I’m known as the discourse guy and the theory guy. There’s always this, oh, I bet he’s gonna talk about language and how language does this and that. That’s fair enough. It’s not that I’m only about language, but what I talk and write about is often concerned with language.
This is also clear from my published work on landscapes. I do approach landscape discursively or textually. If you point that out, yeah, that’s fair enough. I can’t disagree with that. I’m also occasionally faulted for that. Long story short, it’s like I’m reducing it all to language. That’s not really the case though, even if that may appear to be the case.
This essay is not, however, really about whether I’m for or against discursive or textual approaches to landscape and there’s a simple reason for that. I don’t think it’s fruitful to think in such binary terms.
Lack of correspondence
People tend to think that language corresponds with reality, that words correspond with things. They think that what someone says, writes or otherwise expresses, for example by drawing, painting or photographing, represents reality. I do not think this way. Instead, I think that words define reality, that they act upon it, attributing it accordingly, as such and such. This is J. L. Austin’s take on language in ‘How to Do Things with Words’ and Michel Foucault’s take on discourse in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’.
Reality is not represented by language, but it is nonetheless defined by it. We make sense of it by classifying it as such and such. This is both a problem and a solution to that problem. To account for the former, people tend to think that language represents reality, but it is, in fact, defined by them or, rather, for them as they often have little influence over what counts as what. To account for the latter, this problem solves itself once you come to terms with that problem, once you realize that it is all entirely made up.
To explain this in another way, people think that language is something that exists, out there, like on its own, and then when we speak or write, we use that language. This is how I was taught language at school, even though, ironically, I could already express myself through language just fine. Teachers would then make note of what we said and, later on, wrote, and correct us, indicating that we are, somehow, using the language wrong, regardless of how we could understand one another just fine.
The problem with this conception of language is that it is reduced to something static. It’s something fixed. It has this ideal form. Then when it’s used, the user is thought of as using it correctly or incorrectly. This then allows those who know language or, rather, supposedly know language to have power over others. They are given the right to correct those who use language incorrectly.
Orality and scripture
Félix Guattari comments on this issue in his book ‘Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm’. He (89) juxtaposes two conceptions of language, orality and scripture. Most people would probably refer to them as speech and writing, but I’d say his take has more to do with contrasting oral traditions with written traditions. He (89) even warns against thinking about this as either or case. It’s not that speech is better than writing, or vice versa. What he’s after is rather that orality is open-ended, just speech. If it works, it works. Scripture is close-ended, so that speech and writing, what someone says or writes, is always compared with what has been written before and idealized into a code.
He (89) also recognizes what many linguists recognize, regardless of what position they take on the matter. So, language is supposedly this static entity, but that makes little sense when you consider that it has not always been the way it is now. It has changed and it keeps changing. The point is not that, ha, ha, missed it already, pointless enterprise, because it keeps changing, but rather that it makes little sense to conceive language as a static entity, to give it such status, when the way we make sense of it, in such static terms, is our own doing. There’s no this or that language-in- itself, like English-in-itself or Finnish-in-itself, just waiting for us to find it and uncover what it is and how it is constructed. Just go back in time enough and it’ll be abundantly clear that what we nowadays call this or that language, like English or Finnish, didn’t exist back then. To be clear, I’m not saying that this or that language doesn’t exist, that English doesn’t exist or that Finnish doesn’t exist, but rather that it owes its existence to people. In that way, I guess it’s more apt to say that it subsists, rather than existing.
The thing what scripture is that by writing has tempted us to think otherwise, that language has existence of its own and that the scripts, those writings, what we might also call texts, are then the proof of it. To be clear, this is not to say that those writings don’t matter. They do. What’s strange about them is that they are linguistic expressions that make sense, inasmuch as they do, here and now, even in the absence of whoever it was that expressed them.
This leads us to why Guattari (89) reckons that there’s nothing inherently wrong about scripture. It’s rather that as it exists, as writing is definitely a thing, it has an impact on orality. That said, it also works the other way around, so that scripture is impacted by orality, which is also definitely a thing. In his (89) words:
“Too marked an opposition between the oral and the scriptural seems hardly relevant. The oral, even the most quatidian, is overcoded by the scriptural; the scriptural, however highly sophisticated, is worked by the oral.”
Again, most linguists would agree, even if they probably wouldn’t use the terms he uses. I reckon that only the old school, hard core structuralists would disagree. They’d say nay, there is language and then there is language use, either speech or writing. They wouldn’t even care about any of this. They are interested in what language is, not in how it is used, like what it does, while also happily ignoring that language owes its existence or, rather, that it subsists because of people who exist. Others would see his point and relate it to how language changes and would probably be able to talk about that topic for hours.
What bothers Guattari is not that there’s language. He doesn’t want to get rid of language. He (88) may come across such, but that’s because of the way language tends to be conceived:
“Speech … is not a simple medium of communication, the agent of transmission of information[.]”
It’s rather that he (88) wants to make it matter, here and now, to reconnect it with everything else:
“[It] engenders being-there; speech interface between the cosmic in-itself and the subjective for-itself.”
In other words, language is what allows us to make sense of ourselves and what else is there. That said it’s not the only thing that matters when we make sense of the world through it. If we change the circumstances, but retain what someone expresses, it changes how we make sense of it. These can be very minute, as recognized by him (89):
“Ordinary speech tries … to keep alive the presence of at least a minimum of so-called non-verbal semiotic components, where the substances of expression constituted from intonation, rhythm, facial traits and postures, reinforce and take over from each other, superimpose themselves, averting in advance the despotism of signifying circularity.”
Now, to simplify that a bit, as he is certainly know for his jargon, what he is saying is that there are many semiotic modes, not just speech or writing. So, when someone says something, it’s also important to make note of the person’s facial expressions, the person’s bodily expressions, what many people often would refer to as their body language. Even if we can’t see, either because we are blind or we are talking on the phone, it’s not just that we say something, like a string of words, and that we hear something, like some other string of words. Even then, it matters a great deal how someone says something. It can be intonation. It can be rhythm. It can be the pauses or the length of the pauses.
He explains this right after he (89) comments on scripture. He takes issue with it because, in his (89) view, it empties speech and reduces it to a code, making language a matter of conformity, “fixed in the order of law, the control of facts, gestures and feelings.”
To exemplify the difference between the two conceptions of language, he (89) reminds us of various everyday situations. They could be open-ended, but we are taught that they are close-ended. We are therefore expected to act accordingly. He (89) uses the example of going grocery shopping:
“[A]t the supermarket there is no more time to chat about the quality of a product or haggle for a good price. The necessary and sufficient information has evacuated the existential dimensions of expression. We are not there to exist but to accomplish our duty as consumers.”
Indeed, when you go to the supermarket, you have your trolley or your basket. You are expected to fill it with items on the way and then reach the cashier who checks them, one by one, beep, beep, beep. That’s it. No idling. No chatter. No flirting. Buy the goods and go home.
This is not to say that it’s all fixed. No, no. People often do what else is there to do, idling, chatting, flirting, etc., even when they are not supposed to do that. I’ve definitely chatted and flirted with people in inappropriate places, not just in supermarkets, but also in libraries. But that’s the point he (89) makes. You can try to make people believe that everything is fixed, so that it’s all strictly coded, but things are subject to change, no matter how hard you try to make sure that they don’t.
What’s abundantly clear from his book is that people and, more specifically, western people have come to take it for granted that language is to be conceived as scriptural terms and, conversely, that it is not to be conceived in oral terms. Are they to blame for it? Well, yes, in the sense that it’s they who conceive it that way. The problem won’t go away, because it’s a matter of how they think and how they conceive reality. Then again, no, it’s not their fault, as such. They’ve been taught this by their parents and their teachers, so discipline them for thinking otherwise and reward them for thinking in this way. They probably don’t even think it is possible to think otherwise. To them, thinking is this one thing that is the way it is, objectively, and it can’t be changed, so that it’s just what’s subjective, opinions, that can be changed.
Collective assemblages of enunciation
For Guattari (98), it’s interesting and also problematic that western people separate expressing, from what is expressed. To use other terms, they happily disassociate the product from its production. There are just these things, these discreet entities, among other discreet entities. They do such and such, whatever that may be, but they do, whatever it is that they do, as discreet entities.
To simplify that, to just speaking, it is thought that it is the ‘I’ that speaks, no matter who it is, and what is spoken is conceived as information that passes from one person, from one ‘I’, to another person, to another ‘I’, as criticized by him (88). Who they are doesn’t matter. What else is there doesn’t matter. Oh, and it’s not just the case with the subject, the ‘I’ that speaks’, but also the object, the referent that the subject, the ‘I’, speaks of, possible to some other subject, some other ‘I’. There are just these things that addressed in isolation from other things. How they’ve come to being and why they’ve come to being is hardly relevant. It’s basically another, separate discussion.
He (98) notes that this was not always the case. People were groups of people and social relations used to matter. People made sense of the world through what he (98) refers to assemblages of enunciation, what he and Gilles Deleuze also call collective assemblages of enunciation in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’.
This is such a different take on language that it warrants its own discussion. It’s just wildly different from what most people, including most linguistics, are used to. So, what are these collective assemblages of enunciation?
