<<TRANSMATHOME

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

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

 

5. Corpo-real-ising Judgement

 

5.0 Introduction

In this chapter we will trace two different approaches to language and judgement, the pragmatics or schizoanalysis (schizopragmatics for short) of Deleuze-Guattari, and the realist textualism of Horst Ruthrof. [1] Both approaches have many differences with traditional philosophical and linguistic approaches to language. Both seek to reintroduce bodies as fundamental components of any understanding of language — semantics, unless it is dealing with purely formal languages, is nothing without pragmatics. For an adequate understanding of how meanings are produced, its irreducible connection to the social, corporeal or material must be articulated, particularly if one’s interests are political. While Deleuze-Guattari are more explicitly concerned with the political aspects of language, Ruthrof, in an article in the South Atlantic Quarterly, argues that due to lingering formalist tendencies in Deleuze-Guattari, they fail to articulate an account of language that gives an adequate role to the body, hence crippling their political project and undermining their philosophical credibility. [2] I will attempt to answer this charge, in the process, articulating again the key components of Deleuze-Guattari’s approach to language, which as we will see, hinges on their ambivalence towards the order-word.

 

After introducing Ruthrof’s project as presented in his Semantics and the Body, I will examine his application of this approach to Deleuze-Guattari, taking the opportunity to work through their account, with particular reference to the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. From this I will draw some problems both with Ruthrof’s reading of Deleuze-Guattari and with his project as a whole.

 

5.1 The Non-Semiotic Noumenon

At the heart of Ruthrof’s problematic is the relationship between language, meanings and the world. Linguistics, linguistic philosophy and the philosophy of language have all neglected the non-verbal, the non-linguistic, the corporeal — namely ‘sign systems (visual, tactile, olfactory, proximic, haptic, gustatory, auditory ... etc)’ (SB 35). His central thesis, as expressed in the last lines of Semantics and the Body, is that ‘For meaning to occur the non-verbal must inhabit the linguistic schema. In itself language is no more than a symbolic grid which does not mean at all’ (SB 261). Earlier in the book he writes

 

both [empiricism and phenomenology] duck the question of how a significatory system such as language can be linked with something non-significatory. Perception, experience and world need to be translated into signs before the link can be made. Paradoxically, two philosophical traditions — one following Frege, the other Husserl — by committing themselves to opposite positions commit similar errors: the assumption of ideality in natural language meanings and of the possibility of non-significatory phenomena (SB 169).

 

It is particularly the second point (‘the possibility of non-significatory phenomena’) that relates to Ruthrof’s reading of Deleuze-Guattari, in whom he finds traces of a Husserlian eideticism. I will focus on two of his claims. First, the inconceivability of asignifying signs, and second, the impossibility or at least irrelevance of formalist approaches to a ‘corporeal semantics’. As regards the first, I will argue that Deleuze-Guattari succeed both in relativising the sphere of signification to a small subset of actual acts of meaning-creation, namely those associated with judgement or semiotic subjection, but a disproportionately huge part of the theorising that has accompanied, and attempted to describe, meaningful activity in general. The second point causes more problems for Deleuze-Guattari, which we will tackle in reference to their use of the linguist Louis Hjelmslev in the next chapter.

 

I would like to argue that non-significatory phenomena are not impossible, nor can they only be postulated as ‘a kind of non-semiotic noumenon’, as Ruthrof decrees (SB 33). In fact, in arguing that appealing to non-signs is implausible or a challenge to our ‘intuitive grasp of what typically goes on when meanings are being produced’ (SB 33), Ruthrof shores up the underlying basis of his approach in thoroughgoing Kantian defence of common sense. Meaning, as Ruthrof argues, does not reside either in the dictionary or in language considered as a whole; it is a property of the much wider sphere of social doings. ‘Let us say that social doing of any kind is regarded as either meaningful or meaningless by a community,’ where the community could be ‘a tiny group or the population of the planet.’  This community ‘knows’ its world by imposing its ‘significatory matrix’ on it. The community can never escape this matrix of its own devising, since the very notion of an outside — an outside to the matrix of socially recognisable meaning — is indescribable. Understandably, Ruthrof writes,

 

for the purpose of describing meaning [...] this [non-semiotic noumenon] is of no further interest, since everything we can see, touch and talk about is available to us only in the form of signs: more or less meaningful and very rarely meaningless (SB 33).

