1 A Pragmatism of Difference? Gilles Deleuze's pragmatic move ... [PDF]

A Pragmatism of Difference? Gilles Deleuze’s pragmatic move beyond structuralism “Before being is the political.” (Félix Guattari)

In the 26th series of paradoxes in Logique du sens (1969), Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between an order of language (l’ordre du langage) and an order of speech (l’ordre de la parole). Events are what make language possible, says Deleuze. But language does not begin with events. In fact nothing has its origin in the order of language. There is, however, always something beginning in the order of speech. There is always someone beginning to speak. „Il y a toujours quelqu’un qui commence à parler.“ 1 Deleuze is alluding here to a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant says that our knowledge may commence or begin with experience, but “nevertheless does not […] originate […] in experience.” The reason for this, according to Kant, is that “our empirical knowledge” is “composed” of both empirical facts as well as a priori supplements.2 A posteriori knowledge here, a priori knowledge there – and neither “can be distinguished from the other until long practice has made us attentive and skilled in differentiating between them.”3 It is well known that among French philosophers it was Henri Bergson who, in his own characteristic way, took over Kant’s methodological distinction between that which is de facto given empirically and that which de jure claims transcendental validity.4 As Deleuze emphasizes, Bergson changes the philosophical terminology: It is no longer the transcendental that stands opposed to the empirical, but the virtual to the actual. Deleuze refers to this shift when he explains the impossibility of commencing in language in the following way: „On commence toujours dans l’ordre de la parole, mais non pas dans celui du langage, où tout doit être donné simultanément, d’un coup unique.“ 5 “With a single stroke” one is sent into the pure past introduced by Bergson in Matière et mémoire. Deleuze interprets this pure past as a transcendental-virtual synthesis of time, which is presupposed a priori by both the present and by representation.6 The structure of virtual singularities and relations also appears “with a single stroke,” such as „la multiplicité linguistique, comme système virtuel de liaisons réciproques entre 'phonèmes', qui s’incarne dans les relations et les termes actuels des langues divers [...].”7 It is clear that Deleuze’s opposition of an ideal order of events to a real order of representation follows the structuralism he worked out in Différence et répétition. This becomes even more evident when we look at the distinction between sense and meaning Deleuze launches against the dogmatic “postulate of the sentence,” the sixth postulate in the “image of thinking.”

1

Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens, Paris 1969, p. 212

2

Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymund Schmidt, Hamburg 1993, B 1sq.

3

Cf. ibd., B 1-2

4

Cf. Deleuze, Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris 1991, p. 39-40

5

Deleuze, Logique du sens, p. 212

6

„Si Matière et mémoire est un grand livre, c’est peut-être parce que Bergson a pénétré profondément dans le domaine de cette synthèse transcendantale d’un passé pur [...].” (Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris 1968, p. 110) Cf. ibd., p. 110-112 7

Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris 1968, p. 250

1

I will begin by presenting the structuralist concept of language Deleuze developed during the 1960s. This will allow the concepts employed in the Logic of Sense – that possibly describe „a passage from noise to voice“ – to emerge more clearly. As we will see, the expressions “to make possible” and “to commence” function on different theoretical levels. If Condillac and his followers were aiming at a historical origin of language – that is, a beginning in empirical terms – Kant’s formulation refers to a transcendental-logical “making possible,” namely an account of the a priori conditions of the possibility of language. Events that make language possible simultaneously introduce distinctions into what they make possible. In this sense they make a mere uneventful noise, a „bruit indistinct,“ 8 impossible. In a second step, I would like to pose a problem that from a pragmatic perspective shows the insufficiency of the structural method. When Deleuze, in the Logic of Sense, claims that series not only diverge but also converge, which is a not unimportant prerequisite for the commencement of speech, it is not quite clear how „la ligne-frontière fait donc converger les séries divergentes; mais ainsi elle ne supprime ni ne corrige leur divergence.”9 Deleuze does say that it is verbs that embody the conjugation of events, but he contents himself with the remark that verbs swing back and forth between two poles: „entre le mode infinitif qui représente le cercle une fois déplié de la proposition tout entière, et le temps présent, qui ferme au contraire le cercle sur un désigné de la proposition.“10 I would like to posit that Deleuze cannot address the actualizing modalities of language – especially in view of their implications for the theory of power – until the pragmatic dimension has completed the structuralist scheme. The pragmatism (pragmatique généralisée) introduced in Mille Plateaux is not least a response to the changes occurring in Michel Foucault’s thinking during the 70s. Here a second virtually structured area, but this time one of power relations and concentrations of power, is established next to or on top of the diagram of lines of flight and events (first virtuality). Seen from the perspective of the philosophy of language, the distinction taken over from Saussure between langage and parole, now seems too simple to provide an adequate concept (that is, one that also articulates the problems of power) of the pragmatism of language (in other words, speech acts and the “regime of signs”). I. A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme? François Wahl in his 1968 book Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme had already distinguished between a dozen different structuralisms and questioned the possibility of coming up with a general definition.11 Maybe there was no such thing as the structuralist method. Deleuze, however, in an essay for François Châtelet’s history of philosophy, lists six formal criteria according to which essential common features of a structuralist mode of knowledge can be determined.12 I will make use of these criteria in order to briefly characterize Deleuze’s concept of structuralism as it unfolds in Différence et

8


9


10


11

Cf. François Wahl, “Introduction”, in: Wahl (Ed.), Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme, Paris 1968, p. 7-12

12

Cf. Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme”, in: L’île déserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens 1953-1974, ed. by David Lapoujade, Paris 2002

2

répétition. It is on this basis that his reflections on the order of language and speech in Logique du sens can be more systematically situated. The first criterion is the symbolic. „Chez Lacan, chez d’autres structuralistes aussi, le symbolique comme élément de la structure est au principe d’une genèse: la structure s’incarne dans les réalités et les images suivant des séries déterminables.“ 13 According to Deleuze, linguistics deserves the credit for being the first discipline to recognize a third domain this side of the real and the imaginary: the sign or the structural object, which can neither be conflated with the “spiritual” nor with the material characteristics of the letter or phonetic unit. The sign is defined as both signifier and signified. Below the order of real references and imaginary notions thus lies the irreducible order of the symbolic, which is neither grounded in the real nor in the imaginary, but rather determines their genesis and reciprocal relationship. The structural or symbolic elements are initially defined in a negative way: They neither possess a sensory form, nor an imaginary shape, nor an intelligible essence. The second criterion is the spatial position. Deleuze, in agreement with Lévi-Strauss, writes that the elements of a structure make sense „qui est nécessairement et uniquement de 'position'.“ 14 They neither denote anything nor mean anything, but they make sense. This sense results from the combination of symbolic elements spread across or placed throughout a structural space – that is, an intensive topological space that by no means should be understood as an extensive space of real quantities or imaginary qualities. From this we can deduce that the locations and spaces of a structure are primary in relation to the real persons and objects that populate them. Structuralism is a new transcendental philosophy because it thinks a primary plane of symbolic orders, e.g. what Lévi-Strauss in Anthropologie structurale calls the “kinship element,” which essentially determines real lived contexts. Deleuze names the differential and the singular as a third distinguishing feature. As linguistic structural elements, phonemes, for example, do „n’existent pas indépendamment des relations dans lesquelles ils entrent et par lesquelles ils se déterminent réciproquement.“ 15 Deleuze defines symbolic relations according to the differential relation of the points of reference, which considered for themselves are totally indeterminate, but determine themselves in reciprocal relations with each other. He frequently returns to Foucault’s Roussel interpretation, where the pair billard-pillard points to the phonematic differential b/p in French.16 The determinations of the differential relations correspond to the distribution of singular points, which constitute the topological space in a characteristic manner. “Ainsi la détermination des rapports phonématiques propres à une langue donnée assigne les singularités au voisinage desquelles se constituent les sonorités et significations de la langue.”17 Deleuze summarizes his argument by saying that every structure first presents “a system of differential relations, according to which the symbolic elements determine each