Well, this is not easy to answer. It’s not easy define, nor to understand, if you are not familiar with his and Deleuze’s work. To connect this to Austin, language consists of speech acts, regardless of whether we think of it as involving speech or writing. The term is a bit clumsy, considering that’s there’s also writing, and other semiotic modes of expression, but, anyway, what matters is that language is performative. When we say something, or write something, like I’m doing right now, what is said, or written, never, ever describes anything. Instead, this, what is done by speaking, or by writing, defines them as such and such, insisting that it is such and such. That’s the gist of ‘How to Do Things with Words’.
Sets of order-words
Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge and appreciate Austin in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. They (79) refer to speech acts also as order-words and define them as “the relation of every word or every statement”, i.e., what is said (or written, or otherwise express, if we wish to expand this), “to implicit presuppositions”. They (79) explicitly retain the point made by Austin, that what is said and what one seeks to accomplish with what is said cannot be separated from one another. Saying is doing as much as anything else that is considered doing. Of course, it might be that one fails to accomplish anything by saying something, but that’s not the point.
But what is an implicit presupposition? Well, this is something that they (79) grab not from Austin, nor from John Searle, but from Oswald Ducrot. To give you a simple answer, they are what is implicitly presupposed by what is said (or written, or otherwise expressed). It is what is not said when something is said, but is nonetheless necessary to presuppose to make sense of the situation, so that what is said can be understood, so that something gets accomplished, as opposed to not getting accomplished or something else ends up getting accomplished. To be clear, what is not said, but presupposed and only implied, is, of course, something that could be said and has been said before, but nonetheless cannot be said, because you cannot say everything, there and then. It’s just impossible. There’d be no end to it.
To give you a more precise answer, which is what Ducrot provides in his article, ‘Présupposés et sous-entendus’, an implicit presupposition is similar to what someone implies, what many in pragmatics call an implication or an implicature, but not exactly the same. What is particularly noteworthy about his (35-36) account of implicit presupposition is that it is not only something that isn’t said when something is said, but also something that presented as taken for granted by the speaker, with the intention to make it so that what is implicitly presupposed cannot be denied by the hearer. It’s underhanded because, as a speaker, it’s like putting into words into the hearer’s mouth, making the hearer complicit, before the hearer gets to respond.
The thing is, however, what isn’t said, because it isn’t said, and, frankly, cannot be said, because one cannot say everything, there and then, i.e., what is only presupposed and implied also amounts to a speech act. This means that speech acts only make sense if they are preceded by other speech acts that support them, even though they are absent, i.e., not said, there and then. This leads us to Deleuze and Guattari’s (79) definition of language:
“The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment.”
So, language is just what we accomplish by saying something, or by writing something and to accomplish that something, whatever it may be, we need to be aware of what else has been said or written to accomplish something. That’s it. That’s the set.
Also, note how that the set is not the set of all sets, but the set specific to a language, whatever it may be, and, by extension to a variety of language, as it is understood as such, here and now, and not as something that has existence outside time, space and the people who speak or write that language or variety of language.
In practice, this means that when we analyze what someone says, writes and/or otherwise expresses, it’s not a matter of attempting to find something in what is said, written and/or otherwise expressed, nor in the person saying, writing and/or otherwise expressing it. No, no, and once more no. Instead, what we look at is what what’s being said, written and/or otherwise expresses accomplishes. That, of course, also requires us to consider what’s presupposed and implied, which is also why we can’t just analyze what’s said, written and/or otherwise expressed, but also what’s not said, written and/or otherwise expressed. To be clear, to understand that, what saying, writing and/or otherwise expressing accomplishes, i.e., what it does, does not mean that we need to account for everything else, for everything that has been said, written and otherwise expressed before, but just isn’t said there and then. No. That’s not the case. One just needs to account for what’s presupposed, implicitly. That’s not super clear, no, as that depends, but it does not encompass everything else in that set.
Mastery of the entire set is likely impossible, at least if we conceive the set as a language. Even a variety, like a regional dialect, might be impossible to master. But it might be doable if we think of a jargon, like military jargon, or a slang, like a specific slang used by a group in a certain neighborhood. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (83) state that:
“True intuition is not a judgment of grammaticality but
an evaluation of internal variables of enunciation in relation to the aggregate of the circumstances.”
I could not agree more. It’s like when you get it, you get it, and you get it because you understand the set. But what are the internal variables of enunciation? What do they mean by this? Well, the answer to this is that there’s more to language than words and how they are connected to one another, like in scripture, like how something is written, as it is here, as Guattari would point out. They (82) emphasize this point:
“[A] single word can be a complete enunciation.”
But how? Well, they (82) do answer this:
“[T]here must be ‘an extra something’ that ‘remains outside of the scope of the entire set of linguistic categories and definitions,’ even though it is still entirely within the purview of the theory of enunciation or language.”
But what is it? Well, it is speech act or, as they (79) call it, the order-word, which, as already established, is all about “the relation between every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions”. They (82) specify how this works:
“The order-word is precisely that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation.”
Simply put, a word, a statement or an utterance, whatever you want to call it, is always more than just a word, a statement or an utterance. It has that extra something, as they (82) point out. What is, stated or uttered always has that relation to what is implicitly presupposed, as they (79) also point out. Anyway, they (82) go on to add:
“The instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed.”
So, again, there’s just that word, that statement or that utterance, whatever it may be, yet there’s more to it. It is this more that is interesting. It is what allows the words, the statements or the utterances to work in various ways and to transform the bodies, here physical bodies, like the object that one refers to in the act of saying something. This is not a corporeal transformation, no, nothing changes physically, but rather an incorporeal transformation, which means that the way the body is understood and, possibly, other bodies are understood changes, as elaborated by them (82).
Structures and systems
To be clear, this is not the mainstream view regarding language, not in academics, including but not limited to linguistics, nor in systems of education, regardless of the level of education. Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatics is the deep end, the very deep end pragmatics.
Most pragmaticians are still cozy with other linguists and don’t really want to rock the boat, because, you know careers and what not. For them, it’s just language use and all about meaning in social context. They are happy to leave the rest to the other kinds of linguists who are concerned with language and meaning in general. I only bring this up as Deleuze and Guattari (82) comment on this:
“As long as linguistics confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches the assemblage[.]”
Why is the assemblage botched? Isn’t it just about language and its variables? Well, no, it’s not just about those two, as they (82) go on to add:
“It consigns circumstances to the exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue.”
So, the problem with linguistics, especially in its, supposedly, proper form, and even in contemporary mainstream linguistics that acknowledges pragmatics is that it retains the distinction between language and language use. For Deleuze and Guattari, you cannot separate language from the circumstances. There is no language in the abstract.
What many, if not most linguists still consider language and what teachers then teach to their students is that language has an existence of its own, as does each specific language and language variety. Language is thought of as like somewhere out there, even though its not, and that has a fixed form, even though it doesn’t, and when people speak or write, they are just using language, correctly or incorrectly, hence Deleuze and Guattari’s (82) remark about defining variables in contrast with constants.
People often like to explain such and such as a ‘system’, by which they mean that it’s more than just some random collection bits and pieces. It’s all systematic. Another word that people use like this is ‘structure’. Again it’s not just that there is this and then there’s that, but rather how it is all part of some structure. It’s like how it all fits together.
It’s tempting to say that, oh, Deleuze and Guattari (82) are just saying that as well and that’s the case in an everyday sense, sure, but it’s not really the case. They (41) specify this:
“The word ‘structure’ may be used to designate the
sum of these relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth’s last word.”
For them, the problem with structure, and system, is that it is often thought to be immutable. In the context of linguistics, that would be the case with, for example, structuralists, but they are not structuralists, as they (41) clearly point out. They (51) even mention that they prefer to explain this or that, whatever it may be, in terms of its structuration and constitution.
Assemblages are machines
That said, to really understand them, it’s better to simply not use any of those terms at all, if possible. Instead, think in terms of machines, the point being that you don’t have this or that and then that’s it. No, no. They (1) explain this in ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’:
“Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.”
Oh, and pay attention to how it, whatever it may be, is always more than just one thing. There’s nothing that isn’t connected to something else. Everything is coupled and connected, inasmuch as it is, of course, and that’s your machine. Take their example, the human body:
“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times,
at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.”
Yes, human bodies do all of these things, emphasis really being on the doing here. There’s no ‘I’ that you start from and then do this and then that. There’s no body that just is and then something happens. The human body is always, already doing something. It’s not doing everything, at all times, but it is doing something alright, even without the ‘I’ willing any of it. This is why they (2) add that:
“There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.”
As machines always do something, instead just being something, they reckon it’s only apt to call them desiring-machines. They don’t use the term in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. They (219) use the term assemblage instead and specify it as having two sides or, rather, aspects: belief and desire. The former pertains to what they (7, 22) refer to as the collective assemblages of enunciation, which operate “directly within” the latter that pertains to what they refer to as the machinic assemblages of desire.
Overall, what’s particularly important to understand about assemblages is that they are not static collections of things. Yes, if we freeze time, as we often do when we are analyzing something, breaking it down to its components, to understand how it is constructed, how the components relate to another or, indeed, how it works, but you have to understand that, in each, case something has always, already happened for things to be the way they are. Nothing exists in-itself. Plus, nothing will stay the same way forever. It is all subject to change. How fast will something happen? How fast will something change? Well, that depends on those components relate to one another. Even if we isolate something, like focus just on one thing, whatever it may be, that’s an assemblage. If we think of where we’ve isolated it, let’s say in laboratory, that’s also an assemblage. Why? Because assemblages are just another name for machines.
