"People tend to think things are just words, that is, that they are, supposedly, what they are - "a cat is a cat," "a coin is a coin," "I am I.
[...]
However, there have been and will be insurrectionary moments where... people will perceive that what is real about words isn't what they designate - a cat is not "a cat," a coin is - less than ever - "a coin," and I am not "myself."
What is real about language is the operation it carries out."
-Tiqqun, A critical metaphysics could emerge as A science of Apparatuses
or, more on the specifically deleuzian side of things:
"When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing herself when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as "insign," give orders or commands. A teacher's commands are not external or additional to what he or she teaches us.
[...]
The elementary unit of language
the statement — is the order-word. Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words.
Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.
[...]
Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. 4 Every order-word, even a father's to his son, carries a little death sentence—a Judgment, as Kafka put it."
-D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, Postulates of Linguistics
Perhaps sense(s) rather than sense?
“AIl around us language replaces experience. The sign, so soft, substitutes itself for the thing, which is hard. l cannot think of this substitution as an equivalence. It is more of an abuse and a violence. The sound of a coin is not worth the coin; the smell of cooking does not fill the hungry stomach; publicity is not the equivalent of quality; the tongue that talks annuls the tongue that tastes or the one that receives and gives a kiss.”
-Michel Serres
i left something out of the tiqqun quote above this D&G quote. let's produce the quote in full now:
"But for the time being the petty-bourgeois terror of language still reigns uniformly. On the one hand, in the "everyday" sphere, PEOPLE tend to think things are just words, that is, that they are, supposedly, what they are - "a cat is a cat," "a coin is a coin," "I am I." On the other, as soon as the impersonal (PEOPLE) has been subverted and language suddenly becomes a potential agent of disorder within the clinical reality of the already-known, PEOPLE project that regularity out into all the cloudy regions of "ideology," "metaphysics," "literature," or, more commonly, "small talk."
However, there have been and will be insurrectionary moments where, under the effects of a flagrant derangement of the everyday, common sense will overcome that terror. PEOPLE will then perceive that what is real about words isn't what they designate - a cat is not "a cat," a coin is - less than ever - "a coin," and I am not "myself." What is real about language is the operation it carries out. Describing some being as an apparatus, or as being produced by an apparatus, is a practice of denaturing the given world, an operation of taking a step back from what is familiar to us, or wants to be considered so. And you know it."
Notice the use of Common Sense here; in D&G, there is no "faculty for the centralization of information" - there is no "common sense" - in Tiqqun, Common Sense is supposed to close the distance between us and what's around us. It's supposed to penetrate through the "petty bourgeois" veil.
But is it not that the petty bourgeois veil is, in truth, the closest we have to common sense? hasn't the world already been ordered for us? aren't we going to have to develop an incredibly un-common sense? a sense specific to our assemblages?