Stripping (retrieval)

Stripping (retrieval) from Renee Lauzon on Vimeo.

Oceans for Breakfast

Like the Albatross, he crosses oceans for breakfast






and deigns to touch shore only when it involves sex.




Woman is an inconvenient necessity.

Regime of Signs

In this fifth plateau, Deleuze and Guattari identify the varieties and complexities of semiotic systems and how they move, transform, and mix within each other, creating regimes or fixed systems that often privilege a certain type of coding of signs within language. In order to follow their investigation it is highly important to keep in mind that for them language is not simply a means to communicate the seen, felt, or expressed, for Deleuze and Guattari language is  also a system of codes that organizes power within social structures. Therefore, it is possible to destablize or destroy organized power by deconstructing semiotic systems, to transform them, “destratify, open up to a new function” (134). 

Deleuze and Guattari explain that in linguistics a sign is a sign of another sign and that sign follows another sign, ad infinitum, and so it follows that “the signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign” (112). Also the words that we utter are connected to the things that we think. Expression is not limited to what we say; the movement of our bodies-- whether or not we make direct eye contact with someone, what we are thinking comes across on our faces even when we think we are hiding it, we wear our pain, joy, and frustration, or fatigue, our insides on our outsides--these expressions mean something. They orient consciousness and build identity, they mark status and power, they enunciate, and interpret what you are in relation to everything else that is different. 

The most absolute of differences is the one or ones who do not fit within a semiotic system which are defined by Deleuze and Guattari as pre-signifying, signifying, counter-signifying, and post-signifying (135). Each of these systems bear a variety of characteristics as far as their ability to code, and build the form and content in which language operates. These systems are in contradiction to how regimes force out redundancies through the “perpetual referral from sign to sign,” (135) the consistencies, normalcies, and concretized organizations of power in language. Semiotic systems mix and transform into others or privilege themselves over others. For example, a signifying system, characterized by an “overcoding..fully effectuated by the signifier,” which could be the phallus (patriarchy), The Standard of power that all society pivots, The State, The Law, in this “there is uniformity of enunciation, unification of the substance of expression, and control over statements in a regime of circularity.” (135). These characteristics combined with a postsignifying system compounds The State and the subject into a configuration of identity, where consciousness and subjectification builds negative ideas regarding the relationship between The Law and the body. This organization could be seen in matters of marriage, an institution of law that impinges bodies to act in accordance with the law of interpersonal relationships and the hegemonic power dynamics between men and women. 

For Deleuze and Guattari these systems become “stratified” in their types of deterritorializations and bear positive or negative outcomes (134). These outcomes are conformed, as people take on the systems that conform them. A condition of conformity is operating within “a dominant reality” (129). Subjectification is stratified within all semiotic systems as they follow the “characteristic traits of the subjective semiotic,” (129) unless the subject turns away from the dominant reality, for example, a woman turning away from her role as the ideal and her actions revolving around the male gaze. The construction of the feminine is made and is internalized by the subject, and externally acted out in modes of behavior and methods of speech. She becomes feminine. 

The pre-signifying system, according to Deleuze and Guattari, still operates within a system of language that privileges (how can it not?) though it operates “diffusely: enunciation is collective, statements themselves are polyvocal, and substances of expression are mulitple...relative deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between the territorialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State apparatus” (135). The transformations the can occur within semiotic systems is where they can break down, shift and move, gain power, and where we can gain a sense of their points of origin, how they themselves function in society. These are “variables implicit to language, internal to statements” (139). 

Deleuze and Guattari explain transformations of semiotic systems bring about these variables and that is where the study of Pragmatics becomes useful to understanding linguistic systems. Pragmatics looks at how these systems are related to the context in which they are created. In other words, Pragmatics is the study of the relationships between language systems and society. Language and political movements are inextricably linked. 

Deleuze and Guattari are looking at language in the context of situations, content and form and its ability to presuppose meaning. This is what they call the “abstract machine” which for them is “far from being too abstract, [it] is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language..A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and reterritorializations” (141). This is a complicated way of saying that the formalizations of content and expression, matter and substance, form and function, corporeal and non-corporeal, real and not real, the subject and the State, are not functioning separately from one another. Words bring ideas into reality, a becoming part of an assemblage. Expressions of the real can seem unreal, signs replace the thing it is referring, and “content constitutes bodies, things, or objects that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations” (143). “Defined diagrammatically, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (142). This potentiality of language to affect bodies in the future, the real yet to come, makes one stagger against the force of the reality of words; it projection into the future, or line of flight, its deterritorializations and its unknown reterritorialization (where will my words land?) indeed shows how much language is performative and cannot be reduced to the definitions of syntactics,  semantics, or the logical formulations and meanings of one subject or one group (147). 