 

Reference for Ruthrof is redefined in terms of intersemiotic corroboration — the coherence of different semiotics, governed on the one hand by our cultural form of life and on the other by physical laws. A kind of natural selection of cultures has ruled out all those where the accepted beliefs about the world are significantly divergent from how the world actually is, so that there are no forms of life in which drinking mercury or leaping off high buildings are seen as compatible with the preservation of life. The limits of our world are also those of our significatory matrix, writes Ruthrof, and despite his stated aims of bringing the Body back to semantics, he is happy to restate this as the ‘semiotic extension’ of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: [3] ‘The limits of our ‘world’ are not constituted solely by our language but by our sign systems in toto. The limits of our signs are the limits of our ‘world’’ (SB 34). I would argue that this constitutes a semiotic idealism which is little improvement on the linguistic idealism that Ruthrof attacks — and what is more, it prevents him accessing bodies, their actions and passions, altogether.

 

5.2 Having Done with Judgement

Ruthrof, in ‘Deleuze and the Body’, writes ‘We are dealing here with a machinic pragmatics that has political effects. So we need to ask how Deleuze’s semantic politics can operate as a pragmatics ­in a significatory frame, a semiotics’ (DB 566, my emphasis). Perhaps the reason this question (to quote Ruthrof again) ‘does not seem to have been asked in the relevant literature’ (DB 566) is that for Deleuze-Guattari, pragmatics is prior to semiotics, to significatory frames, so in their terms at least, the question does not make sense. Clearly there are fundamental differences in Ruthrof’s and Deleuze-Guattari’s initial orientations: Ruthrof is concerned with semantics, with the sphere of human communication, whereas Deleuze-Guattari’s pragmatics, in principle, is unlimited in scope, and has applications, or rather is its applications, everywhere or nowhere. Yet this would not seem to explain Ruthrof’s criticisms.

 

The Deleuze-Guattarian critique of signification functions on (at least) two levels — firstly signification as a process or event, which they show to be exclusive to specific periods in human history, to be more about subjugation than communication or representation, and to function on the basis of transcendental illusions (though nonetheless real for all that — transcendental illusions are real processes that affect behaviour as well as belief; the two are not helpfully separated); secondly signification as a theory, whereby the signifier is shown to fail to explain anything, and is itself in need of explanation. In short Deleuze-Guattari show that there is much more to be explored, there is much more to life as we are experiencing it now, than signs and their vicissitudes, and there is much more to signs than relations of signifier/signified. Just because Ruthrof prefaces his remark with the words ‘Strictly speaking’, it doesn’t make it any more true that ‘the only asignifying signs we have are formal signs in homosemiotic systems’ (DB 567).

 

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze-Guattari’s target is not simply psychoanalysis, but also the fundamental notions about man as being separate from nature, and constituted necessarily as a free, responsible individual, in a certain overdetermined set of relationships with his parents, siblings, spouse and offspring. Oedipus is figured in a variety of ways in the book, as a myth perpetuated by psychoanalysis (in its attempts, for instance, to ‘discover’ Oedipus amongst the savages) but also as a very real structure of subjectification (the processes by which subject-positions are assigned), at once transcendental illusion and material process with very real effects. Indeed it is in their account of the emergence of Oedipus, which they demonstrate to be closely associated first with ‘primitive’, then despotic, and finally capitalist society, they present the origins of writing and speech, and the way signification has eaten the Cosmos. This account, ‘Savages, Barbarians and Civilised Men’, (Anti-Oedipus chapter 3) is the tale of how Man came to see himself as an isolated unit whose prime characteristics were defined by his limited freedoms, his weighty responsibilities and his wishes, beliefs and needs. Their dense account has many levels, regarding their relationship with Marxism, psychoanalysis and ethnography, but for us the key stages are: the separation of the personal from the social, the changing relationship between the written and spoken word, and the bases for a schizoanalytic approach to language.

