“In the extent to which what is called “meaning” (to be “expressed”) is already, and thoroughly, constituted by a tissue of differences, in the extent to which there is already a text, a network of textual referrals to other texts, a textual transformation in which each allegedly “simple term” is marked by the trace of another term, the presumed interiority of meaning is already worked upon by its own exteriority. It is always already carried outside itself. It already differs (from itself) before any act of expression. And only on this condition can it “signify.” From this point of view, perhaps, we would not have to ask to what extent nonexpressivity could signify. Only nonexpressivity can signify, because in all rigor there is no signification unless there is synthesis, syntagm, différance, and text. And the notion of text, conceived in all its implications, is incompatible with the unequivocal notion of expression. Of course, when one says that only the text signifies, one already has transformed the values of signifying and sign… Grammatology, as the science of textuality, then would be a nonexpressive semiology only on the condition of transforming the concept of sign and of uprooting it from its congenital expressivism.”
Jacques Derrida: “Positions”, pages 33-34.

5) The principle faculty that explicates or interprets the sign, which develops its meaning.

Considering the nature of those assemblages which characterize desire, and comparing them with our observations concerning the essentially temporal nature of such multiplicities as are produced of desire, we must now inquire as to how such assemblages become fused into differential composites. Specifically, what processes define that productive activity through which non-metrical image writing comes into being? For, if we have successfully managed to decenter our analysis from those concepts which are characteristic of a phonetically defined semiology, we must still localize our analysis within a more properly grammatological sphere. Having separated our analytic approach from the subject/object expressivism preferenced by the conceptualizations of presence/absence commonly used within semiology (and particularly, as the pairing of ‘words’ with ‘objects’), we must be all the more rigorous in establishing the essentially differential nature of non-metrical image writing.

At this point, we have already shifted our analytic framework well away from those considerations which informed the work of Proust. If it can be said that Proust exhibited a distinct preference toward a more ‘spiritualized’ realization of linguistic structures, then it must also be said that our analysis demands material determinations which are contingent upon some form of basic functionality. When we seek to apply Deleuze’s fifth criterion for sign differentiation, we will need recourse to something quite different than that which he found to be inherent in Proust: faculties of ‘intelligence’; of ‘involuntary memory’; of ‘imagination’; or ‘of essences’.

When Deleuze makes reference to ‘faculties through which signs are explicated’, he does so with a specific idea of what the word ‘faculty’ means. Consider how he describes such faculties in their functional occurrence:

“The transcendental form of a faculty is indistinguishable from its disjointed, superior or transcendent exercise. Transcendent in no way means that the faculty addresses itself to objects outside the world but, on the contrary, that it grasps that in the world which concerns it exclusively and brings it into the world… Despite the fact that it has become discredited today, the doctrine of the faculties is an entirely necessary component of the system of philosophy. Its discredit may be explained by the misrecognition of this properly transcendental empiricism, for which was substituted in vain a tracing of the transcendental from the empirical. Each faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise). This is the threefold limit of the final power. Each faculty discovers at this point its own unique passion – in other words, its radical difference and its eternal repetition, its differential and repeating elements along with the instantaneous engendering of its action and the eternal replay of its object, its manner of coming into the world repeating. We ask, for example: What forces sensibility to sense? What is it that can only be sensed, yet is imperceptible at the same time?; for language - is there a loquendum, that which would be silence at the same time?..”

Gilles Deleuze, “Difference and Repetition”, translated by Paul Patton. English translation copyright 1994 by The Athlone Press Limited; page143.

            When we ask which faculty explicates the signs of non-metrical image writing, we are doing so in order to better understand the nature of the specific differences of which this form of writing is composed. In this, we are trying to discover that which makes this form of writing unique; we are seeking the extreme points of its development wherein that which it presents can only be seen as a product of an image writing, and never as a product of the spoken word.

“…it is not figures already mediated and related to representation that are capable of carrying the faculties to their respective limits but, on the contrary, free or untamed states of difference in itself; not qualitative opposition within the sensible, but an element which is in itself difference, and creates at once both the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility. This element is intensity, understood as pure difference in itself, as that which is at once both imperceptible for empirical sensibility which grasps intensity only already covered or mediated by the quality to which it gives rise, and at the same time that which can be perceived only from the point of view of a transcendent sensibility which apprehends it immediately in the encounter.”

“Difference and Repetition”, page 144.

            Here, transcendent refers to the fact that the faculties do encounter that which they do not grasp well and, so must shift something of such encounters between themselves in order to obtain a better grip upon these experiences. Always, Deleuze is referring ‘the actual’, to the reality of empirical encounters within the world; specifically, he is concerned with how thought is forced to contend with such encounters and, how this very contention is in itself what we call thought: that active shifting of such differences between the variant ways in which we grasp and re-grasp them within consciousness.

            “Each faculty, including thought, has only involuntary adventures: involuntary operation remains embedded in the empirical. The Logos breaks up into hieroglyphs, each one of which speaks the transcendent language of a faculty. Even the point of departure – namely, sensibility in the encounter with that which forces sensation – presupposes neither affinity nor predestination. On the contrary, it is the fortuitousness or the contingency of the encounter which guarantees the necessity of that which it forces to be thought.”

“Difference and Repetition”, page 145.

            In making reference to a doctrine of the faculties when presenting this fifth criterion for sign differentiation, Deleuze is inquiring into how any specific sign is encountered as a difference; and how that differential aspect of the sign exceeds the grasp of the faculty which apprehends it, and so, comes to be transferred to other aspects of interpretive consciousness. For our purposes here, this will mean determining how such signs as we are dealing with are experienced and, how this experience of difference is maintained in the ways through which said signs interact with each other (as “Ideas”, for example).

