Melissa Wright

Presentation
12.2.2013
The Double Function of Sense in Khlebnikov and Deleuze

Lets Eat Grandma: The Double Function of Sense in Khlebnikov and Deleuze

You eat what you are served or you are served to what you eat.

Bats eat cats. Cats eat bats.

In this paper, I will compare Deleuzes concept of sense as he develops it in The Logic

of Sense and Khlebnikovs use of the word zaum as well as his treatment of language in Zangezi.

Though these thinkers appear to differ in fundamental ways, I will argue that both strive to offer

a conception of language that is not only materialist but which seeks to understand the

fundamentally experiential basis for language, Khlebnikov with respect to his geometry of

happening, as Ziarek puts it in Historicity of Experience, and Deleuze with respect to the

priority of sense in the genesis of meaning (205). I will finally analyze the Epilogue from

Zangezi to demonstrate how the play enacts rather vividly the philosophical tenets we might call

Deleuzean (or shall we say Khlebnikovian). Indeed, the joke Zangezi plays in the Epilogue

illuminates the neutrality of sense and as such, its distinct ability to accommodate not only good

sense, but paradox and non-sense.

While Deleuze, in following the Stoics, places the material world of bodies (or things) as

primary and the world of ideas or languages as secondary, Khlebnikov wants to collapse such

distinctions, to view language not as a separate layer of the world or epiphenomenal output

thereof, but as a part of the world, literally made from the world (blocks of space). Though

language does emerge from the state of affairs, for Deleuze, it is unable to truly penetrate the

deeper mixtures of bodies and thus only capable of rendering meaningful, or effectuating, that
which rests on the outer edges of reality: a shimmer at the surface of things or sonorous, optical,

or linguistic effects (7). Moreover, in prioritizing the physical world as primary, causes are

associated with material bodies and effects with immaterial language. Deleuze frames the

Stoics movement toward this properly materialist worldview as an extreme reversal of Platonic

thought, whereby Ideas or eternal forms are no longer lying in the depth of things, out of reach,

but pushed to the level of the surface, thus constituting all possible ideality. What is now out

of reach, according to Deleuze and the Stoics, is not access to the eternal forms governing the

true and the false, Ideas from the simulacra, but the mixtures of corporeal bodies, that is, access

to actual causes.

What is interesting, however, is that though Deleuze does insist on this Stoic divide

between bodies and language, he enlists sense to return the proposition to its properly

empiricist and materialist basis. Sense is the immaterial event, or phantasm of the surface effects,

but it is still grounded in materiality, directing one side to propositions (language) and the other

to the state of affairs. Moreover, Deleuze infers the existence of sense as that which generates a

real denotation from an ideational material or stratum and renders the effects of that state of

affairs within the realm of language. Deleuze offers the following helpful passage to clarify the

priority of sense: When I designate something, I always suppose that the sense is understood,

that it is already there. As Bergson said, one does not proceed from sounds to images and from

images to senses; rather, one is established from the outset within sense. Sense is like the

sphere in which I am already established in order to enact possible denotations, and even to think

their conditions (28). Sense, here, is capable of assuring a real genesis of denotation not

because it approximates physical reality, but because it is, as Deleuze and Guattari write of

anexact expression in A Thousand Plateaus, the exact passage of that which is underway (20).
In this respect, it does not matter what the proposition expresses or to what it refers, sense (or

expression, as Husserl refers to it) functions and in so doing precedes all the components of the

proposition. In other words, sense is neutral and like zaum, contains within it the beyond of

conventional or good sense and as I argue in the full length paper, though it is the state of affairs

or corporeal surface that makes sense possible, language imbues in it its infinitive and

accommodates future possibilities. This is why, I believe, Deleuze refers to the infinitive verb as

poetry itself; it arrests meaning and shoots it out in two directions at once, as one can read in

the very French definition of sens as not only meaning or sense, but also direction, way, and line.

We might say in this respect that sense for Deleuze mirrors some elements of

beyonsense, a concept Khlebnikov borrows from Kruchenykh to characterize a surplus of

meaning that necessitates the constant creation of new words. Beyonsense, the English

translation of zaum, can be read as beyond/behind (za) the mind, brain, or nous (um). The

beyond/behind of zaum then seems to refer to the world itself, to physical space and we might

say that combined with sense, it fulfills the double function of Deleuzes notion of sense:

directing one side to the state of affairs and the other to the proposition, to meaning or the

conventional understanding of sense, as we might take the Russian um to signify. Indeed,

Deleuze and Khlebnikov both seem to resituate an apparently immaterial form of meaning or

signification in the world of materiality, thus offering a materialist account of mental thoughts, or

noema, but also attributing to language that which it gives back to the world, specifically in its

orientation toward.

In the Epilogue of Zangezi we find what appears to be an enactment of the neutrality of

sense and the possibilities of nonsense in conventional language: All he left was a little note

that said: / Razor, cut my throat! but as we find at the end of the Epilogue, this cannot be the
case, because, after all: Zangezi lives! / It was all just a stupid joke! Zangezi lives, one might

say, in a Deleuzian sense, because the sense of the suicide note is neutral: It can mean both

Razor, cut my throat! but also Razor, do not cut my throat! (or perhaps to put it like Lewis

Carroll might: Throat, cut my razor!). For Deleuze, this is the case because the expression of

sense is always independent of the denoted object. Indeed, as he points out with respect to

Husserl, one denotatum (e.g., star) can have two neomata (e.g., morning star and evening star)

(Deleuze 20). Moreover, [s]ense, writes Deleuze is strictly the same for propositions which

are opposed from the point of view of quality, quantity, relation, or modality (32). Zangezis

death note is an expression or sense, because it does not denote anything. If the note were to

denote something in the world, it would have to have read: Razor cut my throat! In other

words, a razor literally cut my throat.

However, if we think of Khlebnikovs understanding of language as a kind of geometry

of happening, to borrow Ziareks phrase again, it seems necessary to question whether he would

agree with such a reading, since for him language is indeed dependent on the material world.

What the Epilogue shows us though is that we can still enact non-sense within the confines of

conventional language. In some sense, the trickery of his death illustrates not only the paradoxes

language accommodatesallowing him to be both alive and dead at the same timeit also

reveals that his listeners have not learned the lesson of the play, as stated in Plane Eight:

Particles of speech. Parts of movement. Words they do not exist; only movements in space

and their parts points and areas . . . (205). Language, for Khlebnikov, is not composed of

words or static meanings, so the death note is not an actual death note, but rather a trick at the

level of expression or sense. And yet, it would seem that Khlebnikov is even more radical than

Deleuze, who is understandably more careful given his philosophic roots. Khlebnikov on both
sides of sensethat is, he wants language to merge with the world on the one hand and for

sense to erupt into non-sense on the other.

Double-function of sense: what does it tell us about ideology, if anything?

The sense and non-sense of revolt

Thought is the front of that page, while sound is hidden on the back.

Passive and unmotivated movements

Visual, sonic surface of the text (Saussure Deleuze?)

Saussure does not

Words not in meaning, but marks that need to be encountered. Howe

Visual and acoustic to her are a great mystery. Every mark on the page is an acoustic mark. The

shape on the page cannot be separated from the acoustic. Howe

Use infinitives, abolish adjectives (Marinetti) but also Deleuze?

We must renounce being understood. - Marinetti