Susana Caló “Semio-pragmatics as politics”

Caló, Susana 2021. Semio-pragmatics as politics: On Guattari and Deleuze’s theory of language. Deleuze and Guattari Studies 15(2): 266–284.

A move to pragmatics is advocated as the proper level of analysis to account for the political life of language. Such a conceptual move revolves around the following ideas: there is no language in itself that is not already an intervention in an extended material and social field; meaning is not necessarily, nor intrinsically, linguistic; and expression is a separate formalisation to content, but they interact in reciprocal presupposition. (267)

Deleuze and Guattari’s political task is, on this reading, to restore language to its practice. According to them, it is necessary to construct a pragmatic framework that includes an analysis of how language is inseparable from a concrete world which it affects and is affected by. In broader terms, it is necessary to construct a pragmatic framework that addresses the connection between the semiotic and the machinic, in both synchronic and diachronic terms. (269)

For Guattari and Deleuze, what this means is to ‘recognise that expression is independent (and that this) is precisely what enables it to react upon contents’ (99). Thus, for them, the expression–content relation is best seen as a ‘battle’, rather than one involving isomorphism or homology: ‘there is no isomorphism or homology, nor any common form to seeing and speaking, to the visible and the articulable. The two forms spill over into one another, as in a battle. The image of a battle signifies precisely that there is no isomorphism’ (Deleuze [1986] 2006: 66). (270)

The key idea is that form is not a particular privilege of expression. Content has its own form too: ‘bodies already have proper qualities, actions and passions, souls, in short forms, which are themselves bodies. Representations are bodies, too!’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004b: 95) Expression, in reality, is that which is inscribed in bodies, not a representation of bodies. (270)

[…] only through separating the form of content from the form of expression is it possible to problematise the capacity of expression to intervene in content, and the capacity of content to intervene in expression. To grasp the political nature of language, Guattari and Deleuze argue, one has to turn to the ‘form of content that is simultaneously inseparable from and independent of the form of expression [with] the two forms pertain[ing] to assemblages that are not principally linguistic’ (111). (270)

Their semio-pragmatic approach attempts to account for language as an intervention in the relations between discursive and non-discursive domains, linguistic and non-linguistic elements, and between matter and form. In their use of Hjelmslev, the precedence of form over matter that is maintained at the level of the sign in the original model is dissolved, so that the constitutive relation between expression and content is not only accounted for at the level of form, but also at the level of matter – that is, accounted for at the level of the relations within the triad purport–substance–form. This is described as a double articulation of content and expression within each of their triadic strings of purport–substance–form. (272)

Guattari and Deleuze’s position is that the political lies not at the level of linguistic form, but rather at the level of the deep interactions between planes of matter, form and substance, along two axes of expression and content: ‘the inter-penetration of language and the social field and political problems lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface’ (2004b: 91). (272)

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature ([1975] 1976), a minor use of language is described according to a specific relation between content and expression whereby expression frees content, ‘anticipating the material’ (1976: 28). (273)

[…] the three essential characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialisation of a language (langue), the connection of the individual with a political immediacy, and the appeal to a collective
assemblage of enunciation (agencement collectif d’énonciation).11 The deterritorialisation of language (langue) refers to the need to break language free from the structure of identity, the purpose of control or normativity. Political immediacy refers to engagement with a political and social struggle, which requires us to see language not from the point of view of an individualist instance of enunciation, but from the point of view of a collective subject. (274)

The role of the writer therefore is to detach expression from content by introducing statements which, when entering into contact with nonformalised content, force the field of signification to be reorganised. (275)

The problem is how systems of power can use a signifying formalisation to unify all other means of expression, forcibly obscuring the political origins of the articulation of content and signification. (275)

The unity and stability of language can be properly understood only as the result of an operation of power to hide the political multiplicity lying below the linguistic representation. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, ‘there is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity’ (2004b: 116). (276)

Deleuze and Guattari describe language as the ‘transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information’ (2004b: 77). (277)

The constants of grammar, for instance, impose orders of duality upon the world: ‘the compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, nounverb, subject of the statement-subject of enunciation, etc)’ (76). Seen through this prism, it can be said that grammar is first a power marker, and second a syntactic marker. (277)

[…] Deleuze and Guattari disentangle the command from the imperative. Although the imperative might be a particular feature of language, it is the study of the performative and the illocutionary that grounds the entirety of language: ‘pragmatics becomes the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself into everything’ (78). (277)