But why did Deleuze and Guattari change the term between books? Isn’t that just confusing? Yes. It is. But, well, they changed the terms because people kept thinking that desiring machines were just people, like there being this or that subject, the ‘I’, that desires something, as noted by one of their translators, Brian Massumi in his own guidebook, ‘A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari’, in reference to Deleuze’ own commentary regarding the reasons for the change of terms in his (101) book ‘Dialogues’ with Claire Parnet.
Composites and compositions
This is nothing but a Spinozist conception what there is and, more precisely, what there ever is. If you consult Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’, it’s clear that, for him, everything, in its infinity and totality, undergoes constant change or, rather, modulation. That’s why for him everything is merely a modification of substance or, in short, a mode. Some of the change is easy to notice, some of it is difficult to notice, but everything changes, all the time, while, at the same time, everything seeks to persists in its being, preventing any decrease in its capacity affect and be affected, and to perfect itself, increasing its capacity to affect and be affected.
To explain how this conception of one substance, many modes, matches desiring machines and assemblages, it is worth noting that, for Spinoza, each mode is, in itself, a composite. In other words, each mode consists of other modes, which consists of other modes. Take something like a building. It’s a mode. It’s a modification of substance. It’s not all there is to substance, as it’s not all of substance, but it is a modification or a mode, nonetheless. It consists of floors, walls, ceilings, doors, windows and a roof of some kind on top of it all. But even the walls are made of something, as are the ceilings, the floors, the doors, the windows and the roof. The doors probably have hinges, handles, locks, door closer mechanisms, etc. We could then look at them, what they consists of. We could do this, all day long, looking at their components and their materials, what kind of alloys they have, and what not.
We could break down each mode, all the way to their atoms and even then we could go on and on, and on and on, all the way to the smallest of particles, which were once thought to be atoms, but now are, whatever they are, until they are no longer thought to be the smallest particles. The ingenious thing about Spinoza is that he doesn’t have to worry about that, what the smallest mode is, because he can simply that whatever is the smallest and, logically, mathematically, you can always split something. I know he didn’t use the term, but that’s pretty much what infinitesimal stands for.
The thing is that we can do the same thing with modes the other way around as well. We can use modes to compose other modes, hence the point about all modes being composites. A hinge is a composite. A lock is a composite. A door is a composite. A room is a composite. An apartment is a composite. A building is a composite. A building complex is a composite. A neighborhood is a composite. A town is a composite. I think you get the point.
Now, if we think of everything as a modification of substance or, in short, a mode, we are still missing something. What’s still missing is crucial about them and also about the desiring machines and assemblages. If we explain something as a mode, which consists of other modes, we are focusing solely on the bits and pieces, like what is x, y, and z made of, and the problem with that is that it’s a static conception of what’s there.
Assemblage also has this static feel to it, albeit that’s largely a translation issue, as I’ve explained in more detail in the past. The French original, agencement, is better in this regard as it “conveys an active sense of agency as being what some or other entity does“, as explained by Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (11) in their introduction to ‘The Guattari Effect’. Desiring machine is also better in this regard, because it doesn’t have that static feel to it. There’s always this and that machine and, moreover, it’s desiring. There’s always something that’s going on.
The missing bit, what’s crucial about Spinoza’s conception of modes, is affect. Each mode is not just a composite of other modes and, to make sense of how that can even be, how this and/or that mode compose another mode, as well as how modes decompose and recompose, there must be something defines them as more than that. Each mode is always marked by its dual capacity to affect and be affected or, to use simpler terms, what it can do and what can be done to it.
To be clear, Spinoza does acknowledge that all bodies, which are modifications of substance conceived through the attribute of extension, i.e., in physical terms, and not through the attribute of thought, i.e., in mental terms, exist in relation to one another, either moving or not moving. This is also the only way that it is possible to distinguish substance as something physical, yet modified in such and such ways, so that there are these bodies that are distinct from one another. It would be impossible for there to be any composite bodies if the bodies didn’t move or remain in place in relation to other bodies which move or remain in place, colliding or not colliding with other bodies.
Then we need to recognize two crucial aspects that are common between Spinoza’s substance and its modes. Firstly, substance exists, in its infinity and eternity. It’s all there is, at all times. Modes are, however, merely finite modifications of this substance, which means that their existence is limited, both spatially and temporally. They nonetheless seek to persist in the being, to remain that mode, just substance persists, albeit eternally. Secondly, substance is perfect. There’s nothing that is ever wrong about it, regardless of its modifications. If, for example, a forest burns down, what’s left of it is no less perfect than what it was before. The before and after are merely modifications of the same substance. This also has to be the case, because substance is indeed all there is. If this wasn’t the case, there’d be something else in addition to substance. The modes share also this with the substance, albeit in their limited form, being mere modifications of substance. This means that each mode seeks to be as perfect as possible, to simultaneous maximize its capacity to affect and be affected. To be more specific about that, this means minimizing anything negative from affecting it, because that would limit its own capacity to affect other modes, while maximizing anything positive from affecting it. This is, of course, tied to its own capacity to affect. It affects others, which also have capacity to affect it.
Deleuze and Guattari account for the compositions and the affects in their definitions of assemblages or agencements. They (256) refer to composition as the longitude of each body, which is the how we understand each mode through another attribute of substance, in physical terms. In their (256) words:
“We call the longitude of a body the particle aggregates belonging to that body in a given relation; these aggregates are part of each other depending on the composition of the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of the body.”
Bodies and their relative movement provides only a partial account of assemblages or, to be more specific, of machinic assemblages of desire. They (256) refer to affect as the latitude of the body. It accounts for what each mode can do and what can be done to it, in physical terms. In their (256) words:
“To every relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness grouping together an infinity of parts, there corresponds a degree of power. To the relations composing, decomposing, or modifying an individual there correspond intensities that affect it, augmenting or diminishing its power to act; these intensities come from external parts or from the individual’s own parts.”
This degree of power is affect, understood as the body’s dual capacity to affect and be affected. This accounts for how even something as simple as rock is not just a composite body that is composed of other bodies. It’s important to realize that the composition also defines a body’s capacity to persist in its being, which is very high with a rock, and its capacity to perfect itself, which is very low with a rock, considering that it can’t really do anything.
Each mode, such as a physical body, is defined accordingly as an affect, which are transitory states of what a mode can do and what can be done to a mode. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (256) state that affects, those transitory states, those degrees of power, are becomings. In their (256) words:
“We call the latitude of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or rather within the limits of that degree.”
To combine the two, each mode, such as a physical body, is merely a modification of substance, such as it is conceived through the attribute of extension, that is defined by its becomings in two ways. Firstly, there is longitude, which accounts for each mode’s parts, such as body’s extensive parts, and their relation with themselves and the parts of other modes, such as the parts of other physical bodies. Secondly, there is latitude, which accounts for each mode’s intensive parts, such as a body’s intensive parts, and their relation with themselves and the parts of other modes, such as the parts of other physical bodies.
To make sense of this, Deleuze and Guattari (257) ask us to ignore the way we classify the world hierarchically. A good example of this is classifying the animate or, as most people call it, the living into taxonomically, so that there are, for example, plants, fungi and animals, which are then subclassified accordingly. Instead, they (257) ask us to think the different bodies in terms of their affects or becomings:
“A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.”
Most people would disagree, but that’s because they’ve been taught to think of the living world in this way, that surely a racehorse and a workhorse are both horses and that surely we must understand their behavior as what’s common between horses. To be clear, Deleuze and Guattari do recognize that it is possible to classify the living world in this way, just as it is possible to classify the non-living world in this. It’s just a matter of classifying things, but that’s simply what we are capable of. It has its uses, but it also imposes on the living and the non-living alike, so that we end up thinking through these classifications, thinking that they are how things truly are, as opposed to how we’ve come to conceive them. What they are asking is to recognize that to understand bodies, you need to understand how they relate to other bodies, many of which are unlike them, as opposed to thinking them in isolation from what else is there.
They (257) exemplify this with how Jakob von Uexküll conceived of animal worlds. I like Timo Maran’s (10) example of the orb-weaving spider that he uses in his book ‘Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies’ to explain how “it becomes extremely difficult to draw any fixed border between the animal and the environment.” He (10) goes beyond the physical aspects, but the example is nonetheless particularly good, because it acknowledges that an orb-weaving spider is not the spider itself, being composed of whatever it is composed of, but the relation that it has with other bodies, namely the web it weaves, from itself, and the various straws and branches that it attaches the web, in a place that accounts for the flow of air and the flight patterns of various insects. As emphasized by him (10), these other bodies, what we like to think as distinct from the spider’s body, “also become a part of what the spider is”.
In other words, there are no living or non-living entities that are somehow separate from the environment. They are the environment. It’s not that there’s this spider that moves about and weaves webs, in round shapes, hence its name, somewhere where you have some bushes and trees. No, no. It is the combination of the spider, the bushes, the trees and its capacities to weave web and to sense flows of air that make the spider what it is, in this case the orb-weaving spider. That spider is therefore “not a member of a species but an element or an individual in a machinic assemblage” that defines it as an affect or a becoming, i.e., in terms of its capacity to affect and be affected, there and then, as Deleuze and Guattari (257) would explain it. So, in short, it’s not that there’s this and that, somehow distinct from everything else, but rather that everything there is gives rise to what we conceive as this and that.