Deleuze and Guattari give the statements “I love you,” and “I am jealous,” as examples to the variations of meaning in different semiotic systems (147). Is it a collective love of pre-signification or a love of owns country and values and I will kill someone who takes that away? Is it a love that is a part of a condition of subjectification whose line of flight is contingent on the positioning of one’s identity and that of another or is it signifying a uniformity or conformity that  merely represents a love from sign to sign. What does “I love you” propose? “All methods of the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals.. have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough” (148). Our statements can mean too much or mean nothing at all. 

Postulates of Linguistics

In the fourth plateau titled, “Postulates of Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattari address the performativity of language in relation to the science of linguistics. Language, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (76). For them language operates as a command and/or demand for someone to do something. To this end, language is used as a tool to order society, to keep people in obedience, which suggests perhaps quite deeply that the old adage is true: Language is power. 

A command has the power to order. It is with this concern that Deleuze and Guattari state that words do not merely operate as communication or information exchanges, rather as words move from body to body they have the power to command, to order individuals, to get them to operate as they wish. Deleuze and Guattari claim that “it is in this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information” (77). The term “order-word” refers to how the structure of language links words in relation which draws out implicit meanings,  which as Deleuze and Guattari points out, forces a presupposition upon the spoken and written word. “Language comes from itself” (76). The order-word “is the relation of every word or statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are and can only be, accomplished in a statement” (79). The word-order implies an act, a further obligation or continued display of the act as soon as the statement is uttered. The order-word exists both in immanence and in the future, forever (81).  A vow, an oath, a promise is “brought into being by saying it” (78). The implied meaning in stating, “I do,” during a wedding ceremony leaps through meaning and time; in saying it one promises many things that could mean very many different things to different people, though the implied meaning is often contained in an understanding of societal norms. Word-order is a statement that implies and commands a certain set of acts. 

Now what most of this essay is concerned with is showing that order-words have the power to order bodies. In that ordering we see identities coming into being though in a non-corporeal sense. A speech act can transform the orientation of subjectivity (or identity), as the act is impinged upon and attributed to a corporeal body (80). This transformation of subjectivity is an affective force moving in the immaterial but is no less fact. Attributions are categorical, constricting bodies within frameworks of social norms; they are order-words attributed to bodies that reduce complexities to simple constructions of identity (80). Going back to the example of vows spoken in a marriage ceremony, one can see how instantaneous two people’s lives, behaviors, and normative behaviors are transformed once the officiant orders them “husband and wife.” Their corporeal bodies have not been affected in that instant of speech act, “but the declaration….expresses a non-corporeal attribute on bodies” (80). 

Deleuze and Guattari stress the social factor of utterances and their power to affect bodies. “The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblage. It then becomes clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified” (80). It is from here that Deleuze and Guattari begin to discuss the importance of what they call “‘free’ indirect discourse” which has no defined and closed structure of categories allowing discourse to continue to shift through many different voices all accounted for in the webs of social character (80). 

