Regime of Signs

[A demagogue; Image from Teaching American History]

What is a regime of signs? A semiotic machine, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus. In “On Several Regimes of Signs,” they call Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistic of the sign—the linguistic system that privileges the signifier and its signifying function—semiology—but one regime of signs, one semiotic system (i.e. the signifying one), among many—in which it—Saussure’s semiology—is not even the most important. A regime of signs, they define there, is “any specific formalization of expression” that “constitutes a semiotic system” (111). For some (sociopoliticohistorical) reason or other, at the moment the system has semiology at the dominant position (among other semiotics). There is no “natural” reason for this, however. As mentioned, specific sociopoliticohistorical reasons account for this state of things. Thus, instead of the sign, Deleuze and Guattari propose to study signs. Instead of the sign, they make their object of study the regime of signs.

In studying social regimes of signs (specifically linguistic ones, i.e. language), Deleuze and Guattari propose not a linguistics like Saussure’s but a pragmatics that would pay attention to the said sociopoliticohistorical factors (as well as linguistic ones). Starting from the assertion that “language never has universality in itself, self-sufficient formalization, a general semiology, or a metalanguage,” they propose to look at the “form of content [roughly the signified in Saussure] that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression [signifier in Saussure], [with] the two forms pertain[ing] to assemblages that are not principally linguistic [referent in Saussure]” (111-2, 111) (my emphasis). In other words, Deleuze and Guattari propose a study of language that is not closed in upon its object, i.e. language, i.e. itself. A study of language that studies the social (not in addition to but as well as—i.e. immediately, directly—language). A study of language able to go outside. In a very real sense: a pragmatics. (This is, of course, different from Derrida’s grammatology.)

How can we look—pragmatically speaking—at a regime of signs, then? How is a semiotic system—pragmatically speaking—constituted? Deleuze and Guattari explain in the plateau “Postulates of Linguistics.” “Language,” they say, “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience”—for the sake, namely, of production, i.e. in order to produce (i.e. make something happen, or, better yet, make someone do something) (76). It is in this way that “a rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker,” why “the elementary unit of language—the statement—is [not the phoneme or the signifier (as in Saussure), but] the order-word” (76) (my emphasis).

Information, rather than the primary purpose of language, is according to Deleuze and Guattari “only the strict minimum necessary for the emission, transmission, and observation of orders as commands,” i.e. a minimal condition needed to be met in order to carry out the real purpose, i.e. in order to carry out production, i.e. in order to produce—since if the compelled actor is not informed (and does not understand) the order, how will s/he perform the act? (but this is all that information is for: a minimum requirement and not the purpose) (76, 79). Similarly, the subject supposedly communicating, rather than (through his/her communication) the source of language, is, in reality (in Deleuze and Guattari’s estimation)—language being the social thing that it is—a product of the collective assemblage (~ the social) where language really comes from—if the latter happens to require it, i.e. if the collective assemblage happens to require that a statement be individuated and an enunciation (and the enunciator?) subjectified (80). Thus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that “there is no signifiance [that enable the passing of information] independent of dominant significations, nor is there subjectification independent of an established order of subjection” (79). It is in this way that the order-word is primary—true to the definition, fundamental, elementary. “Both [the possibility of information and communication, signifiance and subjectification] depend on the nature and transmission of order-words in a given social field” (79).

In contrast to the referential theory of language (where words refer either to things, other words, or external action), Deleuze and Guattari extend J.L. Austin’s theory of the performative and assert that there are “acts internal to speech, [. . .] immanent relations between statements and acts” (77) (my emphases). These acts are the “implicit or nondiscursive presuppositions” of any utterance, of any speech, of language in general—from which, in fact, “the meaning and syntax of language can[not be separated or] defined independently” (77, 78) (my emphasis).

These implicit nondiscursive presuppositions are constituted by what Deleuze and Guattari call the illocutionary (intrinsic relations “between speech and certain actions that are accomplished in speaking”), which (unlike in Austin) explains (is presupposed by) and includes the performative (acts “accomplished by saying them”) (78, 77). Austin’s performative still implies a subject preceding the utterance, performing the enunciation, whereas Deleuze and Guattari follow Oswald Ducrot in claiming that “certain statements are socially devoted to the accomplishment of certain actions” without the need of a subject from where the said statements must necessarily originate (78).

This is what language does, according to Deleuze and Guattari. Language is not a code or the communication of information (77). Rather, language “order[s], question[s], engage[s], or affirm[s, which] is not to inform [. . .] but to effectuate the specific, immanent, and necessarily implicit acts” in the statement itself (77) (my emphasis). We have a name for these immanent acts (internal to language (to speech, to the statement)): speech acts (79). Speech, rather than defined “as the extrinsic and individual use of [. . .] signification [taken as primary],” is in the pragmatic account inseparable from the acts implicit and presupposed by (all use of) language (78). Language, again, that does not merely inform but effectuates, makes, produces, does something—acts. Language acts. Hence the term (semiotic) machine. Where the term order-word designates (unlike in Austin) “not a particular category of explicit statements [like the performative . . .], but the [very] relation of every word or every statement to implicit [nondiscursive] presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts,” which are for that matter (in (re-)expressing the internal, immanent relation between the statement and the act) redundant (79). Speech acts, in turn, “are, and can only be, accomplished in the statement” (79). Speech act: speech inseparable from—internal/immanent to—(its) act, made redundant in the order-word.

