"Becoming expressive: The Theory of the sign in Hjelmslev and Deleuze and Guattari"

The main subject of my PhD thesis was the strong expressivity of the street art form –
graffiti, which led me to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the sign and to its base – the work
of Louis Hjelmslev. Hjelmslev’s theory goes beyond the structuralist definition and meaning
of the sign to give a meaningful explanation of expression, which I used in my analysis of
graffiti. Without rejecting the fact that graffiti is often considered as a form of personal
representation, I choose another point of view to observe it. I concentrated on the single
graffiti form, which is already “born” and finds its existence within the urban social body.
For that reason I did not analyse its creator and his or her reasons to do graffiti in my
research. I was instead interested in the mechanism of expressivity, and trying to understand
the process of “becoming expressive” in Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of sign and territory
guided me to its roots in Hjelmslev’s sign theory.

In his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language1 Hjelmslev presents a theory of the sign from
the perspective of its expression. The binary structure signifier - signified, with the former
representing the latter, is not the basis of Hjelmslev’s sign. According to Deleuze and
Guattari Hjelmslev describes a new plane of immanence, where the double articulation is not
between two hierarchical levels of language but between two deterritorialised planes, which
are constituted by virtue of the relations between them. Hjelmslev's sign in fact achieves a
new threshold of deterritorialisation and that is why Guattari defines it as a
deterrittorialisation machine2. It is this, Deleuze and Guattari claim in Anti-Oedipus that
makes Hjelmslev's the only linguistic theory that is adjusted to both the flows of capitalism
and schizophrenia.3 They write about a different use of language in capitalism, which is a
non-signified and is realized within the plane of immanence. It is a language of flows, in
which the signs could be anything i.g. phonic, graphic, gestural etc., and they appear by
virtue of a relationship between the flows. And in this language no flow is dominant or
privileged than another. Hjelmslev’s sign appears to be the sign, which is used by the
capitalism, which language is „language of signs imposed on it by merchant capital or
axiomatic of the market.”, write D&G in Anti-Oedipus4.

Hjelmslev considers the sign as a linguistic structure, but he goes beyond the linguistic in his

1
Hjelmslev, L.: Prolegomena to a theory of language, Madison 1963.
2
Guattari, F.: The Anti-Œdipus Papers, Cambridge, Mass & London England 2006, p. 201.
3
Cf. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 312.
4
Ibid., p.310

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theory, because he produced an axiomatic and universal formula of the sign in general from
this. So although he regarded the sign as a binary structure, as Ferdinand de Saussure did,
contrary to Saussure Hjelmslev’s sign has an expression and a content rather than a signifier
and a signified as its elements. As a result, Hjelmslev no longer considered the sign as a sign
of something, i.e. it is no longer a signifier of a signified. This leads to a completely different
meaning of the term 'sign', which no longer needs to be considered as necessarily linguistic.
Accordingly the sign is not an expression whose content is exterior to it, but, as Hjelmslev
puts it, 'an entity generated by the connexion between an expression and a content.' 5 This
'connection' is what Hjelmslev calls a 'sign function', which emerges between the 'functives'
of expression and content.6 In this sense the sign is no longer defined by what it represents
but by the function that defines the relation between its constituent parts. Thus it seems to be
more than simply a double sided structure, because it is the relations between its components,
and not the components themselves, that constitute it. As Guattari writes in the Anti-Oedipus
Papers, Hjelmslev’s structures are processes.7 This is clearly what interested Deleuze and
Guattari about Hjelmslev's work, that the sign exceeds its linguistic structure, and, as Guattari
writes, quoting Hjelmslev: ”[…] the sign has for its vocation to include everything: ‘It is
incumbent upon this metalanguage to analyse all the multiple meanings of – geographical
and historical, political and social, religious and psychological – content that pertain to a
nation […].‘”8

