[TN] = Translator’s Note
1Or, indeed, for Deleuze’s humour, since his affirmation is accompanied by a specific attention to what it is that philosophers do. See his letter to Jean-Clet Martin in Two Regimes of Madness.
2Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (London: Athlone, 1984) p. 88.
3And it remained so throughout his life, as his comments in De Leros à la Borde, which is referred to later, show.
4This is an issue that has been explored at length in the work of Jean-Claude Polack. See for example his Épreuves de la folie. Travail psychanalytique et processus psychotiques (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Éditions érès, 2006).
5Gilles Deleuze ‘Trois problèmes de groupe’ preface to Félix Guattari Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris: La Découverte, 2003) p. x.
6The revised edition of his book Proust and Signs, published in 1970, is strongly marked by his encounter with Guattari.
7Jean-Claude Polack ‘Analysis between Psycho and Schizo’ in Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey The Guattari Effect (London: Continuum, 2011) p. 61.
8Félix Guattari De Leros à la Borde (Paris: Lignes, 2012).
9Guattari ibid p. 82.
10See the present volume p. 98.
11Félix Guattari ‘La psychothérapie institutionelle’ in Psychanalyse et transversalité p. 47.
12See for example Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Julian Bourg From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2007).
13See the extensive discussion in Gary Genosko ‘Busted: Félix Guattari and the Grande Encyclopedie des Homosexualites’ in Rhizomes 11/12 (Fall 2005/Spring 2006). Online at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/genosko.html [accessed 17 March 2015].
14For an up to date discussion see for example Andrew Barry and Georgina Born (eds) Interdisciplinarity. Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (London: Routledge, 2015).
15Some of the links have been documented by Liane Mozère in her article ‘Foucault et le CERFI: instantanés et actualités’ in Le Portique 13–14 (2004). Available online at http://leportique.revues.org/642 [accessed 17 March 2015]. Mozère suggests in particular that Foucault acted as a ‘guarantor’ for this research project, the third CERFI project to have been funded by the State.
16See Michel Foucault, in discussion with Francois Fourquet and Félix Guattari ‘Premieres discussions, premiers balbutiements: la ville est-elle une force productive ou d’anti-production’ in Dits et Écrits 1: 1954–75 (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001) p. 1316.
17The term has no direct equivalent in English, translating variously as ‘facilities’, ‘equipment’, ‘supplies’, ‘kit’ or ‘gear’. Here I’ve followed the anthropologist Paul Rabinow in his book French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, who simply leaves the term untranslated.
It’s worth pointing out here also that Guattari sometimes renders the term in the plural, sometimes in the singular. In a doubtless failed attempt at elegance I’ve exploited the property that the mass noun has of referring to things that can’t be counted as a way of conveying something both of the term’s extension and its multiplicity. Where doing that proved too ugly, I’ve adopted the convention of talking about a ‘form’ of collective equipment.
18Paul Rabinow French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995) p. 2.
19Félix Guattari ‘Pratiques écosophiques et restauration de la cité subjective’ in Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie (Abbaye d’ardenne: Lignes/Imec, 2013) pp. 36–7.
1Roger Chambon Le Monde comme représentation et réalité Paris: J. Vrin, 1952, pp. 165–71.
2It will be objected that our example is too simple and that analysts today are much more subtle! But on closer inspection one would see that they still have recourse to the same types of universalising procedure; it’s just that instead of talking about father, mother, faeces, and complexes, they talk about the symbolic function, the imaginary, the Moebius strip, etc.
3In this text the correct orthography for ‘micropolitics’ and related terms is not clear. Guattari sometimes has ‘micropolitiques’ and sometimes ‘micro-politiques’. In the absence of an obvious rationale for this difference, we have followed the general convention for Deleuze and Guattari’s work.
4Sigmund Freud ‘Metapsychology’ translated by James Strachey Standard Edition volume 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74).
5In the sense that Hjelmslev talks about the ‘figure of expression’. Cf. Louis Hjelmslev Prolegomena to a Theory of Language translated by Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963).
6The French noun ‘possible’ – as in ‘un autre monde des possibles’ has been translated throughout as ‘possibility’ [TN].
7Thinking along the same lines, let us note that argots – the special languages used by vagrants and thieves to protect themselves from their external milieu – are a relatively recent creation. One finds no mention of them before the fifteenth century, that is to say, at the moment when urban and modern capitalist powers were busily expanding. Cf. Auguste Vitu Le Jargon du XVe siècle, Paris: Charpentier, 1884, and Lazare Sainean Les Sources de l’argot ancien, Paris: Champion, 1912.
8‘Ballets roses’ is a name given to a 1959 scandal in which male members of the establishment had ‘ballets’ (striptease, posing nude, etc.) performed to them by teenage girls. There were rumours also of, amongst other things, sado-masochist orgies. Nowadays a ‘ballet rose’ tends to refer to criminal activities involving rape [TN].
9To be ‘traduit devant un tribunal’ means to be brought to a tribunal. But ‘traduit’ also means ‘translate’ [TN].
10Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
11Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1989).
12Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin-Bavelas, and Don Jackson Pragmatics of Human Communication – A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: WW Norton, 1967).
13In the sense defined in Psychanalyse et tranversalité Paris: Maspero, 1972.
1Which would, in Louis Althusser’s view, arise from ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’.
1Georges Duby The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century translated by Howard B. Clarke (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1974).
2Ibid p. 163.
3Ibid p. 213 [translated slightly modified].
4Georges Duby The Age of Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 translated by Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983) p. 102.
5Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism translated by Stephen Kalberg (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).
6René Grousset, preface to Régine Pernoud Les villes marchandes aux XIVe et XVe siècles, impérialisme et capitalisme au Moyen-âge (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1948).
7René Nelli L’Érotique des troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1963) and ‘De l’amitié à l’amour ou de l’affrèrement par le sang à l’épreuve des corps’ Les Cahiers du Sud 347 1958.
8Cf. Jean Gimpel The Mediaeval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976) and Yves Barel Une approche systémique de la ville (Grenoble: Institut de recherché économique et de planification May 1974).
9This system of complementarity between a caste system and a growing class (the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) will, in some way, ‘find’ itself inverted in the dependent situation that bourgeois capitalists find themselves today with regard to union and state bureaucracies. Bourgeois power today only holds up thanks to the gridding of the working class by bureaucratic castes. As for the interdependence of the bureaucracies of the State capitalism of the USSR and American imperialism, it is now almost entirely institutionalised!
10Georges Bataille The Accursed Share translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1988).
1Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Jourent Le Lobby Colvert – Un royaume ou une affaire de famille? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975).
