Maurizio Lazzarato-Signs and Machines - Capitalism and The Production of Subjectivity-The MIT Press (2014)

Maurizio Lazzarato
<e>
SIGNS AND MACHINES
CAPITALISM AND THE PRODUC TION OF SUBJE C TIVITY
Maurizio Lazzarato
Translated by Joshua David Jordan
<B>
SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES
Maurizio Lazzarato, 2014

Published by arrangement with Agence liueraire Pierre Astier & Associes
This edition 2014 by Semiotext(e)
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Contents
Introduction 7
1. Production and the Production of Subjectivity 23
2. Signifying Semiologies and Asignifying Semiotics in Production 55
and in the Production of Subjectivity
3. Mixed Semiotics 95
4. Conflict and Sign Systems 139
5. "Scum" and the Critique of Performatives 169
6. The Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity 201
7. Enunciation and Politics 225
Notes 251
lntroduction1
To say that desire is part of the infrastructure comes down to

saying that subjectivity produces reality. Subjectivity is not an
ideological superstructure.
At the time of Leninism, the government had to be overturned

the trade unions were economists, traitors-power had to go to
the Soviets: in short, there was an idea, there was something. But
here, really, there is no idea. There's nothing at all. There's the idea
of macroeconomics, of a certain number of factors: unemploy
ment, the market, money, all abstractions that have nothing at all
to do with social reality.
-Felix Guattari, "Crise de production de subjectivite,"
Seminar of April 3, 1984
In a seminar in 1984, Felix Guattari argued that the crisis affecting

the West since the early 1970s was, more than an economic or
political crisis, a crisis of subjectivity. How are we to understand
Guattari's claim?
Germany and Japan came out of the Second World War com
pletely destroyed, under long-term occupation, both socially and
7
psychologically decimated, with "no material assets-no raw materials,
no reserve capital." What explains the economic miracle? "They
rebuilt a prodigious 'capital of subjectivity' (capital in the form of
knowledge, collective intelligence, the will to survive, etc.). Indeed,
they invented a new type of subjectivity out of the devastation itsel
The Japanese, in particular, recovered aspects of their archaic sub
jectivity, converting them into the most 'advanced' forms of social
and material production. [ . . . ]The latter represents a kind of indus
trial complex for the production of subjectivity, one enabling a
multiplicity of creative processes to emerge, certain of which are,
however, highly alienating."2
Capitalism "launches (subjective) models the way the automobile
industry launches a new line of cars."3 Indeed, the central project of
capitalist politics consists in the articulation of economic, techno
logical, and social flows with the production of subjectivity in such a
way that political economy is identical with "subjective economy."
Guattari's working hypothesis must be revived and applied to current
circumstances; and we must start by acknowledging that neoliberalism
has failed to articulate the relation between these two economies.
Guattari further observes capitalism's capacity to foresee and
resolve systemic crises through apparatuses and safeguards that it
came to master following the Great Depression. Today; the weakness
of capitalism lies in the production of subjectivity. As a conse
quence, systemic crisis and the crisis in . the production of
subjectivity are strictly interlinked. It is impossible to separate
economic, political, and social processes from the processes of
subjectivation occurring within them.
With neoliberal deterritorialization, no new production of
subjectivity takes place. On the other hand, neoliberalism has
destroyed previous social relations and their forms of subjectivation
8 I Signs and Machines

(worker, communist, or social-democrat subjectivation or national
subjectivity, bourgeois subjectivity, etc.). Nor does neoliberalism's
promotion of the entrepreneur-with which Foucault associates
the subjective mobilization management requires in all forms of
economic activity--offer any kind of solution to the problem.
Quite the contrary. Capital has always required a territory beyond
the market and the corporation and a subjectivity that is not that of
the entrepreneur; for although the entrepreneur, the business, and
the market make up the economy, they also break up society.
Hence the long-standing recourse to pre-capitalist territories
and values, to long-established morals and religions, and to the for
midable modern subjectivations of nationalism, racism, and fascism
which aim to maintain the social ties capitalism continually under
mines. Today, the ubiquity of entrepreneurial subjectivation,
manifest in the drive to transform every individual into a business,
has resulted in a number of paradoxes. The autonomy, initiative,
and subjective commitment demanded of each of us constitute new
norms of employability and, therefore, strictly speaking, a heteronomy.
At the same time, the injunction imposed on the individual to act,
take the initiative, and undertake risks has led to widespread
depression, a maladie du siecle, the refusal to accept homogenization,
and, finally, the impoverishment of existence brought on by the
individual "success" of the entrepreneurial model.
For the majority of the population, to become an economic
subject ("human capital," "entrepreneur of the self ") means no more
than being compelled to manage declining wages and income,
precarity, unemployment, and poverty in the same way one would
manage a corporate balance-sheet. As the crisis wrought by repeated
"financial" debacles has worsened, capitalism has abandoned its
rhetoric of the knowledge or information society along with its
Introduction I 9
dazzling subjectivations (cognitive workers, "manipulators of
sy mbols," creative self-starters and luminaries). The crisis has
brought debt and its modes of subjection to the fore in the figure of
the indebted man. Now that the promises of wealth for all through
hard work, credit, and finance have proved empty, the class struggle
has turned to the protection of creditors and owners of "securities."
In the present crisis, in order for the power of private property to
assert itself, the articulation of "production" and the "production
of subjectivity" relies on debt and the indebted man.
Obviously, we are talking about a negative subjection, the most
obvious indication that flows of knowledge, action, and mobility,
although continually solicited, lead only to repressive and regressive
subjectivation. The indebted man, at once guilty and responsible for
his lot, must take on himself the economic, social, and political
failures of the neoliberal power bloc, exactly those failures externalized
by the State and business onto society.
It is no longer a matter of innovation, creativity, knowledge,
or culture but of the "flight" of owners of capital whose "exodus"
consists in their plundering the welfare state while refusing to pay
taxes. In this way, the univocity of the concept of production (both
economic and subjective) allows us to see that the financial crisis is
not only about economics, it is also a crisis of neoliberal govern
mentality whose drive to turn every individual into an owner, a
business, and a shareholder has miserably run aground with the
collapse of the American real-estate market.
Japan is emblematic of the impossibility of resolving the crisis
afflicting the country since the 1990s without a new model of
subjectivity. Like every other country in the world, Japan is now
post-Fordist, y et more than any other country it has had the greatest
difficulty replacing the Fordist "capital of subjectivity" (full
1 0 I Signs and Machines

employment, a job for life, the ethics of work, etc.) that made it
rich. It is not enough to inject astronomical sums into the economy;
it is not enough to stabilize the banks, weaken and destabilize the
job market, impoverish workers, and so on, in order to promote
growth. To new social, economic, and political conditions, subjec
tivity must be made to correspond, one cognizant of those
conditions and able to persist within them. It is in this sense that the
Japanese financial and economic crisis is above all a crisis in the
government of behavior. Economics and subjectivity go hand in hand.
The unions and political parties on the "left" provide no solutions
to these problems because they too have no alternative subjectivities
on offer. The people, the working class, labor, producers, and
employment no longer have a hold on subjectivity, no longer
function as vectors of subjectivation.
Today's critical theories similarly fail to account for the relation
ship between capitalism and processes of subjectivation. Cognitive
capitalism, the information society, and cultural capitalism (Rifkin)
capture the relationship but do so all too reductively. On the one
hand, knowledge, information, and culture are far from sufficient to
cover the multiplicity of economies that constitutes "production." On
the other hand, their subjective avatars (cognitive workers, "manipu
lators of symbols," etc.) fall shon of the multiple modes of subjection
and political subjectivation that contribute to the "production of
subjectivity." Their claim to found a hegemonic paradigm for pro
duction and the production of subjectivity is belied by the fact that
the fate of the class struggle, as the crisis has shown, is not being
played out in the domains of knowledge, information, or culture.
"Wlille these theories make short shrift of the relationship
between production and the production of subjectivity, Jacques
Ranciere and Alain Badiou neglect it completely. For them, one
Introduction I 1 1
simply has nothing to do with the other. Instead, they assert the
need to conceive a radical separation between "economics" and
"subjectivity," thereby developing an economistic conception of
the economy and an utterly "political" or "idealist" conception of
subjectivity.
Despite the rise of public and private apparatuses for the pro
duction, adaptation, and control of subjectivity, apparatuses whose
authoritarianism has only intensified during the crisis, we must insist
with Guattari that subjectivity still has no ground or means for
subjectivation. "This is a major crisis. A crisis of what? In my opinion,
it is a major crisis because the problem that's at the tip of everyone's
tongue is the following: Shit, we've got to at least have a religion, an
idea! [ ... ] we can't leave everything up in the air like this!"4
But what does the concept of the production of subjectivity
entail? What is meant by subjectivation and, in particular, political
subjectivation?
In capitalism, the production of subjectivity works in two ways
through what Deleuze and Guattari call apparatuses [dispositiftj of
social subjection and machinic enslavement.
Social subjection equips us with a subjectivity, assigning us an
identity, a sex, a body, a profession, a nationality, and so on. In
response to the needs of the social division of labor, it in this way
manufactures individuated subjects, their consciousness, representa
tions, and behavior.
But the production of the individuated subject is coupled with
a completely different process and a completely different hold on
subjectivity that proceeds through desubjectivation. Machinic
enslavement dismantles the individuated subject, consciousness,
and representations, acting on both the pre-individual and supra
individual levels.
1 2 I Signs and tv1achines

Among contemporary critical theories (those of Badiou, cogni
tive capitalism, Judith Butler, Slajov Ziiek, Ranciere, etc.), it is
largely a question of subjectivity, the subject, subjectivation, and the
distribution of the sensible. But what they neglect is how capitalism
specifically functions-that is, through "machinic enslavements."
These critical theories seem to have lost sight of what Marx had to
say about the essentially machinic nature of capitalism: "machinery
appears as the most adequate form of fixed capital; and the latter, in
so far as capital can be considered as being related to itself, is the
most adequate form of capital in general."5
Such is even more the case today given that, unlike in Marx's
time, machinisms have invaded our daily lives; they now "assist" our
ways ofspeaking, hearing, seeing, writing, and feeling by constituting
what one might call "constant social capital."
Nowhere in their analyses do we encounter these technical and
social machines in which "humans" and "non-humans" function
together as component parts in corporate, welfare-state, and media
assemblages. Ranciere and Badiou have radically elided them alto
gether. Thus machines and machinic assemblages can be found
everywhere except in contemporary critical theory.
Now, capitalism reveals a twofold cynicism: the "humanist"
cynicism of assigning us individuality and pre-established roles
(worker, consumer, unemployed, man/woman, artist, etc.) in
which individuals are necessarily alienated; and the "dehumanizing"
cynicism of including us in an assemblage that no longer distin
guishes between human and non-human, subject and object, or
words and things.
Throughout this book, we will examine the difference and com
plementarity between apparatuses of"social subjection" and those of
"machinic enslavement," for it is at their point of intersection that
lntroduciion I 13
the production of subjectivity occurs. We will trace a cartography of
the modalities of subjection and enslavement, those with which we
will have to break in order to begin a process of subjectivation inde
pendent and autonomous of capitalism's hold on subjectivity, its
modalities of production and forms of life.
It is therefore essential to understand that the subjectivity and
subjectivations capitalism produces are meant for the "machine."
Not primarily for the "technical machine" but for the "social
machine," for the "megamachine," as Lewis Mumford calls it, which
includes the technical machine as one of its products.
What are the conditions for a political and existential rupture at
a time when the production ofsubjectivity constitutes the most fun
damental of capitalist concerns? What are the instruments specific
to the production of subjectivity such that its industrial and serial
production by the State and the corporation might be thwarted? What
model and what modalities of organization must be constructed for
a subjectivation process that joins micro- and macropolitics?
In the 1980s, Michel Foucault and Guattari each followed
different paths to arrive at the conclusion that the production of
subjectivity and the constitution of the "relation to the self" were
the sole contemporary political questions capable of pointing the
way out of the impasse in which we still continue to founder.
Each in their own way they revealed a new dimension irreducible
to power and knowledge relations. As the power of self-positioning
and existential affirmation (Guattari), the "relation to the self"
(Foucault) derives-in its double sense of originating in and
drawing off - from these relations. The subjective is not, however,
dependent on them. For Foucault, taking the "care of the self" as
one's starting point does not mean pursuing the ideal splendor of a
"beautiful life" but rather inquiring into the overlap of "an aesthetics

of existence" and a politics that corresponds to it. The problems of
"an other world" and "an other life" arise together in a politically
engaged life whose precondition is a break with established conven
tions, habits, and values. Nor does Guattari's aesthetic paradigm call
for an aestheticization of the social and political but rather for making
the production of subjectivity the central practice and concern of a
new way of political action and organizing.
Subjectivation processes and their forms of organization have
always given rise to crucial debates within the labor movement and
have . occasioned political ruptures and divisions between
"reformists" and "revolutionaries."
The history of the labor movement remains incomprehensible
if we refuse to see the "wars of subjectivity" (Guattari) in which the
movement has engaged. ''A certain type of worker during the Paris
Commune became such a 'mutant' that the bourgeoisie had no
choice but to exterminate him. They liquidated the Paris Commune
just as they did, in a different time, the Protestants on Saint
Bartholomew's."6
The Bolsheviks did not explicitly think of inventing a new kind
of militant subjectivity which would, among other things, respond
to the Commune's defeat.7
Examining processes of political subjectivation by foregrounding
the "micro-political" (Guattari) and the "micro-physical" (Foucault)
dimensions of power does not dispense with the need to address and
reconfigure the macro-political sphere.
It's an either/or: either someone, whoever it is, comes up with new

methods for the production of subjectivity, whether Bolshevik,
Maoist, or whatever; or the crisis will juse keep on gercing worse. 8
Introduction I 1 5
In his way, Guattari not only remained faithful to Marx but to
Lenin as well. Of course, the methods for the production of subjec
tivity that came out of Leninism (the party, the conception of the
working class as vanguard, the "professional revolutionary," etc.) are
no longer relevant to current class compositions. What Guattari
retains from the Leninist experiment is the methodology: the need
to break with "social-democracy," to construct tools for political
innovation extending to the organizational modalities of subjectivity.
Just as the production of subjectivity cannot be separated from
"economics," it cannot be separated from "politics." How must we
conceive of political subjectivation? All political subjectivation
entails a mutation and a reconversion of subjectivity that affects
existence. It cannot only be political in the sense that both Ranciere
and Badiou give the term.
Subjective mutation is not primarily discursive; it does not
primarily have to do with knowledge, information, or culture since it
affects the nucleus of non-discursivity; non-knowledge, and non
acculturation lying at the heart of subjectivity. Subjective mutation is
fundamentally an existential affirmation and apprehension of
the self, others, and the world. And it is on the basis of this non
discursive, existential, and affective crystallization that new languages,
new discourses, new knowledge, and a new politics can proliferate.
We will first examine this question from a specific perspective:
the paradoxical relationship that the discursive-that is, what is
actualized in language but also within the spatiotemporal coordinates
of knowledge, culture, institutions, and the economy-maintains
with the non-discursive, as the focal point of self-production, self
positioning, and existential affirmation.
The same critical theories that neglect the machinic specificity
of capitalism also fail to problematize the relationship between the

discursive and the existential. Indeed, they assign a central role to
the former, that is, to language in the realm of politics (Ranciere),
"production" (cognitive capitalism, Paolo Virno), and the constitution
of the subject (Zizek and Butler).
Structuralism may be dead, but language, which founds the
structuralist paradigm, is still alive and well in these theories. To
grasp the limits of the new "logocentrism,'' we will have to take a step
backwards, returning to the critiques of structuralism and linguistics
advanced in the 1960s and 70s by Guattari, Deleuze, and Foucault.
In different ways, their critiques demoted language from the central
role it was made to play in politics and subjectivation processes
following the "linguistic turn" in analytic philosophy and Lacanian
psychoanalysis. They set forth a new semiotic theory and a new theory
of enunciation better able to register how signs function in these
processes and in the economy. In particular, we will return to Guattari's
semiotic theory. 'While affirming that each subjectivation process
implies the operations of mixed, signifying, symbolic, and asignifying
semiotics, Guattari considers the latter, as they operate in the economy;
science, art, and machines, the specificity of capitalism.
What role and function do different signifying, symbolic, and
asignifying semiotics have in running and controlling capitalist deter
ritorialization and reterritorialization? And what is their relationship
with the subjectivation process?
Guattari and Foucault do not stop at deposing the "imperialism"
of language over other modes of expression and other formations of
subjectivity. 'While emphasizing the strategic importance of different
semiotics for steering and controlling capitalist flows and subjectivity
produc;tion, they argue that in order to bring together the condi
tions for rupture and subjective reconversion, we must move beyond
both language and semiotics.
Introduction I 1 7
Further, they enact "a radical divorce" (Guattari) between
pragmatic linguistics and existential pragmatics, between the
semiotic logic that produces meaning and the pragmatics that
produces existence and political rupture.
In the act of enunciation (in the same way as in every act of
creation), a power of self-positioning, self-production, and a capacity
to secrete one's own referent emerges, a power which has little to do
with Saussurean "speech," the Lacanian "signifier," or the perfor
matives and speech acts of analytic philosophy.
A force of self-affectation, self-affirmation, and self-positioning
doubles power and knowledge rela,_tions, defying the powers and
knowledge in place. It provides the conditions for rupture as well as
for processes of political subjectivation-indeed, for processes of
subjectivation tout court. The rules governing the production of the
self are those "optional" and processual ones invented by constructing
"sensible territories" and by a singularization of subjectivity (Guattari),
by creating the alterity of "an other life" and "an other world"
(Foucault). Hence the recourse, not to cognitive, linguistic, and
informational methods and paradigms, but to political, ethical
aesthetic approaches and paradigms-the "aesthetic paradigm" of
Guattari and the "aesthetics of existence" of Foucault.
Only as a mutation of subjectivity, as the crystallization of a new
existence (Guattari), gains consistency can one attempt a new
relationship to economic, linguistic, technical, social, and commu
nicational flows.
To produce a new discourse, new knowledge, a new politics,
one must traverse an unnamable point, a point of absolute non
narrative, non-culture, and non-knowledge. Thus the (tautological)
absurdity of conceiving production as the production of knowledge
by way of knowledge. Theories of cognitive and cultural capitalism

and the information society, which are supposed to be theorie:; of
innovation and creativity, fail precisely to conceive the process
through which "creation" and "innovation'' occur, for language,
knowledge, information, and culture are largely insufficient to
these ends.
In order for political subjectivation to occur, it must necessarily
traverse moments in which dominant significations are suspended
and the hold of machinic enslavements is thrown off. Strikes, strug
gles, revolts, and riots constitute moments of rupture with and
suspension of chronological time, of the neutralization of subjec
tions and dominant significations. Immaculate, virginal
subjectivities do not then appear but rather focal points, emer
gences, the beginnings of subjectivation whose actualization and
proliferation depend on a constructive process that must articulate
the relation between "production" and "subjectivation" in a new way.
But are the struggles, revolts, riots, and strikes that have spread
around the globe in response to the violence of the crisis sufficient
for instituting a political rupture with capitalism?
The analysis of the Soviet Revolution, which returns like a
refrain in Deleuze and Guattari's work, offers certain, even if only
formal, insights which help to understand the limits of the current
political situation. In their work, the modes of subjectivity produc
tion are translated into politics. Under capitalism, processes of
political subjectivation must both enter and break from economic,
social, and political flows. The two operations are indispensable:
start from the hold machinic enslavements and social subjections
maintain over subjectivity and produce a rupture, which is always at
the same time an invention and constitution of the sel9
"Revolution" erupts from history, that is, from economic,
political, and social conditions while it simultaneously leaves these
Introduction I 1 9
causes and conditions behind by creating new possibilities. It
derives and, paradoxically, does not derive from history.
Viewed through the lens of post-May '68 struggles rather than as
a historical reconstruction, the "Leninist rupture" is characterized by
the coexistence of different orders: the order of causes and the order
of desire (the existential, non-discursive dimension), the order of
"preconscious investments'' governed by causes and aims and the order
of "unconscious revolutionary investments" which have as their cause
a rupture in causality, the condition for opening new possibilitiess.
Such an opening, "prepared by the subterranean work of causes,
aims, and interests," only becomes r through something of another
order, by "a desire without aim or cause."10
Revolutionary possibility can always be identified by the impos
sibility it makes real, and by the fact that a process erupts secreting
other systems of reference at the very place where the world was
once closed. As in all creation (whether artistic, scientific, or social),
the suspension of the ordinary course of things first of all affects
subjectivity and its forms of expression by creating the conditions
for new subjectivation. This process must be problematized. 11
Although the forms of Leninist organization are today neither
possible nor desirable, the "break with causality," the turn from
the expected course of things, the impossible that becomes real,
the organization and metamorphosis of subjectivity-these
remain the burning questions of all revolutionary movements.
And even though one can and must assign the objective factors
[. . . ] within causal series that made such a rupture possible, the
Bolshevik group [ ...] becomes aware of the immediate possi
bility of a proletarian revolution that would not follow the
anticipated causal order of the relations of forces. 12