 

As proposed at the end of Chapter 2, for our purposes here, schizophrenisation is equivalent to capitalism’s process of decoding, where old customs, authorities, institutions and so on are privatised, to become yet more business opportunities and industries, whose significance is to be discerned purely in their success in the stock market. This decoding is always accompanied by a corresponding overcoding in terms of revived archaisms, whereby their old functions in the interests of the State are resuscitated in the interests of homeostasis; kept alive as mechanisms of control and stability, despite their anachronism. This is true even of language. ‘Writing has never been capitalism’s thing’ write Deleuze-Guattari,

 

Capitalism is profoundly illiterate. The death of writing is like the death of God or the death of the father: the thing was settled a long time ago, although the news of the event is slow to reach us, and there survives in us the memory of extinct signs with which we still write (AO 240).

 

This astonishing claim, drawing as it does on Nietzsche, stakes out the problematic in Deleuze-Guattari’s assault on everyday language as a battlefield of social repression-psychic repression. [4] Grammar, in this sense, as an organising principle in language, emerged with the original coupling of speech and writing, at stage two of Deleuze-Guattari’s universal history — the era of the despotic, Imperial State. They present an ironic, critical ‘universal history’, tracing the development from the ‘savages’ of the primitive territorial machine, to the ‘barbarians’ of the despotic State machine, to the ‘civilised men’ of capitalism. This account is ironic, because, as a history of sheer contingency, it nonetheless results in capitalism as a universal standpoint (yet at the same time entirely singular) from which alone it becomes possible to trace a universal history. [5]

 

For each of the three stages, Deleuze-Guattari delimit a ‘body without organs’ (BwO) on which the appropriate regime of representation is played out. [6] The BwO is a polyvalent concept for Deleuze-Guattari with a variety of applications, but in each case, the BwO is what stands in the place of a notion of origin or telos, and instead, while serving as surface of the whole, is figured as one machine-part alongside the rest in a shifting constellation — a proviso which prevents interpreting the BwO as a totality or unity. The general characteristics of the BwO are that it is pure immanence, pure desire, the zero intensity upon which worlds are played out — yet one could equally say that it is produced in and by those worlds, as their limit and end. In A Thousand Plateaus, they ask ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?’ a process that is equivalent, as we will see shortly, to having done with the judgement of God TP 150-151. [7]

The three bodies without organs that correspond to the three stages of universal history are the full body of the earth in territorial representation, the body of the despot in imperial representation, and finally the body of capital itself. In territorial representation, it is the full body of the earth itself that is the repressed represented of all representation — repressed because it is through the coding of all relations in terms of the socius that conceals the body of the earth and instantiates the territorial regime of the primitive socius: the earth becomes the territory. On this surface are played out diverse relationships of direct connotation — rituals in which bodies are marked, segments of power are maintained, social roles are reinforced — yet crucially, voice and graphism remain independent. The territorial machine does not lack writing. Such cultures are deemed oral because voice and graphism are not yet coupled, isomorphically locked in a single ‘language’ — instead, their graphic system ‘marks signs on the body that respond to the voice, react to the voice, but that are autonomous and do not align themselves on it’ (AO 202).  The governing principle is that of use and function: the two levels of mark and word are connected by the eye that ‘evaluates the suffering caused by the graphism’ (AO 204). In what Deleuze-Guattari call the ‘magic triangle’ of ‘voice-audition, graphism-body [and] eye-pain,’ we find a ‘system of cruelty where the word itself has an essentially designating function, but where the graphism itself constitutes a sign in conjunction with the thing designated, and where the eye goes from one to the other, extracting and measuring the visibility of the one against the pain of the other’ (AO 204).

