<<TRANSMATHOME

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

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

 

4. Deconstruction and Schizopragmatics [1]

 

4.0 Introduction

Having in the last chapter illustrated some connections between Deleuze-Guattari and Wittgenstein, and in the process filling out our pragmatic approach to language, I now continue this process by contriving a confrontation of sorts between Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida. I will begin with a sketch comparing the respective approaches of Derrida and Deleuze-Guattari, to make at least some of my prejudices and preconceptions apparent at the outset, before attempting an analysis of the role of Austin’s speech acts in either corpus. The main focus of this analysis will be to show how Deleuze-Guattari escape the deconstructive deadlock and attempt to do something. [2]   In so doing, the analysis will argue that Derrida’s approach — for example, how he might respond to the previous sentence (grist enough for one or two small volumes there, surely) — could be said to be a ‘restricted economy’, in comparison to the more ‘general economy’ proposed by Deleuze-Guattari. [3] A second aim will be to show how, nonetheless, many of Derrida’s conceptual innovations are consistent in certain ways with those of Deleuze-Guattari, and how an account of such connections is useful for our broader discussion of Deleuze-Guattari. I do not disagree with the arguments Derrida presents, but my position is that he does not go nearly far enough.

 

4.1 Differences in Method

The ‘general strategy’ of deconstruction, writes Derrida, is ‘to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions within metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it’. [4]   It is thus a ‘double science’, consisting in the critical project of ‘overturning’ metaphysics’ binaries, and the positive project of enacting a ‘double [or multiple] writing’. Derrida’s cautionary tone as regards the critical move is reminiscent of Deleuze-Guattari’s circumspection in A Thousand Plateaus. [5] To deconstruct is to

 

overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition. Therefore, one might proceed too quickly to a neutralization that in practice would leave the previous field untouched, leaving one no hold on the previous opposition, thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively (P 41).

 

The positive move involves the emergence of a new “concept” (or “word”, where the meanings of ‘concept’ and ‘word’ have subtly changed) — a “concept” that cannot be assimilated by the old regime. For example, Derrida’s expanded and transformed “concept” of ‘writing’ (to which we will return), which

 

simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it, and releases the dissonance of writing within speech, thereby disorganising the entire inherited order and invading the entire field (P 42).

 

This is, for the most part, a completely different philosophical approach from that of Deleuze-Guattari’s schizoanalysis, as evinced by the contrast between their respective styles and subject matter. In practice, this means that while Derrida will focus on a small set of specific texts in each work, often only one at a time, and from these draw sweeping but inconclusive conclusions about the whole Western metaphysical tradition (which for him is intrinsically linked to problems in ‘everyday language’ [6] ), Deleuze-Guattari will cover a massive range of cross-disciplinary sources and draw sweeping but ambivalent conclusions about the Cosmos itself (see ‘Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines’, the conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus). Both are doing something new with (and to) philosophy. Derrida is its self-styled outside, enacting the “confrontation” (that may never actually happen) ‘between the tradition and its other, an other that is not even “its” other any longer’. [7]   His approach is often joyful and light (brimming with puns and irony) but is nevertheless permeated with the painstaking gravity of its relation — as the Aufhebung that is not an Aufhebung [8] — to Western Philosophy. [9]   The interminability of the deconstructive process (at least from the point of view, perhaps astoundingly naïve, from which other paths are possible) seems to lock its progenitor (and much of the disparate ‘school’ he has engendered) into a certain neutered agnosticism.

 

Deleuze-Guattari, on the other hand, are ‘pop analysts’ (TP 24), explicitly concerned with writing for the short- as opposed to long-term memory (TP 15-16). In ‘The Geology of Morals’, they adopt as spokesman Professor Challenger, readily graspable as a caricature of “themself” — not only is his relation to any particular extant discipline decidedly shady (‘the professor was not a geologist or a biologist, he was not even a linguist, ethnologist or psychoanalyst; what his speciality had been was long since forgotten’ (TP 42-43)) and effectively bicephalous (he ‘was double, articulated twice [...] people never knew which of him was present’ (TP 43)), he also shared Deleuze’s predilection (N 6) for an intimate but unorthodox relation to the ‘authorities he appealed to’: ‘The professor cynically congratulated himself on taking his pleasure from behind, but the offspring always turned out to be runts and wens, bits and pieces, if not stupid vulgarisations’ (TP 42) [10] . There is more to this than jokey self-deprecation. In laying things out thus, Deleuze-Guattari make a ‘virtue’ of everything that differentiates their projects from the logocentric, onto-theological approach with which Derrida remains locked in conflict — and thus, arguably, achieve a more positive movement than Derrida’s resolutely critical endeavours. ‘Even in the realm of theory, especially in the realm of theory, any precarious and pragmatic framework is better than tracing concepts, with their breaks and progress changing nothing’ (TP 24). By way of contrast, consider Derrida’s self-restricting announcement that ‘we are not concerned with comparing the content of doctrines, the wealth of positive knowledge; we are concerned, rather, with discerning the repetition or permanence at a profound level of discourse, of certain fundamental schemes and of certain directive concepts’. [11]

