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2.6 Pragmatics and Regimes of Signs

2.6.1

How does this analysis illustrate the account of pragmatics (or ‘schizoanalysis’) in ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’? At the diagrammatic level, there has been a description of a domain of abstract machines: that is, those abstract machines centrally involved in schizophrenia, Tourette’s and autism. The two forms of faciality, language and reason, have been diagrammed in relation to these conditions. However, it is important to remember that the diagrammatic element of pragmatics is described not only as the study of abstract machines, but also as taking place through abstract machines:

The third component is diagrammatic: it consists in taking regimes of signs or forms of expression and extracting from them particles-signs that are no longer formalized but instead constitute unformed traits capable of combining with one another. This is the height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction becomes real; everything operates through abstract-real machines (which have names and dates) (TP p.146)

The process has this form because in any domain of cartography of this kind the fields of language will always be densely complex fields of stratificatory language functioning along the lines of regimes of signs, and these can only be overcome by a process of ‘extracting’ terms and functionings of terms from these  regimes, and putting them into new effect, along the lines of the cartography involved. A case here is the term insanity, which is acutely transformed when the ‘breakthrough’ aspect of schizophrenia is understood, and when (more importantly) it is understood along the lines of the ‘pathology of everyday stratification’ or of everyday passions. In this case the component abstract machines in effect in the writing are chiefly those of Spinoza, and Deleuze/Guattari, but it is also true that a Barbara O’Brien abstract machine has fleetingly been involved, and that the abstract machines of Kant and Freud are in effect, notwithstanding the criticisms of their work.

Abstract machines of this kind do not only involve the going-into-effect of fields of language, but on the contrary involve engagements with the zones of other attributes – for instance, zones of consistency or micro-corporeality, or zones in the form of nexuses of becomings. In the course of this chapter the cartography has been an engagement with the becomings of the human body, and with  the modes of inter-consistency of the human body. At the same time it has been an engagement with language at the level of the analysis of regimes of signs, and at the linguistically micrological level of putting terms into effect in transformed ways which are emergent from the overall engagement, and which are beyond the straticatory functionings of the terms. This involves the other engagements along with the engagement with language, and it does not involve a selection of terms because they are anomalous, but a precise deployment  of terms which will recurrently be anomalous in their functionings through having been taken up into an intensive cartography.

The ‘diagrammatic’ component of pragmatics has therefore been given an exemplification. Earlier, the ‘generative’ component was given a minimal exemplification through the case of the form of expression ‘the idea of God’ in Kantian writing, and in language pertaining to the state/despotic regime of signs. Here, it is a question of staying within the world of regimes of signs, and at the level of forms of expression. For instance, the phrase ‘he lapsed into madness’, does not function in the same way in the clinical regime of signs, as it does in the previously predominant ‘medico-carceral’ regime of signs (engaged with by Foucault in Madness and Civilization[18]) connected to the treatment of the insane along the lines of the treatment of criminals and animals). For the clinical regime madness is a failure of systems, with the subject liable to be suffering ‘off to one side’. For the incarceratory regime the models are that of partial or global degradation over a threshold into a crude but sometimes dangerous mode of functioning (the ‘animality’ of the insane), and that of acts of abandoning  (abandoning or betrayal of reason and right or righteous conduct).  Madness here is assimilated  - in ways that vary depending on the situation -  on the one hand, to the fields of ferocity, stupour and docility, and, on the other, to a catastrophic decay sometimes understood along the lines of an abandoning of safety as a result of  a lure. (the ‘decay of moral fibre’, and the dangers of ‘wild abandon’). To use Foucault’s phrase, madness here is a question of ‘being swallowed up by a darkness’[19]   This mode of engagement is the correlate of the sub-assemblage which functions simply as a prison.   

In turn, it can be seen that the analysis of the programs of assemblages, is what was taking place in the last chapter, when the ‘large-scale’ assemblages of power were analysed in terms of their machinic processes. In the context of this chapter, it can be seen that the program of the clinical assemblage principally involves sedation and return (or partial return) to an overall maximally  re-stratified state or normalised state, or sedation and  incarceration (in the ‘developed’ world the incarceration strand is now intricately annexed to the wider clinical strand, although this does not mean that the medico-incarceratory regime is no longer in effect). Tourettic and autistic people are either sedated, or remain beyond the current formations of the assemblage. Schizophrenics generally either collapse into frozen states, or pass into a cycle of sedation, release, crisis and return (the so-called ‘revolving door’ problem).

Finally, the ‘transformational’ element has been given a degree of exemplification  by putting the case of the urban-network regime alongside that of the despotic regime. For instance, the paranoid, religious regime can pass into a gravely awe-struck, network regime through the point of passage that is the linguistic border-zone of juridical and scientific laws.  The delirium of the pharoahs becomes the delirium of the city states of Ancient Greece, and law emergent from a single point of origin becomes a field of rules administered by several social instances (as has been seen, the delirium in the second case lies in taking projects as a model for thought). The transformation shifts the register of the language of law from being that of the alien (divine, super-human) to that of the micrological world of conditions of possibility of the good or just life, and of ‘correct understanding’. This transition can equally well take place in reverse. There is no ‘evolutionism’ involved here, as A Thousand Plateaus is at pains to point out (‘All history does is translate a coexistence of becomings into a succession’ (TP p.430)). And from one regime there are always many ‘paths’ to other regimes. For instance, the anticipatory and constructional world of the projective regime can mutate into the ‘manic’ world of the single Mission, where it is always a question of regaining or attaining or transfiguring a territory (whether for a group or an individual or a couple), and where thinking is modelled as a de-coding culminating in ‘cracking the code’.

2.6.2

In the course of this chapter it is the ‘diagrammatic’ aspect of pragmatics that has been in effect to the highest degree. This is because the overall concern of the thesis is to lay out the field of engagement or thought of human bodies in a way which clearly delineates major abstract machines and their assemblage-embedded forms of stratification. The term ‘schizoanalysis’ is in many ways a better descriptive term at this point, in that it leads directly to the question of intensive bodies, so that ‘diagrammatics’ can more easily appear as a vast and diverse field of engagement with the other analysed aspects of pragmatics alongside it, rather than being in danger of being seen as an aspect of an engagement which primarily concerns language. Schizoanalysis/pragmatics is intensive cartography or cosmography, and language is only one faculty-affect of the human. To reiterate, because the passage in ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’ is in the context of a plateau engaging with language, the emphasis of the account is linguistic. Pragmatics as a term picks out the necessary process of locating forms of utterance within fields of assemblages, and specific utterances within their specific circumstances. However it also refers to the overall pragmatic process of intensification and flight from constriction which has engagement with language as only one aspect. It is not that pragmatics is engagement with language, and has a ‘limb’ that passes beyond language, but on the contrary that pragmatics is engagement with all fields (under the species of the Cosmos)  and has an element or lineament that consists of engagement with language. As has been seen pragmatics is ‘rhizomatics’, ‘stratoanalysis’, ‘the science of multiplicities’... To understand what is meant, for instance, by ‘stratoanalysis’ it is absolutely necessary that the ideas of abstract machines of stratification and deterritorialization have been put into effect, and these last ideas are precisely what are centrally involved in exemplifying  ‘diagrammatic’ processes.

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