Hjelmslev specifies the relation between the sign's components, the content and the
expression, as a reciprocal connection, and defines it also as a solidarity between the sign
function and its functives.
So how exactly do these connections function inside the sign structure? Hjelmslev writes: ‘If
one and the same entity contracts different functions in turn, and thus apparently might be
said to be selected by them, it is a matter in each case, but of different functives, different
objects, depending on the point of view that is assumed, i.e. depending on the function from
which the point of view is taken.’9
It means that matters are selected or 'chosen' to be functives in the sign structure by the sign
function and they are functives according to the function they have in the sign. They are
5
Hjelmslev, L.: Prolegomena to a theory of language, ibid. c.f., p. 47.
6
“The terminals of a function we shall call its functives, understanding by a functive an object that has function to other
objects.“ebd.: p. 33 and 47-48.
7
Guattari, F.: The Anti-Œdipus Papers, Cambridge, Mass & London England 2006, p. 201.
8
Ibid., p. 217-218.( Guattari quotes Hjelmslev from the french edition of Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage, 1943,
p.167. According to the editor of „The Anti- Œdipus Papers” he replaced in the quotation the term métasémiotique with the
term métalangage.).
9
Cf. Hjelmslev, L.: Prolegomena to a theory of language, p. 48

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conceivable as functives only according to a certain sign function, but at the same time the
sign function itself is not conceivable without its functives.10 Thus the sign function after
Hjelmslev, is “in itself a solidarity”. As a result a content cannot exist without an expression,
and a content is always a content of a certain expression, and vice versa. As Deleuze and
Guattari put it, content and expression are in 'reciprocal presupposition'. This interconnection
between the components in Hjelmslev's sign exceeds any dualism, although because
Hjelmslev himself often emphasised a dual structure to his sign similar to that of Saussaure's
Guattari criticized it for being a 'pseudodualism'.11 This is the first sense in which D&G
separate their use of Hjelmslev's sign from its source, insisting both on its multiple rather
than dualist nature, and hence definitively distinguishing it from Saussure's linguistics.
What is important about Hjelmslev's sign for D&G is that it can include and express
everything. This can only be understood by going deeper into the structure of Hjelmslev's
sign.

Here it must be emphasised that the substances of content and expression cannot be the same.
There is a difference between them, which is defined by the sign function. Hjelmslev
excludes the structural principal that presents content and expression in a hierarchical order,
i.e. one part as being dependent on the other. He writes instead about a common principle or
factor, which is defined only by its ‘having a function’ in what makes a language different
from another one. Hjelmslev named it a ‘purport’ – an unformed, amorphous
(Quotation)“thought mass”, which is an unanalysed entity, defined by external functions,
i.e. it is determined and formed each time by the sign function into a content-substance.
Quoting Hjelmslev – “Purport remains each time, substance for a new form, and has no
possible existence except through being substance for one form or another”12
Hjelmslev’s idea about an unformed matter is very important for Deleuze and Guattari
because it is the reason why a sign can be anything. The unformed matter or the purport is
what they call a plane of consistency, or Body without Organs, which they define as a pure
intensity, a plane composed of free singularities13. This is the foundation for D&G's concept
of the sign. As Stephen Zepke writes, “This understanding of the sign is therefore
ontological, because it puts the sign back into contact with the material and vital plane of
consistency that constitutes it.”14
10
Ibid.

11
Cf. Guattari, F.: The Anti-Œdipus Papers, p. 240.
12
Cf. Hjelmslev, L.: Prolegomena to a theory of language, p. 52.
13
Cf. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: Thausend Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 43.
14
Zepke, S.: Art as Abstract Machine, p. 121.

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According to Deleuze and Guattari the sign's content consists of 'formed matters', which can
be observed from two different perspectives: as substances, insofar there are 'chosen' by the
sign function, and as a form, insofar they are 'chosen' in a certain order. 15 In this sense the
content is the material functive in the sign structure.
The other functive of the sign, the expression, completes the sign structure. According to
Hjelmslev expression can be observed in exactly the same way as the content, namely from
two different viewpoints, as substance and as form. But in this case the substances are not
matters but qualities. Analogical to the substances of the content these qualities must be
chosen as components by the sign function and be chosen in a certain order which is the form
of expression.