Today it is easy to identify the chain of causes, aims, and interests
at work in the present crisis. The choices are endless. What is lacking
are precisely the characteristics of revolutionary action: the "rupture
with causality," the possibility of inventing a politics, like that of
the "Leninist rupture," that does more than follow the chain of
causes, aims, and interests already in play. In order to take on
consistency, in order to install its modes of organization and
metamorphose subjectivity, the revolutionary event, in its break
with causality, must transform the social, economic, and political
conditions from which it arises and ward off the action of the
State, the medias, reactionary forces, and so on. It is the complexity
of this process that seems, for the moment, to escape political
movements. We have in fact a proliferation of political experi
mentations that appear then just as quickly fade because they are
unable to initiate the modes of macropolitical, reproducible, and
generalizable subjectivation.
For its part, capital is also in a "subjective" impasse which forces it
to suspend democracy and adopt forms of authoritarian governance.
The current crisis now produces only negative and regressive
subjections (the indebted man), and capitalism is unable to articu
late production and the production of subjectivity other than by
reasserting the need to protect the owners of capital. The crisis is
nowhere near the end. Given this, the theoretical tools we intend to
develop here will hopefully prove useful for conceiving the condi
tions of political subjectivation, one which is at the same time an
existential mutation antithetical to capitalism, whose crisis is already
of historic proportions.
The problem in the 1960s was overturning the two behemoths
of the party and the union, which prevented all political innovation
and blocked the emergence of new subjects and new way s of
Introduction I 21
conceiving and practicing politics (micropolitics: young workers,
minorities, the women's movement, etc.). Today, with the party
gone and unions completely integrated into capitalist logic,
macropolitical action and its forms of organization, based on an
irreducible multiplicity of subjectivation processes, are at the heart
of our urgent underlying question: "What is to be done?"
22 I Signs and Macllines

1
Production and the Production of Subjectivity:
Between Social Subjection and Machinic Enslavement
Of the two definitions of a manufacture given by Ure, and cited

by Marx, the first relates machines to the men who tend them,
while the second relates the machines and the men, "mechanical
and intellectual organs," to the manufacture as the full body
that engineers them. In fact, the second definition is literal and
concrete.
-Felix Guattari, Chaosophy
It is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that

creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and
cleavages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of
production.
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
1. Social Subjection and Machinic Enslavement
Guattari and Deleuze bring to fulfillment the discoveries of

Marx .and classical political economy: the production of wealth
depends on abstract, unqualified, subjective activity irreducible
to the domain of either political or linguistic representation. The
23
production of wealth (and production, period) operates at the
intersection of two heterogeneous power apparatuses-social
subjection and machinic enslavement. What is called economy is
the assemblage of this dual investment of subjectivity such that,
as Guattari puts it, "one must enter the field of subjective economy
and stop concentrating only on political economy," which was
incapable of realizing the full ramifications of its discoveries.
By assigning us an individual subjectivity, an identity, sex,
profession, nationality, and so forth, social subjection produces
and distributes places and roles within and for the social division of
labor. Through language it creates a signifying and representational
web from which no one escapes. Social subjection produces an
"individuated subject" whose paradigmatic form in neoliberalism
has been that of "human capital" and the "entrepreneur of the sel"
The last avatar of individualism, which has made the person the
center and source of action, emerged with the financial crisis during
which the injunction to become "human capital" has been trans
formed into the negative and regressive figure of the indebted man.
The individual is still guilty and responsible for his fate except that
today he is fated to debt.
Foucault describes the mode of governmentality of "subjects"
who must think of and produce themselves as actors in their own
assignations such that domination issues from the subjects them
selves (self-exploitation, self-domination). The user's, worker's,
and consumer's actions and the divisions man/woman, parent/
child, teacher/student, and so on, are invested with knowledge,
practices, and norms---whether sociological, psychological, managerial,
or disciplinary-which solicit, encourage, and motivate the pro
duction of individuals consequently alienated within the social and
gendered division of labor.

As Marx had already argued, social subjection is a process by
which capital relations become personified; the "capitalist" acts as
"personified capital," that is, as a function derived from capital flows.
Thus the factory worker is "personified labor," a function derived
from variable capital flows, and individual "persons" are social persons
derived from abstract quantities.
But this is only one of the ways in which capitalism acts on
subjectivity. An entirely different process and an entirely different
capture of subjectivity-"machinic enslavement" -come to be
superimposed on the production of the individuated subject or
_ person. Unlike social subjection, machinic enslavement occurs
via desubjectivation by mobilizing functional and operational,
non-representational and asignifying, rather than linguistic and
representational, semiotics.
In machinic enslavement, the individual is no longer instituted
as an "individuated subject," "economic subject" (human capital,
entrepreneur of the self), or "citizen." He is instead considered a
gear, a cog, a component part in the " business" and "financial
system" assemblages, in the media assemblage, and the "welfare
state" assemblage and its collective institutions (schools, hospitals,
museums, theaters, television, Internet, etc.). Enslavement is a
concept that Deleuze and Guattari borrowed explicitly from cyber
netics and the science of automation. It means the "management"
or "government" of the components of a system. A technological
system enslaves ("governs" or "manages") variables (temperature,
pressure, force, speed, output, etc.), ensuring the cohesion and
equilibrium of the functioning of the whole. Enslavement is the
mode of control and regulation ("government") of a technical or
social machine such as a factory, business, or communications
system. It replaces the "human slavery" of ancient imperial systems
Production and tile Production of Subjectivity I 25

(Egyptian, Chinese, etc.) and is thus a mode of command, regu
lation, and government "assisted" by technology and, as such,
represents a feature specific to capitalism.
Deleuze describes precisely the types of subjectivity over which
this dual power apparatus exercises control. Subjection produces and
subjects individuals, whereas in enslavement "[i]ndividuals becomes
'dividuals,' and masses become samples, data, markets, or 'banks."'1
The dividual "functions" in enslavement in the same way as the
"non-human" component parts of technical machines, as organiza
tional procedures, seiniotics, and so on.
Subjection manufactures a su.bject in relation to an external
object (a machine, a communications apparatus, money, public
services, etc.) of which the subject makes use and with which he acts.
In subjection the individual works or communicates with another
individuated subject by way of an object-machine, which functions
as the "means" or mediation of his actions or use. T he "subject
object" logic according to which social subjection functions is a
"human, all too human" logic.
Machinic enslavement, on the other hand, does not bother with
subject/object, words/things, or nature/culture dualisms. The dividual
does not stand opposite machines or make use of an external object;
the dividual is contiguous with machines. Together they constitute a
"humans-machines" apparatus in which humans and machines are
but recurrent and interchangeable parts of a production, communi
cations, consumption, etc., process well exceeds them.
We no longer act nor even make use2 of something, if by act and
use we understand functions of the subject. Instead, we constitute
mere inputs and outputs, a point ofconjunction or disjun ction in the
economic, social, or communicational processes run and governed
by enslavement.

The subject/object, human/machine, or agent/instrument
relationship gives way to a total configuration in which there is a
convergence/assemblage of forces that do not split into "living" and
"dead," subjective and objective, but are all variously "animated"
(physical and sub-physical forces of matter, human and subhuman
forces of "body and mind," machine forces, the power of signs, etc.).
In enslavement, relations among agents and signs indeed exist, but
they are not intersubjective, the agents are not people, and the
semiotics are not representational. Human agents, like non-human
agents, function as points of "connection, junction, and disjunction"
of flows and as the networks making up the corporate, collective
assemblage, the communications system, and so on.
Not only is the dividual ofa piece with the machinic assemblage
but he is also torn to pieces by it: the component parts of subjectivity
(intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, memory, physical force)
are no longer unified in an "I," they no longer have an individuated
subject as referent. Intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition,
memory, and physical force are now components whose synthesis
no longer lies in the person but in the assemblage or process (corpo
rations, media, public services, education, etc.).
Enslavement does not work with "subjects" and "objects," it
works on their deterritorialization (or their decodification), that is,
with the molecular components, the non-individuated intensive,
subhuman potentialities of subjectivity, and the non-individuated,
intensive, molecular component parts and potentialities of matter
and machines. Science transforms matter into decoded flows; by
going from processing "forces" to molecules and atoms and con
tinuously intensifying deterritorialization, it mobilizes even their
chemical and nuclear elements. Money and finance are perfectly
capable of deterritorializing (or decodifying) social "matter," as the
Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 27

last thirty years of neoliberalism have shown. They undermine and
circumvent laws (in particular those dealing with labor) as well as
the codes of social, economic, and political subjects established
with Fordism. Employees and their institutions, employers and
their factories, and the State and its welfare apparatus have been
subjected to deterritorialization processes that have radically trans
formed them.
Enslavement works with decoded flows (abstract work flows,
monetary flows, sign flows, etc.) which are not centered on the indi
vidual and human subjectivity but on enormous social machinisms
(corporations, the collective infrastructures of the welfare state,
communications systems, etc.).
Capital is not a mere relationship among "people," nor is it
reducible to an intersubjective relationship as Hannah Arendt
suggests, for whom there is not an ounce of matter in human
action. A power relation exists but one constituted by social
machines and "assisted" by technical machines.
Foucault's analysis of power is concerned with machinism as
well. The panopticon "is an important mechanism, for it automa
tizes and deindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so
much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies,
surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mecha
nisms produce the relation in which they are caught up. [ .. ]There
.
is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.

Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any indi
vidual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine."3
As in Guattari and Deleuze, the panopticon functions in a
diagrammatic, that is, non-representational way. It is a "diagram
of a mechanism of power," "a figure of political technology that
may and must be detached from any specific use" (an "abstract

machine," as Deleuze and Guattari put it), which is "destined to
spread throughout the social body."4
To say that the neoliberal economy is a subjective economy does
not inean that it promises a new "humanization" of the alienated
subject through industrial capitalism, but only that subjectivity
exists for the machine, that subjective components are functions of
enslavement.
Subjections and subjectivations serve these social and technical
machines and every person's functions and roles are assigned
through them. In capitalism, power relations are not personal as in
feudal societies (or in Ranciere's "distribution of the sensible"), they
issue from the organization of machinisms.5
T he fact that in the current economy one speaks, communi
cates, and expresses oneself does not bring us back to the linguistic
turn, to its logocentrism, and the intersubjectivity of speakers; it is
indicative rather of a machine-centric world in which one speaks,
communicates, and acts "assisted" by all kinds of mechanical,
thermodynamic, cybernetic, and computer machines.
2. Human/Machine Versus Humans/Machines
We find the dual presence of subjection and enslavement in

ergonomics.
"Humans-machines" (in the plural) systems must not be con
sidered a mere collection of "human-machine" (in the singular)
workplaces since they differ in nature from the subject/object,
human/machine "dyad." In humans-machines systems, where
"numerous human and non-human elements interact [.]
. . the
component parts of all work can be expressed in terms of informa
tion." But here the "anthropocentric aspect of the notion of
Produciion and the Production of Subjectivity I 29

information disappears."6 In ergonomics, one no longer speaks of
"signal-organism-response," nor does one employ the model of com
munication theory, in which exchanges are realized between
individuated subjects and allow for "appropriate, although limited,
emitter-receptor analogies.''7 In ergonomics, one speaks of "input and
output," which have nothing to do with anthropomorphism.
To move from ergonomic terms to the philosophical concepts
articulated by Guattari, enslavement involves neither subjects nor
objects as such but "ontologically ambiguous" entities, hybrids,
"objectivities/subjectivities," in other words, "subject-object bi
face" entities.
"Objects,'' machines, protocols, diagrams, graphs, and soft
ware lose their "objectivity" and become capable of constituting
vectors of "proto-subjectivation'' or focal points of "proto-enunciation.''
T hat machines, objects (and signs), do so means that they suggest,
enable, solicit, prompt, encourage, and prohibit certain actiom,
thoughts, and affects or promote others. Very significantly, Foucault
uses the same verbs to describe how power relations function.
Machines, objects (and signs), act in precisely the same way as an
"action upon an action'' (Foucault). This must not be understood
merely as a relation of one human being with another. Non
humans contribute just as humans do to defining the framework
and conditions of action. One always acts within an assemblage,
a collective, where machines, objects, and signs are at the same
time "agents.''
If subjection calls on consciousness and the representations of
the subject, machinic enslavement activates both much more and
much less than consciousness and representation, in other words,
much more and much less than the person, the individual, and
intersubjectivity.

Machinic enslavement activates pre-personal, pre-cognitive, and
preverbal forces (perception, sense, affects, desire) as well as supra
personal forces (machinic, linguistic, social, media, economic
systems, etc.), which, beyond the subject and individuated relations
(intersubjectivity), multiply "possibilities."8
Here it is not a matter of civil society or political institutions,
dependent on "individuated subjects," the person, the "rights of
man," and citizens. Rather, enslavement is the mode in which science,
economics, communications networks, and the welfare state func
tion. Guattari calls this domain, whose ("diagrammatic") activities
involve neither representation nor consciousness, machinic (or
molecular) in order to distinguish it from the world of individuated
subjects. The forms of diagrammatic {non-representational) activity
specific to machinic enslavement are heterogeneous to the represen
tational activities of the political system as well as to the
representational functions of language.
Molecular or machinic-the terms are synonymous-indicate a
difference in kind and not in scale with the molar dimension of
individuated subjects, representation, and consciousness.
The two domains differ in other ways as well. Subjection refers
to the transcendence of models into which subjectivities must fit
and to which they must conform (man/woman, capitalist/worker,
teacher/student, consumer, user, etc.), whereas enslavement instead
refers to the immanence of the process as it unfolds, to the becoming
that involves the molecular, machinic, and supra-individual dimension
of subjectivity.
Capitalism owes its efficacy and power to the fact that it joins
two heterogeneous dimensions of subjectivity-the molar and
molecular, individual and pre-individual, representational and
pre-representational {or post-representational).

3. The Egyptian Megamachine: The First Form of Enslavement
In machinic enslavement lie the novelty, the secret, and the power
specific to capitalism, which exploits the molecular, pre-personal,
and supra-personal activities of subjectivity. The enormous produc
tivity and potentiality of science, and of the capitalist economy, have
to do with the nature of these machinic assemblages. Indeed,
capitalist machinic enslavement is a "resurrection'' of what Lewis
Mumford calls the "myth of the machine," the archaic mega
machine-the Egypt of the pyramids. For Deleuze and Guattari,
the latter marks the first emergence of enslavement, in which
" human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine they
compose among themselves and with other things (animals, tools)
under the control and direction of a higher unity."9
The archaic megamachine is not primarily technological but
social since it is composed of "a multitude of uniform, specialized,
interchangeable" parts "rigorously marshaled together and coordi
nated in a process centrally organized and centrally directed"10
and of very simple technical machines: the ramp and the lever (the
wheel, pulley, and screw had not yet been invented). Mumford's
megamachine is, along with Simondon's technical objects and the
celibate machines of the avant-gardes (Duchamp), one of the
theories Deleuze and Guattari appropriate in their own thought.
One finds in Mumford's work many of the elements that deter
mine the complex conditions for their concept of the machine:
human flows whose "mechanization" long preceded the mecha
nization of human tools; the machinic phylum of the " 'simple
machines' of classical mechanics" (the result of previous inventions
and practices); sign flows ( "translating speech into graphic record
not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages

throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written
orders were not carried out"). 1 1
And then there is the incorporeal dimension of this universe of
values: the myth of divine-right royalty, the sun cult, and "cosmic
fantasies" alone can guarantee the transformation of "men into
mechanical objects [ . . . ] assembling these objects in a machine." The
megamachine also requires the "production of subjectivity," a sub
jectivity for the machine, a subjectivity for enslavement. Workers
had "minds of a new order: mechanically conditioned, executing
each task in strict obedience to instructions, infinitely patient,
limiting their response to the word of command."12 But the mega
machine in addition necessitates subjectivations (the priesthood and
bureaucracy) that ensure, respectively, "a reliable organization of
knowledge, natural and supernatural; and an elaborate structure for
giving orders, carrying them out, and following them through."13
The bureaucracy and caste system are part of an administration
defined as a machinism rather than a structure.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, capitalism, by reviving the
megamachine, profoundly changed the forms of enslavement. It
progressively reduced the number of "recalcitrant and unreliable"
human operators and multiplied the more reliable "mechanical,
electronic, and chemical" ones. 14
The history of neoliberalism is marked by a "generalized enslave
ment" that is today's megamachine. Its apparatuses go well beyond
the factory, which is but one site of their initial actualization. New
social and technical machines have taken hold over behavior and atti
tudes not only in the workplace and in labor generally, but also in
daily life. In our most "human'' actions (speaking, communicating,
writing, thinking, etc.), we are "assisted" by a new generation of
machines. "If motorized machines constituted the second age of the

technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a
third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of enslavement:
recurrent and reversible 'humans-machines systems' replace the old
nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection between the
two elements. In the organic composition of capital, variable capital
defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value),
the principal framework ofwhich is the business or factory. But with
automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of con
stant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same
time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and
the framework expands to all of society."1 5
4. The Functions of Subjection
Capitalism is characterized by a dual regime of subjectivity, subjec

tion-centered on the subjectivity of the individual subject-and
enslavement, involving a multiplicity of human and non-human
subjectivities and proto-subjectivities. Although heterogeneous,
these two regimes or processes of subjectivity are complementary,
interdependent, and contribute to the functioning of capitalism.
Capitalism is essentially a series of machinisms, although the
latter's subjectivations and personifications can never be reduced to
mere copies mechanically derived from the conditions of these
apparatuses. On the contrary, machinisms imply social instruments
for decision-making, management, reaction, technocracy, and
bureaucracy which cannot be deduced simply from the functions of
technical machines.
Subjections not only generate the "persons" of capitalist and
worker but also those that make the social machine run
(man/woman, teacher/student, the bureaucrat and functionary, etc.).

