<<TRANSMATHOME

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

Contents Abstract Abbreviations

 

6. FORMAL//INCORPOREAL

 

6.0 Introduction

In AntiOedipus, Louis Hjelmslev is introduced as the originator of ‘the only modern — and not archaic — theory of language’ (AO 243), a ‘purely immanent theory [...] that shatters the double game of the voice-graphism domination’ (AO 242). In the Kafka book, though they do not mention him, Deleuze-Guattari present a Hjelmslevian account of content and expression as an antidote to readings of Kafka based on the Signifier (K 3-8). However, it is not until A Thousand Plateaus that Hjelmslev is made central to their work. The bulk of this chapter concerns the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language by Louis Hjelmslev and its use by Deleuze-Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. I’ll examine the tensions in their utilisation of his theory, particularly the role of language in it, and hope to show why his Danish posterior was so inviting to Deleuze-Guattari’s alter-ego Professor Challenger, the mouthpiece for their ‘Geology of Morals’. [1] What does this have to do with the terms ‘formal’ and ‘incorporeal’?  I will show that the extent to which Deleuze-Guattari utilise formal resources is more or less the extent to which they take up Hjelmslev’s approach, and that the incorporeal, far from being a merely formal category, is the key to their transformation and radicalisation of Hjelmslev’s embryonic transcendental empiricism.

 

In the last chapter I examined Horst Ruthrof’s ‘realist textualism’, an attempt to put the body back into discussions of language. Ruthrof’s attempt, as I think I showed, fails on almost every level. Not only does he have a completely linguicised notion of the body, he also has a very bizarre notion of formal relations. I argued instead that Deleuze-Guattari, with their much wider ranging Spinozist conception of bodies, and their notion of incorporeal transformation, show the way towards a material as opposed to Ruthrof’s corporeotextual approach to language — and much else besides. They show firstly that an analysis of language cannot be separated from an analysis of the bodies involved, their relations and intermixtures, and secondly that the whole approach cannot get off the ground while a reified notion of the Signifier or of Meaning is allowed to govern the relations between bodies. Instead, meaning and signification are seen to be but a small subset of the functioning of language and the movements of signs, and a new vocabulary of incorporeal relations is required in order to get at the various abstract machines involved in assemblages with linguistic or semiotic components. The resulting methodology, then, what Deleuze-Guattari at one point call a ‘linguistics of flows’ (AO 241), is no more confined to language than a Nietzschean or Foucauldian genealogy is confined to family trees.

 

The problems I seek to address in this chapter are: the mechanics of this analytic approach, the empirical and ontological claims it makes, and the status of the corporeal and incorporeal relations involved. I will demonstrate how Ruthrof’s charge of formalism, levelled at Deleuze-Guattari, conflates formal relations in Ruthrof’s own impoverished sense, with the sphere of the incorporeal in Deleuze-Guattari, a resource which is essential to an analysis which must take pains to avoid erecting any supplementary dimensions to simply take the place of Meaning, Representation or Signification. The result will necessarily be an approach which is ultimately aformal, anexact — it will not be reducible to an algebra of formal relations between predefined and delimited terms — but the method will be rigorous, drawing (as Deleuze-Guattari do, but in different ways) on the Linguistic Theory of Louis Hjelmslev, on Deleuze’s Bergsonian empiricism, and on Deleuze-Guattari’s Geology or stratoanalysis.

 

The aim will be to set out the primary concerns of a pragmatics of the order-word, principal among which will be that the apparatus itself is seen as nothing more than provisional, the terms arbitrary, and the approach as open to transformation as the phenomena to which it can be applied. I see the applications of this apparatus as something that will inevitably be put to the service of philosophical prejudices and preoccupations — how could it not be? — which therefore (like the work of Deleuze-Guattari itself) contain enough safeguards against reification as possible. In the effort not to confuse the map with the territory, while at the same time keeping open the possibility of destabilising the boundary between the two (in the move towards the couple diagram and phylum, where this separation is lost), the method constantly teeters on the edge of self-destruction, or of lapsing into futility and impotence. This machine can only function by breaking down, by devouring its own components, since only in this way can it produce something new.

