It took me a couple of weeks to get everything done, even though I only had like 10 pages left to cover. Yeah, I ended up on all kinds of tangents. Anyway, this time I’ll be going through ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ by Gilles Deleuze. It can be found in ‘Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974’. It is simply attributed to him, but in actuality it is a collection of a bit of this and that, as edited by David Lapoujade. In this article length text, twenty or so pages, he provides an answer to that question mentioned in the title of the text.
But before we get going, he (170) mentions people like Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes, who could all be labeled as structuralists, at least in some sense, but not all of them would have accepted that label. Plus, in some cases they may have been or may have been considered structuralists at some point, but then, later on, not so. In any case, he (170) wants to point out that some of them would agree and would happily use the word structure or structural, while others would not, while referring to the same thing as system, à la Saussure. I’ll be using those two terms more or less interchangeably in this essay, just so you know.
Similar to Ernst Cassirer in ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’, Deleuze (170) reckons that while Saussure is particularly important to structuralism, being that name that people often associate with it, it can also be credited to Moscow and Prague linguistic circles. He doesn’t explicitly mention it, but it’s worth noting here that Jakobson was a member of both circles.
It is at this point where things get interesting as Deleuze (171) states some stuff that might ruffle some feathers. It’s not offensive, no, but let’s say that his views are somewhat … unconventional. He (170-171) states something as bold as:
“In fact, language is the only thing that can be properly be said to have structure, be it an esoteric or even non-verbal language.”
Now, that may make you think that he is in favor of structuralism, especially in linguistics, but that’s not exactly the case (or, rather, we need to take a step back and think of his definition of it, once we get there). He (171) continues:
“There is a structure of the unconscious only to the extent that the unconscious speaks and is language.”
If you’ve read his collaborations with Guattari, this is not at all that surprising, considering he had already worked with him at this point. If you haven’t read those books, namely ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ and ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, this needs further elaboration. To prevent me from going on a tangent, let’s just say that unconscious doesn’t need structure. It just is what it is. I’ll return to this point later. Anyway, what he (171) helps us to better understand this by stating that:
“There is a structure of bodies only to the extent that bodies are supposed to speak with a language which is one of the symptoms.”
In other words, whenever we invoke structure or system, if you prefer the Saussurean term, we are already in the realm of language. How so? Well, what’s outside language or, more broadly speaking, semiotics, has no need for such. It just is and gets by without such. It is we who insist on … speaking … in these terms, imposing on the world. He (171) highlights this by adding that:
“Even things possess a structure only in so far as they maintain a silent discourse, which is the language of signs.”
Following this, he (171) reminds us of the structuralists again, moving once more from structuralism to structuralists, only make a further move by asking us, his readers, to focus on what makes them structuralists. To be more specific, he (171) wants us to focus on them, to investigate our own views of them, as well as their own views of themselves.
To do that, he lists seven criteria that helps us to recognize structuralism: (I) the symbolic, (II) local or positional, (III) the differential and the singular, (IV) the differenciator, differentiation, (V) serial, (VI) the empty square, (VII) from the subject to practice. I will go through these, one by one. There will be a tangent or two, or several, but bear with me.
The Symbolic
Firstly, Deleuze (171) reminds us that we are in the habit of thinking in terms of something being either real or imaginary. In other words, it’s either for real or it’s made up, true or false. Either it’s real or you are just hallucinating. In addition, we are conditioned to think that there’s a dialectical relation between the two, so that one affects the other, as he (171) points out. So, we can think of there being a real order and an imaginary order, as noted by him (171). What structuralism adds to this is another component, the symbolic, so that there’s also a symbolic order, which should not be confused with the real order, nor with the imaginary order (we’ll get to this shortly, why that is), as he (171) points out.
To make more of sense of that, the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, think of words. They are thought to refer to things and to their images. That covers the first two orders. He (172) provides us with an example that you’ll find in psychoanalytic literature, the father that is real, like someone’s actual dad, and the image of a father, like what we think that a father is like. That said, you can also have the symbolic, which is neither the real father, nor the image of dad, but rather the symbolic father, as he (172) goes on to add:
“Not just the real and the imaginary, but their relations, and the disturbances of these relations, must be thought as the limit of a process in which they constitute themselves in relation to the symbolic.”
Or, more simply put, it is the principle behind the real and the imaginary, as he (172) points out:
“[T]he symbolic as element of the structure constitutes the principle of a genesis: structure is incarnated in realities and images according to determinable series.”
So, in summary, something like a father can be A) real, an actual dad, whoever that may be, B) imaginary, an image of a father, or C) symbolic, a symbolic element among other symbolic elements in a system. I won’t further elaborate the distinctions here, because I’ll return to this soon enough.
Skipping some of the examples here (because I’m not that well versed in psychoanalytic literature, sorry), he (172) moves on to characterize these three orders with a statement that may also puzzle you a bit: “perhaps these numerals”, “1, 2, 3”, “have as much an ordinal as cardinal value.” It took me a moment to get this, what he means by this, but once you get it, it’s like oh, yeah! It’s pretty clever alright.
So, let’s start from the first order, the real. It’s not only first, but also one, as he (172) points out. Then there’s the second order, the imaginary. It’s not only second, but also two, because it doubles the real, as he (172) noted by him. I told you he’s clever! If you don’t get it from that already, just think of a case where your imagination has gone wild, when you have doubted something. You are no longer sure that it’s this, that you have this one explanation for it, but a possible second explanation for it, so at least two explanations for it. That’s how the imaginary is capable of doubling the real, through doubt, as he (172) points out. He (172) exemplifies this again with a father and an image of the father, which are two different things, one being this or that father, a real father, whereas the other one is applicable to more than one father, at least two of them. He (172) summarizes this:
“The imaginary is defined by games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double.”
Then there’s the third order, the symbolic. How is it not only third, but also three? Well, in his (172) view, it is three in the sense that the relation between two things, one and two, here the first and second orders, the real and the imaginary, is never structural. You need at least three things for something to be thought as structural, to have a structure. So, if we have one and two, we can think of their relation as a dialectic, but if we have three, it’s already triadic, as he points out, more like a trialectic.
Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad that he deals with in ‘The Production of Space’ can be understood in this way. He (38-39) refers to the first order, the real, as the realm of spatial practice, i.e., physical space, the second order, the imaginary, as representations of space, and the third order, the symbolic, as representational spaces. Without getting too tangled up on this, physical space and representations of space match the real and the imaginary quite neatly. Representational spaces is not as clear a match here as he (39) mentions it being about images and symbols, as opposed to being just about the symbols. Then again, he (33) summarizes it as “embodying complex symbolisms”, being coded to this or that extent, as “to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces.” Plus, he (39) also reckons that it “is the dominated – and hence passively experience – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.” In other words, it’s not, strictly speaking, imaginary, in itself, but what tends to get dominated by the imaginary.
Stuart Elden (110-111) summarizes this triad his article ‘There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space’. Firstly, there’s “space as physical form, real space”. Secondly, there’s the “space as a mental construct, imagined space.” Thirdly, there’s “space as produced and modified over time”, “invested with symbolism and meaning”, “space as real-and-imagined.” I’m slightly irked by the last bit, it being real-and-imagined, but, then again, it sort of is, inasmuch as we take that domination into account.
Building on Lefebvre’s triad, for Edward Soja, the symbolic order is what he refers to as the thirdspace in ‘Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places’. To be more specific, for him (10), this thirdspace is real and imagined, at the same time, thus combining the firstspace that pertains to “the concrete materiality of spatial forms, on things that can be empirically mapped”, what he reckons is “often thought of as ‘real’”, and the secondspace that pertains to how space is conceived through ideas, how it is doubled or re-presented in this way, what he reckons is often thought of “as ‘imagined.’”
What I particularly like about the way he (9) likens thirdspace, i.e., the symbolic, as “a different way of looking at the same subject”, whatever that may be, “a sequence of neverending variations on recurrent spatial themes.” It has openness to it. Like no matter how fixed and closed things may appear to us, they are always changing and open. Simply put, it has the potential to change the way we think about space, as he (11) points out. I think he (11) is, however, being far too modest here. I think it has not only the potential to change the way we think about space, but also about the way we think, you know like, how we think … of just about anything.
He (11) also laments how this potential is typically wasted because people are in the habit of doing what they’ve been taught to do, to think either in terms of the firstspace or the secondspace, the real or the imaginary. He (11) states that he has witnessed this in geography, that being his field or discipline. I’d say that it’s also like that elsewhere, and that not much has changed in nearly three decades. I reckon he (11) is right that there is this “formidable rigidity of the Firstspace-Secondspace dualism into which geographers”, as well as many others in other fields or disciplines, “have been so tightly socialized.”
Right, back to Deleuze (172) who states that the third order, the symbolic, is “at once unreal, and yet not imaginable”, the point here being that it is not real, nor imaginary. Why? Well, because if it were one of those, it would be either of those two and not its own thing. Things get even more interesting when he (173) points out that:
“We can say at least that the corresponding structure has no relationship with a sensible form, nor with a figure of the imagination, nor with an intelligible essence.”
So, in other words, he is indeed stating that the symbolic is not the sensible, that is to say the real, nor what we imagine or think it is, that is to say the imaginary. What is it then? Well, he (173) goes on to add that:
“It has nothing to do with a form: for structure is not at all defined by an autonomy of the whole, by a preeminence … of the whole over its parts, by a Gestalt which would operate in the real and in perception.”
So, to be clear, it is not to be confused with any kind of pre-existing form. That would be imaginary. That would be us imagining some for that defines something real (like some Platonic idea, form or essence). It is something completely different, as stated by him (173):
“Structure is defined, on the contrary, by the nature of certain atomic elements which claim to account both for the formation of wholes and for the variation of their parts.”
What we have is a whole that is constructed of parts or, rather, we understand these elements, whatever they may be, as constituting a whole due to the way they are related to one another.
“It has nothing to do with … imagination, although structuralism is riddled with reflections on rhetoric, metaphor and metonymy, for these figures themselves imply structural displacements which must account for both the literal and the figurative.”
To paraphrase this, to get to the gist of this, figures of imagination, such metaphors and metonyms are second order phenomena, quite literally so, because they pertain to the second order (haha, that was clever!). The symbolic order and its figures are more fundamental than the imaginary order and its figures. After explaining what it is not, he (173) finally explains what it is:
“[I]t is more a combinatory formula … supporting formal elements which by themselves have neither form, nor signification, nor representation, nor content, nor given empirical reality, nor hypothetical functional model, nor intelligibility behind appearances.”
The gist of what it is right there, at beginning of the sentence. It’s a formula that explains how the elements are arranged in relation to one another at any given time, parts that combine as wholes accordingly.
For those who have read Althusser, he (173) reckons that whatever it is that we call theory is, in fact, this structure that he is going on and on about and the symbolic order is what’s responsible for its production. If you ask me, it does make sense that the structure is the theory, as produced by the symbolic order, in the sense that it is that formula according to which it all makes sense. The problem that I have with theory is, however, that it is often understood as this … something that’s not connected to everyday life. It’s like this other plane that is disconnected from reality. Then again, I’m not saying it is like that, but rather that it’s often understood as such, as something otherwordly. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but, yeah, I get puzzled looks whenever I start with theory. It’s like why all this … theory … and why not just get to the point? In my experience, there’s this opposition to theory. This is why I prefer to call it a conceptual framework. Explaining it as something that has to do with concepts and how they are used to make sense of things just seems to work better.
The local or the positional
Jumping to the second criterion, to the local or positional, he (173) reckons that, once more, that it’s best to explain what structure is not, according to this criterion, before attempting to explain what it is, according to this criterion.
In summary, unlike the real and the imaginary orders, the symbolic order cannot be understood as being referential, that is to say referring to something that exists, i.e., a thing, or that we imagine to exist, i.e., an image, by which he (173) means that “the elements of a structure” do not involve “extrinsic designation, nor intrinsic signification.” To explain what the symbolic order is then, he (173-174) states that it is all about sense, in this context specified by the translator as pertaining to meaning and direction, which is why this criterion is positional.
He (173-174) actually credits point to Lévi-Strauss. I was able to find the text in question, ‘Reponses a quelques questions’ and then cross check the pages with its subsequent English translation that you can find published as ‘A Confrontation’. In this context, he is responding to Paul Ricœur (64) who states that:
“But if I do not understand myself better by understanding them, can I still talk of meaning? If meaning is not a sector of self-understanding, I do not know what it is.”
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what they are even talking about at this point as, to me, they seem to be talking past one another. Anyway, Lévi-Strauss responds to this (64):
“But as we are prisoners of subjectivity where that is concerned, we cannot try to understand things both from the outside and from the inside at once[.]”
To which he (64) eventually adds that:
“There is no such choice [between syntax and semantics] because the phonological revolution that you [Ricœur] have invoked on several occasions consists of the discovery that meaning is always the result of a combination of elements which are not themselves significant.”
In other words, the key thing here is that meaning is always anchored in non-meaning, that sense is derived from nonsense. In his (64) words:
“[B]ehind all meaning there is a non-meaning, while the reverse is not the case.”
As a side note, the difficulty here is that we need to be clear on the terminology. It often not clear whether meaning is just meaning, something that’s supposedly given, or whether by meaning we mean something like textual or semantic meaning, like dictionary definitions (which are, not really meanings, at all, but rather ballparking it, helping you…), and by sense we then mean what we mean by whatever it is that we are trying to get across (…to understand what’s meant by something, in some context). Another way of putting that would be to talk of semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning or of textual meaning and contextual meaning.
The problem for me is that people often think that meaning is just self-evident. At its worst, people think that words correspond with things, even though they don’t. Not as bad, but bad nonetheless, they think that meaning is contained in the words themselves (or expressions themselves), so that all you need to do is to consult a dictionary, even though all you get is words being explained in other words, in infinite regress.
In my view, meaning is something that always emerges, here and now. I’d go as far as to say that it is intuitive. It’s like either you get it or you don’t. Then again, people are so used to thinking of meaning the way they do, unlike me, so I’ve come to prefer sense over meaning. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, as long as you get it, but, yeah, I prefer one over the other in order to avoid that confusion.
So, back to Deleuze (174) who clarifies that while meaning or sense, what’s properly structural, pertaining to the symbolic order, is local or positional, it’s not about this and/or that location in real space, nor in some imaginary space. Instead, it’s all about structural or topological space that is not extensional. I think this meshes well with Soja’s (11) views that thirdspace should not be reduced to firstspace, nor to secondspace, because it is not reducible to either of the two. In any case, what matters for Deleuze (174) is that this third order is all about the relationality, how this and/or that elements is in relation to this and/or that element. In his (174) words:
“[P]laces in a purely structural space are primary in relation to the things and real beings which come to occupy them, primary also in relation to the always somewhat imaginary roles and events which necessarily appear when they are occupied.”
Simply put, the symbolic order, the structure, is all about the relations between the relata, which may be this and/or that. The latter matter, but the former matter more, which is why he (174) goes on to add that:
“The scientific ambition of structuralism is not quantitative, but topological and relational[.]”
This is actually why I’m fond of the works of Gabriel Tarde or Pierre Bourdieu. They are both interested in society, that is to say the human society or, rather, societies, and approach it quantitatively, not because they are all for quantification, as such, thinking that it’s simply better than doing research qualitatively, but because it allows them to think topologically, in terms of relations. While Bourdieu shifted from qualitative work to quantitative work, what I like about this shift is the way he ended up visualizing it through what’s known as correspondence analysis, because it helps us to think differently, in terms of topologies or relations, as aptly summarized by Jean-Paul Benzécri (4) in his ‘Correspondence Analysis Handbook’:
“Those who have considered data tables with some attention know that the relations between numbers are more interesting than the numbers themselves.”
While I was doing my PhD, I had a lot of people tell me that opting to study something social the way I did, quantitively, made no sense and I got plenty of flak for it. This is, however, exactly what they tended not to understand. It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the relations between the numbers. It’s about the correspondences, what tend to co-occur, and what do not tend to co-occur. That’s what it’s all about.
To be clear, looking at the relations and the relata does not mean that you are claiming that one thing leads to another. If one thing tends to appear alongside another thing does not mean that one causes the other, or vice versa. That could be the case, but that’s not the point. You are simply looking at the relations between things. We can, of course, ponder why this tends to co-occur with that, but not with something else, but the co-occurrences themselves do not explain such.
