Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

understand the relationship between the signifier and the signified in a

text, a gesture, an utterance.

******

Here we approach, by another route, the problem of interpretation that

we had already hinted at in speaking of Nietzsche. Interpretation con-

stitutes a reconsideration of the genealogical network of attributed

sense. In other terms, interpreting a sign is possible through the work

of reconstructing the intention of which the sign is the bearer, the

context within which this intention manifested itself, and the strate-

gies that the speaker has actualized to obtain his or her pragmatic

purpose (persuasive, dissuasive, insinuating or dissimulating, enticing

or repulsive ...).

For this reason one can say that the surface is the site on which

signification unfolds: the surface is the contact point among agents of

sense, the exteriority that reaches toward the world of relationships,

the interface between language and the world.

As long as we think that signification constitutes the depth of enun-

ciation, we remain entrapped in the conviction that there is a kind of

objective, privileged interpretation of the sign and that the unfolding

of enunciation is somehow predetermined and regulated by the neces-

sary implications of the signified. But this is not in fact the case:

signification is played out in the surface relation between an intended

enunciator and an intended receiver.

The surface is the locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as

long as they do not enter into the surface of organization which

assures the resonance of two series. (The Logic of Sense, 104, empha-

sis in the original)

About this statement, Guattari writes:

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, agglutina-

tions, and misunderstandings ... There is no universality of lan-

guage; 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 crystallizes a silent dance of

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