**WHAT IS A STATEMENT (*énoncé*)?**

**Akseli Virtanen**

**Translated by Janna Jalkanen Greenhill, January 2006**

The *form of expression* is precisely what Michel Foucault aims at with his specific technical term, *statement (énoncé)*. For example, Foucault uses the entire exhausting second part of the *Archaeology of Knowledge* to prove that statement is not a sentence (which belongs to text and is determined by the laws of language), not a proposition (which belongs to the more general argument and is determined by the laws of logic); it is not a speech act, it is not even a unit or an atom of discourse. Instead, according to Foucault, statement is a *function*: it is a function that has acquired a specific form – or the act of formation of a particular function – which operates “transversally” in relation to these linguistic elements that it makes appear in a particular form in time and space, and in which it incarnates. If statement can be distinguished from words, sentences, and propositions, it is because statement contains its own object, subject, and aim in the form of “derivations”: the subject, object and aim are only functions that have been derived from the statement.

Statement is neither entirely linguistic nor exclusively material. It is nevertheless irreplaceable, if we wish to be able to say that such and such sentence is true, acceptable, and interpretable, or that this or that proposition is legitimate, or that a speech act took place. This means that statement is not so much a linguistic element among others, but, as we have already said, a function that operates transversally in relation to these units.(229) The concept of statement , which cuts diagonally through various elements, is thus in no way a structure, that is, a group of interrelations between variables that enables a potentially infinite number of concrete models. Rather, it is a score – “closer to music than to the system of signification”. (230)

The form of the expression of management thus uses linguistic elements and incarnates in them, but not more. Or, as Foucault says, “it fulfils the condition of the possibility of language”. It is the basis for our understanding  - “through analysis or through intuition” – the sense or senselessness of signs, and the rules that dictate their succession or opposition, what they are signs of, and what act is acted through their formation. (231) The form of the expression of management functions: it makes us understand. It is a function that “intersects [the structures and units of language] and causes them appear in time and space.”(232) In this sense, the forms of expression are clusters of statements that cannot be explained by any linguistic category: what makes a “word” a statement regards the implicit preconditions that set in motion the pragmatic variables suitable for the statement, or the “non-linguistics elements” that “give it consistency”.(233)

As a function of this kind, statement is always an event (of stating), or a machine that language or signification can never exhaust. Statement is neither entirely linguistic nor exclusively material. This is exactly what Deleuze means by saying that *“the analysis of the form of expression subjects linguistics, logic, and semiotics to pragmatics”.* (234) The analysis of a statement is neither a matter of formalization or of interpretation. The former attempts to isolate what is said “over” in a sentence; the latter that which is unsaid. That is why logic always wants to prove that there are at least two propositions in every sentence. And interpretative disciplines want to demonstrate the gaps to be filled in a sentence. Deleuze notes, *“it seems very difficult to stick to what is actually stated, to nothing but the actual inscription of what is said”.*(235) In statements everything is real; all reality is clearly present. This not only shows how few things are actually said, but also *“how few are the things that can be said”. *(236)

Let’s take a computer keyboard: it is not a statement (it does not regulate, assess, or observe anything). But the same sequence of letters Q, W, E, R, T in the manual is a statement on the order of letters used in computer keyboards used in the United States. (237) In other words,*“statement does not exist in the way of language (langue), or in the way an object exist for perception”.* (238) A sequence of signs becomes a statement on the condition that it possesses “something else” that gives it consistency. Or, as Deleuze says, it possesses regularity. (239)

This Deleuze’s idea is crystalline: statement exists as the first sense of the word regularity. (240) Statements are rare, but their attribute is regularity, or, to put it more strongly: statement is born out of regularity. This is the “something else” that the statement possesses. This means that the family of statements that Foucault analyzes for example in The *Order of Things* regarding economy is in fact formed by rules of change and variation (the regularity) discovered on this plane. Each statement is inseparable from the other statements of the family through certain rules of change. Consequently, for example Quesnay’s physiocratic and Condillac’s psychological theory of the formation of value, which are considered opposites, belong to the same family of statements, connected by a “moving diagonal”. (241) This moving diagonal is a specific rule of change or variation (a “vector”). As the characteristic of a statement, regularity is like the curve that connects the separate points; the statement is the rule of their connection, the regularity of their connection. (242) Yet the curve and its form are not the same thing as the points, the singularities (defined in their turn by the relation between forces, as we will discuss a little bit later), because it merely connects the points by brushing by. Regularity is something else; its functioning is similar to the way a differential calculus defines the distribution and existence of singular points in the vectored field and the form of the integral curve in their proximity.  In this sense the curve actualizes the power relations (relations between singular points) by regularizing them, making them parallel, and by connecting them. Each statement is not only inseparable from the rare and regular multitude of the singular points, but it is a multitude in itself, and not a structure or a system. The family of statements is defined by certain internal lines of change. Statement is a regularity, a curve that connects the individual points. It actualizes the relations between singularities. The individual points – which Deleuze calls singularities – do not yet form the statement: they are the “outside of the statement”. (243) This means also that the statement cannot be separated from natural variation and change. It is always unstable and atonal, because the rules for the formation of the statement are always found on the plane of itself.