Guattari (94) provides two other examples of assemblages or desiring machines, whichever term you prefer, in his book ‘Schizoanalytic Cartographies’. Firstly, he reminds us that a locomotive makes little sense without tracks and the crew that operates it. Secondly, he notes that a walk on the moon also requires a rocket, a crew and, we might add, a launchpad, fuel, etc. We then also need to account for the political machinations, how certain political support was needed for that. People needed to vote in a certain way for that to happen, for that moon project to be ever approved.
We can also do this with language, or thinking, as Spinoza explains it in ‘Ethics’. We are still dealing with the same substance, albeit conceived differently, from through another attribute, in mental terms. Thoughts are also modes and being modes, they are also always composites. If you want an explanation of how language works this way, you won’t find it in Spinoza. He deals with this on implicitly in his ‘Ethics’.
You’ll find the explanation in Louis Hjelmslev’s ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Language’, which is something that becomes abundantly clear if you read Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary of it all in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. To summarize Hjelmslev’s explantion, he takes the logically smallest components of signs, in this case linguistic signs, that are, in fact, not at all signs. These non-signs are what he calls figurae.
Transformations
The figurae are typically referred to in linguistics as phonemes. They are minimal non-signs. They can be contrasted them with morphemes, which are then minimal linguistic signs. In his other work, namely in ‘Résumé of a Theory of Language’, he calls these cenemes and pleremes respectively, but the nomenclature is not particularly important here. Instead, the point is that you have them and you can do more with them by combining these non-signs, such the three sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/, into signs, such as ‘cat’, which are then combined in various ways with other signs, such as adding the plural form, which springs from the non-sign /s/, so that we get something like ‘cats’ instead of just ‘cat’.
What is particularly interesting and, well, hot about Hjelmslev’s take is that he is indeed saying that signs owe their existence to non-signs. That is pretty insane to state, especially for a linguist, not to mention a linguist of his fame, considering that it amounts to saying that meaning comes from non-meaning, that sense stems from nonsense., as noted by Guattari (208) in his notes on Hjelmslev that bear the title ‘Hjelmslev and Immanence’. To be more accurate, Hjelmslev doesn’t actually state in his work that meaning comes from non-meaning, nor that sense comes from nonsense, that wouldn’t make any sense, but that meaning or, rather, purport, as he calls it in his ‘Prolegomena’, doesn’t exist on its own. It is therefore not the non-signs, nor the signs that matter to him, but rather the sign functions, how it all comes together and functions, there and then.
What makes this Spinozist, as argued by Deleuze and Guattari, is that there is that one substance, as Spinoza would call it, that purport, as Hjelmslev would call it, or matter, as they call it in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but it makes no sense on its own. It’s like saying that there is unformed matter. They actually do say that in the book, but that is only in the abstract. Substance always appears to us as modified, so that there are all these modulations, these modes. It’s the same with purport and matter, because they are both conceived the same way. If you think of reality, which is really what is at stake here, it does fluctuate between having form, now, as you see it or otherwise sense, like smell it, and not having form. It’s rather that matter always has some form, but it is subject to change, to undergoing various transformations, to being de- and reformed.
Think of something like glass. What is it? Well, okay, it depends, but it’s typically sand, but it has just take another form. But even sand is made out of something. It’s just a word that we use for a mass of tiny granules. Those granules used to be part of rocks and they could turn into rocks again. That’s sandstone for you.
Think of something like a lump of coal. What is it? Well, it’s also a rock. It’s decayed organic material that has turned into rock over a long, long period of time. To be clear, it’s not that what was once something organic somehow lost its form and became unspecific, unformed matter, but rather that it was reformed over time, in such and such conditions. What happens to coal when its burned? Doesn’t it just vanish? Well, in a sense, yes, but that’s just the way we think about it. Yes, that lump of coal is gone, combusted, but its actually now out there, just in a different form, as gases and fine particulate matter, such as ash.
If you are interested in all that, well, study chemistry, physics and, particularly relevant to rocks, geology. What matters for Hjelmslev (36) in his ‘Prolegomena’ is that purport only appears to us in this or that form, in relation to content or expression. Again, the point is that what most people call meaning, as opposed to purport or sense (albeit I think these other two are better terms, because of how confusing using meaning can be for most people), is only ever accessible to us, appearing to us, when someone says, writes and/or expresses something in some other semiotic mode.
To be clear, even the non-signs, such as phonemes and graphemes, are made of something, such as phones and graphs, so they are not really ever unformed. They are, in fact, already composites, as is everything. It’s just that their composition changes in the process. In other words, they are reformed in the process, for example when some speaks or writes. This does therefore mean that purport, what Hjelmslev (31-32) refers to in passing also as “the thought itself” can never be accessed, in-itself, and therefore known to us, on its own. In his (32) words:
“Purport remains, each time, substance for a new form, and has no possible existence except through being substance for one form or another.”
This why he (31) states that you can express the same thing differently. This is the case with languages. That said, this is not always the case. You don’t get 1:1 translations. He (33) exemplifies this with how different languages, such as English and Welsh, share the same understanding of what amounts to a color and that the concept of color, that thought itself, is not really a matter of listing of distinct colors, but rather a continuum, which is divided in a certain way, setting boundaries that mark each color as distinct from another, that may or may not be the same in different languages.
His (31-33) color example is particularly useful, because it specifies that while we can think of purport as being this “amorphous mass” or “unanalyzed entity”, it is not like we find some pre-existing thoughts or ideas waiting for us to discover once we analyze that mass. It is crucial to understand that purport or, as Deleuze and Guattari refer to it, matter, only ever appears to us in this or that form or, to explain this the other way around, this or that form only ever appears to us as manifested in such and such way, as formed matter. That’s why Hjelmslev (32) states that:
“Each language lays down its own boundaries within the amorphous ‘thought-mass’ and stresses different factors in it in different arrangements, puts centers of gravity in different places and gives them different emphases.”
In fact, he (32) equates purport with matter:
“It is like one and the same handful of sand that is formed in quite different patters, or like the cloud in the heavens that changes shape in Hamlet’s view from minute to minute. Just as the same sand can be put into different molds, and the same cloud take on ever new shapes, so also the same purport is formed or structured differently in different languages.”
Note that even here we are dealing with composites and, more broadly speaking, with compositions. What is sand? What is a cloud? Well, sand is a mass. A cloud is a mass. One granule is not sand. You need a lot of them. Once they are together, then we can talk about sand. One droplet or ice crystal is not a cloud. You need a lot of them. Once they are together, then we can talk about a cloud. That’s the composite part. Plus, when you think of clouds, if you get droplets at the ground level, that’s fog. It’s only when those droplets, or ice crystals, are high enough, in the sky, that they amount to clouds. This is the composition part, which emphasizes how the composites relate to one another, like how we get composites of composites.
Assemblages of enunciation are sign regimes
To complicate things, if we stop time, we can understand the collective assemblages of enunciation as regimes of signs, as Deleuze and Guattari (140) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. They include, but are not limited to language as the two (140) do not consider language to be the only semiotic mode of expression, nor the only semiotic mode of expression that matters. This is why they (140) state that language is defined by non-linearity, which is “its condition of possibility”, and languages can be relatively stable, albeit subject to change, and thus have their “constants, elements, and relations of a phonological, syntactical, and semantic nature”, a regime of signs, which is broader language and languages, as already noted, is not reducible “to that condition of possibility”, nor to “constants”. In other words, not all signs are linguistic signs, nor reducible to them.
It is also worth acknowledging that not all collective assemblages of enunciation or regimes of signs are the same. They indeed vary from one another, hence the importance of variables. Deleuze and Guattari cover four kinds in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but they leave it open whether that’s all and specify that these four are abstracted into pure form according to their variables. You won’t find such purity out there. It’s all mixed, to this or that degree.
There’s also another way of looking at them, as done by Guattari in ‘Chaosmosis’. He (99) refers to the collective assemblages of enunciation as either as deterritorialized, territorialized or reterritorialized. When something is territorialized, it simply means that it has stable form, at least for now. When it’s deterritorialized, it has unstable form, at least for now. This is just a way of accounting for change. Now, of course, everything deterritorializes eventually, but what deterritorializes must also reterritorialize eventually. We could also refer to this as something have a certain composition and then it decomposes and then those decomposed components recompose. Again, this is just another way of accounting for various transformations.
He contrasts the contemporary society, by which he means the western society and by extension the rest of the world, as the reset of the world has become much like the western world. When it comes to language and, yes, remember, this is largely about language and other semiotic modes of expression, he (98) states that they have become separated from people’s lives. Speaking and writing is thought of as just as ways of communicating information from one person to another. Drawing, painting and photographing are their own things, so that we get drawings, paintings and photographs, that serve their distinct purposes. It’s the same with music and plastic arts. They matter to people, but they are nonetheless conceived as something separate from them. Simply put, everything is neatly parceled, so that it’s all isolated and disconnected from everything else. This was not always the case in the western world and still isn’t the case all over the world. He (98) points out that what people these days call arts were part of everyday life. These things mattered to people. For example, dance and music was part of initiations and rites.