 

To pre-empt the fuller discussion that must follow (but only in part in the present thesis) about the relation between deconstruction and schizopragmatics, one which tentatively awaits the long-rumoured book on Deleuze by Derrida, let me suggest a simplistic version of that relation. Derrida limits himself to talking about what in Deleuze-Guattari’s terms is the level of expression, and never reaches its necessary interrelation (double articulation) with the level of content. In their account of the Strata (TP 39-74), Deleuze-Guattari show the futility of analysing one without the other, of succumbing to the illusion that everything is in some sense linguistic (and for this we could read ‘writing’ in Derrida’s sense [12] ) is ‘the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between one’s pincers’ (TP 65) — which misses the real, categorical differences, both among the systems of signs belonging to different strata, and between the two levels of each stratum (content and expression — which, as we will show in Chapter 6, are not to be confused with signifier/signified!).

 

4.2 ‘Writing’ and ‘Indirect Discourse’

Before launching into the illocutionary, I will examine Derrida’s “concept” of ‘writing’, in order to point to certain correspondences between it and the primacy of the notion of ‘indirect discourse’ in Deleuze-Guattari’s account of language, en route touching on the problematic role of the sign in either approach.

 

In ‘Signature Event Context’ (Sec) [13] Derrida begins by restoring the polysemic [14] value of the word ‘communication’, arguing that to assume it can be ascribed a ‘proper or primitive’ meaning — whether this is a semantically or semiotically orientated definition, e.g. ‘the vehicle, transport or site of passage of a meaning, and of a meaning that is one’, or alternatively a nonsemiotic definition, e.g. ‘the transmission of a shock, tremor or force’ — is inadmissible. This is because, given that we are already dealing with the communication of notions of communication, and the meaning of notions of meaning, there is no foundation on which we can complacently rest our analysis — the very concepts we are appealing to in using language, in writing, at all, are undergoing transformation. For example, to suggest that either of the above definitions of ‘communication’ is primary and that the other stems from its metaphorical application elsewhere, presupposes some notion or other of transport or transmission as that which is ‘constitutive of the very concept of metaphor’ (MP 309-310). [15]

 

With this in mind, Derrida tries to get at that which is constitutive of writing, namely iterability, or the inherent possibility of repetition-transformation, that belongs to every system of marks or ‘graphemes’. Writing is classically defined as that which inscribes a mark or series of marks, each of which is ‘not exhausted in the present of its inscription, and which can give rise to an iteration both in the absence of and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject who, in a given context, has emitted or produced it’ (MP 317). It is part of ‘the very structure of the written’ that ‘a written sign carries with it a force of breaking with its context’ — that is, the written sign, or the mark in general, has an inherent legibility, ‘by virtue of its essential iterability’, which is in no way tied to its ‘original’ meaning, the writer’s intention, or indeed anything that belongs purely to the context of the inscription (ibid). Derrida thus distinguishes this context-independent functionality of the sign, the possibility that it can always be grafted into other chains of signs, from its (now severely circumscribed) capacity for communication.

 

This structural possibility of being severed from its referent or signified (and therefore from communication and its context) seems to me to make of every mark, even if oral, a grapheme in general, that is, as we have seen, the nonpresent remaining of a differential mark cut off from its alleged “production” or origin. And I will extend this law even to all “experience” in general, if it is granted that there is no experience of pure presence, but only chains of differential marks’ (MP 318). [16]

 

The ‘sign’ for Derrida is no longer composed of a relation of signifier and any kind of determined signified. He takes Saussure’s injunction that the sign is determined by its difference from all other signs to its extreme — inserting difference (or rather différance, whose crucial aspect here is that it is not to be conceived negatively, but rather positively or productively) into the structure of the sign itself, the possibility of repetition-difference or iterability that belongs to the sign qua sign. This is to say, having abandoned any ideal notion of ‘pure presence’, the sign is a sign because of this capacity to be differentiated from itself through repetition. Thus whether or not it remains tied to a particular signified, or tied to any signified at all, is undecidable in advance. Having transformed the notion of the sign in this way, Derrida finds its application is unlimited: the thing itself is a sign.

