It is not from the perspective of meaning or interpretation that [Deleuze and Guattari] invest Peirce’s concepts. In fact they explicitly reject this orientation towards meaning which for them renders Peirce “as much a linguist as the semiologists”. Rather, it is for his taxonomy of “sign elements [which] still imply no privilege for language”, of semiotic material not reduced to linguistic forms, that they turn to him, in their development of a productive, asignifying semiotic…
… the notion of an “a-signifying” semiotics—to which diagrammatic agency is for Deleuze central - would have been unintelligible to Peirce. Asignification functions to explode the proliferation of meaning permitted and legitimated by structures and processes of reference, and to subvert the possibility of communication, “which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create ‘consensus’”. A-signifying signs do not refer and re-produce; they produce. Thus, asignification is incorporated into an expanded concept of the sign. Whilst for Peirce, the sign is a “representamen”, with “representative quality”, for Deleuze, signs “are not signs of a thing; they are signs of the passages of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, they mark a certain threshold crossed in the course of these movements”; the sign is “what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates”—a “communication” that, again, is an a-signifying relation, a new order of communication that bears no allegiance to common sense, or to an already existing community of thinkers. Deleuze’s definition of the diagram as the “height of abstraction, but also the moment at which abstraction becomes real” could have been taken from Peirce - and indicates their shared constructivist position (that reality becomes real through a construction). But for Deleuze this “abstraction” does not entail schematic simplification of the formal outlines of a problem, and this “reality” has no basis in, or resemblance to any previous reality (whether conceived, or existing). …
Whilst Peirce’s diagrammatic thought expands thought beyond what is immediately self-evident to it by constructing mediated possibilities on the basis of what is inherently possible for thought, Deleuze’s diagram is a construction of new possibilities that explode that which inheres in thought, explode thought as a form of inherence, and forces thought on a “line of flight” with the “outside” (the intensive “outside” of pure difference). “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” on the plane of “machinic” intensities/forces, of unliveable possibilities that could not have been projected on the basis of what already exists, and shatters what thought can already think. A “thought without image” is opposed to the thought with image that recognizes itself in the act of thinking and subjects thinking to a self-grounding in its representational activity. This “thought without image” is a “thought which is born in thought, the act of thinking which is neither given by innateness nor presupposed by reminiscence but engendered in its genitality”, a thought that thinks only by means of difference around a point of ungrounding. …
Kamini Vellodi, Diagrammatic Thought: Two Forms of Constructivism in C.S. Peirce and Gilles Deleuze
We need to provincialize language because we conflate representation with language and this conflation finds its way into our theory. We universalize this distinctive human propensity by first assuming that all representation is something human and then by supposing that all representation has languagelike properties. That which ought to be delimited as something unique becomes instead the bedrock for our assumptions about representation.
This conflation of representation with language—the assumption that all representational phenomena have symbolic properties—holds even for those kinds of projects that are explicitly critical of cultural, symbolic, or linguistic approaches. It is apparent in classical materialist critiques of the symbolic and the cultural. ...
The alignment between humans, culture, the mind, and representation, on the one hand, and nonhumans, nature, bodies, and matter, on the other, remains stable even in posthuman approaches that seek to dissolve the boundaries that have been erected to construe humans as separate from the rest of the world. This is true of Deleuzian approaches, as exemplified, for example, by Jane Bennett (2010), that deny the analytical purchase of representation and telos altogether—since these are seen, at best, as exclusively human mental affairs.
… the most productive way to overcome this dualism is not to do away with representation (and by extension telos, intentionality, “aboutness,” and selfhood), or simply project human kinds of representation elsewhere, but to radically rethink what it is that we take representation to be. …
We humans are not the only ones who do things for the sake of a future by re-presenting it in the present. All living selves do this in some way or another. Representation, purpose, and future are in the world—and not just in that part of the world that we delimit as human mind. This is why it is appropriate to say that there is agency in the living world that extends beyond the human. …
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think
