Stretching Language to Its Limit: Deleuze and the Problem of Poiesis

Here I begin with Lecercle’s assumption that language is a “problem” for Deleuze, who like Beckett wants to demonstrate the limits of (literary, poetic) language yet can only do so by writing. In “He Stuttered” Deleuze says truly experimental poets stretch the two (initially associative and syntactic) axes of langue to a point “far from equilibrium” where they begin to “stutter” and words (like atoms) begin to self-divide and redouble. After exploring this model and Deleuze’s related discussion of Beckett’s narrative praxis of “exhausting logical possibilities” in “The Exhausted,” I point out that although he specifically rejects “metaphor” as a term tied to classical semiotics, and in his discussions of Beckettian exhaustion and the stuttering langue-machine (which vibrates the classical metaphoric-metonymic axes beyond recognition) does seem to overthrow semiotics, Deleuze’s own discourse seems constantly driven by metaphorical language. For instance, the notion that beyond langue lies “silence” is itself a poetic (metaphorical) rather than “logical” one, as is the argument that Beckett’s inclusive-disjunctive “non-style” tries to “give the possible a reality that is itself exhaustible.” In a final section I show how a model based on the background noise (not sound/silence) of information theory can be fruitfully compared with Deleuze’s vibrating-langue model, and suggest that the former may actually be a simpler, more “efficient” model.