Deleuze (174) provides some examples. Firstly, he (174) notes that, for Althusser, what matters in economy or, to be more accurate, economic structure, is how this and/or that is positioned in relation to something else, whatever that may be. So, if we think of the economy, we do not focus on this and/or that person, the subjects, as interesting as that might be, nor the specific roles they play in that economy, the objects, nor the specific events in which this all takes place. No. Absolutely not. Instead, what matters for Althusser is that we focus on the relations of their production. In other words, we do not focus on people, what they do, nor where and when they do what they do, but rather on how they come or, I guess, rather, may come to occupy such and such position, in relation to such and such other position occupied by someone else, in a certain context. Secondly, he (174) notes that this also the case for Foucault, to whom something like “death, desire, work, or play” is not a matter “of empirical human existence, but above all … the qualifications of places and positions which will render those who come to occupy them as mortal and dying, or desiring, or workman-like, or playful.” In both cases, the focus is not on the subjects, nor on the objects, nor in actual events concerning both, but in the conditions that have come to determine them. This means that what’s interesting is not who it concerns, what it deals with, when and where it takes place, but rather why it comes to be arranged that way in the first place.
This is, perhaps, best explained by Lacan, to whom Deleuze (174) refers to in this context. So, Lacan covers this in his ‘Seminar on “The Purloined letter”’ (I’m referring to the Yale French Studies article, so the pagination matches that). He (59-60) notes that we can “conceive of the signifier as sustaining itself only in a displacement” and that, contrary to what people think, and like to think, “the displacement of the signifier determines” them. He (60) is very adamant about how this works, so I think it’s worth highlighting here:
“[It] determines the subjects in their acts, in their destiny, in their refusal, in their blindnesses, in their end and in their fate, their innate gifts and social acquisitions notwithstanding, without regard for character or sex, and that, willingly or not, everything that might be considered the stuff of psychology, kit and caboodle, will follow the path of the signifier.”
Now, here it’s worth keeping in mind that signification pertains to the imaginary order. The subject does not determine itself, but is determined by the signifiers, because of that, because the real and the imaginary are determined by the symbolic. In other words, it works that way because the symbolic is responsible for the structure, how those signifiers are aligned in relation to one another, as well as how people are aligned in relation to one another. As reiterated by Deleuze (175), meaning or, rather, sense is not something that we can refer to in the real, nor imagine, but rather “an optical effect, a language effect, a positional effect” that has its origins in non-meaning or non-sense.
Deleuze (175) also makes note of how structuralism is often associated with play and theater. I will not get carried away by this, so, I’d say, the gist of this point is that like in many games, such as card games, and in theater, what’s important about structure is the positionality. You have certain positions that can be occupied, and their functions are tied to the other positions. Whoever or whatever occupies that place is therefore a mere placeholder (we’ll get to this soon enough).
To explain that key insight in simple terms, when we invoke a structure or a system, it’s crucial to understand that it’s all about the relations and the relata. Those positions are occupied by some symbolic elements. If we have real or imagined people or things, subjects or objects, occupy those positions, as we often do, they are not of great importance as its that arrangement that matters much more.
To exemplify that key insight, think of a hierarchical structure. It can be anything, but let’s say a feudal monarchy. What we have is a system that has certain key positions. I won’t go through them all. The gist of this arrangement is that you have someone at the top, typically a king or a queen (or an emperor or an empress). That’s a position for you. There are also other positions. You’d typically have dukes or duchesses, counts or countesses and barons or baronesses. The actual people who occupy those positions aren’t that relevant. When they die, they are replaced by others who come to hold those positions. This means that to actually change anything, you need to change the system, that structure.
Back to Deleuze (175) who also notes that structuralism is tied to “a new materialism, a new atheism, a new anti-humanism”, because “the place is primary in relation to whatever it occupies it”, which is why I think it’s only apt to refer to whoever or whatever occupies it as a mere placeholder. Anyway, his (175) point is that as it’s all about the relations and the relata, you don’t have something like God as the final cause that you can resort to explain how things work. Much like nature, culture, humanity, ideology, economy and even discourse, it is certainly possible to imagine that structure works that way though, but that’s the thing, we are then dealing with the imaginary, not with the symbolic. It is then we who ascribe it such status, not the structure itself.
What’s particularly interesting here is his (175) quick remark on how the structure is capable of mutation. This is a rather unorthodox view on structuralism, but it is what makes his take on it interesting. It’s not explained in this context, so you just need to wait for him to cover more ground.
The differential and the singular
Moving on to the third criterion, which is the differential and the singular, he (176) emphasizes the importance of understanding positionality through reciprocal determination of the relata. Simply put, the things that are in relation to one another make no sense if considered in isolation from one another. He (176) exemplifies this with phonemes. If you are familiar with phonology or phonetics, what he (176) points out, that “[p]honemes do not exist independently of the relations into which they enter and through which they reciprocally determine each other”, should not come as anything new to you. So, if you are trying to learn a language, or a dialect, it is of little use to you to focus solely on certain elements. You also need to grasp those elements in relation to one another, as a system.
He (176) moves on to list three types of relations that correspond with the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. I’m going to deviate here a bit and use the terms he (171) uses in ‘Difference and Repetition’: the determined, the determinable and the undetermined. Firstly, in a real relation the relata are determined, like the numbers you use in calculation. For example, think of something simple like 4+5=9, 4×5=20, or 4/5=0,8. Secondly, in an imaginary relation the relata are determinable. For example, thing of an equation with Xs and Ys, like 2X-1Y=4, and then fill in the blanks. Thirdly, in a symbolic relation the relata are undetermined on their own, for example dy or dx, having no ”existence, nor value, not signification” in isolation, as emphasized by him (176), but determinable as dy/dx and ultimately determined once the blanks are filled in. Listing the criterion in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, he (176) indicates that the differential relationship dy/dx is determined or, rather, determining, but I opted to use the formulation he (171) uses in ‘Difference and Repetition’ because it simple makes more sense to refer to it as determinable, as opposed to determined, as long as the blanks are not filled in. I have no idea why he deviates from his previous formulation, which I think is more accurate. Okay, undetermined might actually be a bit misleading, so perhaps determining is apt. Anyway, what matters is that you get the point, which is that the relata are determined relationally, in relation to one another, not in isolation from one another, and it is the relationship or the system of these relationships that are responsible for determining the rest.
Staying on mathematics in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, he (176) cautions you not to think of structures as systems of axioms, by which I believe he means a set theory, but as systems of differentials, as based on differential calculus, which he defines as “a pure logic of relations.” What we get out of this arrangement is singularities, which are mapped as “curves or figures” between “singular points”, his (176) prime example being how we understand a triangle as having lines between three points. Those who’ve studied phonology or phonetics will probably also understand his (176) other example that deals with how the phonetic system of a language result in singularities, marked by certain vocalizations and significations.
He (177) summarizes structures as differential and singular:
“Every structure presents the following two aspects: a system of differential relations according to which the symbolic elements determine themselves reciprocally, and a system of singularities corresponding to these relations and tracing the space of the structure.”
Only to further condense this (177):
“Every structure is a multiplicity.”
So, we are, in fact, dealing with multiplicities, that are differential and singular. When we analyze them, we must look at the relations and the relata, or, as he (177) puts it:
“The question, ‘Is there structure in any domain whatsoever?,’ must be specified in the following way: in a given domain, can one uncover symbolic elements, differential relations and singular points which are proper to it?”
There is a certain difficulty to this though. We are dealing with the symbolic order here. It is not real, i.e., material, nor imaginary, i.e., semiotic, so how does one do this analysis? His answer to that is, perhaps, simpler than what you might expect, even though it only makes sense, if you ask me. Firstly, concerning the real, he (177) states that
“Symbolic elements are incarnated in the real beings and objects of the domain considered; the differential relations are actualized in real relations between these beings[.]”
This is what I’d call materialization or manifestation, which is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to it here and there in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ in addition to incarnation. Speech is a good example of this. Each expression is certainly material. You do need a physical body that acts in relation to another body, so that you get that vibration of air. You can’t study speech without that, like in the abstract. But, of course, speech is more than just materiality, as he (177) goes on to add:
“[T]he singularities are so many places in the structure, which distributes the imaginary attitudes or roles of the beings or objects that come to occupy them.”
As this is probably difficult to comprehend, he (177) rephrases this:
“[T]he symbolic elements and their relations always determine the nature of the beings and objects which come to realize them.”
Simply put, the symbolic determines the real and the imaginary, the things that we deal with and what we think of them, as already mentioned. Anyway, he (177) continues:
“[T]he singularities form an order of positions that simultaneously determines the roles and the attitudes of these beings in so far as they occupy them.”
So, once the symbolic has determined the real and the imaginary, what we have is these positions that define various roles and the attitudes toward these roles. Now, of course, it keeps on determining them as the structure does also undergo mutations, as also already mentioned. So, yeah, don’t go thinking that there is such a thing as a fixed symbolic order according to which the real and the imaginary orders are determined once and for all.
Before I continue, it’s worth noting that you can only study the symbolic order through the imaginary order which cannot be studied in the absence of the real order. The good thing is that we already do that, without it taking us much effort, really. Even when we think, we need a real body (material) that is capable of thinking. So, for example, to the best of our understanding a rock is not capable of thinking. But a body alone is not enough. We also need the imaginary (semiotic). The bad thing is that we think or, rather, like to think that this is enough, that all we need is a body that can think. What we also need is something that is determines how it all comes together. That’s structure for you. That’s the system for you. That’s the symbolic order for you.
I think you should already be able to grasp this, but let’s further exemplify this with his (177) example of familial relations. So, you have parents and grandparents (parents of parents, really) and siblings, brothers and sisters. Let’s assume that you have children and grandchildren (children of children, really), which means that you probably have a spouse, husband or a wife and that your children probably have spouses, husbands or wives. Let’s also assume that your siblings have children, which means that you are an uncle or an aunt (the sibling, the brother or the sister of the mother or father of their children). They are then your nieces and nephews. To one another they are siblings, brothers and sisters, or cousins. Now, if we have real people, then these have been determined, and if we have imaginary people, like perhaps we are guessing, these are determinable, but we can also think of these symbolically, as mere positions in a system of (familial) relations, without ever mentioning specific real or imaginary people. This thought process, of thinking about these (familial) relations does, of course, require a real body that is capable of thinking, of imagining it all, but that’s not the point here. No matter what I think, I’m determined as a son, as a brother, a cousin and an uncle, and determinable as a father and as a husband, in an undetermined, yet determining system of (familial) relations through which my real and imaginary positions are comprehended.
Deleuze (177-178) shifts to explain appellations and attitudes. For him, the resulting singularities correspond with the symbolic order, with its relata and its relations, but they do not resemble that order. In other words, that relation is entirely symbolic, as one might have guessed. The symbolic relations are differential relations. They are responsible for the distribution of singular points and once they are determined, once those blanks are filled in, they are incarnated in species, what I’d rather call categories or classifications. They are the appellations, dealing with variables, which only makes sense, considering you are dealing with something that can determined in numerous ways. In contrast, the singularities are the incarnations of these relations between the singular points. They are attitudes, dealing with functions.
To make more sense of that, as Deleuze’s (177-178) take on that is, perhaps, a bit dense and I’m probably making it only worse by summarizing it, even more densely, I think it’s helpful to take a closer look at how Lévi-Strauss deals with this, considering that Deleuze’s borrows these terms from him. In ‘Structural Anthropology’, Lévi-Strauss (310) mentions two kinds of systems: the system of terminology and the system of attitudes. But before I explain these, I think it’s worth clearing up a potential terminological confusion.
Right, terminology pertains to naming, to what Deleuze (177-178) refers to as the appellations, which corresponds to the name given to it by Lévi-Strauss (343) in the French original, ‘Anthropologie structurale’. This is one of those cases where Deleuze’s translators, Melissa McMahon and Charles Stivale, have opted for another term than the one used in the translation of the cited work, probably because, I’d say, appellation makes you think of the act of naming, or categorizing, whereas terms or terminology make you think of something that already been termed such and such. In other words, appellation is, perhaps, the more apt than term or terminology, as it has that dynamic sense of act of naming, whereas term or terminology lacks that, appearing to us as static or, at least, more static than appellation.
In any case, to explain the system of terminology (or appellations), it pertains to the naming of the different positions, as explained by Lévi-Strauss (310) in ‘Structural Anthropology’. In contrast, the system of attitudes pertains to the attitudes that are expressed by those terms or appellations, the names we’ve given to such and such, as he goes on to add (310). These attitudes could be about “rights, duties, obligations” or about “privileges, avoidance”, as noted by him (310).
I think Deleuze’s (178) take should now make more sense, how, on one hand, you have the variables, whatever positions they might pertain to and whatever placeholders they might involve, and then, one the other hand, the functions that those who or what comes to occupy those positions have in those positions. So, think of the singular points and the relations between them. We can name this and/or that position, which only makes sense in relation to the other positions, and once we’ve determined who or what occupies it, that singularity, we can understand its function in relation to the other singularities, that also have their functions, as determined by those differential relations that determined the distribution of those singular points.
For example, I can and do occupy certain kinship positions, as already noted. They are the variables, the Xs, the Ys, and the Zs, and the like. We could also call them categories or classifications. It doesn’t really matter what you call them, as long as you get the point. Anyway, these positions have certain appellations, which is a fancy way of saying names. We could refer to them as Xs, Ys or Zs, but typically they are common nouns, such as son, brother and cousin, to mention the earlier kinship positions again. Once I occupy such a position, what we could refer to as a nominal variable, which is only apt, giving the names of the variables are common nouns, there are certain attitudes that come with that position. For example, as a brother, I am expected to behave in relation to my siblings in a certain way, by my siblings and by others who know that we are siblings. In other words, a brother is not merely a label among other labels, but it also has a certain function.
If you struggle to comprehend this, think of the variables, aka categories or classifications, as what we might call quiddities (quidditas, whatness), and the functions as pertaining to singularities, what we might call haecceities (haecceitas, thisness), if we follow Duns Scotus’s (d. 3, p. 1, q. 4, n. 76) ‘Ordinatio II’ on this. The former is what something or someone is called, for example a rock or a brother. The latter is the particular rock or the person in question, in relation to what else is there. That’s singularity for you. It’s like you know it, you just know it, it’s this or that, a vague essence and a molecular collectivity, as Deleuze and Guattari (369) refer to haecceities in ‘A Thousand Plateau’. To be clear, it’s not what we think we are, nor what we think something or someone is, but what it has, already, become, in relation to what else is there, as they (263) point out:
“Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: The animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place!”
I wanted to mention this because it would be a mistake to think of us, something or someone else, as singularities, in the absence of what else is there. No. It’s absolutely crucial to understand that who you are, what you’ve become, at any given moment, is constituted relationally, in relation to what else is there, which alo functions the same way, so that “[t]aking a walk is a haecceity”, as they (263) point out, just as me writing this essay is a haecceity. The attitudes do, however, shape our understanding of all that, so that we are aware that everything has certain functions, which creates certain expectations and guides our actions, from one position to another.
Deleuze (178) further exemplifies this with Althusser’s and Étienne Balibar’s work, which can be found in their collaboration ‘Reading Capital’. In this book, Althusser, for his part, comments on Marx’s view of relations of production. He (177) rejects Marxism as historicism, as in this leading to that, and states that we should instead focus on the way in which various forms vary so that we get a certain formation, a combination, in which different elements are configured in a certain way, so that we get a certain gestalt, which is a fancy way of saying a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Deleuze (186) comments on this in ‘Difference and Repetition’:
“[A] variety of relations, with its corresponding distinctive points, is then incarnated in the concrete differenciated labours which characterise a determinate society, in the real relations of that society (juridical, political, ideological) and in the actual terms of those relations (for example, capitalist-wage-Iabourer).”
He (186) then explains why Althusser and Balibar are correct in their objection of Marxism as historicism:
“[T]his structure never acts transitively, following the order of succession in time; rather, it acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse societies and by accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each time and in each case, constitute the present[.]”
This is why the symbolic order is undetermined, as he (171) points out elsewhere in the book, and why it is also determining, as he (176) points out in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’. He (186) notes in ‘Difference and Repetion’ that we shouldn’t think of economy as something pre-existing:
“[T]hat is why ‘the economic’ is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted, always covered over by its forms of actualisation; a theme or ‘problematic’ always covered over by its cases of solution.”
In other words, the economy is always a synthesis in the making, as he (186) goes on to point out. Now, this should help us understand his (178) more to the point commentary of Althusser’s and Balibar’s work in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’:
“[A]bove all, the relations of production are determined as differential relations that are established, not between … concrete individuals, but between objects and agents which … have a symbolic value (object of production, instrument of production, labor force, immediate workers, immediate non-workers, such as they are held in relations of property and appropriation).”
