<<TRANSMATHOME

1.5 Regimes of signs

1.5.1

There is now an even larger array of questions waiting to be answered than there was the last time it was possible to take stock of the situation. A very long spiral ‘return’ has just been completed, but on the way many new problems have been brought into effect. However, at the same time, it is now much easier to answer questions, given all of the preparation that has taken place. Since the beginning of the chapter a long definitional process has occurred which has put in place many necessary ideas for resolving what are now the culminating issues of the chapter, and also for coherently posing questions that will be answered in the chapters which follow.

The first of the questions reverts back to the crux of the chapter - the earlier introduction of the account of pragmatics (and therefore of schizonalysis, rhizomatics, micropolitics...) from ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’. The first question concerns the exact nature of the four elements of pragmatics that were isolated  in this account: viz., the tracing of mixed regimes, the making of maps of transformations of regimes, the making of diagrams of the abstract machines involved (this idea is now hopefully making a lot more sense), and the outlining of the programs of the assemblages to which the regimes pertain. A second question, remaining from last time,  concerns the fact that no detailed account of a regime of signs has as yet been provided. What precisely  is this elusive creature - a regime of signs. A further question concerns the topographical and historical field of kinds of social assemblage. That is, what are the main modalities of social organisation which are being analysed in relation to their differing abstract machines and sign-regimes? A term which Deleuze and Guattari use for this form of modality in Anti-Oedipus is ‘socius’, although in A Thousand Plateaus they prefer the term ‘social formation’.What are the sociuses which are involved in this account? A further question asks after the nature of the ‘abstract machine of faciality’ - the third ‘wide level’ abstract machine that is mentioned at the end of A Thousand Plateaus, along with those of order-words and enslavement. What is this abstract machine, and what is its deterritorialising, creative polarity? And while in this domain, there are also now questions in relation to  two other faculty-affects that were outlined earlier - prehension and topographic emergence. It will now be clear that the wider form of these faculty-affects is in each case an abstract machine of deterritorialisation. What account can be given of these abstract machines, and are they to be understood as only effectuated in organised social formations in an erruptive or sporadic basis? Are they only effectuated (freely functioning or un-enveloped) within fluidly arrayed group-bodies? A final question concerns the need for exemplification and analysis of the idea of the intensificatory aspect of language (language as transmission of engagements), and of the of the anomalous forms of composition of language that in one way or another are integral with this process. What can be said about these emergences visited on bodies through the uttering of compositions which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘pass-words’ or ‘components of passage’?

The main goal of the first part of this section will be the analysis of a particular regime of signs. This regime, as has been indicated already, is to be the ‘projectional’ regime that has been an ongoing thread since the beginning of the discussion of sign-regimes. This account will centrally employ the case of Kant, and of his Critiques (Kant’s work has been involved in a positive sense in this chapter, but there is a stratificatory aspect to his thinking which for several reasons it will now be valuable to analyse). However, to lay the groundwork for this account, and to put into place elements that are needed much more widely, this analysis must be preceded by a brief account of the different (recurrently inter-meshed) organisational modalities being engaged with either directly or indirectly in this thesis (the answering of the third of the above questions).

A first social formation is the despotic State formation, with its systems of control radiating from a central point, and with its circles within circles, culminating in the person of the despot, (pharoah, emperor, god-king), or at least in a central oligarchical core. Even when subsumed within capitalism a modified  form of this modality continues, either in the form of tyrannies involving  military cadres (describing themselves as ‘serving the state’ by controlling it) or in a form like the one which can be typified by the case of  America, with its intelligence agencies, unelected powerful advisors, and elite caste of unelected diplomats. It is the trans-historical field of the despotic state in all its variations that is the zone of fixation for the paranoid regime of ‘signifiance’. Whether it is engagement along the lines of a single transcendent metaphysical point, or along the lines of a Lacanian attribution of a great Signifier, or along the lines of a specific paranoid delirium, it is the worlds of this formation of power that have  been fixed upon (it is the same kind of process as that of being captured by a gravitational field), and which hold the particular engagement with the human from becoming a thinking under the species of the cosmos, or of substance. 