 

From the point of view of this universal history, there is one key break in history, that diagnosed by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, the arrival all-at-once of the State, bringing with it the beginnings of the modern-day subject of bad conscience and cynicism. [8] Nietzsche writes of ‘a leap, a compulsion, a fate which nothing could ward off’, the emergence of the ‘oldest state’ ‘as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery’, which ‘continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped’ (GM 62-63). It is with the arrival of the despot, the conquering and enslaving of the primitive socius by the ‘blond beast’ (GM 25, 63), that the magic triangle is crushed: ‘the voice no longer sings but dictates, decrees; the graphy no longer dances, it ceases to animate bodies, but is set into writing on tablets, stones and books; the eye sets itself to reading.’ (AO 205)  The key transition has been from a socius in which all the radiating networks of ‘words, bodies, sufferings [...] formulas, things, affects [...] voices, graphic traces and eyes’ (AO 204) are linked in relations of use and function, to a socius in which meaning reigns: everything must now be traced back to the despot himself. ‘The triangle has become the base for a pyramid, all of whose sides cause the vocal, the graphic and the visual to converge toward the eminent unity of the despot.’ (AO 205). In Nietzsche’s words, within this ‘structure of domination that lives [...] there is absolutely no room for anything which does not first acquire ‘meaning’ with regard to the whole’ (GM 63).

 

In what sense does the arrival of the despot constitute ‘meaning’?  As I understand this transition, it is one from a situation where the chieftain of the primitive socius occupies a temporary, contingent hold on power, where the territory itself holds sway, to one where such notions as the divine right of kings or pharaohs, the instantiation of a line of rulers, whose authority is absolute — the move, say, from Earth Mother to Holy Father, the emergence of monotheism (which is not to rule out the possibility that there can be monotheistic, despotic conceptions of the Earth Mother). The network of ‘polyvocal graphisms flush with the real’ (AO 206) is replaced the emergence of transcendence as such. The plane of connotation, evaluation in terms of function, is superseded by the plane of subordination: instead of networks of detachable segments, a single term is detached and reified, causing a linearisation of the chains: this is the emergence of writing, a deterritorialised flow of graphisms that are infused with the ‘silent voice’ of the despot:

 

The mouth no longer speaks, it drinks the letter. The eye no longer sees, it reads. The body no longer allows itself to be engraved like the earth, but prostrates itself before the engravings of the despot, the region beyond the earth, the new full body (AO 206).

 

It is necessary to be more specific about the distinction between signs in general and signifiers in Deleuze-Guattari’s sense. They write: ‘The signifier is the sign that has become a sign of the sign, having crossed the threshold of deterritorialisation; the signifier is merely the deterritorialised sign itself’ (AO 206). This particular deterritorialisation, or detachment from the territory, is the constitution of transcendence: the detached object or supplementary dimension on which the whole chain depends. At this point language — not signs in general, but the specific complex of voice and graphism, a writing which presupposes the voice of the despot — is born: and this is the meaning (for Deleuze-Guattari at least) of Nietzsche’s ‘deification’ of grammar. Language, considered in terms of signification, and hence everything else that is considered in terms of signification, consists in the biunivocal relationship between a linear chain of signifiers (each signifying other signifiers) and the transcendent object (whether God, Pharaoh, Pope, phallus, Being — or even Being, absence, nothingness). ‘Despotism’, writes Nietzsche, ‘with its subjugation of the independent nobility, always prepares the way for some sort of monotheism’ (GM 66). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze-Guattari call this the regime of signification, and of it, write:

 

The signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign. All signs are signs of signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network without beginning or end that projects its shadow onto an atmospheric continuum (TP 112).