That is a very good and concise summary of Althusser’s and Balibar’s views in that book. What I like here is the emphasis on how this is not personal. This is not about me, you, Deleuze, Althusser or Balibar, nor about any other specific real or imaginary person for that matter, but about those variables and functions, those appellations and attitudes. We are not interested in the actual people. Like not at all. Instead, we are interested in how people come to function in that system. He (178) really wants you to get this point:
“[I]f it is obvious that concrete [people] come to occupy the places and carry forth the elements of the structure, this happens by fulfilling the role that the structural place assigns to them (for example the ‘capitalist’), and by serving as supports for the structural relations.”
You may not like this, because it does negate your sense of autonomy, by which I mean your feeling of being able to do as you see fit, but that’s exactly how it is. You are only occupying a certain position in relation to others who occupy other positions. This creates certain limits to what you can do at any given time, in relation to others who have such limits as well. He (178) explains this is broader terms:
“This occurs to such an extent that ‘the true subjects are not these occupants and functionaries… but the definition and distribution of these places and these functions.’”
Note how it’s all about the position and what functions those positions have and not about those who occupy those positions and what we think of them. Again, this is not about the real, nor about the imaginary. We do have work through them, yes, but it’s the symbolic that matters. This is not to say that there aren’t actual people, nor that actual people don’t matter. There are actual people, and the actual people do matter. They are, however, of secondary interest, because they are replaceable, inasmuch as the people replacing them are capable of occupying the same place and function the same way. For him (178), the gist of this criterion is then that:
“The true subject is the structure itself: the differential and the singular, the differential relations and the singular points, the reciprocal determination and the complete determination.”
To go back a bit, this is exactly what Deleuze and Guattari (263) mean by haecceities, when they state in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ something as seemingly bonkers as:
“‘The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road,’ cries Virginia Woolf.”
So, instead of thinking about the dog and the road, or the perceived movement of the former and the lack of movement of the latter, separately, we need to consider them as inseparable, there and then, as part and parcel to that moment. They (263) continue:
“That is how we need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities.”
Only to add that (263):
“A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome.”
Like I just pointed out, it’s all about the here and now, or there and then. It’s a bit of this and a bit of that, very vague, yet essential. It’s very intuitive. Either you get it, or you don’t. If you end up thinking about it in terms of distinct entities, doing distinct things, you are already thinking in terms of quiddities, in terms of whatness, and then you don’t get it.
Anyway, Deleuze (178) manages to put this even more concisely in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’:
“Each mode of production is thus characterized by singularities corresponding to the values of the relations.”
Simply put, a singularity or a haecceity is all about the relations and the relata, how this and/or that are connected to one another, at any given time. Conversely, it is not about thinking of them in isolation from one another.
The differenciator and differentiation
Moving on to the fourth criterion, which is the differenciator and differentiation, as named by him (178). In this case, before explaining why he opts to call them what he calls them, it makes sense to cover the two terms he (178) introduces in this context: the actual and the virtual.
To my knowledge, this distinction is borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce, who provides us a very handy definition of the two terms in his dictionary entry on ‘Virtual’ (763):
“A virtual X (where X is a common noun) is something, not an X, which has the efficiency (virtus) of an X.”
This means that when something is virtually the same, it is as if it were the same, yet it isn’t, whereas if something is actually the same, it is the same. For example, I have this cheap keyboard, a Logitech K120. It’s dirt cheap and gets the job done. It’s easily replaceable. So, I could simply get another one and it would get the job done. I wouldn’t know the difference. It’s therefore virtually the same keyboard. It is, however, not actually the same keyboard as this keyboard is this keyboard and that other keyboard is that other keyboard. I could also replace it with some different keyboard and I could still say that it’s virtually the same as the one that I have, inasmuch what matters to me is that it has its place, a position that can be occupied by any other keyboard that also does the job for me.
Peirce (763) also reminds his readers not to confuse virtual with potential and, I might add, with what’s considered possible. He (763) summarizes this concisely by stating that when something, an X, has a certain potential, that potential is tied to that something, to that X, whereas a virtual something, that virtual X, is what functions akin to that something, to that X, but without being that something, that X, because if it actually was that something, that X, it would actually be that something, that X, and not something else.
He (763) exemplifies this with velocity, so that if we replace it with a virtual velocity, it is “equivalent to a velocity in the formula”, without being a velocity. He (763) provides another example in which the American colonies were represented in the British Parliament, but only virtually, by which he means that they, in fact, had non-representation in the parliament, rather than representation. If they had representation, that is to say actual representation instead of virtual representation, by which the British meant they were represented, just like anyone else, even though they were not elected by the colonists, they would not have protested. So, to be clear, from the British standpoint, the colonists had representation. It was not actual representation, because the colonists had not actually chosen these people to represent them. It was virtual representation because the people chosen by others functioned in the place, as if to represent them, as if they had been chosen by the colonists to represent them.
Deleuze (208) explains this in ‘Difference and Repetition’, further clarifying what the virtual is and what it isn’t, as well as what it should not be confused with. Firstly, it does not exist in opposition to the real. Instead, it stands in opposition to the actual. Secondly, both the actual and the virtual are, in fact, real.
Right, this should help us to understand what Deleuze means in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism’ when he (178-179) states that a structure is not actual, but virtual. To be more precise, structure is actual, but only in the sense that it is incarnated (materialized or manifested) in something actual, as apparent to us by the constitution of whatever incarnation (materialization or manifestation) we are dealing with. He borrows a line from Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’, from ‘Time Regained’, as specified in the notes (306), as he (179) states that structure is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” This can indeed be found in that book and at least the translation that I’m looking at has Proust (218) stating that. The difficulty here is that you need to know that, in this context, being ideal but not abstract does not mean an image, or an abstract idea, as Deleuze (179) points out, as, to my understanding, that would make it part of the imaginary order. The ideality of it also seems to be drawn from the works of Lévi-Strauss, but unfortunately Deleuze (179) doesn’t specify that.
What Deleuze (179), however, has to say about this is that structure is about “virtuality of coexistence which pre-exists the beings, objects and works” of a domain that the structure pertains to. In short, a structure is therefore “a multiplicity of virtual coexistence”, as he (179) points out. Once more, he (179) relies on Althusser to exemplify this, so let’s see what he (97) has to say about this in ‘Reading Capital’:
“[T]he structure of the social whole must be strictly interrogated in order to find in it the secret of the conception of history in which the ‘development’ of this social whole is thought[.]”
In other words, to understand a society and how it views itself, we must look at how the society is structured. I agree. That makes sense. Anyway, he (97) continues:
“[O]nce we know the structure of the social whole[,] we can understand the apparently ‘problem-less’ relationship between it and the conception of historical time in which this conception is reflected.”
The point here is that to understand how a society views itself, having this historical time, a past, a present and a future. To give this a bit of context, he (97) is criticizing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s conception of time, which is, in his (94-96) view, wholly unsatisfactory, because it is seen as continuous progress, moving on, dialectically, from one instance to another. He (98) takes issue with that because it doesn’t explain anything about a society, because it takes that society for granted, and because it assumes that one thing leads to another. Okay, maybe it does, gotta give Hegel that, but, then again, maybe it doesn’t, so that kind of ruins it. Deleuze (179) summarizes this as:
“[T]he originality of Marx (his anti-Hegelianism) resides in the manner in which the social system is defined by a coexistence of elements and economic relations, without one being able to engender them successively according to the illusion of a false dialectic.”
So, simply put, don’t go assuming that this leads to that, because you reckon that it does. Okay, maybe it does, but the point here is that we can’t be sure of that, we can’t just say that we got from there to here, just because. Again, maybe it does, but, then again, maybe it doesn’t.
I think Deleuze (178) provides a better example when he addresses phonemes. As he (178) points out, following Jakobson’s and Morris Halle’s discussion of the topic in ‘Fundamentals of Language’, a phoneme is not a sound (as that would be a phone), a letter (as that would be a graph and pertain to graphemes), nor a syllable (as that be about a sequence of phonemes or, more concretely, of phones). Jakobson and Halle (22) indeed points out that phonemes are, in themselves, nonsensical, which is actually a point he credits to Edward Sapir (33) who states in ‘Sound Patterns in Language’ that “sounds and sound processes of speech cannot be properly understood in … simple, mechanical terms” and that a phoneme “has no singleness, or rather, primary singleness, of reference.” Why? Well, as explained by Sapir (34), a phoneme “has no direct functional value” as “it is merely a link in the construction of a symbol” and its subsequent reception as such, as a symbol, in a certain context. Sapir further comments this is a related article, ‘The Psychological Reality of Phonemes’, as he (47) reiterates how speech cannot be reduced to mere sounds:
“In the physical world the naïve speaker and hearer actualize and are sensitive to sounds, but what they feel themselves to be pronouncing and hearing are ‘phonemes.’”
He (47) then further elaborates his definition of them:
“They order the fundamental elements of linguistic experience into functionally and aesthetically determinate shapes, each of which is carved out by its exclusive laws of relationship within the complex total of all possible sounds relationships.”
To make more sense of that, he (47) likens the distinction between phonemes to blunt weapons, noting that no matter how a phonetician (a practitioner of phonetics, not phonology) tells you that there is a middle ground between two phonemes, something in between, there isn’t, categorically, just as there isn’t something that’s between a club and a pole. You could, of course, invent one in between, but that would mean introducing something alongside the two. In his (47) words:
“If a phonetician discovers in the flow of actual speech something is neither ‘club’ nor ‘pole,’ … [the] phonetician … has the right to set up a ‘halfway between club and pole’ entity. Functionally, however, such an entity is a fiction, and the naïve speaker or hearer is not only driven by its relational behavior to classify it as a ‘club or a ‘pole,’ but actually hears and feels it to be such.”
So, as I just pointed out, while we could set up an extra category between the phonemes, just as we could set up an extra category between a club and a pole, based on something, whatever that may be, that’s not what people do. The point here is that you already have a number of phonemes and you can’t just whimsically add more of them. So, to be clear, while he (47-48) is fully aware of how we can analyze speech phonetically, as opposed to phonemically, the thing is that it’s largely a pointless endeavor to most people, because when speaking and listening, people are generally trying to make sense what it is that the other person is saying, as based on those distinctions that matter, and not focusing on what someone sounds like, because that doesn’t matter to them.
To connect this to Deleuze’s (178) discussion of structure in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, we should think of phonemes also in this way. This is what Sapir (61) points out in ‘A Study in Phonetic Symbolism’:
“[T]he meaningful combinations of vowels and consonants (words, significant parts of words, and word groupings) derive their functional significance from the arbitrary associations between them and their meanings established by various societies in the course of an uncontrollably long period of historical development.”
Simply put, to reiterate an earlier point, we get sense from nonsense, meaning from nonmeaning. He (61) summarizes this as:
“This completely disassociated type of symbolism is of course familiar; it is of the very essence of linguistic form.”
This is, of course, only one way of looking at how language is structured. Focusing solely on phonemes has its limitations, as he (61) goes on to add. I’ve been teaching spoken American English for a couple of years now and I can vouch for this (not that Sapir needs my agreement). It is not only what you say, accurately, in a clearly articulated manner (remember, articulation is about segmentation, like it is with phonemes), but also how you say it. In his (61) words:
“As examples may be given in the interrogative tone in such a spoken sentence as ‘You say he’s dead?’ in comparison with the simple declarative tone of the corresponding ‘You say he’s dead’[.]”
Exactly! To be clear, we can also think of two different utterances, such as the way one says ‘teeny’, with clear emphasis, and the way one says ‘tiny’, without any emphasis, as he (61) points out. So, yeah, don’t go thinking that it’s all about what you say. No, no. It’s a lot about how you say whatever it is that you say.
Anyway Jakobson and Halle (27-28) do indeed also point out that phonemes should not be confused with letters of the alphabet as there is no one to one correspondence between them, as anyone who’s ever written and read English can point out to you. Even in languages such as Finnish, where the orthography is pretty spot on, you still have stuff that simply don’t add up, as they (28) point out:
“There is no such thing in human society as the supplantation of the speech code by its visual replicas, but only a supplementation of this code by parasitic auxiliaries, while the speech code constantly and unalterably remains in effect.”
To give you an example, knowing that Finnish is written in a way that is considered to be very close to how it is spoken, you might be fooled to think that something like ‘kenkä’ (a shoe) can thus be expressed (I know, this is just the phonemic transcription of it, actually, but it’s the best I can do here) as /ˈkenkæ/, but no, it isn’t. It’s /ˈkeŋkæ/. Oh, and believe me, it gets even trippier once take into account the inflection (but let’s not go there, just no, no, no…). So, as Jakobson and Halle (28) put it:
“Letters either totally ignore or only partially elicit the different distinctive features on which the phonemic pattern is based and unfailingly disregard the structural interrelationship of these features.”
So, like I just pointed out, even when you think it’s about right, it isn’t. You can’t think of it this way, as the (28) go on to add, while contrasting language with music:
“One could state neither that musical form is manifested in two variables – notes and sounds – nor that linguistic form is manifested in two equipollent substances – graphic and phonic.”
Yeah, it just doesn’t work that way. This is, of course, not to say that writing isn’t handy, nor that musical notation isn’t handy (I mean, why would I otherwise even write?). It’s rather that you are missing the point if you think that language, or music, can be reduced to something visual. This also applies to phonetics and phonology, which both rely on writing. Again, that’s all well and good, but speech cannot be reduced to something that we depict visually, as they (28) reminds us:
“For just as musical form cannot be abstracted from the sound matter it organizes, so form in phonemics is to be studied in relation to the sound matter which the linguistic code selects, readjusts, dissects and classifies along its own lines. Like musical scales, phonemic patterning is an intervention of culture in nature, an artifact imposing logical rules upon the sound continuum.”
Agreed. So, yeah, don’t go confusing these things and reducing language, nor any other semiotic mode of expression to something that it is not (I’ll return to this issue later on).
Right, back to Deleuze (179) summarizes how this all works. In summary, what matters is that a structure is a system of relations that involves the actualization of some, but not all “particular relations, relational, and distributions of singularities”, “here and now”, whereas the others remain virtual, being “actualized elsewhere or at other times”, as he (179) points out.
To make more sense of that, but without getting lost in all the details, he (179) uses language as an example of that, how it cannot be totalized, because it is merely a structure, a system of relations:
“There is no total language [langue], embodying all the possible phonemes and phonemic relations.”
Before I let him continue, and comment on this myself, I’ll explain the terms he is using here. They are borrowed from Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘Course in General Linguistics’. So, Deleuze is referring here to what Saussure calls a system of language (langue), such as English or Finnish, which he then contrast with language (langage) in general, including the actual use of language, what Saussure calls speech (parole).
Anyway, so, a language is always particular, having particular phonemes and relations between them. In other words, you do not have a language of languages, from which languages, such as English and Finnish, derive from. To be clear, this does not mean that languages are not related, but rather that you do not have one language that has all the phonemes and their relations and from which all the languages, such as English and Finnish, then simply pick certain phonemes and the relations between them.
This, of coruse, applies to all features of language and not just to phonemes. They are just a handy example, considering how I went on and on about them, with recourse to Jakobson, Halle and Sapir.
Now, that all said, Deleuze (179) goes on to add that:
“But the virtual totality of the language system [langage] is actualized following exclusive rules in diverse, specific languages, of which each embodies certain relationships, relational values, and singularities.”
If this seems puzzling, like how can there be no totality, only for there to a totality, it’s because a language (langue), such as English or Finnish, is always something that is actual or, rather what’s been actualized, whereas language (langage) in general is a virtual totality and not an actual totality. If we connect these to two remarks by Deleuze (179), you should be able to notice that a language (langue) is always actualized, on the basis of the virtual, which in this case is language (langage).
To put this in plain terms, think of a language as one way of articulating or segmenting the world, among other ways of doing that, which are the other languages. Language, as a system, is then simply a particular semiotic mode in which we do that. Now, of course, we could object to this by bringing up all the varieties that are not considered languages. Yes, but that doesn’t change anything as a language is, in itself, merely a variety among other varieties. It has simply been given a status of language, which means that there’s politics involved. I think that’s worth noting here, but I don’t want to get tangled up on that aspect. I want to move on.
He (179) uses another example, which functions the same way:
“There is no total society, but each social form embodies certain elements, relationships, and production values (for example ‘capitalism’).”
Again, there’s no society from which a society picks a bit of this and a bit of that, so that you have this in relation to that. Instead, in each case you have certain elements that are actualized and others that are not, as he (179) goes on to add:
“We must therefore distinguish between the total structure of a domain as an ensemble of virtual coexistence, and the sub-structures that correspond to diverse actualizations in the domain.”
