Pragmatics is the politics of language.

(A Thousand Plateaus, 91) Until the introduction of Deleuze and Guattaris approach consisting of abstracting philosophical concepts out of literature, music, painting, and art in general in order to shed new light on the already overwhelming repertoire that modernists have offered us, the modernist literature primarily bore the mark of "apolitical". The modernist play on language was regarded as mere formal innovations (Bogue, 113) in literature, but Deleuze and Guattari insisted that many of those authors were in fact political writers and that fragmenting iterations" were " forms of social invention and interactions with power. (Bogue, 113) Even though Deleuze and Guattari write that political aspect is essential part of minor literatures, it is never an easy task to explicitly locate those moments in modernists texts. One could say (in Deleuzian terms) that they are immanent to those works, one of the many lines operating on a plane of consistency. The political is elusive, often shifts forms and escapes us; on one hand, it might be contained in the position the writer occupies while writing the piece, while on the other, it might entirely belong to the position the reader occupies while reading finalized piece of art. The reason why it may be so, following Deleuze and Guattari's proposition is that the political is already contained in the structure of language per se. However daunting chasing of this dragon may be, in this paper I am going to try to locate the political aspect(s) of the minor literature in some of Kafkas short stories.

Deleuze and Guattari write that minor literatures cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics (Deleuze & Guattari, 17), but instead taking this as an axiom, I propose that we look closely at short stories such as The Penal Colony, Before the Law, The Metamorphosis and others to see which molar and molecular lines are at work and how they may be explicitly or implicitly connected to politics. Is the political hidden in the expression or the content, or in both? For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafkas literary machine consists of three parts: letters, short stories and novels. From Kafkas literary machine, they abstracted three major characteristic of minor literature: (1) its minor use of a major language, (2) the political character of minor literature and (3) the collectiveness of its enunciation. And to talk about the political side of minor literature necessarily involves the other two characteristics. Major languages as we know them are inherently political, they are the gatekeepers of political power. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: forming a grammatically correct sentence is for the normal individual a prerequisite for any submission to social laws (ATP, 112). In Towards a Minor Literature, they write that a minor literature does not come from a minor language; it is rather that which minority constructs within a major language (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003:16). Namely, minor literature is representative of a major language affected by a high level of deterritorialisation. This is in accordance with Deleuze and Guattaris idea that, in addition to information and communication, the purpose of language is primarily pragmatic relying on
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indirect speech as a social configuration. They propose that language does not have fixed or constant qualities, or rather that the apparent constants are drawn from the variables themselves (ATP, 114). To start talking about the use of language in Deleuze and Guattaris terms, regardless of whether it is minor or major (or becoming-minor of major) language, we must start from their viewpoint expressed in A Thousand Plateaus, where they argue that languages function is not to communicate, or to inform, but to pass orders through order-words. Language is not life, they write, it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 88) For them language has the means for action, the ability to do things (Bogue, 2003:98), and language itself is in motion, neglecting rules of grammar, morphology, syntax, or even

semantics. Deleuze and Guattari note that even the most redundant of enunciations, as for example I swear, never means the same thing, it always depends on the situation and the actors that use that chunk of indirect discourse appropriating itthrough incorporeal transformation

(Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 90). What Deleuze and Guattari call orderwords has nothing to do with particular linguistic category, they do not belong to a particular category of statement as declarative or imperative, in fact they are the relation of every word or statement to implicit presuppositions,..., to speech acts that...can only be accomplished by statements. (ATP, 87) Order-words are not only commands but stand for every act that is linked to statements by a social obligation hence Deleuze
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and Guattari propose that the only possible definition of language is in fact a set of all order-words, implicit presupposition, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment. (atp, 87). Language already has all three characteristic that denote the existence of minor literature. It is already deterritorialised, already political and always collective. Firstly, the pragmatic (impoverished, irregular, incorrect) use of language is becoming-minor of language; it is categories like syntax that constitute the language as a major one, thus occupying a political position within a language. The unity of language is fundamentally political (atp, 112), hence all the rules that work on rounding the language as a holistic system are political as well. Similarily, Deleuze and Guattari note that the S for Sentence in Chomskian generative grammar represents a power marker before it is a syntactical marker subsuming a respective tree structure of a sentence. But how can Kafkas use of language be regarded as

deterritorialised given his ascetic, sober use of German (Bogue, 114)? Does he compensate for the minuteness and precision of grammar rules with his order-words, his law machines, desiring machines, and his animalbecomings? Bogue at times wonders why Deleuze and Guattari align Kafka with Beckett, Cummings and others, because the way they deterritorialise major language significantly differs from Kafka.