 

That this is a ‘funereal world of terror’ (TP 113) is because everything has been subordinated to signification, everything, or content dissolves in the infinite network of signifiers: there is nothing but the infinite gravity of a recursive ‘What does it mean?’

 

5.3 The Death Sentence

Guattari, speaking at Columbia University in 1975, describes the change of focus that he and Deleuze undertook between the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, away from a focus on psychoanalysis:

 

We thought the most formidable enemy was psychoanalysis because it reduced all forms of desire to a particular formation, the family. But there is another danger, of which psychoanalysis is but one point of application: it is the reduction of all modes of semiotization. What I call ­semiotization is what happens with perception, with movement in space, with singing, dancing, mimicry, caressing, contact, everything that concerns the body. All these modes of semiotization are being reduced to the dominant language, the language of power which coordinates its syntactic regulation with speech production in its totality. What one learns in school or in the university is not essentially a content or data, but a behavioural model adapted to certain social castes. [9]

 

The story of the rise to ascendancy of ‘language’ (conceived of in its significatory aspect) — the semiotization of the world under the great redundant signifier — is presented in A Thousand Plateaus as part of a universal ‘geology’ to correspond to the universal history of Anti-Oedipus. Moving even further from a personalist account, the ‘geology of morals’ presents (through a bizarre lecture by the bicephalous conceptual persona of Professor Challenger) the global process of stratification. Stratoanalysis, the mapping of the transition from intensity to the extensive world, utilises stratificatory processes itself — axioms, formulae, abstract relations — to diagram these processes from the molecular to the cultural. That there is this ambiguity, in Deleuze-Guattari’s (and our) complicity, or at least immersion, in the strata, is reflected by the way Professor Challenger, as he mutates and deterritorialises, gradually develops pincers, stigmata of the holy lobster.

 

The key to stratification are the ‘double pincers’ of content and expression: the terms are arbitrary but the distinction is always real — yet it does not pre-exist the double articulation of the strata. You either have both content and expression, or you have neither. Deleuze-Guattari write ‘we must combine all the resources of real distinction, reciprocal presupposition, and general relativism’ (TP 45). What constitutes a content in relation to one plane of expression could also constitute the expression of a different content. Each plane may itself be subdivided into content and expression. Despite this relativity, the distinction is nonetheless real, in that although they can be isomorphic to one another (TP 108), the two planes must be capable of some degree of independent variance: if not, it makes no sense to distinguish two separate planes, and we have reached instead the level of form and substance of content, and form and substance of expression. In both cases, the substance (from a paradigmatic point of view) is an amorphous continuum (for example, the colour spectrum, which is chopped up differently in different languages), or (from a syntagmatic point of view) a purport — to take a linguistic example, substance of content as a particular thought, such as ‘I need to go to the bathroom’, and substance of expression as the words ‘I need to go to the bathroom’. In both cases, the form that articulates these unformed purports into substances are dictated by the particular language in question: the form of content being ‘I need to go to the bathroom’ rather than ‘Ich möchte zum Badezimmer gehen’, and the form of expression being ‘I need to go to the bathroom’ rather than ‘Far aboot’s yer shunky?’

Deleuze-Guattari draw this terminology from ‘the Danish Spinozist geologist’ Louis Hjelmslev, who, they write, ‘was able to weave a net out of the notions of matter, content and expression, form and substance. These were the strata, said Hjelmslev’ (TP 43, referring to PTL). For Hjelmslev himself, engaged in the program of inventing Linguistic Theory as the source of metasemiotic and metasemiological analyses unlimited in scope, this net, which casts its shadow onto the amorphous continuum, is the ordering of nature according to the vast ranges of linguistic and semiotic systems of humanity, for Deleuze-Guattari the net is neither ‘linguistic in its scope or origin’ (TP 43), and the matter onto which it casts its shadow is far from inert or amorphous. It is the Body without Organs:

 

the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities (TP 43).