2Fernand Braudel shows that the proliferation of ‘model’ cities is such, in the sixteenth century, that a typology can only be established on condition that one use a combinatory that brings into play heterogeneous factors which – aside from questions about size and rank of city – would refer to collective equipment functions, in the very broad sense in which we are considering them here. So, sticking just with the cities of Spain, one might say that Granada and Madrid are bureaucratic cities, Toledo, Burgos, and Seville mercantile cities, but Seville is equally bureaucratic, rentier, and artisanal; Cordova and Segovia industrial and capitalist cities; Cuenca, industrial but also artisanal; Salamanca and Jerez, agricultural cities; Guadalajara, a clerical city; others are more military, ‘sheep-farming’, rustic, maritime, cities of studying, etc. Finally, the only way of making these cities ‘hold together’ in the same capitalist grouping, so that they don’t fragment into a multitude of autonomous and antagonistic cities, is to consider them as arising from the same rhizome of Collective Equipment. Cf. Fernand Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II translated by Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972).
3It is worth distinguishing here the aspect of the deterritorialisation of machines and equipments, in so far as they engender new forms of production and circulation, and the aspect of institutional, regulatory, and imaginary reterritorialisation, which attempts to put a brake on this movement through the system of corporations and guilds, etc.
4Philippe Ariès Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life, translated by Robert Baldick (New York: Basic, 1962).
5Anne Querrien, unpublished.
6Jean-Louis Flandrin Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne société Paris: Hachette, 1975.
7According to Albert Soboul, ‘the courtiers living at Versailles as part of the King’s entourage, represented about 4,000 families’. See Albert Soboul A Short History of the French Revolution translated by Geoffrey Symcox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
8Paul Bois Paysans de l’Ouest (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).
9Jacques Godechot La grande nation: l’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1956).
10Stock market equipment, for example, started to come into existence in the modern form of product exchange and securities market from the end of the sixteenth century; but it is only at the start of the seventeenth century that they will acquire a gigantic size – sometimes, between 5,000 and 6,000 people gathering every day in the stock market at Amsterdam to follow the price of the East India Company.
11Karl Wittfogel Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
12Cf. the ‘great enclosure’ [of unreason] described by Michel Foucault in The History of Madness translated by Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009).
13There is a case here for distinguishing fascist movements from reactionary institutions. For example: the appearance of a Puritan movement, separating from the Anglican institution, and which gives rise to the formation, by the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower, of a sort of fascist community in New England – a new promised land that was to be built against the people of demons, that is to say, against the Indians.
1Maurice Percheron Ghengis Khan (Paris: Seuil, 1962) p. 126.
2It goes without saying that this classification is only proposed as a rough guide, because in fact, the majority of these components straddle different categories: perception and posture also pertain to a pre-signifying register; mimicry from a register of natural coding, etc.
3Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
4Cited by Anne Querrien:
•Does the school observe a sufficient general silence?
•Is the teacher sufficiently silent, making himself obeyed through gesture?
•Does reading occur in hushed tones?
•Is the furniture in order and is the maxim ‘One place for one thing and each thing in its place’ evident?
•Are the lighting and ventilation sufficient?
•Do the pupils have enough room?
•Is the attitude of the pupils acceptable?
•Do the pupils have their hands behind their backs when moving, and do they walk in step?
•Are the pupils satisfied?
•Do the pupils have clean hands and face?
•Are notices about punishments clearly evident and utilised?
•Does the teacher permit himself to threaten to strike pupils?
•Does the teacher exercise permanent surveillance of all pupils?
•Are movements simultaneous?
•Is the head monitor respected?
•Are the monitors well chosen?
•Does the teacher dismiss poor monitors?
•Do the monitors feel that they are sufficiently responsible? What are their exact responsibilities?
•How are the pupils divided up?
•How frequently does the teacher carry out a new ranking of pupils?
•Do the pupils understand what they read?
•Is there sufficient emulation?
•Are the registers kept properly?
•Are prayers given exactly?
•Are songs sung correctly?
•Are pupils overseen by a monitor when they go out?
•Are the parents of absent children sent notes?
Anne Querrien ‘L’Ensaignement’ Recherches 23 1976
5Cf. in Kafka, the very lengthy expositions concerning arguments of an administrative or litigious character, which sometimes take on the quality of a ‘bureaucratic epic’; for example, the different modes of ‘acquittal’ in The Trial: real acquittal, apparent acquittal, unlimited deferral … See also the accounts given of the Moscow show trials, implacable machines resulting not just in the checking of every utterance with a diabolical and fascinating meticulousness, but also the acceptance of a logic of enunciation in which the key points about responsibility are based on the declarations of the accused, which as a consequence sometimes result in impasses similar to the ‘liar paradox’. For example: in his final declaration, Karl Radek, reacting to Vyshinky’s insults, says … ‘I have to recognise my guilt in the name of the general usefulness this truth must bring. And when I hear it said that quite simply those on the accused’s bench are spies and bandits, I have to take a stand against this assertion, not from the point of view of my own defence, from the moment that I recognise that I have betrayed justice … If you are only dealing with simple common law criminals, informers, how can you be sure that what we have said is the rock solid truth?’ Le Procès du Centre antisoviétique trotskyste (Moscow, 1937) p. 565.
6Cf. René Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem ‘Co-ire: album systématique de l’enfance’ Recherches 22, 1976.
7For example, the corner of a blanket, which will service as an object that is intermediary between a partial erogenous zone – the mouth, for example – and the outside world, to which the child is attached exclusively. D.W. Winnicott Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena (London: Tavistock, 1953).
8Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
9Fernand Deligny Cahiers de l’immuable 1 and 2, Recherches 8 1975 and 20 1975; Nous et l’Innocent (Paris: Maspero, 1975).
1PSU – Parti Socialiste Unifié – French socialist party formed in 1967, UDR – Union pour la défense de la République (the name adopted by the Gaullist party in France after the events of May 1968) [TN].
2The courts of royalty doubtless marked a transitory step in the putting in place of this Collective super-equipment. Still marked by the old formations of ostentatious expenditure, they nonetheless announced the deterritorialisation of traditional social formations and the erection of a new type of ‘personalisation’ of central power. One could here in this regard make a baroque eros and a bureaucratic eros into an extension of one another.
3Alain Cotta Théorie générale du Capital, de la croissance et des fluctuations (Paris: Dunod, 1966).
4The notion of the person [personne: also ‘no-one’] should be related here to its primary etymological meaning (of Etruscan origin), that of a theatrical mask; but now it is a matter of a theatre that covers the social field in its entirety.
5Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977) pp. 215–16.
