Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, Part 2
All sense floats on a sea of nonsense.
This is a continuation of Deleuze’s approach to language. As summarized in the last article, Deleuze explicates the concept of “sense” as that which informs and guides language, delivering meanings that are in a constant state of flux.
Sense is paradoxical. It goes beyond doxa, common opinion, that which everyone knows. It goes beyond common sense and good sense.
At the boundary of a proposition and a state of affairs, sense hovers over and glides under any match between, or purported to exist, under a representational view of language.
Sense overflows language.
Sense as paradox underscores the instability between language and the world.
Sense is not static, but dynamic. It moves through language, through propositions and their corresponding states of affairs. Sense changes and differentiates, emerges and fades away.
Nonsense
According to Deleuze, sense harks to something deeper from which it emerges: nonsense.
For Deleuze, just as reality is pure difference, language is immersed in difference. He approaches language in terms of process:
At the boundary, sense brings into contact language as difference with reality as difference.
But beneath sense, that from which sense emerges, is a sea of nonsense. The paradoxical element of sense is in fact nonsense. Nonsense operates in such a manner as:
…to traverse the heterogeneous series, to make them resonate and converge, but also to ramify them and to introduce into each one of them multiple disjunctions. (The Logic of Sense)
Through the Looking Glass
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze illustrates the relation between sense and nonsense by referring to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and the meeting of Alice and the Knight:
“The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’”
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name of the song is called. The name is really ‘The Aged Aged Man.’”
“Then I ought to have said, “That’s what the song is called?” Alice corrected herself.
“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is called ‘Ways and Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”
“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who by this time was completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a Gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”
And at this point, the Knight sings the song.
Carroll’s writings open up sense to the nonsense from which it is derived. Traversing the sense of a linguistic exchange is paradox, and the nonsensical. And for Deleuze, paradox and the relations between sense and nonsense permeate all language.
Language as Process
The relation between sense and nonsense reveals there is more to language than representation. More is conveyed that a correspondence theory of language can allow for. Language overflows itself, weaving through the paradoxes of sense and nonsense:
It is language which fixes the limits (the moment, for example, at which the excess begins), but it is language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming. (The Logic of Sense)
Nonsense is the force or process underlying language. It is the dynamic that comes together from time to time as sense only to dissolve back into paradox. It is only on the basis of nonsense that sense can emerge. Sense is produced by nonsense, an effect.
Nonsense is the pure difference of language. Nonsense is the virtuality of language, as is the sense that is produced from it, akin to a sea of intensities and the singularities which rise and fall in a never-ending process.
Language as Art
To affirm language, to see both sense and nonsense as the virtual of a proposition and a state of affairs, is to view language not purely in static, objective terms; but at all times creative, experimental.
Language is at all times evolving and changing, and never fixed in meaning.
All of which coincides with thought without an image, thought as the posing of question, dwelling creatively in problems rather than rushing to discover solutions.
Viewed from this perspective, language is art, expressive, novelty. And to accept and embrace a reality of pure difference, it is complementary that both thought and language have this liquid quality of becoming.
Reality, our experience of it, and the way we express it all participate in the same virtual process. How we express ourselves reflects our view of reality and experience.
When we use language in a static and closed manner, one limited to representation and judgement, we reactively close ourselves off from an experience of reality as becoming.
On the other hand, when we engage with language as art, an active force, we open ourselves to the creativity and adventure that is reality based in pure difference.
When we engage with language in a manner that taps into the transformative power of sense and nonsense, we open ourselves to the novel and wondrous, the exceptional and arresting.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
