The problems posed by pragmatics are in the process of acquiring a central place in the preoccupations of contemporary linguistics. With linguistic structuralism, contents were tributary to signifying chains that could always be described in terms of chains of binary oppositions. Information theory had established itself in some way at the heart of the machine of linguistic expression. It seemed to go without saying that its purpose was the transmission of information, the rest being mere noise and redundancy. With language having no other content than information, it was not a question for linguistics of interpenetration with the social field and its political problems. The object of linguistics, the ‘objective’ object that was supposed to constitute it as a science, was this atom of information (a sort of quantitative unit of form), whereas the problems of communication were relegated to a question that remained rather marginal, that of enunciation. Imitating scientific objectivity, linguistics thus believed it could keep its distance from any difficult social problematic. Psychoanalysis had proceeded in the same way, but by relying not on information theory, but on biology, linguistics and, recently, even logic and mathematics.
Chomskyan linguistics wanted straightaway to distinguish itself from structural linguistics, which it reproached for not taking into account the creative characteristic of language. In its first version, it considered that the phonological machine could only intervene in the final formulation of utterances, at a so-called surface level. On the basis of a syntactic deep structure, its first linguistic model was supposed to generate and transform utterances without losing any nuance, any semantic ambiguity. But along the way the ‘semantic question’ has only deepened the mystery of the operations that are supposed to be accomplished at the ‘deep’ level. For orthodox Chomskyans, a mathematical machine – a syntactic topology – is relied on to produce semantic compositions, whilst for the ‘generative semantics’ current, this same task is entrusted to a particular logic, a so-called ‘natural logic’ that articulates abstract ‘semantic atoms’ (‘atomic predicates’) and the ‘postulates of meaning’ that link them together.1 Seeking to free itself from the narrow formalism of structuralism and Chomskyanism, a linguistics of enunciation is today endeavouring to find its own path. Its explicit object is the consideration of the pragmatic components of communication. Unfortunately, it still seems to go without saying, for the linguistics of enunciation, that one can only take these components into consideration in so far as they have an impact on the structures of language as such, that is to say, in so far as they have already been syntacticised and semanticised.
And once again the question of the status of the micropolitical fields of power that the research of the phonological and generativist currents had evacuated makes its appearance. One has the impression that once more the wastebasket of linguistics – to borrow an expression from Chomsky2 – has merely been shifted. With the binary reduction of the structuralists, semantics was the wastebasket. With the topologism of the ‘generative semanticists’, semantic contents were apparently taken in hand, but they are studied without the social assemblages of their enunciation ever being worried about; thus the political wastebasket is pushed back towards a pragmatics with undefinable limits. With the linguistics of enunciation, one finally turns to pragmatics, but it is constituted in a restrictive way. It is treated as a signifying content. In the same way as semantic fields, pragmatic fields are flattened, structuralised. They remain dependent on syntactic and phonological machines. To be sure these are more complex than those of Martinet’s structuralism, and they have to be inserted at one point or another in the branching of the deep structures or surface structures of the generativist kind, without the idea that they might have their own system of staging, their own micropolitical fields of enunciation, ever being accepted.
Linguists seem to accept as self-evident that semantic fields and pragmatic fields can be binarised in a similar way to machines of expression that convey ‘digitalised’ information. One might say that they are wary of content and context and that they only agree to take them into consideration on condition of having the guarantee that they can control them on the basis of a rigorous formalisation relying on a system of universals, which protects them from historical and social contingencies. For example, Nicholas Ruwet considers that the creativity of language can only be exercised in the framework of an axiomatics. He refuses the open perspective of Hjelmslev, that it might begin at the more molecular level of the concatenation of figures of expression and figures of content (we will try to define the first as being a-signifying diagrammatic, and the second as a-signifying semantic). Certainly this author doesn’t completely exclude the existence of this kind of work within language, but he relegates it to a marginal position that seems to echo, on a linguistic plane, that which the mad, children and poets experience on the social plane.3 Under these conditions, how can one still hope to preserve the creative dimension of language?
How is one to understand that deviants, group-subjects, can invent words, break a syntax, change significations, produce new connotations, action words, political order words, engender revolutions as much in society as in language?
With Hjelmslev, the project of a radical axiomatisation of linguistics at least presented the advantage of not specifying the irreversible opposition of content and expression. ‘The very terms plane, expression, and content have been chosen according to current usage, and are entirely arbitrary. By virtue of their functional definition, it is impossible to maintain that it is legitimate to call one of these magnitudes “expression” and the other “content”, and not the other way round: they are only defined through their solidarity with one another, and neither can be defined more precisely. Taken separately, they can only be defined through opposition and in a relative fashion, as the functives of a single function that opposes them to one another.’4 Of course it is regrettable that in fact this axiomatised opposition of expression and content coincides with that made by Saussure between signifier and signified, and as a consequence, the ensemble of semiotics are made to depend on linguistics again.5
Whatever the case may be, at the most essential level of what the glossematicians call the ‘semiotic function’, the form of expression and the form of content are articulated so as to constitute a ‘solidarity’ that radically relativises this classic opposition between content and expression.6 This latter finally only reasserts its rights at the level of substances (the meaning of content and the meaning of expression). Correlatively, one can therefore only talk of form to the extent that it is manifest, functionalised in substances. Now, what we are trying to show is that non-linguistic semiotic metabolisms work these substances ‘before’ the constitution of a machine for ‘making significations’, without it being possible to establish a relation of priority or hierarchy with regard to them in relation to the latter (metabolism, symbolic, diagrammatic, etc.). It is by semiotising diverse basic ‘matters’ that this solidarity of forms – which we will call here an abstract machine – constitutes substances of expression and content. What differentiates substance from matters is precisely their being semiotically formed. The distinction that Hjelmslev establishes between the system and the process of its syntagmatisation does not imply that this latter remain a prisoner of autonomous forms – of the Platonic idea type. No form can exist for itself outside of processes of formation. These processes do not necessarily refer to universal codes, closed in on themselves; in certain cases, they remain inseparable from characteristics proper to the base materials that they put into play, what Metz, with regard to cinema, has called the pertinent traits of matters of expression.7 The whole question is one of seeking to determine what gives a creative function to a semiotic component and what takes it away. Languages, as such, have no privilege for semiotic creativity; they even function, most often, as encodings of normalisation. Inversely, non-linguistic semiotics can perfectly easily be creative and even break the lead weight of conformity of dominant linguistic significations. The operation of semiological overcoding of semiotic processes in the ‘free state’, which reduces them to the status of linguistic component, or to a dependency of language, consists in isolating the traits that are useful to power formations for every one of them, and of neutralising, repressing, and ‘structuralising’ the others, by means of the signifying linguistic machine.
