Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

 

64 □ 10,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

What precisely is the relation now between content and expression, and 

what type of distinction is there between them? It's all in the head. Yet 

never was a distinction more real. What we are trying to say is that there is 

indeed one exterior milieu for the entire stratum, permeating the entire 

stratum: the cerebral-nervous milieu. It comes from the organic substra-

tum, but of course that substratum does not merely play the role of a sub-

stratum or passive support. It is no less complex in organization. Rather, it 

constitutes the prehuman soup immersing us. Our hands and faces are 

immersed in it. The brain is a population, a set of tribes tending toward two 

poles. In Leroi-Gourhan's analyses of the constitution of these two poles in 

the soup—one of which depends on the actions of the face, the other on the 

hand—their correlation or relativity does not preclude a real distinction 

between them; quite the contrary, it entails one, as the reciprocal presuppo-

sition of two articulations, the manual articulation of content and the 

facial articulation of expression. And the distinction is not simply real, as 

between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become essential  (as they 

used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genres of being, or 

irreducible categories: things and words. Yet we find that the most general 

of movements, the one by which each of the distinct articulations is already 

double in its own right, carries over onto this level; certain formal elements 

of content play the role of expression in relation to content proper, and cer-

tain formal elements of expression play the role of content in relation to 

expression proper. In the first case, Leroi-Gourhan shows how the hand 

creates a whole world of symbols, a whole pluridimensional language, not 

to be confused with unilinear verbal language, which constitutes a radiat-

ing expression specific to content (he sees this as the origin of writing).

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The second case is clearly displayed in the double articulation specific to 

language itself, since phonemes form a radiating content specific to the 

expression of monemes as linear significant segments (it is only under 

these conditions that double articulation as a general characteristic of 

strata has the linguistic meaning Martinet attributes to it). Our discussion 

of the relations between content and expression, the real distinction 

between them, and the variations of those relations and that distinction on 

the major types of strata, is now provisionally complete.

 

Challenger wanted to go faster and faster. No one was left, but he went on 

anyway. The change in his voice, and in his appearance, was growing more 

and more pronounced. Something animalistic in him had begun to speak 

when he started talking about human beings. You still couldn't put your 

finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot. He 

still had three problems he wanted to discuss. The first seemed primarily 

terminological: Under what circumstances may we speak of signs? Should 

we say they are everywhere on all the strata and that there is a sign when-

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS D 65

 

ever there is a form of expression? We may summarily distinguish three 

kinds of signs: indexes (territorial signs), symbols (deterritorialized signs), 

and icons (signs of reterritorialization). Should we say that there are signs 

on all the strata, under the pretext that every stratum includes territoriali-

ties and movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization? This 

kind of expansive method is very dangerous, because it lays the ground-

work for or reinforces the imperialism of language, if only by relying on its 

function as universal translator or interpreter. It is obvious that there is no 

system of signs common to all strata, not even in the form of a semiotic 

"chora" theoretically prior to symbolization.

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 It would appear that we 

may accurately speak of signs only when there is a distinction between 

forms of expression and forms of content that is not only real but also cate-

gorical. Under these conditions, there is a semiotic system on the corre-

sponding stratum because the abstract machine has precisely that fully 

erect posture that permits it to "write," in other words, to treat language 

and extract a regime of signs from it. But before it reaches that point, in 

so-called natural codings, the abstract machine remains enveloped in the 

strata: It does not write in any way and has no margin of latitude allowing it 

to recognize something as a sign (except in the strictly territorial sense of 

animal signs). After that point, the abstract machine develops on the plane 

of consistency and no longer has any way of making a categorical distinc-

tion between signs and particles; for example, it writes, but flush with the 

real, it inscribes directly upon the plane of consistency. It therefore seems 

reasonable to reserve the word "sign" in the strict sense for the last group of 

strata. This terminological discussion would be entirely without interest if 

it did not bring us to yet another danger: not the imperialism of language 

affecting all of the strata, but the imperialism of the signifier affecting lan-

guage itself, affecting all regimes of signs and the entire expanse of the 

strata upon which they are located. The question here is not whether there 

are signs on every stratum but whether all signs are signifiers, whether all 

signs are endowed with signifiance, whether the semiotic of signs is neces-

sarily linked to a semiology of the signifier. Those who take this route may 

even be led to forgo the notion of the sign, for the primacy of the signifier 

over language guarantees the primacy of language over all of the strata even 

more effectively than the simple expansion of the sign in all directions. 

What we are saying is that the illusion specific to this posture of the abstract 

Machine, the illusion that one can grasp and shuffle all the strata between 

one's pincers, can be better secured through the erection of the signifier 

than through the extension of the sign (thanks to signifiance, language can 

claim to be in direct contact with the strata without having to go through 

the supposed signs on each one). But we're still going in the same circle, 

we're still spreading the same canker.

 

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