 

Henry Staten in his fascinating study Wittgenstein and Derrida [17] argues that this move, contrary to the accounts of many of Derrida’s critics (and followers), does not amount to saying that

 

“there isn’t really any ‘thing in itself’”; nor does it mean “the thing is really all in your mind”; nor “there are really only words — we can’t get outside of words.” Instead, ‘it means approximately this: “Let us consider the experience of what we call ‘things themselves’ as structured more like the presence of signs than like the experience of an idealized ‘full presence’” (WD 58).

 

Earlier in his argument, Staten states that ‘The deconstructive critique of language could even be phrased as a denial that there is language’ — or rather, ‘a denial that there is any boundary of essence between what we call language and what we think of as nonlanguage’ (WD 20-21). But in broadening writing and the sign in this way, and correspondingly deprivileging language (as understood by linguistics for example), can it seriously be claimed that Derrida leaves us with anything other than a linguistic metaphor that encompasses everything, with nothing but severely underdetermined signifiers circulating around from chain to chain?  Staten’s formulation above suggests this metaphoricity, as well as a (perhaps irreducible) phenomenological orientation:

 

“Let us consider the experience of what we call ‘things themselves’ as structured more like the presence of signs than like the experience of an idealized ‘full presence’” (WD 58, my emphasis).

 

There are two responses I wish to present to this reading — intra- and extra-Derridean respectively. Derrida’s aforementioned gesture towards the problem of metaphor in Sec could be developed as either a defence or a critique of Staten’s formulation, both making the same point: to complain about metaphoricity as a literary or stylistic technique as opposed to a suitably philosophical one is to rely on uninterrogated oppositions such as literal/metaphorical or philosophical/literary that Derrida would not countenance. Thus in defence of Staten, we could say that the power of the ‘like’ in his formulation is as good a way as any to approach the account being presented, it is simply more explicit about the non-literal, impure, underdetermined relation to its object that must belong to it as writing. Alternatively, and to Staten’s cost, we could complain that he is inaccurately — or let us say, unhelpfully — reinserting Derrida’s thesis into the economy of ‘mere’ metaphor with which Derrida has already had done. [18]

A second response, and one more central, if not to this chapter then to the thesis of which it forms part, is the possibility of a connection with Deleuze-Guattari. I have proposed that there are important convergences; this is in spite of the many passages in the work of the latter that are directed against any linguisticisation or semiologisation of reality that are symptomatic of many Derridean approaches: for example, in ‘The Geology of Morals’ where they talk of the twin dangers of ‘the imperialism of language affecting all of the strata’, and ‘the imperialism of the signifier affecting language itself, affecting all regimes of signs, and the entire expanse of the strata on which they are located’ (TP 65). The question of the sign, and the ways in which Deleuze-Guattari wish to retain but circumscribe its usage (limiting it to ‘signs of deterritorialization and reterritorialization’, and thus applicable to asignifying instances as well as signifying ones (TP 67-68)) will be raised in Chapter 5. The current proposal is that Derrida’s account can be read as compatible with that of Deleuze-Guattari (in that it releases the sign from signification), and the extent to which it describes signification is the extent to which it is also critical of it.

 

What if we were to assume that, by ‘writing’, Derrida had in mind the same notion that Deleuze-Guattari designate by ‘indirect discourse’? [19]   There are two directions to which such a move lends itself, either towards Derrida (thus making Deleuze-Guattari’s account of language, of order-words, stretch out across all the strata in some way, relating every sign, signifying or not, to the ‘implicit presupposition’ of the order-word: such a move could be made to insert Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (in which ‘sense’ is presented as just this implicit presupposition that constitutes particular signs and subjects) into the Cosmic materialism of A Thousand Plateaus) or else towards Deleuze-Guattari (where Derrida’s ‘writing’ is instead taken to relate only to the level of expression on the alloplastic or cultural stratum). This choice depends on one’s interests, and there are strong arguments for moving in either direction. The former movement returns us to the idea (introduced in Section 1.2) of matter itself ‘stating’ and solving problems, with human writing as a subset of this all-encompassing view. The latter move has the advantage of focusing the discussion on the tangible level of the human. However, let us leave aside this discussion and return to the more concrete and less fantastically speculative notion of the speech act.