We will therefore not take up the distinction maintained by Hjelmslev between sign and symbol again. What we will designate with the expression ‘sign machine’ will cover both Hjelmslev’s sign and symbol systems (Prolegomena p. 142). As a consequence, we will not endeavour to determine what characterises the productions of signification and symbolic or iconic productions at the level of figures of expression, but at the pragmatic level of assemblages of enunciation relative to these sign machines. Thus pragmatics will in a way move into the first rank of components responsible for semiotic micropolitics.
In our terminology, we will say that by semiologising itself in a language, the abstract machine, or if you wish, the machine extracted from the base of semiotic components, the sign machine in what makes it most machinic (that is to say, deterritorialised), brings about a reterritorialisation of these components by their regrouping into two homogeneous planes, that of expression and that of content. In fact, these two planes are not homogeneous at all: they only give the illusion of being so through the double articulation, the polarisation, the structuralisation of the constitutive elements that they set up, in relation to one another. Once they have been homogenised, planified, these ‘base’ components could be called semiological, and no longer semiotic. This semiological super-substance, which has been put in place behind the variety of semiotic substances, this dualist signifying substance, or this super-sense, is only in a position to ‘take in hand’ the intensive multiplicities put into play by the different semiotic vectors on condition that it grids and hierarchises them by this system of double overcoding – overcoding of power at the level of content and logico-axiomatic overcoding at the syntagmatic level. The ideal of order, of the general formalisation of all modes of expression, of the delimitation and control of intensive flows of semiological substances, is an ideal that is never completely reached because in reality, as we will see later on, language leaks all over the place. This ideal is that of exhaustive dichotomous analysis, the binary reduction, the radical ‘digitalisation’ of all semiotic praxis, the model for which was elaborated by information theory, and it continues to function (in the company of behaviourism and Pavlovianism, with which in any case it has certain affinities) as a veritable repressive war machine in the field of the sciences of language and the human sciences.
It is considered, coldly, ‘scientifically’, that reductive binary analysis could by rights be applied to no matter what kind of social fact. And if some or other artifice seems to give success in this, then one is persuaded that the essential point in question has been grasped, one can be satisfied, stop and move on to something else! In this direction, and by pushing things to the extreme, one might then start to consider that because every event can be expressed in terms of the probability of its occurrence, no matter what structure itself results from an originally accidental deducting [prélèvement], or is commanded by a universal logical imperative, the ‘goal’ of which is the constitution of a local nucleus of diminishing entropy in the probabilistic system that is the starting point. The universals that are supposed to weigh over history and its power struggles are thus at the join between two operations, which consist in 1) probabilising events along a diachronic axis; and 2) structuralising events along a synchronic axis. But the true goal of this entire operation consists in making socio-machinic assemblages, which in the last instance constitute the sole effective producers of rupture and of innovation in the semiotic domains that interest us here, disappear under the table. Chance and structure are the worst enemies of freedom. Both proceed from the same conservative ideal of a general axiomatic of the sciences, imported from mathematics starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the same philosophical tradition of the transcendental subject as knowing subject, opaque to the contingencies of history, and which is prolonged today in the ossified and pernickety discourse of epistemology. Every time it is the same magic trick: by means of the defence of a transcendent order founded on the supposedly universal character of the signifying articulations of certain utterances – the cogito, mathematics, the ‘discourse’ of science – one seeks to support a certain kind of stratification of powers that guarantees the status, the material comfort and the imaginary security of its scribes.
There are thus two possible attitudes, two possible politics, with regard to form: a formalist position which sets out from transcendent, universal forms cut off from history, which come to be ‘incarnated’ in semiological substances; and a position which sets out from power formations and assemblages of enunciation, which extracts semiotic components and abstract machines on the basis of machinic processes such as are offered up by history. Sometimes, more or less accidental conjunctions between ‘natural’ codings and sign machines get the upper hand in a given period, but in fact, these conjunctions are inseparable from the assemblages, which in any case constitute the nucleus of their enunciation. Not, as one might be tempted to say, their re-enunciation. In effect, there is no meta-language here.
The collective assemblage speaks ‘flush’ with states of things and states of fact. There is not, on the one hand, a subject that speaks in the void, and on the other, an object that would be spoken in ‘the full’. The void and the full are ‘machined’ by the same deterritorialisation effect. Connections are only possible at the points where ‘natural’ things and the linguistic things are deterritorialised and make possible the connection of their deterritorialisation. Thus, assemblages are not offered up to chance or to an axiomatic of universals: they arise from a general ‘law’ of deterritorialisation: it is the most deterritorialised assemblage which has the potential for resolving the impasse in earlier systems of enunciation and the stratifications of the machinic assemblages that correspond to them. But this ‘law’ doesn’t in the least imply a pre-established order, a necessary harmony. Just a machinic diachrony without any dialectical guarantee. If we believe it necessary to insist on this second point of view – that of abstract machines and not transcendent forms – it is because it seems to us to be the sole possible way out of the impenitent and disempowering dualism in which linguists, and following them, semioticians and structuralists, are imprisoned. But it is not an ideological optional matter. In effect, these two points of view coexist and interact with one another incessantly. From the side of intensive multiplicities, machinic lines of flight tend to deterritorialise semiotic processes, to open them up, to connect them to other matters of expression, whilst stratified codings, on the side of the order of ‘things’, of the dominant worldlinesses tend to syntacticise them and to cut them off from any meshing with the intensive real. On the first side, desire, which is in a perpetually nascent state, follows its own line with respect to semiological stratifications; on the other side, it starts to turn round and round in power structures, in this ‘silent order’ which, Michel Foucault tells us, subjects us to a grid that is prior to linguistic, perceptual and practical grids, to the extent that it neutralises them by doubling them.8
Exiting from the ghetto of linguistics, from the ghetto of significations, depends on whether abstract machines function with signification or independently of it, in what we call a diagrammatic effect (at the level of ‘pre-’signifying symbolic semiotic components, we will not yet talk about an abstract machine but only of a machinic index). When they are liberated from dualist signifying substance, which they avoid or get around, abstract machines do not arise from a particular stratum, constituted – as it happens – from the articulation of a plane of expression with a plane of content, to manifest themselves. With the diagrammatic effect they are organised on the basis of a single plane: the machinic plane of consistency or plane of machinic immanence.9
All the points of deterritorialisation, all the machinic surplus values, are inscribed on this plane. They constitute in some way a sort of machine of abstract machines (and of machinic indices), the place for the potentialisation of all potential machinic assemblages. Abstract machines cease to be slotted into (or encasted in), segmentarised in the strata. On the contrary, now the strata depend on it, in so far as they knot the points of deterritorialisation of their material and semiotic components together with the machinic-semiotic surplus values of the plane of consistency. The strata are thus doubled, haunted by a field of possible on the horizon: that of the upsurge of new machinic assemblages. At this level, the distinction between semiotic machines and their referents ceases to be pertinent, and it is that which motivates our use of the expression ‘abstract machine’. Machines here are no longer either material or semiotic. They are machines of pure potentiality. Not empty potentiality, because they do not start out from nothing, but from the points of potentialisation of machinic assemblages, considered at a given point of the machinic phylum, in a given historical context. Machines are abstract in that they extract the points of connection between lines of destratification. They establish the univocity of possible connections, where the strata seemed to have to maintain separations eternally. With abstract machines and their plane of consistency, ruptures between the strata are brought to light and a passage for the most deterritorialised energy is made possible.
But this univocity of abstract machines remains fundamentally metastable. They are, we repeat, nothing, as such, they have no mass, no energy of their own, no memory. They are nothing but the infinitesimal, super-deterritorialised indication of a possible crystallisation between states of things and states of signs. One might compare them to the particles of contemporary physics, which are ‘virtualised’ by theory and retain their identity for an infinitesimal period of time, an identity which in any case it is not necessary to prove on an experimental plane, as long as the theoretico-experimental complex can continue to function by presupposing their existence. It is this metaphor that leads us to speak, with regard to the diagrammatic effect, of a putting to work of sign-particles: the abstract machine is ‘charged’ either with signification or with existence, depending on whether it is fixed and disempowered in a semiological substance or it is inscribed on the machinic plane of consistency by the process of diagrammatisation. In the first case it serves as a point to which lines of potential destratification cling, which it reterritorialises by folding them back on themselves, by putting them into bi-univocal correspondence, by overcoding or axiomatising them. For the lines of flight it then becomes a vanishing point [un point de fuite], in the pictorial sense this time, a point of closure for representation, which totalises a virtual point of view, that puts an end to all the leaking of desire, a sort of drain for a whole series of contents that are constituted as a dependency of an empty container. Whereas in the second case, the processes of semiotisation will traverse all the strata, will avoid the knots of redundancy that are the effects of signification, the personological poles, the fixation on faciality traits, etc. Whatever its mode of existence and the semiotic compositions which it enters the heart of might be, the abstract machine will no longer be linked to fixed and universal coordinates, but to a becoming with multiple potentialities. When such a diagrammatic effect does not manage to constitute itself, the system collapses and one gets recuperated by dualist substance. The ‘mentalisation’ of signifying contents consists in reifying a real, in paradigmaticising signifieds and syntagmaticising an expression, according to an economy of semiotic normativisation and subjection. As Hjelmslev has demonstrated so well, the diverse modes of semiological formalisation depend on the fundamental break between expression and content in signification. After a first step in which the two breaks between expression and content and form and substance are ‘contracted’ at the heart of the machine of semiotic disempowerment that the famous signifier-signified-referent triangle constitutes, the second step is to award honours to the production of signification, proclaiming its superiority over all other semiotic productions, to the extent that it alone would be able to be defined as a semiology of communication. But a communication of what between who, if not disempowered informational residues between fictive poles of subjectivation, radically cut off from intensive multiplicities?
The subject is thus not a simple effect of a signifier, as the celebrated Lacanian formula ‘the signifier represents the subject for another signifier’ proclaims; it results from the ensemble of processes that converge on the disempowering of modes of semiotisation. The individuated and consciential subjectivation of enunciation corresponds to the particular assemblages of a series of disempowering breaks:
•at the level of sign machines between the signifier and the signified;
•at the level of discourse, between the signified and the referent;
•at the very level of the process of subjectivation, by the establishment of a redundancy of redundancies, of a formalisation of formalisms constitutive of one’s presence to self, of the splitting of the self, by the threat of the loss of identity in the double, by the opposition between the subject and the other and, beyond – and always recentred on the same system of empty resonance – by all the systems of bipolar values (masculine-feminine around the phallus, singular-plural around the whole object, true-false, good-evil, etc.).
When the energy of desiring intensities is captured by the infernal machine of the semiological triangle (signifier-signified-referent), the abstract machines, connected in a closed circuit as if in a sort of cyclotron, lose their open machinic function so as to become signifying abstractions. Instead of being organised according to machinic indices, lines of power (machinic surplus values) or machinic assemblages, intensive multiplicities are structured according to spatio-temporal coordinates, substances of expressions and inter-subjective positions for which these abstractions will be the cornerstone. Thus, signifying abstraction, the abstract machine, machinic indices and assemblages – to which we will return in what follows – do not crystallise ‘spontaneously’ but only because of particular assemblages of enunciation. Abstraction partially crystallises with the territorialised assemblage of enunciation, but above all and most fully with the individuation of enunciation. It implies the erection of a transcendentalised subject, of a transcendentalised object, of a transcendentalised other and of a transcendentalised signifier. All the flows are thus stratified, dualised, grasped in systems of echoes.