6Following from the work of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins on the economy of the most ‘primitive’ of societies, Claude Meillassoux has elaborated the notion of a ‘domestic mode of production’. He opposes the existence of relations of social ‘adhesion’, that are first manifested at the level of the participation in activities of collective production, to the obsessions of structuralists and functionalists who try to base the consistency of these societies on relations of filiation that rest on universals of the exchange of women, incest prohibition type: ‘for the domestic community to reproduce itself, in effect, relations of filiation must be in conformity with the relations of dependency and anteriority established in production: relations of reproduction must became relations of production.’ This domestic mode of production is not, for all that, conceptualised as a genetic stage of humanity: it plays a fundamental role in the imperialist exploitation of its periphery, of archaic agricultural sectors and, at the heart of its system of reproduction, of domestic, female, labour. Claude Meillassoux Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspero, 1975).
1Which we will later describe as a ‘diagrammatic function’.
2Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969) p. 61.
3Memory, as Francis Yates shows us, has long depended on highly territorialised ‘memory’ machines (the architectural rhetoric machines derived from the Ad Herennium of Antiquity), or the highly sophisticated machines like those of Lulle (where concepts are represented by letters of the alphabet which turn around an axis, and figures by concentric circles on which the letters referring to concepts are found and which, when these wheels are rotated allow combinations of concepts to be obtained). See Francis Yates The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
4Criticising the abusive export of the language of informatics outside its own domain, Cornelius Castoriadis asks himself whether the concept of order that biology and anthropology need is necessarily identical to that of physics (Castoriadis Science moderne et Interrogation philosophique Encyclopaedia Universalis Organum, 1975). In effect, and unlike the order of physico-chemical strata, ‘human’ orders seem to be inseparable from collective assemblages and formations of power, that is to say, from modes of semiotisation that expose, arrange, and guarantee them … independently of any transcendental guarantee.
5Paul Lafargue The Right to Be Lazy (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2012).
6Jean-Claude Polack and Danielle Sabourin La Borde ou le droit à la folie (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1976).
7Ludwig von Bertalanffy General System Theory (New York: Basic, 1965).
8See Chapter 10, ‘The Traps of Ideology’.
9In numerous domains, it is the category of the family or household that constitutes the institutional object of reference. For example, national accounts continue to talk of a ‘household budget’ with regard to single people! On the genealogy of familialist intimacy see Lionel Murard and Patrick Zylberman ‘Le Petit travailleur infatigable’ Recherches 25, 1976.
10Factory in Besançon that was the focus of a series of industrial upheavals as well as an experiment in worker management in the 1970s [TN].
11Ivan Illich Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
12See ‘Histoire de la psychiatrie de secteur’ Recherches 17, 1975 and Robert Castel Le Psychanalysme (Paris, Maspero, republished Paris 10/18, 1975).
13The term ‘programme’ is not employed here in the sense that one speaks, for example, of the ‘Common programme of the Left’ but in the sense that sado-masochists talk about a programme, that is to say as means for marking out an experiment that everywhere exceeds their own ‘predictions’, hence the mystery and the fascination, the impression of something that has ‘never been seen’ despite the ritualised character of programmed phases. In contemporary music, one talks equally of ‘programmed music’ when a significant part of the music is left up to the performers and the score gives nothing more than broad indications, general directions.
14Tristan Cabral (Yann Houssin) Ouvrez le feu (Paris: Plasma, 1975).
1Nietzsche On The Genealogy of Morals p. 61, 140.
2After Marcel Bigeard, a well-known General in the French Army [TN].
3Prostitution seems always to retain something of the religious basis of its ancient origins.
4Cf. in this regard the excellent work of Jean-Marie Geng Information, Mystification (Paris: EPI, 1973), and Traité des censures (Paris: EPI, 1976).
1And perhaps tomorrow of old people and school children. Cf. Mathusalem, le journal qui n’a pas froid aux vieux 1 March 1976 (BP 202, 75866, Paris Dedex 18); and for a new approach to childhood, the books of Christiane Rochefort Encore heureux qu’on va vers l’été Paris, Grasset, 1975 and Les Enfants d’abord (Paris: Grasset, 1976).
2On national-Bolshevism in Germany: Jean-Pierre Faye Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972) and Théorie du récit (Paris: Hermann, 1972).
3Sigmund Freud ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’ translated by James Strachey in Standard Edition volume 10 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74).
4Cf. the outline of a map of the neurotic rhizome of Little Hans in Félix Guattari L’Inconscient machinique (Paris: Recherches, 1979).
5Bertolt Brecht Mr Puntila and his Man Matti.
6See the extraordinary ‘reportage’ by Elena Valero, a Brazilian who was held captive for years by Yanomami Indians. Although carefully edited by missionaries, her account reconstitutes the continuing climate of bullying in which Indian women live. Ettoro Biocca Yanoama (Paris: Plon, 1968).
1In the second part of this book we will come back to Chomsky’s thinking, which to our mind precisely misses a certain level of abstraction in the functioning of language.
2Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
3Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
4Paul Virilio L’Insécurité du térritoire (Paris: Stock, 1976) A recent example: the government decision that creates departmental committees that make the placing of children in psychological medical establishments and sheltered accommodation under the direct control of the director for economic and social action, academy inspectors and local dignitaries. Psychiatrists and psychologists will be required to apply the decisions of these committees. After the age of 16, they will be able to transfer certain children, those they judge to be ‘backward’, directly into psychiatric hospitals, the wards of which today are very often, as is known, half empty. Let us be clear that these prominent people are found in the committees with oversight for these same establishments and psychiatric hospitals. Everything is connected!
5Having myself initiated the themes of ‘institutional analysis’ and of analysers some fifteen years ago, I was led to make the following correction in the 1974 re-edition of a collection of articles Psychanalyse et transversalité, published by Maspero: ‘it was starting in 1961, during the meetings of the GTPSI (Groupe de travail de psychologie et de thérapie institutionelle [Working group in institutional psychology and therapy]) that I proposed situating institutional therapy as a particular case of what I have called “institutional analysis”. At that time this idea had few echoes. It was outside the psychiatric milieus, in the groups of FGERI (Federation des groups d’études et de recherches institutionelles [Federation of groups for institutional study and research]) in particular that it was taken up. The leaders of the institutional psychotherapy current hardly envisaged more than a slight extension of analysis in the domains of psychiatry and possibly pedagogy. To my mind, such an extension could only lead to an impasse, if it didn’t aim at the social and political field in its entirety. One of the essential points of the political application of this institutional analysis in particular seemed to me to be the phenomenon of the bureaucratisation of militant organisations, which ought to be a matter for “group analysers”. These themes caught on, analysers, institutional analysis, and transversality have been made to fit every occasion somewhat; perhaps one should see in this an indication that despite their approximate character they harboured a somewhat lively problematic. Far be it for me to defend any kind of orthodoxy with regard to the origin of these concepts! At this time the GTPSI’s work of elaboration was collective; ideas were bursting out everywhere without belonging to anyone. Unfortunately, the climate has changed, and if I have been led to make these clarifications, it is because it seemed to me that they have escaped a certain number of people who are interested in this current of thinking today. To fill the hole in their memories or their lack of training, and in order to be precise, I therefore recall that nothing was said of or written about ‘institutional analysis’ and ‘analysers’ before the different versions that I have given of my report on ‘Transversality’. Published in 1964 in the first issue of the Revue de psychothérapie institutionelle.