[…] the basic unit of language is indeed the order-word, as an act that is linked to statements by social obligations. (278)

[…] the social obligations here are not those that are external to language, for by social obligations Deleuze and Guattari refer to non-discursive presuppositions – later defined as collective assemblages of enunciation. As the example of the judge’s sentencing makes clear, order-words
are characterised by the immediacy of their effectuation. Deleuze and Guattari refer to them as speech acts, following Austin, since they constitute acts that are accomplished in a statement and statements that are accomplished in acts, which, as a consequence, constitute an immediate change in the general semiotic context to which they apply. (279)

To undertake a concrete analysis of a concrete situation is therefore to ‘intervene’ in that same situation, thus changing it. (280)

The duality of order-words captures Deleuze and Guattari’s attention: ‘Death, death; it is the only judgment, and it is what makes judgment a system. The verdict. But the order-word is also something else, inseparably connected: it is like a warning cry or a message to flee’ (2004b: 107). The two sides of the order-word refer to constants (death sentence), and to pushing language towards a continuous variation (flight). For Deleuze and Guattari, the militant task is to ‘draw out the revolutionary potential of the order-word’ (121). (281)

[…] the problem of language is posed in connection with the use by systems of power of signifying formalisations, which obscure the political origins of the articulation of content and signification. (281)

Martin Savransky “The pluralistic problematic”

Savransky, Martin 2021. The pluralistic problematic: William James and the pragmatics of the pluriverse. Theory, Culture & Society 38(2): 141–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419848030

One and many, ongoing and unfinished – like mental and social life, James’ ‘world of pure experience’ discloses its own intrinsic precipitousness. Indeed, I propose that, where James is concerned, the pluriverse has a thoroughly problematic mode of existence. Enjoying no absolute foundations, it insists and persists as a generative buzzing of myriad differences, frictions and transitions, an ongoing and unfinished blending of purpose, accident and drift. And rather than an absolute celebration of the many, rather than a philosophical exposition on multiple worlds and ontologies, or a theory of the organisation of a diverse polis, pluralism is first and foremost a pragmatics of the pluriverse – a political, experimental and pragmatic response to the ongoing insistence of the pluralistic problematic. One that troubles any philosophical effort to dissolve in abstractions the generative problem that animates it. One that resists any political attempt to turn the pluriverse into a single order. (144-145)

Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that, rather than have a concept of the problematic, it was the problematic that had him. (145)

[William James]: “[i]n all voluntary thinking there is some topic or subject about which all the members of the thought revolve. Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, in the manner described some time back, influences us in an intensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our thought’s destiny. “(1890: 259, emphasis added) (145)

In other words, James keeps taking up and dropping models because, if the significance of life lies in its precipitousness, in that thoroughly problematic nature that makes life a strange blending of aim, intensity, endurance, accident, and drift, one cannot ask ‘for whom? in whose life?’ – for that chemical combination is not be found in any single form of individual life, but in difference itself. And this does not just simply refer to the difference between human individuals or groups, for ‘[e]very it carries in itself an infinite number of differences from an infinite number of other its’ (James, 1988: 124, emphasis in original). (151)

Indeed, it might be that, in asking the question ‘what makes life significant?’, James was perhaps gravitating towards what, many years later, Deleuze (2001) was to call ‘a life’, as distinguished from any individual life: an impersonal yet singular plane of immanence, on which everything leans while it leans on nothing. And as his own thoroughly immanent notion of ‘pure experience’ took definite shape alongside the development of his radical empiricism, James emphasised that what makes an empiricism radical is precisely its imperative to do ‘full justice’ to the reality of both conjunctive and disjunctive relations, to feelings of and and but and if, continuities and discontinuities, actuality and potentiality, divergence and togetherness (James, 2003: 23). (152)

The problem of the one and the many is generative because, were one to side with the One, as monism does, one would have to reject the felt reality of difference; in rejecting the reality of difference, one has to renounce the element of precipitousness that gives life its expressive and dramatic character; and in renouncing that, one denies life any significance. As James noted, however, something similar happens if one sides with the Many in an absolute sense, for indeed
divergence presupposes togetherness, and vice versa: a world that is absolutely many and never, in some sense, one, is not ‘a world’ at all, not least because one of the ways in which the world is relatively one is by virtue of the possibility of it being named as one (‘the world’) (see James, 1975: 66; 1996a: 125). But the ‘relativity’ of discursive oneness matters – it is not relativism, which undermines the meaning of truth, but a relativity that affirms the reality of relations. And so discursive oneness should be taken with a pinch of salt, for ‘‘‘chaos’’, once so named, has as much unit of discourse as a cosmos’. (152)