13

Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme”, p. 241

14

Cf. Deleuze, „A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme”, p. 243

15

Cf. Deleuze, „A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme”, p. 246

16

Cf. Michel Foucault, Raymond Roussel, Paris 1963, ch. II

17

Deleuze, „A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme”, p. 247

3

other reciprocally” and, second, “a system of singularities corresponding to these relations and tracing the space of the structure.”18 The fourth measure of a genuinely structural process is differenciation. A structure has to differentiate itself, as this is the only way it can become actualized. A structure implies an inner temporality proceeding from itself to its actualizations. While the coexistence of the elements, relations and singularities is virtual, since they are neither present nor real, possible nor imaginary, their actual manifestations are determined as something that in a differentiated form can be represented by a consciousness geared towards the present. While the virtuality of the structural is not differentiated, by no means is it indeterminate and confused but rather differentially determined throughout. It actualizes itself in exclusive ways by selecting particular conditions and singularities. “Il n’y a pas de langue totale, incarnant tous les phonèmes et rapports phonématiques possibles; mais la totalité virtuelle du langage s’actualise suivant des directions exclusives dans des langues diverses [...].“ 19 Langue as linguistic structure is, in a sense, primary in relation to “the various facts of human speech [langage].”20 The structural method is understood as a genetic method that concentrates on the quasi-causality of the actualization of the virtual: On one hand, structural conditions effect actual results; on the other, the structures differentiate themselves in the process of their actualization. The last two criteria are the series and the empty field. Structures actualize themselves serially by generating at least two different orders that are brought into a non-representational relation: bodies and sentences, eating and speaking etc.21 When Lévi-Strauss presents his new concept of totemism in The Savage Mind, he does this by constructing a symbolic homology between a series of animal species on the one hand and a series of social positions and activities on the other.22 The series do not stand in an imaginary relation to each other, since they at the same time refer to an empty field circulating within them, so that the structural conditions are constantly shifting. They neither collapse into each other nor are they mediated by a founding discourse that would appropriate their structural origin and difference by subordinating their divergent tendencies to a transcendent authority. In fact the various series only converge in the structural object or condition of their differentiation. Against the dual constitution of the imagination the third dimension of the structure comes to bear here: „le Tiers qui intervient essentiellement dans le système symbolique, qui distribue les séries, les déplace relativement, les fait communiquer, tout en empêchant l’une de se rabattre imaginairement sur l’autre.”23 This object X or empty field has all kinds of different names; it is the animating instance of a structure, expresses the objective consistency of its problematic character, and evades identification per se. “Il est toujours déplacé par rapport à lui-même. Il a pour propriété de ne pas être où on le cherche, mais on revanche aussi d’être trouvé où il n’est 18

Ibd., p. 249

19

Ibd., p. 251

20

Cf. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris 1916, ch. III, § 2

21

Cf. Deleuze, Logique du sens, p. 227, p. 229

22

Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage, Paris 1962, p. 48sqq.

