Deleuze for the Desperate #13c: Sign
regimes
Dave Harris
Both Deleuze and Guattari have discussed matters
of language and linguistics in their own solo
pieces -- eg Deleuze (2006) or Guattari's
articles in Genosko (1996). Guattari has a
detailed discussion in his Machinic
Unconscious They also have a
substantial section in their Anti-Oedipus.
Most of what follows will be based on Plateau 4 however.
With the other issues, it's been convenient to
look at some examples first before zeroing in on
the concept itself, but I must say I found the
examples rather obscure here, things like the
history of psychoanalysis or Jewish history.
Instead, I found the summaries, lists and
diagrams, were more helpful, and I refer to
those as we go through.
M Harris
The argument here begins with the notion of
coding. Linguists seem to vary about what a
linguistic code actually does, but the interest
here is on the ways in which signs are actually
attached to objects events or people, how things
are given particular names. Coding for
structural linguists is not particularly
interesting, and seems to be a matter of simply
applying culturally acceptable names that we
have all learned. This is part of a general
disinterest in content in favour of examining
the ways in which signs relate to each other.
However, Deleuze and Guattari are more
interested in the political implications. There
are obvious cases where choosing names involve
politics. Are we to call the Palestinian
activists terrorists or freedom fighters, for
example? Shall we describe the main influences
on policies as market forces,national interests
or class politics?
When we talk about sign regimes, we are talking
about combinations of linguistic and political
features, political in the broadest sense. There
are several main types of sign regimes, four in
this case. Deleuze and Guattari are keen to
assure us that these are to be seen as maps
rather than specific descriptions of historical
stages. They have several other maps which are
similar in intent, such as regimes of
subjectification (Guattari 2013) or of
capitalist regimes (in Genosko 1996). These maps
overlap and display different focuses.
end M Harris
The first sign regime is called pre-signifying
(130). We have fairly simple connections between
signs and events, almost 'natural' forms of
coding they tell us. Codes are found not just in
speech but in gesture and bodily expressions, in
dances or ritual. In Anti-Oedipus
the system is described as undercoding. There is
no tight control over coding, and instead we
have a more polyvocal system. This regime
depended on there being tight local territories,
and as social change weakens those territories,
so pre-signifying sign regimes tended to be
replaced. Deleuze and Guattari argue that this
replacement tended to be total and complete, and
this is in contrast to modern sign regimes.
Second, we find a countersignifying
regime found among nomads and existing in war machines. We have
already discussed the war machine in a video.
The implication here is that there is a refusal
to operate with fully positivistic or
quantitative systems and definitions, but to
prefer intensive measures -- of nearness rather
than measured distance, for example. The
implication is that we also find loose political
coalitions and local leaders rather than a
bureaucratic modern state. As we saw with the
war machine, this regime is never fully
conquered by the state regime, not least because
the modern State needs it to generate new ideas
and practices.
The third regime is developed in early
despotic political systems. It could be called
the signifying regime (of the sign), and
there are eight characteristics of it listed on
p.129. There is
also a useful diagram on page 151. To
summarize, language and coding is controlled
very tightly by a single central authority,
often a human being like king or chief,
sometimes acting as a god. There are some
implications for faciality here. Approved codes
are extended to different parallel circles of
society that all radiate out from the centre.
There is a constant effort to interpret new
events in the light of the central codes, and a
specialist body of priests to do this. This is
also known as overcoding. We start to see
important implications for the construction of
subjectivity as well. Language offers a form of
strong signifiance, language designed
specifically to construct the ideal subject,
someone totally obedient to the central
authority, referring to themselves only in
identities approved by the dominant language,
obeying what God or the King wills. There is a
clear link with the paranoid personality type.
Dissent is still possible, because even
overcoded language can never be fully
controlled. Flows or packets of signs can be
detached from central systems, sometimes after
the work of a charismatic prophet, and can
become associated with deviant groups. This
involves a break with dominant forms of
faciality, a double turning away: God turns away
his face so his human subjects reciprocate.
Usually that meets with punishment in the form
of death or banishment. Dissidents are given the
choice of obeying central authority or going
into exile as scapegoats, choosing between the
face of God or the anus of the goat as they put
it. They seem to have the history of the Jewish
people in mind here and spend several pages
developing their particular take on it.
The fourth one describes modern society
-- the post-signifying regime. There is
no central control over coding, but rather a
number of linguistic flows and codes.
Individuals in these societies see themselves as
freely acting persons with no obligations to God
or to any despotic social arrangements. Instead
they can pursue their own passions. This term is
used after a quick survey of French
psychoanalysis which identified a passional
personality, a rational form of delusion. The
subtypes of that delusion included monomania and
erotomania, which made me think of the mad
passions pursued by young gentlemen in Proust, amour
fou as the French call it. Here, any
external object, event or person can act as 'a
point of subjectification'(141) and develop into
subjective activity. However such activity will
still be limited and takes the form of segmented
lines that stop and then start again. These
lines are further described in Plateau 8 on the
novella. They want to develop rhizomatic forms
of subjective activity instead.