The semiologisation of an abstract machine, its fixation as an abstraction, implies an autonomisation and a disempowering of deterritorialisation: an empty deterritorialisation, turning around on itself, is constituted with the process of consciential subjectivation. This empty system of redundancies of the consciential machine corresponds to this system of the double articulation of signifying chains: a machine for emptying out intensities, a machine to produce the void, lack and the break of representation. Abstraction simulates a passageway between sign machines and real intensities; this semiotic simulation of real articulations implies that all the effective connections between the sign machine and the referent have been cut off, emptied out, such that relations of denotation appear arbitrary and relations of signification unmotivated. But it is a matter of a forced arbitrariness and a forced motivation, an active politics of the break and of the autonomisation of the plane of the signifier. The void must be continuously remade, isolation must be reproduced, the risk that the leaking of desire might re-establish a direct connection between machinic expression, the formalism of content and the traits of expression of the matters constitutive of the referent must be combatted incessantly.10 The task of emptying out and avoiding desire falls to this machine of empty redundancy, this consciential machine. Consciential subjectivation is essentially linked to a certain kind of organisation of society, a system of law and of signification which imposes a space of representation that is separated from the world of affects and of real assemblages. All encoding must pass through the central programming machine. And for that to happen, every intensity must be constrained to renounce the connections that would be established outside of the ‘coherence’ of dominant significations and coordinates. Far from being a given in itself, the signifier therefore has to be incessantly reproduced by the consciential machine and signifying simulation, incessantly prevented from transforming itself into a diagrammatic becoming that would set off direct interactions between the sign machines, affects and field of ‘material’ intensities. Speech and writing are not impotent as such, but also because of a repressive syntagmatisation and paradigmatisation that overcode them. But this disempowering is constantly demolished by the fact that – at the level of the ‘deep’ articulations of its figures of expression – the deterritorialised machine of expression tends to escape this repression, as if of its own accord. The homogenisation of the processes of formalisation that arise from content with those that arise from expression, do not drop out of the sky! It results from a unification brought about by the ensemble of power formations. In ‘depth’ there is neither unity of form nor duality of substance, but a multiplicity of intensities of machinisms with no distinction between expression and content, form and substance.
At the level of social stratifications, exchanges will only be tolerated if they are duly overcoded – that is the regime of relative deterritorialisation. In these conditions, abstraction should no longer be considered a ‘cooled down’ abstract machine but rather as an active system for the neutralisation of machinic assemblages and the extinction of machinic indices. And it always goes hand in glove with a power formation. The abstractions of religion, for example, or those that found personological, ethnic, national identity, etc., create a sentiment of belonging, of participation in a common reference territoriality. All paths lead to the transcendent point of significance to which the diverse religious, moral, political, economic, cosmic value systems are linked. This knot of redundancy, which marks the optimum tolerable of processes of deterritorialisation, has as its function ‘doubling’ and putting an end to the threat of their overflowing. Thus it fixes an objective, point of view, to the lines of flight opened up by the machinic indices and assemblages; the first will have constantly to remain on this side of an abstract horizon, whereas the second will have constantly to return to the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations. With the abstract machines thus fixed like butterflies to the sky of abstract ideas, the energy of desire can be put in the service of a world order that will for its part be completely terrestrial!
It is not a question of bringing desire to the side of the concrete and of excluding it from the side of the abstract. Only an investment of desire in the power formations that produce abstract representations can explain the alienating potential of the latter. The paradox of these transcendental pseudo-mediations which only end up in the void and powerlessness, whilst the true operators are within reach, in the practical assemblages that can, at every moment, restitute power to the signs of the earth and confer an unbelievable superpower on the sign-particle machines of the collective assemblages of enunciation (on theoretico-experimental complexes, on music, etc.). From the point of view of a pragmatics (semiotic or not), one should be led to consider the contingent character of the components of the semiotic triangle, which we are presented with as being grounded on universals, but for which none is independent of particular power formations: on the side of the signifier, scientific and economic assemblages of diagrammatic power; on the side of the signified, assemblages of power in politics, schools, etc.; on the side of semiotics of the referent, systems of the enslavement of modes of perceptual or audiovisual coding, etc.11 (One only perceives objects of consumption, for example, to the extent that one has access to them through monetary semiotics – ‘buying power’, advertising, etc.; if one passes by them without seeing them, one merely dreams about them.)
For Hjelmslev, the substance-form couple was primary in relation to the expression-content couple, whilst from our point of view, it is the possible articulation of these two couples and of the matters of expression of the ‘referent’ by an assemblage of enunciation, that one must start from. The foundation of expression is not to be sought in a transcendental formalisation, but in the constitution of a machine of expression, the modes of subjectivation of which could be symbolic, analogical, signifying, a-signifying, to different degrees, as a function of the assemblage of semiotic components putting more or less deterritorialised, discretised, digitalised, syntacticised batteries of signs to work. In fact, Hjelmslev did not completely free himself up from a linguisticocentric point of view; he only retained the case of expression-content complementarity of the recto–verso type, that is to say, the case of total reversibility between a form of expression and form of content. But the rule of a generalised formalism of this kind could only be established on condition that real operations have been effectuated prior to the convertibility of the value systems concerned. It will be a matter, in the first instance, of State power as the locus for a general convertibility of macro-systems of economic and symbolic values, but also of the tentacular rhizome of power formations and of Collective equipments linked to social groups of all sizes – which miniaturise and deepen this convertibility to attain a systematic control of all singular systems of values of desire. The industry of the spectacle, for example, supported by the mass media, will organise loci for the convertibility of all imaginary representations; whilst the family and the school charge themselves with the semantic translatability and the signifying sectioning of every expression by the child.
