The Seventh Function of Language

Simon passes around the joint. The film of the past few months flashes through his mind, and he is powerless to stop it. As it is his job, he analyzes it for its narrative structures, its additives, its adversaries, its allegorical significance. A sex scene (actor), an attack (bomb) in Bologna. An attack (paper knife), a sex scene (spectator) at Cornell. (Chiasmus.) A car chase. A rewriting of the final duel in Hamlet. The recurrent library motif (but why does he think of Beaubourg?) The pairs of characters: the two Bulgarians, the two Japanese, Sollers and Kristeva, Searle and Derrida, Anastasia and Bianca … And, most of all, the implausibilities: Why would the third Bulgarian wait until they realized there was a copy of the manuscript at Barthes’s apartment before going there to search for it? How did Anastasia, supposedly a Russian spy, manage to be assigned so quickly to the hospital ward where Barthes was being kept? Why did Giscard not have Kristeva arrested and tortured by one of his henchmen until she talked, rather than sending him and Bayard to the USA to keep an eye on her? Why would the document be written in French, rather than Russian or English? Who translated it?

Simon takes his head in his hands and utters a groan.

“I think I’m trapped in a fucking novel,” he says.

“What?”

“I think I’m trapped in a novel.”

The student he says this to lies back, blows cigarette smoke toward the sky, watches the stars speed past in the ether, drinks a mouthful of beer from the bottle, leans on one elbow, lets a long silence linger in the American night, and says: “Sounds cool, man. Enjoy the trip.”

73

“And so the paranoiac participates in this powerlessness of the deterritorialized sign that assails him from all sides in the slippery atmosphere, but in his majestic feeling of anger he accedes all the more to the overarching power of the signifier as the master of the network that spreads through the atmosphere.”

[Guattari, spoken at the Cornell conference, 1980.]

74

“Come on, hurry up, it’s time for the talk on Jakobson.”

“Nah, it’s okay, I’ve had my fill.”

“You’re fucking kidding? That’s really annoying—you told me you’d go. There’ll be lots of people there. We’ll learn stuff … Put that Rubik’s Cube down!”

Click click. Bayard nonchalantly twists and turns the multicolored rows. He has almost completed two of the six faces.

“All right, but Derrida’s on later, we mustn’t miss that.”

“Why not? What makes that knob any more interesting than the others?”

“He’s one of the most interesting thinkers in the world. But that’s not the point, you moron. He’s seriously embroiled with Searle in a row over Austin’s theory.”

Click click.

“Austin’s theory is the performative function, remember? The illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Saying is doing? How to do stuff by talking? How to make people do stuff simply by talking to them? For example, if I had stronger perlocutionary powers, or if you were less of an idiot, all I’d have to say is ‘Derrida conference’ and you’d jump up straight away and we’d already have our places booked. It’s obvious that if the seventh function is anywhere around here, Derrida won’t be far away.”

“Why is everyone looking for Jakobson’s seventh function if Austin’s functions are freely available?”

“Austin’s work is purely descriptive. It explains how it works, but not what to do to make it work. Austin describes the mechanisms in operation when you make a promise or a threat or when you address someone with the intention of making them act in one way or another, but he doesn’t tell you how to make your listener believe you and take you seriously or act how you want him to. He just notes that a speech act can succeed or fail, and he sets out certain conditions for success: for example, in France, you must be mayor or deputy mayor for the phrase ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’ to function. (But that is for pure performative utterances.) He doesn’t tell you how to succeed for sure. It’s not a user manual, it’s just an analysis—you understand the subtle difference?”

Click click.

“And Jakobson’s work isn’t just descriptive?”

“Well, yeah, it is, actually, but this seventh function … we’d have to assume it’s not.”

Click click.

“Fuck, it’s not working.”

Bayard cannot quite finish off the second face.

He feels Simon’s accusing gaze on him.

“All right. What time is it on?”

“Don’t be late!”

Click click. Bayard changes his strategy and, instead of trying to complete a second face, attempts to build a crown around the first face. While he manipulates his cube with growing dexterity, he thinks that he has not really grasped the difference between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary.