Previously, we recalled the different modes of interaction that exist between the molar and the molecular levels. But because we didn’t go into sufficient depth regarding the nature of the semiotic drivers of these interactions – the function of abstract machines in particular – our description remained essentially on a synchronic and spatial plane. It would thus be necessary also to envisage the existence of diachronic interactions that undo the mechanistic systems of causality on which reasoning in terms of evolutionary stages is founded. But how can the way that what comes ‘after’ determines what comes ‘before’ be conceptualised? Every traditional mode of thinking is opposed to the idea that an effect can go against the grain of time! Also, such interactions can only be conceived on condition that they be envisaged at a level we will characterise as ‘machinic’ – without specifying its material and/or semiotic nature – in which they function outside of human spatio-temporal coordinates. Such is precisely the role that we intend to make abstract machines and the machinic plane of consistency onto which they ‘fasten’ themselves play. Neither transcendent Platonic ideas nor Aristotelian forms in proximity with an amorphous matter, these abstract machines make and unmake stratifications of all kinds. They therefore do not function as a system of coding that would be fixed onto existing stratifications from the outside; they ‘hold’ them from the ‘inside’.
In the context of a general movement of deterritorialisation, they constitute a sort of ‘optional matter’ whose crystals of possibility catalyse the connections, the destratifications, and the reterritorialisations that work the living world as much as the inanimate world. In sum, they mark the fact that deterritorialisation ‘precedes’ the existence of strata and territories. Also, they cannot be ‘realised’ in a logical space, but only through contingent machinic manifestations. With abstract machines it is never simply a question of a simple combinatory, but of the assemblage of intensive components that are irreducible to a formal description. So, without implying the recourse to any sort of background world, their necessity follows from a reversal of perspective leading to the processes of coding and of ‘instruction’ independently of a deixis and an anthropocentric logic, and it has as a consequence the reshuffling of the ‘hierarchical’ relations between the singular and the universal. The singularity of a matter that is semiologically unformed can claim universality. And inversely, the universality of a coding procedure or a signifying redundancy can fall into particularism. Neither universal, nor singular, the sign-particles that constitute the abstract machines charge up singularities, not with the power of universality but with a certain potential for traversing the universe of stratifications. Thus marked in their own colours these singularities and the stratifications that they bring about become available for the work of a semiological assemblage. Correlatively, every utterance or instance of power that claims universality finds itself weighed down with a facticity or a historicity that lends them to a possible pragmatic reassembling.
But just as they have tried to annex semiotics, linguists today intend to control the development of a possible pragmatics. As a form of content, pragmatics is bracketed off or, when it is acknowledged, its political tenor is neutralised. What the structuralists did for the signified – a massive operation of neutralisation – is repeated at another level by generative linguistics and the linguistics of enunciation. Certainly there is now a certain acknowledgement of semantic contents and pragmatic contents, but always on condition that they are distanced from the collective assemblages of enunciation on which they depend. Now, in our opinion, the essential object of a pragmatics ought to be the study of micropolitical formations relative to these assemblages and their impact on discourse and language. In whatever way one considers it, contemporary linguistics continues to model pragmatic and semantic fields on the syntagmatic field. Even when it claims to know nothing of language itself – as with the distributionalists or with Chomsky – it remains imprisoned in a certain type of discourse on the basis of which it claims to deduce all the other possibilities of semiotic competence. Hence the imperious necessity which it finds for itself of affirming, as an intangible preliminary, that the types of langue and competence that it studies – normal, masculine, heterosexual, adult, and most frequently, white and capitalist, language – are essentially based on systems of universals. The abstraction of models here simply masks the historically contingent character of the powers in play. But the reproach that one may level at these theories is not that they are too abstract but on the contrary that they aren’t abstract enough and do not account for the kind of singular – and not universal – abstract machines that are put into play by languages, in the context of particular relations of production. We consider that any idea of a linguistic universal, at the level of the form of expression (guaranteeing the autonomy of the grammatical) or at the level of the form of content, has the role of dodging pragmatics in its power functions and of cutting it off from the social and historical field. Here we will oppose something that is not a model, which we will call ‘rhizome’ (or ‘lattice’), to the model of the syntagmatic tree. It will be defined by the following characteristics:
•Contrary to Chomskyan trees, which begin at the point S and proceed through dichotomy, rhizomes can connect any point whatsoever to any other.
•Each trait of the rhizome does not necessarily refer to a linguistic trait. Semiotic chains of all kinds are connected here to the most diverse modes of coding, biological chains, political chains, economic, etc., putting into play not just every regime of signs but also everything that has a non-sign status.
•The relations that exist between the levels of segmentarity within each semiotic stratum, are to be differentiated from interstratic relations, and operate on the basis of the lines of flight of deterritorialisation.
•Pragmatics will give up any idea of deep structure; the pragmatic unconscious, unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, is not a representational unconscious, crystallised into codified complexes and distributed according to a genetic axis; it is to be constructed like a map.
The map, as the final characteristic of the rhizome, can be taken apart, connected, reversed and can be modified constantly. There can be tree structures within a rhizome. Inversely, the branch of a tree can start to bud in a rhizomatic form.
Pragmatics is divided into two series of components:
1Interpretative transformational components (that can equally be called generative), which imply the primacy of semiologies of signification over non-interpretative semiotics.
They are themselves divided into two general types of transformation:
•analogic transformations arising from iconic semiologies, for example;
•signifying transformations, arising from linguistic semiologies.
Two types of ‘seizing power over contents’ through reterritorialisation and subjectivation correspond to them, which depend either on territorialised assemblages of enunciation or on an individuation of enunciation.
2Non-interpretative transformational components which can overturn the power of the preceding two transformations.
One can divide them into two general types of transformation parallel to the interpretative transformations:
•symbolic transformations arising from intensive semiotics (on the perceptive, gestural or mimetic level, etc.);
•diagrammatic transformations arising from a-signifying semiotics, which operate through a deterritorialisation that bears jointly on the formalism of content and on that of expression, and through the putting into play of abstract machines manifested by a system of signs-particles.
Remarks:
1We are not employing the expressions ‘generative component’ and ‘transformational component’ in the same sense as the Chomskyans. For them, the generative capacity of a system functions like a logico-mathematical axiomatic, whereas we consider that the generative constraints (of a language or a dialect) are always intrinsically linked to the genealogy of a power formation. It is the same with the notion of transformation. The Chomskyans conceptualise it in a way that is identical to that of algebraic or geometrical transformations (it will be recalled that the transformations of an equation change its form whilst maintaining the ‘deep’ economy of the relations present). We are talking here in a sense that could be connected to the sense in which in the history of theories of evolution, transformism (or mutationism) was opposed to fixism. But perhaps there is only a tiny bit of derision and provocation in our ‘abusive’ use of the Chomskyan categories, because in fact they have served as a guide a contrario.
2Contrary to the historical decision of the International Association of Semiotics, we propose, with the same arbitrariness, to maintain (and even to reinforce) a distinction between:
•Semiology, as a trans-linguistic discipline which examines systems of signs in relationship with the laws of language (Barthes’s point of view); and
•Semiotics, as a discipline that aims to study systems of signs following a method that doesn’t depend on linguistics (Peirce’s point of view).