<<TRANSMATHOME

BETWEEN THE SEEN AND THE SAID Deleuze-Guattari's Pragmatics of the Order-Word Bruce McClure

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

 

3. Schizoanalytic Investigations:

Deleuze-Guattari and Wittgenstein

 

3.0 Introduction

My contention at the end of the last chapter was that our examination of Schreber had relevance not simply for the Judge himself (nor just for sufferers of paranoid schizophrenia), but that it raised questions regarding the formation of human subjects in general. In order both to tease out this approach more broadly, as well as to make connections between Deleuze-Guattari and a philosopher with whom they have seldom been mentioned in the same breath — Ludwig Wittgenstein. This will orient our Deleuze-Guattarian project of a pragmatics of order-words, and will set the stage for later discussions of some limited convergences between so-called analytic and Continental philosophy. The central point in what follows is the ‘exteriorising’ of language carried out in different ways by both Wittgenstein and Deleuze-Guattari — their rejection of the possibility of considering problems of meaning without also considering specific uses; the importance at every step of the level of social practice (the socius in AntiOedipus’ term).

 

At first sight, the project of engineering unnatural congress between experimental schizoanalysts and concept-creators Deleuze-Guattari, and the scourge of philosophical mystification Ludwig Wittgenstein, may seem misguided. Deleuze says virtually nothing about Wittgenstein himself, but he does not mince his words when it comes to Wittgenstein’s followers. In a 1988 television interview with Claire Parnet, the ABC Primer, he describes the school of Wittgensteinians as ‘a philosophical catastrophe’, a ‘massive regression’ of all philosophy, and in an aside in his Leibniz book of the same year, he refers to ‘Wittgenstein’s disciples spread[ing] their misty confusion, sufficiency and terror’. [1]   Likewise, there is much in Wittgenstein’s painstaking, incremental and notoriously elliptical method and his explicit and implied attacks on metaphysics to suggest he would have little time for Deleuze-Guattari’s deceptively ‘fast and loose’ approach to their vast range of subject matter. Wittgenstein’s derision of the kinds of ‘non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm[s]’ (I 108) [2] that philosophy is inclined to invent, indicate that he would strenuously object to such slippery notions as Body-without-Organs, desiring-production and, indeed, phantasm, that liberally season Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari’s work. My main concern is to illuminate the small but crucial zone where their respective approaches overlap — specifically, in relation to the irreducibly social nature of language — in the hope of finding a Wittgenstein independent of the schools who have taken his name, and a Deleuze-Guattari who perhaps are not as anathema to trends within so-called analytic philosophy as may first appear.

 

3.1 Meaning is Use

For present purposes, I will concentrate on Wittgenstein in his guise as demystifier of philosophical obsessions with mental processes, and with language understood on that basis. I propose a reading, which I hope will be largely uncontroversial, of the Investigations as dissolving traditional philosophical problems into problems of language use, but with the proviso that ‘language use’ is not taken as ‘purely’ linguistic, but to always refer outwards to specific social situations. Wittgenstein regularly mocks philosophy’s attempts to understand the mechanics of language in isolation from social interaction — such as trying to understand naming by repeating a name over and over (I 38) — as well as the attempt to capture the sense of expressions like ‘to understand in a flash’ by trying to catch hold of that intangible feeling by introspection (e.g. I 131, 197). He even goes so far as to issue the injunction ‘Do not try to analyse your own inner experience’ (II xi) — somewhat ironically, given the amount of time he appears to spend doing it. His private language argument, and the famous discussions of the experience of pain, can be seen as prime mobilisations of a technique which can be described as subtracting a dimension, a strategy proposed by Deleuze-Guattari (TP 21), that is, resisting the temptation to posit a supposedly explanatory transcendent notion and critiquing such notions where  they are bequeathed by common sense. For Wittgenstein, this dimension is most often that special, private something (such as whatever it is that might actually be in each of our beetle-boxes (I 293)) which is appealed to by way of explaining how language works. Such appeals to the first person perspective, on the archaic, Cartesian assumption of its privileged access to reality, are shown to be appeals to ‘a wheel that can be turned but nothing else moves with it, [which hence] is not part of the mechanism’ (I 271).