The social sciences arose in order to facilitate the production of
individuated subjects. Linguistics makes the person the origin of
enunciation, psychoanalysis constructs a familial unconscious for
him (one "structured like a language"), which serve to equip the
individual subject with a representational and personological
unconscious. In turn, economics endows the individual with a
rationality that establishes him as a person free to choose and
decide, while political science makes him the agent of individual
rights, which it is imperative he transfer to representatives in order
to avoid a war of all against all. But it is perhaps property rights that
form the most successful individualizing apparatuses of subjectivation.
By dividing the assemblage into subjects and objects, they empty the
latter (nature, animal, machines, objects, signs, etc.) of all creativity,
of the capacity to act and produce, which they assign only to indi
vidual subjects whose principal characteristic is being an "owner"
(an owner or non-owner).
Property is not only an apparatus for economic appropriation
but also for the capture and exploitation of non-human subjectivities
and machinic proto-subjectivities. By ensuring that creation and
production are uniquely the feats of "man," it uses the "world,"
emptied of all "soul," as its own "object," as the instrument of its
activities, as the means to its ends.
Subjection plays an essential role, because it allows capitalism to
establish different molar hierarchies: a first hierarchy between man
(as a species) and nature and a second hierarchy within culture
between man (gender, white, adult, etc.) and woman, child, and so
on. These two hierarchies are the antecedents fundamental to the
more specifically economic hierarchies. 16
Subjection imposes these hierarchies by operating at the intersec
tion of the machinic molecular and the social molar, by converting

and reducing multiplicity to a series of dualisms (subject/object,
nature/culture, individual/society, owner/non-owner) . This transla
tion of machinic multiplicity into dualisms not only enables
hierarchization but also totalization, of which holistic Durkheimian
theory constitutes the theoretical prototype.
Revolutionary political action must also position itself between
the molecular and the molar, although with a completely different
end in view. First, that of converting the machinic dimension into
forms of subjectivation that critique, reconfigure, and redistribute
these molar dualisms and the roles and functions to which we are
assigned within the division of labor.
Second, that of taking enslavement's desubjectivation as an
opportunity for producing something other than paranoid, produc
tivist, consumerist individualism. This is how we avoid the false
choice between being condemned to function like one component
part among others in the social machinery and being condemned to
become an individual subject, human capital (worker, consumer,
user, debtor), "man."
Subjection works against this possibility by assuring the reterri
torialization and recomposition of subjective components "freed" by
the machinic enslavement of the individuated "subject." The latter
is burdened with guilt, fear, and personal responsibility.
The concept of subjection, although with important variations,
is a common thread in the philosophy and sociology of the last fifty
years. However, "machinic enslavement" is Deleuze and Guattari's
original contribution to our understanding of how capitalism works.
Theories that only account for "social subjection" while totally
neglecting machinic enslavement (Ranciere's and Badiou's, for
example) end up distorting capitalism so much that they can hardly
explain the processes of "political" subjectivation that are supposed
36. / Signs and Machines

to take place. If one considers capitalism only from the point of
view of "subjection" or the distribution of the sensible, one loses the
specificity of the forms of machinic desubjectivation and their
diagrammatic functioning. Without accounting for enslavements,
one risks confusing, as Ranciere and Badiou do, Greek democracy
with capitalism, the work of artisans and slaves with the machinic
work of the "workers," Marx with Plato.17
Even Foucault's concept of governmentality can be improved
and developed by combining social subjection and machinic
enslavement. To the pastoral power exercised on individuals, one
must add another, different type of power and control acting on
"dividuals," exercised not by the State but by private enterprise. In
reality, since the early twentieth century, governmentality has
increasingly meant the "government of dividuals."
With the rise of advertising in the 1 920s and later the advent of
television, an ever well-organized machine has developed of which
Google and Facebook can be considered the crowning achieve
ments. The latter make up immense "databanks" which function as
marketing apparatuses. They gather, select, and sell millions of
data on our behavior, purchases, reading habits, favorite films,
tastes, clothes, and food preferences as well as the way we spend our
"free time." The information concerns "dividuals," whose profiles,
composed of the convergence of data, are mere relays of inputs and
outputs in production-consumption machines.
"Dividuals" have a statistical existence controlled by apparatuses
whose operations differ from the individualization carried out by
pastoral power, which is exercised on "real" individuals. The govern
mentality of dividuals, managed by flows, networks, and machines,
not only plays a part in the individual's representations and conscious
behavior but in the desires, beliefs, and sub-representational reality

of subjectivity. Governmentality is practiced at the junction of
the individual and the dividual, the individual as the dividual's
subjectivation.
Enslavement does not operate through repression or ideology. It
employs modeling and modulating techniques that bear on the
"very spirit of life and human activity." It takes over human beings
"&om the inside," on the pre-personal (pre-cognitive and preverbal)
level, as well as "from the outside," on the supra-personal level, by
assigning them certain modes of perception and sensibility and
manufacturing an unconscious. Machinic enslavement formats the
basic functioning of perceptive, sensory, affective, cognitive, and
linguistic behavior.
We are thus subject to a dual regime. We are, on the one hand,
enslaved to the machinic apparatuses of business, communications,
the welfare state, and finance; on the other hand, we are subjected to
a stratification of power that assigns us roles and social and produc
tive functions as users, producers, television viewers, and so on.
Subjection and enslavement are functions that can be assured by
a single person or distributed among different people. Take the
example of a corporation: salaried employees are enslaved to the
automatization of procedures, machines, and the division of labor,
functioning as the "inputs" and "outputs" of the process. But when
a breakdown, an accident, or a malfunction occurs, the subject
function, consciousness, and representations must be mobilized in
order to "recover" from the incident, explain it, and mitigate its
effects with a view to returning the automatic functions and
enslavement procedures to their normal state.
Political action must therefore be understood in a new way, since
it must operate against both subjection and enslavement, refusing
the former's injunction to inhabit certain places and roles in the

social distribution of labor while constructing, problematizing, and
reconfiguring the machinic assemblage, in other words, a world and
its possibilities. Do machinisms open possibilities and potentialities
for emancipation or do they ineluctably lead to carastrophe? Can one
build new existential territories by combating enslavements and the
currently deterritorialized, technologized present?
CAPITAL AS A SEMIOTIC OPERATOR: SIGNIFYING SEMIOTICS

AND ASIGNIFYING SEMIOTICS
Capital is not only a linguistic but also a "semiotic operator." The

distinction is fundamental because it establishes that flows of signs, as
much as labor and money flows, are the conditions of "production."
From a semiotic perspective, machinic enslavement and social
subjection entail distinct regimes of signs. Social subjection
mobilizes signifying semiotics, in particular language, aimed at
consciousness and mobilizes representations with a view to consti
tuting an individuated subject ("human capital"). On the other hand,
machinic enslavement functions based on asignifying semiotics
(stock market indices, currency, mathematical equations, diagrams,
computer languages, national and corporate accounting, etc.) which
do not involve consciousness and representations and do not have
the subject as referent. 1 8
Signs and semiotics operate according to two heterogeneous and
complementary logics. On the one hand, as in machinic enslavement,
they produce operations, induce action, and constitute input and out
put, junction and disjunction, components of a social or technological
machine. On the other hand, as in social subjection, they produce
meaning, significations, interpretations, discourse, and representa
tions through language. Linguistic but also critical theories (Ranciere,

Virno, cognitive capitalism, etc.) recognize only the second logic
while neglecting the first, which is specific to capitalism.
Asignifying semiotics act on things. They connect an organ, a
system of perception, an intellectual activity, and so on, directly to
a machine, procedures, and signs, bypassing the representations of a
subject (diagrammatic functioning) . They play a very specific role in
capitalism since "essentially, capitalism depends on asignifying
machines."19
Stock market indices, unemployment statistics, scientific dia
grams and functions, and computer languages produce neither
discourses nor narratives (these obviously have their place but
among enslavements). They operate by putting to work and multi
plying the power of the "productive" assemblage. Asignifying
semiotics remain more or less dependent on signifying semiotics; yet
at the level oftheir intrinsic functions they circumvent language and
dominant social significations. The European Central Bank raises
the discount rate by one percent and tens of thousands of "plans" go
up in smoke for lack of credit. Real estate prices collapse, as in the
case of American subprimes, and thousands of households are no
longer able to pay their mortgages. Social Security posts a deficit
and measures to reduce "social spending" are put in place.
Flows of asignifying signs act directly on material flows-beyond
the divide between production and representation-and function
whether they signify something for someone or not. Mathematical
equations, computer programs, and diagrams "directly participate
in the process of generating their object, whereas an advertising
image only provides an extrinsic representation of it (although then
it is productive of subjectivity) ."20 Instead of referring to other signs,
asignifying signs act directly on the real, for example, in the way that
the signs of computer language make a technical machine like the

computer function, that monetary signs activate the economic
machine, that the signs of a mathematical equation enter into the
construction of a bridge or an apartment building, and so on.
Sign machines not only and not primarily work at the level of
social representations or in order to produce meaning. They involve
modes of more abstract (deterritorialized) semiotization than that of
the signifying semiotics in the economic, scientific, and technical
spheres. Considered in this way, sign machines operate "prior" and
"next" to signification, producing a "sense without meaning," an
"operational sense." Their operations are diagrammatic insofar as the
subject, consciousness, and representation remain in the background.
The asignifying semiotics of the economy, of money, easily
circumvent laws, conventions, and institutions. The most deter
ritorialized, like money and finance, are the most formidably
efficient.
What matters to capitalism is controlling the asignifying
semiotic apparatuses (economic, scientific, technical, stock-market,
etc.) through which it aims to depoliticize and depersonalize power
relations. The strength of asignifying semiotics lies in the fact that,
on the one hand, they are forms of "automatic" evaluation and mea
surement and, on the other hand, they unite and make "formally"
equivalent heterogeneous spheres of asymmetrical force and power
by integrating them into and rationalizing them for economic accu
mulation. In the economic crisis, asignifying financial ratings and
stock market indices have dominated, deciding the life and death of
governments, imposing economic and social programs that oppress
the governed. The signifying semiotics of the media, politicians, and
experts are mobilized in order to legitimate, support, and justify in
the eyes of individuated subjects, their consciousness and represen
tations, the fact that "there is no alternative."

Modern-day financialization is simply an intensification of
indexing and symbolizing systems that enable the evaluation and
control of differentials in value in and between different domains.
Mass consumption and the mass media constitute other semiotic
systems of evaluation21 and management that enable the integration
and "rationalization'' of differences in behavior, opinion, and meaning
in accordance with economic logic.
Signifying semiologies (language, stories, discourses), on the
other hand, are used and exploited as techniques for control and
management of the deterritorialization undermining established
communities, social relations, politics, and their former modes of
subjectivation. They are meant to model, format, adjust, and
reconfigure the subjectivation process according to the "individual
subject," whose systematic failure has always lead and continues to
lead to the opposite of individualism, namely, to the "collectivism''
of nationalism, racism, fascism, Nazism, machinism, and so on.
The machinism of language is one of the most important
apparatuses for reterritorializing the decoded flows of individuals,
persons, and individuated subjects. Through its "rudimentary psy
chology;" language leads us to believe in "the 'I,' in the 'I' as being,
in the 'I' as substance, and it projects this belief in the I-substance
onto all things-this is how it creates the concept of 'thing' in the
first place."22 Language, Nietzsche argues, entails a m.etaphysics of
the subject and the object, a metaphysics at once anthropomorphic
and "crudely fetishistic."
If our societies are no longer based on individuals, they are not
based on language either. Whatever one might say about the
"linguistic turn," it is but one semiotics among others and by no
means the most important for ensuring the deterritorialized opera
tions of these megamachines.

The Concept of "Production"
In Deleuze and Guattari's return to and renewal of the Marxian con

cept f "production" subjection and enslavement define, together and
through their difference and complementarity, the "economic" func
tioning of capitalism. By buying the labor force, capital pays for
subjection: hours at work (at a given task), availability (of the unem
ployed, or the "free time" of the television viewer), and so on. But in
reality what capital buys is not only the presence of the labor force at
the business, in the institution or social function, nor the availability,
the free time, of the unemployed or television viewer. What it buys is
first of all the right to exploit a "complex" assemblage that includes,
through enslavement, "modes of transportation, urban models, the
media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling,
every semiotic system."23 Enslavement frees powers of production
incommensurate with those of employment and human labor.
In the law of value presented in Capital, Marx: still has an
"anthropomorphic" and "anthropocentric" view of production,24
since surplus value, like labor time, is human. Only the worker's
labor is productive of surplus value, whereas machines do nothing
more than transmit the value that results from the labor time neces
sary for their manufacture. Attentive to the tremendous increase in
"constant fixed capital" (of machinery), Deleuze and Guattari intro
duce the concept of machinic surplus value and machinic time.25
These temporalities are those of enslavement in which subject
and object, human and non-human, natural and artificial become
indistinguishable. Machinic temporalities make up the factors
essential to capitalist production. Unlike human time and surplus
value, machinic temporalities and surplus value have the striking
attribute of being neither quantifiable nor assignable.26

Anti-Oedipus enumerates different forms of surplus-value pro
duction (human surplus value, financial surplus value, machinic
surplus value, or innovation/knowledge surplus value) in the same
way as A Thousand Plateaus describes a multiplicity of capture
mechanisms of the same surplus value (rent, profit, taxes) . The three
forms of its production coexist and converge, notably in the eco
nomic sphere (which also encompasses forms of production that are
not specifically those of capitalist surplus value) . This attempt to
account for the nature of capitalist exploitation does not seem to
me any more promising than the move to attach this multiplicity to
the unity of "knowledge" and 'innovation," as cognitive capitalist
theories endeavor to do.27
Multiplicity can be found everywhere in capitalism, in economic
production, social production (of the unemployed, the student, the
user, etc.), in the production of mass-communications, and in
finance. Indeed, it is never an individual or even a group of indi
viduals (intersubjectivity) who work, communicate, or produce. In
capitalism, one always works or produces in and through a collective
assemblage. But the collective does not only consist of individuals and
elements of human subjectivity. It also includes "objects," machines,
protocols, human and non-human semiotics, affects, micro-social
and pre-individual relations, supra-individual relations, and so forth.
In the same way, it is never an individual who thinks, never an
individual who creates. An individual who thinks and creates does so
within a network of institutions (schools, theaters, museums,
libraries, etc.), technologies (books, electronic networks, computers,
etc.), and sources of public and private financing; an individual
immersed in traditions of thought and aesthetic practices--engulfed
in a circulation of signs, ideas, and tasks-that force him or her to
think and create.

In private enterprise, the employee must act and identify him
self as a producer, subjugated to machines that remain external to
him but of which he makes use. Yet it is never the employee (indi
viduated subjectivity) or the simple cooperative actions of
.
employees (intersubjectivity) that produce. The productivity of
capital depends, on the one hand, on the mobilization and assem
blage of organs (the brain, hands, muscles, etc.} and human faculties
(memory, perception, cognition, etc.) and, on the other hand, on
the "intellectual" and physical performance of machines, protocols,
organizations, software, or systems of signs, science, and so on.
That is to say that productivity depends in large part on enslavement
(and its diagrammatic functioning, which circumvents represen
tation, consciousness, and language), in which, it must be
emphasized, relations are not intersubjective, agents are not persons,
and semiotics are not by any stretch solely signifying.
Capital, therefore, does not simply extort an extension of labor
time (the difference between paid human time and human time
spent at the workplace), it initiates a process that exploits the
difference between subjection and enslavement. For if subjective
subjection-the social alienation inherent to a particular job or any
social function (worker, unemployed, teacher, etc.)-is always
assignable and measurable (the wage appropriate to one's position,
the salary appropriate to a social function), the part of machinic
enslavement constituting actual production is never assignable nor
quantifiable as such.
In machinic enslavement, individual labor and production are
not proportional. Production is not the amount of time spent doing
individual work. We must distinguish between labor (the activity
actually carried out) and employment (a merely juridical status),
because the former exceeds the latter. But we must also distinguish

labor as a real activity and production, which mobilizes a series of
human and non-human elements.
Production and productivity only partially have to do with
employment (or even labor); they are above all a matter of the
machinic assemblage, that is, the mobilization of the powers of
machinism, communications, science, and the social, just as Marx
foresaw in the Grundrisse.28
However, in modern-day capitalism one must go further still,
since it is never a corporation that produces, even if considered from
the perspective of machinic enslavement. In its current configura
tion, capitalist production is nothing other than an assemblage of
assemblages, a process ofprocesses, that is, a network ofassemblages or
processes (the corporation, the social, the cultural, the technological,
the political spheres, gender, public relations, science, consumption)
each one traversing the other.
Capital appropriates this unassignable, unmeasurable value by
way of three principal apparatuses of capture: profit, rent, and taxes.
The "business" assemblage extends, combines with, and presup
poses other assemblages (national and para-national collective
institutions of the welfare state, mass media systems, cultural insti
tutions, educational systems, finance, consumption, etc.), all of
which function by uniting and pushing to the extreme individua
lization (subjection) and deindividualization (enslavement) .
We are subjugated to the television machine as a user and
consumer, identifying with programs, images, and narratives as a
subject, with a subject's consciousness and representations. On the
other hand, we are enslaved "insofar as television viewers are no
longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly 'make'
it, but intrinsic component pieces that are no longer connected to
the machine in such a way as to produce or use it:"29

With enslavement, the component parts of subjectivity func
tion as inputs and outputs of the "television" assemblage, as so much
feedback in the immense network ofsynchronized dividuals constituted
by erislaved viewers. The relation between human and non-human
elements "is based on internal, mutual communication, and no
longer on usage or action."30
Pollsters can measure the "available brain time" spent in front of
the television but not what occurs during this time. The production
of information that results from the combination of the assemblage
of image, sound, and representational flows of the individual and
the component parts of subjectivity of the dividual can neither be
assigned nor measured from the economic point ofview. This, while
subjectivity is subjected to a semiotic machining which transforms
and formats it.
The welfare-state institutions that govern unemployment
compel the unemployed to act and to identify themselves as "bene
ficiaries" of unemployment insurance, that is, as human capital
responsible for their employability. But at the same time the unem
ployed are forced to function as a simple adjustment variable of the
labor market, as a flexible and adaptable part of the "automatic"
functions of job supply and demand.
On the one hand, "pastoral" control and coercion apparatuses,
meticulously attending to the education, projects, qualifications,
and behavior of the unemployed, force them to institute themselves
as subjects. On the other hand, the market considers them deindi
vidualized component parts assuring its automatic self-regulation.
Thus, if unemployment insurance is the measure ofwhat the unem
ployed 'person's availability costs (the measure of subjection), then
what the unemployed produces with his mobility and flexibility on
the job market, what he produces as a consumer or insofar as he
Production and the Production of Subjectivity / 47

makes the unemployment-insurance machine run (as part of the
feedback of the "social machine": the information he provides, even
despite himself, the subjective and objective index he represents,
even despite himself) is unassignable and unmeasurable.
The individual is a subject (human capital) in the financial
system in yet another way. As an "investor/debtor," he can be
viewed as the very model of subjectivation: the promise he makes
to reimburse his debt means that memory and affects (such as guilt,
responsibility, loyalry, trust, etc.) must be created to ensure the
fulfillment of the promise. But once credit has entered the finance
machine, he becomes something else entirely, a mere input of the
financial assemblage. Indeed, the credit/debt incorporated into the
assemblage loses all reference to the subject who contracted the
debt. Credit/debt is literally torn to pieces (in the same way the
assemblage tears the subject to pieces) by the financial machine,
which the subprime crisis has shown all too well. It is no longer a
matter of this or that investment, of this or that debt: the financial
assemblage has transformed the subject into a currency that acts as
"capital," into money that generates money.
The unemployed, the worker, the television viewer, the saver,
and so on, are subject not only to "pastoral" techniques of indi
vidualization (Foucault) but to veritable machines of subjectivation
and desubjectivation. Under capitalism, the processes of subjecti
vation and desubjectivation are just as machinic as the production
of any other kind of industrial commodity.
The hypotheses Deleuze and Guattari advanced in the 1970s are
in large part still relevant today. Subjection still concerns labor even if
its meaning has imperceptibly but undoubtedly shifted from the
"labor" of the worker to the "labor" of the entrepreneur. Since the
1980s, we have moved from the"productive" force of the working class

to that of private enterprise, in particular because of social democracy.
One everywhere praises "the value of work," wittingly maintaining
the ambiguity, for by work we now mean not only the activity one
perfoms for a boss, but also the "work on the self" one must carry
out in order to transform oneself into "human capital."
With enslavement, on the other hand, labor is split in two
directions: that of "intensive" surplus labor, which no longer has
anything to do with labor but rather with "a generalized machinic
enslavement," such that one may provide surplus value without
doing any work (children, the retired, the unemployed, television
viewers, etc.); and that of extensive labor which "has become erratic
and floating."31
In these circumstances, users (of unemployment insurance, tele
vision, public and private services, etc.), like all consumers, tend to
become "employees." "Consumer labor"32 epitomizes a productivity
that no longer adheres to the "physico-social definition of labor."
Desire and Production
From the economic point of view, subjection determines wages and

revenues which have only an indirect relationship with "real pro
duction," in other words, with machinic enslavement. Subjection
divides the population between those who are employed and those
who are not, between those who have social rights and those who
do not, between "active" and "inactive" populations, with no basis
in economic necessity, because a person's contribution to "production''
(to machinic enslavement) is neither assignable nor measurable.
Subjection functions according to binary segmantarities
(employment/unemployment, producer/consumer, men/women,
artist!non-artist, productive/non-productive, etc.), whereas enslavement

functions according to a flexible segmentarity, which traverses
subjections and their binaries. In machinic enslavement, the split
between employed/unemployed, insurance/welfare, productive/
non-productive, no longer pertains. From the point of view of "real
production," from the point of view of the assemblage or process,
everyone "works," everyone is "productive" (or "available," like the
unemployed), in various forms.
"In a certain way, the housewife holds a job at home, the child
at school, the consumer at the supermarket, the viewer in front of
the television screen." On the side of machinic enslavement, chil
dren "work in front of the television; they work at the day-care
center with toys created to improve their productive performance.
In a sense, this work is comparable to that of apprentices at pro
fessional schools."33
For Guattari, the notion of the workplace must be expanded .
to most non-salaried activities and the notion of private enterprise
to the collective apparatuses of the welfare state, the media, and so
on. Modern-day capitalism requires a new perspective in order to
account for its socialization, its hold on the (supra-individual)
"social"34 as well as on that which is infra-individual in subjectivity.
Since the postwar years, unions and the Lefi: have shifted emphasis
from "labor to work" This has left to business leaders and the State
the :fundamental political problem of integrating the "social" (Fou
cault) and "society" (Italian Operaism) and capitalist valorization.
Recognizing the consequences of capital's socialization, Deleuze
and Guattari argue for the univocity of the concept of produc
tion. If production and the social overlap, then the "field of desire"
and the "field of labor," the "economy'' and the production of sub
jectivity, infrastructure and superstructure, can no longer be taken
separately. The question of production is inseparable from that of

desire (Guattari) such that political economy is no more than a
"subjective economy."
The production of subjectivity does not refer, then, to an ideo
logical superstructure; it produces reality and, specifically, economic
reality. It is in fact what defines modern-day capitalism, in which
''work on the self" {praxis) and ''labor" {production} combine.
Contrary to Ranciere's and Badiou's thinking, "production'' is
not a matter of "economics." Nor is it limited to the cultivation of
knowledge, culture, etc., as cognitive capitalism claims. Rather, it
captures and exploits something more profound and transversal to
society on the whole: the process of singularization and the produc
tion of new modes of subjectivation whose basis is desire.
The subjective essence of production described by classical
economists (Smith, Ricardo) and Marx can no longer be confined
solely to "labor" since today's capitalism includes the ethico-political
dimension of "work on the sel" In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and
Guattari advance a fundamentally new concept of desire appro
priate to the new nature of "economy'' wherein "labor" and "work
on the self," production and subjectivation, coalesce and desire
serves to define economy as the "production of the possible."
Capitalist deterritorialization acts on desire such that it is no
longer human, properly speaking, but machinic. Desire is not the
expression of human subjectivity; it emerges from the assemblage of
human and non-human flows, from a multiplicity of social and
technical machines. Deterritorialized desire has nothing to do with
"drives" or "conatus." It is a question instead of the possible, of the
creation of new potentialities, of the emergence of what appears
possible within the framework of capitalist domination. 35
Deterritorialized desire breaks with conceptions of capitalism as
mere rationalization and calculation, with the image of its actions as

aimed solely at the accomplishment of an objective. Its subjective
("anthropological") model does not follow that of the Calvinist/
Weberian deferral of desires nor the Freudian model of their repression.
Another dimension must be brought into play, one which was
always already present but which only today's "economy'' makes
salient. Deterritorialized desire, machinic desire, bears with it an
"economy of possibilities" and an autopoietic (self-productive) sub
jectivity which explains the nature of modern-day capitalism and
above all its crisis. Capitalism can no longer contain them within
the limits of private property or the subjective figure of the entre
preneur of the sel
The Failure of ''Human Capital"
The strength of capitalism lies in its ability to integrate desire as an

"economy of possibilities" into its own functioning in order to pro
mote and solicit a new subjective figure: the economic subject as
"human capital" or entrepreneur of the sel
Looking to account for the change, cognitive capitalist theory
reduces the production of subjectivity or the "subjective" economy
to the knowledge economy, to the information economy, and to the
innovation economy. Cognitive capitalism concedes too much to
economic "science" and, in particular, to the theory of "endogenous
growth," which make knowledge the driver of the economy.
Knowledge is less the basis of modem-day capitalism than the pro-
duction process of subjectivity centered on desire-desire on which

even knowledge, information, and cultural production depend. It is
not a matter of cognitive subjectivity hut of techniques of power
(subjection and enslavement) operating transversely to a multiplicity
. of forms of activity.