 

6.1 Ruthrof Reprise

Central to this approach is the notion of the incorporeal transformation, which I will concentrate on in the final section. Ruthrof can only get his head round this in terms of what goes on in logic or algebra, where from one step of (for example) a syllogism to the next, something pertaining to a realm other than that of marks on a blackboard or the firings of neurones has taken place. Hence Ruthrof accuses Deleuze-Guattari of joining the ranks of philosophers and linguists who in one way or another have evacuated the body — considered by Ruthrof in terms of fields of resonances between the different senses — from an understanding of ‘natural language.’

 

In this narrow conception of the formal, Ruthrof leaves himself with two grim options. Either he must commit himself to this oddly Platonic realm of formal relations, which is separate from everyday uses of language (which for him must be understood in terms of a socially created, intersubjective semiotic matrix) — giving himself the unenviable task of trying to explain where this timeless realm emerged from and how on earth it connects up with everything else. [2]   Alternatively, his formal realm could be seen as the creation of particularly imaginative logicians, who have somehow escaped the corporeal imperative he has imposed on all other manipulators of symbols — the imperative that all symbolic transformations (all possible meaning) involves traces of the body, ‘synaesthetic’ resonances between different corporeal sign systems.

 

Ruthrof’s overarching problems, which prevent him getting to grips with bodies at all, are due to his commitment to semantics, meaning, above all else. It seems clear that in raising the notions of meaning (and hence communication, information and understanding) above all the other aspects of linguistic and semiotic functioning — at the expense of such non-significatory behaviours as ordering, seducing, humiliating, supplicating, consenting, attacking, ingratiating and so on — Ruthrof erects a normalising view of the uses of language and signs whose governing principle is recognition. The lives of bodies, their attempts to find their own ways, maintain and increase themselves and their powers, is ignored or at least subordinated to the life of disembodied rational reflection. Disembodied, because despite the fact that Ruthrof brings in olfaction, touch, taste and so on, he treats them not as unstable zones of real difference, of intensive engagement (as in, for example, Deleuze’s account of the faculties in Difference and Repetition that we saw in Section 1.5) but simply as different tickertape printouts for the rational homunculus to compare and contrast.

 

Underlying this, as Ruthrof freely admits, is a notion of the intersubjective Community which establishes and governs all meaning. It somehow precedes the flows of signs; all meaning refers back to it. The Community is God, the Despot, the supplementary dimension that stands outside Ruthrof’s significatory schema and imposes order on it, yet countenances no explanation or understanding of itself.

 

Do Deleuze-Guattari do any better at providing the basis for an approach to language which is fully materialist?  The rest of this chapter zigzags between an overview of Hjelmslev’s Theory of Language and discussion of how Deleuze-Guattari take it up. Since I am primarily interested in the former in terms of the latter, a comprehensive overview of Hjelmslev has been forfeited in order to deal more carefully with the aspects of his approach that resonate with Deleuze-Guattari.

 

6.2 Deductive Empiricism

Hjelmslev’s net, an enormous system of relations consisting of about 108 technical terms meticulously and incrementally defined (and then summarised, PTL 131-138), has the immense virtue of showing how the analysis of language and semiotics is absolutely inseparable from an analysis of the relations of bodies. It is not that language is some kind of preexistent apparatus which chops up undifferentiated reality into usable blocks, nor is it a system of ad-hoc labels we have invented to tag preexistent objects. It is precisely that the relations between what we often simplistically refer to as ‘words and things’ are in reciprocal presupposition, and in any given investigation, the entire complex of assemblage and abstract machine must be exhaustively analysed, both sides at once and with equal attention. This proviso serves to ward off the risk of using one side to ‘explain’ the other and thus lose sight of or lose the site of the consistency of the ‘whole’. Hjelmslev could be described as a ‘deductive empiricist’, and it is the sense of deduction that he employs that will show us one aspect of how Ruthrof’s notion of the formal completely misses what Hjelmslev and Deleuze-Guattari are up to.