23

Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme”, p. 259-260

4

pas.“ 24 Deleuze works through a number of these paradox expressions: mana (Lévi-Strauss), zero phoneme (Jakobson), phallus (Lacan), the place of the king (Foucault), the handkerchief in Othello (Green), but also “snark” and other portmanteau words in Lewis Carroll. “C’est une erreur de dire qu’un tel mot a deux sens; en fait, il est d’un autre ordre que les mots ayant un sens. Il est le non-sens qui anime au moins les deux séries, mais qui les pourvoit de sens en circulant à travers elles. [...] C’est bien de cette manière [...] que le non-sense n’est pas l’absence de signification, mais au contraire l’excès de sens. [...] Le sens apparaît ici comme l’effet de fonctionnement de la structure [...].”25 It thus becomes clearer how Deleuze in The Logic of Sense sees language as being made possible by events. He is interested in differentiating between what a sentence expresses and the sentence’s expression – on this side the designations, meanings and manifestations find their place, and on the other it is the events that make sense. They make sense because they separate sounds from bodies and organize them into sentences. This is how differentiations are introduced into language, which repeats the separation of the two series of bodies and sentences in the sentences themselves: „cette ligne-frontière [...] passe aussi bien [...] entre les noms et les verbes, ou plutôt entre les désignations et les expressions, les désignations renvoyant toujours à des corps [...], les expressions, à des sens exprimable.”26 Here we have to make note of the fact that sentences do not isolate themselves from events, which is why no dual mediation between things and their meanings can come about. The event does not exist external to the sentence that expresses it, although it does distinguish itself from the sentence. Thus it does not collapse into the abstract characteristics of the actual order of speech. It insists in the expression, just as the verb conveys the temporality internal to language. The linguistic function of expression is differentiated into functions of meaning, designating and manifestation, which all three stay related to their structural possibility. It is crucial that the sense of the sentence can be grasped both verbally and attributively. As attribute, the sense of the sentence exists in what is expressed, “wrapped up in a verb,” which is ascribed to objects. “C’est la même entité qui est événement survenant aux états de choses et sens insistant dans la proposition. Dès lors, dans la mesure où l’événement incorporel se constitue et constitue la surface, il fait monter à cette surface les termes de sa double référence: les corps auxquels il renvoie comme attribut noématique, les propositions auxquelles il renvoie comme exprimable.”27 If language loses this relation to the event it also loses the distinctions that make it possible, leaving behind only an indistinct roar. The event becomes conflated with its sense, which can never be expressed definitively in a sentence, since no sentence can articulate itself and its sense at the same time. This means that language is only possible as structure – its empirical origins are based on a structural makingpossible, which consists in the difference between objects and sentences as well as in the doubling of this difference in the internal organization of the sentences themselves. This is the only way that sense can be conceived as circulating between the series. If objects and words are constituted as separate spheres, they are nevertheless connected with each other in the 24

Ibd., p. 260

25

Ibd., p. 262

26


27

Ibd., p. 213

5

event of language. “C’est ce point qui est exprimé dans la langage par les mots ésotériques de divers types, assurant à la fois la séparation, la coordination et la ramification des séries.“ 28 The convergence of divergent rows is a structural requirement provided that the series come together in a paradox element that keeps them from converging with each other: “centre toujours déplacé qui ne constitue un cercle de convergence que pour ce qui diverge en tant que tel [...].29 On the other hand, it is problematic that “dans le langage [...] le verbe exprime tous les événements en un”, as Deleuze writes, because the emergence of the imaginary understandings of language, the attributions to the actual instances of language, the blockages in the structural circulation of sense, etc. are not individually examined.30 Deleuze seems to not pursue them any further because he sees the break between the imaginary representations of the actual and the rich eventfulness of the virtual to refer to a fundamental structural change. It is the lines of flight that open up in the event. If the forms of actualization, however, are themselves allocated a typologically definable, structural status, it becomes evident that the celebration of virtuality for its own sake can no longer be convincing. The power relations immanent to language are situated as such in a diagram of forces and can only be adequately addressed in the context of a pragmatically informed theory. So we can see that divergent lines are broken here and there, in structurally specific assemblages, and inevitably made to converge in specific points of concentration. II. In Mille Plateaux (1980) Deleuze distances himself from structuralism, „pour autant que celui-ci renvoie le système de la langue à la compréhension d’un individu de droit, et les facteurs sociaux, aux individus de fait en tant qu’ils parlent.”31 Perhaps with Charles W. Morris’ semiotics in mind (which is broken down into syntactics, semantics and pragmatics), Deleuze and Guattari refer to a generalized pragmatics, which is to address the prerequisites of language regularly overlooked by structural linguistics.32 Austin and other theoreticians showed that there are immanent relations between speech and certain acts that are performed by being spoken. Deleuze generalizes the insights of speech act theory by demonstrating that the pragmatic conditions for language reside in the delocutive. Thus it is not possible to conceive of language as a code and speech as the transmission of information. To command is not to inform someone about a command, but to act. Nor is it possible to determine the structures of a language from its phonological, semantic or syntactic characteristics, thereby reducing pragmatics to defining the external determinations of individual speech. For, as Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, it is futile to “maintenir la distinction langue-parole”: it is precisely the consistent meanings and syntactic regulations supposedly underlying individual expressions that “ne se laissent pas définir indépendamment des actes de parole qu’elle présuppose.“ 33 28

