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1.7 Concepts and language

1.7.1

The complex expressive constructions of the above analysis of time in terms of topography has made very evident how important it is that this chapter gives a more detailed account of the place of language in relation to thought. In particular, the question to be answered concerns the nature of concepts. In ‘Rhizome’ Deleuze and Guattari say that they have used words which function ‘as plateaus’, and after laying out the equivalenced terms being explicated in this thesis (‘RHIZOMATICS=SCHIZOANALYSIS...’), they go on to say the following: ‘These words are concepts, but concepts are lines, which is to say number systems attached to a particular dimension of the multiplicities...’(TP p.22). The different elements of these two statements must be analysed. To start with, what is a ‘plateau’? The definition is given a few lines  before the passages just cited. A plateau is ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’(TP p.22). And so, what is it then for a concept to function as a plateau? All of what has been said in relation to language in the course of this chapter is needed to answer this question.   Language in the sense at stake is the communication of engagements, but the point is that a particular term is used in many subtly different processes of communicating engagements, involving engagements with a whole phylum of zones, and their disparate aspects. Therefore with a concept the ‘region of intensities’ is the whole field of different kinds of encounters/engagements (an encounter is the minimal, non-effectuated form of an engagement)  which  have diversely been set into effect through the initial encounters with language-blocks including the concept. The particular uses of the concept are expressions (no matter how attenuated through being tied up with stratificatory processes) of the zones involved in the transmission of the engagements. As elements of processes of communication and intensification  concepts are therefore not conditions of thought, but are elements which can be involved in the initiation of encounters (of thought), although they could equally not be involved in any primary sense. A zone of becoming can go into effect in thought without the faculty-affect of language  being involved in any central way, in that this faculty-affect is with each singularity an engagement with a ‘penumbral’ zone of expressions of the engaged field in the form of a field of  signs, where this need only be connected with at the point where it is necessary to communicate the engagement. The field of concepts is therefore very far from being the condition of thought.

A concept functioning as a plateau is a term functioning in such a way that the full range of the encounters with which the term is involved is being directly or explicitly set into effect, and set into motion, through being extended. What this means is that the use of the term here will be atypical or anomalous. A term enters into different sequences (like a number), where for instance some sequences will be  equivalence sequences, some will be sequences of co-membership of a class, some will be oppositional and ‘opposed force’ sequences, some will be counterpart or analogical sequences, some will be sequences of contiguity, and so on. However, at the same time a term will have ‘non-standard’ uses which get ignored and suppressed within fields of ‘order-word’ functionings of language, and which in many cases are characterised within linguistics as ‘figurative’ or ‘metaphorical’ (although they could also be characterised as ‘freakish’, or ‘idiosyncratic’, or ‘non-sensical’). The full zone of uses is a very complex domain which is effectively the same as an overall zone of functionings of a numerical term (with all of the ‘non-standard’ or anomalous elements that this includes). This is why A Thousand Plateaus refers to concepts as ‘number systems’. However, the key point at this stage is that when a particular term is in effect  as a plateau  its appearances will involve anomalous uses which break a whole phylum of engagements into effect, through the exceptional use undermining a limited mode of actualised engagement. For instance, in A Thousand Plateaus the term ‘machine’ is used in compositions of language which are radically anomalous, such as the term ‘abstract machine’. These appearances of the term are expressions on the part of fields of impersonal, multi-element modalities of production or becoming, where ‘machine’ comes into effect as a term precisely because of these aspects - the processes being impersonal, being zones of production, and being composed of heterogeneous components. What  this means is that the whole field of non-standard functionings of the term (the machine of an eco-system or of the solar system, the machine of sedimentation and stratification, and the ‘infernal machines’ of desire) are brought fully into effect in relation to the idea of machines, at the same time as the phylum in effect is shown to be split between cyclical or structural machines (where this includes both technological  machines and machines such as the solar system) and abstract machines. The new use of the term brings in an extraordinary diagonal line that runs between two kinds of cyclical machines: those determined as externally controlled technical machines (objects controlled by subjects) and those determined as self-sufficient  or self-regulating machines (the system righting itself after perturbations). What is broken  open  is actualised engagement with abstract machines, with transcendental connections or zones of entering into composition. This shift is an intensification of engagement, or, specifically,  the initiation of a new intensificatory modality, and the compositions involving the anomalous forms of the term ‘machine’ (which include other anomalous uses of terms) are components of passage, or ‘pass-words’ (TP: p. 110).

The role of ‘figurative’, ‘metaphorical’ and ‘paradoxical’ language in transmitting difficult ideas and skills now becomes plain. The  compositions are in each case expressions of the zones of engagement involved in the form of disturbances of regulated patterns of composition, where these expressions/disturbances initiate the encounter or engagement with the zones which the person communicating was trying to transmit. The ‘aphoristic’ use of language is not the exception in the domain of initiating thought, it is the rule. The communication of  a new engagement involves language being  free from its entanglements in regulated language. The case of the emergence of the term ‘space-time’ to communicate the Einsteinian way of working is an extraordinary example of this. The use of the term ‘Aeon’ for a second aspect of temporality is a further example. The conventionalised language of time passes through circuits partly made up of the  language of movement, change and time as measurement, and partly also made up of the  language of past, future, memory and existence/non-existence (there is a circuit here that is like a kind of complex, figure-of-eight, with an ‘object’ loop on one side, and a ‘subject’ loop on the other). This is a grim world of repeating order words where time-constructions insist on time being simply a dimension (this is a matter of science), and simultaneously insist on time being an affair of ‘subjects’ (time has nothing to do with forces). However, beyond these constructions are the domains drawing upon the language of Aeon; the language of times, eternity,  space-times, virtuality, emergence...

