The generally accepted conception of language among philosophers and linguists today is that it consists of a single formalization of content (grammar) for the purposes of the transmission of information, or communication. In the fourth plateau ("November 20, 1923 – Postulates of Linguistics") of their book A Thousand Plateaus, authors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provide an altogether different sort of metaphysics and philosophy of language.
On the surface, this plateau presents a systematic critique of the fundamental postulates of linguistics as presented by Noam Chomsky. This critique, however, is used as an opportunity to present the postmodernist conception of words and things. Both the political nature of language acquisition and competence, and the gulf between language and reality, are presented in probably the clearest manner yet – far clearer than, for example, Michel Foucault's own attempt at this formulation, The Order of Things.
Deleuze and Guattari express the four Chomskyan postulates with which they take issue as follows:
I. "Language Is Informational and Communicational" (75)
II. "There Is an Abstract Machine of Language That Does Not Appeal to Any 'Extrinsic' Factor" (85)
III. "There Are Constants or Universals of Language That Enable Us to Define It as a Homogeneous System" (92)
IV. "Language Can Be Scientifically Studied Only under the Conditions of a Standard or Major Language" (100)
In effect, they are challenging the fundamental propositions of the modern study of grammar. What they propose is that language is a complex, ever-changing and heterogeneous system of double articulation – on one level we have the expression and exchange of command cues and socio-political insinuations, and on another level we have the coding of informational content in the form of defined entities. The system is ever-changing as new terms and forms of discourse and discipline become more or less prevalent; it is heterogeneous because each person responds to and issues coded expression and content in different ways, let alone the variability between subcultures.
The first key concept of the fourth plateau is that of mots d'ordre, or "order-words." As the translator notes, "in standard French, slogan, (military) password. Deleuze and Guattari are also using the term literally: 'word of order,' in the double sense of a word or phrase constituting a command and a word or phrase creative of order." (523) Deleuze and Guattari consider this "abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words" (76) to be the fundamental system of language. "Language," they say, "is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience." (ibid.)
An order-word is a use of language that expresses an expectation and an illocutionary imperative not confined by (and in fact more binding than) the grammatical imperative. "Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a 'social obligation.'" (79) These social obligations are not objective moral laws, but rather are part of the system of implied expectations and explicit threats we issue against one another and have had issued against us since birth. These expectations are attributed to "bodies," or entities, but are in fact not inherent in the entities themselves. For example:
Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies. "You are no longer a child;" this statement concerns an incorporeal transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their actions and passions. (81)
The key to identifying the difference between the intermingling of entities and the incorporeal transformation is that the latter happens the instant a certain expression of language is made. Age is a gradual transition, but age category changes instantaneously on a certain day based on a series of expressions that a number of people made over the course of a great deal of time, beginning with the doctor in the delivery room.
A further example:
In an airplane hijacking, the threat of a hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an action; so is the execution of hostages, if it occurs. But the transformation of the passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body into a prison-body, is an instantaneous incorporeal transformation, a "mass media act" in the sense in which the English speak of "speech acts." (ibid.)
Speaking strictly in terms of entities, all we have is a bunch of people inside a plane. What makes them "hostages" (more than people) is an act of expression on the part of reporters, police, and airline personnel.
We can understand the difference between what happens in the world of entities themselves, their corporeal interminglings – and what happens in the world of statements about entities, their incorporeal transformations which constitute expressions, altering our behaviour according to further, implied social interminglings within a certain context. It is the difference between the real actions of bodies, and the expressé or "expressed" of a statement which happens in our heads but which is attributed to bodies. In a fit of poesy, Deleuze and Guattari contrast "the woof of bodies" and "the warp of expresseds." (86) This implies two formalizations in language, rather than the one supposed by traditional linguistics. The form of expression processes order-words, and the form of content processes information. These are two different treatments of the same source material, the enunciation of language. One deals with happenings, modifications, becomings, interminglings, the "silent order of things," gerunds and infinitives; the other deals with events, dates, transformations, order-words, participles and indicatives. Action versus act.
This view of the relationship between expression and content challenges our traditional conception of language as "representational" without disintegrating into the chaotic "textuality"-talk of the deconstructionists. All order-words represent are further interminglings of social/subject bodies; further interminglings of bodies demand new expressions of order-words. They are always both deterritorialized to a greater or lesser extent relative to one another. "Sometimes the semiotic components are more deterritorialized than the material components, and sometimes the reverse." (87) This creates a four-point plan of how a society works: the "machinic assemblage," the woof of bodies, "actions and passions;" "collective assemblage of enunciation," acts, statements, transformations which were attributed to bodies; territorialization, stabilization, becoming sedentary, stasis; deterritorialization, fluidity, becoming nomadic, dynamism.
The tetravalence of the assemblage. Taking the feudal assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies – a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal territorialities and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the Crusades. (89)
Because of the interplay between these two distinct elements of language, content and expression, language isn't homogeneous or reductive in the sense that Chomsky thinks is necessary in order for lanuage to be an object of science. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari's contention is not that language cannot be studied scientifically, but rather that what Chomsky was doing was not scientific – it was a systematic compilation of order-words, a "grammar" of command rather than of representation. Even his "descriptive" grammar was implicitly prescriptive because it did not explore the innately prescriptive aspect of language. What we need is actually an understanding of the form of content, on the one hand, and the form of expression on the other.