What’s different about the past societies, and some existing societies, is that they are all over the place, as noted by Guattari (99). You didn’t have a centralized system to which everything points. There was no single state and no single god. What is particularly notable about the way things are nowadays is that people take it for granted that there is a divine or, I guess, nowadays it’s natural order of things, and that some things are inherently good or evil, true or false, beautiful or ugly, as explained by him (99).
Then there’s the related issue that people project this thinking and what’s considered desirable or undesirable to past societies and then judge them according to the way they think, simply assuming that way back then people must have also thought this way, as he (99-100) goes on to elaborate. This is problematic and happens just about all the time, to the extent that, perhaps, it can’t be avoided, as recognized by him (100). That said, even if it can’t be avoided, then people should at least be aware that it happens, that people, they themselves included, are in the habit of doing this, as specified by him (100).
The thing with these assemblages of enunciation is that they amount to shared ways of thinking. As he (100) points out, they open certain doors, so that this and/or that’s then appears as something that’s possible, so that this and/or that is then not possible. He (100) actually compares this to open and closed doors, but I’d like to specify that further. It’s not that some doors open and then others close, but rather that certain openings, where you’d then expect a door, appear in the wall and, conversely, do not appear in the wall.
To exemplify this, he (100) states that technology and science promote certain things, making them what important, and then relegate other things, make them unimportant. This is the STEM kind of thinking that considers arts and humanities as merely dealing with some touchy-feely stuff and therefore unscientific. The problem with people who think that way is that they fail to understand that it is indeed a way of thinking, not thinking itself. That’s like saying that a computer is a computer and the operating system, what defines what can and cannot be done with that hardware, is not only irrelevant, but that there is only one operating system.
To be clear, this also applies to other ways of thinking, as recognized by him (100-101). It’s also worth noting, as he (101) does, that while various ways of thinking tend to be distinct from one another, and more popular in certain times, in certain societies, than in other times, in other societies, they bleed into one another, to this or that extent. He (101) exemplifies this with printing press revolutionized the arts. We could say the same thing about photography and then we could also say the same thing about digital photography. There’s not shortage of examples.
Technology and politics
What’s clear to Guattari (101) about the contemporary collective assemblages of enunciation is that, when it comes to knowledge, it’s all about technology and science and, when it comes to society, it’s all about politics. I’d say yes, that’s how it is and how it still is, considering that he wrote ‘Chaosmosis’ in the early 1990s. Things haven’t changed that much. Actually, I’d say that it’s even more the case, now that people not only spend their days in front of computers, like sitting in front of them, like I’m doing right now, but live through them as well, carrying small computers with them at all times and keep checking what’s going on like all the time. Just look outside for a moment. There’s people walking their dogs, the leash in one hand, the dog doing whatever it is doing, and the so-called smart-phone in the other hand, their neck tilted down to look at the screen. They might stop to scoop the poop, but they are basically glued to their devices. What I’m saying is that their lives are now centralized in and mediated through this technology.
To be candid, I also own one of these devices. I find them useful, especially on the road, but I barely use mine. It’s like I check it a couple of times a day, to see what the time is or if someone has messaged me. I usually don’t even open the screen lock for days. It’s just a mobile computer for me. It can do a lot of things, yes, and it can be useful, yes, but it offers the worsts ways of doing those things. It’s like would I like to write on it? No. It’s terrible. Too slow. Too clunky. Would I like to take photos with it. No. It’s terrible. Too limited. Terrible ergonomics. Would I watch videos on it? No, it’s way too small. Would I listen to music or podcasts on it? Again, no. It’s just way too big to carry around if you are going for a walk or a run. It’s not even good when it comes to calling and receiving calls. Again, terrible ergonomics. What it can do well is instant messaging, because you don’t need a big screen or a separate keyboard for that. But like, people spend hundreds or even over a thousand euros on them, basically for that. That’s been the core feature ever since mobiles phones became a thing. Oh, and yes, it’s literally a built in feature. You don’t need a separate app for it. You can just message just about anyone who also has a mobile phone. That’s amazing. That’s some proper compatibility. So, ironically, a mobile phone from the 1990s, with the improved screen size from the 2000s, is literally the best one when it comes to this.
I’m more glued to the desk kind of a person, sitting in front of a computer. So, yeah, you got me there. But the difference is that when I’m not doing that, I largely ignore computers. If I go for a walk, or a jog, I don’t even take my smart phone with me. I know that sounds insane, but yeah, that’s what I do. I wouldn’t mind having it with me, but it’s so big that it’s inconvenient. It’s just no thanks. If I take something with me, it’s like a small form factor music player, what used to be called an MP3 player, and wireless earbuds, so that I can listen to something.
Then there’s the politics that Guattari (101) mentions. Look at the news. It’s largely politics and by that I mean politicians saying this and/or that, often to agitate people, and people responding to them, to their agitation, as reported by the media, to agitate people even further, to keep this going. The news could include something that isn’t some hot take, but why would they? It’s bad for business, whereas agitation is good for business. The irony of it all, all this politics, is that virtually nothing ever gets done, one way or another. It’s just rage, agitation for the sake of agitation.
Subjectification
This has major consequences not only for each society, as already discussed, but also for the members of those societies. It’s really about subjectivity. For Guattari (101), it used to be “polysemic, animistic” and “transindividual”, something which you can still see among artists, in children and, more problematically, in people who are considered to be mad. When it comes to the collective assemblages of enunciation, this is the territorialized kind, as noted by him (102).
Contemporary subjectivity , what he (104) also calls modular subjectivity, is all about the supposedly autonomous and rational individual, the self, the ‘I’. Each person considers themself an individual, in the sense that they are indivisible, their own thing. This is ironic, considering that who they think they are is based on the exact opposite, classifying themselves as such and such. Everything and everyone is “bipolarised, Manicheanised, hierarchised” and “sterilised”, as he (103) points out. It’s all about dualities and oppositions, so that if one is …, then one is not …, such as x and therefore not what’s not x, but rather y or z, with one being what’s considered desirable and the other, or others, being what’s considered undesirable, as elaborated by him (103). They are therefore not individuals, in the sense that’d they be indivisible, but dividuals, in the sense that they are divisible, as explained by Deleuze in his (5) essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’. They define themselves and others in this way, through division.
To be clear, what’s desirable, that x, that people seek to value and therefore classify themselves as or associate themselves with is never in itself desirable, nor what it is not, that y or z, is never in itself undesirable. These are just words among other words, just signifiers among other signifiers. But the thing is that some words, some signifiers, end up being thought of as desirable and then conversely, what else is ends up being considered undesirable. This is not to say that people do not value, nor have valued different things even in past societies, but rather that was considered good or bad was largely locally defined, up to them to decide, whereas in this assemblage of enunciation it is all thought to be fixed and, to be more precise, transcendent, as stated by Guattari (103). It is take for granted that something is inherently good/evil, true/false or beautiful/ugly and therefore worth striving for or resisting, as noted by him (99, 103).
The problem with this is not only that there are nothing that is inherently desirable or undesirable, nor that nothing about that is fixed, but rather what it entails if you believe that it’s nonetheless the case. As he (103-104) points out, subjectivity ends up being constituted as a perpetual lack, so that one is expected to strive for what’s considered desirable and resist what’s considered undesirable, even though neither is possible, as there is nothing that can be reached or avoided that is not made up by people. Let’s use a sexist example. A man is supposed to be manly or masculine or, in short, be a man. But the thing is that no man can be a man, to reach such an ideal, as what that man is supposed to be is what’s been idealized from actual men or, to be more precise, from actual people who have certain physiological features. The point is that it’s impossible to reach that ideal and it’s not out of reach because there’s a lack of trying hard enough, but because it’s made up, as stated by him (104), in reference to Friedrich Nietzsche (71), who calls it “[t]he lie of the ideal” and “the curse on reality” in ‘Ecce Homo: How to Become What you Are’.
This is the deterritorialized kind of collective assemblage of enunciation, albeit it’s only that way, deterritorialized, in relation to the territorialized kind of collective assemblage enunciation. Something must be territorialized, having settled, before it can deterritorialized, to take flight or move again. It must also be added that this kind of collective assemblage of enunciation is not only deterritorialized, but also reterritorialized, as explained by Guattari (103). What this means in practice is that local value systems are torn apart and replaced with just one value system, as elaborated by him (104):
“Thus modular subjectivity has no connection with the old dimension of the emergence of values which are neutralised under the weight of codes, rules and laws decreed by the transcendent enunciator.”
It’s God now who has decided what’s good and what’s bad or, rather, evil. When everything is taken into consideration, this amounts to eternal and universal order. The value system is fixed and universally applicable. It cannot be changed. This prevents anyone from attempting too question the value system. It must also be expanded from where it currently applies to where it currently doesn’t apply, because that universality means. If this combination seems a lot like Christianity, it’s because it’s such a good example of this, as noted by Nietzsche (4) in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’:
“Christianity is Platonism for the ‘people'[.]”
It is therefore thought to be people’s duty to subject themselves and expand it to others, so that they also subject themselves to this system of values. There are to be no local differences, just one order of things that everyone is subject to. Guattari (104) comments on this further:
“[Subjectivity] is no longer the result of the changing contours of an intrication of spheres of valorisation secured to matters of expression—it is recomposed, as reified individuation, from Universals laid out according to an arborescent hierarchy.”
