“The gram as différance, then, is a structure and a movement no longer conceivable on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other.”
Jacques Derrida: “Positions”, page 27.  

3) The effect of the sign upon us, the kind of emotion it produces.

Again, each of the seven criteria presented for the purpose of sign differentiation within “Proust and Signs” are applied equally to the four types of signs which Deleuze analyses within that book. Again, I would like to look at one specific type of sign taken relative to one of Deleuze’s criteria for differentiation. My reason for doing so is quite specific: within the form of image writing we are here considering, there is one distinct type of element that is most directly related to emotionality. This element is the face, through and upon which emotion is visually presented. We will find that the presentation of the face can be directly linked to landscapes; and this brings us very close to the concept of territoriality, the importance of which was noted earlier with regard to the ongoing project of decentering semiology into grammatology (through a movement away from a phonocentric expressivism, and toward an exteriority of interrelationships). To this end, my consideration of Deleuze’s third criterion for sign differentiation will focus upon what he terms “the signs of love.”  

   “The second circle is that of love… To fall in love is to individualize someone by the signs he bears or emits. It is to become sensitive to these signs, to undergo an apprenticeship to them… The beloved appears as a sign, a “soul”; the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted. What is involved here is a plurality of worlds; the pluralism of love does not concern only the multiplicity of loved beings, but the multiplicity of souls or worlds in each of them. To love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds that remain enveloped within the beloved.”

“Proust and Signs”, page 7.

            Nothing immerses us within a sense of territoriality as quickly or as completely as love. As Deleuze notes of Proust, ‘signs’ related to a loved one or the focus of ones’ affection are apprehended as if they arrive from another world, an different landscape, an earth upon which we have not as yet walked. Interpreting these signs means finding these worlds, defining these landscapes, and territorializing with that earth… all in the name of that person with whom one is in love. Creating a map of such new territory, or rather recasting an old map (an ‘other’ map) into a configuration one can claim as ones’ own, is an activity that invariably accompanies ones’ encounter with love and, the signs associated with someone whom one loves. Thus, I shall proceed here as if any production of image-based landscapes will in all probability have been intimately associated with an attempt to grasp that world of signs associated in its otherness with a person (or persons) loved by the producer of such images.

            Yet in considering this, Deleuze’s third criterion for sign differentiation, we are considering all emotional affects and not just those associated with love. In a more generalized sense, then, we should consider how such emotional affect is conveyed within this form of image writing. This is quite easily done, since even a very cursory examination of examples of such image writing will reveal that emotional contexts are established through the use of facial features, of facial expressions:  

            “Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passions, and redundancies. Since all semiotics are mixed and strata come in at least twos, it should come as no surprise that a very special mechanism is situated at their intersection. Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system… The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels. The form of the signifier in language, even its units, would remain indeterminate if the potential listener did not use the face of the speaker to guide his or her choices. A child, woman, mother, man, father, boss, teacher, police officer, does not speak a general language but one whose signifying traits are indexed to specific faciality traits. Faces are not basically individual; they define zones of expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations. Similarly, the form of subjectivity, whether consciousness or passion, would remain absolutely empty if faces did not form loci of resonance that select the sensed or mental reality and make it conform in advance to a dominant reality.”

Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus”, copyright 1987 by the University of Minnesota Press; pages 167-168.

            Thus it is quite apparent that faciality will be the mechanism through which emotional affects are found to be presented in this form of image writing. Also of note is the fact that faciality as such tends to occur semiologically when one encounters a white wall/black hole systemization of features… which is certainly what we are most often dealing with here. The face, and images of faces, provide ‘loci of resonance’ that define emotional characteristics within this form of image writing. Since we have seen that an effect of ‘signs of love’ is a production of a sense of territoriality by the person interpreting such signs, we can also go so far as to say that such territoriality is an effect of said emotionality: it is, in a very certain sense, the pivotal point upon which emotional affectivity articulates with external effects. This is because territoriality usually entails the deterritorialization of something coupled with a consequent reterritorialization; in this case, the deterritorialization of the signs of love as emitted by the loved one, and their reterritorialization upon the one who interprets these signs… who thus undergoes a deterritorialization of self, in the attempt to reterritorrialize within a common, extended world directly shared with the one whom is loved:

            “There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest… The beloved gives us signs of preference; but because these signs are the same as those that express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which others might be or are preferred.”

“Proust and Signs”, page 8.

            The extent to which such ‘possible worlds’ are composed should not be underestimated. Indeed, there is a direct correspondence between the faciality expressing emotions, and landscapes which function as relative deterritorializations of any specific world (undertaken in deference to an encompassing earth). All of which leads us, over and over,  to one important point: the most apparent effect of emotive faciality within the image writing we are considering here is a pivotal production of landscapes, and the possibility of subsequent reterritorializations within variant worlds situated upon an all embracing earth.