The current crisis stems from the fact that the production of
this subjective figure has failed. Neoliberalism has been unable to
articulate "production" and the "production of subjectivity."
Neoliberalism aims indiscriminately at the economy and subjectivity,
at "labor" and the ethico-political work on the sel It reduces the
latter to an injunction to become "a kind of permanent and multi
faceted enterprise," whether that of an IT specialist, a maid, or a
supermarket clerk. But with the crisis liberalism has created, the
promise that "work on the self " was supposed to offer "labor" in
terms of emancipation (pleasure, a sense of accomplishment,
recognition, experimentation with new forms of life, upward
mobility, etc.) has been transformed into the imperative to take
upon oneself the risks and costs for which neither business nor the
State are willing to pay.
In the current crisis, for the majority of the population "work
on the self " means no more than the "entrepreneurial" management
of unemployment, debt, wage and revenue cuts, reductions in social
services, and rising taxes.
Following the financial debacle of 2007, which exposed the
impossibility of creating an economy of possibilities within the
limits of private property, capitalism has gradually rid itself of its
epic narratives based on freedom, innovation, creativity, the
knowledge society, and so on. The population must now concern
itself solely with everything finance, business, and the welfare state
"externalize" onto society and leave it at that.
It is now clear that the autonomy and freedom that entrepre
neurial initiative was supposed to bring to "work'' instead mean a
much greater dependency not only on institutions (business, State,
finance) but also on a despotic superego ("I" am my own boss,
therefore I am to blame for everything that happens to me!) .

Modern-day capitalism finds the surplus it seeks less in knowledge
than in the subjective implication to which the "immaterial
worker" must yield in the same way as migr:ill.t and factory workers,
users of social services, and consumers, all of whom provide an
enormous quantity of free labor.
The semiotic and disciplinary machining to which subjectivities
are subjected is not primarily cognitive (capitalism does not need as
many educated people, as many cognitive workers, as cognitive
capitalism believes) . The aim of the capitalist machine is to furnish
individuals with patterns of conscious or "unconscious" behaviors
that compel them to submit to. the "rites of passage" and "initiation''
of the business, the welfare state, the consumer and media society,
and so on. Capitalism obliges individuals to assume the "superegos"
necessary for filling hierarchical roles and functions, whether those
of the unemployed, factory workers, retirees, consumers, or cogni
tive workers.
With the crisis, the semiotic and disciplinary formatting
operated by subjections and enslavements converge in the production
and reproduction of the creditor/debtor relationship. Filling these
roles and functions requires debt and its subjective iteration, the
indebted man.

2
Signifying Se miologies and Asignifying Se miotics

in Production and in the Production of Subjectivity
Mass production and the mass exportation of the white, conscious,
adult, male subject always have as their correlate the reining in of
intensive multiplicities, which elude all types of centralization,
every signifying arborescence.
-Felix Guattari, Lignes defoite
To transform the unconscious into discourse is to bypass the
dynamics, to become complicit with the whole of Western ratio,

which kills art at the same time as the dream. One does not in the
least break with metaphysics by placing language everywhere.
-Jean-Franc;:ois Lyotard, Discourse, Figure
In modern-day capitalism subjectivity is the product of a world

wide mass industry. For Guattari, it is even the primary and most
important of capitalist effects since subjectivity conditions and
participates in the production of all other commodities. 1 Subjectivity
is a "key commodity" whose "nature" is conceived, developed, and
manufactured in the same way as an automobile, electricity, or a
washing machine. More than an economic or political crisis, the
crisis in which we have been stuck since the 1 970s represents a
55
crisis in the production of subjectivity, which can hardly be
explained by technical, economic, or political processes.
Subjectivity, subjectivation, processes of subjectivation, and
subjection are all concepts that consistently appear in critical thought
since the 1 960s (Foucault, Ranciere, etc.), covering different and
often contradictory ideas. In this regard Felix Guattari, who went
further in the conceptual problematization and cartography of the
features and modalities of the production of subjectivity, points to
several pitfalls it is best to avoid.
First of all, the structuralist impasse, which reduces subjec
tivity to the mere result of ..signifying operations: "What the
structuralists say isn't true; it isn't the facts of language or even
communication that generate subjectivity. At a certain level, it is
collectively manufactured in the same way as energy, electricity,
or aluminum."2
The production of subjectivity puts into play something very
different from linguistic performance: ethological, fantasmic
dimensions, economic, aesthetic, and physical semiotic systems,
existential territories, and incorporeal universes, all of which are
irreducible to a semiology of language. The concept of the substance
of expression must be pluralized in order to bring to the fore the
extralinguistic, non-human, biological, technological, aesthetic, and
machinic substances of expression.
The second pitfall comes from phenomenology and psycho
analysis, whose concepts reduce "the facts of subjectivity to
drives, affects, intra-subjective apparatuses and relations," which
Guattari also defines as "intersubjective drivel."3 Technical
(digital, communicational, media) and social machines modu
late and format subjectivity by acting not only within memory
and sense but also within the unconscious. This non-human,

machinic part of subjectivity is irreducible to intra- and inter
subjective relations .
. To avoid the third, sociological pitfall, we must move away
froni methodological individualism and holism. Processes of
subjectivation or semiotization are not centered on individual
agents or on collective (intersubjective) agents. The production of
subjectivity is indeed a "collective" process, yet the collective both goes
beyond the individual, in an extra-personal dimension (machinic,
economic, social, technological systems), and precedes the person
(preverbal intensities within a system of affects and intensities) .
Finally, there is the last difficulty, which Guattari calls the "com
plex of infrastructures": a material infrastructure that generates an
ideological superstructure (Marxism), an instinctual infrastructure
that generates the psyche (Freud), or deep syntactic and linguistic
structures that produce linguistic (signified) content.
We will look to avert these three stumbling blocks while at the
same time avoiding the pitfalls of structuralism.
1. The Remnants of Structuralism: Language Without Structure
Structuralism is dead, but what founded its paradigm-language

is still very much alive. Surprisingly, it is doing quite well, even after
the critical theories that came out of the major theoretical innova
tions of the 1 960s and 70s cleared a way out of structuralism.
Here, however, language does not have the systemic and com
binatory neutrality of structuralism. Critical thought has radically
politicized language yet without ever fully giving up on the logic
according to which language is unique to man and thus the corner
stone ofpolitics. For Paolo Virno, politics must not be sought in the
uses the speaker makes of it; language is intrinsically political
Signifying Semiologies and Asignifying Semiotics in Produciion I 57

insofar as its activity or praxis is realized in the public sphere. Poli
tics and the possession of language are literally one and the same.
For Ranciere, the logos constitutes the measure and verification
of politics' sole principle--equality. Even a command, for one to be
given, presupposes a minimum of equality, the equality of logos. In
order for subordinates to understand and execute an order, they
must share the same language as the person who issues it. Equality
is in this way verified in language.
Judith Butler considers all her work an extension of Hannah
Arendt's affirmation that "men become political beings as beings
of language." In the same vein, Giorgio Agamben establishes a
strict relationship between language and human nature, because
man, "uniquely among living things, [ . . . ] has put [ . . ] his very
.
nature at stake in language."4

The more or less critical, more or less problematic, references
are first of all Aristotle and his twofold definition of man ("Man is
the only animal to possess language" and "man is a political ani
mal"), Hannah Arendt, and analytic philosophy. For Vimo and
Butler, the latter provides the starting point for a repoliticization of
language through an analysis of the relationship between "words
and power."
According to Pascal Michon, who instead draws on the German
tradition, we have undergone a "forgetting of the specificity of
language." The critique of capitalism and a truly subversive politics
of art must be founded on "humanity's sole creative force, the sole
utopian force: the force of language."5
Today, Lacan's psychoanalysis, an apogee of structuralist
thought, seems to be attracting new disciples. With Freudian
themes interpreted in terms of Saussurean linguistics (the
Hegelian master-slave dialectic), the subject becomes an effect of

language and language the source of the subject; the unconscious
is structured like a language and, like a language, it functions
through metaphor and metonymy. 6 The "chain of signifiers," their
combinatory, their "autonomy," their exteriority, their existence
prior to all experience, produces both the signified and the sub
ject. The Hegelian-Lacanian formation of the subject is faithfully
faken up by ZiZek and, albeit with certain revisions, by Butler.
Although she refuses the "structuring role of the law of the father,"
.Butler has the signifier act as a performative within Lacanian theory
leading to the same results. Language functions as a molar
constraint, as a transcendental, as an "original and radical servitude"
that "precedes and exceeds" the subject.
. In an attempt to move beyond the reductive hypotheses
inherited from Marxism, which made language a superstructure or
ideological artifact, Ranciere transforms language along with affects
. into the very origin of society: "the 'social' [ . . . ] is in fact consti
tuted by a series of discursive acts and reconfigurations of a
perceptive field."7
Language and affects not only define the object of the distribu
tion of the sensible, according to Ranciere (with the bourgeoisie
controlling speech and "educated meaning" while the proletariat
emits only animal noise, expressing itself through "brute sense"),
they also constitute new productive forces. For my friends in cogni-
. rive capitalism, the nature of labor and capital is given through
_-language and affects as well. Cognitive labor mobilizes the latter and
cognitive capitalism captures and exploits them.
way of understanding language, even if defined according to
its political or productive function, seems to me a sharp discrepancy
\vith the nature and functioning of subjectivity, enunciation, and
production in modern-day capitalism. In all these theories, and
Signifying Semiologies and Asignifying Semiotics in Production I 59

despite their critical aims, we remain in a "logocentric" world,
whereas with capitalism we have for some time entered a "machine
centric" world that configures the functions of language in a
different way.
In the machine-centric universe, one moves from the question
of the subject to that of subjectivity such that enunciation does not
primarily refer to speakers and listeners-the communicational
version of individualism-but to "complex assemblages of individuals,
bodies, material and social machines, semiotic, mathematical, and
scientific machines, etc., which are the true sources of enunciation."8
The sign machines of money, _economics, science, technology, art,
and so on, function in parallel or independently because they pro
duce or convey meaning and in this way bypass language,
significations, and representation.
In the mid- 1 960s, Pier Paolo Pasolini described the hold
capital's modes of semiotization have over language as the begin
ning of a "post-human world" in which the sites of linguistic
creation shifr to "production'' and machinisms. Given Italy's lin
guistic "backwardness," this process appeared in a particularly
striking way. In the linguistic sphere, the second industrial revolu
tion brought about "the substitution of languages of infrastructures
[ . ] for the languages of superstructures." It had always been the
. .
case, from Egyptian civilization to the first industrial revolution,

that "the linguistic models that dominate a society and make it
linguistically unitary are the models of the cultural superstruc
tures'' and of the intellectual elites in law, literature, education,
and religion. Then suddenly, with the turn from capitalism to
neo-capitalism, which coincided with the transformation of the
"scientific spirit" into the integral "application of science" to pro
duction, "the languages of the infrastructures, let us say simply the

languages of production, are guiding society linguistically. It had
never happened before."9
The languages of "production-consumption'' produce "a kind of
downgrading of the word, tied to the deterioration of the humanistic
languages of the elites, which have been, until now, the guiding
languages." 10 The centers that create, develop, and unify language
"are no longer the universities, but theJactories."1 1 The "interregional
and international" language of the future will be a "signing" lan
guage of "a world unified by industry and technocracy," that is, "a
communication of men no longer men."12
This is exactly the opposite of what one finds asserted by the
exponents of the linguistic turn: analysis is supposed only to examine
the "language of infrastructures" and the subordination of "humanist"
languages, language, and signifying semiotics to the semiotics of
production and consumption.
Even Hannah Arendt in The Modern Condition warns us that
although the "ability to act," to "start new unprecedented processes,"
is still present, 13 it has become the privilege of the sciences which
"have been forced to adopt a 'language' of mathematical symbols
[ . . ] that in no way can be translated back into speech." Ifwe "adjust
.
our cultural attitudes to the present status of scientific achievement,

we would in all earnest adopt a way of life in which speech is no
longer meaningful," for scientists "move in a world where speech has
lost its power."14 Arendt subtly remarks something her commentators
have failed to notice, namely that the dose relationship between
action and speech, which occurs "without the intermediary of things
or matter,''15 belongs to a "human condition'' which has not been
our condition since at least the first industrial revolution.
Pasolini's analyses, which show that it is not only in the sciences
that "language has lost its power," are carried still further in the

work of Guattari. The latter specifies the nature and function of the
"languages of infrastructures" in his most important contribution to
the question: asignifying semiotics.
To map the "languages of infrastructures" and the modes of
machine-centric subjectivation/enunciation, one must follow
Guattari's advice to "ex.it language" by doing two things: dissociate
subjectivity from the subject, from the individual, and even from
the human, and cease considering the power of enunciation exclusive
to man and subjectivity.
Guattari sees no reason to deny the equivalent of a subjectivity
the equivalent of a "non-human for-itself [pour soi]" (which he calls
proto-subjectivity) and of a power of enunciation (which he calls
proto-enunciation)-with living and material assemblages. He asks
rather that we consider the possibility of forces other than those of the
individuated subject's consciousness, sense, and language that might
function as vectors of subjectivation or as focal points of enunciation.
Guattari extends the autopoietic power, the potential of self
production, to all machines. It is a power capable of developing its
own rules and modes of expression, a power which Francisco
Varela reserves solely for living machines. " [A]ll machinic systems,
whatever domain they belong to-technical, biological, semiotic,
logical, abstract-are, by themselves, the support for proto-subjective
processes, which I will characterize in terms of modular subjectivity''
or "partial subjectivity." 16
Modes of subjectivation, assemblages of semiotization and
enunciation of all kinds-human and non-human, collective or
individual-coexist within biological, economic, aesthetic, scientific,
and social processes.
Guattari's theory captures the fate of the creative function in
capitalism. Languages as such have no privilege in creation. On the

contrary, their functioning "can even slow down or prohibit any
semiotic proliferation, and it often remains for nonlinguistic com
ponents to catalyze mutations and break [ . . . ] the dominant
lingriistic significations" and to serve as heterogeneous vectors of
subjectivation. "Genetic codes throughout the history of life and
iconic systems, like art, throughout the history of humanity, have
been at least as rich [ . . ] as linguistic systems."17
.
If one considers all human and non-human reality as "expres

sive," that is, as source, emergence, and detonator of processes of
subjectivation and enunciation, then reality is present in our actions
as multiple possibilities, as "optional matter." Thought and choices
are exercised on the "economy of possibles"; they do not start with
man and do not rely exclusively on "a signifying discourse produced
between speakers and listeners." The history of evolution teaches us
that if the "freedom" of possible choices exists at "higher" anthropo
logical stages, they must he presupposed and found equally at the
most "elementary" levels of the living being and matter. Subjectivity,
creation, and enunciation are the results of an assemblage of human,
infra-human, and extra-human factors in which signifying, cognitive
semiotics constitute but one of the constituent parts.
Guattari is not alone in approaching subjectivity and enuncia
tion from "the point of view of things themselves" rather than that
of the subject, human consciousness, and representation. We can
find the same theme, though in very different terms, in Benjamin,
Pasolini, or Klemperer. But well before their theoretical formula
tion, the new machines of industrial production, cinema, and art
revealed a metamorphosis of the subject, object, and their modes of
expression.
The cinema's invention disclosed a reality expressed without
representation or linguistic mediation. It was no longer necessary to

trace signs and symbols in order to show an object, beings, or rela
tions. Reality signified all by itsel In art, a radical rupture occurred
at the beginning of the century when ready-made, following
cinema's example, signified by way of the object itself, unassisted by
the sign or language. Properly speaking, ready-mades are no longer
representations but "presentations."
Duchamp's Bottle Rack or Fountain are objects mass-produced
by industrial machinisms, produced by a new power-rather than
that of homo Jaber, the power of a machinic assemblage, which
assembles sign, material, and labor flows. Addressing this form of
capitalist production, Marx evoked a global, non-qualified subjec
tivity manifesting itself in any object whatsoever. Guattari explodes
"Marxist" anthropomorphism and its modes of expression by pushing
the deterritorialization of subjectivity to the extreme.
That objects might start "speaking," start "expressing them
selves" (or start dancing, as they do in the celebrated passage &om
the first b ook of Capital), is not capitalist fetishism, the proof of
man's alienation, but rather marks a new regime of expression which
requires a new semiotics. This is not simply a reversal of the subject's
activity manifesting itself as the animation of the object, a reversal
one need only stand back on its head. This is an irreversible process
that shifts the question of the subject to that of subjectivity and
&om human subjectivity to machinic, biological, social, aesthetic,
etc., proto-subjectivities. The return to "humanism," whatever it
may mean, is in any case neither possible nor desirable.
Guattari deploys the philosophical program of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia in the realm of semiotics and the production of
subjectivity. The point is to leave behind the subject/object dualism
imposed on multiplicities, which are neither subjects nor objects, by
inscribing nature and culture along an indeterminate continuum.

