Only through disrupting the arrangement of the army through syntax can we solve.

In his Writing Through The Cantos, Cage frees the poem from Pound’s authorial intention by ironically invoking the author’s name in the mesostic. These Pound mesostics appeared in the 1984 Unmuzzled Ox issue with Jackson Mac Low’s writings through the poem. And while their methods might differ slightly, Craig Dworkin notes that both Mac Low and Cage “perform an ideological hijacking of sorts” when they submit Pound’s poem to the non-intentional rules of the mesostic (101). Cage’s own anarchic politics align more with Thoreau than Pound. In his diary, Cage cites the sentence in Civil Disobedience where Thoreau argues that the best government is one that does not govern at all. Yet for Cage, this also applies to language: “Syntax, like / government, can only be obeyed” (M 215). Thoreau, then, still maintains a syntactical arrangement in his Journal. He might envision a politics with no government in his writing, but if governments administer and order populations through an “incitement to discourse,” Cage demands that such a politics must also break with communication.

In the opening to Empty Words, Cage cites Norman O. Brown’s comment that “syntax” is the “arrangement of the army” (Empty Words 11). A “language free from syntax,” then, results in a “demilitarization of language” (Empty Words 11). This demilitarization, as cited in the epigraph above, was a serious musical concern for Cage. Yet it was also a serious political concern for the speakers at the Schizo-Culture conference.1 Guattari’s lecture in particular called attention to the arrangement of power within certain “linguistic castes” (Schizo-Culture: The Event 192). For Guattari (and Deleuze), “what is at issue is what type of politics is pursued with regard to different linguistic arrangements that exist” (SchizoCulture 193). The university, medical, and state institutions subjugate aberrant signs to a homogeneous linguistic order in order to effectively communicate the goals of the capital.

Yet Deleuze and Guattari identify more than these marching orders. They elaborate on these differing sign systems in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari identify at least “four regimes of signs”—a presignifying, a signifying, a countersignifying, and a postsignifying regime. Not one of these four linguistic arrangements, however, has a primacy or privileged place. For Deleuze and Guattari, every semiotic regime is “mixed and only functions as such.” They conclude, then, that there exists “no general semiology, but rather a transsemiotic” (Thousand Plateaus 136). Such a mutating and changing (trans)semiotic trips the marching feet of the syntactical army.