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Between the Seen and the Said

Deleuze-Guattari’s Pragmatics

of the Order-Word

by

Bruce David McClure

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy

University of Warwick,

Department of Philosophy

January 2001

Table of Illustrations
Abstract
Table of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Visible and the Articulable

1.  An Image Held Us Captive
1.1 The Role of Philosophy
1.2 Possible/Real versus Actual/Virtual
1.3 True and False Problems
1.4 The Image of Thought
1.5 Deleuze’s Critique of Representation
1.6 The Empty Form of Time
1.7 Repetition For Itself
1.8 The System of the Transcendental Ideas
1.9 Immanence of Criteria
1.10 Concluding Remarks: Fourth Person Singular

2. Semiotics and Soul Murder
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Immanence
2.2 Understanding the Nerve Language
2.3 Symbolic Investiture and Order-Words
2.4 Schreber’s Becoming-Minor
2.5 Schreber’s Becoming-Woman
2.6 Conclusion: Homunculess

3. Schizoanalytic Investigations: Deleuze-Guattari and Wittgenstein
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Meaning is Use
3.2 Language Games
3.3 The Abominable Faculty
3.4 Relativism and Mentalese
3.5 Relativism Revisited
3.6 Conclusion: Creativity and a People

4. Deconstruction and Schizopragmatics
4.0 Introduction
4.1 Differences in Method
4.2 ‘Writing’ and ‘Indirect Discourse’
4.3 Austin and the Illocutionary
4.4 The Order-Word
4.5 Conclusion: Resplendent in Divergence

5. Corpo-real-ising Judgement
5.0 Introduction
5.1 The Non-Semiotic Noumenon
5.2 Having Done with Judgement
5.3 The Death Sentence
5.4 On the Formal
5.5 Conclusion: The Ruin of Representation

6. FORMAL//INCORPOREAL
6.0 Introduction
6.1 Ruthrof Reprise
6.2 Deductive Empiricism
6.3 The Hjelmslev Manoeuvre
6.4 Why, in spite of all the evidence, Hjelmslev is not just talking about language
6.5 Conclusion: The Formal and the Incorporeal

7. Linguistic and Metalinguistic Practices
7.0 Concepts of Language
7.1 A Science of Language
7.2 Shibboleth
7.3 What is Wrong with Communication?
7.4 Metalinguistic Practices
7.5 Subjectification
7.6 Conclusion

Conclusion

Bibliography

Table of Illustrations

Abstract

This thesis investigates Deleuze-Guattari’s notion of stratification through a series of investigations into their material on language. Stratification is their term for the process by which matter-energy comes to assume the relatively stable historical formations of our social world, and in particular the relationship between subjects, objects and words. The complex notion of the order-word/password is proposed as key to this process, with its role in the articulations of the strata (as order-word) and in movements of creation and escape (as password). I explore this apparatus from a variety of angles, in order to present an account of Deleuze-Guattari’s pragmatics that demonstrates both its basis in philosophy and its connections with the world.

I begin by introducing the notion of ‘difference in itself’, through Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari’s critique of representation and their account of subjectification, the creation of the subject in space and time (in relation to Bergson and Kant) — and then feed this material through an encounter with Judge Schreber, in the process filling out our account of the subject. The resulting diagram of stratification is further explored through a dialogue with two other key thinkers of language — Wittgenstein, in relation to his social conception of meaning as use, and Derrida, in relation to his critique of Austin and Searle’s Speech Act theory — in either case, demonstrating important connections and contrasts with Deleuze-Guattari.  I then examine the specifics of stratoanalysis through an examination of the related zones of the formal, the abstract and the incorporeal, bringing this to bear on Deleuze-Guattari’s appropriation of the linguist Hjelmslev, and to the criticisms of Ruthrof. The final step is to relate this apparatus both to linguistic and everyday understandings of language, connecting this pragmatics of the order-word with the notion of an ‘art of living’ through a consideration of standardised language and ‘verbal hygiene’.

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Table of Abbreviations

AL: Bolinger, Aspects of Language, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1975

AO: Deleuze-Guattari, AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London: Athlone 1984.

B: Deleuze, Bergsonism, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1991

CC: Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical tr. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London: Verso 1998

CE: Dennett, Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin, 1993

CEv: Bergson, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1911

CM: Bergson, The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L. Andison, New York: The Wisdom Library, 1946

CPR: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, London: MacMillan, 1964

DB: Ruthrof, ‘Deleuze and the Body: Eluding Kafka’s “Little Death Sentence”’, South Atlantic Quarterly 96: 3, Summer 1997, 563-578

DP: Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan, London: Penguin 1991

DR: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, London: Athlone 1994

F: Deleuze, Foucault, tr. Seán Hand, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988

GM: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, tr. Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 1994

HH: Nietzsche, Human, all too Human, tr. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, London: Penguin, 1994

I, II: Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell 1998, Parts I and II

K: Deleuze-Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, tr. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: Unversity of Minnesota Press, 1986

KL: Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use, London: Praeger 1986

LI: Pinker, The Language Instinct, London: Penguin, 1994

LT: Carruthers and Boucher, ed., Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes, Cambridge University Press, 1998

LR: Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, tr. John Viertel, Sussex: Harvester Press 1979

LP: Honey, Language and Power, London: Faber & Faber, 1997

LS: Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, tr. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, London: Athlone, 1990

Ltd: Derrida, Limited Inc., tr. Alan Bass and Samuel Weber, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1993

M: Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, tr. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988

MM: Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought, London: Harvard University Press, 1992

MP: Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass, Brighton: Harvester Press 1982

MPG: Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996

N: Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, tr. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995

P: Derrida, Positions, tr. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981

SB: Ruthrof, Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern, Melbourne University Press 1997

SS: Guattari, Soft Subversions, tr. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener, New York: Semiotext(e), 1996

TI: Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ tr. R.J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1990

TP: Deleuze-Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone, 1987

VH: Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, London: Routledge, 1995

WCE: Phillips Griffiths, ed.: Wittgenstein Centenary Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1991

WD: Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985

Words: Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press 1976

WP: Deleuze-Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, tr. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso 1994

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