"History is Not Bad." (?) - Part II.

My major questions are, as last week, a bit on the side of "what is at stake." This week, given the long, carefully argued logic of D + G's semiotics, I am wondering what is so at stake for them in calling language machinic assemblages. How much is different when we call language an assemblage instead of thinking by the kind of intuitive notion that language is made up of what we say and the context in which we say it. Interestingly they seem to be talking about a process itself double. Assemblage (as effectuating abstract machine (71) amidst the processes of subjectification and deterritorialization) seem involved in the historical progression of language formation, but as we see on for example page 147, it is via assemblage that we are also to understand any particular emission of language.

And I guess we should expect nothing else, as D + G's historical argument about language essentially distills it into processes and moments (141) that although they involve all that is going on in the world, still remains essentially synchronic: "We are not saying that a people invents this regime of signs, only that at a given moment a people effectuates the assemblage that assures the relative dominance of that regime under certain historical conditions" (121)

Something structurally interesting that just occurred to me in this way is that in a synchronic viewpoint, with the impossibility of chronological order comes an almost necessary privileging of overlap. Last Thursday there was an interesting panel lecture held by Francesco Casetti about film and new media, in which MCM's Phil Rosen said he saw progress and technical innovation as almost always overlaps and not complete ruptures: film and the screen, as much as we often think of it as a formative and formally innovative technology, was upon its introduction compared to both theatre and photography, taking from both and leaping off just a bit on its own. This is what seems to be at work in D + G's semiotics: "There is always an appeal to a dominant reality that functions from within" (129).

D + G 's note that new regimes of signs "are formed through transformation and translation" (136) seems to invite parallel to evolutionary theory... mutation and the like... although they/it railed quite a bit about phylogenetic trees in "Rhizome" and reassert in "1730: Becoming" that "becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation" (238). But what is so different about these two processes? My first instinct was that in transformation, the original subsists outside of (although potentially still in constant contact) with the new, but this is precisely true of evolution also. And the generative component of pragmatics (139, 145)? There is a built-in chronology to mixing from existing forms.

I was more or less excited by and completely sold on everything discussed in"Postulates of Linguistics," and both in itself and insofar as it provides a bit of pre-argument for "Regimes," there is probably a lot of interrogation that would be productive there; I just missed it all, swept away in the interesting nuances of the communication of bees and the ways in which we can content-wise break down words (p. 108; something that is highly variable across languages and with fascinating results for consciousness and ability, as indicated by cognitive science experiments involving language).

One of my happy cerebral voyages was spurred by D + G's mention of a synthesizer, which makes "fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way" (109). This is not a direct correlate, but I was propelled into the notion of computers as abolishing different media; in/on a computer, sound, text, images, and movies are all reduced to the same binary language. At the aforementioned lecture last Thursday, the fact arose again and again that the computer screen has become a common vehicle for so much different media, and it was questioned what effect that has on the "old media." In any case, the common language of binary might be interesting to look at vis-a-vis D + G's regimes; it is one of the few things that seems more like a rupture than an overlap, and I can't see it fitting into their general scheme. Although perhaps that also comes down to a question of binary not being a "human language" exactly; even human interaction with binary is separated by many levels (assembly, high-order programming languages) whose becomings might be traced more conventionally.

D + G's talk about statistical space of course brought me back again to the texts read for our first class! Last week I mentioned that the statistical notion of information might be seen as an important factor limiting the rhizomicity of the Internet, and although I didn't do any complex thinking to juxtapose D + G's ideas and Weiner, Von Foerster,, et al. 's, I think that might be pretty fascinating.

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title adopted of course from that great children's book, Squares are Not Bad by Violet Salazar.