The Ontogenesis of Language
The Ontogenesis of Language

Summary/Abstract: Those of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts that pertain to their ideas on language are characterised by sometimes gradual, sometimes dramatic, modifications of concepts, by accessions to new dimensions of thought as they turn to face (or to create) new problematics, by aporias resulting from the abandonment of concepts, and by generally fluid and sometimes amorphous ideas. All of which makes their refusal to devote a single text exclusively to the question of language rather appropriate. This clearly fi ts with Deleuze and Guattari’s view, counter to the in-vogue linguistics and semiologies of the time, that language is not an epiphenomenon. However, the question of language, of what it is and how it functions, is never far from the surface of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing and, I will argue, an exact and yet rigorous consistency of thought – or at least a number of relatively stable points amidst a sea of shifting perspectives and structures – can be found. These points, or axis are at far remove from all other schools of language and linguistics, making a comparative analysis problematic, as they rely on perhaps some of Deleuze’s most illusive, yet most powerful, concepts. This paper works through how ‘Sense’, ‘the Event’, ‘Aion’ and ‘Chronos’ provide open yet reliable conceptual parameters for a theory capable of capturing language’s profoundly open and heterogenic nature.For Deleuze ‘language never has universality in itself, self-sufficient formalisation, a general semiology or a metalanguage’ and due to its essentially amorphous nature, is the primary manifestation of becoming and the poetics of life. Here we have an iteration of the underlying logic to Deleuzian thought, repeated in all his works from painting to cinema, social assemblages to biological milieu and exemplified by this theory of language. The creation of a conceptual system that has an armature, is productive and coherent, its features (the Event, Aion and Chronos) can be subjected to critique and analysis, yet is consubstantial with life’s polymorphous nature and creative potential. The essential point being that the pulsations and movements of Chronos and Aion, Event and Series, are themselves not transcendental structures or manifolds, but folded, aliquid interactions that form the melodic counterpoints of life and therein lies the ontogenesis of language.

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