6Or, in other domains, a new mathematical machine or a new technical procedure.
7Célestin Freinet Pour l’école du people (Paris: Maspero, 1969) and Élise Freinet Naissance d’une pédagogie populaire (Paris: Maspero, 1969).
8Fernand Oury and Jacques Pain Chronique de l’école caserne (Paris: Maspero, 1972); Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez De la class coopérative à la pédagogie institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1970); Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez Vers une pédagogie institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1967).
9A fascinating article that appeared in Liberation in September 1975 on parallel education networks, entitled ‘Living without school’ and in the journal Parallèle April–June 1976, published by the Groupe d’expérimentation sociale (Reid, Hall, 4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris), and an article by Liane Mozère ‘Projet d’hôtel d’enfants’.
10Foucault Discipline and Punish p. 215.
11See also the very surprising Lacano-Maoist metaphysics of Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet L’Ange (Paris: Grasset, 1976), which endeavours to distinguish a ‘discourse of the rebel’ from the Lacanian universals of enunciation, i.e. the four fundamental discourses: those of the Master, the University, the Hysteric, and the Analyst. Cf. Jacques Lacan On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73 translated by Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 1998) ‘Thus the speech of the Master must be purified of the simulacra that clutter it, not so as to bend to it but so as to tear it away from them’ (p. 73). At the risk of adding to their weariness (‘Do we have to keep on saying incessantly that the signifier is not ‘linguistic’ in the sense that it would be opposed to we don’t know what ‘libido’, thought in terms of intensity? Do we have to reaffirm the truism that the opposition of the energetic to signifying law is a pre-critical blunder that since Lacan has been impossible?’) we will continue to worry, along with some other pre-Lacanian asses, about the practical – political and analytic – consequences of the reduction of all systems of intensity, all energetics to the single register, so-called, of the ‘signifier’ (whether linguistic or not).
12Four types of interaction allow physicists to ‘pass’ from matter to energy: gravitational interactions of the ‘weight’ type; electromagnetic interactions of the ‘light’ and ‘matter’ type; weak and strong interactions of the ‘nuclear energy’ type. Another subject for meditation could be the mode of articulation between quantum mechanics, at the microscopic scale, and statistical mechanics, at the macroscopic scale, or even the principles of relativity, which consist in never separating time and space measurements from the movement of the instruments that accomplish them, that is to say, from their ‘observer’, or, if one wishes, their assemblage of enunciation. But unlike the relativist ‘observers’, whose own movements and referential coordinates are ‘homogenised’ on the basis of the same principle of mathematical invariance, collective assemblages of desire never entirely give up the singularity of what physicists call the line of their ‘gauge space’. Cf. Banesh Hoffmann The Strange History of the Quantum (New York: Dover, 1959).
1See Language 27, September 1972 p. 72 on ‘generative semantics’.
2Bar-Hillel also talks about it as a ‘wastebasket’. See ‘Out of the Pragmatic Wastebasket’ Linguistic Enquiry 2/3 p. 71.
3‘But first note that the utilisation of these unexploited possibilities, for creative ends, remains very unusual, even in poetry. One could indeed quote the “Jabberwocky” of Lewis Carroll, Finnegans Wake or certain texts by Michaux; but the least that one could say is that this type of creativity has only extremely distant connections with the creativity which operates in the ordinary use of language.’ Nicolas Ruwet Introduction to Generative Grammar translated by Norval H. Smith (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1973) p. 30.
4René Lindekens Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage (Paris: Hatier, 1975) p. 85.
5Hjelmslev defines language as a ‘semiotic into which all other semiotics may be translated – both all other languages, and all other conceivable semiotic structures’ Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage p. 109.
6As René Lindekens writes ‘… the semiotic relation of absolute interdependence, which characterises the link between the planes of expression and content – from which the denotative power of sign systems issues – and which Hjelmslev calls a relation of solidarity, must be considered as contracted exclusively by two forms, from one plane of the sign to the other’, Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage.
7Cf. Christian Metz Film Language translated by Bertrand Augst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) and Language and Cinema translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1974).
8Michel Foucault The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970).
9The notion of ‘machinic consistency’ is proposed here in opposition to that of ‘axiomatic consistency’ in mathematics.
10This implies that one follow Greimas when he proposes to stop considering the extra-linguistic world as an absolute referent and to treat it as a set of more or less implicit semiotic systems. A.J. Greimas On Meaning (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
11Roland Barthes denounces the claim that denotation founds the “first meaning”: ‘denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one which seems both to establish and to close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature: doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature?’ Roland Barthes S/Z translated by Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p. 9.
12Paul Ricoeur thus opposes the possibility of translating the meaning of one instance of discourse to the impossibility of translating the signified of a system of signs: ‘this logical function of meaning, carried by a phrase in its entirety, cannot be confused with the signified of any of the signs put to work in the phrase. In effect, the signified of the sign is solidary with the system of a given language; for this reason, it cannot be transposed from one language to another; on the contrary, the meaning of the phrase, which it would be better to call the “intended” than the signified, is a global thought content which one can propose to say differently within the same language, or to translate it into another language; the signified, then, is untranslatable, the “intended” is eminently translatable’ Paul Ricoeur ‘Signe et sens’ Encyclopaedia Universalis 1975.
13Oswald Ducrot, preface to John Searle Les Actes de langage. Un essai de philosophie de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972) p. 25.
14In the terminology of Charles E. Bazell, here we should speak instead of non-grammatical utterances. Bazell believes it necessary to establish a distinction between a-grammatical utterances and non-grammatical utterances. The first, of the ‘he seems sleeping’ type, are susceptible of rearrangement, of being translated back into ‘normal’ utterances: ‘he seems to be asleep’, for example. However, because the second, of the ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ type aren’t ‘missing’ anything, because they cannot be related to any crystallisation of a signified, and do not correspond to anything recognisable, avoid any possible correction, as if by themselves. But this distinction seems entirely relative to us: there are effectively many repressive intermediaries between the correction of grammar by a teacher and the incorrigible segregation of the text of the mad by psychiatry. Cf. Langage 34 June 1974.
15Louis Hjelmslev La Stratification du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1971) p. 58.
16Herbert E. Brekle Sémantique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) pp. 54–60.
17One could make the same remark with regard to Freud’s first models.
18Sebastian K. Saumjan opposes a system of abstract objects based on the operation of application (AGM: applicational generative model) to Chomsky’s system of linear concatenation, but his formalisation seems not to lead him to having to account for the modelling of language on the basis of the facts of power. See Langage 33 March 1974 p. 22, 54, on Hjelmslev’s influence.
