7) Essence.

            “As the quality of a world, essence is never to be confused with an object but on the contrary brings together two quite different objects, concerning which we in fact perceive that they have this quality in the revealing medium. At the same time that essence is incarnated in a substance, the ultimate quality constituting it is therefore expressed as the quality common to two different objects, kneaded in this luminous substance, plunged into this refracting medium… An essence is always a birth of the world, but style is that continuous and refracted birth, that birth regained in substances adequate to essences, that birth which has become the metamorphosis of objects.”

“Proust and Signs”, pages 47-48.

            Once we begin to unify two different ‘objects’ in a ‘sign’ by way of a ‘common substance’, we have created something quite different than what we started out with. While it is important to notice here that such an act does indeed constitute a territorialization (and as such, brings about ‘the birth of a world’), it is more important to notice something else about the product that results:

"First, every concept relates back to other concepts, not only in its history but in its becoming or its present connections. Every concept has components that may, in turn, be grasped as concepts (so that the Other Person has the face among its components, but the Face will be considered as a concept with its own components). Concepts, therefore, extend to infinity and, being created, are never created from nothing. Second, what is distinctive about the concept is that it renders components inseparable within itself. Components, or what defines the consistency of the concept, its endoconsistency, are distinct, heterogeneous, and yet not separable. The point is that each partially overlaps, has a neighborhood, or threshold of indiscernability, with one another...Components remain distinct, but something passes from one to the other, something that is undecidable between them. There is an area ab that belongs to both a and b, where a and b "become" indiscernable. These zones, thresholds, or becomings, this inseparability define the internal consistency of the concept. But the concept also has exoconsistency with other concepts, when their respective creation implies the construction of a bridge on the same plane. Zones and bridges are the joints of the concept.

Third, each concept will therefore be considered as the point of coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of its own components, rising and falling within them. In this sense, each component is an intensive feature, an intensive ordinate, which must be understood not as a general or particular but as a pure and simple singularity - "a" possible world, "a" face, "some" words - that is particularized or generalized depending upon whether it is given variable values or a constant function. But, unlike the position in science, there is neither constant nor variable in the concept, and we no more pick out a variable species for a constant genus than we do a constant species for variable individuals...The concept of a bird is found not in its genus or species but in the composition of its postures, colors, and songs...The concept is in a state of survey in relation to its components, endlessly traversing them according to an order without distance. It is immediately co-present to all its components or variations, at no distance from them, passing back and forth through them..." 

"What Is Philosophy?", pages 19-20-21).

As we consider Deleuzes’ seventh criterion for sign differentiation in its application to non-metrical image writing, we notice something very special occurring: although the very basic image elements we encounter in this form of image writing are distinguishable at a level whereupon the characteristics of the material substrate are transposed into the differentiations of ‘images-as-signs’, the composite assemblages that such differentiations form (as multiplicities) are not ‘signs’ per say: they are, in fact, concepts.

This is why at no point did we need to make recourse to the semiological principles of any phonocentric expressivism: we need not seek to establish any direct correspondences between the words of a defining, spoken ‘language of origin’ and the images presented through such a grammatologically definable form of writing. Instead, we can expect to be able to directly define the actual concepts being constructed by those who produced this form of writing. We can now say, as might Jacques Derrida and with the certainty of demonstrable proof behind us, that this type of writing is indeed a linguistic form which is quite distinct from speech; and, as such, it is neither exclusively nor necessarily subject to any analysis defined only through interpretive concepts derived from a study of the spoken word.

Since we have recourse to a large body of information relating to what concepts are and, to how concepts function, we also have access to functional definitions that are directly applicable to those composite assemblages that form within non-metrical image writing. So, we don’t have to waste our time arguing with anthropologists and archaeologists and (phonocentric) linguists and ‘”cultural geographers’” about whether or not non-metrical image writing is a form of language: we can just get to work reconstructing some of the histories that were destroyed through the imposition of Eurocentric Interests upon the First Nations of North America.

To this end, let’s now consider some of the specific features encountered through an analysis of non-metrical image writing.

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“There is no Logos; there are only hieroglyphs. To think is therefore to interpret, is therefore to translate. The essences are at once the thing to be translated and the translation itself, the sign and the meaning. They are involved in the sign in order to force us to think; they develop in the meaning in order to be necessarily conceived. The hieroglyph is everywhere; its double symbol is the accident of the encounter and the necessity of thought: “fortuitous and inevitable.”

“Proust and Signs", pages 101-102.