From this point of view, the linguist Louis Hjelmslev's work of the
late 1 960s and early 1 970s on categories of expression and content
proved fundamental. In Hjelmslev, however, the pair expression/
content remains prisoner to the Saussurean opposition between
signifier and signified, whereas for Guattari expression does not
refer to the signifier or language but to a collective semiotic machine
preexisting both (a collective assemblage of enunciation encompassing
diverse and heterogeneous substances of human and non-human
expression). Likewise, content does not refer to the signified but to
a social machine that preexists it (a machinic assemblage of action
and passion we can by no means reduce to the economic, social, or
political spheres) . The double articulation of expression and content
is not a specific property of language; the latter represents only one
functional modality of the organic, biological, social, aesthetic, etc.,
strata of reality.
The enlarged conception of this twofold relationship allows us
to avoid the pitfalls of Marxism and structuralism, because expression
and content, one presupposing and reversing the other reciprocally,
maintain no causal relationship. Expression does not depend on
content (Marxism), nor is content the product of expression
(linguistic structuralism). Subjectivity is neither the result of lin
guistic or communicational expression nor the product of deeper
socioeconomic contents.
In a fundamental methodological shift, Guattari asks us to grasp
the subject/object relation and the expression/content relation "by
the middle," to foreground and problematize the "expressive
instance," that is, the enunciation. In this way, he lays the basis
for a new pragmatics, a new theory of enunciation, in which, para
doxically, the ground of enunciation is existential, not discursive. 1 8

2. Signifying Semiologies
In the beginning of assemblages of enunciation, we find neither

verb, nor subject, system, nor syntax . . . : instead, there are compo
nents of semiotization, subjectivation, conscientization,
diagrarnmatism, and abstract machinisms.
-Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious
A sign, in terms ofits expressiveness, is the equivalent of another sign

(any other sign); every hierarchy among signs is unjust, unjustifiable.
-Pier Paolo Pasolini, }feretical Empiricism
The strength of capitalism lies in its articulation of processes of

social subjection and machinic enslavement as well as in the effects
of their respective signifying and asignifying semiotics. Both appa
ratuses play a fundamental role in controlling processes of capitalist
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, for they enable the
adjustment, modification, solicitation, assemblage, and stabilization
of processes of desubjectivation and subjectivation. The fundamental
distinction between signifying semiologies and asignifying semiotics
has to do with the different ways in which they function and their
very different effects on subjectivity. We will examine them sepa
rately in order to elucidate the distinction, one which no less always
involves mixed semiotics.
Instead ofmaking language the site for the verification of equality;
instead of considering it implicitly political because a manifestation
of the publicity of action or, even, of making it a new productive
force, Guattari proposes to "exit language" and develop a semiotic
theory beyond human semiotics. In a capitalism organized
around and founded on asignifying semiotics (Pasolini's "languages of

infrastructures"), language is only "one particular but in no way
privileged example of the functioning of a general semiotics." This
general semiotics must account for both signifying speech and the
machines of aesthetic, technical-scientific, biological, and social signs.
Guattari distinguishes among different types of semiotics situated
beyond the measures and hierarchizations of human language:
"natural" a-semiotic encodings (crystalline systems and DNA, for
example), signifjing semiologies including symbolic (or pre-signifying,
gestural, ritual, productive, corporeal, musical, etc.) semiologies and
semiologies of signification, and, finally, asignifjing (or post-signifying)
semiotics. This represents Guattari's most important contribution to
our understanding of capitalism and the production of subjectivity.
In "natural" a-semiotic encodings, expression is not an auto
nomous stratum with regard to content. In a rock, in a crystalline
structure, the "form" is conveyed by the "material" itself, such that
expression and content are inherent to each other. There is no
differentiating between a mineral, chemical, or nuclear stratum and
a semiotic stratum organized into an autonomous syntax.
The separation, the autonomization, of expression begins to
develop with the emergence of life. With plants and animals "form'
is transmitted through codes that create complex molecules and
reproductive systems of species which begin to autonomize and to
separate from "substance."
With human behavior, signifying semiologies, and asignifying
semiotics, transmission no longer depends on genetic codes but on
learning, memories, languages, symbols, diagrams, graphs, equa
tions, and so on, in other words, on semiotics functioning according
to an autonomous syntax and strata of expression. In semiologies
of signification, unlike natural encodings, expression and content
maintain a relationship of interpretation, reference, and signification.

I. The Political Functions ofSemiologies ofSignification
Despite the specific attention paid to symbolic and asignifying

semiotics which lie outside of language, Guattari has left us with a
very precise picture of how language functions within capitalism.
The establishment of a language and of a system of dominant
significations is always first of all a political operation before it is a
linguistic or semantic one. A certain type of language and certain
modes of individuated semiotization and subjectivation are neces
sary in order to stabilize the social field disrupted by capitalist
deterritorialization, a deterritorialization which undermines previous
subjectivities, forms of life, and institutions. Stabilization entails the
predominance of a national language, carrying with it the laws and
modes of functioning of incipient capitalism over dialects, excep
tional languages, and modes of infantile, "pathological," and artistic
expression. The national language reduces them to marginality by
bringing them "before the court of dominant syntaxes, semantics,
and pragmatics."
The constitution of linguistic exchange and of distinct and indi
viduated speakers is, on the one hand, coextensive with the constitution
of economic exchange, of its rational agents, and of the juridical con
tract and its contracting parties. On the other hand, it is coextensive
...
with psychic instances of the "self" (id/superego) and the "other."

Capitalist formations have recourse to a particular type of signi
fying semiotic machine which, overcoding all the other semiotics,
allows "economic" production as well as the production of subjec
tivity to be administered, guided, adjusted, and controlled. By
exercising power over symbolic semiotics, the semiotics of significa
tion function as both a general equivalent of expression and a vector
of subjectivation centered on the individual.

Throughout Guattari's work we encounter the comparison with
symbolic (pre-signifying) semiotics such as they function in primi
tive societies. This allows us to grasp the sudden change as well as
the novelty the "imperialism and despotism" oflanguage represents.
First of all, capitalism requires that symbolic semiotics
(whether gestural, ritual, productive, corporeal, musical, etc.) be
hierarchized and subordinated to language. Unlike language, they
"do not involve a distinguishable speaker and hearer. Words do not
play a major part, since the message is carried not via linguistic
chains, but via bodies, sounds, mimicry, posture and so on." 19
Since symbolic semiotics are "transitional, polyvocal, animistic,
and transindividual," they are not easily assigned to individuated
.
subJeers, to persons ("I," "you") .
In our capitalist societies there is still this transindividual mode
of functioning but it is confined to marginal forms of expression:

madness, infancy, artistic creation, and creation period, as well as
amorous or political passion.
Symbolic semiologies and the semiology of signification cannot
be distinguished by the strata of expression they put in play. Sym
bolic semiologies function according to a multiplicity ("n") of strata
or substances of expression (gestural, ritual, productive, corporeal,
musical, etc.), whereas semiologies of signification bring together
only two strata (signifier/signified) .
In primitive societies, different semiotic strata (artistic, religious,
linguistic, economic, corporeal, musical, and so on) do not enter into
dependent or hierarchized relation with each other. Speech interacts
directly with other forms of expression (ritual, gestural, musical,
productive, etc.) instead of constituting a higher modality of it.
Each stratum of expression conserves its specific consistency and
autonomy. The translatability of different semiotic strata is not

accomplished through a formalization of expression {the signifier)
that overpowers other. semiotics, but through a social assemblage
(tribe, community) which, on the contrary, precludes the emer
gence of a single signifying substance, of a signifying synthesis, of a
system that hierarchizes and subordinates other forms of expression
to language. In capitalism, on the other hand, these nonverbal forms
of expression depend on language.
"The signs of society can be interpreted integrally by those of
language, but the reverse is not so. Language is therefore interpreting
society."20 In this way, Emile Benveniste concludes the superiority
of language over other semiotic systems. It leads Guattari to
remark: "One sought to make symbolic semiotics dependent on
linguistic semiologies on the pretense that they could not be deci
phered, understood, or translated without recourse to language.
But what does that prove? We wouldn't say that because we take a
plane to go from the US to Europe that the two continents depend
on aviation."21
Generalized exchange is not part of the economic sphere alone.
The comparison, quantification, and exchange of economic values
necessitate, first of all , significations that remain invariant in time
and space, enabling a general translatability of semiotics into a
linguistic "standard." Determining "value" requires the institution
of a national language that operates the comparison and internal
translatability of languages and local dialects.
In reality, words and sentences have no sense except within a
particular enunciation, a specific syntax, and a local micro-political
situation. Every day every one of us passes through a multiplicity
of heterogeneous languages: a language we speak to our families,
at work, with friends, with God, with our superiors, and so on.
Language has to function as an equivalent to these different

semiotics, which express power relations and local heterogeneous
desire.
Unlike the territorialized assemblages of primitive societies,
capitalism must realize the homogenization, uniformization, and
centralization of different human and non-human expressive
economies: language, icons, gestures, the language of things
(urbanism, commodities, prices, etc.). All semiotics must be com
patible with and adapt to the semiotics of capital, especially those
having to do with the labor force.
Individuals are from birth subjected to semiotic processing;
initiation into semiotics is the very first "labor" accomplished.
Guattari compares it to the work of trainees in industry.
The child not only learns to speak a native language; he also learns
the codes for walking down the street, a certain kind of complex
relationship to machines, electricity, etc. [ . . . ] and these different
codes have to be made part of the social codes of power. This
aspect of general exchange among semiotics is essential to the
capitalist economy. [ . . . ] The initiation to capital above all entails
this semiotic initiation to various codes of translatability and to
the corresponding invariant systems.22
The semiotic assembly line not only produces knowledge and

information but also attitudes, stereotypes of behavior, and sub
mission to hierarchies. One must never dissociate "the work of
semiotization going into professional development from the work
of modeling and adapting workers" to power relations.23 The
uncons,cious, "superegoistic" investment in professional roles, the
acceptance-as "active" as possible-of subordination, is as
important as obtaining "knowledge" and learning skills. One

never exists without the other; the latter is, moreover, activated
only once the former is assured.
2. Reference, Signification, Representation
The establishment of invariant significations, of relations of equiva

lence and stable translatability among semiotics, which serve as
bases to the production of subjectivity, is accomplished by a for
malized sign-machine coordinating what Guattari calls the
semiotic triangle: "reference, signification, representation." Denota
tion institutes a biunivocal rlationship between the sign and the
thing designated (the referential function) , whereas in symbolic
semiotics this relation is floating, vague, uncertain, "unsure of
itsel" In certain "uncivilized languages," a mere shift in accent is
all that is needed to change not only the meaning but also the
word. The signifying expression loses the polyvocality and multi
referentiality it possesses in symbolic semiologies in order to
designate in an exclusive and univocal way.
By joining the sign to its referent, reference denotes a reality that
becomes the "sole" and "unique'' reality, the dominant reality,
whereas in primitive societies "realities" are multiple. Each semiotic
system (religious, social, magic, animal, animistic) expresses a
heterogeneous world whose composition is maintained by the
social assemblage of the group.
The reduction of polyvalence and multi-referentiality, the
neutralization of the "heterogeneous, mixed, vague, dissymmetric"
specific to symbolic semiotics, and the primacy of the "pure," the
invariant, and the specialized-all this is epitomized in the mathe
matical theory of information. The invariance of the information to
be transmitted is precisely the concern. The standardization of

language eliminates as much as possible the intensities and affects
not univocally assignable, which, being unable to ensure stable
denotation and meanings, threaten to function on their own.
In "neocapitalism" (Pasolini), this process of rationalization and
impoverishment of expression subsequently develops still further.
The "technological principle of clearness, of communicative
exactness, of mechanical scientiflcity, of efficiency,"24 works on
language from the inside. For Pasolini, these principles constitute a
stratum that is not simply added to other strata historically regis
tered in language (the Latin stratum, the humanist stratum, etc.) .
The last signifying stratum to evolve toward the "signaletic" effi
ciency of applied science has come to overpower the others,
rendering them homologous with the ends and necessities of lan
guages of "production/consumption."
In order to neutralize all polyvocality and multidimensionality
of expression, to reduce all vagueness and uncertainty, significations
are directly encoded by a linguistic machine that intersects the syn
tagmatic axis of selection of the signifying unities of language, in
conformity with a grammatical order, and a paradigmatic axis of
composition of sentences and significance, according to a semantic
order, such that meaning becomes "automatic." The intersection of
these two axes does not constitute a universal mode of expression
but rather a veritable machine for structuring, mapping, and
establishing meanings.
In primitive societies, "One symbol interprets another symbol
which is itself interpreted by a third and so on, without the process
ending in a final signifier whose sense would be sedimented, for
example, in a dictionary and without the sequence compelling us to
respect a grammaticality that determines rigorous rules of syntag
matic concatenation."25

It is only with the definitive installation of capitalism in the
nineteenth century that one sees firmly imposed the '"absolute
stability of the signified, under the proliferation of the relations of
designation [ . . . ] in order to ground the comparison of forms."'26
In capitalism, grammar and syntax function as the police of
language. ''A rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a
syntactical marker."27
Modern government of behavior entails that the significations
defining the functions and limits of our actions (man, woman,
worker, boss, etc.), determining our roles within the social division
of labor, are solidly established and leave as little room as possible
for interpretation and dispute.
With the third term of the semiotic triangle-representation
the world is split into a mental or symbolic world (a world of
images, representational icons, symbols) and a "real, denoted"
world. The sign does not directly refer to reality; it is no longer
directly connected to a referent. Now, in order to be semiotically
efficient, the sign must pass through the mediation of the symbolic
order, it must pass through the signifying machine.
In this way, representation makes signs "powerless" insofar as
they do not act directly and pragmatically on the "real." To be trans
formed, they must pass through the mediation of consciousness,
representation, and the subject.28 The comparison with primitive
societies highlights the separation effected in capitalism between
production and representation, between the signifier and the real.
For "primitive peoples," flows of signs constitute a reality in the
same way as material flows. There is no separation between semiotic
production and material production because signs continue in the
real and vice versa.

Primitives are realists, not mystics. The imaginary and symbolic
are real. There is no otherworld. Everything extends into every
thing else. There is no separation-break. The Bambara does not
irnitate, metaphorize, index. Its dance and its mask are full signs,
a total sign that is simultaneously representation and production.
[. . .] It doesn't watch representation impotently. It is itself, collec
tively, the spectacle, the spectator, the scene, the dog, etc. It is
transformed through expression. [ . . .] This is a sign in touch with
reality. Or a sign such that there is no break between reality and
imaginary . . . mediated by a symbolic "order." No break between
gesrure, speech, writing, music, dance, war, men, the gods, the
sexes, etc.29
in the semiotic triangle, everything becomes logical and formal.

Significations seem to have been secreted immanently through
the syntactical structures of language itself.
The dominant significations (identity, sex:, profession, nationality,
etc.) from which it is difficult to escape (individually through
madness, infancy; alcohol, drugs, creation, love, or collectively
through political action) are produced at the intersection of a
twofold formalization process: that of the linguistic machine which
automates those expressions, interpretations, and responses
imposed by the system, and that of the formation of powers pro
ducing signifleds.
Suppose I come into the room wearing a long gown: in itself

it means nothing, but if I am doing it to show that I am a
transvestite, there is no problem; but if, say, a conference of
clergy wearing cassocks is taking place, then it will have quite
a different meaning. In a mental hospital, it could be interpreted
Signifying Semiologis and Asignifying Semiotics in Production I 75

differently again: "He's not too well today-wearing a dress
again." In other words for a man to wear a gown means one
thing if he is a judge or a priest, another if he is a lunatic, yet
another if he is a transvestite. Signification is inseparable from
taking power. 30
Structuralism confers unity and autonomy on signifying semiotics

as if there were such a thing as language in itself, capable of secreting
meaning according to deep syntactical structures and signification,
whereas "Language is everywhere, but it does not have any domain
of its own. There is no language n itself. What specifies human
language is precisely that it never refers back to itself, that it always
remains open to all the other modes of semiotization."31
The closure and formalization of language are political mecha
nisms, because "anything that fails to be caught in the neutralization
of non-linguistic components conserves the possibility of the system
of intensity's going out of control."32 The closure of semiotics of
signification within a world of "pure significance," what Guattari
defines as the "impotentization" of the sign, is what makes it very
difficult for structuralism and analytic philosophy to problematize
the pragmatics and "existential function" of expression.
In our societies, expression must always be accomplished via
denotations that establish and recognize only one reality, the domi
nant reality-through meaning that bi-univocally establishes the
relationship between the sign and its referent and through the mental
and impotentized world of representation separating the sign from
the real. Expression thus circumscribed and formalized contributes
to the production of a new subjectivity. In primitive societies, the
referent of symbolic semiotics is the group, the collective assemblage,
the community. With semiologies of signification, the referent is the

individuated subject (and its double, the transcendental subject) ,
the empty subject withdrawn into himself, cut off from the assem
blages and connections that constitute him, living as the
autonomous, free source of his actions and enunciations.
Individualization is established and rooted in language through
what Guattari calls "personologization." The normalizing power of
language lies in "linguistic Oedipalization," whose objective "con
sists in formalizing the subjectivation of statements according to an
abstract encoding of the I-you-he type, which 'provides the speakers
with a shared system of personal references.'"33
The subject of enunciation (a composite subjectivity "in flesh and
blood" rich in a multiplicity of semiotics, in modes of perception and
knowledge) who says "I'' tears himself away from the global, lived,
existential dimension of the assemblage, merges with the subject of
utterance ("I"), with the "social" linguistic form that precedes and
defines him. By molding itself to the subject of the utterance ("I"), the
collective assemblage of enunciation submits to the individualizing
linguistic machine. The latter, in turn, overcodes semiotic systems and
the different expressive modalities of subjectivity in accordance with
the modalities of the "semiotic triangle." The multiplicity of semiotics,
the plurality of enunciative focal points, the veritable sources of enun
ciation, are reduced to the individual subject.
Personologization of psychic apparatuses (the ego, the superego,
the id) corresponds to linguistic personologization (I-you-he) .34
The normalizing power of psychoanalysis converges with the nor
malizing power of signifying semiotics in the creation of the
individual as both guilty and responsible for his guilt.
Infrapersonal intensities (relational, affective, emotive, existen
tial intensities, intensities of desire, "where you do not know if you
are a man, woman, dog, plant, or anything at all, where you no

longer know who is who, no longer know who is speaking to
whom'') and extrapersonal intensities, those of massive economic,
linguistic, social, etc., machines, are confined to this twofold-lin
guistic and psychic-personologization.
The inclusive-disjunctive syntheses of primitive societies ( I am
"
jaguar") are no longer found only among the mad, children, artists,
and poets ("I is an other") . The linguistic signifying machine
operates and imposes "exclusive disjunctions" (you are a man, you
are a woman, etc.) which prevent becomings, heterogeneous
processes of subjectivation; it recognizes only identities defined by
these significations (man, chd, animal, etc.) and by specialized
functions (worker, boss, student, etc.). The structure of the modern
signification machine opposes inclusive-disjunctive syntheses, con
centrating all subjectivity and expressivity in man by reducing the
other (nature, things, the cosmos) to an object.
The subjectivity of capitalist societies is not only an autonomous
and independent subjectivity confined to the individual, it is also a
subjectivity fragmented into compartmentalized and "interiorized
faculties" (Reason, Understanding, Sense, etc.) each in opposition to
the other according to the dualisms of the sensible and the intelligible,
the real and the imaginary, thought and extension.
In primitive societies "an individual's psychism was not orga
nized into interiorized faculties but was connected to a range of
expressive and practical registers in direct contact with social life and
the outside world."35
The individuated subject of capitalist societies is endowed with
an "individuated body," with a "naked body," a "shameful body,"
which must be made part of domestic and social economies. The
naked body, the shameful body dosed in on itself like language,
autonomous and independent, detached from the multiplicity of

the assemblages that constitute it, is a construction of industrialized
societies which make it a "natural" body. It is not at all clear, according
to Guattari, that we have "a body, for we are assigned a body, a body
is produced for us." Other collective assemblages of enunciation and
action "machine" other bodies, other ways of behaving, and other
relationships with the community.
The primitive body is never a naked body, but always a subset of

the social body, traversed by markers of the socius, by tattoos, by
initiations, etc. This body does not contain individuated organs:
it is itself traversed by souls, by spirits, which belong to the set of
collective assemblages. 36
Guattari seems to be taken by the same "fanatical Marxism" to

which Pasolini lays claim when he underscores the political function
of linguistics. The "linguistic machine" and its theories are pressed
into the service of the law, morality, Capital, and religion. They sys
tematize, structure, consolidate, and enable power formations. The
constitution of national languages (meta-languages originating in an
internal colonization of dialects and local ways of speaking) and the
institution of the Nation State are processes that mutually sustain
one other. Linguistic unification is above all political unification. It
is only "with the installation of a State machine [that] signifying
power really acquires its autonomy."37
Pasolini reminds us that beneath the nineteenth century's
extensive research in linguistics which constructed the semiotic
conditions of capitalism there is at once expansion and colonialism
within, European countries and imperialist expansion and colo
nialism outside of them. Every linguist in industrialized Europe
concentrated on "purely oral language" (a category distinct from

"language" and "speech") and on the "pure speakers" who
"belonged to a historical world anterior to theirs [ . . . ] like colo
nialists with peoples of color. It is the fatal racism of the
bourgeoisie." After the Second World War, European bour
geoisies changed their relationship with these "pure speakers,"
using them "as immigrants, to keep salaries low. Lille and
Cologne, Paris and London, are full of Italian, Greek, Spanish,
Algerian, Moroccan, Negro 'speakers'-who increase in number
immensely every year." In this light, Pasolini gives Levi-Strauss
and his brand of structuralism-special attention, calling him
"the poet of low wages."38
3. Asignifying Semiotics
Whereas with social subjection and the semiologies of signification

we are in a molar world inhabited by distinct and individuated
subjects and objects, machinic enslavement and asignifying semiotics
operate beyond the subject/object, sign/thing, production/repre
sentation divide.
Asignifying semiotics (stock listings, currencies, corporate
accounting, national budgets, computer languages, mathematics,
scientific functions and equations as well as the asignifying semiotics
of music, art, etc.) are not beholden to significations and the indi
viduated subjects who convey them. They slip past rather than
produce significations or representations.
They involve more abstract modes of semiotization than lan
guage. They manifest themselves in the sciences, industrial
corporations, the service industry, stock market, military, artistic,
and communicational machines rather than in the world of civil
society, political representation, or democracy.

