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Assemblages, Multiplicities, and the Asemic: Re-reading Austin, Derrida, and Multimodality through Deleuze and Guattari
In twentieth-century philosophy, the debate between J.L. Austin and Jacques Derrida over Speech Act Theory marked a decisive rupture in how thinkers understood language. Austin shifted philosophy away from mere representation toward linguistic action, while Derrida exposed the instability of context and the metaphysical bias favoring speech over writing. Yet, viewed through the radical materialism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, both thinkers remain trapped inside an overly linguistic, sign-obsessed worldview. In works like A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari dismantle the primacy of the signifier altogether, offering a philosophy of assemblages, multiplicities, and asignifying semiotics. Re-reading the Austin-Derrida debate, language acquisition, and structural asemics through Deleuze and Guattari reveals that human communication is not a binary contest between speech and writing, nor a chain of disembodied traces, but a rhizomatic, multimodal machine operating across bodies, environments, and affects.
Order-Words and Collective Assemblages: Deleuze and Guattari on Austin
Deleuze and Guattari hold J.L. Austin in remarkably high esteem, largely because he broke with the idea that language is primarily a tool for transmitting information or representing reality. In A Thousand Plateaus, they seize upon Austin’s concept of the illocutionary act—language doing something in the very moment it is spoken—and radicalize it through their concept of the order-word (mot d'ordre). For Deleuze and Guattari, the elementary unit of language is not the statement of fact, but the command, the slogan, or the social directive that compels obedience and organizes reality.
However, Deleuze and Guattari refuse to anchor these speech acts in the conscious intention of an individual speaker or a static set of polite "felicity conditions." Instead, they argue that every speech act emerges from a collective assemblage of enunciation. When a judge pronounces a defendant guilty, the judge’s words do not work because of the judge’s inner sincerity. They work because the words are plugged into a vast social machine—a courtroom, legal codes, police forces, prisons, and historical power relations. Through what Deleuze and Guattari call incorporeal transformations, language instantaneously alters the social status of bodies (turning an accused citizen into a convict) without changing their physical matter. Thus, Austin’s performative is rescued from individualistic psychology and placed directly into the realm of social power and material institutions.
Beyond the Signifier: Critiquing Derrida’s Textualism
If Deleuze and Guattari appreciate Austin’s pragmatics, they are deeply critical of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. While Derrida brilliantly exposed the "phonocentrism" of Western philosophy—the privileging of spoken presence over written absence—Deleuze and Guattari argue that Derrida merely inverted the hierarchy without escaping its trap. By expanding "writing" (archi-écriture) to encompass all reality, Derrida replaced the tyranny of the spoken voice with the imperialism of the Signifier and the text.
For Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida’s obsession with iterability, textual traces, and endless chains of signifiers remains a form of linguistic idealism. In Derrida’s framework, signs only ever refer to other signs in an infinite deferral of meaning. Deleuze and Guattari reject this closed textual loop. In their view, language is never an autonomous, self-referential system of signs; it is always directly plugged into non-linguistic reality—into bodies, tools, desires, ecosystems, and physical forces. Where Derrida sees a signifier constantly slipping away from its context, Deleuze and Guattari see a rhizome: an open network where words, gestures, physical objects, and biological drives connect laterally without any need for a master linguistic text.
Language Learning and Functional Ecology as Rhizomatic Connection
Shifting focus to language acquisition and everyday functional communication exposes the exact limits of Derrida’s textualism while confirming Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. A child learning to speak does not enter a pre-existing web of disembodied signifiers, nor do they decode abstract rules of iterability. Instead, the learner enters a machinic assemblage—a dynamic coupling of bodies, spaces, and practical needs.
In a kitchen, a playground, or a workshop, language learning is a process of becoming and functional experimentation. A child’s vocalizations, pointing fingers, eye movements, and physical reaches connect directly with a caregiver’s posture, the weight of a cup, and the spatial layout of a room. Here, language functions as a tool for navigating the environment, coordinating bodily movements, and channeling affect (the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected). Meaning is not derived from the structural difference between written or spoken signs; it is produced through real-time, ecological coupling. Function dictates connection, and communication succeeds because the organism and its environment operate as a single, integrated system.