What passes from expression to content and inversely are relatively deterritorialised forms, forms for which deterritorialisation has been standardised, cut off from its potential dynamism. The convertibility of systems is always synonymous with impotentialisation and power: impotentialisation of desire by the stratifying power of signifying semiotic formations that succeed in localising, ‘identifying’, formalising it, in a system of empty redundancy. Let us consider the case of a complete reversion between a signifier and a signified during the learning of a foreign language: the fact that a denoted object can serve to indicate an unknown word implies that an element of the referent, or of representation, passes into a signifying position, whilst the chain of phonematic or graphematic expression passes into a signified position. What is happening? Is there the transmission of a form? Of information? Is it not rather the putting into place of a new component of perceptual encoding, in which the sign-percept thing will be the correspondent of the thing said or murmured? What is in question here is therefore not a simple linguistic technology of the translateability of a form but an assemblage of enunciation that may or may not render possible such and such a micropolitics of discourse.12 A child can very easily manage to machine words and things without cutting them off from desiring intensities. Little Hans, for example, will avoid formalising a paradigm around the penis – he will speak instead of the function, of the ‘wee-wee maker’ (wiwimacher), which he will find at work a bit everywhere. But once the power of the adult, the family, the school, is established at the heart of its mode of semiotisation, everything changes: the energy of desire will have to be invested in the syntacticisation of utterances, the identification of objects, classes, coordinates of all sorts: the child must at all costs give up his or her question-machines and accept the fixed order of things, that is to say that neither women nor trains have wee-wee makers. Thus the dichotomising formations of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement, of the addressor and addressee, of the inanimate and the living object, of the masculine and the feminine, etc. will be fixed and stabilised, although for the child innumerable passageways between these stratifications exist.
The individuation of the process of enunciation and the semiotic discernibilisation of another from oneself are correlative to the taking off of a plane of content that is transcendent in relation to the ‘natural’ territorialities of desire and in relation to the plane of immanence of machinic intensities. The splitting of enunciation is inseparable from the splitting of signification. The subject of enunciation, the Other, the Law and the plane of content always correspond to the setting out of the object of power. Content crystallises a world, not a universal world, but a worldliness that is marked by contingent fields of force. Here would be the place to clearly distinguish the different modes of structuring of formalisms as a function of the fact that they do or don’t imply the existence of an autonomised plane of expression radically separating the object expressed from the machine of expression. In effect, the formalisation traits of different ‘matters’ of expression, in Hjelmslev’s sense, are not necessarily structured in such a way that they are translateable. When they are, it is because they have been treated in an appropriate way. But it would also be worth distinguishing between diverse modes of translateabilisation, depending on whether they have a scientific proposition or a common-sense utterance as their object, whether they are effectuated by an aesthetic machine or by a revolutionary social machine, etc. It would be illusory to think, for example, that the structure given to musical forms in the baroque era contains the axiomatic of the development of romantic music ‘in potential’. To be sure there are constants, logical correspondences, but the passage from one era to another is not made up of that alone. Many other factors are to be attributed to the social, historical and technical field, etc.
No formal structure presides over the different semiotic strata, except in the minds of theorists of art or epistemologists. Even in the case in which a style, a theory, even an axiomatics, succeeds in imposing itself, like a dogma, and seems to mark its era with its imprint, real changes, in fact, always result from the tangling together of components that everywhere exceed the domain in question. Also, once the structural couple substance of the signifier/substance of the signified finds itself threatened by the irruption of an internal line of flight – a diagrammatic component – all the traits of the matters of expression tend to reassert their rights and return to their intrinsic mode of formalisation (which is manifest with the semiotic compositions of the dream or of anxiety). Thus, relativising the traditional signifier-signified opposition, as we propose to do, doesn’t necessarily imply giving up on applying the content-expression opposition to other kinds of structural assemblage. As Oswald Ducrot suggests, the identification of semantic reality with signification isn’t completely self-evident, to the extent that the pragmatic dimensions of content exceed signification in its customary sense.13
In these conditions there is perhaps something to be gained by reserving the use of the notions of semantic content and semantic field for the particular case of interpretative analogical components, by taking up the outline of a classification of semiotic components that we proposed earlier. One would then have:
•Analogical generative components, the semantic contents of which would entertain relations of ‘envelopment’ with the referents that they interpret, and would generate fields of interpretance. Their mode of enunciation would arise from territorialised collective assemblages (the classic or transitivist example of childhood ‘before’ language).
•Generative semiological linguistic components the interpretation of which operates on the basis of a syntagmatic ‘studding’ of the plane of content (the plane of significance). The referent here being distanced from the signifying representation, the mode of enunciation would arise from individuated subjective assemblages that are relatively more deterritorialised than the preceding case (function of the ego).
| Semiotic components | Functions of content | Articulations of content and expression | Assemblages of enunciation | |
| Generative interpretative | Analogical | Semantic | Fields of interpretance | Subject, collective and territorialised |
| Semiological linguistic | Signifying | Plane of significance (double articulation) | Subjective, individuated, egoic | |
| Transformational non-interpretative | Symbolic intensive | Performative and indexial | Lines of flight and of destratification | A-subjective performative |
| Diagrammatic | Of sense a-signifying | Plane of consistency | A-subjective machinic |
•Intensive and a-subjective symbolic transformational components, the contents of which index referents and enunciative coordinates (machinic indices, line of flight and performative function). They desubjectivise, ‘machinise’ enunciation, deterritorialise personological strategies, without for all that catalysing the diagrammatic processes of deterritorialisation of sign machines. They would operate by the reassemblage of semiotic components without creating any new ones properly speaking (for example: mystical or aesthetic desubjectivation). One will speak here of a collective assemblage of enunciation even in the case in which a single individual is expressing him or her self here, because he or she will be considered as a non-totalisable intensive multiplicity.
•A-subjective diagrammatic transformational components, the a-signifying contents of which not only deterritorialise the assemblages of enunciation but equally the machines of expression, semantic formalisms but would also enter into a direct connection with the modes of encoding proper to different stratifications of the referent (which implies a common ‘reference’ at the most deterritorialised level: that of the machinic plane of consistency). One will speak here of a machinic assemblage of enunciation.