19Abbreviation for ‘sentence’.
20Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1989).
21The first verbal expressions of the child are past participles, for the past (‘left’, ‘fell’) and infinitives for the future. Then periphrasis develops (‘I am going to go’) and inflections only come in the last place. Cf. Elizabeth Traugott ‘Le changement linguistique et sa relation à l’acquisition de la langue maternelle’ Langages 32 1973 p. 47.
22Cf. Robin Lakoff Language and Woman’s Place (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
23Cf. the study by Joey L. Dillard Black English, Negro Non-Standard English, and Mexican (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).
24Brekle Sémantique pp. 94–104, and also W.C. Watt, who is equally oriented towards an ‘abstract performative grammar’ having to account for the functioning of what he calls ‘mental grammar’ in its relations to perception, memory, etc.
1Thomas Bever ‘The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures’ in J.R. Hayes (ed.) Cognition and the Development of Language (New York: Wiley, 1979) vol. 279 p. 203.
2Giving up the simplifications that tended to reduce genetic encodings and evolution to a capitalisation of information and a statistical selection in which the most complex elements entertained an ‘arborescent’ dependency with regard to the most elementary elements, certain theories now envisage the transfers of genetic information can be produced through viruses and in such a way that evolution can ‘go back’ from a more evolved species to a species that is less evolved or generative or the more evolved. ‘If such passages of information were revealed as having been very important, certain geneticists declare that we would be led to substitute reticular schema (with communication across branches after their differentiation) to the bush- or tree-like schema that serve to represent evolution’ Yves Christensen ‘Le rôle des virus dans l’évolution’ La Recherche 54, March 1975 p. 271.
3Sigmund Freud ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ translated by James Strachey. Standard Edition volume 7 (London: Hogarth, 1953).
4Pierre Clastres Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Paris: Plon, 1972) and Society against the State, Jacques Lizot Le Cercle des feux. Faits et dits des Indiens Yanomami (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
5Nathan Lindquist declares that linguistic innovations can attack important centres ‘like paratroopers’ and then radiate across neighbouring countryside. Cited in Bertil Malmberg New Trends in Linguistics translated by Edward Carners (Stockholm: Lund, 1964) p. 65.
6Languages 32 December 1973 p. 88.
7Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics translated by Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
8And one doesn’t get the impression that the linguist is ready to be rid of it any time soon, as when, for example, this same Françoise Robert, frightened by her own audacity with regard to the ideas she proposes in relation to a ‘community grammar’, is disturbed that such a conception might lead to a representation of competence that would threaten to destroy the sacrosanct concept of langue. Malmberg New Trends p. 60.
9Langage 32 December 1973 p. 90.
10The distinction proposed by Julia Kristeva, within the process of signifance, between the level of a semiotic chora and a symbolic level, besides perpetuating and universalising the signifying, also has the disadvantage of closing up diagrammatic transformation on itself, making it a sort of deep structure, an arche-writing, once again. With Julia Kristeva, the innateness of universals leaves the symbolic so as to emigrate into the semiotic. In these conditions, pragmatics risks getting bogged down on an interminable textual practice like psychoanalysis risks wandering between a symbolic phenotext and a semiotic genotext which despite being freed from the personological polarities of communication, nevertheless remains prisoner of the hypothesis of an ‘unconscious signifying’ subjectivity. Julia Kristeva La Révolution du langage poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).
11Regarding a possible tripart division of deixis, into time, space and socius, see Langage 32 December 1973 p. 45.
12They thus escape both sense and signification at the same time, in so far as the first, as Brekle proposes, would be assimilated to the intensional content of a concept attached to a signifier, and the second to its extensional aspect. Brekle Sémantique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) p. 44. But from a ‘machinic’ (and not a logical) point of view, sense would mark the establishment of a diagrammatic connection that is independent of any representational or significational system.
13In the same way as a group, an institution, or a much bigger social grouping, an isolated individual can be constitutive of such an assemblage, which is never reduced to being just a totalisation of individuals, but which engages other, ‘non-human’ flows (non-human sexuality, economic flows, material flows, etc.).
14John L. Austin How To Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), John Searle Les Actes de langage. Un essai de philosophie de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972), Oswald Ducrot Dire et ne pas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1972).
15Information theorists define signification as ‘an invariant in the reversible operations of translation’ (B.A. Uspenskij quoted by Juri Lotman The Structure of the Artistic Text translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1977) p. 34.
16Alain Rey ‘Langage et temporalités’ in Langages 32 December 1973. Jean-Claude Chevalier for his part writes that ‘the language of general grammar and repression; for the bourgeoisie, the predicative schema and its meta-language (and the pre-eminence of syntax is indeed an ideological decision); for the people, technical words and vocabularies and a spoken language abandoned to an indifferent freedom’ ‘Idéologie grammaticale et changement linguistique’ Langages 32 December 1973.
17Charles Sanders Peirce Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1965).
18François Jacob considers that the linearity of a mode of encoding allows much more rigorous control of the linking of encoded sequences. Francois Jacob ‘Le modèle linguistique en biologie’ Critique 322 March 1974 p. 202.
19Without exposing the specificity of the diagrammatic sign, Bettini and Casetti define its contour well. See Filippo Bettini and Francesco Casetti ‘La sémiologie des moyens de communication audio-visuels et le problème de l’analogie’ in Dominique Noguez (ed.) Cinema: Théorie, Lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973) p. 92.
20Peirce classified algorithms amongst icons of relation, etc.
21Lotman The Structure of the Artistic Text p. 36. Content, for Lotman, is synonymous with the signified.
22In Hjelmslev’s terminology: figures or glossemes of expression.
23The development of a semiotics of synaesthesias would, on this point, be fundamental: how can sounds be seen, colours heard, words somatised … A propos of ‘intersensorial transpositions’, Merleau-Ponty wrote ‘the senses translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and are mutually comprehensible without the intervention of any idea’ Maurice Merleau-Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception translated Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 235 [The French text misquotes Merleau-Ponty – having ‘sons’ (sounds) instead of ‘sens’ (senses).].
24Semiotics operating by batteries of discrete signs, cutting up information into successive dichotomies baptised ‘digits’.
25See the different semiotisations of jealousy and vengeance amongst the Crow and Hopi Indians, noted by Lowie and signalled by Levi-Strauss in his preface to Solei Hopi. Don C. Talayesva Solei Hopi (Paris: Plon, 1959) [French language translation of Sun Chief. The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian.].
26One could distinguish between level a) human enactment, level b) abstract signification, level c) machinic enactment.
27‘effect’ in the sense in that in physics one talks of a ‘Compton effect’.
