( title )
Cloud Cows: Remarks on Marking

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( epigraph )
"Territory is besides the point."

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( machine-node )
We have written a sentence. We have assembled a machine. This is the machine-sentence: "Territory is besides the point." The trick to perceiving this sentence as a machine is to imagine or observe its being connected. The machine has the form of an aphorism. Our little machine-aphorism could very well be a node in a rhizome. What stands apart, an aphorism, operates in a connected fashion; it is cited in a discourse.

* * *

( explanation )
Deleuze and Guattari in the introductory ("Rhizome") chapter to A thousand plateaus invite readers to think in terms of rhizomes. They recognize the difficulty in accomplishing such a feat: "It's not easy to see the grass in things and in words (similarly, Nietzsche said that an aphorism had to be "ruminated"; never is a plateau separable from the cows that populate it, which are also the clouds in the sky.)" [A thousand plateaus, p. 23]

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( stating the obvious )
Hence these cow clouds, a series of loose remarks on a little machine.

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( unpluggings )
The little machine-aphorism has been unplugged from somewhere. It arises from a reading of a passage of "What is a minor literature?" from the book on Kafka. It is not a citation though it masquerades as one.

Although it appears as a quotation, it is not excised from that production signed Deleuze and Guattari. The words "territory is besides the point" are not culled verbatim from the signifying matter that is the chapter from the Kafka book, the chapter that itself is lifted and reproduced elsewhere as a stand-alone essay (See Out There: Marginalization and Contempory Culture).

Rather the machine-aphorism we have chosen as an epigraph is constructed from a set of readings. It is the product of a rumination on the presentation of the tetraglossic taxonomy imported by Deleuze and Guattari into their essay-chapter to describe Kafka's Prague situation.

* * *

( justification )
Several sentences before the taxonomy is introduced and is applied to Kafka's Prague we read (translation by Dana Polan) that "Ordinarily, in fact, language compensates for its deterriorialization by a reterritorialization in sense. Ceasing to be the organ of one of the senses, it becomes an instrument of Sense." (p. 20)

D'ordinaire, en effet, la langue compense sa déterritorialisation par une reterritorialisation dans le sens. Cessant d'être organe d'un sens, elle devient instrument du Sens.

* * *

( gloss )
Polan's rendering "the organ of one of the senses" selects for one meaning or sense. It preserves the indefiniteness (one of many). It leads the reader to suppose that one is dealing with an apparatus of perception. What is almost lost in translation is that "sense" can also mean "meaning". Deleuze and Guattari are contrasting meanings with Meaning. We offer this reading of the plural and the singular capitalized and furthermore remark that "sens" can mean "orientation" or "direction". With this multiplication it is not clear which (sense as meaning, sense as apparatus, sense as orientation) belongs with the organ and which with the instrument. Territory comes to reside beside the point. "Territory is besides the point."

* * *

( appropriation )
The name (François Lachance) signing these cow clouds or cloud cows is also connected with a work circulating under the title of Sense.

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/BRIDGE.HTM

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( over-determination )

* * *

( )
A machine can break down (into pieces).

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( démontable )
There is another version of the Rhizome introduction. It was published in 1976 by Les Éditions de Minuit. One can find there some remarks on Deleuze and Guattari's citational practices. Remarks that are not found in the Rhizome intro version at the beginning of Thousand Plateaus.

"Nous voudrions citer qu'avec amour. [...] procéder par oubli et soustraction, faire ainsi un rhizome, faire des machine avant tout démontables [...]"

Démonter: to dismantle, to unhinge.

[Verification: the Rhizome essay published separately in 1976 may be found in Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F., _On the Line_. Trans. John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. I have as of yet been unable to obtain a copy to check if this the case.]

* * *

( provisionally tentative )
"Deleuze and Guattari, following Henri Gobard, provide a tentative matrix for these relations, in fact a four-way model [...] This schema can only be provisional. The relationships between and functions of, different languages will always vary depending on the specifics of space and time, which is to say a definition of the minor will depend on a definition of the major." Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2006) p. 71.

* * *

( synonyms )
Machine. Mechanism. Organization. Automaton.

* * *

( source )
Gobard, Henri. L'Aliénation linguistique. (Paris: Flammarion, 1976) contains a preface by Gilles Deleuze. This preface references the Kafka example of a fourfold taxonomy: vernacular, vehicular, referential and mythic.