Pay attention to how he refers to this structure or system as having to do with virtual coexistence, which could be just about anything, like virtually anything, and how it is contrasted with the actual existence of this and/or that, what we actually encounter, what has been actualized, e.g., a language or a society. If we think of coexistence as something actual, none of this makes sense. So, yeah, don’t do that. Don’t think in that way. Why? Because the whole point here is to have an open-ended system that is not predetermined. That’s why. It’s supposed to be maybe, maybe not, or, for now, until it isn’t or, rather, might not be. If it were all actual, it’s like there’s a warehouse from which you simply take something readymade. The whole point is that whatever you take from that supposed warehouse is unspecific and once you put it into use it becomes specific, in a way that is unlike something else that has also become specific, so that you can distinguish between the two and so that you can’t have each of them be each other, this and that, at the same time. You want that mutual exclusivity. That does not, however, prevent it all becoming something unspecific, from which you’d then get something specific again, nor turning something specific into something that is not what it was. That’d be absurd as the whole point is to have an open-ended system in which you have all kinds of mutations or transformations that are, nonetheless, not whimsical.
He (179) explains what I just did, but in fancier terms:
“Of the structure as virtuality, we must say that it is still undifferentiated (c), even though it is totally and completely differential (t).”
So, firstly, there’s the structure, that is to say the system. It’s unspecific or, as he (179) puts it, undifferentiated, yet fully differential. He (179) goes on:
“Of structures which are embodied in a particular actual form (present or past), we must say that they are differentiated, and that for them to be actualized is precisely to be differentiated.”
So, secondly, what we encounter, what’s actual, having this or that form, here and now, is that which has become differentiated, having been actualized.
I know this is getting pretty repetitive, but to make sure you get the point he (179) wants to get across, things are therefore not different just because they are, as if there was this warehouse that contained all the wares from which they were distributed into the world. No. No. No. Absolutely not. Instead, things are different because they’ve been differentiated, not from one another, as that’d would be like saying that there are these pre-existing different things, but from what there simply is at all times, undifferentiated, yet differential.
If you want to simplify this further, if you are struggling with differentiation, it’s more or less the same as actualization, as he (179) points out there. Conversely, if you are dealing with the virtual, you are dealing with the undifferentiated, which has the capacity to be differentiated as it is differential.
I think differentiation, how you get something different from the undifferentiated, makes a lot of sense, but you do really need to understand what it is about. If you don’t get it, it doesn’t do you much good to use those terms. That’s why I find the virtual and the actual really handy. It shouldn’t take a whole lot of effort to understand them. Then again, if you crave for a more comprehensive explanation, you do need to take your time and figure out the differentiation part.
Moving on, he (179) states that differentiation works in two ways. Firstly, there’s the species. To use his (179) exact words, “[t]he differential relations are incarnated in qualitative distinct species”. Secondly, there are the parts and extended figures, in which “the corresponding singularities are incarnated”, as stated by him (179). To connect the two, it is the latter that give character to the former, as he (179) points out. If this wasn’t the case, then there’d just be these things, as if they’d been pulled out of that great warehouse.
In both cases, make note of incarnation again, which is what I already noted as being the same manifestation or materialization. Another way of thinking about that is taking form. Later on, he (180) also refers to this as realization. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, they (41) also mention it as a matter of actualization. Anyway, no matter what term you use for that, the point is that relations require relata. To exemplify this with language, be it spoken or written, language does require the material world. Speech does require a body to produce it, another body to receive it, as well as other bodies to transmit it. It’s the same with writing. It’s just that air is replaced by a material surface, such as a sheet of paper or a computer screen.
He (179-180) further elaborates the difference between the virtual and the actual, or the undifferentiated, yet differential, and the differentiated, by stating that the actual is always constrained by its temporality. In other words, whatever is actualized, depends on that actualization. Simply put, it lasts as long as it lasts. He (180) then adds a layer of complexity to this by stating that the parts of the actual, whatever has been actualized, have their “particular rhythms.” To put that another way, he (180) summarizes this as:
“[T]he position of structuralism is thus quite clear: time is always a time of actualization, according to which the elements of virtual coexistence are carried out at diverse rhythms.”
Now, I don’t think he means that the virtual is timeless, as such, but rather that it is infinite, whereas as the actual is finite, having this or that temporality. Think of life span. That’s it. That’s your time here. Anyway, what he (180) adds to this does seem to support that:
“Time goes from the virtual to the actual, that is, from structure to its actualizations, and not from one actual form to another.”
So, yeah, the virtual is not timeless. It’s rather that time is understood differently once we are dealing with the actual. As a side note, notice how he once more retains this pairing, avoiding thinking in terms of the actual alone. Anyway, you might wonder what the deal with rhythm is then? Well, for time to make sense in the actual, it has to pass, to move on, if you will. In his (180) words:
“[T]ime conceived as a relation of succession of two actual forms makes do with expressing abstractly the internal times of the structure or structures that are realized at different depths in these two forms, and the differential relations between these times.”
Here we go back to the structure or the system, which is the virtual. Again, what’s particularly important here is that we can’t think merely in terms of the actual. To go back a bit, once more, note how he mentions this as a matter of realization, which is the same as incarnation, manifestation, materialization, taking form or actualization, as already noted a couple of times.
To get somewhere, that is to say be productive (sorry for the pun, you’ll see), he (180) adds to this that:
“And precisely because the structure is not actualized without being differentiated in space and time, hence without differentiating the species and the parts which carry it out, we must say in this sense that structure produces these species and these parts themselves.”
Note here that he is indeed stating that it is the structure that is responsible for the production of the species and the parts or, as I’d like to call them, the wholes and the parts, the partial objects, which he and Guattari (42) cover in ‘Anti-Oedipus’:
“We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity.”
I’ll try to get back on track here, as soon as possible, but I wanted to include this because it explains why there isn’t like this warehouse that has it all and from which we pick something. They (42) are talking about the virtual and the actual here as well, albeit without using those terms. What they (42) are saying is that it is futile to list all that’s actual, in hopes of accounting for all that is actual. Another way of saying this is that it’s not like a puzzle that you can piece together, as they (35) point out in ‘What Is Philosophy?’:
“They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of dice.”
If they were like a pieces of a puzzle, you wouldn’t know if you have all the pieces. You couldn’t ever hope to complete that puzzle. Plus, you wouldn’t even know if they are parts of the same puzzle and some of them would have lost their distinct shape. The upside of that is, of course, that you can do whatever with those pieces. Pick and mix. See what happens.
Anyway, to elaborate on what they mean by throws of dice, or what I believe they mean by it, Deleuze explains this in ‘The Logic of Sense’. He (58-59) notes that there are two kinds of games: games of skill and games of chance. The former game has a set of rules that are fixed, so that it’s all about the skill of the players. You are expected to discover the rules by going through some rulebook. If we use dice throws to explain how that works, it’s as simple as stating that each throw has a fixed outcome, typically either good or bad for the player. To be clear, there is room for some chance, as he (59) points out, but it’s largely about the skill of the player. This is also how it is many sports. What differentiates the players from one another is their skills and what’s often most valued is their ability to make plays (playmaking) or, as he (59) refers to it, their development in “the art of causality.” In other words, a good playmaker can see what’s about to unfold. In stark contrast, the latter game has no fixed rules. He (59) states that it has “no preexisting rules”, which does not mean that it has no rules, but rather that the rules are not fixed from the get-go. Instead, the rules are invented as you play the game, so that “each move invents its own rules; it bears upon its own rule”, as he (59) points out. Now, that doesn’t mean that this kind of game doesn’t have rules. I mean you do always start from somewhere. So, yeah, you do have a set of rules at the start, but each move in the game is capable of transforming those rules. In his words (59):
“These throws are successive in relation to one another, yet simultaneous in relation to this point which always changes the rule, or coordinates and ramifies the corresponding series as it insinuates chance over the entire length of each series.”
In other words, each throw is certainly conditioned by the previous throw, which is also conditioned by the previous throw. Simply put, the rules change or, I’d say, may change with each throw. How much can they change? Well, that depends on the previous throw. To think that in the opposite way, whatever rules you have are subject to change each time the dice are thrown. This is why, for him (59-60):
“The unique cast is a chaos, each throw of which is a fragment.”
Here the point is, or, rather, the point I want to make is that you can’t go back to the start. Why? Because there is no beginning, nor an end. Just infinite number of throws. You start the game midgame, or so to speak. Anyway, he (60) continues:
“Each throw operates a distribution of singularities, a constellation.”
This is what he (60) goes on to call a nomadic distribution, in opposition to the non-sedentary distribution of the other type of game. To make sense of that, he (60) states that:
“[I]nstead of dividing a closed space between fixed results which correspond to hypotheses, the mobile results are distributed in the open space of the unique and undivided cast.”
To account for structures or systems, he (60) adds that:
“[W]herein each system of singularities communicates and resonates with the others, being at once implicated by the others and implicating them in the most important cast.”
In summary, the throws of dice mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari (35) in ‘What Is Philosophy?’ have to do with everything that is not only connected to everything else, both spatially and temporally, but also co-constituted that way. This is also why (60) Deleuze adds to this that:
“It is the game of problems and of the question, no longer the game of the categorical and the hypothetical.”
Indeed. As like to put it, largely because of what I’ve taken from Deleuze and Guattari, having read them, give me a problem and I’ll try to come up with a solution to it, or give me a question and I’ll try to give you an answer to it. It’s that simple. You just move from one problem or question to another. The thing is, however, that each problem, once solved, each question, once answered, may create new problems or questions, and by that I mean that they may only come to being because certain problems or questions have been solved or answered and not because they exist or have always existed.
Now, you might object to this, as acknowledged by Deleuze (60). What kind of game has no rules or, rather, what kind of game allows the rules to change like that? Well, none actually, none that make any sense, anyway, as conceded by him (60). The thing is, however, that this is how we think, as he (60) points out:
“[P]recisely for this reason, it is the reality of thought itself and the unconscious of pure thought.”
This is what it means to be creative, as he (60) goes on to add:
“If one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens; and if one tries to produce a result other than the work of art, nothing is produced. This game is reserved then for thought and art.”
It’s an odd game, that’s for sure. But I’d say that it’s odd only because we are so used to thinking in terms of fixed rules. There are no winners and losers in this game, only winners, inasmuch as you can think this way, as he (60) goes on to specify this:
“In it there is nothing but victories for those who know how to play, that is, how to affirm and ramify chance[.]”
To comment on this, it’s about taking chances, being like, hmmm, what if, what if instead of just taking things for granted, i.e., playing by the rules that you think exist, you’d just see what happens. It’s all about experimentation. It might not be productive. There’s that. But it might. It just might and there’s only one way to find out.
He (60) contrasts this strange game with the other kind of game in which it is all about “dividing it in order to dominate it, in order to wager, in order to win”, which is pretty much every game there is. It’s not really a game, if you think of it, because most people wouldn’t consider it a game. It’s more like a journey.
Why don’t we do this then? Well, because we’ve become so acquainted with thinking of the world in as this game of skill that has fixed rules. That’s the gist of it. I’d also say that people don’t really want to change their thinking, not because they couldn’t, as I’m sure they could, but the thing with a game in which each move changes the rules, or is capable of changing them anyway, is pretty chaotic, as noted by Deleuze (59-60). It is much safer and comforting to think of reality, of it all, as having fixed rules, even if or, rather, even when those rules work against you.
He (61) also comments on the infinity of this, noting that there are therefore not only an infinite number of throws of dice, so that one occurs after another, as they do, but an infinite number of divergent throws of dice, at all times. In other words, the virtual isn’t infinite merely in the sense that it accounts for all the moments in time, one thing leading to another, and so on and so forth, having one infinite path, but rather that it can go anywhere from there, having infinite divergent paths. This is the point about each throw of dice changing the rules of the game, just explained in other words.
Right, I want to expand on what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about this in ‘Anti-Oedipus’. They (42) tell us that we shouldn’t be looking back, longing for a harmonious past, nor assume that there is a certain goal that we ought to reach:
“We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date.”
This is followed by repeating the second bit, which I take to be in reference to Hegel (and, in a sense, Aristotle):
“We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreary, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges.”
Now, following that quip, to return to the parts and wholes, I like the way they (42) explain how you still can have totalities, i.e., wholes, without having a totality of totalities, the whole of wholes:
“[I]f we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all of these particular parts but does not unify them; rather, it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately.”
Simply put, we have wholes that are composed of parts, which are also wholes that are composed of parts, and so on and so forth, to infinity. To connect this to the topic of this essay, it is the structure or the system that defines their composition, producing them as such and such, in relation to one another.
To avoid thinking that structure is something that exists, on its own, outside it all, “[w]e must insist on this differenciating role”, which Deleuze (180) emphasizes in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ that:
“Structure is in itself a system of elements and of differential relations, but it also differentiates the species and parts, the beings and functions in which the structure is actualized. It is differential in itself, and differentiating in its effect.”
In other words, as I just pointed out, you cannot think of relations in absence of the relata, nor the other way around, for that matter. I won’t tangled up on this, but I’d also make note of the functions here, as function is a word that he and Guattari like to use in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ to make sense how this, whatever it is, is connected to that, whatever it happens to be.
Moving on, once more, Deleuze (180) reminds us in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ that we shouldn’t confuse the imaginary, that second order, with the symbolic, that third order. He (180) notes that the former tempts us to think that we can understand everything through it, in the sense that we can imagine something actual through something else, which is also actual. That said, that’s merely a surface effect that hides the structure or the system behind it, how all that is actual has been actualized, how it is produced from the virtual, as he (180-181) points out. This does not, however, mean that we should therefore simply ignore the imaginary. No. It’s rather that we should be aware of how it has that effect, how it doubles the real, and how makes it all seem like that’s all there is to the real, that the real is simply mirrored by the imaginary.
As the last point pertaining to this fourth criterion, he (181) adds that structures or systems are not only differential, and responsible for the production of what’s real, as well as imaginary, but they are also unconscious. So, to go back to what I quoted very early on in this essay, it is not the unconscious that is structured, as he (171) points out, but rather that structures are unconscious, as he (181) points out in this context. He (181) also wants to remind us, again, for the umpteenth time by now, that we can’t separate the actual from the virtual:
“[S]tructure never exists in a pure form, but is covered over by the … relations in which it is incarnated.”
In other words, we can only make sense of a structure or a system as incarnated (i.e., manifested, materialized, realized or actualized) in what it is responsible for producing, be it real or imaginary. He (181) is pretty adamant about this:
“One can only read, find, retrieve the structures through these effects.”
Again, this goes back to my earlier example of how language is always incarnated, manifested, materialized, realized, actualized, taking a certain form, so that it is not only something linguistic, or semiotic, but also material. This is also the case of discourse. We can certainly think of language and discourse, as separate from the material world, like abstractly, but even then something material, a body, like my body, is responsible for that abstraction, for those thoughts.
I think Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon (183, 203) exemplify this well with pedestrian crossings, aka zebra crossings, in their book ‘Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World’, as does Jan Blommaert (36) in his book ‘Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity’, the point being that we have a regulatory or health and safety discourse that only comes to make sense as incarnated, manifested, materialized, realized or actualized (or whatever word you want to use for that) once layers of paint are applied to a road surface. We can certainly think of road safety abstractly, but you do need roads, road markings, road signs, as well as some sort of traffic on those roads, for any of that to make sense to us as such. Oh, and I know I’ve used this example before, at least a couple of times, but it is such a good example that it is worth mentioning again.
If you prefer to use Spinozist terms, another way of explaining that, how we make sense of something like a pedestrian crossing, or anything for that matter, as this applies to everything, in the past, in the present and in the future, to what has existed, what exists and what may exist, is say that it’s all immanent. If you are familiar with his work, as best exemplified by his ‘Ethics’, there is only one matter that appears to us in two ways, either as bodies or as thoughts, as what we’d contemporarily call the material side of things and the semiotic side of things respectively. That matter is formed in certain ways, so that it appears to us as formed matter, as those bodies and thoughts. Those forms, what we might also call structures, are inseparable from the matter in the sense that we can only make sense of them, as forms or structures, by analyzing the formed matter, be it material or semiotic, kind of like working our way back from it. While the two sides are distinct from one another, material being material and semiotic being semiotic, they are, nonetheless, of the same matter. Plus, you can’t have one without the other. You can’t have thoughts without bodies and the notion of bodies make no sense without us having thoughts. It’s all immanent.
Deleuze (181) points to Louis Althusser’s work once again, as well as to Jacques-Alain Miller’s work, but I’ll cover them one by one. The former, giving credit to the latter, addresses this in ‘Reading Capital’. He (188) notes that we can’t think of structure as something that is outside, as this absent cause. In his (188-189) words:
“This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark[.]”
To which he (189) adds that the exact opposite is the case:
“[O]n the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.”
Exactly. Structure is not transcendent, something beyond or external to reality. Instead, it is immanent. But what about Miller? What does he have to say about this? Well, he covers this in ‘Actions of the Structure’. His (71) take is indeed similar to Althusser’s take:
“Structure no more subtracts an ‘empirical’ content from a ‘natural’ object than it adds ‘the intelligible’ to it.”