Ibd., p. 214

29

Ibd., p. 214

30

Ibd., p. 216

31

Deleuze, Guattari, Mille Plateaux, Paris 1980, p. 101

32

Cf. ibd., p. 110. Cf. Charles W. Morris, Foundations of the theory of signs, 1938

33

Deleuze, Guattari, Mille Plateaux, p. 98

6

The immanent relations between utterances (énoncés) and actions are considered to be implicit, non-discursive prerequisites for language, or speech-acts, “en cours dans une langue à un moment donné.“ 34 They are what is expressed in a sentence and make sense. They structure the field of utterances and their meanings by establishing redundancy relations in which the authority of language becomes sedimented. Code words and commands circulate in a language like slogans that are passed on without being explicitly comprehensible or interpretable. They delineate the segmentations or circulating identities of people as disciplined and controlled beings. “Il n’y a pas de signifiance indépendante des significations dominantes, pas de subjectivation indépendante d’un ordre établi d’assujettissement. Toutes deux dépendent de la nature et de la transmission des mots d’ordre dans un champ social donné.“35 According to Deleuze and Guattari, this area is a collective assemblage or quasistructure, which is defined by language-immanent acts, so-called “incorporeal transformations.”36 Incorporeal transformations conceptualize acts that are ascribed to bodies by being expressed in utterances. Speech acts are characterized by the fact that the utterances they express and the effects they elicit are strictly simultaneous and coessential. The transformation from bread and wine to the body and blood of Christ performed in the speech act of the priest, for instance, takes place in the ascription of an incorporeal attribute. In the same way the transformation of passengers into hostages takes place in the declaration of the hijackers etc. In every case the semiotic transformation ensuing from a performative utterance depends on corresponding conditions, which make the collective assemblage appear as a complex of power. Naturally a little boy’s announcement on an airplane that he is taking over command as hijacker has a low degree of credibility. In this sense, the utterance variables that relate language to its practical implications can be defined. The determining factors, which lie outside language as a linguistic system and reside in the totality of the circumstances, are thus transported into language as its immanent prerequisite. So it is the pragmatic implications expressed in utterances as their “inner reasons,” which Deleuze and Guattari, in reference to Pierre Bourdieu, refer to as “relations of symbolic force.” These “machinic” variables thus function, in a way, as singularities in a structural domain, in that they reciprocally determine each other and combine relational constructs into one or more semiotic systems. The conceptual shift between structuralism and pragmatism is profound. It is true that the pragmatic critique of structuralism in A Thousand Plateaus is not meant primarily as selfcriticism, but (as before) is aimed at the representational tendencies in structuralism. At the same time, there are some remarkable aspects to this shift. It leads to a subtly differentiated examination of virtual structures, since it is already in their territory that the productive forms of power are situated in their diffuse microphysical relations. The critique of power effects and control is no longer satisfied with focusing on the actual – that is on demonstrating and shaking up its forms of distribution, justification, perception and mediation. It now rather has to refer to the level of virtual structuring itself and offer concrete conceptualizations for alternative modes of structuring. In a philosophy of language context, this means that the 34