There is just one authority, one order and everything flows from that. Even if some disagree with this, it is thought of as a given. That’s why it’s presented as eternal and universal. He (104) continues:
“Imprescriptible laws, duties and norms take the place of the old prohibitions which always arranged a place for conjuration and transgression.”
This is a good point. It’s not just that you have a set of laws, that can be changed, as they often are, and a set of duties that come with them, but also norms. The whole point is that people are not only subjected to a certain order and that they must therefore live their lives accordingly, to avoid breaking the laws or else, but they and others, everyone, really, must subject themselves to this order. This is what Foucault calls a disciplinary society in his book ‘Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison’ and Deleuze calls a society of control in his essay ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, the added twist being the dividuality.
I think it’s important to clarify what God’s position is or was. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, Deleuze and Guattari state that societies had gods or, rather despot-gods who were either the god of a particular society or someone who claimed the divine right to rule in that god’s place. In reality, there never was any god, only people who claimed to speak on their behalf. So, really, the god is always the despot-god and handful of people who cozy up to the ruler. Whatever that despot-god says or, more broadly speaking expresses, as just a frown or smirk will do, are understood in those societies as despotic signifiers, as explained by them (115, 126).
Contrary to what many linguist believed, and still believe, following Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘Course in General Linguistics’, signifiers (sound-images), such as words, do not refer, nor represent, like stand in, for signifieds (concepts), as there are no signifieds, only signifiers, as Deleuze and Guattari (114) point out. In other words, there’s just a chain of signification as signifiers only ever refer to other signifiers, like how words can only ever be explained in other words, in infinite regress.
This flaw in the theory undoes conceiving signs and linguistic signs this way. It just doesn’t work. There is no language in itself. There are no signifieds just waiting there for people to refer to and represent them through signifiers, as Hjelmslev (33) demonstrates in his ‘Prolegomena’ with his color example. Instead, meaning, sense or purport, whatever you want to call it, what Hjelmslev (31-32) also refers to as “the thought itself”, only ever appears in the act of speaking, writing or otherwise expressing oneself. If you don’t get it, you can attempt to explain it, that meaning, that sense or that purport, but the explanation, like those words that you use, are not the meaning, the sense or the purport. If get it after it’s been explained to you, in other words, it’s because what was explained give rise too meaning, sense or purport.
This does not mean that signification is irrelevant, that signifiers don’t matter, because that’s like saying that what people say, write or otherwise express make no difference. They do matter, but they are only part of how people come to understand or misunderstand one another. The problem is that there’s nothing that stops the chain of signification. That’s where the despotic signifier comes into play. The will of the despot-god, or in short, god, is the only thing that matters. Everything else is simply not that important.
There are other names for that as well, even if it must be acknowledged that they are not exact matches. Jacques Lacan (21, 29, 32) calls these elevated or privileged signifiers master’s signifiers (S1s) in ‘The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis’ and Jacques Derrida calls them transcendental signifieds in ‘Of Grammatology.
The master and the slave
I’m no Lacan expert, nor claim to be one. In my understanding, in his treatment language is tied to the subject and it is the subject that emerges through language. In other words, it is the subject that speaks, writes or otherwise expresses its subjectivity, only because it is addressed in speech, writing or other kinds of expressions by other subjects, who do the same.
He addresses this in reference to Hegel’s conception of the master and the slave in ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’. For Hegel (108-109), the subject works in these two ways and recognizes oneself in the others, as one might expect really. So, in other words, the master needs the slaves, to be a master, and the slaves need the master, to be slaves. The thing is that, of course, it is the master who asserts this position over the slaves, as being the one who decides what’s what, what counts as truth, but this does not mean this how things truly are, as recognized by Hegel (114).
That’s where the term master in Lacan’s (29) master’s signifier (S1) comes from. It is to be understood as what the master’s discourse is reducible to. He (29) adds that:
“It represents x, which s precisely what there is to be clarified in the matter.”
So, to connect this to Hegel (114), it is always the master, the one in control that defines how things are, even if they aren’t really that way. The slaves do not have much to say about this. It’s also what defines them as slaves. They simply take all discourse, all signifiers (S2) as something that simply exists, as knowledge, and that they cannot or, to be more precise, are not in position to intervene in, as explained by Lacan (13). This is why he (21) states that:
“S1, is, to say it briefly, the signifier, the signifier function, that the essence of the master relies upon. From a different angle … the slave’s own field is knowledge, S2.”
This is not to say that the master is not constituted by knowledge. Everyone is. It’s rather that the master is in position to intervene in that, in what counts as knowledge. In that way the master is a subject (S1), in the sense that the master has the capacity to act, and a subject to (S2) knowledge and power, in the sense that they also constituted through the knowledge (S2) that they have power over (S1). In contrast, the slave is merely a subject to (S2) knowledge and power. They are constituted through knowledge (S2) that only the master has power over (S1).
This is why he (104) places great importance on knowledge. What is it anyway? Is it just knowledge about the world? No, not really. Why? Because it is produced by people who are in the position to produce it, as he (104) points out. That’s authority. This is why he (104) states that:
“S2 occupies the dominant place in that it is this place of the order, the command, the commandment, this place initially held by the master, that knowledge has come to occupy. Why does it come about that one finds nothing else at the level of its truth than the master signifier, insofar as it brings the master’s order?”
If this seem familiar, it’s probably because it is. This the order-word, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari (76) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:
“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.”
Now, the thing with order-words is that they are speech acts, in the sense that J. L. Austin defines them in ‘How to Do Things with Words’. They never describe the states of affairs, not even when one says something as simple as ‘the sky is blue’. Instead, they define them, asserting that this is the case. If someone says something like ‘the sky is green’, there will be objection to that, not because the sky could not be green, or some other color, it sure could and what does blue or green mean anyway, as Hjelmslev (33) reminds us in his ‘Prolegomena’, but because it is taken for granted that it is blue and not some other color (S2). The thing is, however, if you are the despot-god and you say that it is green (S1), then it is green (S2). This is, of course, not as drastic these days. There’s no despot-god, no emperor who has some divine right and authority to define what’s what, but that’s not the point here. This still applies, even in the absence of despot-gods and if you ask Deleuze and Guattari (130), that’s even worse, because people have ended up acting as the master and the slave at the same time:
“This is the paradox of the legislator-subject replacing the signifying despot: the more you obey the statements of the dominant reality, the more in command you are as subject of enunciation in mental reality, for in the end you are only obeying yourself!”
To be clear, this is the power of language and it can’t be avoided. It works this way, as explained by J. L. Austin. It gives people control over their surroundings, including over other people. Now, of course, this does not mean that people must use language to become masters, to enslave others. It’s rather that it can be used this way and it is used this way, to this day.
Just realizing that this is how language functions allows you to resist this, even if it doesn’t guarantee anything. Not realizing this, on the contrary, just makes empowers to those who do realize it. You are there, thinking that it’s all good, knowledge (S2) good, right, not realizing that it is not something that is uncovered, like waiting the brightest minds of humanity to find, but rather produced by people who are in position to produce it (S1). Even if they think that, nah, no one gets to have say what the research and what they publish (S1), what they still fail to recognize that they have been placed in that position by others. These others are people who are in position to define the criteria, that knowledge, that anyone who are considered to be placed in similar positions need to have studied and subscribe to (S2), before they can do research and publish it somewhere (S1). This is why Deleuze and Guattari (130) state in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ that:
“A new form of slavery is invented, namely, being slave to oneself[.]”
It’s also worth noting, as Lacan (106-107) does, that this is not about someone wanting to have power over others and then the other just happily accepting that over them. Instead, it’s rather that there’s something that the so-called master desires, what he (106) calls the “object a“, which is the subject’s object of desire. The thing is, however, that, according to him (108) this can never be reached. This object, whatever it may be, remains out of reach. This amounts to a split subject ($), a person who is never what it (S1) thinks it is (S2), as explained by Lacan (108).
To clarify the symbols, as used by Lacan in his book, there’s the master’s signifier, or master signifier, as it’s more commonly referred to, which he also refers to by using the symbol S1. Then there’s there’s signifiers in general, to which he refers to using the symbol S2. Then there’s the split subject, also occasionally referred to as the barred subject, as it can’t reach or it is prevented from reaching what it seeks to reach. For that, he uses the symbol $. I used them here, in this essay, quite liberally, to account for both subject and signifier, because I thought it actually worked quite nicely that way, considering how he reckons that subjectivity works this way, through language, in reference to signifiers.
Now, if you fail to grasp why the subject fails to reach what it is reaching for, identifying with this and/or that signifier, it’s because all those signifiers are made up, even the ones that the most enlightened and well meaning academics insist on, as criticized by Lacan (104-105). Buying into that, that you are this and/or that, is itself the problem, as identified by Deleuze and Guattari (130). There is no solution to it, because it’s a made up problem. It will only go away if you stop thinking that way, which is what two would like the readers of ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ to learn from reading them.