 

A central proposal that follows from this rejection of mentalist accounts of language and thought as adequate justifications, is that the meanings of words cannot be separated from their use, a move Deleuze endorses in The Logic of Sense (146). [3]   The idea that there is something that is the meaning of a particular word, that can be accessed in isolation from any particular use in a particular context, is thoroughly dismantled in the Investigations: ‘only someone who already knows how to do something with it’, writes Wittgenstein, ‘can significantly ask a name’ (I 31), and later, ‘When one says “He gave a name to his sensation” one forgets that a great deal of stage setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense’ (I 257).

 

Wittgenstein can repeatedly be seen to emphasise the vast range of uses and applications of language, with a view to hacking any story — such as that of naming (as we have seen), or that of communication (to which we will return) — which might claim to capture what is essential about language. Indeed (in I 92), he criticises the notion that there is an essence to language that lies below the surface, arguing instead for what is ‘already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement.’  One of his methods is to take a particular word, such as the verbs ‘to believe’ (e.g. I 587), ‘to obey’ (e.g. I 206, 219), or ‘to be’ (e.g. I 558), and by means of hypothetical examples and extreme cases, he shows that whenever it seems we have a grasp on their supposed essence, it evaporates into thin air, and all we are left with is the varieties of usage and the corresponding varieties of contexts or language-games in which they occur. An example whose significance will become clear in what follows, is that of the statement

 

“My broom is in the corner,” — is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? [...] Suppose that, instead of saying “Bring me the broom”, you said “Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted onto it”! — Isn’t the answer “Do you want the broom?  Why do you put it so oddly?” [...] This sentence, one might say, achieves the same as the ordinary one, but in a more roundabout way (I 60).

 

In other words, what appears to be a case of analysing a statement into its logical components, or basic constituents, turns out to take us further away from rather than closer to understanding. To better understand statements and commands concerning brooms, we need not dig around for the essence of broomness, but instead are referred upwards and outwards, firstly to situations where brooms come in handy (as wholes rather than connected bits) and more broadly to the sphere of social interactions in which remarks and commands in general can be understood to function. We can clumsily refer to this direction of analysis as ‘reducing upwards’, and we will discover more of its importance in what follows.

 

3.2 Language Games

Wittgenstein’s famous notion of the ‘language-game’ has been instrumental in his frequent alignment with relativist linguists such as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, and the associated suggestion that different cultures can have no hope of understanding each other — the idea that language and thought are intertwined to the extent that speakers of different languages live in incommensurable realities, between which only vague, approximate and ultimately futile bridges of translation can be built. Since on this view there is a one-way determination from language to thought, the ‘facts of the matter’ are said to be accessible only to fully-fledged players of a particular language-game, and one language-game changes in nature when subsumed or assimilated by another. I propose to leave this position of linguistic determinism and translative nihilism hanging in the air for the moment, and approach the question of the nature of language from a slightly different angle, that of the command and the rule, the analyses of which take up a large proportion of one the key texts for present purposes, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

 

To examine one of Wittgenstein’s suggestions, most relevant to Deleuze-Guattari’s account, could a language exist which consists entirely of commands?  Right at the start of the Investigations Wittgenstein proposes a language shared by builder A and his assistant, B, consisting only of four words, “block”, “pillar”, “slab” and “beam”. A calls one out, and B fetches the appropriate item — ‘Conceive this as a complete primitive language.’ (I 2)  That this thought experiment is at all plausible has been questioned by a number of commentators: surely the builders need to have more means of communication open to them than these four words? [4] However, it is here that we have a striking connection with Deleuze-Guattari, who in A Thousand Plateaus propose that the ‘basic determination’ of language is the command, or order-word. Raimond Gaita phrases what seems to be the insight,

 

something which is like what the builders do must have been the origins of all natural languages — that in their beginnings, natural languages must have consisted of a few names which were devised and used to further a common enterprise, and that the features of natural languages which are essentially connected with peoples, their histories and cultures, are sophisticated developments from such primitive languages. Therefore (the thought continues) whatever qualitative discontinuities there may be between language as we have it and what the builders do, they are not of a kind which mark the difference between language and a mere semblance of it (WCE 102). [5]

 