 

Here the BwO, the full body of the earth, is the Plane of Consistency — on whose surface the strata of Hjelmslev’s net congeal, fold upon one another and ossify.

 

Deleuze-Guattari’s use Hjelmslev’s formal resources in ways which, as we will explore in the next chapter, elude Ruthrof’s criticisms. Form is to be understood in terms of Deleuze-Guattari’s notion of abstraction. Forms of content and expression are statistical regularities with only relative stability and porous boundaries. They are completely dependent on the populations, packs, multiplicities, who are the ‘subjects’ of particular strata (TP 54). Whether we are talking geologically, biologically or socially, it is never a case of autonomous forms being imposed on inert matter. Intensive immanence is not homogeneous sludge, it is already fully differentiated. As we saw in Chapter 1, intensity is difference, it does not change in degree without also changing in kind. The appearance of formed substances in the strata is a result of their foldings, their selection of the more homeostatic organisations, so that regularities and correspondences are amplified through the machinery, generating localised areas of stability, and giving the illusion of a pre-existing natural order.

 

Formal transformation is possible in the material world, if we conceive of form in this way, as an aspect of virtual — incorporeal, yet fully material — processes, acting on and through stratified assemblages. What constitutes ‘incorporeal transformation’ can be conceived both as the instantaneous crossing of a threshold (resulting, for example, in the switching in a chemical clock) or as change imposed on a multiplicity from outside, from an exterior milieu. Deleuze-Guattari’s view of language, of which for them the basic determination is the order-word, is in terms primarily of such switching. The two aspects of stratified social assemblages, corresponding to content and expression, are the machinic assemblages of bodies, and the collective assemblages of enunciation. The emission of order-words by collective assemblages can be speech acts, but equally be mere gestures, the issuing of memos, the presentation of university degrees, passing of sentence, even (in certain circumstances) tacitly assenting in conversation — in each case a judgement has been performed, an instantaneous insertion into the flows of bodies (content) has been made from the deterritorialised flows of social signs (expression), causing a sudden shift in the relative relations of forces that may be anything from barely perceptible to catastrophic.

 

That language is not primarily about information or communication for Deleuze-Guattari is clear — rather, what we saw earlier in terms of the redundancy of signification also applies to the order-word: commands are not interested in conveying an understanding; they are miniature death sentences, little ‘stings’ to use Elias Canetti’s term (CP 351), which lodge in us until we can pass them on to someone else. And we all have massive investments in these controls, for if you play by their rules, accept willingly the stings from those higher up the structure and happily pass them on to those below, you will go far, my son. To summon up Nietzsche once again: in Human, all too Human, he writes,

 

In social dialogue, three-quarters of all questions and answers are framed in order to hurt the participants a little bit; this is why many men thirst after society so much: it gives them a feeling of their strength. [10]

 

However the order-word carries the ever-present possibility of a transformation of a different kind. It can also be a password, a component of passage, a switching point a new arrangement of forces, with greater rather than fewer available directions. While it is seldom as simple as this, the two extremes of the order-word continuum are death, as we have seen; the full force of social repression-psychic repression in the name of normalisation — how ever relative those norms may be to particular social milieus — and at the other end, creation, the ‘liberation of desire’, escape from bad conscience, blame, responsibility — away from the internalisation and reproduction of social norms, towards a transformed relationship of forces. Nietzsche at one point uses the concept of justice in reference to this bright new day — unshackling justice from judgement: 

 

No one is responsible for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is to be unjust. This is also true when the individual judges himself. The tenet is as bright as sunlight, and yet everyone prefers to walk back into the shadow and untruth — for fear of the consequences (HH 44). [11]

 