In the second portion of this essay we find the authors discussing many theories of the natures of content and expression. Determined to both have form, content and expression act in relation to one another as speech acts or statements change through present and past tenses (85). These “intermingling of bodies” are from where Deleuze and Guattari take their discussion of the performativity of language in relation to linguistic structures in order to insist upon a different perspective of how language operates. With the collective assemblage Deleuze and Guattari are showing the movement or passage within an understanding of language outside the linguistic constants. They state: “An assemblage of enunciation does not speak ‘of’ things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and states of content” (87). In other words, one does not have primacy over the other; each are moving in a passage through de-terrorialization (that which carries away) and re-territorialization (that which redistributes), and one does not exist because of the other in a linear sense. Things and the expression of things are sets that form within the social framework as “corporeal modifications….and incorporeal transformations” (85) are adjusted as bodies move, speak and act, and affective forces intermingle. The collective assemblage seeks to subvert the constraints of linguistic science, a science that wants autonomy from politics and semiotics which are concerned with how the linguistic systematization of language effects the understanding of what language does, how it affects (85). “A language seems to be defined by the syntactical, semantic, phonological constants in its statements; the collective assemblage, on the contrary, concerns the usage of these constants in relation to variables internal to enunciation itself (variables of expression, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations)” (85). The term “variables” is an important factor to keep in mind while reading Deleuze and Guattari, for they are seeking heterogeneousness against the homogeneousness of constants in language and categories that simplify identity, asserting a power on bodies. They define content and expression as independent and operating at various levels though the defining lines do not demarcate into separate categories when concerned with how they act. According to Deleuze and Guattari “expressions intervene or insert themselves into contents...not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different way” (86). Content and expression operate within each  of their forms through the movement of deterritorialization or “lines of flight” (89). It is from this line the forms change and move, are altered across language, across time and history, across identities and societies’ defining laws, borders, norms of behavior, love, marriage, wealth, systems, and functions, only to be reterritorialized in all kinds of ways and all kinds of manners (89). It is helpful to envision a flock of birds moving through the sky, traversing land and sea and air, calling out in song, then being scooped up by a change in weather patterns that traveled hundreds of miles, a rhizome, a variant, and a bird is captured, transformed. 

This is helpful to get a sense of the movement content and expressions within fields of social order; though Deleuze and Guattari are linking the systems of language and their affective force to order bodies and the power of ideological thought (89). Seen in isolation or operated in isolation these two imposing forces (language and ideology) have the power to sneak under the radar of discourse and investigation, though used in relation to the operations within the social character, it becomes apparent how “the interpenetration of language and the social field and political problems lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface” (91). The abstract machine refers to how used in isolation systems have the tendency to confine or refrain the affective forces that each possess; in isolation systems render themselves static and stable when in fact they are operating, forcing in very pervasive ways. “There is a constant tendency to seek reduction...but placing-in-variation allows us to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium without beginning or end” (94). Variations in writing style, enunciation, dialects, ghetto languages, all of these types of variations in language help to build a continuum, a passage through language, rather than a stoppage, a unification, centralized and standardized; it builds a desire for difference, as Guattari puts it, rather than a desire for homogenization of society and self. 

On the Refrain

In the beginning of the eleventh essay in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explain that an aspect of the refrain is a song hummed by a child to quell the night terrors that lurk in the darkness (311). This song is an expression sent out to grasp forces, to mark a line that bridges internal fears and external pressures, to break them or reorder them so they are less severe. The refrain also brings order to chaos or forces chaos out; it is a drawing of distance, and a flight from areas of uncertainty, ambiguity, or momentary loss. The refrain gathers, forces out, and lets in other forces from other territories. The refrain is how we meet, push against, and “join with the World” (311). 

As Deleuze and Guattari go forth in their discussion of the refrain it is important to remember that sound is a part of the workings of the refrain, for they mark territories. “Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it,” (311) mark the lines of territories, spaces between territories, residual markings that essentially constitute ways of acting in, acting with, and acting against the world. A male bird of paradise displays his colors to attract a mate, his colors express virility and dominance, his song marks a territory to keep other males of the same species at a distance but also it attracts females. His expression “is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression [that] are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being” (316). In other words, matters of expressions are learned, cultivated, adapted, even imitated. These expressions state a possession of qualities that which relate to certain the territorialization of different modes of being; ways of acting (performing). The fact that these expressions of qualities have a more profound affect in regards to what is possessed places a primacy of having over being makes one pause at the result of knowing based on appearances. “The territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that territorializes them...the refrain is rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have become expressive--and they have become expressive because they are territorialized” (316-317). 

According to Deleuze and Guattari milieus are coded by the context of styles, movements (social, political, artistic, and musical), -isms, and each “code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction,” (313) meaning that each code has a way of moving into other milieus, producing milieus at the same time or collapsing milieus into each other: a rhythm to the chaos. Appropriation and repetition is a way to carry the milieu to another. Humans seem to “dip into” the past and catch and carry all manners of expressions and materials into the present and future. It is a state of becoming that factors into a territory or milieus moving into others becoming “counterpoints” or counter-culture, in the melodic expressions, its end of rhythm a movement into a new territory (317). These territories relay (325) information back and forth and speak to each other in a relationship of movement, sound, marks, expressions, and re-organized forces that affect the organization of people, of matter, animals, resulting in a “plentitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each of which is a being” (Proust “The Captive” cited by Deleuze and Guattari 319). This music and these strains are each a being because they act autonomously and are self-moving which isn’t to say that they are separate and lack relation; they are heterogenous elements that pass into each other: “from forces of chaos to forces of the earth. From milieus to territory. From functional rhythms to the becoming-expressive of rhythm. From phenomena of transcoding to phenomena of decoding. From milieu functions to territorialized function” (322). 

