Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

singularization of the language act. In The Machinic Unconscious,Guat-

tari squares accounts with linguistic structuralism and begins to dis-

place the problematic field toward the domain of pragmatics.

There is nothing less logical, less mathematical, than a language.

Its ‘structure’ results from the petrifaction of a kind of catch-all

from which its elements emerge by borrowings, amalgams, agglu-

tinations, and misunderstandings ... It is the same with linguistic

laws as with anthropological laws, for example those that concern

the incest taboo: seen from the distance of a grammarian or an

ethnologist, they seem to have a certain coherence, but when

one gets closer to them, everything gets confused, and one notices

that it’s a question of systems of arrangements able to be drawn in

all directions and of rules able to be used in all sorts of ways.

(L’Inconscient machinique, 25, our translation)

The Chomskyan definition of rules of the functioning of language,

of universal structures of linguistic competence appears to be general-

izations unable to explain the real becoming of linguistic commun-

ication, because linguistic communication functions in relation to

non-linguistic contextualized levels of communication that contin-

ually redefine language. Any individual, Guattari observed, continually

passes from one language to another. The ideal speaker that Chomsky

proposes is an abstraction deprived of analytic value when one tries to

examine its real language production.

There is no universality of language, nor is there any universality in

language acts. Each sequence of linguistic expression is associated

with a network of semiotic links of all kinds (perceptive, mimetic,

gestural, image-thoughts, etc. ...). Any signifying statement cry-

stallizes a silent dance of intensities played out both on the social

body and on the individuated body. From language to speaking in

tongues [glossolalie], all transitions are possible. (L’Inconscient

machinique, 31, our translation)

Claude Hagège usefully wrote on the notion of linguistic universals

in order to set up a methodological question, the question of the rela-

tionship between linguistic science and language as a real process.

Formal universals are not, in fact, language universals, but rather, gen-

eral conditions of coherence for linguistics. They are epistemological

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