            “Now the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritorialized world. There are a number of face-landscape correlations, on this “higher” level… All faces envelop an unknown, unexplored landscape; all landscapes are populated by a loved or dreamed-of face, develop a face to come or already past. What face has not called upon the landscapes it amalgamated, sea and hill; what landscape has not evoked the face that would have completed it, providing an unexpected complement for its lines and traits?”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, pages 172-173.

           

            “Love’s signs are not like the signs of worldliness; they are not empty signs, standing for thought and action. They are deceptive signs that can be addressed to us only by concealing what they express: the origin of unknown worlds, of unknown actions and thoughts that give them meaning.”

“Proust and Signs”, page 9.

            Signs of love, presented through emotive faciality, are productive of landscapes, of possible worlds… worlds not entirely known to their producer, landscapes that have formed without the person who produces the images that present them, from an earth which need conform only to its own actuality. In order to truly grasp these points, we must again leave Marcel Proust and his values behind, in order to more realistically define how emotive faciality directly relates to landscape production in the image writing we are examining.

            First, we must realize that any separation between lovers in Proust’s day and age was most likely due to cultural constraints enforced by social sanctions; in contrast, such separations in the context of the world from which this form of image writing originated were necessary, and delineated by constraints imposed by a desire for survival. In such a context, if a person in love is placing themselves in a world they are not part of, it is most probably to intercede between that world and the person(s) that they love. In other words, that landscape creation which we have linked to the effect of emotive faciality in the context of ‘signs of love’ is a symbolic insertion by the lover of their sense of presence into a loved one’s world - a world which the lover is necessarily absent from.

Here, we see that a generalized separation between presence and absence becomes problematic: neither concept can be considered an adequate description of the situation under consideration. Instead, we must (as Derrida suggests) consider such situations in terms of the differences being introduced. The faciality one can expect to encounter from such a context will incorporate all of the resources that the image producer would have had conceptual access to, and might have made use of, in any attempt to safeguard their loved one(s) from any manner of danger explicit within the world… in short, all of the mechanisms through which difference might be introduced into otherwise uncontrollable sequences of events. This is the nature of the territorializations undertaken within this image writing on the behalf of the loved ones of those who were producing these images… and of the positions upon which the form of image writing being considered herein articulate. This is why faciality deterritorializes before reterritorializing inclusive of a loved one: it does so in deference to the encompassing, existential realities of the earth.

            “One never deterritorializes alone; there are at least two terms, hand-use object, mouth-breast, face-landscape. And each of the two terms reterritorializes on the other. Reterritorialization must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality: it necessarily implies a set of artifices by which one element, itself deterritorialized, serves as a new territoriality for another, which has lost its territoriality as well… The hand and the breast reterritorialize on the face and in the landscape: they are facialized at the same time they are landscapified. Even a use-object may become facialized: you may say that a house, utensil, or object, an article of clothing, etc., is watching me, not because it resembles a face, but because it is taken up in the white wall/black hole process, because it connects to the abstract machine of facialization.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, page 174-175.

            “With all the more reason, the signs of love anticipate in some sense their alteration and their annihilation. It is the signs of love that implicate lost time in the purest state… If the signs of love and of jealousy carry their own alteration, it is for a simple reason: love unceasingly prepares its own disappearance, acts out its own dissolution. The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of the person we shall have stopped loving”

“Proust and Signs”, pages 18-19.

            So defined, love is the ultimate form of territoriality: those who are implicated within this state always erase themselves through such a creation; they always become party to that state only as the pre-conditions for their self-defined existence cease, and always articulate their co-being through differences which displace the associated concepts of presence and absence.

            This may at first seem to have no direct bearing upon the image writing we are considering herein, but it very much does. For, not only do the ‘signs of love’ provide us with emotive faciality, landscapes, and territorialization: it also just happens to provide us with a key consideration relative to this image writing’s narrative structure. For, it is in exactly these kinds of narrative transitions between image elements - where one conceptually stops, where the next conceptually starts – that we will ultimately discover this form of image writing’s grammatical structure, as presented through relationships of interconnectivity.

            “A language is always embedded in the faces that announce its statements and ballast them in relation to signifiers in progress and subjects concerned. Choices are guided by faces, elements are organized around faces: a common grammar is never separable from a facial education… Doubtless, the binaries and bivocalities of the face are not the same as those of language, of its elements and subjects. There is no resemblance between them. But the former subtend to the latter. When the faciality machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single substance of expression, it already subjugates them to the exclusive form of signifying and subjective expression. It carries out the prior gridding that makes it possible for the signifying elements to become discernable, and for the subjective choices to be implemented. The faciality machine is not an annex to the signifier and the subject; rather, it is subjacent (connexe) to them and is their condition of possibility.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, pages 179-180.

