Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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2 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accom-

panied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, 

and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling 

one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more, 

seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the "supple larynx" is a 

development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in 

a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryn-

geal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the 

forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly. Everyone knows that lum-

berjacks rarely talk.

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 Physiological, acoustic, and vocal substance are not 

the only things that undergo all these deterritorializations. The form of 

expression, as language, also crosses a threshold.

 

Vocal signs have temporal linearity, and it is this superlinearity that con-

stitutes their specific deterritorialization and differentiates them from 

genetic linearity. Genetic linearity is above all spatial, even though its seg-

ments are constructed and reproduced in succession; thus at this level it 

does not require effective overcoding of any kind, only phenomena of 

end-to-end connection, local regulations, and partial interactions 

(overcoding takes place only at the level of integrations implying 

different orders of magnitude). That is why Jacob is reluctant to compare 

the genetic code to a language; in fact, the genetic code has neither 

emitter, receiver, comprehension, nor translation, only redundancies and 

surplus values.

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 The temporal linearity of language expression relates not 

only to a succession but to a formal synthesis of succession in which time 

constitutes a process of linear overcoding and engenders a phenomenon 

unknown on the other strata: translation, translatability, as opposed to the 

previous inductions and transductions. Translation should not be 

understood simply as the ability of one language to "represent" in some 

way the givens of another language, but beyond that as the ability of 

language, with its own givens on its own stratum, to represent all the 

other strata and thus achieve a scientific conception of the world. The 

scientific world {Welt,  as opposed to the Umwelt  of the animal) is the 

translation of all of the flows, particles, codes, and territorialities of the 

other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialized system of signs, in other 

words, into an overcoding specific to language. This property of 

overcoding  or  superlinearity  explains why, in language, not only is 

expression independent of content, but form of expression is independent 

of substance: translation is possible because the same form can pass from 

one substance to another, which is not the case for the genetic code, for 

example, between RNA and DNA chains. We will see later on how this situ-

ation gives rise to certain imperialist pretentions on behalf of language, 

which are naively expressed in such formulas as: "Every semiology of a 

nonlinguistic system must use the medium of language... .Language is the

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 63

 

interpreter of all the other systems, linguistic and nonlinguistic." This 

amounts to defining an abstract character of language and then saying that 

the other strata can share in that character only by being spoken in lan-

guage. That is stating the obvious. More positively, it must be noted that 

the immanence within language of universal translation means that its 

epistrata and parastrata, with respect to superpositions, diffusions, com-

munications, and abutments, operate in an entirely different manner than 

those of other strata: all human movements, even the most violent, imply 

translations.

 

We have to hurry, Challenger said, we're being rushed by the line of time 

on this third stratum. So we have a new organization of content and 

expression, each with its own forms and substances: technological content, 

semiotic or symbolic expression. Content should be understood not sim-

ply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists 

them and constitutes states of force or formations of power. Expression 

should be understood not simply as the face and language, or individual 

languages, but as a semiotic collective machine that preexists them and 

constitutes regimes of signs. A formation of power is much more than a 

tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. Rather, they act as 

determining and selective agents, as much in the constitution of languages 

and tools as in their usages and mutual or respective diffusions and com-

munications. The third stratum sees the emergence of Machines that are 

fully a part of that stratum but at the same time rear up and stretch their 

pincers out in all directions at all the other strata. Is this not like an interme-

diate state between the two states of the abstract Machine?—the state in 

which it remains enveloped in a corresponding stratum (ecumenon), and 

the state in which it develops in its own right on the destratified plane of 

consistency (planomenon). The abstract machine begins to unfold, to 

stand to full height, producing an illusion exceeding all strata, even though 

the machine itself still belongs to a determinate stratum. This is, obviously, 

the illusion constitutive of man (who does man think he is?). This illusion 

derives from the overcoding immanent to language itself. But what is not 

illusory are the new distributions between content and expression: techno-

logical content characterized by the hand-tool relation and, at a deeper 

level, tied to a social Machine and formations of power; symbolic expres-

sion characterized by face-language relations and, at a deeper level, tied to 

a semiotic Machine and regimes of signs. On both sides, the epistrata and 

parastrata, the superposed degrees and abutting forms, attain more than 

ever before the status of autonomous strata in their own right. In cases 

where we can discern two different regimes of signs or two different forma-

tions of power, we shall say that they are in fact two different strata in 

human populations.

 

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