Indeed, so like Althusser, he (71) reckons that structure is always immanent. Note how, for him (71), it’s not something that has been subtracted from something else, nor something that is added to something else. He (71) continues:
“If we remain content with articulating objects within the dimension of a network in order to describe how its elements are combined, then we isolate the product from its production, we establish between them a relation of exteriority[.]”
Yep. If we think of structure as something separate from what it is that we are dealing with, then we think of it as external to whatever it is that we are dealing with. In other words, we end up thinking of structure as a transcendent cause, as opposed to an immanent cause.
In Miller’s (71) view, it’s also important to think of structure in terms of its structuration, by which he means “the action of the structure”, so that we can think of in terms of structuring structures and structured structures. What’s the deal with that? Well, if we think of a structure as something that is structured, it’s clear that a structure is not something that simply exists, the way it exists, as something that doesn’t change. If we think of structure as structuring, then it pushes us to think of that structure as having an effect on something, i.e., being active in some sense, as opposed to being passive. Now, take both into consideration, so that a structure is a structured structuring structure, and add immanence to it. What you get from that combination is mutation or transformation. Pretty cool, eh?
He (74) likens this with the subject, pointing out that we can’t simply start from it, think of it as the subject of, but rather as, simultaneously, the subject to. I’ll return to this point soon enough.
To link this to the earlier discussion of the virtual and the actual, Miller (71-72) considers structuring to be about the virtual as that point we remain open, not dealing with something that’s already actual, constituted as such and such, and the structured to about the actual, as at that point whatever we are dealing it is already actual. If you ask me, that does make sense.
It’s probably not exactly the same, but I do want to point out that this reminds me of how Pierre Bourdieu (53) defines habitus in ‘The Logic of Practice’, thinking of them as “systems of … structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”. He (171) condenses that further in ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’, mentioning them as “structured and structuring structure[s]” in a figure. I think Loïc Wacquant’s take on this is helpful, as covered by him in ‘Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu’s Sociology’, as included in ‘An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology’ by him and Bourdieu. He (18) poses this as a question:
“[W]hy is social life so regular and so predictable?”
Ah, yes, why is it that I can often figure out what people are going to say or do? Because people are very similar to one another, way, way more similar than they like to think. That’s why. I could explain that through Gabriel Tarde’s work, but I’ve done that in the past and I don’t want to get tangled up on that here. Anyway, Wacquant (18) continues:
“If external structures do not mechanically constrain action, what then gives it its pattern?”
Now, I’ve already given an answer to this, which is that structure is not transcendent. Instead, it’s immanent, as explained by Althusser and Miller. This is also what Wacquant (18) goes on to point out:
“Habitus is a structuring mechanism that operates within agent[.]”
If we want to think of structures as being external, then we need to think of them as something that are internalized, as done by Wacquant (18) in this context. They are, nonetheless, still immanent, in the sense that they always operate from within, and not from without. He (18-19) also wants to emphasize that structures are not fixed. Instead, they are “historically constituted” and “immanent in a historical system”, as he (19) points out. We can think of them as external or transcendent in the sense that this or that structure is not attributable to some individual, transcending that individual, being beyond it, as mentioned by him (19), but that’s not the same as thinking of that structure as being transcendent, operating on its own, higher plane of reality or the like.
According to Miller (71) then, a structure is “that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes.” I don’t know about you, but that is pretty darn close to how one can understand Bourdieu’s habitus. Anyway, what’s important in both accounts is that the subject does not experience the world individually, as such, but rather collectively, according to the structure that sets its limits, establishing what can and cannot be thought, said or done at any given moment.
Miller (77-78) further specifies this by pointing out that we can’t give primacy to the subject when we are dealing with language. Speech (or writing) does certainly require a speaker (or a writer), as well as a recipient, a listener (or reader), intended or not, but that’s beside the point here, as he (77-78) points out. If I’ve understood his (75-76) beef with this correctly (of which I can’t be sure as I’m not that well versed in psychoanalysis), the subject nonetheless misunderstands this and is led to think that it is something which it is not, principally the subject of, while happily ignoring how we got there, how the subject is, rather, principally, the subject to. In other words, the problem here is (or seems to be) that the subject ends up thinking in terms of the imaginary, instead of the symbolic, so that we get something like a split or doubled subject who thinks reflexively, about oneself, thinking of itself as its own cause. This is then what he (79) refers to as metonymic causality, how it is the subject that “takes the effect for the cause”, and what Deleuze (181) refers to as Althusser’s structural causality in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’.
I think it’s time to move on to address thinking of structures as unconscious. Riffing on Althusser’s take (which also reminds me of Bourdieu’s habitus) on this matter, Deleuze (181) states that:
“[T]he unconscious by itself forms the problems and questions that are resolved only to the extent that the corresponding structure is instantiated … and always according to the way that it is instantiated.”
This mirrors what Miller (75-76) has to say about the production of subjectivity. Note how problems and questions are tied to the structures, so that only certain problems and certain questions come being, while others do not. It’s the same with the solutions and the answers. They are also tied to the structures, so that we get only certain solutions and certain answers to certain problems and questions, not just any solutions, nor any answers. In Deleuze’s (181) words:
“For a problem always gains the solution that it deserves based on the manner in which it is posed, and on the symbolic field used to pose it.”
The first part should be rather self-explanatory by now. The second part may require some further elaboration. If you are having difficulties with that, like what does he mean by symbolic field, remember that when we are dealing with the first order, we are dealing with the symbolic order. So, instead of thinking of it as this one structure, think of a number of structures that correspond to certain symbolic fields. That should do it. He (181) exemplifies this:
“Althusser can present the economic structure of a society as the field of problems that the society poses for itself, that it is determined to pose for itself, and that it resolves according to its own means, that is, according to the lines of differentiation along which the structure is actualized[.]”
We could replace that economic structure with something else, let’s say social structure or psychological structure. We’d then move from the field of economy to the field of society or to the field of psyche. He (182) does this by moving on to exemplify this we how Serge Leclaire deals with this in psychoanalysis, but I won’t get tangled up on that (as I’m not that familiar with psychoanalytic work). You can do that yourself. I’ll move on, once more.
The serial
The fifth criterion listed by Deleuze (182) is serial. What’s been covered so far, the symbolic, the local or the positional, the differential and the singular, the differenciator and differentiation, account only for half of the structure, as noted by him (182). To be accurate, that’s four out of seven, so a bit over half of it, but he (182) seems to be thinking about it in a different way. What’s important about this criterion is that it’s what animates structure, as he (182) points out.
The gist of this criterion is that all symbolic elements, the relata, and their differential relations are organized in series, as summarized by him (182). To complicate that, as that’s not all there is to this, these series, themselves constituted by other symbolic elements and their differential relations, are related to other series, as he (182) goes on to add. So, while we can think of them in isolation, these series don’t exist in isolation from one another. He (182) uses the previous examples, phonemes and morphemes, and indicates that they are both organized in series, on their own, in their own way, but they are not entirely isolated from one another. Anyway, that’s why it’s all serial.
To summarize Deleuze (182-183), the difficulty that comes with the series or, rather, seriality, is figuring out their positions, how they are related to one another, which supports which and which co-exist alongside one another. Simply put, let’s say that it is all quite the mess.
Deleuze (183-184) also emphasizes the importance of not thinking of these series as reflecting one another. Why? Well, if the series and their constitutive elements, as well as their relations, did reflect one another, we’d be dealing with the real and the imaginary. We’d simply be doubling, remember. Instead, what we have are certain slippages or displacements, as he (183-184) points out. He (184) also notes in this context that this is why metaphors and metonyms pertain to the symbolic and not to the imaginary. To make sense of that, it’s important to know that, according to a dictionary, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, metaphors (OED, s.v. “metaphor”, n.) are expressions that are similar, but not the same, used to explain something in place of something else, hence the aptness of thinking of it as a displacement, as opposed to thinking of one thing as reflecting another thing. It’s the same with metonyms (OED, s.v. “metonym”, n.), in the sense that one thing associated with another is used in its place, but without lapsing into thinking that they are interchangeable. I think Deleuze (184) explains this quite well by stating that:
“Far from being imaginary, they prevent the series that they animate from confusing or duplicating their terms in imaginary fashion.”
Indeed, in both cases, with metaphors and metonyms, one thing does not simply reflect the other. That’s why “they express the two degrees of freedom of displacement, from one series to another and within the same series”, as noted by him (184).
The empty square
The sixth criterion, the empty square, relates to what appears from the serial. To be more accurate, there is “this singular object”, this “convergence point of the divergent series” that characterizes this criterion for him (184). But what is it? What is this convergent thing that emerges from the series that are, by necessity, divergent (as otherwise they’d be the same series)? That’s a good question, which is why he (184) points out that we might therefore refer to it as the “[o]bject = x”, as “the riddle [o]bject”, or as “the great [m]obile element”.
I might be wrong, as this is pretty difficult, but my answer to that question is that it is that which moves about, connecting one series to another. It could be anything really, hence the x. I’d also say that it is about the function of that x, what it does, and not what it is, nor what it resembles. Anyway, he (185) exemplifies this with the refrain of a song as it is where the verses that are the divergent series converge. Another good example that he (185) mentions is how a crown connects to two series, the ruler and the heir, symbolically, as there can only be one ruler at the time, as I pointed out earlier. In other words, in this case the crown is the x that marks one’s position at the top of the hierarchy. This example is also good in the sense that it helps us to understand why it is so important not to confuse the imaginary and the symbolic. It is not a matter of resemblance. The crown or, rather wearing it, is not a matter of imagining oneself as the ruler, as he (185) points out.
What is particularly important about this object = x, this mobile element, is that it is singular. He (185) elaborates this point by noting that it is the thing we are looking for when it goes missing. It has its place in the symbolic system, wherever it may be, but if it is not there, where we expect it to be, it is thought to be missing, as further elaborated by him (185). In contrast, in terms of the real, that thing is not missing. It is always in the right place, as he (185) points out.
To summarize what has covered thus far, the sixth criterion gets it name, the empty square, not from a fixed place in the system, as that’d be a square, but from the displacement of the object = x, as explained by him (185). It is also why he (184) calls it the mobile element. For it to move, it needs somewhere to move, like an empty square in a game, as noted by him (185). If all the squares were already occupied, the structure would be fixed, hence his (182) earlier emphasis on how important it is to conceive the structure as something that moves or, rather, as something that is animated.
Jacques Derrida offers us another way of looking at this. In ‘Of Grammatology’, he refers to this displacement of meaning, how a word never corresponds to a thing (to give you a very naïve example), as différance. To start from somewhere (as I’m not that well versed in this either), he (62) first reminds us not to confuse différance with difference (which is, by the way, exactly what my autocorrect wants to do, every single time):
“It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces difference.”
In other words, you want to look at the production of differences, not the differences that we can observe. It’s also worth noting that he is not saying that difference is not important, but rather that it’s more important to understand how it all gets to be that way. He (62) continues:
“[Différance] does not depend on any sensible plenitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude.”
See. I told you. Anyway, I’ll let him (62) finish this point:
“Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/ signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation, motor or sensory.”
Now, if you aren’t familiar with the word ‘anterior’, in this case it’s about something that’s before something else, as in ‘prior to’, or as defined in a dictionary (OED, s.v. “anterior”, adj.): “[t]hat comes before in time or logical order; preceding, former, earlier, prior.”
So, long story short, différance is always primary and difference is always secondary, no matter what. There needs to be that differentiation for something to be different. In my opinion, it’s actually better to use the word ‘differentiated’ instead of ‘different’, because it implies that whatever it is that we are dealing with is the result of differentiation.
Derrida also refers to différance as arche-writing and as trace. He (56-57) reckons that it is apt to think of it as writing, not because it is like actual writing, like words on a paper, or on a screen, but because writing, in that sense that I just mentioned, expresses “the most formidable difference.” By this he (56) wishes to emphasize that writing is not merely some derivate version of speech. He (29) makes note of how writing is typically treated this way, as secondary to speech, and thus considered to be merely derivative of speech. There is this view that writing is more durable than speech, having a longer duration, an extended life span, which is the case, unless we count audio recordings of speech as speech, as also acknowledged by him (41), but this is considered problematic among linguists, notably by Saussure, because that durability gives it prestige, as noted by him (41). Writing is more permanent, you know, like a permanent record (only like, because, of course, writing can also cease to exist), which is why it is considered problematic. I actually agree with this. People do think that writing is proper, whereas speech is this, how to put it, unruly manifestation of language. This is not, however, the point Derrida wants to make in ‘Of Grammatology’. I think he was well aware of how language is standardized and then how that standardized language is imposed on people. What he (41-42) objects to is viewing writing, in itself, as having a negative impact on language:
“For it is indeed within a sort of intralinguistic leper colony that Saussure wants to contain and concentrate the problem of deformations through writing.”
Haha, leper colony, he called it a leper colony! I don’t read his texts enough, but this is why I love Derrida! He certainly didn’t hold back! I reckon most academics would consider such jibes as inappropriate, and thus inexcusable in academic texts, but I don’t mind. Sure, he is being hyperbolic, and this could be expressed in other ways, but something tells me that it wouldn’t be as amusing then.
Anyway, the issue that Derrida (41-42) takes with thinking of writing in this way, as corrupting speech and thus causing unwanted deformations in language, is that change, what he also likes to call play, is seen as something inherently negative. He (41-42) exemplifies this with how people may end up pronouncing a word differently when they base it solely on writing, not knowing how to pronounce it, which then may end up having effect on speech, on how people pronounce those words. He (41) encapsulates the underlying problem in a series of questions:
“Where is the sacrilege? Why should the mother tongue be protected from the operation of writing? why determine that operation as a violence, and why should the transformation be only a deformation?”
Indeed. The problem with this view is that any transformations of language attributable to writing are not seen as mere transformations, without any judgement as to whether is for better or for worse, but as deformations, in the sense that the word is commonly used as indicating a change for the worse (OED, s.v. “deformation”, n.):
“The action, process, or result of altering the form or character of something … for the worse[.]”
Dictionary definitions (OED, s.v. “deformation”, n.) also suggest that the word is typically understood as pertaining to “disfigurement” and “defacement”. It is also thought of as having to do with deviation (OED, s.v. “deformation”, n.):
“A deviation from the normal structure of a part of a person, animal, or plant; the condition of having such a deviation[.] … Also[,] the process resulting in such a deviation.”
In summary, the problem with viewing writing this way, as deformative, is that it takes it for granted that there is a certain existing form that is, in itself, perfect or, at least, superior to the form that is then deemed as deformed. So, as explained by Derrida (45, 58), the problem here is that it cannot be verified that that speech is language and that writing is a poor graphic representation of speech, yet it is presupposed that it is the case.
Anyway, back to arche-writing, which is, for him (60), prior to speech and writing, or any other mode of expression, for that matter. He (59-60) credits Louis Hjelmslev for deprivileging speech, so that it is then on par with writing, but also criticizes the Dane for relying on “a popular conception of writing.” I’m not entirely sure what Derrida (60) means by that, but I reckon that he means that Hjelmslev ends up, nonetheless, privileging speech over writing as in the popular or vulgar conceptions that’s how it is. In any case, he (60) argues that:
“It is very dependent and very derivative with regard to the arche-writing[.]”
He (60) then further specifies this:
“This arche-writing would be at work not only in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those of nongraphic expression.”
In other words, arche-writing pertains to everything, both the substance and the form of expression. To further comment on that, the substance and the form of expression are, themselves also substances and forms of content, in relation to other substances and forms of expression, which also function the same way, as noted by Deleuze and Guattari (44) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:
“In short, we find forms and substances of content that play the role of expression in relation to other forms and substances, and conversely for expression. These new distinctions do not, therefore, coincide with the distinction between forms and substances within each articulation; instead, they show that each articulation is already, or still, double.”
Anyway, Derrida (60) still has more to say about arche-writing:
“It would constitute not only the pattern uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement of the sign-function linking a content to an expression, whether it be graphic or not.”
I think he is right about this. His views on Hjelmlev’s take on language seem to be pretty spot on. For Derrida (60), something is, however, missing:
“This theme could not have a place in Hjelmslev’s system.”
I agree. I think Hjelmslev does wonders with his formulations, making us think not in terms of signs, but rather in terms of sign-functions or, to put it more simply, in terms of functions. That said, there is still something that’s a bit static for my taste, which is what I believe Derrida (60) points out in this context:
“It is because arche-writing, movement of differance, irreducible archesynthesis, opening in one and the same possibility, temporalization as well as relationship with the other and language, cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic system itself and be situated as an object in its field.”