[…] the introduction of the pragmatic question does not, despite appearances – and more, despite its philosophical and political trajectory after James – propose some sort of ‘third way’ that would allow monists and pluralists to ‘tolerate’ each other a little more. The pluriverse may be a world of many worlds, but it is not one where many worlds simply ‘fit’ (cf. Reiter, 2018). Just as James grants that some forms of oneness in things do exist, he also shows that for each one of these ways in which the world discloses itself as one, something always escapes: chaos cannot be contained in its discursive oneness, paths of continuity are constantly broken by interruptions and blockades, generic unities are imperfect, networks of acquaintanceship and power do not, often despite their best efforts, dominate every single fact. ‘Ever not quite’, James (1996b: 321) wrote, ‘has to be said of the best attempts anywhere in the universe at attaining all inclusiveness’. (154)

Pluralism, in other words, is a name for staying with the feeling of and, of but and if and with; for staying with the one and the many, with the pluralistic problematic. (155)

If pluralism stays with the pluralistic problematic, it is precisely because the latter generatively impregnates the world with differences, relations, novelties and potentialities that make the pluriverse think, dream, fear, and aspire. In other words, because they make it go on, creating an after to every ending. (155-156)

Which is to say that the primary aim of a pragmatics of the pluriverse is that of contributing to the pluriverse’s own verification (Savransky, 2017b). A self-congratulatory process, one might suspect. How can a philosophy get its own verification wrong? In fact, the opposite is the case. It is a thoroughly risky task. First, because without being able to justify its difference by appealing to some transcendental principle, it strips itself from any philosophical authority. And second, because as it is bound to respond to the imperative of the pluralistic problematic, a pragmatics of the pluriverse prevents us from thinking of ourselves as the only true actors, capable of making and unmaking worlds with words. The pragmatics of the pluriverse, by contrast, must itself operate as a singular, generative vector of precipitousness in what will nevertheless remain a wider, disparate, dangerous and multifarious pluriverse. It holds out a trusting hand to a world which it trusts may meet its hand, but holds it out at its own risk, without guarantees. (156)

Charles S. Peirce “What pragmatism is”

Peirce, Charles S. 1905. What pragmatism is. The Monist 15(2): 161–181.

[…] a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism. (162–163)

[…] to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he best to announcee the birth of the word „pragmaticism“, which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. (166)

Belief is not a momentary mode of consciousness; it is a habit of mind essentially enduring for some time, and mostly (at least) unconscious; and like other habits, it is, (until it meets with some surprise that begins its dissolution,) perfectly self-satisfied. Doubt is of an altogether contrary genus. It is not a habit, but the privation of a habit. (168)

[…] a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is „saying to himself“, that is, saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society, (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood,) is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism. (170)

It [pragmaticism] will serve to show that almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish, – one word being defined by other words, and they by still others, without any real conception ever being reached, – or else is downright absurd; so that all such rubbish being swept away, what will remain of philosophy will be a series of problems capable of investigation by the observational methods of the true sciences, – the truth about which can be reached without those interminable misunderstandings and disputes which have made the highest of the positive sciences a mere amusement for idle intellects, a sort of chess, – idle pleasure its purpose, and reading out of a book its method. (171)

[…] the pragmaticist maxim says nothing of single experiments or of single experimental phenomena, (for what is conditionally true in futuro can hardly be singular,) but only speaks of general kinds of experimental phenomena. (173)

The rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future. How so? The meaning of a proposition is itself a proposition. Indeed, it is no other than the very proposition of which it is the meaning: it is a translation of it. (173)

[…] pragmticism is not definable as „thorough-going phenomenalism“, although the latter doctrine may be a kind of pragmatism. The richness of phenomena lies in their sensuous quality. Pragmaticism does not intend to define the phenomenal equivalents of words and general ideas, but, on the contrary, eliminates their sential element, and endeavors to define the rational purport, and this it finds in the purposive bearing of the word or proposition in question. (175)