 

Hjelmslev writes:

 

A theory will attain its simplest form by building on no other premises than those required by its object. Moreover, in order to conform to its purpose, a theory must be capable of yielding, in all its applications, results which agree with so-called (actual or presumed) empirical data (PTL 10-11).

 

This could be taken as an indication that Hjelmslev himself is engaged in a programme of proving what we already know; of ensuring any possible results conform to an already ‘given’ empirical, a common-sense understanding of the world. But this would be to assume a predetermined and unproblematic empirical, which Hjelmslev, working at the coalface of material linguistics, clearly does not. Instead, his ‘so-called’ empiricism (as he puts it) can be seen as the attempt to construct Planes of Consistency. He presents the empirical principle, the basis of his entire approach:

 

The description shall be free of contradiction (self-consistent), exhaustive, and as simple as possible. The requirement of freedom from contradiction takes precedence over the requirement of exhaustive description. The requirement of exhaustive description takes precedence over the requirement of simplicity (PTL 11). [3]

 

Hjelmslev’s method is deductive rather than inductive, precisely because of his prioritising of the requirements of self-consistency over those of  simplicity and exhaustiveness. Induction, the movement from individual instances to the categories they supposedly exemplify, has according to Hjelmslev been the misguided approach of his linguistic forebears. Induction ‘inevitably leads to the abstraction of concepts which are then hypostatized as real’ (PTL 12). This movement from particular to universal I would characterise as ‘bad abstraction’, as opposed to the ‘good abstraction’ of the bidirectional relation between abstract materiality and the articulations of the strata. Induction as characterised by Hjelmslev is the age-old error of ‘discovering’ or rather positing universals derived from particulars, of reifying the transcendental as a field of immutable forms, from which particulars are then supposed to have somehow descended.  It is apparent that no such procedure can beget anything that can function as an ‘explanation’; the result of this sort of induction is often merely a wholesale justification of the status quo. Perhaps more insidious is the selective derivation of the ideal, which is then applied to messy reality by way of so-called ‘critique’: step one, focus on the apparent rules or regularities you are particularly keen on; step two, derive supposed universals from these; step three, attempt to downgrade or eliminate all those phenomena which fail to conform to your universals.

 

Instead of this move from particular to universal, Hjelmslev proposes a move from the initial ‘totality’ of the object of analysis (the text) to a description which homes in on its specificities, its singularities, moving from the net of relative, arbitrarily-delimited classes and categories to the real differences they designate, and ending with the most exhaustive and simple description which manages to retain the initial totality or consistency.

 

This procedure may therefore be defined briefly as a progression from class to component, not from component to class, as an analytic and specifying, not a synthetic and generalizing, movement, as the opposite of induction in the sense established by linguistics (PTL 13).

 

Relating this notion of a preexistent totality of the text to the use made by Deleuze-Guattari may appear awkward, but it is simply the case that Deleuze-Guattari are more pragmatic in their delimiting of the ‘unities’ in question. Rather than Hjelmslev’s notion of the totality of the text in its self-consistency, which precedes and survives the analysis, we should think instead of the move from particular problematics or problem fields, to a description of the assemblages and abstract machines involved. As we saw in Chapter 1, Deleuze’s Bergsonism presents his First Rule of intuition as method, as:

 

Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems (B 15).

 

The initial step, then, is to delimit a ‘self-consistent’ problem field, a true problem, as object of analysis. To run the risk of confusing terminology which we will later return to tease out in more detail, we can for the moment equate Hjelmslev’s ‘totality of the text’, Deleuze-Bergson’s ‘problem field’, and Deleuze-Guattari’s ‘Abstract Machine’ or ‘Plane of Consistency’. Guattari writes [4]

 

Abstract machines can always be complicated but they can never be broken down without losing their mutational specificity. So one must take them in their entirety. It is impossible to reach them piece by piece, through learning or conditioning (GR 142).