            “The incarnation of essences proceeds in the signs of love and even in the worldly signs. Difference and repetition remain then the two powers of essence, which itself remains irreducible to the object bearing the sign, but also to the subject experiencing it… In the signs of love, the two powers of essence are no longer united… Far from expressing the idea’s immediate power, repetition testifies to a discrepancy here, an inadequation of consciousness and idea… Love’s repetition is a serial repetition… a series in which each term adds its minor difference… But also, between two terms of the series, there appear certain relations of contrast that complicate the repetition… And above all, when we pass from one loved term to the next, we must take into account a difference accumulated within the subject as well as a reason for progression in the series…”

“Proust and Signs”, pages 67-69.

            When considering the actual narrative structures inherent in this form of image writing, we will inevitably find that the serial repetitions which characterize “signs of love” are also indicative of the grammatic structures which allow such a form of image writing to function as a distinct, and consistently linguistic, systemization. Again, it is precisely those differentiations displacing the semiotic conceptualization of ‘presence/absence’ that provide the points of articulation which define the essentially grammatological nature of this form of writing. Such articulations can be traced back through the landscape-oriented formations associated with faciality and into the emotive contextualizations characteristic of faciality, which in turn are localized in a distinctly material association between the physical substrate being so utilized and the essential (yet contingent) nature of the images produced upon such substrates.

            “This machine is called the faciality machine because it is the social production of the face, because it performs the facialization of the entire body and all its surroundings and objects, and the landscapification of all worlds and milieus. The deterritorialization of the body implies a reterritorialization on the face; the decoding of the body implies an overcoding by the face; the collapse of corporeal coordinates or milieus implies the constitution of a landscape.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, page 181.

            “Essence is incarnated in the signs of love but necessarily in a serial, and hence a general, form. Essence is always difference. But, in love, the difference has passed into the unconscious: it becomes in a sense generic or specific and determines a repetition whose terms are no longer to be distinguished except by infinitesimal differences and subtle contrasts. In short, essence has assumed the generality of a Theme or an Idea, which serves as a law for the series of our loves. This is why the incarnation of essence, the choice of essence that is incarnated in the signs of love, depends on extrinsic conditions and subjective contingencies, even more than in the case of the sensuous signs.”

“Proust and Signs”, page 75.

            In this way, we will indeed be able to define such ‘Themes’ and “families of ‘Ideas’” as grammatological ‘laws’ which present us with the metalinguistic underpinnings inherent within this form of image writing. Further, we will be able to demonstrate the incontestably linguistic nature of this form of writing by showing how very basic and discrete images, taken in the broadest sense as ‘signs’, evolved over time into something which corresponds to what Deleuze describes, in “Proust and Signs”, as “essences”… and which can be further correlated the definition of “concepts” used by Deleuze and Guattari in “What Is Philosophy”. For, although Proust was himself concerned with the role of art in the explication of all realms of “signs”, we are here concerned with how that which characterized art for Proust - the “essential” - allows us to define the functionality of the differential transitions that articulate and compose this form of image writing’s narrative structures. 

            “Proust was able to make the face, landscape, painting, music, etc., resonate together… A face refers back to a landscape. A face must “recall” a painting, or a fragment of a painting… the white wall becomes populous, the black holes are arrayed… The narrator munches his Madeline: redundancy, the black hole of involuntary memory. How can he get out of that? And it is, above all, something one has to get out of, escape from. Proust knows that quite well, even if his commentators do not. But the way he gets out is through art, uniquely through art.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, pages 185-186.

            “In the case of the signs of love, we are mainly within time lost: time that alters persons and things, that makes them pass. Here too there is a truth – or truths. But the truth of lost time is not only approximate and equivocal; we grasp it only when it has ceased to interest us, only when the interpreter’s Self that was in love has already disappeared… Love’s time is a lost time because the sign develops only to the degree that the self corresponding to its meaning disappears.”

“Proust and Signs”, pages 86-87.

            Our primary concern here will be with defining the movements of territorialization that establish this form of image writing as an externalized grammatological systemization (through this ‘disappearing Self’), rather than as an expression of some theoretically absolute semiological internalization. Such externalizations will be composed of those differential aspects through which territoriality is composed (in the displacement of a current world into ‘a something’ that does not actually exist yet) and which are resonant with a cessation of the ‘self’ that, in creating such territoriality as the production of difference, displaces both presence and absence. This resonant displacement, in its productive differentiation, can eventually be seen to wholly shift the characteristics which define faciality away from an exclusively emotive context and into a grammatical presentation of territoriality which is essentially narrative (meta-narrative, to be precise) in its linguistic functionality.

            “How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How do you dismantle the face?.. The point is to get out of it, not in art, in other words, in spirit, but in life, in real life… art is never an end in itself; it is only a tool for blazing life lines, in other words, all of those real becomings that are not produced only in art, and all of those active escapes that do not consist in fleeing into art, taking refuge in art, and all of those positive deterritorializations that never reterritorialize on art, but instead sweep it away with them toward the realms of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless.”

“A Thousand Plateaus”, pages 186-187.

            In defining such grammatological principles, we will indeed find ourselves working with an asemiological, anasemantic functionality which the concepts that dominate analyses of phonetically-based writing systems simply do not address.