One will note that the collective assemblages such as we have envisaged them in the first part of this work exceed the diverse cases in our table: they can be territorialised and arise from a predominantly analogical component (primitive societies, groups of adolescents, etc., for example); they can participate in intensive symbolic components (the experience of drugs, for example); they can be adjacent to a machinic enunciation (the chorus in relation to the orchestra in a modern opera, for example); or they can remain dependent on an individuated economy of enunciation (the sliding of group-subjects towards subjugated groups). In a more general fashion the terms of the fourfold division that we are proposing must not be considered as if they were the nuclear elements of a semiotic ‘machinics’. In effect, each one of them puts into play a particular diagrammatic function so as to attain its point of effectiveness (even when it is a matter of a point of signifying impotentiation), and to one degree or another, they develop an indiciary semantic and signifying function. Everything is a matter of assemblage here, of accent, of the dominant tone, in a word, of semiotic micropolitics. One is therefore only ever dealing with mixtures associating these different kinds of component. A poetic assemblage of enunciation, for example, will result in symbolic concatenations and modes of subjectivation associating different regimes of signs, about which one could say that they are at one and the same time semiologically formed – although partially a-grammatical14 – and a-signifying, although bearing pre-coded semantic contents.
Let us also note, with regard to this table, that it seems to us that the linguistic categories of Benveniste, of interpretance and significance, which for this author correspond to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes respectively, can be transposed here to a semiotic level, but on condition that they are disjoined from one another. Interpretance here becomes a component that can be autonomised:
•Applied in isolation to an intensive symbolic component, starting from that component it generates an analogical semiotics (without any intersection between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, but with the development of fields of semantic interpretance and territorialised assemblages of enunciation).
•Applied to a diagrammatic component (a sign machine of linguistic origin, for example), it transforms that component (or retransforms it) into a signifying semiology, taking on the significance function itself, through the intersection of paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, correlative to a process of subjectivation (or of re-subjectivation).
The degree of grammaticality proposed by Chomsky would therefore be a function of the degree of dependency and counter-dependency established in the framework of a signifying linguistic assemblage between, on the one hand, the ‘latent’ semantic contents of the analogical and performative components of the symbolic components implicated in it, and, on the other hand, the ‘potential’ diagrammatic components of the a-signifying machine that is put into play here. The a-significance of an utterance could therefore result from two types of transformation: it either succeeds in avoiding the despotism of signifying formalisms at a morphematic level, and is enriched by new indiciary ‘charges’ – the polysemic or homonymic proliferation that opens it up in different directions, for example (this is the case with the passage from a semiotic assemblage dominated by a signifying mode of generation to a symbolic transformation); or, at the ‘glossematic’ level of its figures of expression (phonemes, graphemes …), it manages to insert itself in a semiotic assemblage dominated by a diagrammatic transformation, the content of which escapes any system of analogical representation or signifying overcoding. Consequently, the diagrammatic utterance will participate directly in a machinic assemblage, by ceasing to put into play semiologically formed substances, but [rather] the pertinent traits of a matter of expression constitutive of ‘scientifically formed’, musically formed, etc., a-signifying chains.15
For us, these distinctions should lead us to lift the ambiguities that, for example, result from Charles Sanders Peirce’s amalgamation, under the term icon, of ‘images’ and ‘icons of relation’, the images arising from semantic and indiciary contents and the icons of relation from diagrammatic contents – or even from oppositions between lexical signification and grammatical signification, these latter equally arising from the diagrammatic components proper to language. The diagrammatic sense that we propose here could equally be brought into proximity with the operatory sense that Klauss opposes to eidetic sense.16 For this author, operatory sense puts assemblages of signs into play that represent sequences of phonemes or semantic configurations, whereas eidetic sense remains prisoner of the triangle of signification, sign-concept-object represented. But in our opinion he still over-valorises eidetic sense, which he makes into a sort of secret reference for operatory sense. That is why, when he quite rightly considers that concatenations of symbols in abstract calculations are operations endowed with a certain kind of sense, he adds that it is a matter of a sense that is ‘less rich’ in possibilities as regards the possible handling of objects that they represent. We consider, on the contrary, that the sense without signification that is produced by a diagrammatic economy of signs is capable of thwarting the impasses proper to semiologies of signification, in so far as it introduces a supplementary coefficient of deterritorialisation into semiotic assemblages, enabling [these] semiotic machines to simulate, to ‘double’, to effectuate the relational and structural knots relative to material and social flows, precisely at the points which an anthropocentric vision is blind to.
The fascination that Chomskyan formalisation has exercised over the last fifteen years doubtless derives from the topological constructions that are associated with it: one manipulates its trees and symbols, one discernabilises ambiguities. Chomsky’s first approach certainly immediately touched on something of the abstract machine that functions in language. But the succession of models proposed and the attempt by psychologists, semanticists and logicians to recuperate the model have tempered the very abrupt character of this abstract machinism. What is perhaps best in Chomsky’s work are his very first intuitions.17 Certainly today the supporters of generative semantics can easily contest his opposition between deep and surface structures and re-establish a continuity between syntax and semantics. In sum, they restore the reasonableness of Chomsky; but they can only do so to the extent that they continue to agree never to leave the framework of signifying semiologies. In fact, by trying to carry along the orthodox Chomskyans with them, into a linguistics that is further than ever from a pragmatic micropolitics, they really only get bogged down themselves. Perhaps one should deepen the initial intuitions of Chomsky, by considering that his first models of abstract machines were not yet abstract enough, that they still remained too reliant on the signifying articulations of language and the grammaticality that he sought to grasp, far from having to be alienated in a ‘semantic logic’ should, on the contrary, be understood as one of the modalities of the abstract power that is put into play by the most decoded of capitalist flows (that is to say, a-semantic and a-signifying diagrammatic flows).18 What is grammaticality? To what does this categorical symbol that dominates all phrases, this sign S19 and this first axiom of the generative structure of Chomsky’s syntagmatic trees, which forces all derivations to go back to a unique point of origin, correspond? Must it be considered simply as the generative kernel of the first grammatical significations, or rather as one of the most fundamental markers of the a-signifying pragmatics inherent in a certain kind of society? Without doubt it participates in both dimensions. S is a mixed marker: in the first place it is a marker of power, and secondarily it is a syntactic marker. Forming grammatically correct phrases is the prelude for a ‘normal’ individual for all submission to social laws. No-one can ignore the principle of grammaticality, any more than they can the law, or they belong in special institutions set up for sub-humans, children, deviants, the mad and maladjusted; the individual is [referred to] sub-systems of grammaticalisation; one is interpreted, translateabilised, adapted.