 

In other words, the move is from an unanalysed ‘whole’, to an analysed ‘whole’ — yet in both cases, the apparent totality is nothing other than the plane of consistency itself. Not an essence or form in any sense, it is rather a machine part that functions as surface, or else that inserts itself in the assemblages in question. Guattari continues

 

[Abstract machines] cling to each other, every part of them becoming a process. They assimilate themselves into an assemblage and change its “destiny”. Or they silence themselves and return to a plane of pure machinic virtuality (GR 142).

 

6.3 The Hjelmslev Manoeuvre

How does Hjelmslev envisage his theory as proceeding?  This issue of the relationship between the structure of language as revealed by the theory, and the structure of reality itself, is the problem of the map and the territory alluded to above.

 

To formulate the problem in a simplified, tendentious, and deliberately naïve form — does the object determine and affect the theory, or does the theory determine and affect its object? (PTL 13)

To flesh out this problem, Hjelmslev moves from the notion of a theory as a ‘system of hypotheses’ (PTL 13) to that of theory considered in terms of arbitrariness and appropriateness (PTL 14). The former factor is a move that differentiates Hjelmslev’s approach from that of a naïve empiricism, giving him the freedom to build a system independent of any experience. This is an important sense in which the Hjelmslevian net (to which we’ll shortly return in greater detail) is formal: it is a

 

purely deductive system, in that it may be used alone to compute the possibilities that follow from its premises (PTL 14).

 

This can be seen as a move from naïve to transcendental empiricism, where what is being sought, as we have seen, is the immanent structure (in this case of language), but the method refuses to abstract this structure from the given, for such a move would be to model the transcendental on the empirical.

 

It is the second factor, that of appropriateness, that makes or breaks the theory, by introducing premises

 

which the theoretician knows from preceding experience that they fulfil the conditions for application to certain empirical data. These premisses are of the greatest possible generality and may therefore be able to satisfy the conditions for application to a large number of empirical data (PTL 14).

 

So, does the theory determine the object or vice versa?  Hjelmslev’s answer is a resounding “both...and”: he writes

 

by virtue of its arbitrary nature the theory is arealistic; by virtue of its appropriateness, it is realistic (PTL 15)

 

and then,

 

By virtue of its appropriateness the linguistic theory is empirical, and by virtue of its arbitrariness it is calculative (PTL 17).

 

Here Hjelmslev presents the two sides of his approach as appropriate/empirical/realistic and arbitrary/calculative/arealistic. He writes

 

Linguistic theory cannot be verified (confirmed or invalidated) by reference to [...] existing texts and languages. It can be judged only with reference to the self-consistency of its calculus (PTL 18).

 

While Deleuze-Guattari transform this ultraformalist notion of calculative consistency into a notion of real or material consistency, there is already in Hjelmslev reason to see something more than a fantastic algebra of linguistic components: he argues elsewhere against a purely logical notion of this consistency, meaning that his own use of formalism exceeds the logic of identity and contradiction, and instead works in terms of ‘participation’.

 

Hjelmslev remarked that a language necessarily includes unexploited possibilities or potentialities and that the abstract machine must include these possibilities or potentialities (TP 99).

 

The Prolegomena is concerned primarily with applicability — fixing by definition the properties common to all ‘“natural” languages’, as defined in the process as those semiotics into which all other semiotics can be translated (PTL 19). For the purposes of the Prolegomena, Hjelmslev performs a kind of  transcendental deduction: to focus initially on “natural” languages, and then move outwards after the principles have been established, to the entirety of semiotic phenomena (sign systems that necessitate biplanar analysis). This focus, based on the empirical principle, safeguards the theory’s claim to immanence (PTL 19-20, 108). Another aspect of the significance of Hjelmslev’s formal approach is that the system of formal as opposed to real definitions is

 

not a question of trying to exhaust the intensional nature of the objects or even of delimiting them extensionally on all sides, but only of anchoring them relatively in respect to other objects, similarly defined or premised as basic (PTL 21).