The post signifying regime looks more liberating
because there are no central dominant codings
and no sustained despotic signifiance, but there
is a downside in endless relativism. Individuals
do not lack signs with which to describe
themselves adequately, despite Lacan, but rather
suffer from an excess of possibilities.
Sociologists like Durkheim would call this state
anomie (the whole scheme looks rather like
Durkheim). Individuals in post-signifying
regimes are endlessly restless, have endlessly
segmented lives, with no possibilities ever
definitively excluded. Deleuze and Guattari
refer to the importance of guilt and betrayal,
in a literary reference to Borges which I have
not followed (see p.138 and note 20)
Deleuze (1990) refers to the notion of a society
of control, with an awful combination of
the freedom to develop however you want, but
everything requiring access to information, the
right sort of legitimation and entitlement. You
find your subjective identity only as a category
within more general types -- not an individual
but a 'dividual'.
The notion of the endlessly restless consumer,
or the human individual awash in a sea of
overlapping flows of signs seems to offer some
promise in explaining some of the pathologies of
current social media. There is an article by
Genosko (2008) that explores some of those
possibilities. We can at least see that
post-signifying systems imply a deep dependence
on current forms of communication, and that when
we operate with them we are always open to the
actions of others, we experience eternal debt is
how it is put. We might add that we are
particularly open to externally-provided flows
of signs.
So we have four main types of sign regime, but,
with the exception of the first one, it is
common to find them mixed. A particular mixture
might encourage the development of individuals
extending their lines of subjectivity, only to
have a priest step in now and then and insist on
interpreting what they do in terms of dominant
codings. The examples in this plateau include
modern psychoanalysts as priests, and again
there is a reference to a slogan by Lacan on
page 138. Patients freely develop their
subjective thoughts, only to have the
psychoanalyst intervene and insist that they are
really displaying classic symptoms of neurosis
or psychosis. I must say I think that the
interventions of any experts in social fields
can be criticized like this. University
academics are also good examples. To paraphrase
Goffman (1968), educational experts are people
who identify problems with your thoughts that
you never even knew you had. Bourdieu (2000)
uses the term 'symbolic violence' to describe
the ways in which researchers in social science
treat the views of their respondents as mere
'data'.
Let's trace some implications for the human
subject. The paradox of the subject is well
developed by French Marxists like Althusser
(1977) , who is cited in this Plateau p. 144).
In order to be accepted as a a fully responsible
human subject, you have to subject yourself to
socially accepted forms. For Deleuze and
Guattari there is a linguistic twist. People can
experience themselves as human subjects when
they enunciate, initiate an act of
communication. They are subjects of enunciation.
But they also find themselves are subjects of
the statement made about them and others. This
probably illustrates the difference between the
I and the me, which sociologists might have
encountered in the work of GH Mead, but which is
attributed to Kant here. In the examples in this
Plateau, the I is the thinking subject that says
'I believe…' But there are also statements in
which the I stands for a general person, a me,
which might equally be about a he or a she — 'I
breathe...'.
As usual it is tempting to think of a more local
example. When I was a full-time academic I was a
free thinker able to pursue argument wherever it
led according to my own passions, but I was also
an employee and found myself in statements made
by my employer, along with all the other
employees. We were redundant, had to work
harder, had to produce more research or do more
teaching or whatever. The subject of the
statement dominates in stratified social life
say Deleuze and Guattari, while the subject of
enunciation persists, perhaps as one of those
rational delusions, or perhaps only in purely
private thought, we might add. The subject of
enunciation 'recoils' into the subject of the
statement is how they put it. The human subject
is 'doubled'.
It's not surprising that post signifying regimes
are highly compatible with capitalism with its
endless flows of subjectivity and illusory forms
of subjective freedom. They are also taken as
natural by structural linguistics, where
endlessly flexible signifiers just link to each
other with an almost infinite capacity to apply
to almost anything. In
capitalism, exchange value is abstracted
from use values for any commodity whatsoever
and is used to set up a system of relations
of exchange which apply to everything
everywhere. Any Marxist could
see the political implications of this
similarity, and Guattari spells them out in
several places in Genosko (1996).
The Plateau ends with what is a familiar
argument referring to abstract machines of
language as a way forward. Actual languages are
based on actual regimes of signs, which means
that language gets stratified by political and
economic power. But actual languages also face
towards the plane of consistency as they put it,
that is they point to an underlying abstract
machine that has produced them. Abstract
machines, operating at the virtual level,
produce all actual systems as possibilities, but
there are additional possibilities which have
not been actualized and those will help us break
out of the current sign regime. Apart from
anything else, they will help us
deterritorialize current possibilities As
they put it: 'there is no universal logic
[behind language] nor is there grammatical
reality in itself, any more than there is
signifier for itself' (p. 164).
