/soy/ - Soyjaks

A Thousand Plateaus

1914: One or Several Wolves?

10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)

November 20, 1923 — Postulates of Linguistics

When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing herself when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as “insign,” give orders or commands. A teacher’s commands are not external or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from primary significations or result from information: an order always and already concerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the statement-subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementary unit of language — the statement — is the order-word.

If in a social field we distinguish the set of corporeal modifications and the set of incorporeal transformations, we are presented, despite the variety in each of the sets, with two formalizations, one of content, the other of expression. For content is not opposed to form but has its own formalization: the hand-tool pole, or the lesson of things. It is, however, opposed to expression, inasmuch as expression also has its own formalization: the face-language pole, the lesson of signs. Precisely because content, like expression, has a form of its own, one can never assign the form of expression the function of simply representing, describing, or averring a corresponding content: there is neither correspondence nor conformity. The two formalizations are not of the same nature; they are independent, heterogeneous. The Stoics were the first to theorize this independence: they distinguished between the actions and passions of bodies (using the word “body” in the broadest sense, as applying to any formed content) and incorporeal acts (the “expressed” of the statements). The form of expression is constituted by the warp of expresseds, and the form of content by the woof of bodies. When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through the body, when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an intermingling of bodies; but the statements, “The knife is cutting the flesh,” “I am eating,” “The water is turning red,” express incorporeal transformations of an entirely different nature (events).

The question of structural invariants — and the very idea of structure is inseparable from invariants, whether atomic or relational — is essential to linguistics. It is what allows linguistics to claim a basis in pure scientificity, to be nothing but science … safe from any supposedly external or pragmatic factor. The question of invariants assumes several closely connected forms: (1) the constants of a language (phonological, by commutativity; syntactical, by transformativity; semantic, by generativity); (2) the universals of language (by decomposition of the phoneme into distinctive features; of syntax into fundamental constituents; of signification into minimal semantic elements); (3) trees linking constants to one another, with binary relations between trees (see Chomsky’s linear arborescent method); (4) competence, in principle coextensive with language and defined by judgments of grammaticality; (5) homogeneity, bearing on elements and relations as well as intuitive judgments; (6) synchrony, which erects an “in-itself’ and a “for-itself’ of language, perpetually moving from the objective system to the subjective consciousness that apprehends its principle (that of the linguist himself or herself).

Since everybody knows that language is a heterogeneous, variable reality, what is the meaning of the linguists’ insistence on carving out a homogeneous system in order to make a scientific study possible? It is a question of extracting a set of constants from the variables, or of determining constant relations between variables (this is already evident in the phonologists’ concept of commutativity). But the scientific model taking language as an object of study is one with the political model by which language is homogenized, centralized, standardized, becoming a language of power, a major or dominant language. Linguistics can claim all it wants to be science, nothing but pure science — it wouldn’t be the first time that the order of pure science was used to secure the requirements of another order. What is grammaticality, and the sign S, the categorical symbol that dominates statements? It is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker, and Chomsky’s trees establish constant relations between power variables. Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers simultaneously. We can conceive of several ways for a language to homogenize, centralize: the republican way is not necessarily the same as the royal way, and is not the least harsh.

587 B.c.-A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs

Year Zero: Faciality

First theorem: One never deterritorializes alone; there are always at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well. Thus there is an entire system of horizontal and complementary reter-ritorializations, between hand and tool, mouth and breast, face and landscape. Second theorem: The fastest of two elements or movements of deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterritorialized. Intensity of deterritorialization must not be confused with speed of movement or development. The fastest can even connect its intensity to the slowest, which, as an intensity, does not come after the fastest but is simultaneously at work on a different stratum or plane (for example, the way the breast-mouth relation is guided from the start by a plane of faciality). Third theorem: It can even be concluded from this that the least deterritorialized reterritorializes on the most deterritorialized. This is where the second system of reterritorializations comes in, the vertical system running from bottom to top. This is the sense in which not only the mouth but also the breast, hand, the entire body, even the tool, are “facialized.” As a general rule, relative deterritorializations (transcoding) reterritorialize on a deterritorialization that is in certain respects absolute (overcoding). We have seen that the deterritorialization of the head into a face is absolute but remains negative in that it passes from one stratum to another, from the stratum of the organism to those of signifiance and subjectification. The hand and breast reterritorialize on the face and in the landscape: they are facialized at the same time as they are landscapified. Even a use-object may come to be facialized: you might say that a house, utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is watching me, not because it resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization. The close-up in film pertains as much to a knife, cup, clock, or kettle as to a face or facial element, for example, Griffith’s “the kettle is watching me.”

1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?”

The heroine, a young telegrapher, leads a very clear-cut, calculated life proceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams she takes one after the other, day after day; the people to whom she sends the telegrams; their social class and the different ways they use telegraphy; the words to be counted. Moreover, her telegraphist’s cage is like a contiguous segment to the grocery store next door, where her fiance works. Contiguity of territories. And the fiance is constantly plotting out their future, work, vacations, house. Here, as for all of us, there is a line of rigid segmentarity on which everything seems calculable and foreseen, the beginning and end of a segment, the passage from one segment to another. Our lives are made like that: Not only are the great molar aggregates segmented (States, institutions, classes), but so are people as elements of an aggregate, as are feelings as relations between people; they are segmented, not in such a way as to disturb or disperse, but on the contrary to ensure and control the identity of each agency, including personal identity. The fiance can say to the young woman, Even though there are differences between our segments, we have the same tastes and we are alike. I am a man, you are a woman; you are a telegraphist, I am a grocer; you count words, I weigh things; our segments fit together, conjugate. Conjugality. A whole interplay of well-determined, well-planned territories. They have a future but no becoming. This is the first life line, the molar or rigid line of segmentarity; in no sense is it dead, for it occupies and pervades our life, and always seems to prevail in the end. It even includes much tenderness and love. It would be too easy to say, “This is a bad line,” for you find it everywhere, and in all the other lines.

What happened? This is the question Fitzgerald keeps coming back to toward the end, having remarked that “of course all life is a process of breaking down.”

Some segments are more or less near, and others more or less distant. The segments seem to encircle an abyss, a kind of huge black hole. On each segment there are two kinds of lookouts, near-seers and far-seers. What they watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and rebellions occurring in the abyss. But there is a major difference between the two types of lookouts. The near-seers have a simple spyglass. In the abyss, they see the outline of gigantic cells, great binary divisions, dichotomies, well-defined segments of the type “classroom, barracks, low-income housing project, or even countryside seen from an airplane.” They see branches, chains, rows, columns, dominoes, striae. Once in a while along the edges they discover a misshapen figure or a shaky contour. Then they bring out the terrible Ray Telescope. It is used not to see with but to cut with, to cut out shapes. This geometrical instrument, which emits a laser beam, assures the dominion of the great signifying break everywhere and restores the momentarily threatened molar order. The cutting telescope overcodes everything; it acts on flesh and blood, but itself is nothing but pure geometry, as a State affair, and the near-seers’ physics in the service of that machine. What is geometry, what is the State, and what are the near-seers? These are meaningless questions (“I am speaking literally”) because it is not so much a question of defining something as effectively drawing a line; not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which everyone will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual or collective.

1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…

1837: Of the Refrain

1227: Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine

I am ending this thread.

Explain in deleuzean terms