D&G encounter previous readings; also, race.

The pseudo-dialogue on page 46 of "A Thousand Plateaus" assembles for the first time in an imagined place, even as it seemingly recalls, a debate between Cuvier, Geoffroy, Vialleton, and Professor Challenger.  This move by D&G consolidates a discourse that was never topically cohesive, from the perspective of the disciplines each person represents in the text (though Geoffroy is always ready to switch specialities).  Moreover (best part) Professor Challenger is not ‘real.’  This recalls other gestures we’ve come across in our readings this semester.  First, I’m reminded of Hayles’ project of narrating just how the Macy Conferences played out, how a certain definition of information came to be chosen.  Deleuze and Guattari later make a similar gesture regarding invariants/variables with regard to language, and how a certain homogeneity and constancy was necessary in order to study language like a science. 

I’m reminded also of Foucault’s interest in the taxonomy from a Chinese encyclopedia, quoted by Borges.  “Dangerous mixtures” (of the real and the imaginary) are not possible, the quality of monstrosity presents itself only in interstitial blanks (Preface in The Order of Things, xv-xvi).  Deleuze and Guattari’s simultaneous presentation of real and imaginary participants in a real and imaginary discourse in A Thousand Plateaus constitutes such a dangerous mixture, giving them in Foucault’s terms a common locus, what later is related to a tabula.  Not to further complicate the process of reading this text, but I couldn’t help but relate Foucault’s utopia and heterotopia to Deleuze and Guattari’s text.  Has the space on which order appears already been predetermined by another sort of order?  What does a heterotopia have to do with heterogeneity, variability in language?

I don’t mean to move recklessly from one use of the hetero- prefix to another; I bring up the resonance because both have to do with organizing thought, language, what is possible to say or think. 

“If language always seems to presuppose itself, if we cannot assign it a nonlinguistic point of departure, it is because language does not operate between something seen (or felt) and something said, but always goes from saying to saying” (ATP, 76)

I got the sense repeatedly that gestures made in this text are willfully obtuse because anything else would be consolidated into existing logical structures.  The quote above advocates a certain abstract existence of language in order to grant it—autonomy?  Fair enough—it follows that the consequences and implications for ontology will involve a radical recalibration of notions of subjectivity and identity.  But there’s nothing to hold onto—I went for bodies, and what bodies were kept slipping—the body without organs, the plane of consistency, the body of the knight and his horse and the stirrup, political bodies, etc.  Slipping—fleeing? 

I recalled here both Fanon readings we did.  Bodies, what about raced bodies, visibility, language and subjectivity.  Heterogeneity came up again here: 

"It was Proust who said that 'masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.'  That is the same as stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech.  To be a foreigner, but in one's own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one's own.  To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even a dialect or patois.  To be a bastard, a half-breed, but through a purification of race.  That is when style becomes a language.  That is when language becomes intensive, a pure continuum of values and intensities" (ATP, 98). 

I’m still sorting out D&G’s use of ‘biunivocal’—is it applicable here?  Also, what do you mean, “through a purification of race” ?  I am considering this text as presenting the rhizome as a possibility for revolutionary thought in that it breaks the possibility for stable, unified subjectivity, thus eliminating what might be logically reinforcing structures of oppression.  Does this ultimately undo raced identities as well?  What are the implications for race in D&G’s dealings with bodies? 

This chapter is filled with references to “Black English” (Labov, Chomsky) that really caught me off guard (opposing “Black” or “ghetto” English to “standard English”, though I get that it is not “the authors themselves” positing this).  This partly gave rise to the two questions above.  On 102, D&G elaborate political implications of grammaticality of minor and major languages.  Later: “Use the minor language to send the major language racing” (105).  But don’t let the minor language take the major’s place, perhaps: perhaps, set everything racing, fleeing, becoming.  In motion, and falling out of memory? 

A question unrelated to most of the rest of the post:  everything is an order-word— an order as both a command and an organization?