The deterritorialization is already present in Kafkas choice to write as he does and his standpoint is a political one; he is well aware of his position in
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Czech society as someone belonging to an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses, like a "paper language" or an "artificial language. (TML, 16) Kafka makes language tremble like Gregors feet and oscillate like his body does; in that sense his language is very palpable and has an almost atmospheric quality. (Bogue,108) One could easily imagine being present in the room where Georg tucks in his father, almost sensing fathers untidiness, experiencing his neglected appearance at the same time Georg does. His language is also spatial, it gives rise to different dimensions, he mixes the sounds and sound representations on the linguistic diagram (Bogue, 106) and manages that not by creating sound markers in language but by making the language itself stutter (Deleuze in Bogue, 107). And what does this proper grammatical use of German language actually mean? I am only reading an English translation of Kafka - English being a learned, almost artificial language for me which seems, paradoxically, to be partly diminishing this double distance created firstly by Kafkas use of German as these stories have been translated from into English. Given the linearity of language in addition to its successiveness, can it be indicative of overcoding (ATP, 69) or superlinearity (ATP, 69) of language that allows not only translation of Kafka, but creates numerous decoded flows as its residue just like the State apparatus does in an attempt to appropriate other apparata (ATP, 496). These flows are something that makes Kafka distinguishable; they are the immanent critique laid down for us to discern, the individuated story that is
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immediately connected to politics. In "The Judgement" Kafka offers us a possibly Oedipal situation par excellence; we have the standard antagonistic father-son relationship where the sons attempt to speed up the retiring process of the father. With the mother dead, the father no longer represents a figure of interest- he is now but an obstacle for a capitalist-driven desires of the son given the fathers juridical position of the keeper of the symbolical (and financial) order etc. But there is more to the plot revealing the political power play and deception to be residing on both sides as two lines of flight and both with potentially deadly consequences. The story starts off with Georg, and his benign Sunday morning letter to his Petersburg friend from which we learn of his engagement to Miss Frieda Brandenfeld (a girl from a well-off family(41)), his mothers death, his fathers withdrawal from the family business, and the business unexpected boom in the past two years. (39) But it is only when Georg decides to approach his father for a piece of advice on the letter-to-an-old-friend that the story takes a completely unexpected turn unfolding the diabolical powers under the seemingly peaceful setting. We learn of the great political stakes the writing of letters had in this and see the extent to which Georg was deceived by the fathers alleged condition. When he gets up to great Georg, his immediate thoughts reveal to us what giant of a man his father still is. (42) The deception is part of the story and deliberate play-acting (A good word!) is performed by both of them equally. Deleuze and Guattari write that one discovers behind the familial triangle (father-mother-child) other infinitely more active
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triangles from which the family itself borrows its own power, its own drive to propagate submission, to lower the head and make heads lower. (TML, 11) An empty space had opened in the triangle when the mother died, a space that got filled up by the Russian friend, revealing other triangles lying under the familial one, the economic, political and juridical triangles. Deleuze and Guattari write that it is not the judges, commissioners and so on a substitute for the father,, but the father is a condensation of all these forces that he submits to and makes his son submit to.(TML, 12) In there we see an Exaggerated Oedipus, and one played out by both sides. This Exaggerated Oedipus did not show us that neither of them was guilty (TML, 10), rather conversely, it showed that both of them were guilty of plotting and working behind each others back. To go back to the already mentioned Deleuze and Guattaris thesis about language, let me briefly gloss over their definition of order-words. The orderwords have double potentiality, as they bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or a potential death if they do not obey. (ATP, 118) Order words, just like death, deeply concern bodies. They bear the potentiality of incorporeal transformation just like death, but they also bear the spark initiating the line of flight included in it as its other face in a complex assemblage.(ATP, 118) As Deleuze and Guattari point out, every order-word carries a little death sentence (ATP, 85), which is more than obvious in The Judgement, in the last

lines that Georgs father directs to his son: I sentence you to death by drowning(49), as a speech act which immediately takes him on a line of flight. Looking backwards, Georg was too territorialized, too self-confident, not ready to deterritorialise his again too comfortable position, he was tucked in just the way he tried to tuck in his father. And we must admit that the language Georg used was indicating such a turnover, he manipulated it with ease, overcoding every situation to the extent that it had to produce the decoded vectors dispersing in every direction. And it was too late when he realised it as you are already dead when you hear the order-word (ATP, 119), and noreterritorialization - as those Georg attempted gripping at the rails and saying dear parents, I have always loved you (50) - has the ability to save you. The only way to escape the order-word is to anticipate it and to set off on a line of flight way before order-words struck upon you. This does not only show the political or juridical power language has, but also demystifies the interconnectivity of the molar structures that support one another and the powerful political network that binds them together. The Judgement bears witness to Kafkas deterritorialisation of language itself without having to make major ruptures in the syntactic order of sentences. Alternately, he does this by changing the discourse; starting from a proud father who heartedly greets Georg, a becoming-child of an adult by fiddling with Georgs watch chain (45), and, finally, by becoming Georgs prosecutor and his judge using the jurists discourse to pass the death penalty for his son, all uttered ever so soberly by an impoverished language, and cold and
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objective voice. Yet, despite this, he somehow does manage to find a way to make his language stutter, and it is either through body movements or through impossible and comic situations. Another example of the deadliness of the order-word is Gregor, who anticipated its enunciation long before he finally heard it from his sister. She is the only one who could actually sentence him for it would be too obvious, too expected and too Oedipal if the sentence was pronounced by his father and the circumstances would not be met. This is something Austin calls felicity conditions referring to expected or appropriate circumstances for the performance of a speech act to be recognized as intended. The felicity conditions pertain to conventionality of procedure, appropriateness of persons and circumstancesand requisiteness of thoughts, feelings and intentions. The order-word must be said by the right person, and could Gregor possibly wished for more horrid a judge? The lethal words we must try to get rid of it(139) get repeated three times (three is a magical number), which might indicate different rules in enunciating the order-word. The first one was deadly enough for Gregor, for his conviction that he needed to disappear was....firmer than his sisters (141). George however did anticipate this situation, as his line of flight was initiated exactly because of such an end and was directed against it. More importantly, it was coded in a pre-existing order and started long before the order-word made its appearance obvious. Gregor sensed the intermingling of

