static homogeneity of the Ordered world. For the password all matters and functions
circulate and interact on the Plane of Consistency: the password breaks open
both words and things, by being both word and thing, function and matter,
itself, in the demonstration that nothing was ever really separated from anything
else in the first place.
This bears directly on our everyday understanding of
and dealings with language, because every imaginable human utterance (a category
the limits of which could undoubtedly be argued about indefinitely) takes
a stand, at least one, on the question of the human. The vast majority of utterances, no doubt,
unquestionably affirm the human world (by which here I mean the strata, though
the two terms are far from interchangeable) by asserting the relevance of
some particular aspect of it — dinner, sex, television, and so on — and this
is so even when they are scabarously critical or loudly indifferent. Utterances in the category of ‘opinion’
are characterised by a position on a scale from ‘listen to me, I’m right!’
(a wholehearted affirmation of the game of opinions as narcissistic medium
of self-assertion) to all those positions where one is reluctant or unwilling
to give an opinion and hence join in the game — hence placing the self in
relation to the game. However,
there are uses of language — conversation, writing — where there is something
more than ‘mere talk’ at stake, though this phrase is misleading. The sense of ‘mere talk’ here is that
of the redundancy of the order-word, where what is being said precisely does
not matter (where ‘to matter’ is a punning abbreviation of ‘to engage with
matter’), as the words involved are merely the cover over the reinforcing
of the machineries of stratification — hence it is not that there is any disconnection from the molar real in this
chatter, since the underlying message in all mere talk, however ‘trivial’,
is THIS IS REALITY. This is the ultimate order-word, the underlying
message of (the stratic side of) every utterance. Similarly, it is certainly not that these
other uses of language are more ‘meaningful’, since they may very well be
utter nonsense from the angle of the strata. Indeed, this may be precisely because
they dissimulate or underdetermine the REALITY from which they emerge/into which
they are inserted.
In
other words, the password (be it script that turns into pictures, a humorous
utterance, a sentence that turns into music, an experiment in cut-up or electronic
sampling) brings different realms into contact; it makes new directions possible
(if only for a moment), it throws new light. It is not ‘mere talk’, not because it
lacks redundancy but because that same redundancy is put to use. Where the order-word exists to overdetermine the relations of control
within the strata, the password is the failure, the impossibility of completely
harnessing the surplus value to that end, with the result that incidents of
unprecedented invention break out. The
attempt to maintain things as they are results in changing them more radically
than could have been anticipated. The emergence of ever more robust tiers
of order and control is inevitably coupled with the emergence of more possible
fracture-points, more distortion in the channel, more elements in play and
more unanticipatable catastrophe.
All this exists at once. No one has a monopoly on distinguishing
the order-words from the passwords.
At any given moment, one’s responses to either order or chaos need
be worship or revulsion or anything in between; neither abstract extreme can
exist without the other. As humans
we are already entirely dependent on the strata for the bulk of our day-to-day
needs; we are the stratified. Yet
at the same time it is possible to ‘push the envelope’ of what can be seen,
felt and said,
For the question was not how to
elude the order-word but how to elude the death-sentence it envelops, how
to develop its power of escape [...] There are pass-words beneath order-words.
Words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words
mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. A single thing or word
undoubtedly has this twofold nature: it is necessary to extract one from the
other — to transform the compositions of order into components of passage
(TP 110).