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( precis )
p. 23 - 27 Gobard outlines the genesis that leads to his four functions. Gobard identifies four components for the analysis of language. "L'apparition du language peut se comprendre à partir de l'analyse de ses quatre composantes: affective, cognitive, techno-ludique et magique." Gobard maps these onto his functions of language: vernacular, vehicular, referential and magical. He does so by way of appeal to children's behaviour. The child in presence of the mother does not communicate anything, the child communes; the child asking for a glass of water communicates information, a desire, almost an order; the child is captavitated by the sounds of the language and indulges in producing certain pleasurable sounds. The fourth component isn't tied to an example in child behaviour. Gobard characterizes the magic function as "La dernière composante est celle où le language ne sert ni à communier, ni à communiquer, ni à jouer, mais à déjouer, c'est-à-dire à maîtriser le sort, la nature." (p. 26)

He doesn't offer a direct mapping of the tetragenesis onto the tetraglossic. There is some slippage. His four functions as reprised by Deleuze and Guattari are the vernacular, the vehicular, the referential and the mythic. Deleuze and Guattari do not comment on the tetragenesis.

Gobard is mainly interested in the relations between vernacular and vehicular functions since he is mainly concerned about the status of English (a vehicular language) and how it is taught in the French school system - French being a vernacular under siege. There are occasional remarks about obfuscation in advertising as a form of the magical function. However, most of the book reads like a screed concened with the struggle between vehicular English and vernacular French. The tetraglossic model after its initial introduction is undeveloped.

* * *

( memories of underdevelopment )
The child's call for water (lo lo [l'eau] or wa wa [water]) is considered by Gobard to be a cognitive function. It points to a desired object. [The genesis of the "vehicular" function.] However the same sequence could simply be a techno-ludic utterance [The genesis of the "referential" function.] Notwithstanding the arbitrariness with which the observer can assign functions, there is always an intentionality ascribed to these flows of language. The utterance is directed. It has sense. Even nonsense is oriented.

The tetraglossic model is based on purpose. The language user is intent on communing, communicating, playing or outwitting (communier, communiquer, jouer, déjouer).

What is intriguing about this close-up view of the taxonomy is the recognition that the functions are connectable. "Lolo" by its kinship with glossolalia borders on the magical even in its most sense-making moments. Reduced to its particles, language outwits itself. Meaning is skirted. New directions open up. Senses at play hollow out the Sense. Organs (tongue and ear) interfere with the operations of the instrument of language.

* * *

( magic )
[insert U-sequence here]

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( replay )
The point is a non-place. U-topia. U-trope. U-turn. U-bahn. "U-bahn" plus "Deleuze and Guattari" plugged into a search engine nets a reference to the sessions of Radical Theory Berlin. (The reading group's site mentions the nearest subway stop to their gathering that took place on the 17 of November 2010.)

What does this little exercise demonstrate?

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( the passage )
This is how in "What is a minor literature?" that Deleuze and Guattari invoke the work of Gobard:
Using the research of Ferguson and Gumperz, Henri Gobard has proposed a tetralinguistic model: vernacular, maternal, or territorial language, used in rural communities or rural in its origins; a vehicular, urban, governmental, even worldwide language, a language of business, commercial exchange, bureaucratic transmission, and so on, a language of the first sort of deterritorialization; referential language, language of sense and of culture, entailing a cultural reterritorialization; mythic language, on the horizon of cultures, caught up [in] a spiritual or religious reterritorialization. The spatiotemporal categories of these languages differ sharply: vernacular language is here; vehicular language is everywhere; referential language is over there; mythic language is beyond.
And so we built the aphorism-machine that "territory is besides the point."

* * *

( diectics )
Deleuze and Guattari do not cite the temporal categories that Gobard associates with the functions: now (maintenant); later (plus tard); once (jadis); always (toujours). One notes that the first three rely on a point. The fourth is a mystical point -- at once centre and circumference.

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( remark )
Ferguson and Gumperz. Gobard picks up the work of Charles A. Ferguson on diglossia. In certain language communities there exists a fonctional separation based on two languages, one for religious, teaching and other aspces of culture, the other for everyday living. We can read off this description of diglossia, Gobard's vehicular and vernacular functions. From John Gumperz comes the recognition that diglossia exists not only in multilingual societies but also covers the case of situations where there are vulgar and classic varieties based on dialect or register. His book is Language in Social Groups. [See remarks on paratext and the reading of the "What is minor literature?" chapter as moving from language to the collective.]

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( paratext )
In the Table of Contents, in the French edition, each chapter is followed by a number of subheadings. Chapter 3 which is entitled "Qu'est-ce qu'une littérature mineure?" appears in the Table of Contents with the shortened title "La littérature mineure" and three subheadings: "Le language -- Le politique -- Le collectif". It is the only Chapter to have its title shortened in the Table of Contents. It is worth noting that the Table of Contents provides a capsule reading of the Chapter that aligns it with the tripartite attention in the next chapter: letters, short stories, novels.

