Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities by Felix Guattari

Author:Felix Guattari [Guattari, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781474274937
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-12-16T23:00:00+00:00

• the entirety of semiotisation activities (going from internal perceptions to modes of communication arising from the mass media);

• micropolitical levels (arising from the formation of bodies without organs);

• machinic indices and abstract machines (arising from the machinic phylum and the plane of consistency);

• which result in the putting into correspondence within each stratum of diverse systems of segmentarity and deterritorialising lines of flight.

Each pragmatic sequence involves a composition of powers at all levels and of every kind; its effectiveness depends on the dominant mode of semiotisation that it puts to work, due in particular to whether or not a diagrammatic semiotics liberates the functioning of certain abstract machines (financial, scientific, artistic, etc.). Thus we are led to define a micropolitical pragmatics as an activity of the assemblage of modes of semiotisation that everywhere exceed linguistic personology – towards corporeal intensities on the infra side, and towards the socius on the supra side. From this point of view, one would have to stop considering pragmatics as on the outskirts of syntax and semantics. Semiological (linguistic) pragmatics only represents a particular case of a more general semiotic pragmatics. The crystallisation of a signifying power, that we would put on the side of generative pragmatics (linguistic semiology), corresponds to a stratification of the libido, it coiling up into a system of redundancy of expression and redundancy of contents, the articulation of which has the effect of disempowering utterances of enclosing them either in the [worldliness] of an instituted power, or in an idiosyncratic system arising from madness or creation, for example. But before being stabilised as a language or a dialect, this kind of micropolitical competence is first experienced as a collective performance: every degree of fluidity is thus possible in the passage from an individual performance, even one that is marginal or delirious, to the completely sclerotic encoding of the dictionary or academic grammar kind. Besides naturalising the foundations of language, the brutal opposition of competence and performance squeezes [in English in the original] collective assemblages of enunciation – that is to say the groups that, in linguistic matters, are genuinely creative – to the profit of an alternative between an individuated or a universal subjectivity. One can approve the position of psycholinguists such as T.G. Bever, who consider that judgements of grammaticality are ‘forms of behavior like any other’1 without for all that falling into the trap of linguistic ‘psychologisation’. That a signifying grammaticalisation might take power over semiotic ensembles relative to capitalistic social fields, thus contributing to their stratification, doesn’t in the slightest imply that such ensembles can only be based on the universals that are supposed to rule over them. In fact, one is in the presence of the same type of universalisation procedure with a retroactive effect used by all power formations that wanted to give themselves the apparent legitimacy of divine right, and in particular those that sought to ‘justify’ the expansionism of capitalist exchangism. From the fact that one can always ‘structuralise’ monetary, linguistic, musical, etc.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.