order-word

  ---- by Verena Conley

  The 'order-word' is a function immanent to language that compels obedience. The fundamental form of speech is not the statement (énoncé) of a judgement or the expression (énonciation) of a feeling, but the command. Language gives life-orders, and as a result humans only transmit what has been communicated to them. All language is expressed in indirect discourse; thus the transmission of order-words is not the communication of a sign in so far as it is understood to contain information.

  Order-words are not restricted to commands. They are also the relation of every statement with implicit presuppositions and speech-acts that are realised in statements themselves. The relation between a statement and speech-act is internal. It is one of redundancy, not of identity. Newspapers use redundancy to order their statements; they tell people what to think. Seen thus, the redundancy of the order-word is its most pertinent trait. Information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of orderwords. An expression always contains collective assemblages; statements are individuated only to the degree that a collective assemblage requires them to be transmitted as they are.

  Order-words transform bodies. It is the judge's sentence that transforms the accused into a convict. What takes place beforehand (the alleged crime the accused is said to have committed), or afterwards (the enactment of the penalty) are actions and passions affecting bodies (that of victim, convict or prison) in the largest sense. The instantaneous transformation from the suspect into the convict is a pure incorporeal attribute that takes the form of content in a judge's sentence. Order-words are thus always dated. History recounts the actions and passions of bodies that develop in a social field. Yet, history also transmits order-words from one generation to another. Performative statements are nothing outside of the circumstances that qualify them to be as such. Transformations apply to bodies but are, themselves, incorporeal. In the political sphere language mobilises the order-word, causing vocabulary and sentences to vary and change as also do the order-words.

  Order-words function as explicit commands or implicit presuppositions. They lead to immanent acts and the incorporeal transformations expressed in their form. They also lead to assemblages of expressions. At a certain moment these variables combine into a regime of signs. New order-words arise and modify the variables without being part of a known régime. The scientific enterprise that claims to extract constants is coupled with a political enterprise that transmits order-words. Constants, however, are always drawn from variables so that certain linguistic categories - such as language and speech, competence and performance - become inapplicable. Language consists of a major and a minor mode. The former extracts constants while the latter places them in continuous variation. The order-word is the variable that defines the usage of language according to one of these two treatments. As the only metalanguage, it is capable of accounting for a double direction: it is a 'little' (or simulated) death, but it is also a warning cry or a message to take flight. Through death the body reaches completion in time and space. As a warning cry or harbinger of death the order-word produces flight. All of a sudden variables find themselves in a new state and in continuous metamorphosis. Incorporeal transformations are again attributed to bodies, but now in a passage to a limit-degree. The question is less how to elude the order-word than how to avoid its impact as a deathsentence and, in turn, to develop a power of escape from within the scope (expression and statement) of the order-word.

  It is thus imperative that life answer the order-word of death not by fleeing but by making flight, in order to accentuate active and creative attributes. Beneath order-words, Deleuze adds, there exist pass-words, what he otherwise describes as words that pass and are components of passage. In strong contrast, order-words mark stoppages, they are arrestive, and in massive shape they organise stratified compositions. Yet, every single thing or word has this twofold nature, a capacity to impose order and to inspire creative passage. For the benefit of life and flight it is necessary to extract the one from the other, that is, to transform the compositions of order into components of passage.

  Connectives

   § body

   § death