Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 03:48:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Orpheus <cw_duff-AT-alcor.concordia.ca>
Subject: Guattari/Derrida




	Excerpt from Molecular Revolution. p. 75. Yes, I own a copy of
this now out of print book. When will the noble translators get a noble
grant and translate it? bloody hard work!! En tout cas.... It is a nice
marked up copy. Which I got real
cheap way back when. Before, even before [begriff!] Mona and Franny came
into the crowd. 

	(b) Semiologies of signification.[italics]  --  On the other hand,
all their substances of expression (of sound,sight and so on) are centred
upon a single signifying substance. This is the  'dictatorship of the
signifier'. That referential substance can be considered as a written
arche-writing, but not in Derrida's sense: it is not a matter of a script
that engenders all semiotic organization, but of the appearance - datable
in history - of writing machines as a basic tool for the great despotic
empires.

	This is from the essay called The Role of the Signifier in the
Institution. The essay was from a talk given at the Paris Freudian School
held in La Motte, November 1973. Published in Semiotext. The translation
is by Rosemary Sheed. The book was introduced by David Cooper who had been
a colleague of RD Laing and of Felix Guattari.
	
	There is a glossary which defines the term arche-writing
(Arche-ecriture) this way: An expression advanced by Jacques Derrida, who
puts forward the hypothesis of a writing at the basis of speech. This
writing of scratches, prints, conserved in inscriptions,, would be
logically prior to the oppositions time and space, signified and
signifying. Schizo-analysis objects that the vision of this conception of
language is still too totalizing, too "structuralist." Glossary p. 288

	The excerpt is from a chapter where Felix is discussing the
problem of institution and neurosis treatment and the approaches he was at
the time practicing. This was also the time when Laing was working in
England with a very different approach to the problems of schizophrenics
and institutions. I have found this essay very hard going in the French so
this translation [however wea] has served some pratical purposes. It has
also been used by some workers [mental health workers, advocates,
etcetera] as a reference book  in the field. It is clear for anyone who
has worked in the field [someone such as myself] that the concept of a
signifier and a semiotic which is exclusively that of the written is not
very useful. This is precisely what Guattari was suggesting and getting in
his talk. He gave a very similar talk at the main hospital [mental
hospital as they are called] here which also touched on some of these
matters.
	What Guattari is saying here can be linked to this from p. 7 of
OTP
	A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts,
not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and
cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic
universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized
languages. There is no ideal-speaker-listener anymore than there is a
homogeneous linguistic community. p 7 One Thousand Plateaus. trans. B.
Massumi.


	part of the work of the mental health worker who has to take
account of what happens outside of language is what needs to be accounted
and can indeed be accounted for with a rhizomatic model. Thus its
practicality.

	And there are 2 other references to Derrida in Molecular
Revolution.

	as  follows: Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire from a course
given to students at Columbia Hall New York. 1975.

	"Short of appealing to some divine agency - such as Derrida's myth
of the 'complicity of origins' established at the level of a signifying
arche-writing - there is no menas of conceiving tghe conjunction of words
and things other than by resorting to a system of machinic keys that
'cross' the various domains we are considering.

	This is from section 3 of the above named essay. This section is
called: Collective organizations of a-signifying semiotics.

	There is a3rd reference in the last essay of the book. This essay
was written by Eric Alliez and Guattari. It was translated by Brian
Darling for the English version of Molecular Revolution.  p 273 of the
book etc.

	****

	It seems to me that whether Hegel did or did not want his voice to
be heard we are left with the books. We either read them or don't. We
either read them in German or don't. We either read Plato in Greek or do
not. Most of us don't read at all, most of us are read by the texts we
presume to read. We splash through concepts like idiots. Some of us try to
read. The rest are idiots with blank stares in their faces.