The putting into circulation of normativised agents of production happens above all by the semiotic enslavement of every individual as a speaker-listener capable of adopting the linguistic behaviour that is compatible with the modes of competence that he or she is assigned by virtue of his or her particular position in society and production. The axiom S, the signifying first principle of language – the production of phrases that correspond to the norms of grammaticality – seems to us to arise first and foremost from a fundamental micropolitical principle of capitalist societies. These societies are constituted in such a way that by rights no-one can escape from the despotism of decoded flows: flow of abstract labour, as the essence of exchange values; flow of monetary signs, as the substance of expression of capital; flow of linguistic signs syntagmaticised and paradigmaticised in such a way as to correspond to normalised modes of inter-human communication. Certainly the threat of a power takeover by decoded flows doesn’t begin with capitalism; it already existed in the most ‘primitive’ of societies. (One should distinguish here between what Pierre Clastres calls societies with and societies without a State, which don’t have the same defensive attitude towards the accumulation of power in a State apparatus.)20 As we tried to show in the first chapter of this study, primitive and ancient societies are already traversed by capitalist flows, which they attempt to ward off; one has to wait until the ‘accident’ of the Middle Ages in the West, and the Renaissance to see the appearance of societies that really do lose control of the decoded flows, in a sort of generalised – economic, political, religious, aesthetic, scientific – baroque, processes that will lead to capitalist societies.
The semiotic enslavement of flows of desire which capitalist societies carry out does not tolerate the autonomy of any intrinsic encoding, and no desiring machine can escape being overcoded by the signifying machine of the State. The signifying power of the national language and State power tend to coincide. The molecular segments of expressions are substituted for the old segmentary structures of the socius, so as to constitute the plane of content that conveys at the same time the imperatives of both moral and civil laws. It is by the lifting up of this plane that the intensities of desire take off from their old territorialities and receive the polarity of subject and object. They are mediatised, gridded and become social need, demand, necessity and submission. They only exist to the extent that, on the one hand, their expression enters into redundancy with the principles of State organisation as the locus for the recentering and capitalisation of power, and on the other, they fold in on themselves, are translateabilised, that is to say that when all is said and done, they give up their character as an a-subjective nomad flow without object.
The State machine of semiotic enslavement in fact constitutes the fundamental tool enabling the dominant classes to ensure their power of the agents and means of production. Everything apparently begins with the dichotomies engendered on the basis of the axiom S, which organises phrases that can be divided into nominal and verbal syntagms, which seem to correspond to one of the fundamental requirements of the human condition, although in fact it is only a particular semiological transformation, the signifying transformation, which forces discourse to bend to the activity of predication. But capitalist power cannot content itself with the semiotic assemblage of intensities in the infinitive mode alone.21 Intensive infinitives must be modulated, they must place themselves in the service of a predicative pragmatics and a deictic strategy that is compatible with the dominant system of significations (coding of hierarchical position, permutation of roles, division of sexes, etc.). Intensities will have to do their bit for the norms of the dominant system, and the more abstract and interiorised normative encoding is, the more effective it will be. In particular, what we call the ‘becoming-sexed-body’ will be negotiated in its relation with the ‘becoming-social-body’ by the regime of pronominality and gender, which will axiomatise the subjective positions of female alienation.22 But it is equally in its slightest details that the composition of political and micropolitical powers will be indexed by language. This abstract economy of power and its implications for the modes of generation of the transformation of syntactic, lexical, morpho-phonological and prosodic components of language thus seems to us to be inseparable from the intersection of pragmatic fields of enunciation, from what Ducrot designates as the ‘polemical value’ (in the etymological sense) of language. Simply taking this into account ought to reduce any idea of founding the autonomy of language on a system of universals to nothing.
Generative linguistics presents competence to us as a sort of neutral instrument in the service of the creative production of discourse. One gains access to the sky of linguistic universals outside of any social or historical contingency. And for every thing that remains obscure, one falls back on the miracles of heredity! But there is no grammaticality in itself, no competence in itself. Competence and performance are always relative.
Any crystallisation of a competence as a norm, as a framing of diverse concrete performances, is always synonymous with the establishing of a position of power. There is no general competence, it is always linked to a particular – political, social, economic, religious, aesthetic, etc. – terrain. That doesn’t signify that it doesn’t put into play abstract means – abstract machines – which spring up like mutations of the machinic phylum of the human ‘branch’. But they do not depend on grammars based on structural universals (for a long time capitalist political economy has wanted to present itself as the general grammar of all possible economy!) There is no performance, that of a child at school, for example, other than in relation to the kind of competence that is fixed in the framework of educational micropolitics, of a given society in a given era. In a general fashion, every competence will involve political relations between nations, regions, political classes, castes, ethnic groups, etc. Theories of the universality of competence rest on the in itself simple idea that the individual’s capacity for linguistic production exceeds his or her effective discursive production – his or her performances; in other words, that s/he has at his or her disposal a machine of expression that puts into play abstract schema, and that this machine is much more than the simple totalisation of the series of utterances it is capable of producing. No doubt! But the relations between this ‘competence machine’ and the productions that it performs can be inverted. The machine itself is produced by its production. How could it be any different? Where else could it come from? From an innate linguistic faculty? Competence and performance interact constantly. At a given moment, competence – the machinic virtuality of expression – holds the keys to the deterritorialisation of stratified and stereotypical utterances; at another moment, a particular semiotic production deterritorialises an overly rigid syntax. A competence that is territorialised on a given social space – a group, an ethnicity, a trade, etc. – can be relegated to the rank of a sub-competence, the effect of which will be to devalorise the different kinds of performance which are associated with it,23 then, as a function of the modification of relations of force that are present, or of a transformation of the local micropolitics of desire, this same competence can ‘take power’ in a bigger social space and become a regional, national or imperial competence … A style imposes itself, a patois becomes an aristocratic way of speaking, a technical language contaminates vernacular languages, a minor literature takes on a universal importance … Let’s be clear that the processes of political agitation do not just concern the diffusion of morphemes but put into play all the drivers of language.