28As in this ‘page of writing’ by Jacques Prevert, in which the ‘lyre-bird’s’ flying off into the sky liberates not only the semiotics repressed by school (singing, dancing, …) but also all the other modes of encoding and stratification: ‘and the windows become sand again, the ink becomes water again, the desks become trees again, chalk becomes a cliff, the pen-holder becomes a bird.’ Jacques Prevert Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
29Langages 26 June 1972.
30Cf. also the way in which the imposition of the ‘language of the Republic’ on ‘wild France’ acquired the character of a colonial campaign, such as it was inaugurated by the Jacobin method of the Revolution. One finds the same slogans here as marked their furrows across the colonial empire: ‘of routes and schoolmasters.’ Michel de Certeau, with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).
1Cf. the myths of the man without a face, etc., and the fact that when a psychotic loses the ability to recognise his own face, the entirety of signification is modified.
2‘A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur’ – literally ‘In the shadow of young girls in flower’ is the title of part of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, translated by Montcrieff and Kilmartin as ‘Within a Budding Grove’ [TN].
3‘… I had always striven, when I stood before the sea, to expel from my field of vision, as well as the bathers in the foreground and the yachts with their too dazzling sails that were like seaside costumes, everything that prevented me from persuading myself that I was contemplating the immemorial ocean which had already been pursuing the same mysterious life before the human race …’ Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time v.1 translated by Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981) p. 963.
4Cf. in this regard Henri Michaux’s film on drugs, despite its very poor production quality.
5Cf. René Spitz’s description of the functioning in a newborn baby of a ‘Gestalt-sign constituted by the eyes, forehead, and nose in movement.’ From the second month, the baby follows the eyes of the moving face of the adult, and during breastfeeding, it fixes its eyes continually on the mother’s face. It smiles at a face (or a mask) but only on condition that it is seen head on. René Spitz De la naissance à la parole (Paris: PUF, 1968). See also Otto Isakower ‘Contribution à la psychopathologie des phénomènes associés à l’endormissement’ Nouvelle Revue de la psychoanalyse 5, 1972, and Bertram D. Lewin ‘Le sommeil, la bouche, et l’écran du rêve’ ibid.
6‘In any case, that is to say whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, we are in the process of unifying the Earth and the peoples that it bears under the infinite production of reason in its “purity” and of consciousness in its “propriety”’ writes Gerard Granel a propos of Husserl’s phenomenology (‘Husserl’ article Encyclopaedia Universalis volume 8). The whole question here is one of knowing if it is just a matter of taking note of the ravages of the capitalist crusade to unify modes of subjectivation or, indeed, of putting oneself at its service in the name of a metaphysics of being in the pure state and the universal truth, which one intends to turn into ‘a question, a place of combat and of decision’.
7Jacques Lacan ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in Écrits. A Selection translated by Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 2004).
8Other registers, that of refrains, for example, or constellations of sonorous and rhythmic traits occupying temporality – Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’ for example – which impose a break between the world of speech and the world of song, would equally be called into question by a such a reorientation of semiotic assemblages.
9Ethnologists ought not to content themselves with preaching against ethnocentrism, they ought also to devote themselves to making possible the existence of a counter-ethnography that would give to the ‘primitives’ the means of developing their point of view on the Whites, who they very generally consider to be sad, inhuman, cadaverous.
10The ‘retro’ phenomenon does not itself result from a passing fashion. It has always existed, at least in the context of societies that are engaged in a process of the acceleration of history, that is to say, of the acceleration of processes of deterritorialisation (the Romans, for example, were fascinated by the traces of the Greek and Egyptian past).
11See for example how the judges in court cases where the defendant has been caught red-handed literally judge them according to ‘how they look’. Christian Hennion Chronique des flagrants délits (Paris: Stock, 1976).
12Frances A. Yates The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).
13Cf. the article by Maurice Arvong in Le Monde 1 September 1976.
14La Recherche 66, April 1976.
15Jakob von Uexküll Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer, 1909/21).
16Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1957) p. 258.
17Jean-Luc Parant Les Yeux MMDVI Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976: ‘… the work that is the great builders of EMPTY holes that are the eyes WITHOUT WHICH THEY NOT THE EYES WOULD NOT BE ABLE EITHER TO FLY OR SEE AND THE EYES HAVE DUG HOLES IN ALL THE WALLS SIGHT HAS UNBLOCKED EVERYTHING like the pioneers OF EMPTY space who have beaten a path to life by hollowing out the night and the consistency THAT GRIPPED US LIKE A SKIN to the point of finding the EMPTY day and this void THIS VOID without which THE EYES we could neither FLY move or see and the eyes are submerged entirely in space and only ever return to the surface covered with their hard and creased membrane EYELIDS.’
18Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time p. 227, 375, 570.
19In the framework of quantum physics, ‘quantum tunnelling’ allows the passage of a physical system from one ‘authorised state’ to another ‘authorised state’ via a succession of ‘prohibited’ intermediary states to be described. See La Recherche 58, July–August 1975.
20Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology. The Biology of Behaviour translated by Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1970).
1Nikolas Tinbergen The Study of Instinct (London: Oxford University Press, 1951).
2René Thom Structural Stability and Morphogenesis translated by D.H. Fowler.
3From this point of view, we cannot follow Michel Foucault when in The History of Sexuality v.1 he considers that there is a specific repression of desire correlative to the evolution of capitalism. It is true that he doesn’t talk about desire, but about sexuality, and that the target being aimed at having thereby been first reduced, it seems clear that in effect there must, all things considered, always be ‘as much sexuality’ in one epoch as another. But when sexuality-desire is subsequently broadened to the discourses and power formations that relate to it, it becomes less evident that there might not be a recuperative repression, which is miniaturised and interiorised more and more, that is specific to the methods of capitalist subjection.
4In English in the original [TN].
5Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 143.
6Remy Chauvin Entretiens sur la sexualité (Paris: Plon, 1965). Cf. the references assembled by Eibl-Eibesfeldt ibid pp. 158–9.
7Eibl-Eibesfeldt ibid p. 323 and 450.
8‘An entire study of animal behaviour (one could say as much of human behaviour) involves in the first place the determination of norms for the species under consideration, living in its natural milieu, or in conditions that reproduce them as faithfully as possible … whereas in the wild rabbits live in a society and manifest complex sexual customs, caged rabbits are limited to vegetative activity. There is no possible comparison between the behaviour of a rat free in the wild and a white rat living in the confines of a small cage. Man has selected the gentlest individuals, the least ‘rodent-like’ and created a being whose psychic level, compared to that of the wild rat, is that of a mongoloid idiot [sic] in relation to a normal human. When one thinks that the immense body of work accomplished by American zoopsychogists, with the aid of mazes and other tests, is based exclusively on the reactions of this idiotic white rat of the Winston or any other race, one is taken aback, to say the least …’ Pierre-Paul Grasse ‘Zoologie’ Encyclopédie de la Pléiade v.1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) p. 251.