 A second, and closely related social formation is the ‘authoritarian’ formation of the state-in-preparation, or the displaced group dedicated to re-attaining or attaining a territory, or to maintaining a particular mode of organisation in the name of this goal. This is a continually recurring formation. In ‘Apparatus of Capture’, Plateau 13, Deleuze and Guattari define the different social formations they have detailed in terms of ‘machinic processes’ (TP p.435), pointing out that the despotic formation can be defined in terms of an ‘apparatus of capture’ in relation to fluid nomadic modes  of distribution, which it encounters and incorporates (eventually swallowing up the nomadic distributions of capitalism, at which point capitalism swallows the despotic formation). At this stage they do not mention the authoritarian formation (they analyse it in detail earlier). What can be pointed out, to complete the account in ‘Apparatus of Capture’, is that the authoritarian formation of power is marked by both an apparatus of capture and an apparatus of preparation, where the preparation is both for the return to the territory and for withstanding assaults, of whatever kind, from the human and/or non-human landscapes within which the formation is lodged (often very precariously, whether the landscape is a desert or a society). This social modality has as its correlate the ‘passional regime of subjectification’ (TP p.147). This regime, as A Thousand Plateaus shows, is a manic-depressive world of engagements in terms of visionary struggles, great end-points to be attained, and of lonely, driven quests for some sort of culmination, homecoming or redress. These engagements can concern a group, a couple or an individual, but they relate to the ‘epic’ proceedings of a ‘we’ or of an ‘I’. At the level of couples this is the world of proceedings bound up with the idea of attaining a somehow fated, or pre-ordained (‘written in the stars’) state of romantic or conjugal bliss. At the level of ‘cult’ groups it is a world of language bound up with a projected and programatic religious attainment or political transformation. In relation to individuals, in its poetic or fictional mode this regime expresses itself in terms of the idea of the hero who travels from a home territory and trains himself  for the State at every turn, eventually becoming a leader, either of a different  group, or of the original one.

Another two social formations analysed in A Thousand Plateaus are the tribal mode of  organisation, and the counter-state nomadic formation, which can be defined  as being marked by machinic processes, respectively, of prevention of the internal emergence of state formations (this analysis is taken direct from A Thousand Plateaus), and of combat with the state formations which have emerged.

It is not possible go into great detail about these two regimes in this thesis, but one point should be made in passing on the basis of the definitions. This is the point that the nomad counter-state formation of power (analysed in ‘Treatise on Nomadology’) is a modality of organisation, and therefore is stratificatory in nature. It is to be understood  as a formation counterposed alongside the state formation, and as not being wholly free from constrictive regulation. The nomad regime of signs (‘countersignifying regime’), as A Thousand Plateaus shows (TP p.118),  is the combinant of a fluid distribution at the level of the formation of power, and is bound up with an operational numeracy, the very operationality of which makes it very close to an escape from the machine of order-words. However,  as a regime of signs, this regime remains part of the field of stratification, in that a fixation on the zone of holding open a particular zone beyond the state – and directly against the state - is a modality of stratification like any other, even though it remains the case that it it is definitionally far more deterritorialised and deterritorialising than any of the others: ‘In this countersignifying regime, the imperial despotic line of flight is replaced by a line of abolition that turns back against the great empires, cuts across them and destroys them, or else conquers them and destroys them, to form a mixed semiotic’ (TP p.118). The nomad formation of power is the ‘fixated’ - though as yet uncaptured - form of the nomad ‘war machine’, where the fixation can be either dormant or in full effect (capture of the war machine is the symbiotic incorporation  of the formation by the state in the form of a fluidly functioning and  only partly controllable military modality (see Appendix, note 3)). It is necessary to make this point so that the subtlety of the analysis of the war-machine is understood. When the  war machine is fully separated from stratification it ‘changes sign’ and becomes  fluid distribution  beyond the state (and other regimes of signs/formations of power), rather than fluid distribution pivotally or primarily  against the state (and it should be said that group bodies being beyond the state is precisely what melts adherence to state stratificatory modes of regulation). At this point there is no longer a war machine  in the sense of a fixated formation or a state-captured formation, but instead there is a war machine in the form of a body of engagements that sweeps up all available skills (necessarily including ‘warrior’ skills of tactics and operational numeracy, and of lucidity and physical fluidity/versatility) in a process of intensification, and of escape from stratification. Here, insofar as stratification is not in effect, processes of communication are not fixated on particular fields and are employed to break open new lines of engagement (in ways that continually break conventional patterns at all levels), and therefore there is no involvement of a regime of signs. 

