Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

requirements which can teach us something about logical systems,

about methods to be used in the social sciences and about the inge-

nuity of the people who develop them; they tell us little about actual

languages ... or about the species characterized, at least in part, by

those languages. We must not, simply because a linguistic theory

requires certain methodological procedures, confound these pro-

cedures with the object to which they are applied. (Hagège, The

Dialogic Species, 35)

And Hagège also observed that:

Linguistics, born of the recognition of constants, is in large part

becoming a study of variation against a background of invariants;

a science that no longer contemplates constants in and of them-

selves, but subsumes them under the thousand faces of their

variants. (67)

This consideration coincides with what Guattari wrote about lan-

guage in L’Inconscient machinique. Rather than question language from

the point of view of structure, Guattari questions it from the point of

view of eventuality, of the speech act: removed from the generative

conception of structuralism that makes of language the execution (that

is, repetition) of a preconstituted and innate programme, language is

thus rethought according to a nomadic vision.

Language is essentially deterritorialization, the invention of a con-

text. We generally say that the meaning of a statement depends on the

context, but we must add that the meaning of the context in turn

depends on the statements that intersect it. As the invention of con-

texts, the constant mutation of laws within which the game is played,

language is stateless and nomadic. Which does not exclude, obviously,

identifying nuclei – truly anchored, territorialized – of linguistic flows

from being determined. The stabilization of national languages, the

formation of codes, subcultures and so forth constitute regimes of lin-

guistic territorialization. In this area, communication does not func-

tion as redefinition and invention of contexts, but as its confirmation,

as identification and self-identification.

And here we turn to the theme of the refrain.

The refrain is above all a musical phrase that returns in the course of

a song: a phrase that, in returning, constructs and brings forth the

complex rhythm. It is a factor of assemblage: by constructing rhythm

and bringing forth the song’s complex rhythm, the refrain functions as

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