Generated Degenerating

In reading the mass of notes and musings that make up The Anti-Oedipus Papers by Félix Guattari, I come to a clearing where it begins to make sense (which is of course in Guattari's world a way station and not a final destination). I think it is the comparative framework that gives this paragraph its coherence and cogency. He is contrasting two great linguists.

For Hjelmslev, there is no interpreted system, only interpretable systems. So there is always a possible opening, a passage from non-sense to meaning [sens]. There is never any closure back onto semantic or grammatical "normality." And then there is Chomsky: the inherency, the realism of the state of a given language, the mechanism of engenderment, etc. What counts for Chomsky is for deep structures to rejoin real performances. And not for deep machines to produce non-sense, breaks and history.

In this translation by Kélina Gotman, I am particular taken by the implied syntagm: non-sense, breaks, history. It becomes almost possible to introduce a program: generate noise, cause disruption, alter history.

And so for day 712
24.11.2008