Deleuze and Futurism by Palmer Helen;

Deleuze and Futurism by Palmer Helen;

Author:Palmer, Helen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing


The above description is Deleuze at his most Jakobsonian, and is extremely reminiscent of Jakobson’s famous statement that the ‘poetic function’ projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the selection of combination.22 It is helpful at this point to source this remarkable statement in Jakobson’s thought by breaking it down into its constituent parts and looking more closely at the axes of selection and combination. In Jakobson’s essay on aphasia he introduces the concept of the ‘twofold character of language’.23 In this passage Jakobson first presents two aspects of language as the concurrence of simultaneous entities and the concatenation of successive entities, but these are only one part of the two principal aspects of selection and combination. Concurrence and concatenation are both part of the combination, although – and this is one significant point where Jakobson departs from Saussure – he notes that Saussure only recognized the temporal sequence of concatenation and failed to take concurrence into account. Using selection and combination, then, Jakobson identifies two types of aphasia: the similarity disorder, which exhibits a deficiency in selection; and the contiguity disorder, which exhibits a deficiency in combination. His conclusion, then, maps these disorders onto the opposing linguistic tropes of metaphor and metonymy: ‘Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder.’24 We therefore have a string of related oppositional terms within Jakobson’s ‘bipolar structure’: one pole consists of selection, similarity and metaphor, whereas the other consists of combination, contiguity and metonymy. We can add to the list the axes of paradigm and syntagm, in which the former maps onto selection and the latter maps onto combination. It is important to point out, however, that again showing his proto-Deleuzian colours, Jakobson never loses a sense of fluidity of these oppositions under the schema of his poetic function. He maintains that in poetry, ‘where similarity is superinduced upon contiguity, any metonymy is slightly metaphoric and any metaphor has a metonymic tint’.25

In Deleuze’s account of creative stuttering, both linguistic axes are affected: the ‘disjunction of similars’, outlined above, as normal linguistic practice becomes a combination, and the ‘connection of combinables’ is divided. The stuttering is therefore a double stuttering. ‘Every word is divided, but into itself (pas-rats, passions-rations); and every word is combined, but with itself (pas-passe-passion).’26 The syntactic line that this type of language follows is described as a ‘syntax in the process of becoming’. It is not wholly outside of language, but the outside of language. This is the linguistic limit that links up Deleuze’s earlier term ‘sense’, discarded by this point in his career. This limit heralds a point where language transcends itself and tends towards another mode of expression altogether, and Deleuze is aware of this: ‘Words paint and sing, but only at the limit of the path they trace through their divisions and combinations.’27 It is this manipulation of spatiotemporal boundaries, the creation of new, impossible syntactic lines in order to transmute language, that Deleuze shares with the futurists.

Futurist



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