5.4 On the Formal

In what might be either irony or a typo, Ruthrof himself goes on to describe his single conceivable variety of asignifying signs as signifiers, albeit ‘signifiers that act as nothing more than placeholders for whatever variables we wish to substitute’ (DB 567). Several remarks: First, if Ruthrof finds ‘asignifying signs’ oxymoronic, what about ‘asignifying signifiers?’  Second, what is the force of ‘nothing more than placeholders?’  Is it that the signs in question are arbitrary, that they are not determined by the ‘variables we wish to substitute’?  The insight that linguistic signs are arbitrary, the disputes over rigid designators, natural kinds and so on (about which the jury are still very much out), would at the very least suggest that this arbitrariness is not a property of formal languages that sets them apart from natural languages. Third, is the point that in formal languages particular individual logicians, say, decide what the signs stand for, where as in natural languages everything is determined on the level of our intersubjective Vorstellungen?  The remarkable immunity to social constraints and influences that Ruthrof grants logicians, these Übermenschen who alone can meddle in the formal realm, would suggest a reification of formal languages on his part — they arrive like thunder, immune to social representations, and capable of transformations belonging to an order distinct from everything else that happens. I would counsel that logicians and their adventures are as much permeated by social constraints and political/libidinal investments as the rest of us.

 

If Ruthrof does not regard logicians in this way, it certainly seems to be the case that he allows for a dualism between the corporeal and the formal — for example, in his discussion of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, he asks ‘Is sense [placed by Ruthrof’s Deleuze in the ‘no-man’s-land between world and full formalisation’] quasi-propositional or quasi-corporeal or both?’ (DB 570)  (Might it not rather be neither?)  This strange isolation of the formal from the corporeal — if by corporeal Ruthrof means ‘standard social conceptuality’ — makes the formal an incorporeal netherworld, even if Ruthrof conceives of it only as a misguided technique or resource of logic-influenced philosophy. Is he denying that the formal is a part of the real world?  If it is not, how come it seems to have so many applications (consider the chastening success of the ‘hard’ sciences, mathematics, and the design and functioning of computers as three interrelated examples)?  If he is not denying that formal languages are as much active components of our world, as much as economies, exchange rates, particle accelerators and so on, might it not after all be the case that some ‘formalisation’ of natural languages could be possible?  In any case, I contest Ruthrof’s claim that

 

the description of language, especially from the perspective of a politically engaged pragmatics, gains nothing from the stipulation of empty signification, such as asignifying signs (DB 567).

 

On the contrary, if the choice is between a pragmatics that entertains the possibility of ‘empty signification’, and one which a-prioristically refuses to, it is the latter that would seem in danger of being politically limiting. What Deleuze-Guattari show is that it is far more dangerous dogmatically to insist that everything necessarily signifies, than to insist that it does not. The former makes ‘signification’ empty and redundant (even if a zone of supposedly non-signifying algebraic placeholders is staked out).

 

I would argue that Ruthrof is misguided in noticing an ‘impression of formalism’ (i.e. an antipathy towards a properly ‘corporeal’ semantics) lurking, as is the support he finds for it in Brian Massumi’s remark, ‘x = x = not y (I = I = not you) [is replaced in Deleuze-Guattari’s work] with an open equation: . . .+ y + z + a. . . (. . . + arm + brick + window +. . .).’ [12] It is true that Massumi’s formulation does not capture ‘what actually occurs in natural language and in standard social conceptuality’ as Ruthrof sees them. This is because Deleuze-Guattari are critiquing natural language and understandings thereof in terms of ‘standard social conceptuality’ — a critique which (as usual with Deleuze-Guattari) applies both on the level of ‘standard social conceptuality’ as such and on the level of theoretical approaches which extract a notion of ‘standard social conceptuality’ from the polyvocality and continuous variation of actual language use, and attempt to use this standard in a legislative, limiting way whilst claiming (as Ruthrof would seem to be) to be purely descriptive. How else are we to take his appeal to such a standard, as though it were not his own abstraction but were in fact the way things have to be, the way things must be described by any theoretical approach to be taken seriously.