A worthwhile approach to analyzing asignifying semiotics is by
way of the "concept of the machine." Since the extraordinary
expansion of machinism to every aspect of life-that is, not only to
"production" as was the case in Marx's time-no adequate theo
rization of the machine has been advanced except in a handful of
authors' work, among which Guattari's.39
To understand the concept of the "machine," one must set
aside the subject/object, nature/culture opposition, for that is the
only way one can separate "human nature" and the machine. The
machine is not a subset of technique but partakes of the essence of
man; indeed, the machine is a prerequisite to technique.
We must move beyond the classical model centered on the
tool, which makes the machine an extension and projection of the
living being. Such a model remains founded on the "humanistic
and abstract" model in which the machine serves as an organ or
prosthesis. Guattari's machinism does not oppose man and
machine "in order to evaluate the correspondences, the extensions,
and possible or impossible substitutions of one for the other," but
instead brings them into "communication in order to show how
man is a component part of the machine, or combines with some
thing else to constitute a machine. The other thing can he a tool,
or even an animal, or other men."40
The concept of machine stricto sensu must therefore he expanded
to the functional whole which connects it not only to man hut also to
a multiplicity of other material, semiotic, incorporeal, etc., elements.
It is utterly insufficient to conceive of the machine solely in
terms of technique. The machine is at once a material and semiotic,
actual and virtual, assemblage. On the one hand, before being a
technique, the machine is diagrammatic, that is, inhabited by
diagrams, plans, and equations. On the other hand, in the machine

there are "visible, synchronic" dimensions (the assemblage of com
ponent parts, plans, equations), but also virtual, diachronic
dimensions, since it is situated at the intersection of a series of past
machines and the infinity of machines to come. The factory, for
example, is a machine of which men and technical machines are
but factors, component parts. It makes up an assemblage that sur
passes them. Public institutions, the media, the welfare state, and
so on, must also be considered-non-metaphorically-machines,
because they assemble (machine) multiplicities (people, proce
dures, semiotics, techniques, rules, etc.). Art too is a machine, an
assemblage whose terms-::-the artist and the artwork-can be
extracted from the assemblage only via abstraction: "There is not
one operator or one material that is the object of the operation, but
a collective assemblage that involves the artist individually and his
public, and all the institutions around him-critics, galleries,
museums."41
The distinction Francisco Varela makes between "allopoietic
machines," which produce something other than themselves, and
autopoietic machines, which generate and determine their own
organization through an "incessant process of replacing their com
ponent parts," reduces technological machines to instrumental
apparatuses incapable of self-generation. Such is true only if one
separates man and his indiscoverable nature from machines and
their no less indiscoverable essence. If, on the other hand, we con
sider the machinic assemblage they constitute with human beings,
"they become ipso facto autopoietic."42
To understand the humans-machines functional whole, one
must rid oneself both of the mechanistic thesis of "the structural
unity of the machine," which makes it appear as a "single object,"
and of the vitalist thesis of "the specific, personal unity of the living

organism," which makes it appear as a "single subject," whereas
both the subject and the object are multiplicities. Once the struc
tural and vitalist unity is undone, once we have recognized the
multiplicities of elements, functions, expressions, and contents that
constitute man as well as machine, a "domain of nondifference [is
established] between the rnicrophysical and the biological, there
being as many living beings in the machine as there are machines
in the living."44
Industrial psychologists have reluctantly begun to admit that
the relation between man and machine is not primarily instrumental
but rather affective, that the object is "animated," that it is consti
tuted of networks of forces, that to work means to exercise an
occupation on these forces. 45
Unlike a thinker like Heidegger, for Guattari, the machine does
not turn us away from Being, the machine does not veil its exis
tence from us. On the contrary, the machinic assemblage and the
technical machine, considered as one of its components, are "pro
ductive of Being." Ontological mutations are always machinic.
They are never the simple result of the actions or choices of the
"man" who, leaving the assemblage, removes himself from the non
human, technical, or incorporeal elements that constitute him-all
that is pure abstraction.
The recurrence and communication among the human and
non-human within the assemblage, their extraordinary creativity
and productivity, is not primarily due to language. Language is not
sufficiently deterritorialized to fulfill this function in capitalist
machinic assemblages; it is still too "human." In machinic enslave
ments, the ontological barrier between subject and object
established by social subjections is continually blurred not because
of language but because of asignifying semiotics.

Guattari makes the distinction "between semiologies that pro
duce significations, [ . . . ] like the 'human' enunciation of people who
work with machines-and [ . . .] asignifying semiotics, which, regard
less of the quantity of significations they convey, handle figures of
expression that might be qualified as 'non-human' (such as equations
or plans which enunciate the machine and make it act in a diagram
matic capacity on technical and experimental apparatuses)."46
With asignifying semiotics, we are no longer in the pre-signi
fying regime of the polyvocal expression of primitive societies
which mix and transversalize the semiotics of dance, song, speech,
and so on, nor are we in the signifying regime in which the sign
refers to another sign by way of representation, consciousness, and
the subject. Asignifying semiotics are a matter of assemblages where
man, language, and consciousness no longer have priority.
In asignifying semiotics "we even move beyond the semiotic
register." Strictly speaking, it is no longer a matter of the sign,
because the distinction between the sign and the referent such as
linguistics has maintained tends to lose all relevance. In theoretical
physics, "No one today demands positive proof of the existence of
a particle so long as it can be made to function without any con
tradiction in the totality of theoretical semiotics as a whole. Only
when an extrinsic, experimental effect brings the semiotic system
into operation does hindsight question the existence of the parti
cle."47 Between the sign and the referent a new kind of
relationship emerges.
Guattari distinguishes between the impotentized signs of
semiologies of signification, which owe their semiotic efficiency to
their passage through representation and consciousness, and the
"power signs," "sign-points," of asignifying semiotics, which act on
material flows. "Power signs," "sign-points," have a long history,

since art and religion were the first to produce. them: "The
Shamanic invocation, the sign-writing of the geomancer, are in
themselves direct signs of power. They mark the importation into
nature of signs of power."48
It is easy to see the difference between these signs by examining
how they function within capitalism's most important institution:
money. Money is an impotentized sign when it functions as
exchange value, a means of payment, in other words, as a simple
mediation between equivalents. In this case, it does no more than
represent purchasing power49 by establishing a bi-univocal rela
tionship between money-signs and a given quantity of goods and
services. Power signs, on the other hand, express money as capital
and the role of money as credit. They represent nothing, they have
no equivalents, except in the future exploitation of the labor force,
nature, and society. They are power signs because instead of repre
senting something they anticipate it, create it, and mold it. Power
signs constitute the semiotics of an economy of possibles. 50
Sign-poinrs act in two ways. On the one hand, they are capable
of operating semiotically; even if the functions of denotation and
signification deteriorate; on the other hand, they are capable of
intervening directly in material processes in which the functions of
denotation and signification break down.
The simplest example of direct intervention is that of the
microchip, where sign flows act directly on the material components.
The polarities of iron oxide particles are converted into binary num
bers when a magnetic strip is passed through a reader equipped with
the appropriate computer program. The signs function as the input
and output of the machine, bypassing denotation, representation,
and signification. Sign flows engage real flows, giving orders and
producing a change in conditions.

The expressive function meshes directly with material flows,
and becomes capable of catalyzing machinic "choices," such as
feedback, and bringing about changes of state [ . . . ]. [T]he dia

grammatic formula inscribed on my parking permit sets off the
mechanism of the entrance barrier: it allows me to go from an
"outside" to an "inside" state. 51
But in a more general way, we can think of monetary signs which

act directly on production flows, or of a computer language which
makes technical machines run. By acting on things outside of
representation, signs and things "engage one another independently
of the subjective 'controls' that individuated agents of enunciation
claim to have over them."52
The semiotic functions of "power signs" do not represent, do
not refer to an already constituted "dominant" reality, but simu
late and pre-produce a reality that does not yet exist, a reality that
is only virtually present, multiplying possibles, by creating
"optional matter." Rather than given in advance, existence consti
tutes the very stakes of theoretical-experimental assemblages in
physics and the artistic-experimental and political-experimental in
other domains.
Guattari calls the operations of asignifying semiotics "diagram
matic." The diagram is a semiotic system and a mode of writing
that fulfill the conditions of power signs. The concept is taken from
Peirce's categories, in which diagrammatic semiotics encompass
images and diagrams (also called "icons of relation") . Guattari
classifies images with symbolic semiotics and makes diagrams a
separate category whose functions are operational, rather than
representational; they have the capacity to reproduce with great
exactitude the functional articulations of a system. Diagrammatic

signs, by acting in place of things themselves, produce machinic
rather than significant redundancy.
Within a different theoretical framework, Bruno Latour has
shown the capacity of diagrams to break through what Guattari
calls the "ontological iron curtain," separating words and things,
subjects and objects. Unlike language, the diagram operates a
machinic, and non-signifying, translatability of phenomena by
reducing optional matter: "In modeling the situation, the diagram
allows for the imagining of new scenarios," new possibilities for
action and creation.53
"Diagram'' is also the name Foucault gives to the panopticon, a
"machine" or "machinery" that "automatizes and disindividualizes
power."54 "Dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference," are not
assured by people but rather by machines of which individuals are
component parts. 55 To understand how diagrams and asignifying
semiotics function, one fundamental element is missing. Regardless
of the kind of assemblage (economic, social, atomic, chemical,
aesthetic, etc.), expression and content are continually subjected to
processes of deterritorialization which asignifying semiotics and
machines allow to be harnessed, controlled; as well as produced.
Diagrams (like equations, designs, graphs, apparatuses,
machines, etc.) come to accelerate or slow down, destruct or stabi
lize, processes of deterritorialization which language has difficulty
grasping. 56 Without diagramm atic machines and signs, without
the simulation and pre-production they enable, without the
capture of non-human phenomena and relations by asignifying
semiotic systems, our picture of deterritorialization would be
"extremely myopic and limited."
Through asignifying semiotics machines "speak," "express
themselves," and "communicate" with man, other machines, and
Signifying Semio\ogies and Asignifying Semiotics in Produciion I 87

"real" phenomena. Through "power signs" they interact with the
expression and content of the atomic and chemical strata of mat
ter, the biological strata of the living being, and the cosmic strata
of the universe. Like machines, atomic, biological, chemical, eco
nomic, and aesthetic strata are therefore agents "productive of
Being," speakers and agents of partial "discursivity." Machines and
asignifying semiotics are able to "see" these strata, "hear" them,
"smell" them, record them, order them, and transcribe them, some
thing that is impossible for human senses and language. Infinitely
small and infinitely large, infinitely fast and infinitely slow, they
escape our systems of perception and language.
Asignifying semiotics and machines operate in the same way in
the preverbal world of human subjectivity, inhabited by nonverbal
semiotics, affects, temporalities, intensities, movements, speeds,
impersonal relations, non-assignable to a self, to an individuated
subject, and thus, again, difficult for language to grasp.
In a machine-centric world, action on the real requires artifi
ciality, an increasingly abstract artificiality. Man without
machines, without apparatuses, without diagrams, without equa
tions, without asignifying semiotics, would be "aphasic,"
incapable of "speaking" these worlds, of apprehending and inter
vening in processes of deterritorialization. In a machine-centric
world, in order to speak, see, smell and act, we are ofa piece with
machines and asignifying semiotics. It is in this sense that asignifying
semiotics constitute focal points of enunciation and vectors of
subjectivation.
The strength of capitalism lies in the exploitation of machines
and semiotic systems that conjoin functions of expression and
functions of content of every kind, human and non-human, micro
physical and cosmic, material and incorporeal.

The asignifying semiotics and machines (economic, scientific,
etc.) these functions put to "work'' are connected with subjectivity
and consciousness. But it is not solely nor mainly a matter of
reflexive consciousness or human subjectivity. Above all, they mobilize
partial and modular subjectivities, non-reflexive consciousnesses,
and modes of enunciation that do not originate in the individuated
subject. Guattari always uses the same example of driving a car in
order to describe how subjectivity and consciousness function in
machinic assemblages.
When we drive, we activate subjectivity and a multiplicity of
partial consciousnesses connected to the car's technological mecha
nisms. There is no " individuated subject" that says "you must push
this button, you must press this pedal." If one knows how to drive,
one acts without thinking about it, without engaging reflexive
consciousness, without speaking or representing what one does.
We are guided by the car's machinic assemblage. Our actions and
subjective components (memory, attention, perception, etc.) are
"automatized," a part of the machinic, hydraulic, electronic, etc.,
apparatuses, constituting, like mechanical (non-human) compo
nents, parts of the assemblage. Driving mobilizes different
processes of conscientization, one succeeding the next, superim
posing one onto the other, connecting or disconnecting according
to events. Often as we drive we enter "a state ofwakeful dreaming,"
a "pseudo-sleep," "which allows several systems of consciousness to
function in parallel, some of which are like running lights, while
others shift to the foreground."57
The thought and consciousness of the individuated subject
come into play when there is an obstacle, a disturbance, or an
"event." Then the subject, consciousness, and representation are
used in order to modify the feedback relations among the human

and non-human components of the automobile "machine," in order
to reestablish the automatic mechanisms and machinic operations.
Needless to say that it is in this work apparatus that we first expe
rience the dual processing of subjectivity (desubjectivation and
subjectivation, automatic functioning and individuated subjects'
actions, routine and innovation). But Guattari suggests that in modern
day capitalism this is how every apparatus and institution operates.
Whereas the formalization of signifier and signified allows for
only one subject, one consciousness, one unconscious, one reality,
and one existence, machinic enslavement takes in a multiplicity of
modes of subjectivation, a multiplicity of states of consciousness, a
multiplicity of unconsciousnesses, a multiplicity of realities and
modes of existence, a multiplicity of languages and semiotic systems.
If, as in the theories of Badiou and Ranciere, you find no trace
of "machines," machinic enslavement, asignifying or diagrammatic
semiotics, you can be sure that, however interesting they might
otherwise be, these theories have nothing relevant to say about the
nature of capitalism-quite simply because without "machines,"
without asignifying semiotics, without diagrams, there is no capitalism.
There are indeed relations of domination, power, and subjections,
but these are not the relations of capitalist domination, power, and
subjections. Still more troubling: the "distribution of the sensible,"
the "subject," and "political subjectivation" without the machinic
assemblage, without its molecular and microphysical operations,
without their non-human dimensions, amount to an idealism of the
"subject" and to a politics as "pure" as it is unlikely.
My friends in cognitive capitalism present a different set of
shortcomings, for they seem to have returned to the anthropomorphic
limits of a certain brand of Marxism. Cognitive "labor" is supposed
to mean the incorporation of the tool by the brain, a way for man

to appropriate the knowledge of machines (an implausible, back
wards expropriation of the machine) .
If the machine is not, as the tool-inspired model has it, a
prosthesis or an organ, then the humans-machines relation can be
reduced neither to an incorporation nor to an exteriorization.
Htimans-machines relations are always on the order of a coupling,
an assemblage, an encounter, a connection, a capture. Generations
of Italian activists grew up reading Marx's Grundrisse, whose
Italian translation is: "Frarnmento sulle macchine" (Fragment on
Machines) . Yet today machines seem to have disappeared from
critical theory.
In Marx's time, there was only the inside of the factory (with
a concentration and intensity incomparably lower to that of
today's corporations) and the outside, the latter among a handful
of apparatuses such as the railroads. Today, they are everywhere
except in critical theory. They are everywhere and especially in our
daily lives.
I wake up in the morning, turn on the lamp, and I provide the
catalyst that "activates" a network. If one follows the electric flows
passing through an infinity of networks, one will trace things all
the way back to the nuclear power plant. As I make breakfast, I
put machines to work (the stove, the refrigerator, etc.), which,
depending on the case, free up domestic work or increase its pro
ductivity. Still half-asleep, I turn on the radio, which subjects
speech and voice to profound "machinic" transformations. The
usual spatial and temporal dimensions of the sound world are
suspended. The human sensory-motor schemas on which sound
perception is based are neutralized. The voice, speech, and sound
are deterritorialized because they lose every kind of relationship
with a body, a place, a situation, or a territory.58

Before going out, I make a phone call. In what time and space
does the conversation take place? Once outside, I take out money
from an ATM that gives me orders (enter your password, take
your card, and take your money!). If I make a mistake, the
machine refuses to give me the money and "eats" my card. To take
the subway I have to submit to the orders of another automaton,
the ticket machine, which fills the emptiness left by the humans
at the ticket counters.
If I have not had the time to read the newspaper on the Inter
net, I buy it and experience "speech" and, in particular, political
speech, which, unlike Arendt's theory, does not express itself
through the voice but rather through "objects and matter," in other
words, speech that, as with the radio, is no longer logocentric but
machine-centric. 59
If I have a problem with unemployment or my welfare check, I
contact a call center which each time asks me to press 1 or 2 or 3.
The same thing happens when making an appointment with the
electric company, subscribing to an Internet service, obtaining
information about my bank account, and so on. I have to figure
things out for myself even ifl lose time doing it, since it is impossible
to find a human being within these networks. Moreover, the time
that I lose is time gained by the company or institution, time that I
have graciously made available to them.
I make a call from my cell phone connected to a satellite or I
send an SMS. I take a taxi guided by the non-human voice and
intelligence ofGPS-"in one-half mile go left, then turn right," etc.
In the afternoon I order books online, I Skype with a Brazilian
friend, and I respond to my e-mails; I plug into different information
networks-political, cultural, etc. I send an instant message on
my computer.
92 I Signs and fvlachines

At the supermarket, I fight with the automatic check-out that is
supposed to save me time, while I do the work, for free, of a clerk
usually employed part-time. Ifl buy a plane or train ticket online, I
avoid going to the station, but I must, however reluctantly, carry out
unpaid "work" that increases the productivity of the train company
or airline. My perception of the world is filtered through the images
on television (3 hours 30 minutes per day on average), movies, the
Internet, etc., etc. 99.9% of the music that we listen to is recorded
and distributed by every kind of machine. Even at the local library
the "loans and returns" are no longer handled by human beings
but by machines. Humans are left to deal with the breakdowns
and ensure that humans function correctly as component parts of
the assemblage.
We could all continue the list of our relationships, whether
problematic, indifferent, or pleasurable, with the machines that
"assist" us daily in even our smallest everyday activities. In modern
day capitalism, we are surely not confronted with an economic,
social, and political model of production of "man by man," as
cognitive capitalist theory maintains. We are faced with an
immense machinic phylum that, in one way or another, affects us
and forces us beyond logocentrism.
We must rise to a challenge beyond the limits of central or hege
monic "knowledge," cognitive work, or the "distribution of the
sensible." We must free the human and non-human forces that the
first industrial revolution imprisoned in labor, language, and life, and
do so not in order to find an "original" subjectivity, but to open and
activate other processes of its production by seizing on the deterri
torialization of work, language, and life as an opportunity. The
particular interest that Guattari takes in machines and asignifying
semiotics stems from the possibility they offer to collective action

of moving beyond the ways of life and subjectivation based on
work, language, and (biopolitical) life. Asignifying semiotics and
technical, scientific, artistic, and revolutionary processes of deterri
torialization constitute the propitious conditions for doing away
with the humanist, familialist, and personological modes of repre
sentation, the nationalist, racist, and classist modes of
subjectivation, according to which capital is territorialized and in
which individuated subjects become alienated. The suspicions
analytic philosophy and psychoanalysis provoke have to do with
their role in stabilizing and maintaining capitalist deterritorialization
by providing the categories and methodologies for reterritorializing
the desubjectivation carried out through the machinic enslavement
of the individual, the person, and the "ego." Language acts as the
raw material for the semiotic engineering responsible for manu
facturing an individuated subject adapted to the dominant
significations that assign him a role, an identity, and a function
within the social division of labor.