[…] the pragmaticist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which were just now said to be destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable. In its higher stages, evolution takes place more and more largely through self-control, and this gives the pragmaticist a sort of justification for making the rational purpory to be general. (178)

[…] the third category, – the category of thought, representation, triadic relation, mediation, genuine thirdness, thirdness as such, – is an essential ingredient of reality, yet does not by itself constitute reality, since this category, (which in that cosmology appears as the element of habit,) can have no concrete being without action, as a separate object on which to work its government, just as action cannot exist without the immediate being of feeling on which to act. (180)

Todd May “A new neo-pragmatism”

May, Todd 2011. A new neo-pragmatism: From James and Dewey to Foucault. Foucault Studies 11: 54–62.

[…] a truth is to be conceived as a belief that helps us navigate the world more efficiently to our purposes. Rorty writes, ‚James’ point *when defining truth as ‘what is good in the way of belief’+ was that there is nothing deeper to be said: truth is not the sort of thing which has an essence.‛9 We discover truths when we recognize that certain beliefs are better to have than others, because they fit better with our attempt to live. (56)

[…] there is nothing in particular to be said about truth, but instead only about particular truths. As Dewey puts the point, ‚Truth is a collection of truths; and these constituent truths are in the keeping of the best available methods of inquiry and testing as to matters-of-fact; methods which are, when collected under a single name, science. As to truth, then, philosophy has no pre-eminent status; it is a recipient, not a donor.‛ (56)

It is in this intertwining of truth, inferential structure, and living we find the relation of Foucault to pragmatism. There is a deep bond, but also a certain critique that is at play here. Let us start with the bond, since it will lead us to the critique. Foucault writes that, ‚Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.‛ As with the pragmatist approach to truth, one might quibble with Foucault’s wording here. I have argued elsewhere that what Foucault is getting at is not truth per se but instead beliefs that are justified within a particular political and epistemic structure. (57)

For Foucault, as for James, truth happens to an idea. Rather, his intervention consists in asking about the political character of practices, especially in their particular historical dimension. Once this political character is recognized, the idea of successful navigation of the world will seem more complicated. To anticipate, the questions that his investigations allow us to ask, concern the character of successful world engagement. (59)

The claim is not that all practices have the same level of depth or influence when it comes to relations of power and knowledge. If that were the case, then it would have been just as expedient for Foucault to study baseball as psychotherapeutic practice. Rather, the idea is that, to one extent or another, power and knowledge, and particularly their relationship, arises within practices. (60)

What Foucault offers in focusing on the level of practices as his unit of historical and genealogical inquiry is not a specialized or narrow analytic, but instead a way of understanding ourselves and how we got to be who we are through the most common and pervasive ways in which we engage with the world. (60)

The addition I have made to Foucault’s own claim about practices is that it is in the practices that the power/knowledge relationships are to be found. Even this is not an addition so much as a clarification that allows us to see more straightforwardly the relationship between his work and pragmatism. (60–61)

What is the implication of all this for pragmatism? It lies in introducing a complexity that appears to have escaped James and, to a lesser extent, Dewey, for whom the success of a practice lay in its ability to help us navigate the world. If Foucault’s genealogical approach is helpful, the concept of success must itself be investigated rather than being a sort of ‚unexplained explainer.‛  Successful navigation of the world seems to be a matter of accomplishing one’s goals better or more efficiently or more meaningfully. This being said, we might ask, what are the self-understandings tied up with particular senses of success? If, for instance, we are produced to one extent or another to be psychological beings with personalities of the type that psychotherapy promotes, then success will be defined in psychotherapeutic terms. (61)

We cannot, then, take the notion of success or the idea of navigating the world more successfully at face value. We must see it as the name of a problem to be investigated rather than a solution to be attained. This, it seems to me, is a point that would deepen pragmatism without violating any of its central commitments. It would, instead, offer a historical dimension to pragmatist thought. (61)

We might, from another angle, locate the difference between Foucault and the pragmatists and neo-pragmatists this way. For the latter, pragmatism is a matter of what is practical; while for Foucault, pragmatism is a matter of taking our practices as the unit of analysis. What gives Foucault’s work its force, and what makes it relevant for pragmatism, is that it is through our practices what is considered practical arises for us. We cannot take the practical, or successful within it, as a given. That is the lesson of his genealogies. (61)