The illusion of identity
What are these master signifiers in practice then? Mark Bracher explains what the deal is particularly well in his book ‘Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism’. They are “identity-bearing signifiers” or “identity-bearing words” if we limit ourselves just to language, as summarized by him (23). They are therefore the various objects of desire that people seek to identify with. It’s easy to notice their importance to people when someone devalues the signifiers that others consider valuable, such as people’s “familial, national, ethnic, racial or sexual identity”, as noted by him (23). Think of insults, where someone says being a father/mother is the easiest job in the world, or that people of this or that nationality/ethnicity/race are stupid, or that men/women are stupid. This does not, of course, have to be about insults. It can be far less obvious, like implying that someone isn’t manly enough, because they aren’t tall and muscular, or that they are too manly, because they are tall and muscular.
Master signifiers are illusory, considering that they are merely signifiers among others, as already established, but it is what it is. Many people, if not most people think this way, at least in the west. In Bracher’s view (23-27), people seek to identify with certain signifiers for two key reasons. Firstly, a lot of people’s desires are passively narcissistic. They want to do as they see fit and be praised for this, but without making a fuss about it. This way they feel good about themselves, being this and/or that. Secondly, a lot of people’s desires are actively narcissistic. These people also want to do as they see fit and be praised for this, but they want this so badly that they make a fuss about it and forgo their own ideals for whatever it is that other consider ideal. It’s like a shortcut for recognition.
It’s also worth noting that master signifiers function in clusters. So, it’s not only that people seek to define themselves through signifiers, which are typically signifiers that are already considered desirable by others as that’s an easy way to feel good about oneself, to feel desired and recognition for one’s desires, but also that people seek to identify with any related signifiers as well, as elaborated by Bracher (27). This means that people also identify with various synonyms, metonyms and metaphors, as specified by him (27). For example, man is a master signifier, something which is considered desirable, but it’s not just that it pays off to be manly. It also pays off to be tall and muscular, because such attributes are thought of as defining what it is to be manly. This means that the master signifiers are primary signifiers and the related signifiers are secondary signifiers through which one seeks to identify with the master signifiers, as further elaborated by him (27). For example, this happens when someone starts lifting weights at the gym to become more muscular, not just to be muscular, as that’s just a secondary signifier, but to be manly and to be recognized for identifying with the master signifier, for being manly.
This identification with primary signifiers, i.e., master signifiers, through secondary signifiers is also part and parcel with capitalism. It’s not just that someone starts working out to be more buff and thus more manly. It’s often not what people do, but rather what they buy, as Massumi (84) points out in his guidebook and exemplifies it with a humorous, albeit apt example:
“Not incidentally, this is good for business. … Love may be the light of one’s life, but a toaster is an acceptable substitute. … To quote Barbara Kruger: ‘I shop therefore I am.'”
In other words, people shop to feel good about themselves. The problem is that they don’t actually end up feeling good about themselves. They think that maybe it was the wrong thing they bought. To feel good about themselves, they buy something else, only to realize that also doesn’t make them feel good about themselves. Okay, maybe they do feel good about themselves, there and then, for a moment, but that’s the thing, they feel like that wasn’t enough, which would be the case with the primary signifier, or good enough, which would be the case with the secondary signifier.
Having sex is a great example of this. People think that their more-than-friends relationship with someone is determined by it, as if there wasn’t just about most of the day that you do other stuff, with or without other people. Oh, and this is not about being against having sex, but rather that it’s something people want, over and over again, like now I’m happy, until you aren’t and you gotta do it all over again, again and again. I think you get the point.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, the power of signifiers has to do with redundancy. They (79, 132-133, 168) state in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ that there are two kinds of redundancy that is relevant to signifiers: objective frequency and subjective resonance. The former has to do with the repetition of what is said, written and/or otherwise expressed. It’s all about how likely or unlikely it is that one encounter certain signifiers. The more they are repeated, the more frequent they are. The latter has to do with how what someone says, writes and/or otherwise expresses is received by someone else, whether it resonates with them and to what extent it resonates with them.
What makes master signifiers or despotic signifiers, as Deleuze and Guattari (117, 126) call them, so problematic is that they are highly redundant in both ways. In their view (76, 168), people not only emit them, receive them and transmit them to each other, but they also capture them and are captured by them.
If it wasn’t obvious from the book titles of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborations, the contemporary collective assemblage of enunciation that is relevant to us is part and parcel with capitalism, as Guattari (104-105) states in ‘Chaosmosis’. God is not, no longer to blame here, nor is Christianity. Capital has taken God’s place. All values are equal. That’s the axiom of capital, as he (104) points out. It takes anything and turns it into something that it wasn’t. In fancier terms, it first deterritorializes and then reterritorializes. It revels in that. Think of Che Guevara t-shirts. Just when you think you’ve managed to escape it and, perhaps, even subvert it, it captures what seeks to escape it and makes it part of itself, so that even rebellion ends up being turned into merchandise.
Escape routes
But how does one escape it? Is that even possible? In Guattari’s (101-102, 105-107) view, it is possible and our best bet is art, not institutional art, but just art. What about language? Well, … how to put this … it’s not that language is to blame for the despotism of the signifier, but I’d say the other semiotic modes are better in this regard. Why? Well, that’s because to work against capitalism through language would require linguists to get with the times, to embrace and privilege pragmatics over everything else in linguistics, as promoted by Deleuze and Guattari (77-78) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Why linguists? Why not teachers? Well, because linguists are the ones who produce knowledge about language, whereas teachers just teach that to their students. Yes, of course, we do also need to change the teachers and that way the students, but this is downstream from the problem. We need to focus upstream, which means changing linguistics. Now, is that going happen? No, not really. I mean, have you ever met a linguist? Most of them are still, somehow occupied with structuralism, even if they may not even be aware of that, because, as Lacan (104) points out, most academics aren’t really into changing their views.
The problem with signifiers and understanding oneself through signifiers is that it results in a split in subjectivity, as already established. In my view, Lacan correctly identifies or, rather diagnoses that that people attempt to define themselves as subjects through the objects that they desire, even though they are never able to do this, because it’s impossible. You see this all the time. People say that they are like this and/or that, you that they need this and/or that, often some concrete object, but it can also be more abstract, like being recognized for something. But this assumes a lot, namely that there are subjects and objects to begin with. Massumi (83) explains this in his guidebook:
“Clearly, there can only be an ‘other’ to confuse ‘one”s self with if there is first a ‘one’ to have a self: in other words, if subjectivity functions as a closed system.”
He (83) specifies this by stating that:
“Theories of subjectivity as it constitutive splitting arising from an imaginary dialectic of presence and absence, fusion and fragmentation … assume what they end up denying[.]”
There’s this one that is taken for granted and then something happens to it, in relation to the other, which is just another one. In other words, the subject is taken for granted. It’s the starting point. That’s the problem. As he (84) points out, this amounts to “a retrospective projection” which treats the “end effects” as “the foundation”.
To be clear, people do think this way, like I already pointed out, as Lacan points out in his work, and as Deleuze and Guattari point out in their work. But the thing is that they don’t have to think this way.
Affective reading
Perhaps the best example of this, how language can be open-ended, is literature. It can be understood as consisting of stories, ranging between what’s considered factual and what’s considered fictional and containing some meaning or meanings to be found in it, as discussed by Deleuze in detail in ‘Proust and Signs: The Complete Text’, but this is simply what people have been taught, not something that is inherent to language, nor to literature, as he (7-8) points out in ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’. He (7) comments on this common way of reading:
“[Y]ou see … a book … as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies[.]”
The problem here is that signifiers are empty and only refer to other signifiers, which are also empty, as already noted. This is a fruitless endeavor, yet a lot of people insist on this, as he (7) goes on to add:
“[A]nd then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it.”
I’d say that most people cannot help themselves. They want to know what this or what means, because they’ve been taught that each word has a meaning. He (7-8) continues:
“And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on.”
This is the scholarly part of it, explaining something, that it meant this, possibly in agreement with others, and not that, possibly in disagreement with others. You can do this again and again, because all words are empty, because all signifiers are empty.
Then there’s the other way of reading that he (8) comments on. It has nothing to do with signifiers, nor with attempting to find meaning in something, as he (8) goes on to explain:
“[Y]ou see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?'”
To clarify this, something written, like a book, is a machine, to use the term he and Guattari use in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, or an assemblage, to use the term he and Guattari use in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, because it always connected to something, even in its physical book form. For example, if you leave it in the sunlight, its pages may end up all yellow. Here the point is, however, rather on its semiotic form. What matters is the connection between the reader and what’s read, as he (8) on to specify:
“How does it work for you?”
Its also worth noting that this connection may be limited or dysfunctional. Sometimes things just don’t work, as he (8) goes on to add:
“If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book.”
The point here is that writing does not contain any inherent meaning. There is no obvious meaning or meanings to be encountered in any writing, nor hidden meaning or meanings to be uncovered in any writing. This does not, however, mean that anything goes, that it’s all up to the reader then, which is something that he (9) implies here.
He (27) addresses in more detail in ‘Proust and Signs’, noting that people rely on stock notions of objectivism and subjectivism. To account for the former, he (27) states that:
“We think that the ‘object’ itself has the secret of the signs it emits.”
He further specifies this, what he (27-28) also calls paying homage to the object, in the context of literature. He (28-30) notes that people tend to think that meaning resides in what they read, for example in a novel, and therefore in its characters and its places, only to add that this tendency has to do with how people take it for granted everything exists for them to see and observe and that they have the intelligence to put what they see and observe into words, which can then be shared with others. This tendency or, rather these tendencies are reinforced by others who also tend to think this way, so that when someone tells something to someone else who thinks alike, they are tempted to think that this is indeed how language works, as he (30) goes on to add.