1.5.2

It is now necessary to move on to a fifth social formation.  This is the modality of networks of towns, or of trading  networks. In one way or another this formation functions alongside the despotic formation, whether within it, or, in some cases, off to the side of these formations. In the second kind of case there can be a central ‘node’, but this is not the same as a capital of a despotic formation. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the mediteranean  towns of ancient Greece were an example of such a network, with Athens at one stage functioning as a centre, but not in the way in which a despotic capital is a centre. The towns function here like a stationary ‘pack’ - with or without a leader - and they function in a way which is based around trade, around flows of goods, and around administrative functions aimed at settling disputes and improving conditions for the flows. However, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, it would be wrong to put too much emphasis on trade in a simple sense. There is more to the inter-connections than flows of items: ‘The commercial character of the town has often been emphasised, but the commerce in question is also spiritual, as in a network of monasteries or temple-cities’ (TP p.432). What is important is, firstly,  that town-networks have judiciary systems that as such  function through the application of bodies of laws, and, secondly,  that they also have administrative systems that follow a body of agreed principles (rather than the body of the despot issuing orders by fiat). Everything here concerns a coordination within and between towns which functions to polarise flows in the direction of the points of the network. It can be seen therefore that a town-network is a fabric of heterogeneous projects involving a diverse field of judiciary processes. The projects are projects of trade (where the trade is itself of very diverse kinds), projects of construction, projects of developments of bodies of laws, and projects involving appeals to the judiciary machineries (trials, appeals for permission etc.).

The  town-network is therefore the formation of power which has the projective regime of signs as its correlate on the level of expression. It can be seen that the two senses of the term ‘projective’ are equally central. In the town-network formation of power it is a question of diverse projects, but these projects as such involve projection in that they involve a plan for a  re-iterable process with beginning and known end, such that  it is possible to say ‘X will be the outcome’. The two major senses of the term ‘project’ tend to be understood as distinct, with one being a noun and the other a verb, and with their different pronuciation, but they are in fact very closely linked in terms of the fields in relation to which they are expressive. The other point here is that the town-network modality, as has been seen, is a fabric of judiciary processes and of application of rules or laws. The projective regime of signs, as correlate of this modality,  is  engagement along the lines of re-iterable processes with ends statable in advance, and of engagement in terms of applications of rules or laws, where these applications are the conditions of developments or productions. Engagement here concerns processes of concentration on elements of zones which are regular or regulated (as with calculations and habits, in relation to human bodies), and concerns the  production of blocks of regulatory or constrictive  language. It can be seen that the ‘hinge’ that joins the formation of power with the regime of signs is the domain of legal processes (this is one form of what is called ‘double articulation’ in ‘The Geology of Morals’(TP p.40)). On the one hand, the law is a process of cutting, blocking and initiating flows, and on the other, it is also a process of issuing spoken and written judgements. And beyond this hinge, going out along the line of the regime of signs, there is the whole field of engagements along the lines of diverse field of projects and of web-works of laws which are the subtending conditions of forms of production.

