The use of controlling language of the biopolitical entrenches its subordination and causes its speakers to search for a ‘master’, solvency from anything within the state fails

Consisting of four parts, the syntax in Empty Words increasingly breaks down until, by its conclusion, there are no discernable words: “eeeaeh geirrds sn iendtngtch – h t” (66). Such a total break with communication makes Empty Words difficult to interpret to say the least, as Cage presents the reader with an unreadable text. This question of how to read Empty Words likewise presents a question for biopolitics. How can one manage and administer a text that remains illegible and fails to communicate?

Cage, then, seems to offer an alternative to the biopolitical use of language, and such alternatives were the subject of more than one lecture at the SchizoCulture conference. On the first day of the conference, Lyotard delivered a lecture in French while two graduate students translated. His talk addressed the strategies of a “weaker language.” According to Lyotard, countercultural and political groups since the 60s attempted to attack or resist a major or national language from the outside. Yet, as one graduate student translated, such an exterior approach “is what the masterly position asks for,” since “it is a complement the masterly discourse must and intends to conquer.” (Schizo-Culture: The Event 83). Lyotard instead suggests that “one should imagine a strategy without exteriority,” which will “use the rule of that discourse itself by including meta-statements inside its own” discourse (84).

This interior linguistic attack echoes one of the characteristics of a minor literature that Deleuze and Fėlix Guattari describe in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In this short text, which was published the same year as the conference, Deleuze and Guattari note how “a minor literature doesn’t come from a major language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). Yet Deleuze and Guattari acknowledged their disagreements with Lyotard at the conference. As Lotringer recalls, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault stood at the back of the room while Lyotard delivered his lecture. Lyotard was aware of their presence, and noted that he was eager to start a conversation with them. However, all three “didn’t say anything […] they just turned on their heels and left the room” (Schizo-Culture: Event 21).

Deleuze and Guattari, however, were more vocal in their critique in Anti Oedipus. While they praised Lyotard’s Discours, Figure (1971) for reversing the primacy of the linguistic signifier, they found that Lyotard “still steer[s] the schizzes toward shores he has so recently left behind: toward coded or overcoded territories” (Anti-Oedipus 244). In a 1985 essay on “postmodern deadlock, Guattari further accuses Lyotard (and Baudrillard) of constraining language in a “structuralist corset” (Soft Subversions 298). Such deference to the linguistic signifier was evident in Lyotard’s lecture at the conference, where both the audience and translators constantly demanded clarity. When one audience member did not agree with a graduate student’s translation, the attendee began to translate Lyotard’s lecture sentence-by-sentence. This, however, only further agitated the rest of the audience, who in turn accused the new translator of making Lyotard even harder to understand: “We can’t follow the French or the English now” (Schizo-Culture: Event 87). Eventually the self-appointed translator was told to “knock off the shit,” and it was suggested that those who could “speak French and English sit next to somebody who can’t understand French and translate for them” (Schizo-Culture: Event 89). Yet in a talk that posits how to disrupt a major language from within, it seems odd that the translators and audience still sought clarification from a “master.”