 

There is also the option of including operative (temporary) definitions, to be superseded at a later stage, part of Hjelmslev’s attempt to be as ‘unmetaphysical as possible’ (PTL 20):

 

A purposeful attempt to eliminate implicit premisses leads to replacing postulates partly by definitions and partly by conditional propositions, so that the postulates as such are removed from the apparatus. Thus it seems possible in most instances to replace pure existence postulates by theorems in the form of conditions (PTL 21).

 

In addition to the elimination of all implicit premisses, Hjelmslev’s conception of the objects of the analysis is contextual and relational rather than in any respect essentialist.

 

The important thing is not the division of an object into parts, but the conduct of the analysis so that it conforms to the mutual dependences between these parts, and permits us to give an adequate account of them [...] Both the object and its parts have existence only by virtue of these dependences [...] After we have recognized this, the “objects” of naïve realism are, from our point of view, nothing but intersections of bundles of such dependences. The dependences [...] become from this point of view primary, presupposed by their intersections [...] A totality does not consist of things but of relationships (PTL 22-23).

 

Hjelmslev’s ‘wholes’, then, are merely that to which all ‘parts’ have a uniform relation, an account which coheres with the body without organs being a machine part alongside the all the others, distinguished only by the fact that it has the same relationship to all the other components.

 

Hjelmslev distinguishes functions and functives, on the basis that functions are dependences, and functives are entities that contract functions. A function is composed of functives, which themselves may be composed of functives (and which are therefore functions of functions), or may not be composed of functives (in which case Hjelmslev calls them ‘entities’). He provides a tripartite model for the types of interrelations that can occur between functions of a system in terms of constants and variables, where

 

constant: functive whose presence is a necessary condition for the presence of the functive to which it has function

variable: functive whose presence is not a necessary condition for the presence of the functive to which it has function (PTL 131)

 

The three types of interrelations are determinations, interdependences and constellations (see Fig. 5 in the section of tables and diagrams at the end of the chapter).

 

It is only on the basis of these relationships, which clearly have nothing intrinsically linguistic about them, that Hjelmslev gets round to talking about signs. [5]   As Deleuze-Guattari emphasise, what is special about Hjelmslev is his notion of double articulation of these elements into two planes, which he names (arbitrarily) content and expression. [6]   It is not immediately clear whether Hjelmslev himself would regard as legitimate any applications of double articulation to systems which do not involve signification. However, even if (as seems likely) he would reject such a possibility, the complexities of his notion of the ‘sign-function’, the fact that it does not entail any one-to-one mapping of the forms of expression onto the forms of content, means that it is entirely legitimate to apply this model to any system consisting of two isomorphic series which vary independently. In other words, while Hjelmslev himself may not have been able to see beyond signifying systems, his unflinching rigour has produced a system already free of any necessary connection to, or dependence on, signification.

 

6.4 Why, in spite of all the evidence, Hjelmslev is not just talking about language

The ‘Geology of Morals’ attempts to provide an account of the mechanisms of stratification, where stratification is seen as the process of organisation of matter on the Full Body of the Earth; it is responsible for everything we see around us, as well as for our own existence as organisms, as subjects. No wonder Deleuze-Guattari refer to these stratified structures (whether energetic, physico-chemical, geological, organic and alloplastic) as the ‘Judgements of God’, judgements with which in the words of Artaud, the aim is to ‘have done’ — or at the very least, to see that ‘it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth’s last word’ (TP 41). The other half of the story is matter, the Body without Organs of the Earth: ‘the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body in all its flows: subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, prevital and prephysical free singularities’ (TP 43). To facilitate this massive and perhaps impossible shift in perspective, from everyday human concerns to the impersonal, intensive flows from which they arise, Deleuze-Guattari concentrate not so much on the question of what it would mean to escape the strata, as on that of how the flows of the destratified body get imprisoned within the strata in the first place.