Gaita goes on to argue that this view, if it can indeed be taken as what Wittgenstein is proposing in these passages, marks a moment of divergence from the main thrust of the rest of the Investigations, and hence for Gaita, an unrepresentative approach not crucial to the work as a whole. The problem is that the builders appear to lack what is central to natural (as opposed to purely artificial or functional) languages, namely the capacity to distinguish between sense and nonsense, which, he insists, depends on the capacity for conversation. Though a situation (proposed by Norman Malcolm) can be imagined in which A utters something resembling nonsense — such as ‘Slab!’ in a situation where, clearly, only beams will do, causing B to fall about laughing, and A to slap his forehead and chuckle when he realises his mistake — this is not convincing for Gaita, because he assumes that they would only find it funny if they had experience of other situations of nonsensical uses of words, i.e. in a conversational setting. [6] Gaita believes this to be a Wittgensteinian insight into the difference between natural, public languages which are intertwined with the human beings that are capable of conversing in them, and the mere semblances of language we might find amongst robots, say, or amongst a tribe of Wittgensteinian builders. Natural language is for Gaita characterised by the very necessity that more than simply commanding can happen in it.

 

3.3 The Abominable Faculty

In contrast to Gaita’s emphasis on conversation, I hope to show that a more sophisticated and all-encompassing notion of the command, namely Deleuze-Guattari’s order-word, can indeed be taken as language’s ‘elementary unit’ (TP 76) — more fundamental, even, than subjects or signs, information or communication — and that this approach to language coheres with much in Wittgenstein’s Investigations.

 

As with his other peculiar and occasionally disturbing examples of inability to recognise, to understand, to follow rules, Wittgenstein shows that given the underdetermination of rules themselves, and the fact that when you start looking for the rules for how to correctly obey rules, you end up in an infinite regress, that the understanding of rule-following has to stop somewhere. He writes

 

“How am I able to follow a rule?” — if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do”   (I 217).

 

Need we be satisfied with this apparent dead end?

 

Rather than pursue the intra-linguistic line towards the infinite regress of rule-upon-rule, Wittgenstein, on a number of occasions, appeals to training [‘Abrichtung’] as the basis for language functioning the way it does — the teaching of language is not explanation (I 5), nor can it simply be ostensive definition (I 6), ‘but only [these] together with a particular training’ (ibid.). Later, he writes ‘Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so; we react to an order in a particular way’ (I 206).  This is why it is nonsense to assume that conscious operations of interpretation or understanding are necessary components of the order.

 

When I obey a rule, I do not choose.

I obey the rule blindly’  (I 219).

 

As Gordon Bearn writes, this is ‘Training in the sense that we train animals to do tricks, or the sense in which we break a horse’. [7] It could be otherwise, but it is not, and we are unable to fully accept as plausible, people who are in other respects normal (i.e. not completely insane), who nonetheless think it intuitively likely, for example, that the instruction ‘continue the series n+2’ means one thing up to 1000 — 2, 4, 6, etc — and another — 1004, 1008, etc — thereafter (I 185). This is because, as Deleuze-Guattari say, the whole process of induction into language is one of learning to obey commands, to accept as given the ‘semiotization’ of reality on the basis of the social practices in which we must participate.

 

When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing herself when she questions a student [...] The compulsory education machine does not communicate education; it imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the statement-subject of enunciation, etc.) (TP 75-76). [8]

 

We are trained, disciplined and docilised, to the point that we tend not to be particularly aware of the ‘abominable faculty’ that has been instilled in us, ‘consisting in emitting, receiving and transmitting order-words’ (TP 76). This semiotization occurs through the interlocking of the rules of linguistic and paralinguistic expression on the one hand, which have as much to do with gesture, facial expression and posture as to do with word order, matching tenses and the like, and on the other hand, the networks of social practices (such as the way the day is divided up into work time and free time, or the differing etiquette of communication with peers, elders and juniors) segmentalised with appropriate behaviours for each situation. [9]   They call these two sides of the social machine the machinic assemblage of bodies (training, discipline) and the collective assemblage of enunciation (the statements or order-words in circulation at a given point). The difficulty of fully distinguishing these levels mirrors the difficulty in Wittgenstein of distinguishing the corresponding terms, form of life, and language-game. [10]   I propose reading the two sides as mutually, holistically interdependent, yet without referring to or representing one another, a relationship Deleuze-Guattari describe as reciprocal presupposition: neither side can be adequately understood except in relation to the other; neither is primary or foundational, they both appear at once (in the double articulation of the strata). Our language-games do not represent our form of life — philosophy cannot create some special language that gets more deeply into the heart of things, nor can it use ‘some sort of preparatory, provisional one [...it can only] use language full-blown [...] this by itself shews that I can adduce only exterior facts about language’ (I 120). [11] Why so? Because language has no interior. As Deleuze-Guattari put it, ‘If language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying’ (TP 76).