9The first ‘quantitative’ studies by primatologists (Washburn, DeVore) started out from the hypothesis of a direct relation between the strictness of hierarchical domination amongst apes and the degree of adaptation to life in the savannah, and have had to be reoriented. What has been given primacy is no longer simply the quantity of social relation (delousing, etc.), but the quality of their diverse assemblages and their order of appearance. For example, the graph of links of the four assemblages of two baboons (one dominant, one dominated): 1) combat; 2) presentation of posteriors; 3) the mounting of a sexual character; 4) social delousing. See Hans Kummer ‘Le comportement social des singes’ La Recherche 75, December 1976, pp. 10–12.
10In this regard we will later turn to the use, for example amongst birds, of specific refrains for the sexual ‘closure’ of a species (Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 24, 104) and to the more fundamental relations that exist between the semiotisations of rhythm and of territory.
11Kummer ‘Le comportement social des singes’.
1Jurgen Nicolai Vogelhaltung und Vogelpflege. Das Vivarium (Stuttgart: Franckh-Kosmos Verlag, 1965). Quoted by Eibl-Eibesfeldt.
2Filmed at the rate of 48 frames a second and decomposed image by image, these expressions are also found in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, France, Japan, Africa, amongst Indians of the Orinoco-Amazon region, etc. Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology pp. 436–42.
3Which is opposed here to symbolic interpretation.
4With regard to criticism of mechanically ‘progressive’ phylogeny, we can only repeat here what François Dagognet has said and transpose it from the botanic taxonomies of zoology: ‘… Simplicity does not stand as an index of primitiveness or ancestrality. In effect, it can be excluded that the flower was initially polycarpic and multi-petalled (cycadeoidea theory), as the oldest records of the Early Cretaceous (the Bennettitales) tend to suggest. Similarly, Monocotyledons would also be derived from dicotyledons and not the other way around, as an additive theory of evolution would have it, with regular movements from one to two. It is true that certain palaeobotanists are happy to admit dense and ramified lines, on the basis of a single complex, but this is another way of refuting the concept of a rectilinear and progressive movement. And these remarks show well enough the traps of a phylogeny understood too much in terms of a transition from the simple to the complex, although the abundance of spiral forms […] may translate an earlier situation’ Encyclopaedia Universalis vol. 15 p. 764.
5Paul Géroudet Les Palmipèdes (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1959) pp. 20–40.
6Paul Géroudet Les Échasseurs (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1967) pp. 31–40.
7Paul Géroudet Les Passereaux (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, nd) vol. 2 pp. 89–94.
8Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 193.
9In proximate forms, one finds a courtship ritual that makes a reference to ‘nesting’ even amongst fish. For example, the male decorates its spawning area with [twigs] in such a manner as to produce a star effect that will attract females. Example given by Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 126.
10Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who also recalls the work of I. Nicolai concerning the coevolution of Wydahbirds and the birds that they parasite (different species of Bengali finch, waxbills, etc.) on the basis of the fact that they imitate their host’s song: ‘it is highly probable that the traditional links of the wydahs with their host-species, which are maintained by the imitation of the latter’s song, has led to the evolution of different races from this group’ Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 162 and 194.
11Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 130 and 136.
12This ritual is composed of several assemblages:
Dancing: with their necks pushed back, the partners alternate in turning beaks, head to one side, in such a manner that the beak touches the shoulder pushed upwards;
•clashing of beaks, which ‘imitates’ the search for food by the young;
•banging of beaks, which evokes a threat;
•crying towards the sky, which evokes instead an appeasement;
•smoothing of shoulder feathers of the partner (always punctuated by a banging of the beak).
And at the end of each sequence, the order of which is not very strict, the two birds both bend towards the ground and emit ‘two sonorous syllables’ so as to seal a sort of ‘nesting contract’.
13Paul Géroudet Les Passereaux vol. 2 p. 10.
14Ibid vol. 3 p. 10.
15An entire field of animal play ought equally to be explored. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, for example, describes an extraordinary game of croquet between two Galapagos finches, pushing a small mealworm back and forth through a crack in a branch, into which they had probably previously inserted it. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 252.
16K. Immelman has demonstrated that zebra finches with highly colourful plumage, maintain a certain distance from one another, whereas the all-white birds of the same species sit more closely to one another. Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 143.
17Even at this level of biological fascination that imprinting constitutes, there will continue to exist sorts of degrees of freedom or optional matters, as tends to be indicated by the fact that zebra finches who have been raised by female society finches will court society finches when adult if they are given the choice. If on the contrary they are forced to cohabit with a conspecific female they will appear to become ‘normal’ again: they court and breed with them as if there had been no imprinting. In short, the effects of imprinting seem to be imposed on the order of desire.
18Research of K. Immelman, cited by Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 241.
19Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt pp. 51–2.
20It is to be noted that mathematical techniques of data analysis have for some years had recourse to methods of transcription that appeal precisely to elementary faciality traits. Thus in Chernoff’s method, parameters are represented by the mouth, the nose, etc., and one compares physiognomies so as to compare the objects studied. See Edwin Diday and Ludovic Lebart ‘L’analyse des donnees’ in La Recherche 74, January 1977.
21According to them, all, or a part, of the behaviours of negation, approval, welcoming, flirting, arrogance, intimidation, triumph, submission, rage etc., arise from codings that are transmitted through heredity. Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 440 et seq.
22Let us emphasise that it isn’t ‘centres’ that neurosurgeons localise, but only resection points that have as a consequence the disorganisation of the components in question. Everything leads us to think in effect that each real act of memorisation – in particular when it concerns long-term memory – puts into play the electrical potentials of a whole population of neurons, which cannot be ‘localised’ but which is ‘selected’ in the brain as a whole. Wilder Penfield and Brenda Milner ‘Memory deficit produced by bilateral lesions in the hippocampal zone’ Archive of Neurology and Psychiatry 1958. E. Roy John Mechanisms of Memory (New York: Academic Press, 1967).
23There is rhythm in the beating wings of migrating birds, in the trotting of wild horses, in undulating gliding of fish; but it is also as impossible for animals to trot, fly, or swim, in metre as it is for humans to breathe in time with a metronome. Ludwig Klages Expression du caractère dans l’écriture (Neuchatel: Delachaux-Niestlé, 1947) p. 41.
24A rhythm of a period of 24 hours, playing a role that turns out to be more significant the more it is studied, as much at the levels of cellular biology, pharmacology, the physiology of tissues, organs, and functions, as of ethology. The majority of rhythms of a greater periodicity – like that of migrations – result from a composition based on circadian rhythms, and thus, in the final analysis, from these molecular rhythms.