Note here how he reckons that arche-writing is archesynthesis, the movement of différance. The point here is that you need that movement. If it’s part and parcel with the forms, you don’t have that movement.
What’s also particularly important about arche-writing is that it is a non-origin, as he (61) points out. By this he means that there is no origin that we can go back to. The system, the structure, is not fixed. It may appear fixed and even have certain fixity, but it is not unchanging. Parts of it are erased, all the time, as he (61) points out:
“The trace is not only the disappearance of origin-within the discourse that we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.”
Here the discussion shifts from arche-writing to trace, although they are, really, the same thing as they are both about différance, as he (62) goes on to point out. He (62) further comments this non-origin:
“Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity.”
If I’ve understood this correctly, the point about trace is that, in line with différance, whatever we have, whatever is different from something else, always contains traces of what it is not, that is to say of its differentiation, having been differentiated.
I think I’ve done enough to explain or to attempt to explain Derrida’s take on this and how it is relevant to this essay and I think it’s time to return to ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’. Commenting Lewis Carroll’s work, Deleuze (186) notes something as strange as:
“It is incorrect to say that such a word has two meanings; in fact, it is of another order than words possessing a sense.”
That may seem strange. Why? Well, because we are used to saying that words have meanings. Words do not have meanings. They do not possess any meanings. Instead, we make meanings. We understand words in a certain sense, that’s for sure, but even then we are actively making sense of something. So, oddly enough, it’s that making of it that’s important, as he (186) goes on to point out:
“It is the nonsense which animates at least the two series, but which provides them with sense by circulating through them.”
In short, this criterion is all about making sense from nonsense. So, as bananas as that may seem, all meaning is based on nonmeaning. There is, however, a bit more to this, as he (186-187) points out:
“It is this nonsense, in its in its perpetual displacement, that produces sense in each series, and from one series to another, and that ceaselessly dislocates … the series in relation to each other.”
Now, to connect that back a bit, to that object = x, it is what, in Saussurean terms, simultaneously functions as the signifier and the signified, the former being one series and the latter being another series, hence the importance of the series or seriality, as he (187) goes on to add. Again, the point here is that meaning or, as I prefer to call it, sense (as people often just think that meanings are contained in the words) is something that emerges, not something simply exists and is possessed by words. This is exactly what he (187) wants to get across:
“Sense … emerges as the effect of the structure’s functioning, in the animation of its component series.”
To make (more) sense of that (pun intended here), people use words such as ‘thingamajig’ or ‘thingie’, in the absence of something specific, yet they are able to get the message across, as exemplified by him (187). So, there’s this “excess of sense” that we get, each time, emerging as the series are connected to one another, as summarized by him (187).
It is also in this context that it becomes (or should become) clear why it’s object = x. It is whatever it is, once it is determined. It cannot be explained beforehand, which is why he (187) states that “[i]t is and must remain the perpetual object of a riddle, the perpetuum mobile!” That can be tricky to understand, but the point here is to reiterate the earlier point about the emergence of sense. It can be anything, depending on the series. Even dictionary definitions work this way, connecting certain series, which have been drawn from other series, often with names, dates and circumstances being explained in quite the detail. No matter what you do, you can’t pin it down. You cannot indicate that it is this word, because a word is only ever explained through other words, in this and/or that sequence, as part of this and/or that series.
It is this very indeterminacy underlying the structure, the system, leads Deleuze (187) to point out how paradoxical this is, because it is:
“[I]t is good that the question How do we recognize structuralism? leads to positing something that is not recognizable or identifiable.”
Note how it is something that cannot be recognized, nor identified. Why? Well, because meaning or sense is always emergent. Like I just pointed out, you can’t pin it down. You can’t simply find it somewhere, just waiting for you to identify it. That’s why.
Jumping ahead, skipping the examples drawn from psychoanalysis (as I’m not that well versed in all that), Deleuze (188-189) clarifies the position or role of different structures or systems in relation to one another. In summary, there are many of them, what he (188) here refers to as structural orders, and none of them have predetermined primacy over the others. In his (188) words:
“The structural orders—linguistic, familial, economic, sexual, etc.—are characterized by the form of their symbolic elements, the variety of their differential relations, the species of their singularities, finally and, above all, by the nature of the object = x that presides over their functioning.”
Note how it may appear that all we need to do is to define that object = x, but that’s a mistake, as he (188) goes on to state. Why? Well, the point about that object = x is that is not undetermined (or it is), nor determined (once it is determined), but rather determinable (being undetermined only inasmuch as it has not been determined), as (188) noted by him. It can’t be this and/or that, as that would make that, what’s determined, fixed, as emphasized by him (188). That’s why it’s an empty square, as reiterated by him (188):
“As a result, for each order of structure the object = x is the empty or perforated site that permits this order to be articulated with the others, in a space that entails as many directions as orders.”
This is why a structure or a system is paradoxical, as further elaborated by him (188):
“[Object = x] thus has no identity except in order to lack this identity, and has no place except in order to be displaced in relation to all places.”
This is also why he (188-189) is unwilling to give any structure or system primacy over other structures or systems. In his (189) view, no structures can “pass as symbolic elements”, nor “as ultimate signifiers.” What would happen if we do that? What happens if privilege a certain structure or a system and determine that object = x? Well, he doesn’t explain it here, but my take is that we end up with promoting some signifiers as master signifiers, arbitrarily elevating them to the position of what Derrida refers to as transcendental signifieds in ‘Of Grammatology’, according to which everything would, supposedly, be understood.
From subject to practice
The seventh, and the last criterion emphasizes practice and de-emphasizes the subject. The gist of this is that while nobody would deny the existence of subjects, this and/or that person, what’s much more interesting is their position in relation to other subjects, as he (189) is quick to point out.
To expand on that, there are certain positions that are “filled or occupied by real beings”, inasmuch as “the structure is ‘actualized’”, as he (189) points out. In other words, you have something that’s virtual, until it’s considered actual. This is not something that’s put into question here by him. So, people are real and therefore important, at least to themselves.
But what’s more important is the structure in question, and the various symbolic elements that constitute a system of relations, in which they are then the relata. Why? Well, as he (189) points out, “we can say that places are already filled or occupied by symbolic elements” and that “the differential relations of these elements are the ones that determine the order of places in general.” In other words, the structure or the system of differential relations is responsible for determining the placement of the symbolic elements, that is to say what is in relation to what else is there and how and to what extent they are related to one another, as well as to what else is there.
To simplify that a bit, to focus on just one thing, instead of trying to explain all of that, a place or a position in the system is, in a sense, already occupied by some symbolic element, before it is filled by something real or something imaginary, as he (189, 191) points out, reiterating a point he made earlier (181). To put that another way, in reverse, we don’t find the symbolic out there, like on its own, because it always appears to us immanently, as manifested or incarnated in something real or imaginary, as mentioned by him (172, 177-178, 181) a couple of times before explaining this criterion.
What is the consequence of this? Well, if you are researcher who approaches the world in this way, people aren’t that important to you. Instead, what’s interesting are the positions they come to occupy in the system. Of course, to make sense of what we could also refer to as the virtual, we need to take a look at the actual. Why? Well, I just explained it, but it’s because a structure or a system does not have an otherworldly existence. It’s not transcendent. It’s immanent. That means that it’s within, not without. So, the way you do that is to deal with actual people, who produce actual expressions, in actual circumstances. You focus on what it is that they’ve said or done. Why? Because there’s no other way. The symbolic is always incarnated in the real and the imaginary, as these two are its effects, as he (181) points out by stating that “[s]tructures are unconscious, necessarily overlaid by their products or effects.”
This is also my approach when I do research, as I’ve mentioned in the past. It might not be in fashion, but it is what it is. I get plenty of hate for it and so will you, if you opt to do things that way, but, again, it is what it is. It’s not a great look when it comes to personal life either. Most people don’t like it if you challenge their sense of autonomy, no matter how well you can explain it to them. They are so stuck in the imaginary that they ignore the real and the symbolic, to use the key terms of this essay. I certainly haven’t made many friends that way. People may even think that you’ve lost your sanity, but that’s just their defense mechanism. Thinking differently is tough. It’s rewarding, but tough. At first it feels like someone is tearing you apart, hence the knee jerk reactions to it. So, yeah, be warned.
Anyway, I’m interested in certain things, often revolving around what I’ve come to refer to as the collective production of subjectivity, following Guattari’s (25) interest in “collective subjectivity” and “the production of subjectivity” in ‘Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm’, which I believe is apt to approach in this way. It’d be pointless to focus on the subjects, to listen to what they think about themselves or something else, because I’m not interested in any of that, be it real or imaginary. Of course, I could include people, but I still wouldn’t be interested in them or what they think. Instead, I’d be assessing how they appear to me as they do, doing what they do, saying what they, thinking what they think, and the like. The thing is, however, that if I include them and if I do any of that, I’m not examining their place in the system, in relation to something, what it is that I’m interested in. How so? Well, I’m then also playing a part, occupying a certain place in the system, in relation to them, which also changes their place in the system. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating this is what William Labov refers to as the observer’s paradox in his book ‘Sociolinguistic Patterns’.
Reiterating another point he made earlier, Deleuze (189) also reminds us not to think of this as something that can be done once and for all. The thing with examining a structure or a system is that you are looking at it right here, right now. Don’t go thinking that it’s going to stay the same. It will change. It may appear to us something that doesn’t change, but it’s because most structures or systems change so slowly that it is difficult to notice the change. If you ask me, what typically changes is who or what occupies a certain place or a position in the system, but not the system itself. But that’s not really a change, unless that change results in a change in the system itself and for that to be the case, it must alter the symbolic order. Anyway, for him (189) this is attributable to the sixth criterion, which is the empty square.
What’s the deal with that? How does the empty square explain that? Well, if you fill it, what’s empty will no longer be empty. That’s the simple answer. You’ve halted signification, congratulations, but you’ve done it in an underhanded way, by elevating some signifiers to the position of master signifiers or transcendental signifieds, as discussed earlier. You haven’t uncovered how the world works. You are only saying that you did.
His answer to that is more complicated. He (189) does acknowledge that the empty square mustn’t be filled, like duh, but he (189) also emphasizes that it cannot even be filled, not even by a symbolic element. To be more specific, he (189) states that:
“It must retain the perfection of its emptiness in order to be displaced in relation to itself, and in order to circulate throughout the elements and the variety of relations.”
Again, to go back a bit, you need that perpetual displacement. If you don’t have that empty square, you won’t have that slippage, that displacement. In other words, it needs to keep moving. If you think you’ve filled it, well, you haven’t. You only think you have. It still keeps moving and the world keeps changing, no matter what you do.
He (189-190) also characterizes the empty square as eternally lacking its occupant, so that it’s this void, only to clarify that “[t]his void is, however, not a non-being”, like something negative, something that’s missing something, waiting to be filled, once and for all, but rather something positive, like an answer to a question or a solution to a problem, as opposed to being the answer to the question or the solution to the question. In the notes (308) it is indicated that this issue is also covered in ‘Difference and Repetition’ and in ‘The Logic of Sense’. If you take a closer look at the latter book, there is indeed a relevant passage in which he (54) explains this:
“A problem is determined only by the singular points which express its conditions.”
In other words, a problem is only a problem inasmuch as there is something that is comes to appear to us as a problem, as he (54) goes on to specify:
“It seems, therefore, that a problem always finds the solution it merits, according to the conditions which determine it as a problem.”
Indeed. Now, if we look at the former book, he (196) states that, ever since Plato, we’ve been conditioned to think in terms of certainty or necessity, as opposed to possibility or contingency. This is exactly why I formulated this as being like coming up with an answer to a question or a solution to a problem, as opposed to thinking it in terms of there being the answer to the question or the solution to the problem. The point here is to keep it open-ended, instead of thinking that there are these questions or these problems that are always already there, in a closed system, just waiting for us to come across or uncover them and to find the right answers or solutions to them.
He (197) exemplifies this with being questioned. In this example, there is one person who knows something, at least supposedly, and another person who is tasked to find out that something the person supposedly knows. Furthermore, there is a problem that the other person needs a solution to, and it is through questions that the person seeks answers that lead to that solution. There’s a great line in the film ‘The Guard’. The character played by Brendan Gleeson, an Irish Guard (a police officer) answers the phone, replying “That’s for us to know and you to find out”, following a question asked by a character played by Liam Cunningham, “How many murders have you had in the last 24 hours?”, after ignoring the caller’s initial attempt to probe into police affairs. This way subverting the expectations is a recurring thing in the film, but that’s the charm of that character. It’s perfect here, because it reveals there’s something that’s constituted as a problem. The person asking the questions is trying to solve a problem by asking that question. The murder is only a problem to the caller, one of the murderers, inasmuch as the guards are on to the murderers. By acting unaware, followed by refusing to explain police affairs to random callers, the guard outsmarts the caller. It still counts as a tip, something to take into account, but by acting that way on the phone, the murder remains a problem for the murderers, as they have no way of knowing whether the guards will investigate their involvement. Now, you may be a bit confused by that, like how is a murder not a problem, like isn’t it always a problem? I get it, and yes, it is a problem, but what’s important is to ask to whom it is a problem? To the guards? Yes. To the murderers? Maybe, depending on whether they are off the hook. To others? Maybe, depending whether it concerns them.
Deleuze (198) expands on that, once more likening it to throws of dice, just like he also does in ‘The Logic of Sense’, as already discussed. The gist of his (198) take in ‘Difference and Repetition’ is that the only rule there is the throwing of the dice, but I think it’s worth expanding just a bit, as he (198):
“The singular points are on the die; the questions are the dice themselves; the imperative is to throw.”
To unpack that, as I reckon that can be difficult to comprehend if you are not that familiar with the contents of the book, we have that throwing, which he (198) considers to be imperative, and what we throw are the dice, which are the questions. That should be fairly easy to comprehend. But what are singular points? Well, to go back a bit, he (176) distinguishes between singularities, which are mapped as “curves or figures” between “singular points”, as already noted, and exemplifies this with how we have a triangle as that what has three lines between three points. He (153, 176) expands on that, indicating that there are ordinary or regular points, as well as distinct or singular points. He (163) states that in relation to a problem, distinctive or singular points are what determine it. To give you some more examples, he (177) reckons that “dips, nodes, focal points” and “cent[ers]” are examples of distinctive or singular points on curves. There are, of course, also those ordinary or regular points, but they are like, ordinary or regular, because there isn’t anything that makes them stand out from the other points, unlike the distinctive or singular points. So unpack those examples pertaining to curves, a curve is only a curve if it curves and it curves because there are some points which define it as curving.
To give you a better example, as Deleuze’s examples are a bit, well, terse, Daniel Smith’s commentary of this in ‘Deleuze on Leibniz: Difference, Continuity, and the Calculus’ is particularly helpful. He (143) explains this quite neatly with a very simple example:
“A square, for instance, has four singular points, its four corners, and an infinity of ordinary points that compose each side of the square[.]”
It’s the same with Deleuze’s (176) own example: the triangle. It just has three sides, which we can think of being composed of ordinary or regular points, and the distinctive or singular points, those corner points. So, in short, the triangle and the square are the singularities in these examples. Now, of course, if we were to have a number of triangles or squares, we’d have to figure out their distinctive or singular points in order to understand how this triangle is this triangle and not that triangle, or that how this square is this square and not that square.
Smith (143) provides a couple of other examples, but this will do just fine. It’s aptly simple and explains what Deleuze is after, as summarized by him (143):
“The singular is distinguished from or opposed to the regular; the singular is what escapes the regularity of the rule.”
So, think of that square again. Think of drawing it. It can be understood as having an infinite or, rather, indefinite number of ordinary points. They are those sides. Those lines you draw. But it also has those four points, one in each corner. Those are the points that define it as a square. That’s where the magic happens, or so to speak. They are the singular points. In his (143) words:
“[M]athematics distinguishes between points that are singular or remarkable and those that are ordinary. Geometrical figures can be classified by the types of singular points that determine them.”
Exactly! If you find this difficult, as I do, as I’ve always sucked in mathematics, he (144) is also kind enough to provide some more concrete examples, so that this becomes relevant to everyday life. Those singular points are, for example, what “mark a change of phase”, such as “boiling points, points of condensation, fusion, coagulation, crystallization” and the like, as noted by Smith (144). That’s how you get singularities and can distinguishes between this and that. Oh, and yes, it’s a bit more difficult than that to explain what distinguishes this form that, but I think you get the point.
So, to unpack what singular points are in relation to dice throwing, each throw of dice has something singular to it. If a die only had ordinary or regular points, everything would remain the same. Now, of course, this is not to be confused with games of skill, as they have fixed rules, as noted by Deleuze (198) in ‘Difference and Repetition’, and as noted earlier already.