 

The necessary exteriority of language (Wittgenstein’s idea that everything is already on the surface), and the all-encompassing nature of the order-word, are made clearer in the following passage from A Thousand Plateaus (with an explanatory sentence from me inserted in the middle): ‘Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a “social obligation”,  Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly’ — because every statement commits us to other statements through the rules of grammar, and ultimately to acts, which we are forced to carry out if we are not to be shown to be mad, or lying, or stupid, or otherwise unable to function socially. ‘The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a given language at a given moment’  (TP 79). Wittgenstein is close to this, when he muses ‘The civil status of contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem’ (I 125, my emphasis). How would we react to people who constantly contradict themselves in their words and actions?  How willing would you be to spend an entire weekend, as an experiment, deliberately contradicting yourself?   This would seem to suggest, that no matter how willingly and deliberately we aspire to consistency, correctness and consideration for others in thought and deed, we are from time to time reminded what awaits us when we mess up. Is this sheer coincidence, or can we discern a pattern here?  The point is that as long as we behave in accordance with the grammar of behaviour, conforming to others’ expectations, we are allowed to get on and mind our own business, but when we break the rules, or apply them in peculiar new ways, we might either be praised for creating something new, or else we risk admonishment, censure, ostracism, imprisonment or a damn good hiding. (Clearly these controls do not govern each of us in the same way — they vary dramatically in their effects across bodies, genders, situations, and we are affected by and respond to them in vastly different ways. It is in this continuous interaction that we ‘become who we are’.) 

 

It could be argued that to focus in this way on this allegedly intrinsic normativity of linguistic interaction is paranoid, sensationalist and possibly destructive. Surely we should attend to the content of what people say rather than this dark level on which we are supposedly preoccupied with emitting and receiving commands all the time?  Unfortunately such a naïve view fails to get to grips with how the system keeps itself stable, mistaking the level of information and communication for the bottom line, the zone of most importance. It fails to see that the ostensive content of conversations and other linguistic interactions (newspaper articles, colloquia, sessions in parliament or court, bureaucracy, etc) is entirely dependent on the normative, behavioural level, and that the content itself is often entirely redundant — ‘the redundancy of the order-word is [...] primary and [...] information is only the minimal condition for the transmission of order-words’ (TP 79). We will return to the centrality of redundancy shortly — but here it will suffice to say that for a pragmatics of the order-word, what is said is subordinate in importance to, and entirely dependent on, what is being done in saying it.

 

To rehearse the objection again via a return to Gaita’s argument against a language consisting solely of commands, surely for all the implicit and explicit commanding that goes on, there is a lot more to our linguistic behaviour, most of which seems to be unrelated to commands?  What is wrong with Gaita’s notion that it is conversation rather than commanding or ordering that characterises natural language?  It should help to emphasise two basic notions that Deleuze-Guattari share with Wittgenstein. Firstly, we again have the idea that to speak is to do something (which may succeed or fail), something necessarily public (even if one is alone). [12]   This speech-action depends on the backdrop of shared social practices (which are divisible — though not absolutely or straightforwardly — into linguistic/symbolic and nonlinguistic regularities (and irregularities)). Secondly, Deleuze-Guattari argue that the most basic properties of utterances are the ways in which they conform to, or break away from, these regularities — moves characterised respectively as order-word and password — corresponding to the extent to which utterances are, in Wittgenstein’s broad sense, grammatical, by which I take to mean not just rules of sentence formation, but the rules of applications of different terms in different situations, as well as their links with non-linguistic behaviour (facial expression, intonation, gesture and so on). What Deleuze-Guattari call the password, then, corresponds (in the first instance) to deviant, inventive, experimental uses of language. [13]   This can be from such a case as Wittgenstein urging us to change our associations from one set of pictures to another (e.g. I 115), or when he suggests that conceptual moves in philosophy (such as the proposal that ‘sense-data are the material of which the universe is made’) are less ‘grammatical movements’, or moves within an already-established language-game, as ‘a new way of looking at things [... like] a new way of painting; or again, a new metre, or a new kind of song. —’ (I 401).

 

What exactly am I proposing here?  There are two aspects which we now examine in greater detail — the notion of reciprocal presupposition, and how it differs from relations of representation or signification, and the notion of the normativity of the order-word, its status as mechanism of normalisation.