There is universality of speech acts and as language is inseparable from these acts, there is no universality of language. Every sequence of linguistic expression is associated with a network of semiotic chains of all sorts (perceptual, mimetic, gestural, imagistic, etc.). Every signifying utterance thus crystallises a mute dance of intensities that plays out on social and individuated bodies at the same time. From language to glossolalia, all the transitions are possible. There are no linguistic universals. The examples of universals proposed by the Chomskyans, such as the existence of the morpho-phonological organisation of double articulation on the plane of expression, for example, are machinic characteristics, which concern the conditions of possibility of language and which are as extrinsic to it as the range of phonic articulations on the basis of which a phonological semiotics might be established. These supposed universals are only the specific traits of a particular substance of expression, what Christian Metz calls the ‘pertinent traits of matters of expression’ on the basis of which semiotically formed substances are constituted. Heredity is often brought to the fore to explain the speed with which language is learned. But let’s consider the fact that in a milieu that is ‘impregnated’ with musical semiotics, a four-year-old can attain genuine musical competence: is one going to account for this on the basis of a hereditary ‘montage’ of the capacity to read and of the highly specialised capacity with one’s hands we know is needed, for each musical instrument? The idea is absurd!
The hypothesis concerning universals at the level of content is even more fragile. The organisation of contents, the constitution of a homogeneous field of representation, always corresponds to the crystallisation of a power formation. Neither can any category, any mode of categorisation be considered as such as being universal and as being programmed by a hereditary code. It is always a social field, a micropolitical field that overcodes the cutting out of contents. Hereditary programming can only play on strata that are extrinsic to language and, besides, nothing allows one to consider that it is itself linked to a system of universals (unless one considers, for example, genes as such a system, but that would imply once again a misunderstanding of the role played by the other physico-chemical strata). What good is invoking universals if their existence in fact depends on contingent relations between heterogeneous strata? The stability that in fact obtains for the genetic code has nothing universal about it, any more than does the structure of matter. Its stratification, the fact that it is reverted to, that one finds it everywhere doesn’t imply the erecting of a transcendent formalism, but the putting into play of mutational abstract machines.
In recent years, a certain number of authors, such as John Searle, Wunderlich, etc., have endeavoured to broaden the Chomskyan point of view, which never gets out of the system of language to turn towards the study of performance and ‘speech acts’. Foregrounding what, after Habermas, he calls ‘communicative competence’ (or even ‘idiosyncratic performatory competence’), Herbert E. Brekle24 is led to oppose this to a ‘systemic competence’ of the Chomskyan kind. The latter rests on abstract structures which, after the fixing of rules of formation and transformation, are closed onto phonetic chains, whilst the former are linked, according to dynamic self-regulating relations to a whole set of communicative competence factors that, according to the author, must be articulated at three levels: that of a ‘linguistic faculty’, that of language as a system, that of speech (‘idiosyncratic performatory competence’), with different kinds of problems of syntax, semantics and pragmatics arising at each of these levels. Such a project does at least have the advantage of freeing the relations between competence and performance from the traditional oppositions of langue and parole, and expression and content. One would thus be dealing with a particular compositions of semiotic dimensions at different levels, the elucidation of which should be pushed to its limit: the description of real acts of speech in all their concrete dimensions (this would, in our opinion, probably lead to an unavoidable rupture with the Chomskyan technology of dichotomous trees, that is to say, with the intervention of a pseudo-mathematisation of language). Unfortunately in its current state, the pragmatics to which he refers and which should be the hinge between syntax and semantics at different levels is still conceived of as resting on universals. Whilst the existence of these universals already seemed to us to derive from a misunderstanding at the level of syntax and semantics, the claim to inject them into pragmatics seems to us this time, frankly, to be aberrant. Herbert E. Brekle is thus, at the level of a supposed ‘universal faculty of language’, led to adopt Habermas’s point of view regarding a ‘universal pragmatics’ that would have to account for the general structure of all discursive situations and for the constitution of the possible speech acts. According to Habermas, one would have to oppose a particular class of speech acts to these pragmatic universals, which they wouldn’t belong to but which would, on the contrary, serve to ‘represent actions or behaviour institutionalised in a certain culture or regulated by social norms’.
The examples of the universals of ‘general structures of discourse’ that are proposed are:
•personal pronouns, with a performative and deictic function: I, you, he …;
•vocative forms and honorifics;
•spatio-temporal deictics, demonstratives, etc.;
•performatives, such as: to assert, to ask, to order, to promise …;
•intentional or modal expressions such as believing, knowing, necessarily.
The examples of speech acts not belonging to pragmatic universals:
•phrases introduced by verbs such as to greet, to congratulate, to thank, to baptise, to curse, to name, to condemn, to acquit …
What a curious conception of universality! How is asserting or knowing more universal than greeting, naming or condemning? And what place is reserved for non-individuated modes of subjectivation, the transitivism of childhood, the upheavals undergone or organised by dominant coordinates in madness and creation? Furthering the only part of this project that seems of interest to us, that of the idiosyncratic performatory competence, should lead its promoters to give up fragile categories such as ‘linguistic faculty’ transmitted to them by Saussure, and free themselves up for once and for all from this obsession with ‘universals’ that has been reactivated by Chomsky. It is not just a matter for linguistics of giving psycho-linguistic and socio-linguistic problematics their due in the analysis of the pragmatic dimensions of ‘linguistic behaviour’, but also of accepting the coming into force of the problematics of the micropolitics of desire.