To get back on track here, to account for the void, again, Deleuze (190) reckons in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ that his friend Michel totally gets it, what he is after with that. As a total spoiler, just by mentioning the title of the book, or, rather, title of the English translation, it is in ‘The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences’ that Foucault (373) points out that:
“For this void does not create a deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think.”
So, to reiterate an earlier point, the void that is the empty square is not something negative. It is, in fact, positive. That square must remain empty, for this exact reason, so that it is, once more, possible for us to think, as Foucault (373) puts it here. But, for that to happen, we need to take cues from Friedrich Nietzsche, as Foucault (373) points out in this context:
“It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man’s disappearance.”
To make more sense of that, in light of what’s been covered, which is, I know, I know, like almost forty pages now (or more, depending on how that’s measured), not only must we therefore no longer cling on to a world that we think is possible to uncover, but we must also no longer give primacy to ourselves. In other words, we need to abandon thinking in terms of what’s objective and what’s subjective. That gets us nowhere. Deleuze (190) explains what we must do instead:
“The subject is precisely the agency which follows the empty place: … it is less subject than subjected …—subjected to the empty square … and to its displacements.”
So, as already emphasized, quite a bit, he (190) asks us to think of the subject as subjected, as someone that something is done to, as subject to, as opposed to using it a starting point, as someone that does something as subject of. This does not mean that the latter doesn’t matter, but rather that we must also account for the former, before we account for the latter, as he (190) goes on to add:
“Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, an always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but preindividual ones.”
In short, this is about questioning yourself: who or, rather, what are you anyway? How did you come to be the way you are or, rather, how do you come to be the way you are, at any given moment? He (190) mentions how, for Foucault, this about dispersion. I think it’s highly apt to reiterate that this is about the collective production of subjectivity. That’s that dispersion for you. Instead of simply being one, one is always many. It’s that simple. It’s, perhaps, not flattering, but it is what it is. There’s a lot that’s ordinary or regular, which is what makes you a lot like others, but there’s also that something that, nonetheless, makes you distinctive or singular. This is also what I believe is what makes us all trans, as in transindividual, as Gilbert Simondon (19) refers to it in ‘L’individuation psychique et collective’ (sorry, no English translation is available).
But I probably wouldn’t be writing this essay if that’s how we thought. Instead, we tend to think in an exact opposite way, privileging the object or the subject, holding an objectivist or a subjectivist view of the world. It is for this reason that Deleuze (190) indicates that two things can and, I’d say, do happen. Firstly, it is possible that we end up treating that empty square as an lack an object. It’s like as if only I could achieve that and then it would be great. Now, as already mentioned, the trick with the empty square is that it’s always leaping ahead, never to be achieved, as such. You got to keep going, which is why he (190) mentions that the subject that follows or accompanies the empty square is nomadic. Secondly, the exact opposite can happen, so that one settles for oneself. This type of a subject is thus sedentary. It’s all about the me, me, me and, once more, me. To summarize the two, he (190) reckons in Nietzschean fashion that in the first case it’s all about God and in the second case, in its absence, it’s about humans taking that role. To end that with a bang, he (190) goes as far as to state that this is “the reason why man and God are the two sicknesses of the earth, that is to say of the structure.” I did swap out man in the previous sentence, but I chose to keep it here, because I think it’s even more apt to retain that sexism, considering that I reckon that it is, by and large, men who have been responsible for all that.
To avoid that, so that we’d get there, to that transindividual, to that nomad subject, what we might also refer to a matter of transversality, we need to be aware of how we end up doing either of those things that foil it, as noted by him (190). This means that we need to be aware of the structure, because that’s about the symbolic order, whereas anything real, like real beings, such as real human beings, and their images of the real, like themselves, are about the real order and the imaginary order and owe their existence to the symbolic order, being its effects, as he (190-191) goes on to elaborate.
I don’t think this is highly important, but I guess it’s worth bringing up that he (190-191) refers to these two ways of foiling the way structure works as accidents or great accidents. Why does he call them accidents? Well, they are accidents in the sense that they are occurrences, incidents or events, like something that takes place, or have taken place, as we tend to think of accidents as something that have already happened, and in the sense that they are negative events. However, that’s only one way to think of an accident, in the most everyday sense, as a dictionary (OED, s.v. “accident”, n.) will surely point out to you. It can also be understood as having to do with something that isn’t considered to be essential (OED, s.v. “accident”, n.). He (190-191) seems to be using the word in two ways. Firstly, he acknowledges that an accident is indeed an unfortunate event. It is not, in itself, unfortunate, but it is understood as such in his treatment. I mean, he (190) does refer to the two accidents as “sicknesses”. Secondly, there is no essential vs. non-essential divide here, which is something you probably won’t find in a dictionary. His (191) point is, however, all about making sure that you understand that anything that happens, i.e., an event, is immanent to the structure and not something that comes from outside the structure. He (191) also wants to stress that structure is not an essence, so don’t go thinking that accident is something non-essential in his understanding of the word. Simply put, there isn’t this perfect structure that is then, occasionally, struck by accidents, like these flukes or something.
He (191-192) doesn’t have a whole lot more to say on the criteria that he lists in order to help us make sense of structuralism, but, before wrapping things up, he wants to emphasize how a structure is not something fixed or static. He (191) exemplifies this with the work done by Althusser and Foucault, noting that structures undergo mutations and involve transition of forms. He (191) summarizes this quite neatly:
“It is always as a function of the empty square that the differential relations are open to new values or variations, and the singularities capable of new distributions, constitutive of another structure.”
Note here not only what’s been already covered, as all of this has already been covered, but also how we go back to the start of this essay by the end of that sentence. Simply put, structures are structured and structures are also structuring, just as Bourdieu defines habitus in ‘The Logic of Practice’ (53) and in ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’ (171). I think mutation and transition are apt words for that. I believe transformation would also work.
Deleuze (191) also accounts what our role is in relation to structures. In short, it’s about what he (190) refers to as the nomad subject, what Simondon (19) refers to as a transindividual in ‘L’individuation psychique et collective’. In Deleuze’s (191) words:
“[T]here is a structuralist hero: neither God nor man, neither personal nor universal, it is without an identity, made of non-personal individuations and pre-individual singularities.”
Exactly. It is this hero that you’ll also find appearing in his own works and in his works co-authored with Guattari. It is also the kind of hero I like and strive to be. Oh, and I know, I know, it’s contradictory to be that kind of hero, because to be that kind of hero, you mustn’t be anything, this and/or that, but rather constantly not be anything, this and/or that, but rather keep becoming, which is the same as being without an identity.
In this context, Deleuze (191) also emphasizes the importance of that structuralist hero. Simply put, structure needs such a hero in order to change. If that empty square is not treated as a trajectory that takes us somewhere, wherever that may be, as he (190) also refers to it, but rather as lack, as something that we must chase in order to fill that lack, or as something that we must fill with ourselves, the structure won’t change. The system will stay the same or at least largely the same. To put this in another way, as he (191) does, that hero is needed to throw the dice.
This leads us to why Deleuze’s reckons that the final criterion has to do with practice. For him (191), without it, we are stuck in an unchanging system. He (191) is particularly adamant about this, noting that “this practice”, whatever it may be like, for example “therapeutical or political”, it is what “designates a point of permanent revolution, or of permanent transfer” which takes us “from one structure to another” through those mutations or transitions.
For me, the last page includes nothing of great importance. All he (192) does is wrap things up, reminding of how important, yet difficult all of this is. I agree. He spends only some three pages covering this last criterion and it took me for ages to get through it. There’s just so much packed in there that unraveling it took me a lot of time. It’s also difficult to understand how it is about practice as he doesn’t really explain what he means by it. He does explain the subject, and how this is not about a sedentary subject, but about a nomadic subject, but I think he leaves you hanging when it comes to practice. Okay, it’s sort of there in some of his (191) statements like “safeguarding the displacements” as that implies that still must be done, at all times, so that it’s not just one action, but rather constant action, so something that must be understood as a practice. This is a highly important point, so I wish he’d expanded on that a bit.
Some thoughts
‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ is certainly an interesting text. It was first published in 1972 in volume eight of ‘Histoire de la philosophie’, which is the same year that ‘Anti-Oedipus’ was published. It’s similar to what’s included in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and, later on, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but he no longer uses many of the terms covered in this text in those books. In that sense this is more in line with ‘Difference and Repetition’ and ‘The Logic of Sense’. I don’t know the reason for opting to use other terms in his subsequent works. My guess is that he found other terms to be more apt for his purposes, as I’ve mentioned in the past as well.
The great thing about this text is that it explains his view on structuralism, which is something that can be difficult to find in his subsequent works as the terms have changed. I’m basing this solely on what I remember, but he comes across as way more hostile to structuralism in his subsequent works, especially when collaborating with Guattari. For example, he and Guattari (5) mention that structuralism is plagued by “[b]inary logic and biunivocal relationships”, as are psychoanalysis, linguistics and information science. They also criticize it for being static, when they (237) state that it “does not account for … becomings” as “a correspondence of relations does not add up to a becoming.” They (237) are very adamant about this issue:
“When structuralism encounters becomings of this kind pervading a society, it sees them only as phenomena of degradation representing a deviation from the true order and pertaining to the adventures of diachrony.”
What’s worth noting here is diachrony, which is a term used in linguistics when accounting for linguistic change, as explained by Saussure (81) in ‘Course in General Linguistics’:
“Everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to do with evolution is diachronic. Similarly, synchrony and diachrony designate respectively a language-state and an evolutionary phase.”
He (80-81) prefers synchrony over diachrony, despite calling it “the science of language-states” and, somewhat ironically, “static linguistics”. Now, that’s ironic, because the problem for many is that synchrony is about something being static. To my understanding, he is using that word, ‘static’, in different sense, as in ‘state-ic’, in order to convey that it’s about the states, as opposed to the phases. It’s also presented this way in the French original, so that’s on him and not his translators.
Anyway, Deleuze and Guattari (237) oppose structuralism, as exemplified by that passage, because structuralists like Saussure happily ignore diachrony. To be more accurate, it is not that someone like Saussure aren’t aware of diachrony. He (80-81) explicitly addresses both and thinks that both are needed, only to point out something like this:
“The first thing that strikes us when we study the facts of language is that their succession in time does not exist insofar as the speaker is concerned.”
Okay, fair enough, that’s not that odd, but wait for it. He (81) continues by noting that a speaker is always in a certain state and not in a phase, so:
“That is why the linguist who wishes to understand a state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore diachrony.”
To be fair, note how he isn’t saying that diachrony is irrelevant in all cases. It’s only irrelevant if you wish to understand language as a state. Much of this is, in fact, attributable to this opposition of doing things the way they were done at the time, diachronically, as he (82) goes on to explain. Again, you can give him credit for that, for doing his own thing, as I’ve pointed out in the past. He (82) also opposed thinking of considering a certain language state as “normative” and lending itself “the role of prescribing rules”, instead of being content with “recording facts”. I can give him credit for that.
While I can give him credit where its due, the problem with Saussure is that while does acknowledge diachrony, he is clearly against it, to the point that he (84) states that:
“Diachronic facts are not … directed toward changing the system. Speakers [do] not wish to pass from one system of relations to another; modification does not affect the arrangement but rather its elements.”
Or, as (84) he goes on to reiterate it:
“Here we again find the principle enunciated previously: never is the system modified directly. In itself it is unchangeable; only certain elements are altered without regard for the solidarity that binds them to the whole.”
To give him credit, it’s only likely that most changes are related to the elements. Fair enough. Then again, he clearly indicated here that the system is unchangeable, so that all you have are these elements that function as placeholders. In other words, he doesn’t see how it could be possible that you have changes in the arrangement itself. He (85) keeps on saying this:
“[C]hanges are wholly unintentional while the synchronic fact is always significant.”
Simply put, no matter what happens, no matter change takes place, it’s always unintentional, accidental or, better yet, inconsequential.
That said, he (86) flip-flops between the two, noting that you have a system that cannot be changed, only to point out that you get change as this “fortuitous and involuntary result of evolution.” I get what he is after when, for example, he (87) stresses that the whole system doesn’t change, as only parts of it change, but I don’t really understand how he doesn’t see the system as changing from within. Okay, a system does remain a system regardless of any changes to the system, fair enough, I’ll happily grant him that, but what about it?
He also contradicts some of his other views. For example, despite his (9, 82) recognition and opposition of normativity, in the context of grammar, he (9) reckons that language (langue) as a system is normative:
“[F]from the very outset we must put both feet on the ground of language and use language as the norm of all other manifestions of speech.”
In other words, we have language (langage) in general, which includes speech (parole), but a language (langue) as system, such as English or Finnish, is nonetheless considered to be normative, so that speech (parole) is then to be assessed on the basis of its conformivity with a language (language) as a system. This is exactly what Deleuze and Guattari (237) object to and explains why they refer to structure as something that they oppose (6, 8, 11, 16-17, 21) or are, at least, not too happy with (41):
“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.”
As you can see, it’s like yes, but no. Why? Well, because structure comes across as static. That’s why. I think that’s also why they ended up preferring to use machine, instead of structure. I mean, I guess you could still use structure and not machine, but it does have this issue. It does tempt you to think in static terms.
It’s also worth noting that, while certainly critical of structuralism, the two (236) also give it credit for rejecting the imaginary order and pushing us to think in terms of the symbolic order. If you’ve struggled so far with what the difference is between the two, they (237) provide a good example that should help you make more sense of that:
“A man can never say: ‘I am a bull, a wolf…’ But he can say: ‘I am to a woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep.'”
In other words, the great advance of structuralism is to allow us to think terms of relations and relata, instead of in terms of resemblance. This is then carried over to post-structuralism, but I’ll expand on that soon enough.
Anyway, in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ you get Deleuze explaining it all, the pros and cons, without taking shots at structuralism. That said, I’d say that only the first half, or so, is about structuralism as it is generally understood, both by its proponents and opponents, and the latter half goes beyond, way beyond that. That’s why I’d say this is more of a look at structuralism, from a post-structuralist viewpoint.
To be clear, much of what Deleuze covers in his text is in line with existing definitions of structuralism. For example, to give you a dictionary definition, it (OED, s.v. “structuralism”, n.) has to do with:
“Any theory or method in which a discipline or field of study is envisaged as comprising elements interrelated in systems and structures at various levels, the structures and the interrelations of their elements being regarded as more significant than the elements considered in isolation.”
Yes, and I think Deleuze would agree with that definition. That’s the gist of the first four criteria covered in his text. When it comes to linguistics, which is where much of structuralism originates, a dictionary (OED, s.v. “structuralism”, n.) will tell you that:
“Any theory or mode of analysis in which language is considered as a system or structure comprising elements at various phonological, grammatical, and semantic levels, the interrelation of these elements rather than the elements themselves producing meaning.”
Again, I think that Deleuze would agree with that. This is what’s covered in the fifth and the sixth criteria. Something has to account for meaning or, as I prefer to call it, sense, because the elements themselves cannot account for it.
Much of what Deleuze covers in his text is, however, not in line with structuralism. It goes beyond it, to the point that a structuralist probably wouldn’t agree with his take. Simon Blackburn helps us to understand why that might be the case, as explained by him (353) in ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy’:
“The common feature of structuralist positions is the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.”
The first sentence, which I only included here to make more sense of the second sentence, is not the issue here. It is the second sentence which highlights the issue for someone like Deleuze. Structuralists, as defined here, and as exemplified by Saussure, have this belief that you can account for whatever you may encounter with recourse to an unchanging structure. That’s the problem. That’s also why I’m against structuralism, as I’ve pointed out in the past, and for post-structuralism, as I’ve also pointed out in the past.
What is post-structuralism then? Well, my answer is that it’s what comes after structuralism, what’s beyond it. The problem with that answer is that it’s hardly satisfactory. It doesn’t really tell you anything. I’ll let Blackburn (285) explain what it is:
“[Post-structuralism] does not share the structuralist view that the unconscious, or the forms of society, will themselves obey structural laws, waiting to be discovered.”
For me, it is that notion of discovery that distinguishes post-structuralism from structuralism. For a post-structuralist, there is nothing that is simply given, just waiting for us to discover it. If we wish to use that word, what we discover are inventions, things have come to being instead of having always been there.
As that’s just one book, I’ll have a quick look at some others. ‘The Routledge Dictionary of Philosophy’ by Michael Proudfoot and Alan Robert Lacey includes many things, many of which are interesting, but, alas, no entries for structuralism, nor for post-structuralism. ‘The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy’ by Robert Audi does include such entries. The entry for the former by Audi (1029-1030) is not as clear as the entry by Blackburn, but he (1029) does indicate that its Saussurean take involves “a closed system of elements and rules, which account for the production and the social communication of meaning.” They key thing here is that the system is thought to be closed, as opposed to open. Accounting for the latter, Audi (851, 1030) covers it in both entries. What catches my attention is how he (851) states that:
“[P]oststructuralism rejects the structuralist emphasis on the synchronic, extratemporal analysis of systems[.]”