Instead, there is something
behind statements and more general semiotic or
sense making, activities — 'machines,
assemblages, and movements of
deterritorialization'. We have to
get back to the abstract machinic level in
order to realize the full potentials of
language and semiotic activity. The
only constraint on the operation of those
machines and assemblages is the plane of
consistency, roughly that any possibilities have
to reflect the characteristics of the machine.
Later on they are going to say that there may
be, for example, certain 'traits' ultimately
affecting both content and expression.
Actual linguistic expressions are going to have
four basic functions or components (160 – 1).
(1) The generative function means that any
particular form of expression can be located in
different regimes as in the example of mixed
semiotics, so any subjective enunciation can be
recaptured by some expert interpreter.
(2) Recaptures are possible because there is a
transformational component in language, where
one term is transformed into another, again in
mixed regimes. This makes it look as if forms of
expression alone are the important components,
but we want to also restore content as an
independent variable.
(3) There are more critical elements too,
however including diagrammatic ones where we can
take particular particles (emanating from
contents?) or signs and see them instead as
something more unformed, as traits capable of
combining with one another (161). This process
of abstraction actually approaches the real
state which includes a virtual dimension. We are
to do this abstraction both with contents and
expressions, and Plateau 3 gives more clues
about how to do this with content, as in the
next audiofile.
(4) There is the machinic component, as
discussed above, showing how abstract machines
are 'effectuated in concrete assemblages'. We
can do this with the forms of both expression
and content. Again the point about content is
explained later in this series, but the idea is
that matter is formed into more understandable
substances before any human semiotic activity
takes place.
So what philosophers do, and this might be seen
as a critical kind of pragmatics, also known as
schizoanalysis, is to look at mixed semiotics
and see how they have been generated. Then we
map transformations and understand them as
'buds'. Then we develop the diagram of the
abstract machine as a matter of 'potentialities
or as effective emergences', trying to get back
to the 'semiotically unformed matters in
relation to physically unformed matters'.
Finally, we outline a programme of assemblages
that will distribute everything and that
'effectuate abstract machines, simultaneously
semioticizing matters of expression and
physicalizing matters of content' (162).
We have no further developments of these
abstract processes here, but we do have an
example. We might take a particular propositions
such as 'I love you'. Then we ask about the
statements underpinning this proposition which
might be different for different groups. We try
to examine how a particular regime of signs
particularises this proposition. We need to ask
about nonlinguistic elements as well, 'variables
of enunciation', how motives and social
constraints prompt us to enunciate such a
proposition. Rather bizarrely Henry Miller is
cited as an authority here to show how the term
'I love you' shows that the type of love varies
in different societies — romantic love,
collective love and so on. That proposition can
be captured by a despot and worked into both
signifiance and interpretation to produce a
signifying chain that controls people —
decisions by leaders is also a form of love, for
example. There is also a passional form where
individual subjects develop particular points of
subjectification, as when they fall madly in
love as we saw. Plateau
6 on the body without organs also notes
developments such as courtly love as we saw. By
looking at these different examples we are led
to ask questions about abstract machines and
assemblages. We would not even get close if we
just worked with the formal syntax of
propositions, or some transcendental model,
working on the apparent universal logic of
language or grammar.
We have located particular propositions in
regimes of signs and noted possible mixtures,
translations and transformations. Pursuing
classic 60s sexual politics, we can also try to
develop new unknown statements about love,
perhaps turning on 'sensual delight, physical
and semiotic systems in shreds, a-subjective
affects, signs without signifiance' (163). There
might be 'feverish improvisations,
becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, real
transsexualities, continuums of intensity,
constitutions of bodies without organs'
References
Althusser,
L. (1977) 'Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)'.
In Althusser L . 'Lenin and Philosophy' and
Other Essays, London, New Left Books (notes here)
Deleuze, G.
(2006) Two Regimes of Madness: texts and
interviews 1975--95. Ed D Lapoujade.
Trans. Ames Hodges & Mike Taormina. New
York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series (notes here)
Genosko, G. (2008) A-Signifying Semiotics. The
Public Journal of Semiotics II(I),
pp.11--21. Online: journals.lub.lu.se/index.php/pjos/article/download/8822/7920
Genosko G (Ed) (1996) The Guattari
Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell. (my notes)
Goffman, E (1968) ,Stigma:
Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.
Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. (notes here)
Guattari, F. ( 2013) Schizoanalytic
Cartographies. Translated
by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury
Academic. (my
notes)
Guattari, F. (2011) The
Machinic Unconscious. Essays in
Schizoanalysis, translated by Taylor
Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
Foreign Agents. (notes here)
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