 

Reciprocal presupposition is the codependence of the two levels we have been discussing — that of language-game, or collective assemblage of enunciation, and that of form of life, or machinic assemblage. The former consists in events, the latter in bodies, their actions and passions. Paradoxically, they differ in nature but are both equally material — the level of events inserts itself into the flows of bodies, as incorporeal transformations effected by speech-acts or other emissions of order-words (gestures, memos, publications, legislations, etc). The ‘instantaneousness’ of the incorporeal transformation is not to be taken in terms of clock-time, since its effects on the level of bodies may be staggered (for example, the discovery of an historical document that resonates in the present, connecting up moment of emission and moment of reception across history; or a ‘no spitting’ poster in a department store, imposing a transformation on each customer into potential spitter and/or spat-on). [14]

 

For the purposes of this section, the point is to introduce reciprocal presupposition as an initial assumption from which the investigation proceeds: rather than separating language from the rest of behaviour, we separate the level of event (or expression) from the level of bodies (the corresponding content). As far as this goes here, the point is that the two must be examined in tandem, neither is primary or foundational.

 

3.4 Relativism and Mentalese

It is time to return to the question of linguistic or cultural relativism, which I take to be the thesis (often known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) that

1.   ‘the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds’,

2.   ‘this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds’,

3.   that there is ‘an agreement [to organise and classify in this way] that holds throughout our speech community’, and

4.   that ‘we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organisation and classification of data which the agreement decrees’ [15] .

This position leads one to severe pessimism when it comes to the possibility of ever understanding or communicating with speakers of other languages, and makes the task of learning another language seem nigh-on impossible, since it would involve displacing the terms of one’s own speech community, which Whorf sees as ‘absolutely obligatory’. But moreover, it reifies language to the godlike position of providing the very structure of our experience, indeed of being the very condition of possibility of conscious thought.

 

In this extreme form, the thesis is relatively easy to dismiss. Steven Pinker does a good job of dismantling the usual arguments in its favour, which tend to rely on extremely dodgy anthropological evidence (mystificatory accounts of Apache grammar, the Hopi conception of time or the astounding range of Eskimo words for snow (almost as many as can be found among professional skiers!); physiologically ignorant accounts of different languages’ supposedly bizarre colour spectrums, and so on). However, he goes on to stretch our credulity a little when, in the interests of demonstrating how thought is entirely possible without any form of language, he cites the example of Ildefonso, hero of Susan Schaller’s A Man Without Words. [16] I quote Pinker’s gloss and italicise the more blatant contradictions. Ildefonso, a deaf adult who allegedly lacked ‘any form of language whatsoever — no sign language, no writing, no lip reading, no speech’, was

 

a twenty-seven-year-old immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso [as opposed to “the nameless one”] grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the sign for “cat”. A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the signs for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged  his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities. He led Schaller to other languageless adults in forgotten corners of society. Despite their isolation from the verbal world, they displayed many abstract forms of thinking, like rebuilding broken locks, handling money, playing card games, and entertaining each other with long pantomimed narratives (LI 67-68).

 

Was Ildefonso really completely isolated from our ‘verbal’ form of life?  Pinker needs him to be because he is trying to show the presence of ‘Mentalese’, the universal language of thought, which we each translate into our particular language/dialect/ideolect — or in the case of Ildefonso, leave untranslated. Pinker enlists Alan Turing as an ally, using his notion of the Turing Machine to show that reasoning is independent of language, and contends that

 

Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice versa. People without a language would still have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects. Indeed, if babies did not have a mentalese to translate to and from English, it is not clear how learning English could take place, or even what learning English would mean (LI 85).

 

In place of this notion of mentalese, I wish to point to the zone of fledgling and larval selves discussed in the last two chapters — the continual pandemonium of context-fixated ‘judgements’ that orient the organism in its world: indeed they precede the organism as integrated whole: it is not at all clear that non-linguistic creatures have any need of an overarching concept of self-identity, over and above the consistency of their perceptions and impulses. However, to posit an innate mental language common to all one’s subselves is firstly to export an already constituted conception of language back to the origins of the subject, as if that could then serve as an explanation of language or thought. It is also to risk taking thought as representational, before the notion of representation can have taken root in the neonate’s bodymind: the idea of mentalese, conceived as strings of mental tokens for things in the outside world, places the child at one remove from the world, rather than being always already immersed in it. There is undoubtedly mediation between self and world, but it need not be conceived of as necessarily representational. Rather, it is mediated through its multiplicity: the idea of a single integrated self surveying the world, and perhaps internally narrating its survey in vividly descriptive prose, is a result of,  rather than any kind of explanation for, the many connections between organism and world, categorisable (at least after the emergence of the organism as a supplementary dimension) as impulses from within and impingements from without.