 

The problem with Ruthrof’s injunction against formalism is that it constitutes an a prioristic prohibition on philosophy: formal languages, all the resources of logic and syntax, are strictly limited to those particular spheres, and cannot be applied to any corporeal phenomena without resulting distortion — and by the same token, how are we ever to understand where formalism came from, its achievements as well as its black holes, if we cannot talk about the relations it describes?  Deleuze-Guattari draw on formalist techniques as they draw on everything else: pragmatically, knowingly — so that each ransacked discipline is contextualised within the machinery of the strata. They do indeed talk of forms, of formal distinctions — such as form and substance of content and form and substance of expression — but these relationships are components of machines and are always relative to particular concerns, particular perspectives. [13] Their discussions of immanence, of incorporeal transformations, if at all productive, have the potential to explain formal relations as Ruthrof understands them. It is a function of the (super)linearity of natural language that allows the inscription and function of formal languages. The same properties of language that facilitate its universal takeover, its imperialism, are those that allow the quasi-linguistic apparatus of logic to appear with such force and efficacy.

 

 

5.5 Conclusion: The Ruin of Representation [14]

 

Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains [‘the subject, its concepts and also the objects in the world to which its concepts are applied’] . The faculty of judgement is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection, of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. [15]

 

Ruthrof’s analysis of language need not be dismissed but rather refigured as descriptions of the proper functioning of language. Another author I would cite in this respect is Ruth Millikan. [16]   I see such authors as exemplary theorists of the level of order-words. Their aporia is to miss the underside to language’s regular, proper functioning, its social determinations and standardised representations, and examine the deviant, the transitional, the unprecedented, that cannot be accounted for in terms of proper function or ‘standard social conceptuality’ at all.

 

By setting up culturally sanctified, intersubjective intersemiotic corroboration as the ground of all possible meaning, Ruthrof installs his own despot above the world, its silent voice ringing through every meaningful act. This despot is the Community, and it reduces all possibility of meaning to intersemiotic redundancies, the translations between different semiotic chains on the model of language. Just as we saw in Nietzsche’s account of the first state machine, ‘there is absolutely no room for anything which does not first acquire ‘meaning’ with regard to the whole’ (GM 63). Thus Ruthrof’s signification is not merely lexically similar to the regime of signification described by Deleuze-Guattari. He may have introduced aspects of meaning generally neglected by linguistic accounts, but because he conceived of them in terms of signifiers, whose importance is to be judged in terms of corroboration, his ‘metasemiotics’ retains language as text as its central model. His notion of corroboration, an interchangeability between verbal, haptic, olfactory, tactile and all other types of signs would itself indicate a rather formal, empty notion of sign — not to mention a complete absence of anything distinctly corporeal or non-linguistic. More importantly, corroboration, coherence, analogy, redundancy between signs as necessary for any kind of meaning, is an abstract principle of community-sanctioned order, correctness. It is not that this is inaccurate, that meanings are not created and fixed in this manner. It is that in an age where capitalist representations are all-pervasive, a critical standpoint on community-sanctioned meaning, or better still, an investigation of those experimental zones where such meaning itself is of no interest, where the outcome is not determined in advance, is surely where philosophy comes into its own.

 

In the next chapter, we examine in more detail the relationship between Deleuze-Guattari and Hjelmslev, from whom they have drawn their crucial notion of stratification. Of central importance will be the apparent paradox that they should draw from a linguist (indeed, one with far from modest notions about the role of language in life — see Section 6.5) a theory which aims to transform our understanding of language, which (as we saw in Section 4.4) is antagonistic to the central tenets of linguistics, and which seemingly aims to describe the whole of matter in ostensibly linguistic terms, while at the same time denying language any foundational role! Meanwhile, in parodic deference to the faculty of judgement, I will end this chapter with a slogan, hopefully more password than order-word, for a truly corporeal account of meaning: not ‘body as text’, but text as body, text as machine.