1.7.2

There are no rules involved in the generation of new components of passage in the field of language. What is involved is an abstract machine (or a faculty-affect, which is also abstract) and therefore definitionally there is no empirically analysable regularity involved, such that rules could be set out as general principles of the process. This is the domain of the transcendental or abstract, which has the zones of regularity engaged with in empirical work as an aspect, but as a constrictive aspect, not as an aspect which determines emergence or creation. When emergence is involved in the generation of communicative blocks of language what is going into effect is, firstly, the particular zones  and becomings  which are involved, and, secondly (although there is in fact no strong separation here), the ‘satellite’ field of the  expression of the zones and becomings in the form of fields of specific terms. A specific term is here to be understood as a whole intricate and ‘rhizomatic’ system, where the many colours or nuances of its functioning are the effects  of the phylum or phyla in whose ‘orbit’ it is.  It is not grammars that are important in relation to language and thought, but dictionaries. For instance, all of the past uses of a term are part of its overall rhizomatic system (the case of the anomalous uses has already been included in the account). However, the field of the term is not a set of rules, it is the functioning of the singular fields involved in the domain of language, and as such it is a field of forces which can go into effect (transmutatively) in communicating an engagement. What needs to be understood is that the singular engaged zone  and the fields of the terms involved are all on one plane making up an overall zone being engaged (only the engagement is split between different faculty-affects). If the example taken is that of the modality called capitalism, then it is the lineaments and zones of this modality that are primarily being engaged with, but at the same time the field of the expressions of capitalism in language is also liable to be going into effect, especially if there is a process of communication taking place. An aspect of the modality of capitalism is its expression at the level of language, in relation to the functioning of a field of terms - ‘capital’, ‘investment’, ‘money’, ‘finance’, ‘futures’ etc.

 In a specific situation involving the production of explicatory language there can be recourse to ‘guide-line’ statements that help to initiate thought, but these always relate specifically to the overall engaged zone in some way, rather than just to the language involved, and  they are immanent to the particular process (an example here could be the A Thousand Plateaus statements about pragmatics which this chapter is employing as one starting-point). These ‘guide-line’ elements  are therefore not extrinsic conditions of the engagement taking place: on the contrary they are ‘leading edge’ aspects of what is going into effect in the engagement, insofar as it involves the production of language. In successfully employing such statements as initiatory elements, an ‘opaque’ or only partially  effectuated field of diagrammatic functionings passes over a threshold. The diagrammatic functioning is the going into conjoined effect of fields of aspects of the zone involved, in the sense that an intricate modality of engagement emerges (this is not a representational sense of the term ‘diagrammatic’). The initiatory guide-line material (dormant pass-words being used as ‘axioms’) becomes a field of components of passage in the full sense, and becomes an element involved in the production, in relation to the particular domain of the zone involved,  of new diagrammatic guide-line material, new components of passage. Terms such as those isolated by Kant in his table of categories are not conditions of thought, although – taken up in a very different way - they can be elements of diagrammatic processes.[14] In fact Kant’s categories are elements that are liable to be put into effect in the most minimal, reiteratively instrumental forms of transmissions of engagement, where a simple modification is being communicated (‘the field is plural, don’t just concentrate on one’ - this is one modification transmittable through a simple plurality term).  Other than this, the functioning of these elements pertains to the ‘abominable faculty’ of the production of order-words (and given that they have been extracted from a table of judgements, not from a field of guide-line statements, it is hardly surprising that they play an extensive role in this zone of  stratification).

The way in which concepts are on the same  plane as the zones being engaged (and are in fact  an aspect of a field pertaining to these zones) can be given a further demonstration by taking the case of the group or individual body as nexus of modes of thought or of engagement. The core of engagement here is with the phylum of  group and individual bodies. It is the elements and affects - lines of exteriority or modalities of engagement – of the bodies of this phylum which make up the densely complex central zone here being engaged, and the functionings of terms which are expressions of this zone  are an additional or ‘adjunctive’ field pertaining to this zone. There is the body as nexus of thought, with its fusional connections with the forces (zones and phyla or attributes) of the Cosmos, or of Substance, and then there are the functionings of terms which have been drawn into effect by this zone (thought, reason, idea, invention, creation, discovery etc.). Language here is part of the field of effecting of the zone, and the functionings involved are components in a process driven primarily by the central lineaments of the zone, in which new functionings of terms can emerge in a new process of engagement. In the case of this chapter, working in close connection with guide-lines from A Thousand  Plateaus, the key diagrammatic elements which have emerged are the ideas of faculty-affects, attributes or ‘planes’ of Substance: reason, language, trans-prehension, and topographic emergence. The functionings of the terms involved here have emerged from engagement with group and individual bodies as nexuses of thought.

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