Territorialized matters of expressions become the first markings of the relationship between human beings and material, of matters to be expressed, to say, “hey, that is mine,” even expressions can be owned, contracted and copyrighted expressions, music is a mark, art is a mark as well (316). A mark that moves to a territory, that moves to an assemblage of territories, that moves to milieus and motifs, the counterpoints is a dialogue of these, and mixed in one can find a relationship carrying the markings of an animal’s relationship to itself, its peers, its sameness and its difference, its world and cosmos. The Classicism concerned itself with creation, God in relation to the earth (chaos of forces, chaos of the earth, God orders the chaos so must the artist), the beginning (338). The Enlightenment was science and reason and the artist confronts this with Romanticism; science renders everything on the surface of things, formalization and hierarchies rule, “so the artist no longer confronts the chaos, but hell and the subterranean, the groundless,” (339) suddenly man stands alone in nature (Casper David Friedrich “The Monk By the Sea), and then man wishes to harness the forces of the earth, territorialize land and sea, and he makes machines; but Deleuze and Guattari continue to assert that this is not an evolution or a natural progression of things, rather it is a synthesis of matter, elements chaotic, territorialized, de-territorialized, and re-territorialized all the way up to the cosmos; from personal space drawn by style and gesture, to groups tending to certain parameters of actions, perceptions, and beliefs, until the entire place is surrounded; but things move and wiggle in and we let others in, the world comes flooding in and “a people [are] oscillators as so many forces of interaction” (345). Does this not bring forth a staggering realization and question of how matters of expression and the manners in which they are expressed has a resounding affect on bodies and effect that cascades and flattens it like or opens it up? Here I go for the negative but what seems to be at stake here, in this discussion of the refrain and its relation and distribution (organization) of affective forces on a people, on an earth, a body, a territory, is that ways of organizing people (military, political, social, mass media, scientific, molecular, and atomic, pop music) can be seen as leveling the surface of identity, a negation of difference, universal and uniformity slides in its margin, establishing powers. “People often have too much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, the noise (344)….The established power have occupied the earth,” (345) and to counteract, it seems, with the assertion of Deleuze and Guattari, would be to open up to the Cosmos. The artist can do this, the writer, and the musician and it seems to be less of property and possession, and a being more profound than having when the material is gathered, sonorous material deterritorialized, set off; not a signpost that sticks but a rhythm that “pilots” (347). This is not to be confused with transcendence, a flight from material, from body and time. What Deleuze and Guattari are saying here is an unfolding of temporal experience, a song, a refrain, duration, sonorous material deterritorialized, free from uniformity, conformity, free from signs that are detached from the referent. 

The state of a people can be seen by the role its people play. As Deleuze and Guattari begin to conclude this discussion on the refrain they point out that the role of the artist in relation to a people has changed since the Modern age. “Our governments deal with the molecular and the cosmic, and our arts make them their affair also, with the same stakes, the people and the earth, and with unfortunately incomparable, but nevertheless competitive, means” (346). Perhaps to far distilled to simplicity the investigation into how the refrain works to contain, set free, make “fuzzy,” or lets in forces becomes a question of why some make bombs and some make art. These questions easily become fixed in dualities, become closed on themselves, becoming these black holes that Deleuze and Guattari refer to throughout this text. The sound of our actions carry. We try to sedate them while getting transfixed by the chaotic actions within the fray. We rally and subdue and we find it hard to let the melodies and rhythms go. 

For Anne Carson and Eros

Burned by ice water, sweet wounded ones, I speak to you. Every time is sweet then bitter like a winter not knowing how to be winter, heating up every few days, and raining tears, warming and destroying. Cold snaps and I am trying to hold ice and snow in my warm hands. 

Stripping (retrieval)

http://soundcloud.com/reneedlauzon/stripping-retrieval-final-mix