<<TRANSMATHOME

3.7 Language

In relation to the faculty-affect of language, the initial questions can be these: What are bodies of writing for pragmatics? And what are they in relation to the ideas  of zones of consistency, and abstract machines? The answer is that they are fields of expression of abstract machines (they are drawn into effect by abstract machines), in the form of sequences of terms laid out into a co-emplaced array, where, insofar as the language is expressive of generative abstract machines, the terms are juxtaposed fields of signs which can concatenate as the going into effect, at the human (non-book) level, of the abstract machines involved. From thought in the form of the abstract machine, to the expression of the abstract machine in writing, to  thought in the form of the abstract machine working pro-genitively (initiatingly) through the functioning of the abstract machines’s expression in fields of signs. In the case of books, there can be a hyper-text level in the form of an array of ‘axiomatic’ statements, whether in the form of axioms labelled as such, or in the form of italicised sections, or in the form of chapter headings, or section headings. This extra level is to be thought of as a ‘ring’ or field of elements within the wider field of the book, and obviously it is possible to have more than two fields of this kind. It is also the case that these arrays can involve terms appearing at multiple points, and in juxtapositions that can wrench arrays of terms into new, intensified and widened patterns of application. When an array of terms has gone into regular employment in this way, it can be said that the array has implanted itself as a new complex cluster or pattern within the fields of regular functionings of the field of order-words (insofar as this is what is taking place, the abstract machine can be said to be ‘encasted’ within the strata). This is an axiomatic in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use the word in A Thousand Plateaus. However, there is also the axiomatic insofar as it is an ongoing, shifting aspect, at the level of expression, of the abstract machine. The array of terms in any particular case is always a hypertext, like a book: it is a co-emplaced array of co-functioning pro-generative elements (signs), and with the emergence of trans-mutated variations/widenings of the array, a ‘ring’ of bodies of expressive elements forms that is composed of books, rather than elements of books.   And at the level of the ongoing emergence of the abstract machine there is also the ‘progressive’ aspect of the going into effect of transmutated fields of functionings in the field of order-words (the emergence of these new fields is transformation on the axis of stratification). The Spinoza abstract machine at the level of expression has a hyper-text field in the form  of the  axioms, definitions, and postulates of the Ethics, and it is one which is intermeshed in a way, such that, through conjunction with the rest of the book, it is capable of having its elements taken up in the form of a new field of functionings with the field of regulated language (‘substance, attributes, modes’).  The Nietzsche abstract machine does not have any aspect  which readily conduces toward the formation of an axiomatic, or of an accepted, regulated field of functionings, with the exception perhaps of the language of wills and forces which is central to its expression in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, where it is arguable that a point of fusion is made between this abstract machine and the Spinozistic one (abstract machines can  both be connected together, and can function together to generate compositions which are expressive of a wholly new abstract machine), and where the language of ‘active’ and ‘reactive’ (etc.) can easily be encasted in the strata.  The Burroughs abstract machine does not have any formations of this kind at any level. It is clearly apparent now that this does not imply a difference on the level of thought, but only a difference in terms of form of engagement, and in terms of the areas of the social assemblage for which the writing is being composed. In all three cases the abstract machines are abstract machines expressing themselves in writing, where the writing is expressive of engagement in relation to the Cosmos, and its aspects and modes.

An important example of the emergence of new abstract machines, is the emergence, jointly through the co-functioning of fields of abstract machines expressing themselves though fictional writing, and of abstract machines expressing themselves through philosophical writing, of abstract machines whose expression in writing  implacably refuses classification on either side, through being an emergence pervasively involving major aspects from both fields. An example here is Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Another instance is ‘The Geology of Morals’, with its narrative and its conceptual figures, and there are other more extraordinary examples. The fact   of these hybrids is a last, crucial substantiation of the point that the division between philosophy and fiction does not exist at the level of thought, but only at the level of the stratified divisions between different modes of writing, and associated different fields of social assemblages. In the case of ‘The Geology of Morals’, it is simultaneously the case that there are conceptual figures, and arrays of terms customarily designatable as ‘descriptive’ (although these arrays and their elements are all in fact functioning in a field of engagement in relation to the Cosmos), and that there are also terms multiply entering into series with each other, in refrains, culminating in a major concatenation of the terms at the end, where these terms can freely be taken up into series in new expressive blocks of writing (for instance: ‘plane of consistency, abstract machines, machinic assemblage, stratification’).