 

4.3 Austin and the Illocutionary

In this section and the next, I will draw some connections and divergences between Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida, showing the extent to which either account connects with and surpasses the speech act theory of J L Austin. As far as Deleuze-Guattari are concerned, Austin is a valuable stepping stone in their critique of the ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ (TP 75-110), and the setting up of their pragmatics. By opening up the zone of the illocutionary, Austin has tied language to action: words are primarily something one does things with — and communication of information is but a tiny subset of all the things one can do. [20] However for Deleuze-Guattari (and in a less extensive way for Derrida) the status of the ‘one’ (or ‘many’) doing things with words changes radically. Language can only be defined as ‘the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech acts current in a language at a given moment’ (TP 79). The move cannot be from identity (of speakers and intentions, of signifiers and signifieds, of words and things), to speech acts (the successful utilisation of these relations in order to inform, communicate or otherwise act). For Deleuze-Guattari, the signification required by information-transmission and the subjects in communication both presuppose or ‘depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given social field’ (ibid). What, then, becomes of speech acts as we knew them?  We must backtrack and examine the Derridean route.

 

Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, for Derrida, marks a Nietzschean moment in English philosophy:

 

Austin had to free the analysis of the performative from the authority of the value of truth, from the opposition true/false, at least in its classical form, occasionally substituting for it the value of force, of difference of force (illocutionary or perlocutionary force) (MP 322).

 

As Derrida shows (both in Sec and at considerably greater length in Limited Inc), however, Austin reintroduces precisely this distinction in his initial move of bracketing off all ‘unhappy’ or ‘infelicitous’ speech acts as being ‘parasitic’ on the paradigmatic cases of those which are deemed happy or felicitous. To qualify for the latter honour, you must first be in no doubt as to your own intentions in performing the act; you must succeed fully and totally in the articulation of these intentions; said articulation must therefore be the pure coincidence of you-the-speaker’s words and intentions (there must be no element of ‘merely acting’ — i.e. citing the words without really meaning them, all the way down — or any other kind of deviation from good sense and gravity); those to whom they are directed must share your language and conventions of behaviour; they must hear your enunciation clearly and with no margin for misunderstanding or confusion; they must then act precisely according to what is appropriate and do so because of your enunciation and not for any other reason... (these criteria must proliferate until all possible errors or impediments to the success of the act are removed). Austin admits that such a pure instance of a speech act may never actually exist, but nevertheless takes this idealised case as the model from which all our everyday, messy and otherwise unhappy speech acts are derived.

 

John Searle, in his Reply to Derrida (itself quoted in total by Derrida in his response, ‘Limited Inc a b c...’ (Ltd)) insists that this is a straightforward strategic move on Austin’s part which does not involve any kind of evaluation of the differing degrees of felicitousness in speech acts, nor any kind of ontological prioritising of the model over its copies — but as Derrida convincingly shows, this defence is untenable. Austin and Searle both require this idealisation of speech acts for their analyses to get off the ground in the first place, since neither wants to accept or even consider Derrida’s moves as will shortly be described, since they would seem to preclude any possibility of a science, philosophy or pragmatics of speech acts as Austin and Searle have formulated them.

 

For Derrida, Austin’s illegitimate move, his lapse back into ontotheological metaphysics, is the move of setting the ideal instance up as that against which all imperfect instances are measured. Derrida employs his characteristic technique of turning the author’s words against himself — in this case, Austin’s allowance that error or infelicity, while incidental to the ideal model, is nonetheless a latent possibility within any performative (MP 323, Words 18-19).

 

Derrida deconstructs the notion that statements proceed or function through identity (whether identity of words and intention, or of words and things). Rather, he argues, this posited, ideal identity is permeated by the essential, immanent possibility of error, abuse or ‘infelicity’. Therefore, if there can be a theory of speech acts at all, it cannot proceed on the basis of such an unattainable ideal, without a) presupposing a fundamentally inaccurate model of how language works (where the ideal has to be the rule rather than the impossible exception); b) having to admit its interminability — in Ltd, Derrida argues that the ‘set’ of papers which constitute this “particular debate” necessarily remains open, as each new instalment will itself be subject to the application and re-application of all the questions and categories accredited by the theory of speech acts,

 

whether or not they are performatives, in what measure and aspect they depend upon the per- or illocutionary, whether they are serious or not, normal or not, void or not, parasitic or not, fictional or not, citational or not, literary, philosophical, theatrical, oratorical, prophetical or not, etc. (Ltd 39);

 

and therefore c) remaining subject to speech act theory’s ‘fundamentally moralistic’ presuppositions (ibid.).