25Alain Reinberg ‘La chronobiology. Une nouvelle étape de l’étude des rhythmes biologiques’ Sciences vol.1, 1970; ‘Rhythmes biologiques’ Encyclopedia Universalis vol.14 p. 568; Julian de Ajuriaguerra Cycles biologiques et psychiatrie (Geneva: Editions Georg et Cie, 1968).
26William H. Thorpe Learning and Instinct in Animals (London: Methuen, 1969) pp. 421–6.
27‘By a “body” I understand whatever has a definite shape and position, and can occupy a region of space in such a way as to keep every other body out of it’ René Descartes Meditations 2nd Meditation.
28Von Weizsäcker, for example, writes ‘In the case of physics, the law resides in the action of forces, in the case of organic movement, it comes from form’ Viktor von Weizsäcker Le Cycle de la structure translated by Michel Foucault and Daniel Rocher (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1958).
29And also, indirectly, specialists of psychoanalytic ‘pass’ words.
30An example of a non-signifying and non-individuated system of ‘reflexivity’ carrying out highly complex discursive work: the duplication of the double helix systems of DNA that correspond at the molecular level with the duplication of chromosomes.
31Cf. ‘L’oeil écoute. BABA + GAGA – DADA.’ Review of the work of Harry McGurk and John MacDonald ‘Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices’ from Nature 26 December 1976, in Le Monde 26 January 1977.
32For example, why is it that life ‘got going’ on the basis of carbon and not silicon?
33For example, Holst has established that the rhythms of the pectoral fins of fish are always dominant in relation to the rhythms of the dorsal and caudal fins. Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 41.
34A humorous example of an animal warding off of a ‘politics of black holes’ through the putting into play of highly sophisticated semiotic interactions: that of [male] insects which, in order to delay the fatal moment, at least whilst copulating, under threat of being eaten by their female mate during intercourse, offer them little alimentary gifts. Those of the species Hilaria even push the stunt as far as offering them an unconsumable object of some sort, wrapped in a cocoon that is particularly difficult to take apart … Noted in Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 127.
35Kenneth W. Braly has shown, for example, that immediate ‘natural’ perception of complex forms was influenced considerably by learning on the basis of an unconscious perceptual memory. Kenneth W. Braly ‘The Influence of Past Experience in Visual Perception’ cited in Robert Frances La Perception de la musique (Paris: Vrin, 1972) p. 52.
1For example, faciality traits trigger attention behaviour amongst the young, reactions to the ‘baby’ schema (Lorenz, Spindler …) or the effects of suggestion like those exploited by Milgram with his torture experiments, graduated, simulated, and ordered by a hierarchical authority. Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 446 and 448.
2Thorpe Learning and Instinct in Animals p. 469.
3‘[L]ike that cup of tea, all those sensations of light, the bright clamour, the boisterous colours that Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination, insistently but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something that I might compare to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium. But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil (like that of the steeple of Martinville), one would have to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he “heard” the universe and projected it far beyond himself’ (III, 382).
4Proust himself was a passionate gambler and at several points in his life lost large sums of money playing baccarat.
5The field opened up by music cannot be restricted to seven notes on a keyboard, but to an incommensurable keyboard that is still almost entirely unknown … The great artists discover new universes and show us ‘what richness, what variety lies hidden unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void’ (I, 380).
6Proust gives a remarkable description of the worldly salons as collective assemblages of enunciation, in Cities of the Plain in particular: ‘salons cannot be portrayed in a static immobility which has been conventionally employed up to this point for the study of characters, though these too must be carried along as it were in a quasi-historical momentum’ (II, 769)).
7‘The abundance of impressions which he had been receiving for some time past, even though they had come to him rather through the channel of his appreciation of music, had enriched his appetite for painting as well’ (I, 244). But this new lease of life for painting will be short lived; it too will subside in the black hole process of semiotic collapse that will characterise his passion for Odette.
8Each one of Odette’s visits ‘revived the sense of disappointment which he felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he spontaneously admired’ (I, 215).
9Sigmund Freud ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ in Standard Edition volume 9 (London, Hogarth, 1959).
10A differential analysis would perhaps be led to show that photographs do not have the same function for Proust as for Kafka (for Proust, the photograph is related to the portrait, whilst in Kafka, the portrait is related to the photograph).
11The same objection was made against partisans of a mathematician such as Henri-Leon Lebesgue.
12Cf. ‘Histoire de la musique’ Encyclopédie de la Pleiade volume 1 p. 1168.
13Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1989) p. 107 et seq.
14Franz Kafka ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk’ in Complete Short Stories (London: Penguin, 1983) p. 361. From this point of view, let us also note that for John Cage, a politics of sound should not be an obstacle to silence, and that silence should not obscure sound. He envisages a sort of ‘recuperation’ of nothingness, as the following extract from one of his interviews with Daniel Charles shows:
JC: Nothingness is nothing but a word.
DC: Like silence it must suppress itself …
JC: And one thereby comes back to what is, that is to say, to sounds.
DC: But don’t you lose something?
JC: What?
DC: Silence, nothingness …
JC: Look, I’m losing nothing! It isn’t a question of losing anything in all that, but of gaining.
DC: Coming back to sound is thus to return to sounds ‘accompanied’ by nothingness, this side of all structure.
JOHN CAGE Pour les oiseaux (Paris: Belfond, 1976) p. 32
See also the comparison that John Cage establishes between going beyond what is called music and what is called politics: ‘politics is the same thing. And I can even talk about “non-politics” the way that with regard to my work, one spoke of “non-music”.’ Ibid. p. 54.
15Cf. the fine homage by the musician Jacques Besse ‘Robert Schumann was sectioned’ in La Grande Pâque (Paris: Belfond, 1969).
16In certain African musics, a phrase can be drummed without being articulated verbally.
17In fact, this new deterritorialised relation between labour power and power formations doesn’t just concern leading economic sectors, it also has an effect on older sectors, on the public function; it also traverses the milieus of the unions, politics, universities, the judiciary, etc.
18Other creators, such as Berlioz, will also use their own inadequacies so as not to cross a certain threshold of deterritorialisation.
19One need only think of Debussy’s Children’s Corner, La Boîte à joujoux, the role of childhood in Pelleas and Melisande, or of L’Enfant et les sortilèges by Ravel. But what specifies the position of childhood in these works, to our mind, is that it no longer functions as a basic refrain, as a generative bloc, as a bloc of becoming; at the end point of a generative process of a different nature, it no longer appears as anything other than a redundant theme. In any case, Claude Debussy very frequently only characterised the content of his works after the fact by giving them expressive titles (for example, the symphonic poem La Mer).
20Cf. Pierre Boulez’s analysis of rhythmic cells in Sacré du printemps: Relèves d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
21‘… when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new beauty which deepens his sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again. Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation …’ (I, 229).
22In English in the original [TN].