To tackle the second question, “How is a semiotic system constituted?” we need to sketch out the collective social (not principally linguistic) assemblage that both the form of expression (the signifier) and the form of content (signified)—i.e. language—presuppose as the reason for (the determinant of) their current configuration (their current state and relation). (This collective assemblage is related to Michel Foucault’s regimes of power.) As in charting the virtual-the intensive-the actual, we need to construct a schema.

But a simpler one, involving just one step. Envision the collective social assemblage and focus on one particular part: the collective assemblage of enunciation. This assemblage does not come afterwards or in addition to language (as seems to be the case with Lacan’s non-signifying but despotic signifier). On the contrary. “There is no individual enunciation,” Deleuze and Guattari assert (79). “There is not even a subject of enunciation” (79). There is first and foremost the impersonal collective social (not principally linguistic) assemblage of enunciation.

So, in the (pragmatic) schema: put this collective assemblage before—first and foremost—as primary, originary—the form of content (the signified) and the form of expression (the signifier)—i.e. before language. Put it there as what determines language, what explains it. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, this—the collective assemblage—is what explains the illocutionary, what gives statements, speech—language—their character—and (rather than the other way around) what determines subjectivity (78). This—the collective nondiscursive assemblage—and not the subject, not information—is where language comes from—in order to give orders: the order-word. What is this thing again, this collective assemblage? It is none other than the non-discursive social thing that determines language (and how signs function in a particular social milieu): namely, those sociopoliticohistorical factors (shaping the semiotic).

A proof of this that Deleuze and Guattari cite is indirect discourse. In a quasi-Derridean move, they assert that indirect discourse—not metaphor or metonymy—not the trope—is “the first determination of language,” “the first language” (76-7). “All discourse is indirect,” they say, “and “the translative movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse” (77). Language does not communicate (at least as a primary purpose), but transmits, translates—and mostly—not through direct but—through indirect discourse. “Indirect discourse,” Deleuze and Guattari expound, “is [simply] the presence of a reported statement within the reporting statement, [which is none other than] the presence of an order-word within the word” (84). They then claim that language in its entirety is precisely this process: “Language in its entirety is indirect discourse” (84). Which “in no way presupposes direct discourse; rather, the latter is extracted from the former, to the extent that the operations of signifiance and proceedings of subjectification in an assemblage are distributed, attributed, and assigned, or temporarily” (84). This is the way in which “direct discourse is a detached fragment of a mass and is born of the dismemberment of the collective assemblage” while indirect discourse is the continuous manifestation/expression of that collective assemblage (84).

Thus, indirect discourse (which all of language is) testifies to the (originary) presence of the collective assemblage. “There are no clear, distinctive contours,” explain Deleuze and Guattari (80). “What comes first is not an insertion of variously individuated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse. [. . .] It is [precisely] the assemblage, as it freely appears in [indirect] discourse, that explains all the voices present within a single voice, [. . .] the languages in a language, the order-words in a word,” that explains, in a word: language (80). It is on this “molecular assemblage of enunciation” that the subject depends, an assemblage “not given in [one’s] conscious mind, any more than it depends solely on [one’s] apparent social determinations, which combine many heterogeneous regimes of signs” (84).

And what does it do, language (as determined by the collective assemblage)? What (illocutionary) act is performed? What order does the word give? Deleuze and Guattari describe these acts immanent to language as “the set of all incorporeal transformations current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society” (80). This is how pragmatics is a materialism, because there is no divide between signs and bodies (as seems to be the case with Lacan’s non-signifying but despotic signifier). Not even considering affects (“the actions and passions affecting [. . .] bodies”) and focusing solely on acts, it is still seen, according to Deleuze and Guattari, that words are able to do something on bodies (and vice versa?), i.e. they effect an incorporeal transformation, impose “noncorporeal attributes” on bodies (which is “the ‘expressed’ of the statement”) (80). Just take the pronouncements: “You have been found guilty!” or “I now declare you husband and wife.” “This [. . .] relation between statements and the incorporeal transformation or noncorporeal attributes they express” is what is designated by “the order-words or assemblages of enunciation in a given society (in short, the illocutionary)” (81).

These incorporeal transformations are instantaneous, immediate (with the statement expressing the transformation simultaneous with its effect) (81). They are present in an overall process (i.e. there are no divides such as the (economic) base and (ideological) superstructure of crude versions of Marxism) (81). They would have no effect “outside of the [external] circumstances that make” them valid (82). Even so, while these transformations “appl[y] to bodies” and rely on external validating circumstances, they are “incorporeal, internal to enunciation” (82) (my emphasis). And it is this relation between the external and the internal—with attention paid to both—that is studied by pragmatics, “a politics of language” (82).

Picture the whole (pragmatic) system (of language) then: explicit commands implicitly presuppose order-words, which express immanent acts or incorporeal transformations, which are the variables of the (primary, originary) impersonal nondiscursive collective assemblages of enunciation (83). A particular configuration of the determinable relations of these variables is what is referred to as “the assemblages combin[ing] in a regime of signs or a semiotic machine” (with the caveat that “a society is plied by several semiotics, that its regimes are in fact mixed”) (83, 83-4) (emphasis modified). “Order-words, collective assemblages, or regimes of signs cannot be equated with language,” Deleuze and Guattari clarify (85). “But they [do] effectuate its condition of possibility (the superlinearity of expression) [. . .]; without them, language would remain a pure virtuality (the superlinear character of indirect discourse)” (85).

Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.