 

It is not necessary to appeal to mentalese in order to dispute linguistic relativism, nor is it necessary to propose linguistic relativism to dismiss the notion of mentalese. Mentalese is tantamount to the suggestion that fundamentally, all humans at least think in the same language, even if they often have trouble listening to one another. My proposal would be that even speakers of what is ostensibly the same language are as likely to misunderstand one another as those of different languages: in both cases, what matters as much as the tongue spoken, are questions of shared or conflicting aims and the balance of power between the speakers — their respective capacities to coerce or willingness to cooperate. This is not to do with their having equivalent capacities to represent in their heads what is occurring, since on the level of the order-word, ‘understanding’ is irrelevant anyway, if it means anything over and above being able to reproduce the appropriate behaviours. As Wittgenstein takes pains to show, this kind of explanation is irrelevant in comparison to descriptions of what people actually do. The point is that there is much more at play in any interaction than simply the words that are spoken and the ‘thinks’ that are ‘thunk.’

 

As regards Ildefonso, he as much as anyone else had been coercively initiated into the social whirl, and even if he did not have conventional language, he clearly had developed, of necessity no doubt, ways of surviving in amongst particular groups. The common factor between him and, say Steven Pinker, and the explanation for the empathy the latter feels for him, is due not to a common mental language representing the world identically in either head, but rather the shared social world, the world where one is shaped through a mixture varying degrees of coercion and encouragement — training — to the extent that one can achieve a degree of independence. Despite the huge differences between the situations in which Pinker and Ildefonso grew up, and despite the fact that Pinker could hear and speak, they both had to spend much of their time interacting with other people without getting beaten or killed, and neither of them needed an innate representational language to learn this fact. In any case, over and above this basic level of ‘common humanity’, the differences between Ildefonso and Pinker need to be emphasised — indeed, it is the vast difference between their respective economic situations that makes it incredibly hard to draw anything conclusive from such a comparison!

 

3.5 Relativism Revisited

At the start of section 3.2, I alluded to the problem of linguistic relativism, the notion that the differences between languages and the cultures they characterise are insurmountable. I would like to propose that the present picture gets over this difficulty by giving an account of the functioning of language which shows the impossibility of separating it from the functioning of a culture as a whole, and hence aspires to an objectivity that is not founded in ‘universals of communication.’  Communication is not the be-all and end-all of language, because communication is impossible without a common form of life — that is, a common training, resulting in compatible notions of rules and how to follow them, and the constant background threat of what might happen if you don’t. The corresponding point is that language is not the be-all and end-all of culture, and hence that there are approaches open to us which, while necessarily expressed through language, point far beyond it, and indeed collapse the supposed boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. In Wittgensteinian terms, the idea that ‘“Language (or thought) is something unique” [...] proves to be a superstition [...] itself produced by grammatical illusions’ (I 110). In Deleuze-Guattarian terms, to reify language or thought and appeal to them for answers about the nature of things, is to make them transcendent, to see them as in some way standing outside the complex interactions of machines of all kinds — social, technological, biological, physical and so on.

 

We can happily, therefore, reject the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of the futility of translation, arguing that a thorough enough description of linguistic and social practices of different cultures give as much (or as little) hope of understanding as do similar descriptions of our own. To reject this possibility would be to reify language, ascribing to it powers way beyond its actual capabilities. Nor would accepting this stance entail an appeal to a universal human nature or any other homogenising notion — instead, schizoanalysis sets about differentiating the different machines at work, looking for the ways they vary independently yet mutually presuppose one another, without ever coming to rest on a single founding principle (such as Language, Being, Man, Spirit or God).