 

As might be expected, these mechanisms are far from straightforward; the fact that Hjelmslev attempted something similar and almost as ambitious a few decades previously is something Deleuze-Guattari were bound to make use of. The drawback is, in attempting to provide an alternative to conventional, anthropocentric conceptions of matter and life, the last thing Deleuze-Guattari want to do is to suggest that language, which undoubtedly is the focus of Hjelmslev’s enterprise, somehow structures matter and organises life. Deleuze-Guattari warn of the imperialism of language, ‘the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between one’s pincers’ (TP 65), and say that ‘Despite what Hjelmslev himself may have said, the net [of Hjelmslev’s apparatus] is not linguistic in scope or origin’ (TP 43). We now turn to Hjelmslev himself, in order to find ways to defend this patently ludicrous claim.

 

‘Language — human speech’, Hjelmslev observes — ‘is an inexhaustible abundance of manifold treasures’. In an opening paragraph that more or less equates language with everything that is good and great about humanity, Hjelmslev concludes by speculating

 

So inexorably has language grown inside personality, home, nation, mankind, and life itself that we may sometimes be tempted to ask whether language is a mere reflexion of, or simply is not all those things — the very seed leaf of their growth (PTL 3).

 

His linguistic theory, then, sets out to make this inexhaustible abundance into the object of

 

a systematic, exact, and generalizing science, in the theory of which all events (possible combinations of elements) are foreseen and the conditions for their realization established (PTL 9).

 

But what exactly does Hjelmslev mean by ‘language’?  Hjelmslev’s linguistic theory cannot merely be a combinatory analysis of the ‘disiecta membra of language’ — its ‘physical and physiological, psychological and logical, sociological and historical precipitations’ (PTL 5) — but rather an analysis of ‘language itself’. The latter, as worked out by the Theory of Language he proposes, is a ‘self sufficient totality, a structure sui generis’ (PTL 6), which is also the very ‘means to knowledge’ (PTL 5). Hjelmslev is confident of the importance of this theory to epistemology, though he leaves open the question of whether ‘the structure of language be equated with that of reality or be taken as a more or less distorted reflexion of it’ (PTL 6).

 

But then, in the following passage, Hjelmslev proposes ‘linguistic structure as the dominating principle’ of “reality” as an ‘organized totality’:

 

A linguistic theory which searches for the specific structure of language through an exclusively formal system of premisses must, while continually taking account of the fluctuations and changes of speech, necessarily refuse to grant exclusive significance to those changes; must seek a constancy, which is not anchored in some “reality” outside language, whatever language it may be, and that makes a particular language identical with itself in all its various manifestations. When this constancy has been found and described, it may then be projected on the “reality” outside language, of whatever sort that “reality” may be (physical, physiological, psychological, logical, ontological), so that, even in the consideration of that “reality”, language as the central point of reference remains the chief object — and not as a conglomerate, but as an organized totality with linguistic structure as the dominating principle. (PTL 8)

 

In light of this, how on earth can Deleuze-Guattari’s claims for Hjelmslev be defended?  The key is that despite his eulogising of all that is good and human and calling it language, for Hjelmslev language IS the structure of reality as an organised totality (at least insofar as it is amenable to the analysis of deductive empiricism), and hence precisely not merely ‘human speech’. Whereas Ruthrof, as we saw, starts from a linguistic model of meaning, and an impoverished one at that, and moves outwards to what he sees as a theory of corporeal realism, Hjelmslev begins with a massively intricate apparatus composed of a variety of formal relations of both structure and process, and even though he claims always to be talking about language, we are deep into the intricacies of his ‘net’ before he has even started talking about meaning. Deleuze-Guattari, in shifting the focus of analysis from language to ‘the strata’, are talking about the same thing: constancies or consistencies which are not anchored in some outside “reality”, but which generate self-identity, resemblance, continuity and stability — which is then projected back onto the “reality” outside, be it physical, physiological, psychological, logical or ontological!  On all these levels, the analysis of the strata is about shoring up the mechanisms at work.

