Anti-Oedipus Book Club

kys nobody here gives a shit about contys. what the fuck does a rhizome have to do with language?

Rhizomes connect all over the place so they are opposed to trees which are genealogical and hierarchical and have a set direction of connections. When language becomes creative, it often does so through these unconventional connections. Rimbaud's "I is another" isn't just a reversal or refusal of grammatical norms, but a creative act, because the sense is made at a different level than at the merely propositional one (it being a philosophical statement).

Your own two sentences (that nobody cares about contys and then asking, rhetorically or not, about rhizomes and language) can form such a connection as well since in one sense, in one possible reading (but not in every sense), they are contradicting statements.

I understand how when >10565639 talks about normal linguistical models not being abstract enough, they're saying that language really works on more tangled, complicated levels of connection and association, but because you sound like you know what you're talking about, what exactly is D&G's project with all this?

Isn't Deleuze that fag who doesn't like the feeling of a cat rubbing up against him?

Their project works on several different levels. Basically, they were materialists who criticized Freud and Lacan for not being truly materialist (Lacan probably never cared much about it, but Freud constantly considered that he was after some kind of scientific objective truth). The reason for their idealism was that they gave too much credit to images and language and none to matter, treating matter as inert rather than as having singular points (which are its forms, so that the matter-form duality no longer stands) which allow for complex interactions. Jung is included in these criticisms even though D&G are closer to him than to Freud (Deleuze being the only French citizen to think that Jung is more profound than Freud, as Derrida joked).

Their linguistic theory is related to their criticism of psychoanalysis even though it has its own targets and logic (Hjelmslev against Saussure, Labov against Chomsky, etc.), their aim being to show that when language is self-contained in a system it is starting from a set point and treating it as the rule rather than the enforced exception. Language is creative and we must stutter in our own language, which amounts to finding the right assemblages for us, the key point being that an assemblage connects things from very different domains (the orchid and the wasp interact despite being materially different and evolving separately initially, as Proust says): it connects words or phrases to affects (not just feelings, but every type of capacity to affect and be affected) to environments to times to spaces to gestures to images to anything else you can think of. Thus language as such cannot be thought isolated except by discarding the things that give it sense to begin with. Like DeLanda says: if someone says that their life has no meaning and that they're depressed about it there's no point in showing them the dictionary definition.

Oh nice I'll be back tommorow

>liking to be raped by a cat

platonist philosophy is helluva demon

Cat fags are just the worst.

Good shit. Language is an important issue for them not just for its place in their metaphysical and psychological systems, but also serves a crucial political role. This is their distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic schemas in the first chapter of ATP. The arborescent model always points to a centralized authority, subsuming all the polyvalence of becoming to a standard by which everything is judged in its being. This is Chomsky's model, as well as most of those in linguistics. A firm definition of "sense" is set (e.g. distinction between signifier and signified) which serves as the demarcation between language and nonsense. See Chomsky's famous example of nonsense: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," a sentence which is syntactically correct but "meaningless" in Chomsky's system because it does not refer to any idea that can be re-presented. But D&G argue that it can only be called meaningless in a system that automatically excludes any usage of language not confined to a rigid distinction between signifier and signified. To them, it has sense because to can be USED for any number of functional ends. In a very Wittgensteinian passage, they give examples of senses for "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously": it could be a password, surreal song lyrics, the punchline of a carefully built-up joke, the expressionistic description of synesthesia, etc. Its sense comes from its place in the assemblage. This is the rhizomatic model of language: if it connects, it has sense.

So what's the political implication of this? As I mentioned in my last post, since language is constantly overflowing, language is constantly BECOMING in all directions. Not only are the formal rules of language changing in ways that counteract the arborescent schema imposed on them by grammatical linguistics, but language is used in new ways to plug into new assemblages. This is the "minor language" that D&G talk about in their book on Kafka and in ATP. To take an obvious example, when a black man says "nigger" it doesn't mean the same thing as when a white guy does, even though the referent of "nigger" in both cases is a black person. This is because black people found a way to plug "nigger" into a new assemblage separate from the racist one that originally created it. When a black person says "nigga," now it's part of a sort of ironic yet sincere assemblage in direct opposition to the assemblages where "nigger" is used to demean people of color. This is the function of a "minor language": to take the words created by systems of power and reappropriate them to say something entirely different. To SPEAK the language of power but to SAY something underneath it.

Language is important because it's one of the most visible reflections of political assemblages. "Correctness" of language is always a certain imposition of power using arbitrary divisions to designate one population's way of speaking as being the standard for the rest. When language is "wrong" but still has sense, it shows that a new assemblage is being formed. New slang indicates new forms of self-identification are being formed, a new "style" shows that literature has picked up on a new intensive experience of the world.

HE HAD A SKIN CONDITION