These processes constituting the sign organise, or encode it's matter into a “static” and
“stable” order (a form). Every time this order changes the sign takes on another code, which
organises the substances anew. Deleuze and Guattari write, “Forms imply a code, [and so]
modes of coding and decoding.”16
For Hjelmslev, substances and form are variables, or as Deleuze and Guattari call them
“intermediate states”,17 inasmuch as one can find in the structure of content, in its form and
substances, elements that could “play the role of expression in relation to other forms and
substances“18.
Hjelmslev writes:
“[...] expression and content are chosen in conformity with established notions and are
quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no justification for calling one,
and not the other, of these entities expression, or one, and not the other, content. They
are defined only by their mutual solidarity, and neither of them can be identified
otherwise. They are each defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually
opposed functives of one and the same function.” 19

This means the sign components are autonomic, because they ”[…] necessarily presuppose
each other”20, as Hjelmslev writes, but the components of their structures can exchange their

15
Cf. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: Thausend Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 43.
16
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: Thausend Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 43.
17
Ibid., p. 44.
18
Cf. ibid. p. 44.

19
Hjelmslev, L: Prolegomena to a theory of language, p. 60.
20
Ibid.

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“roles”. Guattari’s critique on this point is that although Hjelmslev describes the content and
expression as variables and autonomic components, which can presuppose each other, he still
keeps the duality of the sign distinguishing its components from one another and continuing
to see the sign only as linguistic. For that reason Deleuze and Guattari describe the 'sign
function' more accurately as a process passing in-between the structure it simultaneously
defines.21 This turns the sign into an open multiplicity, in which a change in any of the parts
means a change in the whole. As a result, and as Deleuze and Guattari write:

“There is never correspondence or conformity between content and expression, only

isomorphism with reciprocal presupposition.”22

Content and expression must therefore be understood as layers or planes of one and the same
structure - the sign.23 Here we return to Guattari’s original postulate that a sign can include
everything. It contains an expression that is not necessarily a linguistic expression. What G
means more exactly is that a sign, understood through Hjelmslev, is not constituted through
the difference between two signifiers, which is the basis of Saussure's sign, and means its
expression is always constituted out of linguistic differences. Hjelmslev moves the sign onto
a material level, and so out into the world. A sign is anything that has been selected as
substance/form and has a content and an expression. It is in fact a manifold assemblage, one
that is, Deleuze and Guattari claim, “[...] so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a
general model, only a relatively simple case.“24
The mechanism of becoming expressive is therefore based on structures which become
processes, as Guattari writes. This allows pure matter to become expressive, and precisely in
this process of becoming expressive the sign appears.

Going deeper into this analysis of sign allowed me to study graffiti from the point of view I
needed. Graffiti can no longer be considered only as a representation of its author, but as an
expressive form as well. Furthermore, it appears and enters into a rhythmic relation with its
background, the city, taking its place directly over the rough textures of the urban surface, the
different materialities, textures and mobilities of the cityscape. Through its multiple
variations of forms, sizes and styles - from single scratches or drawings, stickers, painting
21
Cf. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: Thausend Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 44.
22
Ibid.
23
Hjelmslev desribes content and expression as sides or layers of one and the same structure, which are arbitrary and
solidary. Cf.ibid. p. 59-60.
24
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.: Thausend Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p. 61.

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styles and even three dimensional cut out works it creates a complex network of relations and
forces, which are actualized in an assemblage of expressive materials. It is connected and
relates to the urban body twice – to its material body, the city surface, and to its social and
political body, the urban public space. Being spread like this graffiti emerges as nomadic
flows inside urban-planning and does so in an at once political and aesthetic sense. Thus it
acts directly upon the functional structures in the city, namely on its level of expression,
Graffiti deterritorialises these structures only to reterritorialise them as a new rhythm in a
new assemblage.