The question  of ‘mythical’ and ‘supernatural’ figures and events in fiction is completely transformed by this account. It is no longer possible to understand such figures as simply ‘not real’. Confronted by the singular virtual forces of the intensive ‘spatium’ (and by the half-hidden world of the faculty-affects of human bodies) it can be precise and incisive to use the language of demons, and of sorcerous or shamanic transformations (the earlier case of Dionysus can be the example here). This is not a question of obscuring issues, but of a rigorous intensive cartography emerging from engagement with the intensive thresholds and virtual (and actual) forces of the cosmos. The decisive difference which remains is the degree of stratificatory over-coding involved in the cartography. But it can be seen that philosophical writing has been as liable to be caught up in stratification and in regimes of signs as has fiction. And even when non-natural or ‘fantastic’ fiction is heavily stratified the figures and events in question are liable to be smouldering fires – residual forms taken up from less constrained cartographies. It is necessary to think again about why it is that writers of horror fiction and ‘fantasy’ fiction are among the most successful authors on the planet. And perhaps more importantly still, it is necessary to think again about the prevailing reason-entrapped attitude toward the  cartographies  of tribal and nomadic societies (though these societies are of course also subject to their own forms of stratification).

The stratificatory forms in the domain of language are compositions consisting of order-word functionings of terms. These are the passions of language, equivalent to (and conjoined with) the passions of the faculty-affect of  zones of consistency. As has been seen, these compositions of language take the form of judgements. What this means is that they consist of de-intensificatory sequencings of terms which maintain disciplined patterns, where these customary or habitual patterns are partly to be understood as the result of engagement with language being fixated on zones of language connected to the zones engaged by stratificatory reason.  These functionings of language are implicit or explicit judgements, and they immanently carry out a sentence in the form of a closing down or at least a de-intensification of a form of engagement. The de-intensification is at the level of language: it is a conduction away from the zones of ‘indiscipline’ in language which are in fact the points where language is bound up with areas other than those pertaining to stratificatory reason. However, the engagement of language is always in one sense inseparable from engagement with other attributes (this is of the very nature of attributes), even at points when the ‘focus’ could be said to be language, and this means that the de-intensification at stake is far from being only at the level of the use of words. Order-words insist and instill: they insist in the sense that they are always repetitions rather than ‘pass-word’ transmutations, and they instill in the sense that they diminish or curtail encounters or becomings. Also, in speech they are almost invariably issued in the stratificatory tones of subjectification, or of faciality – tones of authority, reproach, condemnation, urbane civility, superciliousness, disgust, sad assurance, etc. In the case  of living human bodies, and of bodies in general, order-words insist ‘you are you’; ‘the thing is X’, repeating kinds of sequences and repeating ‘I’ and ‘you’ (etc.) in a way which conducts away from engagement with bodies as microcorporeal fields, as nodes of multiplicities, and as nexuses of affects. This is what is at stake when  Burroughs says  ‘just wipe away the words and look’.[17] Human bodies can be subjectified, but they are also bodies without organs: that is, clusters of virtual and actual zones and connections, where the elements and the whole can pass over thresholds (including leaving behind subjectification). The insidiously brutal functioning of order-words is given a precise summation by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the idea of redundancy: 

We are saying that the redundancy of the order-word is [...] primary and that information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of order-words (which is why the opposition to be made is not between noise and information but between all the indisciplines at work in language, and the order-word as discipline or ‘grammaticality’). Redundancy has two forms, frequency and resonance; the first concerns the signifiance of information, the second (I = I) concerns the subjectivity of communication (TP p.79)

The question of the ‘signifiance of information’ is the question of the modes of the ‘abominable faculty’ – these modes being the regimes of signs. As has been shown, there are many of these regimes of signs, and each one is the correlate of an assemblage of power, such that in each case there is always a double zone. For language and reason to be fixated together on the language and systems of  one of these zones is for there  to be an entrapment of engagement within  an acutely narrow domain, and, what is more, an entrapment which progressively suppresses that which is outside the domain (that which ‘makes no sense’). The fact that there is generally a continual shifting taking place from one regime to another does not help – this is just a slippage from one form of fixation to another. In its ‘quiet’ form the entrapment or passion is the smoothly enslaved production of particular kinds of customary disciplined language (the language of the State mode or model, the language of the mode of urban or town networks, the language of the dislodged body of people). In its convulsive form the passion in fact breaks free from production along the lines of  existing order-words and becomes the turbulent, compelled production of new zones of order-word language, locking the language to the productions of stratificatory reason in the form of elements of the assemblages of power. Other, deterritorialized productions of language are always involved in these convulsive processes, but these are precisely the lines of flight that are being desperately over-coded. Kant is woken from his sleep, and terrified of the oceanic world he is entering, he reaches desperately for  elements of urban or town networks – law-courts, faculties, projects...

A question concerning modes has therefore been resolved (the account has emerged alongside the account of language). Modes are models, but models in the sense of zones with which bodies can enter into composition, in a way where the language of the zones becomes applied to the bodies. The language of laws can perfectly be applied to human bodies, and bodies can enter into composition with assemblages of power, in an intensification of their segmented, regulated aspect. But there is also a language of deterritorialised  human groups; a language of multiplicities or packs; a language of molecules, a language of music; a language of a hydro-cycle planet with its flows, singularities and stratifications. Entering into deterritorialised composition with the mode that is planet Earth is a far more extraordinary becoming than a stratified becoming with an assemblage of power.

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