<<TRANSMATHOME

1.1 Thought, bodies, language

The question of thought concerns, on the one hand,  those zones or forces which ‘go into effect’ or are engaged in thought, and, on the other,  the field of affected or thinking bodies in the form of single bodies, and bodies in the form of groups. This is the necessary initial distribution of the field to be addressed in this chapter (and in the thesis as a whole). It can be seen that these elements, drawn from the idea of thought, bring the question of thought into relation with the question of affects. On the one side there is the idea of forces, or of that which is or has been encountered or incorporated such that thought takes place, and on the other hand there is the idea of the corporeality of  bodies, and of groups of bodies  (it should be said, however, that the idea of corporeality involved here involves the molecular, and the idea of fields of flows and of modulations).

Affects, bodies, group bodies: but what about language? Straightaway (in what will be a first ‘spiralling’ movement of departure and return), the question of communication must be raised in relation to the issue of bodies in the form of groups. This is both the best way of advancing the discussion of thought, and of beginning to set out what is in effect in the use of the term ‘pragmatics’ (and the equivalenced terms, such as ‘micropolitics)  in A Thousand Plateaus. For this thesis (and for Deleuze and Guattari) communication is the communication of a form of engagement. What this means is that it is the transmission, or making communal of a form of engagement (where the engagement could be determinable as science, art, play, technics, social skills, mathematics or philosophy). Language overall also involves modulations of engagements, and the fostering or intensification of engagements (warnings, encouragements, putting people at their ease). This account, as with what was said in relation to thought, is also in tune with the idea of affects: it is a question here of encounters, bodies and forms of functioning of bodies.

In the case of language, it can be seen that not all aspects of compositions of linguistic elements are to be understood as communicational in a sense that involves the intensification of the activity of the body. Compositions of language can also function to instill with regulated or habitual modes of functioning, and to discourage from given modes of activity. For Deleuze and Guattari this functioning of language is the issuing of ‘order-words’ (Plateau 4, ‘Postulates of Linguistics’, TP pp. 75-110). Order-words are constructions of language which function suppressively, in a way which involves both an ordering or regulation of bodies, and a regular or ‘disciplined’ sequencing at the level of the constructions. Counterposed to these constructions are compositions which transmit engagements, where these compositions continually involve anomalous uses of terms, anomalous syntax, and new words and phrases. It can be seen that the landscape of the question of thought and language is very much a political one. However, it is important not to confuse order-words with orders (the field of order-words is only minimally connected with the field of imperative constructions, and many imperative statements are not order-words).

When thought is understood in terms of affects the result is that the idea of concepts is displaced by the idea of an exteriority pertaining to thought, where this exteriority involves the  transmutation of fields of language. What this means is that in a general sense concepts come into focus as  extrinsic guiding principles which function as a suppression of engagement, of thought. In ‘Treatise on Nomadology’ Deleuze and Guattari affirm the  attack by the author Kleist on what they describe as ‘the central interiority of the concept as a means of control - the control of speech , of language, but also of affects, circumstances, and even chance’. The ideas of exteriority, and of the transmutation of language in thought set out in a passage which comes immediately afterwards:

The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world’. [...] A thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an exterior form, operating by relays instead of forming an image; an event-thought [...] instead of a subject-thought, a problem thought instead of an essence-thought or theorem... (TP p. 378)

Thought understood in terms of affects involves the transformation of the bodies involved, and a transformation of the zones encountered, if only at the level of that aspect of those zones which is their involvement in the thinking bodies (forces must be understood in terms of what they do). It is for this reason that Deleuze and Guattari say ‘All of thought is a becoming, a double becoming’ (TP p.380).  For instance, the field or phylum of metals is encountered by the human, and both humans and metals pass into becomings in the continuing and multiple process of this encounter.

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