The Primacy of the Multimodal Assemblage
This ecological reality highlights Derrida’s central blind spot: his failure to offer a truly multimodal critique. Because Derrida was focused on dismantling the philosophical bias of speech over writing, he treated communication almost exclusively as a linguistic problem. Yet, through a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens, reducing communication to a debate between speech and writing misses the fundamental nature of how assemblages work.
Communication is inherently a multiplicity—a heterogeneous, multimodal interplay of vocal frequencies, facial micro-expressions, posture, spatial proximity, visual icons, and material artifacts. Face-to-face spoken interaction is not privileged in human life because of a metaphysical illusion of "presence." Rather, embodied interaction is a high-bandwidth intensive assemblage where multiple sensory registers operate simultaneously. Gesture, prosody, and physical space do not merely decorate spoken words; they form a single, indivisible expressive machine. When writing strips away the body and the immediate physical space, it does not reveal the "true" iterable nature of all language, as Derrida claimed. Instead, it creates a different kind of assemblage—one that must compensate for the loss of somatic channels by inventing new material supports, such as punctuation, page layout, and typographic formatting. Multimodality is therefore far more decisive than any speech-versus-writing hierarchy because it describes the actual material reality of how bodies and environments interact.
Asignifying Semiotics and Structural Asemics
Finally, Deleuze and Guattari provide the exact philosophical vocabulary needed to understand structural asemics—the non-semantic, non-linguistic scaffolding that organizes communication without carrying readable meaning. They call this realm asignifying semiotics (or a-signifying ruptures). Unlike linguistic signs, which represent concepts and require conscious interpretation, asignifying signs act directly upon matter, nervous systems, and social machines.
Examples of asignifying, structural asemics permeate both speech and writing:
- In Embodied Interaction: The rhythmic cadence of a voice, a sudden silence, a shift in posture, or the architectural layout of a room operate directly on the nervous system. Before a single word is processed by the brain, these asemic rhythms modulate affect, establish territory, and prime bodies for action.
- In Text and Digital Media: White space, margins, font weight, musical notation, mathematical symbols, and computer code do not "mean" something in the way a spoken noun does; they operate structurally to direct the eye, organize space, or trigger automated processes.
In the Austin-Derrida debate, structural asemics was the unacknowledged engine running beneath the surface. Austin’s "felicity conditions" depended entirely on asignifying spatial and rhythmic cues—the elevated bench of a judge, the ceremonial pacing of a ritual—which he vaguely dismissed as mere "conventions." Derrida, meanwhile, constantly exploited the asemic spacing of the printed page to disrupt his readers, yet he subordinated this rich sensory materiality to the linguistic metaphor of "writing." Deleuze and Guattari liberate structural asemics from the shadow of language, recognizing that rhythmic, spatial, and material patterns are primary forces in their own right.
Conclusion
Re-reading the clash between J.L. Austin and Jacques Derrida through the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari transforms a narrow dispute over words into a expansive theory of material life. Austin rightly discovered that language is an active force that transforms social reality, while Derrida showed that no speaker can lock down the destiny of a sign. Yet both thinkers remained bound to a world where language was the supreme arbiter of meaning. Deleuze and Guattari shatter this linguistic enclosure. By replacing the isolated speaker with the collective assemblage, the endless text with the ecological rhizome, and the linguistic signifier with multimodal, asignifying semiotics, they reveal communication for what it truly is. Human expression is never a simple choice between speech and writing; it is a vibrant, multisensory machine in which bodies, rhythms, spaces, and words collide to produce the world anew.
If you would like to explore this further, we could look into:
- How Deleuze and Guattari's concepts apply to modern digital and algorithmic communication (like social media feeds or AI interfaces)
- A deeper dive into Guattari’s specific semiotics (such as his distinction between signifying and a-signifying semiologies)
Which direction sounds most interesting to you?
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