This brings us back to Kant. All of Kant’s critical writing is densely enmeshed in this regime of signs. A better way of putting this would be to say that Kant’s work caused the projective regime of signs to pass over a threshold to a new degree of actualised complexity of functioning. As has been pointed out before, the Kantian landscape is a world of laws, titles, rules, regulations, appropriate authorities and judgements. Kant lays out an account of the production of knowledge in its diverse forms, and the idea of the production of knowledge is the idea of thought. But this account is all along concentrated not upon emergences or creations (thought)  but upon re-iterative and calculative processes, and it is concentrated upon these processes in a way where everything is always laid out in juridical and projective terms. Thought is an encounter and an emergence, and therefore what Kant makes connection with, through his projective and juridical thinking, is not thought, but the world of habit and calculation (repetitive deployment of a rule or rules). What this chiefly means is that, as Deleuze points out in Difference and Repetition, Kant’s work is centrally in connection on this  level  with the  world of processes of recognition.[10] This can be the process of coming to recognise, through a following of a procedure, that the answer to a sum is a given number, or coming to recognise, through following a procedure of inspection (‘get closer’, etc.) , that an object X is a case of Y. But the key point is that these are the only domains with which the language of conditioning principles is in connection in terms of the ‘knowledge processes’ of human bodies. The illusion or passion to which which Kant falls victim is therefore not different in kind from the illusion constitutive  of the paranoid-despotic regime of signs. Here it is not a question of control from a centre, but of fields of projects with an underlying web of rules or ‘principles’.

However, it is important not to lose sight of the Kantian  breakthroughs or departures which are driving this intensification of the projective regime. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, is entirely correct to call Kant the discoverer of the transcendental (‘of all philosophers, Kant is the one who discovers the prodigious domain of the transcendental’[11]). What this means is that Kant breaks into effect (partly in implicit form) the idea of a thinking body as a heterogeneous field of faculties, where the productions-connections stretched between  faculties  and encountered fields cannot be studied according to the modes of empiricism. These worlds of productions-connections make up the field out of which the regularities or constants of empiricism emerge, and must be engaged with through a  different  empiricism, a ‘transcendental empiricism’. Kant’s failure is that he intricately collapses this idea of a heterogenous nexus back into a world of conditioning principles, where the real point of connection for these principles is principally the domain  of human formations of power, with the details being worked up primarily from the organisational fields of the ‘civil’ assemblage. As we have seen the lineaments or ‘conditions of possibility’ making up the world of the transcendental are becomings, faculty-affects,  and abstract machines. However these are real zones of entering into composition between fields, so that the phrase ‘conditions of possibility’ is always liable to re-instate the over-coding. Abstract machines are zones of densely intricate fusions on the part of forces, or of an intensive or inter-consistently differentiating matter, and striations and recurrences must be understood as patterns which are aspects of these abstract machines (in the same way as surface ripples are aspects of a body of water), rather than as being made possible by some immaterial modality of conditioning. However, for Kant the extension of his line of thought is foreclosed by a  world of principles, whose disparate points of connection with the world are not connections with thought, but are in fact empirical fields. Firstly these are the worlds of laws, and secondly these are codified forms of instrumental practises in  the domain of logic, where this second set of instances is taken  as an overarching field of determining instances or principles (without regulatory ideas nothing would make sense). The uncovered lines of the world of faculty-affects are obscured beneath a terrible stratification on the part of the abstract machine of order-words (and in particular, the projective regime of signs), and the abstract machine of enslavement, or of stratificatory reason.

Thought here becomes a project, in the sense that there are fixed elements held to be the principles that condition what takes place (the  categories). Action also is understood in terms of projects and principles, with the categorical imperative as ur-law, from which a world of regulating principles follows (where these regulating principles in practise are project-habits  which foreclose encounters, and where their production is a turning from engagement with the singular, to an engagement with the generalisable). Finally, time here becomes the time of the  project, or plan-in-action.