This is related to viewing a system as something that’s closed, in the sense that a structure is thus understood to be timeless and unchanging. This is something that I believe Deleuze would agree with and consider it to be marking the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism.
What about other disciplines? How about linguistics? Well, Keith Brown and Jim Miller (351, 421) account for both in ‘The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics’, but don’t really expand on how they differ from one another. Similarly, David Crystal (289, 457-458) accounts for both in his ‘A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics’ in relation other entries, but doesn’t really elaborate on them, nor how they differ from one another. A much more useful discussion of both can be found in the ‘Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics’, under the ‘Poststructuralism and Deconstruction’ by Thomas Broden. He (795) notes that:
“[P]oststructuralism critiques the scientific character of structuralism’s project, together with its deontology of objectivity[.]”
This is in line with what’s been covered so far. He (795) also notes that:
“Poststructuralism contests many of the founding traits structuralism attributed to its structures, especially totality and autonomy, giving emphasis instead to fragmentation, multiplicity, and hybridity.”
I agree and that’s certainly Deleuze’s trajectory in ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’. It starts from structuralism, only to end up dealing with what’s more like post-structuralism, even though it’s still quite far from what’s presented, for example, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Anyway, Broden (795) continues:
“It sharply repudiates the universalist turn of so much of structuralism in the 1960s, asserting a historical and cultural specificity which radicalizes those of earlier structuralist research (e.g., Jakobson; cf. Althusser).”
What’s particularly relevant here is the repudiation of universalism, which is another way of expressing the post-structuralist opposition of closed systems, in favor of open systems.
It’s worth noting, however, that post-structuralism is not a wholesale rejection of structuralism. I’d say it’s much more like poking holes in the latter, in order to end up with the former. You reject what doesn’t work, while using what works. You then come up with something that works to make up for what doesn’t work. This is what Broden (795) also goes on to point out:
“Poststructuralism adapts rather than adopts certain key structuralist moves: it upholds the Saussurean concept of difference and its founding importance, while temporalizing it, and giving it a polemical interpretation.”
Oh yes, I totally agree. In other words, that universalism is replaced with historicism. That notion of structure or system is retained, as is the relationality, but it is seen as constantly changing. It may not change a whole lot, so you might not ever notice it changing, but it does change, as discussed earlier already.
Broden (795) summarizes the goal of this change from structuralism to post-structuralism by noting that it seeks to understand the subject without recourse to idealism, materialism, nor any kind of body-mind duality. In his (795) view, post-structuralism is “a monist syncretism of the material and the symbolic”, which makes sense as it is the imaginary that’s responsible for that problematic doubling of the real.
I think Broden’s (796) account of thinking of post-structuralism as about the one and the many is also accurate. To be more specific, I think he (796) aptly summarizes what post-structuralism is about:
“For poststructuralists, popular and learned notions of wholeness, unity, and totality often represent erroneous, interested, or self-satisfying images which mask variegated, conflicted, and opaque situations and events.”
Indeed. That’s the imaginary order that Deleuze covers in his text. That’s Lacan’s contribution to this, as Broden (796) goes on to add:
“For Lacan, in spite of ego’s vision of itself as a stable whole, the subject remains different from Itself[.]”
Yeah, like I’ve pointed out in the past, you are not what you think you are. Instead, you are what you are, at any given moment.
What about geography, considering that this blog is not only about discourse, but also about landscape? In ‘The Dictionary of Human Geography’, as edited by Derek Gregory, Ron Johnston, Geraldine Pratt, Michael Watts and Sarah Whatmore, it is acknowledged (725) that structuralism as pertaining to “the enduring and underlying structures inscribed in the cultural practices of human subjects.” This is largely in line with what’s been covered so far, albeit it is, of course, not entirely clear whether enduring means unchanging or something that can change, but is resistant to change. Anyway, it is also noted (725) that structuralism was never really a thing in geography, largely due to other existing alternatives that had more purchase at the time, as well as due to being eclipsed by what followed, post-structuralism. In contrast, post-structuralism is stated (571) to be addressing “the perceived rigidities, certainties and essentialisms” that are viewed to be the problem with structuralism. Again, this is totally in line with what’s the been discussed in this essay. It is also mentioned (571) that post-structuralism is not to be understood as simple anti-structuralism, despite being against it, because much of what’s central in structuralism is retained by post-structuralists. Yep, that’s right. Post-structuralism is not a wholesale rejection of structuralism, as already noted a number of times. What’s also notable here is that the writers (572) mention this as being particularly important to landscape studies. I agree. I’d say that’s pretty difficult to take anyone interested in landscape seriously if they aren’t familiar with post-structuralism, which also necessitates some kind of general understanding of linguistics and/or semiotics.
You’ll also find these two –isms addressed in the 12 volume ‘International Encyclopedia of Human Geography’. It is in volume 11 that you’ll find an account of structuralism, under the entry ‘Structuralism/Structuralist Geography’, and in volume 8 that you’ll find that for post-structuralism, under the entry ‘Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies’. Addressing the former, Richard Smith (30) acknowledges some of the core issues already in the provided glossary, noting that structuralism is anti-humanist, anti-empiricist, as well as anti-historicist. Yeah, that’s about right. In the entry itself, he (30) further specifies this:
“[S]tructuralism is holistic … because of its insistence that while observable phenomena are present, they are also absent precisely because any object’s being is determined by its relationships, its relation to the whole structure to which it belongs[.]”
In other words, because it’s holistic, accounting for the whole, it can’t be individualistic, nor empiricist, as he (30) points. That said, somewhat contradictorily (as already evident is Saussure’s work), the structure, the system, is, nonetheless, observable only through those individuals that one observes, you know, empirically, as also acknowledged by him (30).
I think Smith (31) also puts it very aptly when he notes that while structuralism is against many things, namely empiricism and positivism, because it has that holistic bent to it, and while it does not claim to provide us “a knowable real world”, only “knowable structures”, it nonetheless ended up being heralded as providing us “a universal understanding of reality and knowledge.” I think it’s crucial to notice here that the claim was not to provide objective knowledge, but rather an objective, structural understanding of the world, as cautioned by him (31). They are not the same, no, but, then again, they do all aspire for that objectivity. That’s exactly what irked the post-structuralists, as already noted at least a couple of times.
He also makes a particularly good observation (albeit in passing), when he (37) notes that structuralism focuses on the relations between the relata, without fussing over the relata, which means that it leaves no room for some transcendent plane of ideas, forms or essences, à la Plato, because relata are definable in relation to other relata. That’s immanence for you. There is, of course, a danger of lapsing into such, if you have those aspirations for objectivity, but that’s on you then, not on structuralism as such, as already noted.
As a final gem, unbeknownst to me prior to this, Smith (37-38) also recommends Deleuze’s ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ as a guide to structuralism. Yeah, I didn’t see that coming! Nice! What a turn of events! Anyway, I totally agree, even though Deleuze’s take is pretty difficult if you are not already at least somewhat familiar with structuralism and post-structuralism. You can get so much from the text that it’s totally worth all the hours that go into it.
Moving on to the entry on poststructuralism by Keith Woodward, Deborah Dixon and John Paul Jones, in their (396) view it, is marked by what I’d say is obvious carryover from structuralism, that aforementioned unwillingness give the terms, the relata, any kind of primacy over other terms, the other relata. I’d say yeah. If you do end up doing that, perhaps out of frustration, because the terms don’t mean anything in themselves, as it is if you stay true to structuralism, it’s on you. You’ve made that decision to privilege certain terms over other terms, treating them as master signifiers or transcendental signifieds (there are other terms, I know, but to use the ones I’ve used in this essay). Anyway, I like the way they (396) emphasize this:
“[W]hat renders this approach distinctive is its rigorous interrogation of those core concepts – such as objectivity and subjectivity, center and margin, materialism and idealism, truth and fiction – that underpin much of modern day academia, including the majority of geographic thought and practice.”
I agree. This is also why I’m known as the theory guy, the guy who just goes on and on, and on and on, about theory or, rather, as I like to think of it, on concepts. I know I’m far from perfect, like there’s only so much you can do, especially when you’re expected to limit yourself to this and/or that many words, but it really grinds my gears when others get to explain things through fancy concepts, some of which I also use, but without ever explaining them. I know, I know, some of that is attributable to the way academic publishing works, so there’s that, as I just pointed out, but some of it is just being lazy. Now that may sound controversial, but, hey, that’s what Woodward, Dixon and Jones (396) are also saying. Oh, and don’t get me wrong. I get it. I totally get it. Who doesn’t like being lazy? Like why bother if no one expects you to do any better? I certainly like not having to do anything. That’s lazy for you. Then again, if I know something isn’t right, if something just doesn’t cut it, if it doesn’t work out for me, if there’s something about it that bothers me, I need to go back to the drawing board. I mean, I read ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ because I wasn’t happy with how landscape was presented in existing landscape studies, regardless of the field or discipline. I really, really needed to do that as otherwise I would have considered myself a hack. Oh, and yeah, totally worth it. It’s a life changing experience to read that book, not just because it has, in my opinion, the best account for landscape that there is, but because it takes you to places and makes you wonder. If you persist, like I did, oh boy, you no longer want to think the way you did before.
I think they (396) are correct in their observation that post-structuralism gets plenty of flak for being unconcerned with the material world, which is the real order discussed in this essay. I get this flak too. Not all the time, but I do get it. I understand why that is, but I’d say it has much to do with people’s unfamiliarity with post-structuralism. There’s some merit to such criticism, yes, but, at the same time, the critics often fail to realize that while we do need material bodies to express anything semiotically, just having that debate about that requires us to have recourse to some sign system.
I think they (397) also correct when they point out that post-structuralism knows no bounds. I’d say that it makes it very difficult for anyone to stay within their supposed field or discipline. Oh, and speaking from experience, it totally irks a lot of academics. Like how dare this person cross that boundary! But, again that’s just lazy thinking. These people probably know that they could do better, but it’s just not in their interest to do so, because it’s easier not to bother. Plus, if they let people do like whatever, then hey kind of also have to do that, engage with what else is there, outside the boundaries of they fields or disciplines. That’s a lot of hard work, so it’s in their interests to object to it.
They (397) also acknowledge the carryover from structuralism to post-structuralism. That’s why they (397) reckon that it’s post- rather than anti-structuralism. I agree, but I won’t get into detail here, because what they go on to elaborate is in line with what’s been covered already (you know, Saussure etc.). What’s worth noting, however, is their (398-399) take on Derrida’s role in all this. What I find particularly important about his role in shifting from structuralism to post-structuralism is the strict adherence to structuralism. Because it’s all just about the relations and the relata, you cannot privilege any of the terms, as they (399) go on to point out:
“[P]ost structuralism throws doubt onto all certainties regarding researchers’ ability to accurately represent reality, for our concepts do not simply represent that reality, in the sense of mirroring their referent, but represent reality within a fully relational system of understanding that does not require the referent to be cognized in the same manner by all.”
Yeah, if you ask me, that’s spot on. Okay, I wouldn’t use say that our concepts represent anything, really, but that’s only a minor gripe here. I get the point. That’s displacement, that empty square for you. Plus, in their defense, they (400) do acknowledge this when explaining Foucault’s role in all this:
“[A]n articulation is more than mere communication – it is an active intervention in the social and physical realms.”
This is also how J. L. Austin views language in ‘How to Do Things with Words’. You don’t describe the world, this and/or that object, as if it was there for you to describe it as such. Instead, you come to define it as such, each and every time, hence the emphasis on thinking of discourse as a matter of practice, as they (400) also explain it.
I also appreciate their take on Deleuze’s (401-402) view on this. I think they (401) are, once more, spot on when they characterize Deleuze’s anti-Platonism:
“[It is] not a world of similarities shared by static objects, but rather one in which all of materiality is continuously moving, mutating, and transforming, differentiating even from itself in a constant process of becoming.”
Yep. Very well put. I can only nod approvingly. They (401-402) go on to explain this, in more detail, but I don’t think it’s necessary for me to repeat it all. It’s good reading, even beyond that, so do check it out. The last point I want to include from them (405) is this:
“Whereas previous theorizations understood landscapes to be the imprint on nature of a culture, or the effect of social process such as capitalism, post structuralism has pointed to their status as a complex of significations and discourses that are intertextually bound with a host of other landscapes and discourses.”
Again, very well put. I totally agree. This makes it not only difficult to comprehend, because most people aren’t even aware of post-structuralism, but also difficult to pull off, because it takes a lot of effort to work this way, to deal with texts or discourses, as they are always linked to other texts or discourses. It’s not neat and you won’t get any neat answers. There’s always more to it. In their (405) words:
“The landscape as text metaphor thus sees place as intersecting with an infinite number of other texts and contexts, such that we cannot demarcate where one starts and another begins.”
Yeah, the difficulty with coming to terms with discourse is that can only be defined in reference to more discourse. So, to understand this and/or that discourse, you need to understand this and/or that other discourse, and so on, and so, forth, ad infinitum, as they (405) point out here. There’s always more to it. All accounts are therefore just partial accounts. Then again, that’s not to be considered a negative thing, as it means that we aren’t stuck in a world where nothing changes. Anyway, this has a tremendous impact on landscape studies, as they (405) go on to specify:
“These multiple sites of discursive propagation open a circuit beyond the earthiness of landscapes, seeping into other representational media such as film, television, cyberspace, the body, political discourse and other forms of speech, and written texts of all kinds, including maps.”
It’s for this reason that I find their (407) acknowledgement of Richard Schein’s work as further reading highly fitting. If you want a coherent and well written post-structuralist take on landscape, typically exemplified with a well-researched empirical example, look no further. There are others, of course, but my own views are very much the same. I just prefer the Deleuze-Guattarian way of doing it, instead of the Foucauldian way of doing it, because Deleuze and Guattari actually had something to say about landscape, whereas Foucault didn’t. Plus, I think the former give me more tools to address what I want to address in my own work than the latter does. It’s just a better fit for me. If Foucault works better for you, then it does. I don’t mind. It’s the same with Derrida. I don’t mind. I do my work, the way you see fit. You do your work, the way you see fit. It’s that simple.
To end with something, it was interesting to do a close reading of Deleuze’s ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’. I tried my best not to include anything that has to do with machines, as opposed to structures, as this text is about the structures. To wrap things up, you could say that the text is about structuralism, but also not about structuralism. It’s like, well, it depends on your definition of it. The way I read it, post-structuralism is, in fact, structuralism in the sense that it takes structuralism seriously, treating structures or systems as something immanent and changing, as opposed to something transcendent and fixed. Then again, if we think of how structuralism is generally understood, what Deleuze has to offer goes way beyond structuralism, which, then, makes it about more post-structuralism than about structuralism.
What I particularly like about the text is the way he clarifies the Lacanian terms, the real, the imaginary and the symbolic and how these are connected to everyday life. It might not do anything for you, there’s that, but I like how he explains how the subject gets trapped in the imaginary. In other words, I like how he is able to elaborate on how the subject becomes doubled in a vicious circle of subjectification and signification, so that it’s all about the me, me, me, and once more, me, while also involving the power of imagination to conjure all kinds of images of the real as the very definition of that me. You do get this covered in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but here you get another take on that.
Of course, his take on structuralism and my subsequent take on it is bound to make some people unhappy. I mean, it’s not always clear whether someone is a structuralist or not, or a post-structuralist for that matter. I don’t think Deleuze, nor Guattari, would be too happy that I refer to them as post-structuralists. I think they’d be more happy with being labeled something like functionalists or constructivists. Then again, I don’t think that matters. To me they are post-structuralists. Close enough.
So, if you want a crash course on structuralism, check out Deleuze’s ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’. It’s difficult and time consuming reading, there’s that, but it’s not even close to the level of difficulty that you encounter if you read his collaborations with Guattari. This is relatively easy and straight forward in comparison to those.
Also, if you are into landscapes, like I am, albeit, perhaps, for the ‘wrong’ reasons, as I’m sort of against them, getting to understand what the fuss about structuralism and post-structuralism is all about is something that I can only recommend. Like I had no idea that this text was recommended by a geographer, Richard Smith, and I was totally pumped once I read that. I also liked how, for once, other geographers, Woodward, Dixon and Jones, pointed out how important structuralism and post-structuralism is to the study of landscapes. It was about time someone pointed that out, like explicitly mentioning the value of those traditions.
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