The problem is that this way of thinking, what he (27) calls objectivism, ignores the people who do not think this way. It also includes everyday situations where people end up thinking otherwise, which leads us to subjectivism. To account for the latter, he (36) adds that:
“[W]e overcome the disappointment of the object by a compensation of the subject.”
This temps people to think that if something isn’t objective, if meaning cannot be found in the object, then it’s subjective, merely an interpretation among other interpretations. But this is also not the case, as he (36) points out. The only thing this realizations reveals is that there are no signifieds, no “intelligible values”, only signifiers, only “subjective associations of ideas”, as specified by him (36-37).
Both ways of thinking are inadequate, no matter how popular they are. Meaning does not reside in the object, nor in the subject. Instead, it is something that emerges, there and then. It is crucial to understand this, that reading is a relation between the reader and what the reader is reading. The writing does something to the reader, unless, of course, it doesn’t do anything, as emphasized by him (8) in ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’:
“[S]omething comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging into an electric circuit.”
To be clear, it’s not that explaining is pointless, nor that understanding is pointless, nor that our reading isn’t always an interpretation, but rather that the explanation, the understanding, nor the interpretation are not the same thing as what comes through, or doesn’t come through. It’s like having to explain a joke. It can help the person to understand what’s funny about it, but the explanation, what we might also call someone’s interpretation of the joke, is not what’s funny about it. You either get it or you don’t. It’s that simple. Oh, and it’s not really a problem if you don’t get it, even after someone explains it to you. Let it go and find another joke, as he (8) would probably tell you to do. Maybe that’ll work and you’ll get a good laugh out of it.
Each reader is, of course, different, to this or that extent and therefore there is never any guarantee that the reader gets something out of some writing, just as there is no guarantee that the hearer gets something out of speech. In other words, what one gets out of something, if anything, depends on its and our relation to what else is there, what he (8) calls the outside. It’s also worth noting that this is not something fixed. That relation with the outside changes, to this or that extent, depending on what it is that one connected to and whether something comes through or not, as he (8) points out in reference to how issues faced by young people prompted him and Guattari to write ‘Anti-Oedipus’ , which, in turn, prompted the young people who read it to change their views and their behavior. Simply put, the idea really is that what’s interesting about language is not what it is, because you can never figure that out, but what it does, inasmuch as it does, because it is capable of doing so, so many things.
Being is Becoming
Once you’ve managed to escape thinking in these two ways, in terms of objects and subjects, you may a experience a strange, perhaps even a madness inducing sensation. I’ve mentioned this before, at least a couple of times, but it’s worth mentioning again, as a warning, but, anyway, I certainly did have such experiences while I was reading ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ and, more specifically, the plateau titled: ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without
Organs?’. It did feel like I was no longer myself, that I was being torn apart, just as Deleuze and Guattari (160) refer to the experience. It’s also why heeded to their (160) warnings and took my sweet time with that plateau.
They (159-160) state that it is beneficial for us to experiment with our bodies, to figure out what our bodies can do, which means that we must figure out what we can and cannot do the way our bodies are organized and then alter that organization, opening our bodies to what else is there. This also applies to our psyches, as they (160) go on to add. This means that we need to avoid thinking as split subjects, which, in turn, means avoiding signification and subjectification, as they (160) point out.
In summary, to act and think otherwise, dismantle ourselves as organisms, that is to say to avoid limiting ourselves in terms of how we think our bodies are organized and therefore what we are capable of, and the way we think in terms of signification and subjectification, that is to say how we come understand ourselves and others as subjects, as well as what else is there as objects through language. This is, however, no mean task, as they (160) point out, largely because this is how most people or, rather, most people in the West have been thought to think of their bodies, themselves, and what else is there. It is possible, that’s for sure, as it was for them and as it is for me. It’s just difficult as people are so accustomed thinking in a certain way. It’s also difficult as, at first, it does indeed feel like someone is tearing you apart. This is exactly why they (160) emphasize the dangers involved:
“Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death.”
Simply put, do not experiment with your bodies in ways in which may result in your death. Similarly, do not play with your psyche in ways in which may result in your psychic death. This is no joke. This is also why I’m hesitant about talking about signification and subjectification with people who do not have previously explored the topic to some extent. It’s one thing to experiment with oneself, to experience being disassembled, and make it, to experience being reassembled, and another thing to experiment with others, to influence them in ways in which they cannot handle, so that they end up experiencing being disassembled, without any guarantee that they make it, not to mention on their own terms, to experience being reassembled.
It is also worth clarifying and emphasizing that dismantling your body as an organism does not mean harming yourself. Do not go thinking that it’s about harming your own body, like chopping off limbs or something, because that tends to only results in limiting what your body can do, which simply isn’t good for you. There are plenty of disabled people who have learned to do without certain parts of their bodies, which is only a testament to their fortitude, but they’d probably prefer to have able bodies. When it comes to your body, this is more about thinking outside the box, like what could it do, but it currently cannot do because you are too fixed to your ways.
Guattari specifies in ‘Chaosmosis’ what happens when you no longer think as a split subject, when you’ve escaped signification and subjectification. It changes the way you think of being, as explained by him (109):
“Being is first auto-consistency, auto-affirmation, existence for-itself deploying particular relations of alterity.”
The point here is not that there’s no being, but there is no being to begin with. Instead, the being is only ever what it is, they way it is constituted, there and then, like here and now, and affirms itself through itself and others. This is another way of saying that all being is machinic, as he (109) goes on to add:
“The emphasis is no longer placed on Being — as general ontological equivalent, which in the same as other equivalents (Capital, Energy, Information, the Signifier) envelops, encloses and desingularises the process — it is placed on the manner of being, the machination producing the existent, the generative praxes of heterogeneity and complexity.”
Simply put, the way he (109) explains being isn’t about what exists, but about how something exists. Furthermore, it’s applicable to everything, not just to humans, as emphasized by him (109):
“The for-itself and the for-others stop being the privilege of humanity[.]”
At this point, it’s worth reiterating the point about the orb-weaving spider, as explained by Maran (10). It’s part of a larger whole, a machinic assemblage of desire, alongside the web it weaves, the branches it uses as support for the web and the flow of air that passes through the web, where it happens to be placed. Maran’s (10) account also acknowledges that semiotics is not something that’s exclusive to humans and therefore it’s fair to say that such spiders also make sense of their surroundings through certain collective assemblages of enunciation. We might not recognize this as being the case, but that’s because we tend to privilege ourselves and the way we make sense of the world through language.
Guattari agrees with this biosemiotic or ecosemiotic view. He (95) acknowledges that it makes little difference whether we are talking about humans or something else:
“[O]ne has to admit that it matters little if such systems are designed by the brains of humans, or produced, encoded and transmitted genetically by living structures in the course of a long and complex evolution. The signaletic soul and/or encoding machine is not peculiar to [hu]man[s]. … All sorts of physico-chemical and organo-chemical assemblages can also do this.”
So, to use Maran’s (10) spider example again, it doesn’t matter that a spider was not taught by another spider, like spoken to, to sense flows of air and to weave a web between certain branches to take advantage of these flows. What matters is that the spider is more than just a body made up of other bodies that are organized in a certain way. This is all about what a body can do, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari (256), and, well, it can do all that and, perhaps, even more as many bodies are capable of adjusting to changing and new circumstances, albeit some better than others, as acknowledged by Maran (10).
Love of the unknown
The physical world tends to be conceived as something concrete and language is thought to correspond or, at least, represent the physical world. It’s all supposedly knowable. That’s how most scientists and scholars talk about it all. They make discoveries. The unknown is something to be known and what remains unknown often troubles them. Guattari (117) argues against all this:
“To produce … all things that imply the permanent promotion of different enunciative assemblages, different semiotic recourses, an alterity grasped at the point of its emergence[.]”
Simply put, we mustn’t think that the world is close-ended. Instead, we must think that world is open-ended. This also applies to each and everyone on an everyday level. This means for him (117) embracing “intensive and processual becomings, a new love of the unknown” and “breaking with consensus, the infantile ‘reassurance’ distilled by dominant subjectivity.”
In his (117-118) view, this also means giving up on a lot of the ways in which people are classified, for example, as autistic or neurodivergent, as it is called these days. Why? Isn’t being diagnosed as such and such good for these people. Well, maybe, but his (118) point is rather that people who appear strange, such as autistic or neurodivergent, whatever term you want to use, are not closed off from this world, unlike others, unlike those who are supposedly normal or neurotypical, but rather connected to the world in open-ended, different ways than other people who hold to a view of a close-ended, knowable world.
This love of the unknown is what I’d like to promote as well, but not in the sense that it’s about discovering or uncovering something, like a truth that is waiting for us to find it and understand it, but rather as this openness to creativity and innovation. It’s not comforting, no, but it’s intriguing. There’s always this, what if, which tempts us to experiment, to see what happens, if anything.
References:
- Alliez, E., and A. Goffey (Eds.) (2011). The Guattari Effect. London, United Kingdom: Continuum.
- Austin, J. L. ([1955] 1962). How to Do Things with Words (J. O. Urmson, Ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
- Bracher, M. (1993). Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change: A Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
- Deleuze, G. ([1990] 1992). Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, 59: 3–7.
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