 

This last point Derrida applies to Foucault’s archaeology (in ‘To Have the Ear of Philosophy’, a conversation with Lucette Finas, cited in Ltd 108, note 1), and given the ties between Foucault’s archaeology (specifically, his account of the ‘statement’) and Deleuze-Guattari’s appropriation of Austin, the same issue can be raised in relation to A Thousand Plateaus. [21] To what extent is the notion of the order-word, as illocutionary act, infected with Austin’s moralism?  Is a pragmatics of the order-word inevitably moralistic?  Or, do Deleuze-Guattari depend on aspects of speech act theory that Derrida has blown out of the water?

 

4.4 The Order-Word

What exactly is the order-word?  We need to tease apart the various elements of Deleuze-Guattari’s analysis — simultaneously flagging the correspondences with deconstruction. The order-word emerges in their attack on the presuppositions of linguistics (their headings to the four sections of the chapter ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ in A Thousand Plateaus), i.e.:

 

I.     “Language is Informational and Communicational” (TP 75)

 

II.    “There Is an Abstract Machine of Language That Does Not Appeal to Any ‘Extrinsic’ Factor” (TP 85)

 

III.   “There Are Constants or Universals of Language That Enable Us to Define It as a Homogeneous System” (TP 93)

 

IV. “Language Can Be Scientifically Studied Only under the Conditions of a Standard or Major Language” (TP 101)

 

‘Postulates of Linguistics’ is a circle, its four sections (corresponding to the four postulates above) tracing a path through the following stages: I. the introduction of key concepts (order-word, indirect discourse, incorporeal transformation and collective assemblage of enunciation, which presents the pragmatics of the order-word (as an aspect of language’s intrinsic continuous variation/relation to the outside) as prior to syntax and semantics, and as prior to any reified notions of information or communication);  II. the situating of the collective assemblage of enunciation as always tied to a particular machinic assemblage of bodies, where the latter (as bodies, their actions and passions) are distinguished from the former (incorporeal transformations, redundant complexes of statement and act that are attributed to or inserted instantaneously into the realm of bodies) — they thus enact the critique of linguistics insofar as it ignores this necessary interweaving of language and life;  III. the presentation of language as in continuous variation, and amongst whose variables are to be found nonlinguistic as well as linguistic factors — thus, language as a set of constants is replaced by the Abstract Machine as the set of lines of variation which are effectuated in particular Concrete Assemblages (with both machinic and collective aspects, both of which are more or less relatively deterritorialised at any given point); and finally IV. the introduction of the distinction between Major and Minor languages, which does not distinguish between types or categories of language, but between ways of approaching the same language — i.e. from the quasi-scientific standpoint of linguistics, with its insistence on grammaticality, on syntactic and phonetic constants and so on, and the concomitant political project of legislative standardisation, or from the standpoint of indirect discourse itself, where language’s intrinsic variation is encouraged, exacerbated (‘making language stammer’ (TP 104), becoming a foreigner in one’s own tongue), everything is set in motion, and the capacity of order-words to become components of passage (passwords) is utilised. In what follows, I will trace a path through this argument that will make things more clear.

 

The order-word is presented as command/judgement/death sentence (TP 76) — an initial definition which shores up the key aspects of the order-word seen more generally (as the ‘elementary unit of language’ (TP 76)). These intertwined aspects can be summarised as follows: a) that it is the implicit, nondiscursive presupposition of a statement (TP 77 and 524n9), it is the illocutionary act that is in a relationship of redundancy with the statement; b) that the order-word is the effectuation (through this redundancy of statement and act) of an instantaneous, incorporeal transformation that is attributed to bodies; and c) that since this statement-act can only occur in certain circumstances, the order-word is noted as ‘precisely that variable that makes a word an enunciation’ (TP 82).