 

A given stratum retains a unity of composition in spite of the diversity in its organisation and development. The unity of composition relates to formal traits common to all of the forms or codes of a stratum, and to substantial elements, materials common to all of the stratum’s substances or milieus (TP 502).

 

Where for Hjelmslev this is in order to catch a glimpse of the structure of reality itself, to bring out the Judgements of God in all their ‘inexhaustible abundance’, for Deleuze-Guattari it is to open them up to their outside, to demonstrate the existence of a beyond to the strata and their orders and organisations. Guattari writes

 

The issue is not to resume his project of a radical axiomatization of language but to start up again from those categories which appear to be the result of a truly rigorous examination of the totality of the semiotic problematic (GR 145). [7]  

 

6.5 Conclusion: The Formal and the Incorporeal

In this chapter we have examined what Hjelmslev actually says about language and stratification, and have offered an explanation and defence of Deleuze-Guattari’s appropriation thereof, arguing that their taking-up of a few of his terms is not the wholesale importing of a totalising formalism of language, but rather the pragmatic deployment of a mobile apparatus (form and substance of content, form and substance of expression). Rather than form being isolated Platonic realm, it is only distinguishable from substance by a move of ‘bad’ abstraction, since the two are not independently variable. The terms ‘content and expression’ come in when there is independent variance between two interlocked series, and in this case, it is not an issue of the imposing of form, but one of the expressing of functions (with their own form and substance) overcoding material components (with their own form and substance).

 

The point of the incorporeal transformation, then, is not that it pertains to a formal realm as Ruthrof argues. Instead, it is of a piece with Deleuze-Guattari’s utilisation of Hjelmslev in their attack on signification, representation, and other approaches to language which involve mysterious relationships of meaning or mediation. The incorporeal transformation is the simultaneity of the statement/act and its effects, and the archetypal example is the command. As Canetti writes, ‘Commands are older than speech. If this were not so, dogs could not understand them’ (CP 351). Though Hjelmslev’s apparatus is complex enough to allow us, for example, to diagram language change, the relationships between different languages, and the interrelations of its different components, it also helps us to see that language (as one form of expression) can only be understood in relation to the content with which it is in reciprocal presupposition and that it is best approached as an entire system.

 

If we tie this in with our discussions of the order-word from the previous chapters, we see that Deleuze-Guattari take this considerably further. Rather than simply insisting on the interdependence of content and expression, they argue that this very distribution is potentially re-established or challenged with every utterance: what is transformed with the emission of the order-word is precisely the arrangements of bodies and the distribution of symbolic power. There is a continuous variation intrinsic to language, and it is not purely linguistic, it bears on matters-functions of all kinds. The incorporeal transformation can be entirely stratic, it can redundantly reassert the sovereignty of despotic meaning and the rigid distinctions between words and things. Alternatively, as ‘component of passage’, it can enact

 

a transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favour of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, more ardent, than bodies or words (TP 109).

 

Despite this it is in the realm of distinct bodies and words we remain for the time being. In the following chapter, from the perspective of our Deleuze-Guattarian pragmatics, we confront certain different approaches to the science and politics of language. Our particular concern will be to examine the charge that might be inspired by passages such as that just quoted, that Deleuze-Guattari do not really have anything very useful to say about language, in the face, for example, of the growing problem of illiteracy.

 

Hjelmslev’s Net

On the following pages are diagrams detailing aspects of Hjelmslev’s apparatus, including his notion of the sign function, and how it compares to that of Deleuze-Guattari.

 

Fig. 5 The Analysis Complex

 

Similarly, in relational terms:

function

í î

functive (function of a function)

í î í î

.

.

.

í î í î

functive (not a function: entity)