I've recently spent a week in Jamaica. The following are hazy fragments pulled from the drunken wreckage that the reader may appreciate:
Minoritarian Language:
While the residents of the wonderful tropic island speak and write in English, the significant cultural language privileged there is 'Patwa' which is a spoken phonetic language that - as if indexing the myriad past colonial forces that produced modern day Jamaica and its peoples - pulls together a variety of other languages and dialectics such as English, Scottish, Spanish, and African.
For example, 'alright man' is spoken as 'I'ree man;' a sign in a traffic circle read 'Nuh dutty up Jamaica' or 'Don't dirty up Jamaica' (don' litter). And here's one from the Wiki: "im caan biit mi, im dʒos loki dat im won" - "He can't beat me, he simply got lucky and won."
I'm inclined to say that the language is less representational than other languages for two reasons;
- 1:While a chain of signifiers is still at play, and while a word still represents a thing (that is, words aren't degenerated completely into sound / used as brute force inductors, like a tic, screech, or a growl), it is significant that the brute force of the throat-chest coupling and how it makes use of air to produce phonemes is preserved alongside the representational aspect of the language;
- 2: The language is not written, it is spoken, and with that, it is less abstract-rule-bound, and therefore more fluid, flexible, and open to drift. Speakers toy with the intonations, emphasis, harshness, etc. Speaking certainly relies on stored information - conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit, etc., - of the language, but each encounter between enunciators is a relatively unique event. A historical story of global power landgrabs plays itself out in the mouth of each islander; a cascade of alien languages inhabit bodies performing a kind of linguistic dance.
Ok, I am getting a bit carried away (I've been drinking). In other words, for the most part if you know English, you can hear the language and intuit its meaning without needing to know Patwa,, and the fact that it is not written and therefore more open to interpretation means that it is less deadlocked by representation.
Deleuze and Guattari return to these concepts again and again throughout A Thousand Plateaus:
"vocal substance, which brings into play various organic elements: not only the larynx, but the mouth and lips...the mouth as a deterritorialization of the snout...the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips...an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human females have breasts...deterritorialized mammary glands: the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, and the breasts on the lips). What a curious deterritorialization, filling one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe, once more, seems to have exerted strong pressures of selection: the 'supple larynx' is a development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest. To articulate, to speak, is to speak softly" (pg. 60-61).
"each minor language has a properly dialectical zone of variation...it is rare to find clear boundaries on dialect maps; instead, there are transitional and limitrophe zones, zones of indiscernibility. It is also said that 'the Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than any system of spelling...Black English has its own grammar, which is not defined by a sum of mistakes or infractions against standard English" (pg. 101-102) [more by me on Quebecois here].
The authors go on in explaining that all speaking is a kind of singing, and that any major language, such as British English, is picked apart and reworked by 'the minorities of the world.' The majoritarian is homogenous, while the minoritarian is "potential...becoming" (pg. 106).
Micropolitics
For Deleuze and Guattari, minor language and non-representation are linked to vital politics.
The authors note that representation is an unavoidable evil, but one that should be employed in a way that decreases the overall amount of representaton in the world. That is, it is to be avoided, but one can only avoid it by using it. The only way out is through.
This amounts to a Molecular or micropolitics (see here for more) - or an attempt at nonrepresentational politics. A politics that is not mired in language, which Guattari often described as "impotent." A politics whose energy is not captured by a deadening linguistic apparatus that must appeal to an other.
As Land puts it in his NRx text The Dark Enlightenment - 'exit not voice.'
Democracy is the epitome of representational politics. It's all voice, no exit, and to make matters worse, the multiple voices of the crowd (polyvocality) are reduced (overcoded) to the one 'representative' that symbolically stands in for the many via bureaucracy.
As Land continues in The Dark Enlightenment
"the democratic mechanism in extremis, separating individuals and local populations from the consequences of their decisions by scrambling their behavior through large-scale, centralized re-distribution systems. You decide what you do, but then vote on the consequences. How could anyone say ‘no’ to that?
No surprise that over 30 years of EU membership Greeks have been eagerly cooperating with a social-engineering mega-project that strips out all short-wave social signals and re-routes feedback through the grandiose circuitry of European solidarity, ensuring that all economically-relevant information is red-shifted through the heat-death sump of the European Central Bank...thus effectively disabling all financial feedback on domestic policy choices."
Don't worry - I have a stupid vignette for this too. It has a bit of a set up, so hang in there.
- 1: When we landed I had a local beer in the airport lounge. Rather than bring me the can, it was poured into a Styrofoam cup. I am not being hyperbolic when I say it smelled exactly like sewage, or low tide. I drank it anyways.
- 2: Later, while being taxied, we drove past a large factory-looking building which we were informed is the plant the local beer I had earlier in the lounge is produced at. This was a building with no security - not a single guard, fence, or camera.
- 3: Even later, while walking along the beech I saw a pool of murky rainwater that had collected in a concrete divot - "maybe that's the beer they gave me earlier" I joked to my girlfriend. "Everyone here drinks that stuff, so everyone would get sick, and they'd all know exactly what unguarded building to storm if so" she retorted. "A good incentive to produce a beer that is in fact not poison, as the product feedback would be instant, and extreme, unlike America where'd you'd have to call Bud Lite's hotline, and proceed with a long legal battle" I responded.
It's merely an anecdote, but on this small island, local populations are not separated from the consequences of their actions, their behaviors remain relatively unscrambled, unvoted upon, and therefore the financial feedback loops remain intact. Perhaps a minoritarian language obstructed or deccelerated the development of linguistic, representational, symbolic, abstract bureaucratic apparatuses of capture?
Militant Monism
My girlfriend and I are being taxied in a van whose entire insides have been covered in leather and suede. It's sticky and I've had a few. The driver is making small talk so I start small-talking back.
Driver looks back:
"We don't like the cops here, they're all corrupt, but the military - we like them. They aren't corrupt. They really protect the people. They do the job the cops are supposed to do but don't. And they're not allowed to leave the island. Only protect, not fight wars."
Interesting. Cops bad, military good. Not what we'd expect with our Western ACAB notions that lump all armed authority together.
Some time goes by in hot silence. Then:
"We don't like politicians around here either. They divide people. See that statute - that's Samuel Sharpe. He was a revolutionary. Our revolutionaries are people, not politicians"
Later, I'm sitting on the beach drinking a fruity cocktail and Bob Marley's 1973 hit 'I Shot the Sheriff' comes on. As we all know, the lyrics go
'I Shot the Sheriff, but I Didn't Shoot the Deputy'
In other words, I will own up to killing the local authority, but I won't own up to killing the authority above the local authority. In other words, I shot the cops (we don't like cops), but I didn't shoot the military (we like the military).
Next, Marley's 'One Love/People Get Ready' came on.
Cops are likened to the corrupt government and the corrupt politicians that divide people - separate people from themselves, incentives, feedback, etc., - but the military are likened to the militant revolutionaries that fought against politicians in order to unite people - that is, one love, one people.
The cops look inward, to regulate, and are disliked, while the military acts as a wall to keep others out so that the civilians can live their lives. If the Jamaicans I met had their way, they'd do away with cops, solve problems on an individual, case by case basis (like they do with their crazy driving), and utilize the military for its purely negative function of keeping threats out - as a kind of hard border of bodies.
Proto-patchwork anyone?