 

Deleuze-Guattari are rejecting the picture of words and things, signifiers and signifieds. Instead, words, even statements, are things or bodies alongside other things or bodies. What constitutes the ‘superlinearity of expression’, [22] however, what distinguishes the cultural or alloplastic stratum from the physical and biological strata, is the variability intrinsic to language that allows it (if the circumstances are right) to effect incorporeal transformations of bodies — instantaneous, immediate changes that are distinct from the incremental modifications of bodies and their actions and passions. [23] Deleuze-Guattari’s examples of incorporeal transformations range from the familiar courtroom scene in which the accused becomes the convict through the judge’s performative, to the ‘mass-media act’ [24] whereby the passengers of a hijacked plane are turned into hostages, not by the gestures of the Uzi-wielding terrorist but by the international news bulletins. The illocutionary is defined as the set (or continuum) of (possible, or rather, ‘virtual-real’ (TP 100)) order-words in a given society.

 

Do Deleuze-Guattari therefore face the problem raised by Derrida, of the felicity of speech acts?  Are they dependent on a model whereby everything works out and everyone concerned is acting in good faith, in spite of the numerous cases in which, for example, hoodlums laugh in the faces of policemen, pupils intimidate teachers and politicians’ insistence on ‘family values’ are often roundly derided by the general populace? Deleuze-Guattari raise the problem of the circumstances of the order-word in order to show that the order-word can be equated with the variation within language that makes incorporeal transformations possible — the obvious example being the distinction between any old fool shouting ‘I declare a general mobilization’ and the situation in which that old fool happens to have the authority to do so (TP 82). In the latter case, the appropriate variable has been effectuated, constituting the necessary redundancy between statement and the act in which it simultaneously consists. But what is at stake here is not a ‘context’ external to language. Still less is it the intentions or good faith of an individual actor. Rather, the effectuation (or not) of the appropriate variable is a function of the collective assemblage of enunciation, which we have encountered already as the illocutionary realm of a particular society at a given moment, the set of order-words appropriate to it, or (in a formulation that will become crucial) the particular mixtures of regimes of signs that are dominant.

 

So, rather than begin from the point of speech act theory as conceived of by Austin and Searle, where it is regarded as an innovation to consider those instances where things are being done with words, as opposed to their merely being deployed to inform or communicate, and where the general set-up of a society of free individuals whose normal mode is to act honestly and rationally towards one another, Deleuze-Guattari, like Derrida, start from another position entirely. For Derrida, as we have seen, what must precede any setting up of speech act theory is the whole system of writing, the notion of the sign as intrinsically iterable, and the necessary flaw or fissure this inserts into any notion of full presence — the sign as something which by its very nature is differentiated from itself is necessary before any confused individuals can set about trying to insist otherwise. For Deleuze-Guattari, instead of ‘writing’ we have ‘indirect discourse’ (see fn125 above), the movement from saying to saying of language, the many voices within a single voice, the presence in any one enunciation of all others of the same ‘family’ (the set of all ‘I do’s, of all ‘Did you spill my pint?’s, of all ‘This is not Philosophy!’s). On this basis, such phenomena as ‘intuition’, glossolalia and seances can be understood in terms of special attention to, or celebration or exploitation of this aspect of language. Every enunciation is in this way already collective, whether the population in question is that of subpersonal singularities, (‘larval and fledgling selves’) or of a particular minority, or other particular spatio-temporal cross-section of the socius. Direct discourse is an extraction from this ‘anonymous murmur’ (F 18), it can only be reached via a ‘dismemberment of the collective assemblage; but the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice’ (TP 84).

 

This extraction of direct discourse from indirect discourse, and its establishment in a position supposedly of self-evident primacy, is one aspect of stratification, which proceeds through the ossification of continuous variation, of the intensive micro-variations of matters-functions on the Plane of Consistency. Deleuze-Guattari’s list of linguistics’ postulates above defines the assumptions of Major language, language considered in terms of an underlying syntactic or phonetic structure (often assumed to be a structure or capacity hard-wired in the human brain), a homogeneous system with listable constants or universals, from which the everyday deviances of speech are the exception and precisely not the rule. To assume language ‘really is’ like this, underneath all the colloquialisms, dialects, patois and so on, as well as all the variations, inflections and idiosyncrasies in an individual’s speech depending on who she is talking to and where she is, is not simply to adopt the disinterested position of the scientist, it is to adopt a State-centred politics that must deprivilege the inherent variations in language and label them incompetent or ungrammatical:

 