* * *

( aphorism footnote )
The syntagm that Deleuze and Guattari trace in the Kafka book (i.e. the trajectory from letters to novels through short stories) is complicated by the acknowledgement of the diaries and very short texts. In an extended footnote to Chapter 4 "The Components of Expression" they write: "In these components of Kafka's work -- letters, stories, novels -- we haven't dealt with two elments: on the one hand, very short texts, somber aphorisms, and relatively pious parables [...] On the other hand we haven't dealt with the Diaries for an inverse reason. Namely, that the Diaries touch upon everything: it is the rhizome itself. It is not an element in the sense of one aspect of the work, but the element (in the sense of milieu) that Kafka declares he never wants to leave, just like a fish. This is so because this element communicates with all of the outside and distributes the desire of the letters, the desire of the stories, the desire of the novels."

There are opportunities to devote more attention to the aphorism.

* * *

( rewirings )
We supplement our examination of what Deleuze and Guattari import with some connections that make our little machine tick.

* * *

( Kandinsky )
Kandinsky in the point chapter in Point and Line to Plane (translated by Howard Dearstyne and Hilda Rebay) comments on three printmaking techniques and how points are formed by them: bitten into the surface in the case of drypoint. In the case of the woodcut, the "point does not sit in the paper, but on the paper. His description of the point created by a lithographic process reminds one of Deleuze and Guattari as they characterize lines of flight. Kandinsky writes "The point sits so lightly upon the paper that it would not be surprising if it were to fly off it."

Tricky for territory to be on point.

* * *

( Wittgenstein )
Our excerpt from the Tractatus tackles the aphorism as tautology.

3.144
Situations can be describd but not given names. (Names are like points; propositions like arrows -- they have sense.)

4.461
Tautologies and contradictions lack sense. (Like a point from which two arrows go out in opposite directions to one another.) (For example, I know nothing about the weather when I know that it is either raining or not raining.)

Interesting implications for how aphorism-machines work. [Hint: cloud cows and cow clouds.]

* * *

( Barthes )
From his reflections on photography, Camera Lucida. "[T]his element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points, precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole -- and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."

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( join )
"What is a minor literature?" was reprinted in Out There: Marginalization and Contempory Culture. It is accompanied by an arresting paratext. On the page facing the opening of the chapter, presented in the anthology as a stand-alone essay, is a reproduction of a photograph by Michael Jenkins. The 1989 photograph depicts a man in a sailor suit exposing a flacid cock with below in large type is the word "JOIN" which serves as an imperative. Ironic given that Deleuze and Guattari in Chapter 5 of the Kafka book, "Immanence and Desire" implicate readers in an invitation to write for "Writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle the assemblages." It follows that we sometimes connect by disentagling.

* * *

( Barthes Redux )
In his book on linguistic alienation, Henri Gobard quotes from Roland Barthes. It is a quotation that resonates with themes found in Deleuze and Guattari. The quotation is located in note 1 on page 166. "Le language vient toujours de quelque lieu, il est topos guerrier." It is tempting to paraphrase and read in a remark on language issuing from some point but it may be more accurate to suggest that "lieu" indicates some "place".

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( Yi-Fu Tuan )
Space and Place (1977).
"Space" is more abstract than "place". What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. [...] The ideas "space" and "place" require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. (p. 6) [Note: the vice versa may be the security of space and the threat of place. The paragraph goes on...] Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. [Link to Kandinsky's notion of points flying off.]

* * *

( temptation )
Just as terroritory is besides the point, could not the point be between space and place? Or is there some other geometry at work?

* * *

( other routes )
One example of the application of Gobard's four-part taxonomy is the use made of it by Réda Bensmaia in a brief article about North African writers where she "hope[s] to have shown how and why the Francophone writers of the Maghreb have to count with tetraglossia in every step of their work. It is the conditions that makes it possible for the people of the Maghreb to connect with the multiplicity of facets of their culutre." See "Introduction to Tetraglossia: The Situation of Maghrebi Writers" in Bilingual Games ed. by Doris Sommer (Palgrame, 2003) p. 95.

Note that for Bensmaia tetraglossia is a condition arising out of a multi-lingual setting where the various languages serve different functions. It bears an uncanny similarity to Kafka's Prague as mapped by Deleuze and Guattari. Elsewhere I find a hint as to how effects inventoried in a tetraglossic analysis could be acheived in a unilingual (which is not to say monological) context.

Bensmaia is also the author of the forward to the University of Minnesota edition of the Deleuze and Guaattari book, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (forward translated by Terry Cochran) wherein minor literature is characterized as "a method (of writing) -- of picking up, even of stealing: of "double stealing" as Deleuze sometimes says, which is both "stealing" and "stealing away" [...]".

Given this re-reading sensitized by the tunings of the tetraglossic model, I would venture to say that the tetraglossic situation of different functions and different languages can be made to operate in a monological context through practices of citation. With a little technical twist, some simple machine-building, the unilingual (be it monological or dialogical) can made to babble and bubble.

A selection is made to converge on a point of insertion: mark, copy, paste.

* * *

( epitaph )
Becoming point l e s s