 

In place of such a foundation is an armoury of material relations, an open-ended series of concepts which can be applied or ignored as the investigation dictates. The key notion in what we have been talking about is double articulation, the separation of material flows (of bodies, events, signs) into two reciprocally-presupposing levels. I have suggested that Wittgenstein’s terms ‘language-game’ and ‘form of life’ designate the double articulations of the social machine, which Deleuze-Guattari call respectively the collective and machinic assemblages. On either side, two opposing tendencies can be observed, that towards stability and regularity, and that towards creation and change. In Wittgensteinian terms, the former would be speech-actions in accordance with Grammar — unproblematic and smooth social functioning — while the latter is seen in his many examples of failure to apply rules correctly, of attempts to misuse language (such as attempting to mean ‘The weather will change’ by saying ‘a b c d’). He often seems to be presenting these possibilities (or impossibilities) as disturbing, strange, uncannily counterintuitive notions, yet by emphasising their ever-present possibility he once again shifts our focus away from isolated intra-linguistic problems to the complex and inseparable threads of language, thought and social behaviour — which are themselves inseparable from our nature as disciplined, docilised subjects of control. Perhaps this is the common state of humanity, as Wittgenstein suggests, when he writes

 

Suppose you came as an explorer into an unknown country with a language quite strange to you. In what circumstances would you say that the people there gave orders, understood them, obeyed them, rebelled against them and so on?  The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language (I, 206).

 

3.6 Conclusion: Creativity and a People

In conclusion, while the differences in their respective views of the role of philosophy must remain insurmountable, we can nonetheless see in both Wittgenstein and Deleuze-Guattari the insistence on tackling in a non-reductive fashion the whole field of social practice, the changing field of discipline and training that produces and sustains it, and the possibilities for creation, disruption and anomaly it produces in spite of itself. If we have shown that this approach gets out of linguistic relativism, does it have anything to say about non-humans? Is it limited in scope to human language-users, allowing a priori rejections, like Gaita’s, of, for example, the possibility of thinking, conversing robots? I would argue no, since to be a language-user, to be a human, already presupposes the social machinery we have been discussing. If you are a participating member in a group of humans, if you have learned strategies enough to avoid getting beaten or killed, you are to all intents and purposes human. If, however, you somehow manage to change this social machinery, or discover completely new forms, you are no longer concerned with the human as we know it — but you are still ‘schizoanalysing’: investigating the nature, formation and functioning of all the different machines and their dual tendencies — restrictive, habitual, stabilising, and disruptive, explosive, revolutionary — yet without raising any one above the rest as first cause or prime mover. The aim is that of demonstrating the possibilities for invention and intervention that accompany the recognition that there is nothing standing apart from the contingencies of our social practices and the resulting understanding of ourselves they produce, that grounds them as eternal or immutable. If we change our practices we change ourselves, and change what it is to be human.

 

What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. If you believe in the world, you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small in their surface and volume [...] Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people. [17]

 

Our discussion has led us back to the notion with which we began (Section 1.1) — the existence of two tendencies, that of stability, regularity and control, and that of creation, change and disruption. What is the status of these tendencies, and can they be shown to be fundamental?  This raises the question of Deleuze-Guattari’s method of stratoanalysis, the point of which is to examine the contingencies of matter and life, on the basis of a complex materialism which refuses an a priori distinction between the behaviour of humans, that of animals, and that of organic and inorganic processes. This is not to propose a universal homogeneity of the interactions of material processes — some ludicrously simplistic cosmic reductionism — but instead to recast our investigation of language in terms of layer after layer of immense complexity where the primary terms are no longer human subjects and their conscious needs and desires.

 

As we have seen, the purpose of the analysis is to strip out transcendencies, terms such as ‘human’ and ‘language’ which remain unchallenged or uncritiqued throughout the investigation. Instead, we are reaching for a ‘bottom-up’ approach which tries to keep in view both the pandemonium of low-level interactions and the emergent, high-level controls and regularities that are exhibited by the most complex systems. Such an analysis cannot proceed without its interests being declared from the outset; it is a philosophical or ethical enterprise and not a scientific one; its targets are dictated not by the determinacy of some sort of scientific objectivity but by an interest in transforming our notions of language and the human, of opening up the paths closed off by traditional approaches, of increasing our powers and potentials, the possibilities of creation, of a people.

 

This last term is to be emphasised on the basis of the social conception of language elucidated above. The weight of our common sense assumptions about subjects and their signs can be dissolved by due attention to collectivities, both extant and potential, possible and impossible. Language, we have argued, is always already public and social; each enunciation is the product of a collectivity, and only secondarily is it attributable to a single individual. While on one level it could be seen as nothing more than a distinction in points of view — whether collective or individual is seen as primary, or whether the collective is universal or relative, global or local — it should become apparent that if the account is successful it will show the standpoint of the individual to be a small subset of the interactions of collectivities, and that the shifting constellations of these collectivities produce an unlimited range of possible individuations.