Ibd., p. 100

35

Ibd., p. 101

36

Cf. ibd., p. 113

7

sense or that, what is expressed in a sentence or utterance, coincides with the implicit conditions or symbolic reasons of the pragmatic itself. “Je dépends toujours d’un agencement d’énonciation moléculaire, qui n’est pas donné dans ma conscience [...] et qui réunit beaucoup de régimes de signes hétérogènes. Glossolalie.“ 37 Indirect speech becomes the exemplary case of an utterance that belongs to a collective assemblage. It takes over the conveyance of sense, which circulates in it – e.g. as slogan, secret, ideal value, etc. “Le discours indirect est la présence d’un énoncé rapporté dans l’énoncé rapporteur [...].“ 38 In no way does indirect speech presuppose direct speech; it is rather the other way around: Direct speech results from an endless babble or mutter of voices by cutting through the virtual assemblage in such a way that its variables enter into constant relations, or that the constituting processes of signification and subjectification establish fixed attributions. A schizophrenic explains in this sense: „j’ai entendu des voix dire: il est conscient de la vie.“ 39 Although indirect speech, the multiplicity of voices, the semiotic regime, etc. do not become mixed with language, they nevertheless “remplissent chaque fois la condition, si bien que, sans eux, le langage resterait pure virtualité [...].“ 40 The distinction of free indirect speech invalidates the essential characteristics of the structuralist understanding of language. Pragmatics makes use of free indirect speech inasmuch as it applies to the prerequisites that make language possible. It refers to the totality of incorporeal transformations that produce sense by having it move back and forth between bodies and utterances. The notion of constants as linguistic factors of a langue here and variables as merely external and non-linguistic factors of a parole there has become obsolete. “Les variables pragmatiques d’usage sont intérieures à l’énonciation, et forment les présupposés implicites de la langue.“ 41 The pragmatic relation between indirect and direct speech thus in no way functions as a substitute of the structuralist relation between language and speech. In distinction to The Logic of Sense, in A Thousand Plateaus the speech act of the collective assemblage precedes both the order of language as well as that of speech. This is not a communication of events, but the virtual determination of political semiotic systems, which are not defined – at least not essentially – by their characteristics in the results of their actualizations. Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari return to the philosophy of language concepts set forth in The Logic of Sense in the section on pragmatism titled “Postulates of Linguistics.”42 This section allows us, in conclusion, to briefly summarize the elements that testify to a continuity or, on the other hand, to a discontinuity and deviation, in Deleuze’s philosophy of language. We can find continuity in the outline of the genetic structure, which returns diagrammatically as a assemblage. All the determinations ascribed to the structuring of the structure in terms of a theory of immanence and difference are maintained. This is the symbolic field that structures itself by providing the actual bifurcations with a virtual and temporal background. 37

Ibd., p. 107

38

Ibd., p. 106

39

Ibd., p. 107

40

Ibd., p. 108

41

Ibd., p. 108

42

Cf. ibd., p. 121ff.

8

The difference of non-sense circulates beneath the serial actualization lines, preventing a representational correspondence or agreement to emerge between the two sides of content and expression. The pragmatically motivated critique of structuralism is aimed at the possibility of grasping more concretely the immanent milieus in which variables of expression interact with those of content. Nothing is gained by opposing representation and event to each other in an abstract way. Referencing the Stoic “philosophy of language,” Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus emphasize the “incorporeal transformations” that bridge the gap between “bodies” and incorporeal expressions. The incorporeal attributes are neither merely distinguished from bodies nor are they merely expressed in utterances, but are ascribed at the same time to bodies: In no way do they describe or represent these bodies; rather they intervene. “En exprimant l’attribut non corporel, et du même coup en l’attribuant au corps, on ne représente pas, on ne réfère pas, on intervient en quelque sorte, et c’est un acte de langage.“ 43 Perhaps it is no coincidence that Foucault’s name appears in this context.44 Deleuze does not have a well-founded mediation between expressions and facts in mind, but rather a battlefield on which „les formes d’expression et de contenu communiquent, les unes intervenant dans les autres, les autres procédant dans les unes [...] par conjugaison de leurs quanta de déterritorialisation.“ 45 One will at least has to say that Deleuze in The Logic of Sense produces only a very abstract model of linguistic and – primarily – social structures, while the later work on the pragmatic dimension of speech acts provides concepts that allow the structural idea to be expanded and made dynamic and useful for concrete singular studies. An examination of the collective assemblage of expression follows the vertical (virtual deterritorialization/ actual reterritorialization) and the horizontal axis (forms of content and expression) in an environment of desire structured both linguistically and socially. It is this last point that can motivate a strategic turn away from a (theoreticist) ontology of univocity towards a political philosophy of the pragmatic itself.

43

Ibd., p. 110

44

Cf. ibd., p. 123

45

Ibd., p. 112

9