            “Ideas occur throughout the faculties and concern them all. According to the place and existence of a faculty determined as such, they render possible both the differential object and the transcendent exercise of that faculty… In this manner, Ideas correspond in turn to each of the faculties and are not the exclusive object of any one in particular, not even of thought.

            “Ideas are thus multiplicities with differential glimmers, like will-o’-the-wisps, ‘virtual trails of fire’, from one faculty to another, without ever having the homogeneity of that natural light which characterizes common sense. That is why learning may be defined in two complimentary ways, both of which are opposed to representation in knowledge: learning is either a matter of penetrating the Idea, its variations and distinctive points, or a matter of raising a faculty to its disjointed transcendent exercise, raising it to that encounter and that violence which are communicated to the others.

            “…Ideas must be called ‘differentials’ of thought, or the ‘Unconscious’ of pure thought. Ideas, therefore, are related not to a Cogito (“I think”) which functions as ground or as a proposition of consciousness, but to the fractured I of a dissolved Cogito; in other words, to the universal ungrounding which characterizes thought as a faculty in its transcendental exercise. Ideas are not the object of a particular faculty, but nevertheless particularly concern a special faculty to the point that one can say: they come from it (in order to constitute the para-sense of all the faculties).”

“Difference and Repetition”, pages 193-194.

            Note here that, while we have found that it is the ‘signs of love’ which create a world of signs as a landscape of territoriality, it is the violence of events upon this earth which causes the one who loves to insert themselves into the ‘possible worlds’ of those ones who are loved, in an attempt to intercede before such violence on their behalf. Here again, we see that a ‘dissolution of the self’ characterizes deterritorialization (induced as it is by the violent nature of the earth) from one’s own world and, consequently, reterritorialization into the “possible worlds” of others.

The differentials which characterize signs are products of particular faculties which have been raised to the transcendent exercise of their limits, causing them to pass such differential elements to other faculties. The composite results of such carriage (which will remain in evidence as we begin to consider the narrative structures of non-metrical image writing) are Ideas, which occur as multiplicities. Such Ideas, which can also be referred to as ‘concepts’, always carry the disjointed nature of their origin with them:

"Philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit together, because their edges do not match up. They are not pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless..."

"What Is Philosophy?", page 35.

            Indeed, it is through a fragmentary origin at the functional edge of particular faculties that those multiplicities which are Ideas, concepts, or signs assert their characteristic differential variances. This is why considerations concerning which faculty explicates particular signs are of such interpretive importance that a separate criterion for sign differentiation is assigned to them.

Since we are dealing here with a form of image writing, and with ‘signs’ that are essentially visual in nature, it seems obvious that we should be considering the role which vision plays in the explication and interpretation of such signs. However, we have already seen that such images cannot be interpreted in a spatial way; thus we must look for some other functionality of vision which is more in keeping with what we have already observed concerning non-metrical image writing… and which is more likely to carry us to the point where it becomes more apparent just exactly what is happening when the differences which are encountered within the world through our faculty of sight are transferred from the instances of these encounters, and into non-metrical image writing.

    "The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art. Several notions, both practical and theoretical, are suitable for defining nomad art and its successors... First, "close-range" vision, as distinguished from long-range vision; second, "tactile", or rather "haptic" space, as distinguished from optical space. “Haptic” is a better word than “tactile” since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical function… The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure connectivity. Contrary to what is sometimes said, one never sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a distance; one is never "in front of," any more than one is "in" (one is "on"...). Orientations are not constant but change according to temporary vegetation, occupations, and precipitation. There is no visual model for points of reference that would make them interchangeable and unite them in an inertial class assignable to an immobile outside observer. On the contrary, they are tied to any number of observers, who may be qualified as "monads" but are instead nomads entertaining tactile relations among themselves. The interlinkages do not imply an ambient space in which the multiplicity would be immersed and which would make distances invariant; rather, they are constituted according to ordered differences that give rise to intrinsic variations in the division of a single distance. These questions of orientation, location, and linkage enter into play in the most famous works of nomad art: the twisted animals have no land beneath them; the ground constantly changes direction, as in aerial acrobatics; the paws point in the opposite direction from the head, the hind part of the body is turned upside down; the “monadological” points of view can be interlinked only on a nomad space; the whole and the parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. This is an animality that can be seen only by touching it with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger, not even by way of the eye… Striated space, on the contrary, is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective…

    “There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. It is the absolute of passage, which in nomad art merges with its manifestation. Here the absolute is local, precisely because place is not delimited.”

"A Thousand Plateaus", pages 492 - 494.

            The description provided by Deleuze and Guattari of haptic space nicely coincides with the observations we have made concerning the intricate interconnectedness of non-metrical image writing. It presents us with a non-spatial way of defining vision, and as such brings us toward that extreme edge of vision’s function (as a faculty) where the differential aspects produced within vision transfer to other faculties, and so begin to assemble as composite multiplicities. It integrates perfectly with our earlier analysis of the lighting conditions under which some examples of non-metrical image writing appear to have been produced (and the intensity of concentration that characterizes such productive activity). This in turn suggests that the haptic space of the close optical may in itself be differentiated into many sets of specific existential relationships. The functionality of the close optical also provides us with a distinctly localized mechanism responsible for producing such characteristic intricacies of visual imagery as we have seen in our study of non-metrical image writing. Most importantly, the concept of haptic space allows us to demonstrate that non-metrical image writing must be seen as a product of mechanisms which are quite distinct from those held to be responsible for speech: and in this, finally, we can feel justified in stating that writing in this specific context must be understood as something which is not inherently a form of that semiological expressivism which, through phonocentric concepts, currently defines so much of modern linguistics.