Linguistics can claim all it wants to be nothing but a pure science — it wouldn’t be the first time that the order of pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order (TP 101). [25]

 

4.5 Conclusion: Resplendent in Divergence

So far, then, we can see at least two correspondences between Derrida and Deleuze-Guattari:  1. In either case, the basic linguistic element (the sign for Derrida, the order-word for Deleuze-Guattari) has the characteristic of iterability or difference-from-itself. 2. Just as Derrida notes Austin’s complicity with metaphysics in his extraction of self-present, self-identical constants (in his idealisation of actor, context and the capacity to exhaustively describe them both), Deleuze-Guattari note a corresponding complicity between linguistics’ attempts to regulate and standardise language, and the State’s stratic procedures for disciplining and regulating bodies. The correspondence between these otherwise very different moves can be summarised in the suggestion that Derrida’s deconstruction of phallogocentrism, of onto-theological metaphysics (and of the “everyday language” that presupposes it) is (in its critical aspect) entirely consonant with Deleuze-Guattari’s account of the Strata. Both wish to have done with identitarian accounts of language, whether based on unproblematised notions of signification, of notions of timeless structure, or on a sense-giving transcendental subject. For both parties, then, the theorisation of ‘speech acts’ on the basis of such constants will only ever be a strategic, pragmatic project, and not one that can claim exhaustive scientificity, or any other form of ‘the last word’.

 

However, while Derrida titillates himself with page after page of the ritual humiliation of John Searle (at least in Ltd), Deleuze-Guattari present an account of language which, arguably, is more practical than that of Derrida in a number of ways.

 

·      In ways we will explore more thoroughly in the remainder of the thesis, Deleuze-Guattari’s account presents ways of understanding the relations between words and things, or rather statements-acts, and the bodies on which they intervene, leaving signifier and signified behind, while Derrida just keeps agonising over the irreducible psychologism of Saussure (P 23).

 

·      This theorisation in terms of bodies and events is certainly no less pragmatic and flexible than Derrida’s; indeed his suggestion that ‘the thing is itself a sign’ makes some kind of sense, since gestures, expressions and so on are obviously as efficacious as transmitting certain order-words as statements are, in the appropriate circumstances. Yet these circumstances are dependent on the collective assemblage of enunciation, itself in reciprocal presupposition with the machinic assemblage — and both assemblages being Concrete instantiations of a singular Abstract Machine. All this takes us a long way from the individual thing which may or may not be a sign, and demands a diagrammatics of the Concrete Assemblage (in terms of the arrangements of bodies on the one hand and the mixtures of regimes of signs on the other) before we can talk about individual signs: not a particularly straightforward way to proceed, but nonetheless a practical one.

 

·      Their account of Minor Language (and the related discussions of Minor Literature [26] ) provides tentative suggestions for effectuating this setting-in-variation of language, this becoming-minoritarian: subtract the ‘supplementary dimensions’ of the superimposed constants of grammaticality, and saturate all the intrinsic variation — make language stutter. [27]

 

As for the queries with which we ended section 4.3: do Deleuze-Guattari rely on a moralistically normative account of speech acts?  This point is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, for Austin and Searle the ideal situation is primary, but for Deleuze-Guattari, indirect discourse is primary, the continua of all a society’s order-words at a given point, including all their ecstatic, cheerful, indifferent, gloomy, and despairing instances, and all are virtually present in each. Deleuze-Guattari are happy for Derrida to pop up and insist that the possibility of ‘infelicity’ is always present whether you like it or not, since for them, this is what is great about the order-word, its redeeming feature — acting not as ‘little death sentence’ but as password. This capacity (the priority of indirect discourse) is what can set it in motion and give it the virtual-real capacity to rearrange things in creative new ways, through an inclusive disjunction of contrary instances and impulses. On this level at least, Derrida’s account of the productivity of différance seems to obtain.

 

Secondly, Deleuze-Guattari undoubtedly have a normative slant to their account of language, consisting as it is in an attack on the ‘molar’ presuppositions of linguistics, as opposed to the ‘molecular’ linguistics of variation and transformation they propose. Yet this is strictly speaking an ethical rather than a moralising approach, as, I would argue, was that of Foucault (against whom Derrida initially made the claim), i.e. it concerns an immanent pragmatics in which the rules are subject to transformation with every move — there is no categorical imperative, or indeed any Universal laws, nor even any implicit, normative assumption of ‘good’ or ‘common sense’, or of a Normality that should be striven for.