The last point needs to be taken up first.  As Deleuze  points out, Kantian time is ‘the time of the city’:

Time is no longer the cosmic time of an original celestial movement, nor is it the rural time of derived meteorological movements. It has become the time of the city and nothing other, the pure order of time.[12]

What this means is that time has ceased here to  be understood in terms of extrinsic rhythms by which things are counted (and into which actions are  inserted) and has come to be understood in terms of processes which carry their own time with them, as part of a plan (‘this transaction will take 50 hours, or I will be bankrupt, and if X happens, it will be speeded up, and will take 40 hours’). In this world of city projects it is not directly a question of timing the event to find out it’s length according to an extrinsic standard, but it is a question of setting the length in advance and then living in accordance with this length. The point in relation to Kant is that this modality finds its correlate in his thinking of time as ‘internal’. The shift to thinking time in this way is an important development, because the inter-consistent field of the body is part of the world of modulations and rhythms that is at stake in the question of time. Time here ceases to be understood as a dimension or medium in which things move or develop, but becomes one with a field of synthesis, or production. Time had been the dimension, or the lines of intersecting rhythms (as with the rhythms of the earth in relation to the sun and stars), but in Kant it becomes a production. However, what fundamentally undermines this movement in Kant is that the production is not understood affectively (or inter-affectively), but is understood in terms of ‘a subject function’ of reason, expressed by saying that it is always possible for an ‘I think’ to accompany a ‘representation’. An empirical  logical process (that of substance and predicate) has been over-coded onto a transcendental field. On top of this, the overall field of the Kantian account of time is one of  developments in accordance with categorial principles (rather than of field-specific and mutable guidance devices for initiating thought), and is also one of a field of practises regulated by the generalising functioning of the categorical imperative. What this means is that the domain of the Kantian body in relation to time is in fact a domain of ends. The ends are ‘plans’ that are immanent to the process, like the plans of city projects. The ‘I’ of the ‘I think’ in each case is pre-eminently expressible in terms of its projects, its doings and its thoughts, and these in Kant’s account centrally involve fixed principles founding thought and dense fields of ideal laws, either in effect, or unrealised. Time as production is therefore coded-over with a logic structure,  is held down within the interior of the body, rather than being widened out into emergence as a whole, and the ‘line’ of time is set out in terms of the end-points of projects. In terms of production, what Kant chiefly makes contact with here is a minimal form of modulation, or internal development of a body. Insofar as everything is understood in terms of plans and rules, all that is fully in question here is the idea of the stratificatory abstract machine of reason in contact with the stratificatory abstract machine of order-words. In the terms of this thesis it is a case of an ‘auto-affection’ between stratificatory reason and the ‘I’ of the specific manifestation of order-word abstract machine. There is the process of the plan being put into action, and then there is the plan. Stratificatory  reason obeys the plan, but then the plan is in the first place in part a product of this mode of reason.

The stratificatory element of Kant’s work is therefore pre-eminently a case of the projective regime of signs being forced into more complex manifestations. However, the despotic regime cannot be wholly shut out from the picture (as Deleuze and Guattari say,  regimes of signs are always mixed to one degree or another). In relation to the question of thought, it can now be pointed out that the ‘classical image of thought’ is an image of thought pertaining primarily to the projective regime, but with a connection to the  regime of signifiance (this is hardly surprising, given the dense field of intersections between the two  formations of power which are involved). In Kant the production of knowledge  is on one level made to revolve around logical functions which are determined as regulative ideas: the ideas of the self, the world and of God. This line of thought is a remnant aspect of engagement with the ‘imperium’ of decrees from on high, as opposed to engagement with the ‘republic’ of individuals (TP, p.375), with their network of projects and legal processes. It can be pointed out, in passing, that this is a basic exemplification of the first of the four aspects of pragmatics - the ‘generative’ aspect, by which the concrete mixtures of regimes of signs are analysed.

<<Back to CONTENTS | Chapter 1.6 Depth topography>>