Statement is connected also with the other meaning of the word “regularity”. Statements are like dreams in the way they each possess their own particular object or their own particular world whose objects, subjects, and finalities are merely functions “derived” from the statement. This particular world of the statement is its internal regularity defined by the slope of its curve, that is, the “discursive order” whose subjects, objects, and aims are defined by limits of the variation of the statement. These limits of variation lead us to the third meaning of regularity, which is repetition (the rarity of the statement).

The particular world of the statement always refers to the space of non-discursive formations, to institutional quarters, to *“institutions, political events, economic practices and processes”*, which are necessary for the formation of the objects and subjects of the particular world of the statement. There is a great temptation to think this relation as one of two signs that symbolize each other, expressing nothing but the form they share (for example capitalism), or to try to prove, in the manner of causal analysis, how institutions and economic processes determine the sense of the statement or people’s behavior. (244) However, transversality (or “diagonal movement”, to use Deleuze’s term) opens up a third possibility: discursive relations and non-discursive quarters, discursive relations together with non-discursive quarters that are neither inside or outside the group of statements, but form the limits of the aforementioned variation. Statement defines itself always in a particular relation to “something else” that is always on the same plane with it, conditioning, limiting, taming it, making it meager and repeatable, *“giving it materiality that enables repeatability”.* (245)

Statement is a repetition in itself, but it repeats always “something else”.

**Footnotes**

229) Foucault uses the term “vertically”, Deleuze “diagonally” or “transversally”. Transversality is an organizationally active concept used by Félix Guattari. See Guattari (1984), Molecular Revolution, p. 11-23; Also Genosko (2002),Felix Guattari, chapter 2: “Transversality”. London: Continuum; Genosko (2000), “From Transversality to Ecosophy”. In Guattari (2000): The Three Ecologies. Tr. by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone.

230) Deleuze (1988), Foucault. Tr. by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, p. 52. Deleuze calls the logic of statements also “atonal”, i.e. logic without a tonic, scale, or harmony; its “course” is change (variation). I will return to the relation between musical score and statement in the third part of this book. On the connection of musical score and language, see Virno (1996), “Virtuosity and Revolution”. In Virno & Hardt (eds.) (1996): Radical Thought in Italy. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, p. 194-195.

231) Contrary to what Deleuze seems to be saying (“the rules of the formation cannot be simplified into an axiom”), as a concept statement is very close to self-evidence. For example, it makes the question on the origin irrelevant, because what is more important is repetition. See Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge. Tr. by A.M.Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, p. 105. Foucault’s concept of statement can indeed be seen as a sophisticated conception on the structure of “self-evident” and its relationship with language. Deleuze compares statement also with dreams, which always have their own specific object or world, as well as with Bergson’s memory, insofar as the statement exists in its own space. See Deleuze (1988), Foucault, p. 4-8. On statement, axiom, self-evidence and their role in management that functions without signifying mediation, see part III of this study.

232) Deleuze & Guattari (1988), A Thousand Plateaus, p. 140.

233) Ibid. p. 147.

234) Deleuze (1988), Foucault, p. 3.

235) Ibid., p. 15.

236) Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 119-120.

237) Ibid., p. 86.

238) Ibid.

239) Ibid, p. 144.

240) Deleuze (1988), Foucault, p. 6.

241) Deleuze (1988), Foucault, p. 3 and 13.

242) See Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 82; Deleuze (1972), “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?”, p. 265.

243) Deleuze (1988), Foucault, p. 78-79 and 85.

244) Foucault (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 162-163.

245) Deleuze (1988), Foucault, p. 10.

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