molar structures within his family, the bureaucratic machine working silently and simultaneously with the family machine so he initiated a

deterritorialization, a becoming vermin, a line of flight as the only possible way out from what already seemed a lose-lose situation. One might wonder how come that Gregor did not manage to avoid the death sentence in spite of his becoming, but according to Deleuze and Guattari, Gregor found himself re-Oedipalized by his family (TML, 39), which drove him to certain death, preceded by the order-word. On the topic of order-words, there is a counter example that confirms this lethal rule. In "The Penal Colony", we get to know a condemn man who is altogether clueless about the form of his sentence. As was already discussed, the death penalty is always already accomplished the moment, or just a second prior to hearing the order-word carrying it. That is what allows court-machine to deprive the individual of freedom, that is the rite of passage, the threshold between a free and a convicted individual, and that is precisely why the condemned man from in the penal colony stays alive. Of course he is guilty, guilt is always without doubt, as the officer puts it. (M, 155) But we dont get to hear that, even if we do, the condemned man doesnt-although he tries to eavesdrop the conversation. That is why the officer and the research traveler talk in French, because if the condemn man knew his punishment, he would already be dead.

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The order word has its other dimension too for it can mean flight as well as death. In other words, when you hear the sentence, either the death is already there, or you are already on a line of flight. Language is variable in that it is already in a new state, that of continuous variation. The thing that escapes us is whose death penalty we are waiting to see or whose line of flight is about to end abruptly. As we come to learn only afterwards, the officer was well aware of the research travelers position in his political project of regaining the power through something that could easily turn into last death sentence in "The Penal Colony". Deleuze and Guattari elaborate extensively on the importance of the last object in a series, i.e. the liminal or marginal position. They argue that limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, whereas threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change. (ATP, 484) Deleuze and Guattari use both limit and threshold extensively for their analysis of capitalism, saying that it is the penultimate position in any assemblage that influences the entire group. (ATP, 484) In every day economics it would mean that the least paid worker has a lot of influence on the work cost of the entire working assemblage, marking the zone of proximity and sounding the alarm for the landlord or capitalist not to allow riots but instead attempt to reterritorialize the mode of production all over again. Consequently, in "The Penal Colony" we have already reached the threshold of change because half way through the elucidation of the machine the officer provides for the researcher we already learn that many things are unfitting. By unfitting I do
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not only meanthe broken belt or the creaking sound the old machine produces, but the fact that this is not the penultimate but rather the ultimate convict ever to be subjected to this particular process of punishment in the colony. And Kafka does a marvelous job by switching the positions of the convict and his judge, making the convict not only interested in seeing how the machine works but ultimately playing a role of an executioner for the officer. This was, however, the only way to do it, for the condemned man did not hear the order word. The same order-word the officer denied the condemned man was his own punishment. Of course, the researcher played the role of mediator for something the officer already foresaw, his own little death sentence. And we should not doubt whether it is righteous or not for guilt is always without doubt (TPC, 155) as Deleuze and Guattari succintly explain:
The danger of the diabolical pact, of diabolical innocence,is not guilt but the trap, the impasse within the rhizome, the closing of all escape,the burrow that is locked everywhere. Fear.The devil himself is caught in thetrap. One allows oneself to be re-Oedipalized not by guilt but by fatigue, by alack of invention, by the imprudence of what one has started, by the photo, bythe policediabolical powers from faraway. (Towards a Minor Literature, 33)

It would be almost too easy to mark the relationship between the late commander and the young officer as Oedipal and it would be as equally easy
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to denote the breaking up of the machine as decomposition of the law that has become only an empty form. Instead, there seems to be a kind of diabolical power that governs the officer, who believes this to be that last chance given to people when they sign a contract with the devil. But the Diablo does not tolerate lack of invention, or fatigue, IT can allow itself to abandon, to betray, he is the ultimate traitor that can offer one a way out, a road to political power- the rest is upon you. The officer did indeed engage in becoming-machine, but the machine was broken, long before the creaking started and belt-snapping started (another example of how Kafka

deterritorializes the language from the inside), maybe even before old commander died. And the officer was too blind to see it, he underwent a procedure he believed was releasing, but never experienced the so many times observed transfiguration in the tormented faces in the moments of passing judgement(M, 165)

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