3
M ixed Semiotics
A subjective fact is always the product of an assemblage of hetero

geneous semiotic levels.
-Felix Guattari, ''.Agencements. Transistances. Persistances,"
Seminar of December 12, 198 1
Although we can distinguish different semiotics for the needs of

analysis, modes of expression are always the result of "mixed
semiotics" which are at once signifying, symbolic, and asignifying.
We will here describe how the stock market functions, how a
medium such as the cinema, the infant's "subjectivity," and the
organization of service sector labor function as mixed semiotic
assemblages. We must underscore that, in each of these cases, lin
guistic, cognitive, and communicational semiotics do not always
play the principal role. Accounting for mixed semiotics will pro
foundly alter our understanding of enunciation since all these
semiotics-and not only language--constitute sources of enunciation
and focal points of subjectivation. Analyzing these different cases,
we will ' focus closely on the shift from the individuated subject
to subjectivation carried out by capitalist machinisms as well as
Guattarian theory.
95
1. The Trader's Machinic Subjectivity
A caricatural yet widespread version of the "subject" is homo eco

nomicus, a subject capable of exercising sovereign rational control
over his choices and actions. The financial trader represents its fully
realized paradigm, although his subjectivity has nothing sovereign
or rational about it.
Finance is the prime example of diagrammatic semiotics in
which signs function in place of the "objects" to which they refer.
The sign flows circulating from computer to computer in real time
constitute a reality that is as objective as material flows; they influence
subjectivity and the functional links in the system which set share
prices and act directly on the "real" economy.
In the trading room there are only diagrams, only curves traced
by a worldwide computer network, which indicate the upward and
downward movements of share prices. Several semiotics are already
mobilized here: "impotentized signs" limited to representing price
history, but also "power signs," "particle-signs," "sign-points," which
stimulate, anticipate, make prices happen-in short, these are dia
grammatic signs that transform the "real." Unlike the referential
function, there is not one reality but a multiplicity of heterogeneous
realities: the reality of the "real" economy, the reality of forecasts
about the economy, as well as the reality of share prices and the
reality of expectations of these prices rising or falling. The "stock
market" does not refer to a single reality.
The trader's "human'' subjectivity establishes focal points of
proto-enunciation both in the (higher and lower) price differentials
of assets and in the productivity differentials of the "real" economy
foreca.St by the calculations of machines. These differentials repre
sent nodes of proto-subjectivation in which human subjectivity {or,

rather, components of subjectivity-understanding, memory, atten
tion, perception, etc.) come to fit and combine with machinic
proto:subjectivity.
Diagrams, curves, and data "speak," "express" themselves, and
"communicate," for, by making visible, comparable, and manipulable
the most diverse flows of information (machinic translatability),
they forcefully contribute to decision-making and price-setting.
Diagrams provide the thresholds of proto-subjectivity from which
human subjectivity determines its choices. With each threshold it
crosses to make a decision, to express an evaluation, and to indicate
a price, subjectivity has no choice but to rely on machines, asigni
fying writing systems, and information codified and produced by
mathematical instruments.
Enunciation would be completely different without these a
semiotic modes ofwriting and without machines. Given the current
conditions of deterritorialization and the phenomenal accumulation
of information to process, enunciation would be quite simply
impossible. Curves, diagrams, and machines are indispensable
components of enunciation, of "non-human" sites of partial
subjectivation.
That signs (machines, objects, diagrams, etc.) constitute the
focal points of proto-enunciation and proto-subjectivity means that
they suggest, enable, solicit, instigate, encourage, and prevent certain
actions, thoughts, affects or promote others. Machines, objects, and
signs do more than influence certain actions, thoughts, or affects;
through asignifying semiotics, machines communicate directly with
other machines,, entailing often unforeseeable . and incalculable
diagramillatic effects on the real.1
The freedom, independence, and autonomy of the individual
economic subject are undermined by still other forces influencing
Mixed Semiotics I 97
him, making him act and decide without necessarily accessing
consciousness. What type of subjectivity and what semiotics are
mobilized by these sites of proto-subjectivation determined by
diagrams, computers, and so on? Foremost, as with primitive
peoples, the insane, and children, the subjectivity is transitivist,
transindividual, and the semiotics symbolic.
In order to account for the subjective behavior involved in asset
pricing, convention theory and cognitive capitalist theory presup
pose agents' mimetic behavior. The intersubjectivity, language,
and communication of the mimetic relationship are supposed to
supplant the methodological individualism of homo economicus,
founded on rationality and sovereignty. Unfortunately, mimetic
behavior is irreducible to linguistic, cognitive, or communicational
intersubjectivity.
Without in the least partaking of the philosophical theory that
underpins the notion of financial behavior as mimetic behavior, we
must emphasize that for its creator, Rene Girard, mimetic emula
tion is above all the emulation of desire. One does not imitate ways
of being, one does not imitate ideas or the "cognitive basis" of the
"other"; one imitates desire. If mimesis implies the emulation of
desire, its constitution and dissemination/circulation cannot,
however, be explained by communication, language, or cognition,
because affects undermine precisely the communicational, informa
tional, linguistic, and cognitive models.
"Mimetic rationality'' is not linguistic-cognitive-far from it.
For affect suspends the speaker/hearer enunciative dichotomy.
'Meet sticks to subjectivity," but as much to the enunciator's
subjectivity as to that of his addressee. Spinoza, Guattari suggests,
perfectly understood this transitivist feature of affect: " ('from the
fact of conceiving a thing like ourselves to be affected with any

emotion, we are ourselves to be affected with a like emotion') [ . . . ] .
Affect is thus essentially a pre-personal category, installed 'before'
the c_ircumscription of identities, and manifested by unlocatable
transferences, unlocatable with regard to their origin as well as with
regard to their destination."2
Affect remains "vague, atmospheric," Guattari says, in other
words, it is not founded on systems of distinct oppositions as in the
linguistic, communicational, or cognitive models. It is therefore
quite reductive to explain mimetic behavior via linguistic, commu
nicative, or cognitive rationality. Somewhere there are downward
trends and there are upward trends in the same way as "mana"
circulates in animist societies. Mimetic communication occurs
through contagion and not through cognition.
When it is a matter of choosing, deciding, and exercising
"freedom," the trader's human subjectivity, language, signifying
semiotics, and cognitive power do not rise above but instead act,
are of a piece, with machines, power signs, symbolic semiotics,
and affects. Machines and power signs, no less than the individual's
"freedom," are constitutive of his decision-making, choices, and
pour-soi.
The trader's subjectivity is undoubtedly a "machinic subjectivity''
whose operations can only be determined by way of the functional
whole of humans-machines. Mathematical systems, data banks,
interconnected computer networks, telephone networks, and so on,
are part ofthe financier's subjectivity. Through him, groups, lobbies,
interested economic and political parties, and schools of thought act
and express themselves. His enunciation also depends on mimetic
action and, furthermore, on the laws and rules that permit certain
operations and not others, or the loosening of both laws and rules
as the State has endeavored to do for the last forty years. Instead of
lvlixed Semiotics I 99
a rational subject who controls information and his choices, homo
economicus is a mere terminal of asignifying, symbolic, and signi
fying semiotics and of non-linguistic constituents which for the
most part escape his awareness. We are not only well beyond the
individualism and rationality of homo economicus, we have moved
beyond "cognitive capitalism."
In this context, signifying semiologies, discourses, cognitive
activities, fulfill a specific function: controlling the deterritorialization
and desubjectivation the diagrammatic semiotics and symbolic
semiologies define. The individual subject, his sovereignty and
rational behavior, ruined by the real workings of the stock market,
must literally be reconstructed, refabricated, by signifying semiolo
gies, communication, and cognition. The discourse of economists,
media, experts, and judges3 create the belief that it is indeed the
individual subject who acts and who thus must be compensated as
a result. Through the semiotics of signification, stories, information,
and commentary are produced which construct and legitimate the
function and the role of these "individuated subjects" (traders) in
public opinion.
Signifying semiologies cannot be reduced to "ideology."4 Narra
tives and discourses that speak of homo economicus, the freedom of
the entrepreneur, the self-regulating power of the markets, and so
on, have no superstructural function, since it is sign machines that
produce a specific and fundamental commodity: the individuated
subject. The "ideological force" of signifying semiologies does not
lie in the fact that it prevents us from thinking or in mere manipu
lation (although it can do both as well), but rather in its ability to
effect a mutation in subjectivity. The refrains of neoliberalism (be an
asset, be a self-starter, get rich, etc.) are there to ensure this happens.
The latter do not hide a reality from us; instead, they endow us with

a relationship to time, space, and others by making us exist some
where in a world that refers every subjectivity which capitalist
deteritorialization produces to the entrepreneur, individual success,
competition, social Darwinism, and so on.
2. The Mixed Semiotics of the "Human"
This opposition-on the one side, desire-drive, desire-disorder,

desire-death, desire-aggression, and, on the other, interaction
[ . . ]-seems to me an utterly reactionary reference.
.
-Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution in Brazil
In the last years of his life, Guattari often drew on Daniel Stern's book
The Interpersonal World of the Infant5 in order to map a cartography
of the semiotic, affective, and existential components that contribute
to the production of subjectivity. In Stern's work, preverbal subjec
tivity, expressed through asignifying symbolic semiotics, is described
in its problematic relationship to the linguistic "social machine."
According to Guattari, linguistic theory and analytic philosophy
systematically ignore or gloss over this pre-individual subjectivity,
which is at the root of all modes of subjectivation.
Stern's book undermines the unity of the subject by enumerating
the multiplicity of "selves," semiotics, relations, and affects, espe
cially preverbal ones, constituting him. The approach proves
particularly enlightening when trying to apprehend the existential
and self-referential dimension at the heart of Guattari's theory of
subjectivity. Far from passing solely through language, cognition, or
cornmullication, the relation to the selfpresupposes a self-positioning
that is existential, pathic, and affective prior to being linguistic or
cognitive. Subjective mutation is not primarily discursive, because it
Mixed Semiotics I 1 01
is situated at the focal point of (existential) non-discursivity at the
core of subjectivity. It is starting from this existential dimension that
there is an emergence, a processualicy, a taking on of consistency, of
subjectivity. Only from this asignifying, unnamable, and incommu
nicable core can there be signification, language, and narrative. The
point has important political implications since this same pre
individual subjectivity is brought to bear by capitalist machinic
enslavements to exploit affects, rhythms, movements, durations,
intensities, and asignifying semiotics.
1. The Emergent SelfandAsignifying Semiotics
Before acquiring language, infants actively construct forms of

perceiving, communicating, and experiencing the self and the
world through very rich and differentiated nonverbal semiotization.
Stern's work underscores what is from the outset the trans-subjective
nature of the earliest experiences of the infant, who is yet unable to
distinguish between a sense of self and other.
Stern describes three "senses of self" (the sense of an emergent
self, the sense of a core self, and the sense of a subjective self) that
precede the "sense of verbal sel" "Sense of self" does not mean, in
the first three cases, "concept of," "knowledge of" or "awareness of,"6
as these experiences do not pass through language, consciousness,
or representation.
According to Guattari, the different senses of self preceding the
linguistic sense of self are in no way stages in the Freudian sense but
"levels of subjectivation," nonverbal focal points and vectors of
subjectivation that manifest themselves throughout life in parallel
with speech and consciousness. The three first senses of self are
expressed through mixed, asignifying and symbolic semiotics.

Between the infant's birth and the first two months of life, he
experiences the "genesis" of an "emergent interpersonal link," the
genesis of what Stern calls the "sense of emergent self" There are
three principal ways in which the infant experiences this: amodal
perception, categorical affects, and vitality affects. The infant has a
great ability to select from and organize the general and abstract
features of what happens to him. Intensities, temporal figures,
rhythms, and movements are features common to every sensorial
form and the infant can easily identify and, from there, transpose
them from one sense to another, from sight to touch, for example,
or from touch to hearing.
The abstract and amodal features of what happens are appre
hended through two different affective processes: categorical affects,
which express anger, surprise, joy, sadness, and so on, and vitality
affects, which express changes in mental states and intensity
thresholds in his way of feeling. Vitality affects are "captured by
dynamic, kinetic terms, such as 'surging,' 'fading away,' 'fleeting,'
'explosive,' 'crescendo,' 'decrescendo,' 'bursting,' 'drawn out,' and so
on."7 Dance, music, as well as the duration of video-cinemato
graphic images are, according to Stern, realities that best capture
these intensities, these "ways of feeling."
This global, subjective world in which there is not yet a division
between subject and object, in which the self and others are indis
tinguishable, in which communication occurs by contagion, "is
and remains," according to Stern and Guattari, the "fundamental
domain of human subjectivity." It operates outside of consciousness
and represents the "matrix" (Stern), the "existential core" (Guattari),
of experiences from which "thoughts and perceived forms and iden
tifiable acts and verbalized feelings will later arise. [ . ] Finally, it is
. .
the ultimate reservoir that can be dipped into for all creative
experience."8 All learning and all creative acts depend on this sense
of emergent self "This domain of experience remains active during
the formative period of each of the subsequent domains of sense of
self" as well as during later learning and creative processes.
We have access to these modes of semiotization in childhood,
through psychosis, drug use, and certain altered states of consciousness,
but also through artistic creation, falling in love, political passions,
existential crises, and, even discursively, through philosophy.9
2. The Sense ofa "Core Self," the Sense ofa ''Subjective Self," and Sym
bolic Semiotics
The sense of a "core self' (the self as opposed to the other and the self
with the other) constitutes the experience of self and other as "entities"
with "a physical presence, action, affect, and continuity." The sense of
core self depends on "numerous interpersonal capacities."10 This is still
not a cognitive construction (for it occurs outside consciousness) but
rather an integration of experience and a "memory without words"
which provide the bases for all the more complex senses of self
According to Stern, the period spanning two to six months is
perhaps the most exclusively and intensely social period of the
infant's life (the social smile, vocalizations directed at others, the
mutual gaze, etc.) . 1 1
The sense of a subjective self occurs when the infant discovers
that he has a "mind" and that others do too, that experiences, con
tent, affects, and emotions are shareable (or not shareable) and can
be communicated without words because language is yet unavailable.
Self and other are no longer only core entities with a certain physical
presence, action, affect, and continuity; they are entities with
"internal and subjective states."
1 04 I Signs and fvlachines

How does one relate with the subjective experience of others,
share their affects, without the use of words? As Guattari and
Simndon {or Spinoza) might put it, one does so through "transi
tivist, transindividual" subjectivity.
Between the ages of nine and twelve months, the infant is able
to coordinate his "mental states," such as "joint attention," "inten
tions," and "affective states." Vitality (dynamic and kinetic) affects
and categorical affects (joy, sadness) constitute the material enabling
the infant's "attunement" and sharing, which presuppose the exis
tence of a "shared framework" of signification and the means for
"preverbal" communication (gesture, posture, facial expression and
vocal expression, etc.).12 Affects remain the "predominant mode
and substance of communications with [the] mother"; other people
affects coupled with gestures, posture, nonverbal action, and
vocalizations-are the "most immediate origins" of and . the pro
tolinguistic conditions for the emergence and acquisition of
language. l3 As Guattari remarks, "It is at the heart of this proto
social and still preverbal Universe that familial, ethnic, urban, etc.
traits are transmitted (let's call it the Cultural Unconscious).14
3. The Seme ofa "Verbal Self" and Signifying Semiotics
The fourth sense of self, the sense of a verbal self, has to do with the
junction and disjunction, the complementarity and gap, between the
verbal and nonverbal parts of subjectivity, between asignifying
symbolic semiotics and signifying semiologies. This is because the
emergence of language is the source of a cleavage between experience
as it is "lived" and as it is "represented."
If linguistic significations make our experiences with others
more easily shareable, they can also make certain parts of these same
experiences inaccessible to others as well as to ourselves. The non
verbal and "global" part of experience and that part of experience
converted into words can very well coexist, the verbal part harmo
niously enriching and expanding lived (affective) experience. But
the latter may also be fractured, rendered poorly by language,
consequently forcing experience underground (repression). The
adult's words, "Oh, look at the yellow sunlight," specify, separate,
and fracture the amodal experience of the sunray the infant has.
"The paradox that language can evoke experience that transcends
words is perhaps the highest tribute to the power of language. But
those are words in poetic use; The words in our daily lives more
often do the opposite and either fracture amodal global experience
or send it underground."15 The three preverbal senses of self are
not steps in the formation of the verbal sel They remain inde
pendent centers of semiotic and subjective "production" and
continue to function in parallel with their own "autonomy'' and
their own semiotics.
According to Guattari, the way in which linguistics and psy
choanalysis conceive of the relationship between verbal and
nonverbal semiotics raises the same political problem. The theories
are informed by a model founded on the opposition between a raw
world of desire, drives, instinct, animality, and spontaneity, on the
one hand, and, on the other, a universe of social order, the symbolic,
law, and prohibition expressed by language and signifying semiotics.
The semiotic-linguistic model is in reality a political model. In the
same way as a supposedly undifferentiated economy of desire neces
sitates signifying, symbolic semiotics, the law, and taboos to provide
its structure, in the process of political subjectivation we need the
political party and its "democratic centralism" in order to structure
and discipline the spontaneity of subjectivities.
1 06 I Signs and fvlachines

Butler considers the model of "symbolic castration" and the
"law" at once necessary and inevitable in the formation of both
speech and society. The idea of a "prediscursive libidinal multiplicity
that effectively presupposes a sexuality 'before the law"' 16 is part of
a "romantic vision" of subjectivity even for Foucault, since we can
say nothing about and do nothing with a reality prior to language,
the law, the symbolic, and the taboo, contrary to what Stern
demonstrates. Access to the "real" of the undifferentiated can only
be assured through the "mediation" of the symbolic, the law,
taboo, and the signifier.
Since desire partakes of dream, fantasy, and representation,
there will always be a choice to make between a "pleasure principle"
and a "reality principle." For Bernard Stiegler, the "drive" closest to
animality must undergo a symbolic "sublimation" in order to
reestablish the necessary functions of the "super ego" and the "law"
destroyed by capitalism. Virno, for his part, follows to the letter
Wittgenstein's aphorism according to which "speech'' replaces
"drive." Language completely reconfigures the world of drives "by
shaping them from top to bottom," for it teaches us to express, with
words and grammar, what is of the order of affect. In Badiou's party
less Marxist-Leninism, the opposition between the animal and the
subject turns on the opposition between "desiring spontaneity'' and
"organization." Guattari challenges the model on the grounds that,
as we have just seen, the nonverbal semiotics of subjectivity have
"absolutely nothing undifferentiated about them''; they on the con
trary "involve highly elaborate operations of assemblage, syntax, and
modes of semiotization that do not necessarily imply the existence
of metalanguage and overcoding in order to interpret, direct, nor
malize, and order them."17 They are neither poorer nor richer in
language; they are different.
lvlixed Semiotics I 1 07
The point is not to devalue language and signifying semiotics, but
rather, as opposed to what linguistics and analytic philosophy do, to
place ourselves between the discursive and the non-discursive in order
to make enunciation and subjectivation "grow from the middle."
3. Cinema's Mixed Semiotics
We go to the cinema in order to suspend for a moment our usual

modes of communication.
-Felix Guattari, "Le divan du pauvre"
A political battle has unfolded and continues to unfold around

cinema for control of the effects of subjectivation and desubjecti
vation that the "non-human'' semiotics of the cinematographic
image produce on the individuated subject. The three preverbal
senses of self, the sense of a verbal self, and semiotics (at once
asignifying, symbolic, and signifying) are mobilized by cinemato
graphic machinism which by deterritorializing the image and
perception (the "film-eye") risks undoing, in its way, the unity of
the subject.
With the cinema, we have a textbook case of how the signifying
machine comes to neutralize, order, and normalize the action of
symbolic and asignifying semiotics which exceed dominant signifi
cations. By hierarchizing the latter through signifying semiotics, the
film industry functions like group psychoanalysis (Guattari),
powerfully aiding in the construction of the roles and functions
and, especially, in the fabrication of the individuated subject and
his unconscious.
Guattari lists precisely the semiotics at work in the cinema:

-the phonic fabric of expression that refers to spoken language
(signifying semiology);
-the sonorous but nonphonic fabric that refers to instrumental
music (asignifying semiotics);
-the visual fabric that refers to painting (both symbolic and
asignifying semiotics);
-the gestures and movements of the human body, etc. (symbolic
semiologies);
-the duration, movements, breaks in space and time, gaps,
sequences, etc., that make up asignifying "intensities."18
The cinema, whose effects derive above all from its use of asignifying
symbolic semiotics ("linkages, internal movements of visual
images, colors, sounds, rhythms, gestures, speech, etc."19), repre
sented for a brief moment the possibility of moving beyond
signifying semiologies, of bypassing personological individuations,
and opening up possibilities that were not already inscribed in
dominant subjectivations.
Film images cannot be directly encoded, marked out, and
framed by the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes that ensure the
relative stability and invariance of meanings as in language.
With cinema, it becomes possible to rediscover the features of
pre-signifying semiotics in a post-signifying world. The cinema
does not put two components of expression (signifier/signified) into
play, but rather, as in primitive societies, "n": the images, sounds,
and words spoken and written (texts), movements, positions, colors,
rhythms, and so on. Depending on the component that prevails,
there are different modalities of reading and seeing a film. "It can be
seen through its colors or rhythms, through its images, through the
chain of affects it creates, and there is absolutely no univocal,
necessary, or unmotivated relationship between a signifying chain
and the contents signified."20
As in primitive societies, images (symbolic semiotics) and
intensities, movements, intervals, temporalities, and velocities
(asignifying semiotics) reintroduce ambiguity, uncertainty, and
instability into denotation and signification. Expression once again
becomes polyvocal, multidimensional, and multireferential. "The
semiotic components of film glide by each other without ever
fixing or stabilizing themselves in a deep syntax of latent contents
or in transformational systems that would lead, superficially, to
manifest contents."21
The same impossibility of formalizing filmic language is analyzed
by Pasolini. For the Italian poet, the cinema as well as an important
part of human reality and of things themselves are expressed through
systems of signs, in other words, by nonverbal (images or "im-signs")
and non-human "languages." Images from memory and dream all
have the features of film sequences, they are "almost prehuman events,
or on the border of what is human. In any case, they are pregram
matical and even premorphological (dreams take place on the level of
the unconscious, as do mnemonic processes) ."22
The cinema is at once "fundamentally oneiric" and a "hypnotic
monstrum." The "irrational" elements of the language of film, "bar
barous, irregular, aggressive, visionary," cannot be eliminated; thus
the difficulty in establishing an "institutional film language."23
Indeed, these features, which Pasolini terms "irrational," make up
the modalities of expression of affects, intensities, velocities, etc.,
whose functioning depends on a logic other than that of the indi
viduated subject's rationality.
The cinema is thus capable, if for only an instant, of making us
"orphans: single, amnesiac, unconscious, and eternal," and removing
1 1 0 I Signs and Machines

us from the social divisions oflabor that assign us a role, a function,
and a meaning.24
The intensities, movements, and duration of film images can
produce effects of desubjectivation and disindividuation in the same
way that childhood, drugs, dreams, passion, creation, or madness
can strip the subject of his identity and social functions. Cinema
suspends perception and the habitual coordinates of vision, making
the sensorimotor system malfunction. Images and movements no
longer depend on the movement of the object nor on the brain;
instead, they are the automatic products of a machinic apparatus. In
turn, montage disrupts the links between ordinary situations,
images, and movements by compelling us to enter into different
space-time blocs.
But instead of eluding dominant subjectivations, film images
can, conversely, chain us to them. They are only focal points of
subjectivation. As vectors of subjectivation, they can only trigger,
initiate, or open processes of heterogenesis (both the production of
heterogeneity and processual genesis) . The consistency of subjective
heterogeneity depends on the interplay of a multiplicity of forces,
apparatuses, and techniques. It depends, in the final analysis, on a
politics and an aesthetics. The ethico-political battle, which the
American cultural industry has resoundingly won, has been fought
over this focal point of heterogeneity. The industry has worked to
neutralize and stifle heterogeneity by exploiting, like psychoanalysis,
personological and farnilialist signifiers.
The shifr of cinema's multireferential and polysemic semiotics
toward dominant values and the domestication of the "oneiric
monster" and its "irrational elements" have occurred through the
reduction of symbolic semiologies and asignifying semiotics to the
models of capitalist subjectivity.
Mixed Semiotics I 1 1 1
The commercial cinema is "undeniably familialist, Oedipian,
and reactionary. [ . . . ] Its 'mission' is to adapt people to the models
required by mass consumption."25 If it is incapable of establishing
as invariable and stable significations as language, it can still pro
duce models of subjectivity that have the force of examples, the
obviousness of physical presence. Cinema acts on the depths of
subjectivity because it provides subjectivity with identities and
models of behavior by exploiting asignifying and symbolic semiotics.
In this way, it functions like "group psychoanalysis," normalizing
intensities, hierarchizing semiotics, and confining them within the
individuated subject.
Commercial cinema's effect on the unconscious is even more
powerful than that of psychoanalysis, since its unconscious, "popu
lated by cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers" (in other words, a
non-Oedipal consciousness, an unconscious equal to the world
around us), and the range of semiotic mechanisms it mobilizes
"directly connect with the spectator's processes of semiotization."26
The effect produced by commercial cinema and in turn by tele
vision has nothing to do with ideology, for it does not involve
reflexive consciousness and representation.
"All its irrational, elementary, oneiric, and barbaric elements
were forced below the level of consciousness; that is, they were
exploited as subconscious instruments of shock and persuasion''27
by the cultural industry and industry in general.
Consciousness-raising is not a sufficient response because
images affect us and organize themselves in direct relation with the
three "selves" preceding the linguistic self Asignifying, symbolic
semiotics do not act on consciousness but rather directly on "the
continuous variation and force of existing and potential action."

Here, subjectivity has nothing to do with Althusser's ideological
apparatuses, because it, and especially its components, are
produced as a whole, bringing to bear what I call asignifying
elements, which provide the basis for relations to time, rhythms,
space, the body, colors, and sexuality.28
4. Signifying and Asignifying Semiotics in the Division ofLabor
As a matter of fact, two axioms seem to have guided the advance

of Western civilization from the outset: the first maintains that
true societies unfold in the protective shadow of the State; the
second states a categorical imperative: man must work.
-Pierre Clastres, Sodety Against the State
All the semiotics and modalities of subjective implication we have

described come to bear in every division of labor. But whereas
signifying semiotics and social subjection are recognized and ana
lyzed as such, the processes of asignifying symbolic semiotics and
those of machinic enslavement are ignored in the sociology of
work (and "industrial psychology''). This is all the more surprising
given that they are what constitute the specificity of the capitalist
division of labor.
The same "logocentric" limit detracts from Marie-Anne Dujarier's
otherwise remarkable analysis of the organjzation of production in
"mass services" (a geriatrics clinic and a restaurant chain) , wherein
language is understood as a component of the division of labor and
c "29
a "producnve rorce.
.
"Because service work is relational," the author argues, "it

mobilizes language, to such an extent that one could even say that
most often working means speaking."30 At the same time, she
enumerates a great variety and intensive use of asignifying semiotics
irreducible to speech. Up and down the hierarchy, asignifying
symbolic semiotics operate with signifying semiotics, but the rela
tive weight of one with respect to the other changes according to the
hierarchical level in which they function.
The board of directors does "political work when it sets the
organization's goals and strategies by providing the necessary
resources" ("capital, operating budget, and their allocation'') .31 The
board's "orders" are transmitted along the hierarchy, mobilizing the
most varied asignifying transactions. Speech would be insuffi
cient to organize the production "process" and powerless to
command and activate subjectivities.
"CEOs" give preliminary form to the generic objectives handed
down from the board of directors "in the form of 'development
plans,' 'ethical commitments,' 'quality policies,' 'cost-saving mea
sures,' 'authorization' 'management control,' 'digitalization,'
'marketing strategies,' 'IT systems,' 'advertising campaigns."'32
"Budget constraints" are also transformed into asignifying organi
zational elements: "budgets," "HR policies," "investment plans."
Under the CEOs, the work of "manager experts," to whom
upper management has entrusted the work of turning out instruc
tions and ensuring they are followed, "consists primarily in
transforming the abstract demands for 'total quality,' 'comfort,'
'attractiveness,' 'versatility,' or 'ethics' into 'specific organizational
requirements."' The translation of CEOs' choices is non-discursive.
Employees are not summoned the way Menenius Agrippa did the
plebeians in an attempt to convince them with his rhetorical arsenal
to put an end to their insubordination (Ranciere treats the episode as
a model of the egalitarian function special to language). In the capi
talist organization of work this is not how orders are transmitted.

They do not function solely (and we could say principally) "inter
subjectively." Orders are not first issued through discourse but
through apparatuses using asignifying semiotics. If we hold to the
description given by the author herself, signifying semiotics are
limited to accompanying discourse or to being completely absent
from it: "Orders take the form of the organizational chart, plan,
project, manual, protocol, charter, indicators, procedures, processes,
and production and management sofrware."33
The organization of work is first of all a question of diagrammatic
pragmatics. Linguistic imperatives34 ("you must" ) or exhorta
tions ("you should" ), meetings, "ideological" speeches, and so on,
would have little hold on subjectivity were they not supported by
asignifying semiotics (diagrams, programs, budgets, management
indicators, accounting figures, etc.) which do not speak but func
tion. They do not first address the "I" of the "salaried" individual.
They set off operations while bypassing consciousness and repre
sentation. Asignifying semiotics work like a "material" cog in
humans-machines, humans-organizations, humans-processes
systems. They establish a reader, an interpreter, a facilitator; and yet
this reader, who may very well be a human being as a machine,
software, procedure, etc., is without representations.
The corporation, in certain cases (call centers), diagrammatically
exploits even language, by reducing signifying semiotics to a means
of signaling that simply triggers prefabricated address and response
procedures. There is nothing of the dialogical event in the verbal
exchange between employee and consumer. Words and propositions
are the "input" and "output" of the machinic enslavement specific
to service relations. Only idiots like Alain Finkielkraut still think
that responsibility for the "degradation" of language lies with poor
schoolchildren, immigrants' sons, the youth, etc., whereas, as Pasolini
already had it in the 1 960s, private enterprise and marketing are the
ones responsible.
The conversation with a consumer must be quickly referred

back to a 'script' which the operator will then read word for
word. He can be penalized if he "goes off'' script, even for offering
an intelligent or empathetic response to the customer. Thus the
"prompts," replies to questions, and other forms of civility are
planned out prior to the conversation. Dialogue is "triggered"
according to the customer's attitude and questions. Finally, the
scripts are a way of "taylori_zing" conversation; the latter is split
into basic units and each task performed. Conversational scripts
are made up of pre-fabricated phrases thought up by those who
do not speak them and spoken by those whose self-interest is not
to think.35
The affects, intensities, and "emotions" that animate every verbal

exchange are submitted to the same semiotic training, whose aim is
to program and control behavior. "Emotion itself is conceived to be
a task and is planned for prior to its occurrence. It can be prescribed
to the employee or to the consumer independently of what they
feel. Labor management institutes plans such that the employee,
whether a ticket-taker, youth leader, cashier, flight attendant, hair
dresser, bus driver, or museum guide, is compelled to adopt
cheerful, assuring, calm, happy, or funny behavior."36
Analyzing the use of semiotics in the customer service relation
ship-from below rather than from the board of directors'
perspective-Dujarier notes that "language is growing increasingly
abstract." When a service is carried out, whether at the elderly per
son's bedside or the customer's table, "language" is "that which is

constructed according to each speaker's linguistic references in the
interaction between employee and consumer."37 This "language of
professionals" marks out a community of peers (employees) and
allows us "to speak and, therefore, to examine what real work is."
"Higher up, in the idiom of orders and control, 'managerial'
language is employed." In "the procedures, plans, and management
or economic indicators used by hierarchical superiors, the semantic
references are essentially taken from the language of action ('do
this') and measurement ('in order to obtain a result').38
"Above managerial language we find the language that
addresses methods and processes," the language of "experts,"
which produces "discourse about discourse" because its object is
managerial discourse itself. At a still higher level, "political dis
course" concerns the evaluation of results and methods and
represents what the author calls "a discourse about discourse about
discourse," that is, a discourse about experts.
The move to ever-greater abstraction in capitalist command is
always interpreted in terms of language (a "discourse about dis
course" and a "discourse about discourse about discourse"), whereas,
as one moves up the hierarchy, rather than speak of abstraction, we
would do better to analyze the way in which asignifying semiotics
are increasingly used. The hold superior hierarchical levels have over
inferior ones does not occur because of the use of metalanguage but
through the exploitation of asignifying semiotics.
In monitoring, the second function devolving on those higher
up the ladder, the same mechanisms and semiotics are at work as
in order-giving. Monitoring consists in the activation "of major
indicators, of overall rankings"; it "is exercised through tracking
mechanisms" and prioritizes the automatic mechanisms and
"impersonality" of asignifying ratings. Functional control wins out
over disciplinary and discursive control even as it employs them
both.39
Even "self-control," which measures the "subjective" investment
of the employee's "I"-one form of social subjection-is "main
tained by managerial tools (rankings, performance summaries,
etc.)." Within the service industry a large part of the employee's
work consists in rating, ranking, classifying ("We have to follow
procedures, jot down, draw up the indicators, validate, track [ . . ].
.
Personnel rate everything and rate themselves on everything").40

Ratings make tracking possible, which machines in turn process via
asignifying semiotics. The ll!anagement tools mobilized through
"self-control" are still machinic apparatuses, a kind of hypomnemata
of labor structure. 41 The "I" of social subjection can only be sepa
rated from technical machines, from organizational machines, from
processes, through abstraction.
Symbolic semiotics play an overwhelming role in the service
relationship by arranging the essential aspects of business commu
nication with customers. Through advertising, symbolic semiotics
are fully part of the management techniques of labor organization.
The (dreadful) business and marketing culture which they instill
while molding public/customer subjectivity also directly acts on the
subjectivity of employees, for whom "advertising communication is
'really' what must be produced [ . . . ] . [Employees] behave at work as
if they believed, on the one hand, that the people they serve believe
the promises made to them, and, on the other hand, that it is
essential to fulfill them. In this interplay, the ideal promised to the
consumer becomes the norm of what must be produced."42
Dujarier differentiates in her work among semiotics, cleverly
called "mille feuilles semantics": "body language" (symbolic semiotics),
"technical language" (asignifying semiotics), and "social languages"

(signifying semiotics) all converge in the service relationship.43
What is lacking in this is an appreciation of machinic enslavement.
It is not an empirical but a conceptual shortcoming, since machinic
enslavement is very much present in the text and clearly mentioned
by those interviewed who exercise command functions in the
company under the term "process."
At higher levels, the "language of experts, theoretical language,
often colored with Anglicisms [ . . ] , no longer deals with work" but
.
with "process." "Managers" are not interested in whether one

belongs to a particular trade or in its legitimacy; the focus is the
organization and control of "processes" essentially consisting of the
application of methods, monitoring of indicators, verification of the
uniformity of procedures, and the organization of meetings.
CEOs and experts "represent themselves and are considered
as specialists, not in 'labor,' but in 'processes,' 'techniques,' and 'tools.'
The central role played by process also emerges in monitoring
procedures."44 What first of all must be monitored and evaluated
are the humans-machines systems, the mixed semiotics (signifying,
asignifying, symbolic) which together make up "processes."
Sociology and industrial psychology seem to be incapable of
grasping conceptually the qualitative leap that has occurred in the
move from "work'' to "process," from subjection to enslavement.
Those high on the hierarchy no longer deal with work but with
"process" which integrates labor as "one" of its parts. They organize
machinic enslavement (process), in which work appears no different
from machines, semiotics, procedures, advertising, and communi
cations. Within these person-based services, whose machines do not
bear down with the same crushing weight as in other industrial
sectors, diagrams, schemas, indicators, budget entries, etc., take
machines' place in the organization of the process.
Mixed Semiotics / 1 1 9
The sociology (and the psychology) of work is imprisoned,
along with the rest of sociology, in anthropomorphic thought whose
"actors" are the "I" of the employee and the intersubjectivity of the
"collective" of workers. Deleuze and Guattari's anti-sociology frees
us from the political limits imposed by the reduction of labor orga
nization to the personology of social subjection.
Although the Marxist and Marxian theory of value has directly
or indirectly inspired the "progressive" part of sociology and indus
trial psychology, it in no way helps to escape this anthropomorphic
paradigm, for by distinguishing "living labor" from "dead labor," it
assigns all creativity and prouctivity to the former and relegates to
the latter a mere reproductive function. The distinction between
living labor and dead labor is appropriate only from the point of
view of social subjection. From the point of view of machinic
enslavement the sites of productivity, the vectors of enunciation, the
"for itself" (pour soi] and "for the other" (pour lautre], are not exclu
sively human. Machines, objects, procedures, diagrams, maps, and
so on, are not waiting for the "biblical" spirit of living labor to
restore life, mobility, and creativity to them. From the point ofview
of machinic enslavement, asignifying semiotics, objects, diagrams,
programs, and so on, contribute to production, creativity, innova
tion, in the same way as "people" do. Like machines, humans are
hybrids of "dead" and "living labor."
Machinic enslavement (or processes) precedes the subject and
the object and surpasses the personological distinctions of social
subjection. The latter, between living and dead, subject and
object, are the result of the reterritorialization process centered on
"man" and "labor." Sociology and industrial psychology operate a
humanist reterritorialization, a "humanization'' of work, which has
nothing progressive about it; indeed, it is identical to the social

subjection it legitimates. Instead of being considered an operation
of power, capitalism's distribution of places, roles, functions, and
jobs is identified with man's very emancipation. By attributing "sta-
tus and social place [ . . . ] [work] contributes decisively to the
construction of identity. . . it allows one to act on the world, on
other people and oneself."45
Sociology and industrial psychology only recognize "work"
("work assigned," "work accomplished," "work experience," etc.)
and completely neglect the fact that "work" is always "capitalist
labor," that the concept itself exists nowhere else but in capitalist
society. They project the category "labor" onto the past and the
future by making it a "universal" spanning all of history.
The political dimension of the distribution of "labor"46 is for
gotten in favor of an analysis of self-realization. "Work is a bodily
and existential experience that man makes of the limits and uncer
tainty of his actions [ . . . ] . The work we do (or are deprived of) plays
a decisive role in each person's psychic and somatic thought."47
Sociology and industrial psychology confuse "work'' with the
"political program'' the workers' movement created in response to
"wage slavery." It was not labor as such that guaranteed emancipa
tion. Self-realization, identity formation, and social recognition
through work have always been at the heart of the capitalist-and
socialist-project irsel The reverence for and celebration of work
expressed by France's last president48 are more than the products of
ideology and opportunism. We must look to something other
than "real full employment," genuine "work-value." For the social
democratic functions with which work has been invested-income
guarantees, social recognition and mobility, the meaning and
confidence in the future-are no longer borne out by work or
employment. Starting with machinic enslavement, we must
conceive a reterritorialization that leads to something other than
"work=value." We must seize the opponunity of desubjectivation
opened by machinic enslavement so as not to fall back on the
mythical-conceptual narratives of producers, workers, and employees.
This is one of our most urgent tasks if we are to invent new political
subj ectivations.
5. The Dual Function and Processing of Subjectivity
Power uses signifying semiotics, but never loses itself completely

in them, and it would be a mistake to imagine that it could fall
victim to its own signifying methods or ideologies.
-Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution
What is the relationship between asignifying semiotics and semi

ologies of signification in the exercise of capitalist power? Their
actions coalesce and complement one other. Economic and political
power is inconceivable without the production of subjections and
significations that determine for each person the position one is to
occupy (you are a man, you are a woman, you are a worker, you are
a boss, etc.), the way to behave, the function to fill (you have to pro
duce for yourself, for your family, for the State, etc.), the way to
think, and to express onesel If you do not think and if you do not
act the way the State wants and as the market demands, your
thoughts and behavior will have to adapt, they will have to be made
compatible with these significations.
There is no moment when we are not encircled by power forma

tions. In our societies people must not gesticulate overmuch, we
must each stay in our proper place, sign on the dotted line,

recognize the signals we are given-and any failure may land us
in prison or the hospitaI.49
As Foucault reminds us, power-which is simply an action upon

an action-determines possibilities, probabilities, potentialities,
and virtualities, which must continually be territorialized and inte
grated into the molar dimension of institutions and significations, to
become embodied in the roles and behaviors of individuated subjects.
Money, for example, creates deterritorializing effects insufficient
in themselves. The economic imperatives that result from them (for
example, reducing the debt, cleaning up government accounts,
imposing "sacrifices" on the dominated, etc.) must be interpreted
and translated into discourse, thought, and action by the media,
political parties, unions, experts, and State administrators and
addressed to public opinion, to each social group and every indi
vidual. The State, the media, and the experts ceaselessly produce
narratives, stories, and statements that continually reinfuse with
meaning the asignifying operations of credit money, which, in its
specific function (diagrammatic, asignifying) , has no use for
subjects or objects, persons or things. Money and profit recognize
only an abstract and deterritorialized subjectivity and an equally
abstract and deterritorialized object (Marx) : any subjectivity what
soever and any kind of object whatsoever without territory, existence,
or subjectivity. Subjections attach this deterritorialized subjectivity
to roles and functions in which individuals in turn become alienated.
Conversely, if we remain at the level of social subjection and
signification, power is reduced to an icon, an image, a representation
for contemplation (about which, in reality, we are rarely fooled) .
Discourses, narratives, and significations capture subjectivity
only at the level of representation, consciousness, images, and
significations. To take hold, to act on subjectivity, to determine
where and when to act, another type of process is needed, a molecular
process of subjectivity carried out through machinic enslavements
that circumvent representation, consciousness and signification.
Enslavement mobilizes both more and less than the person and the
individuated subject insofar as it intervenes at infra-personal and
supra-personal levels.
The two modes combine and complement one another: signifying
semiotics effectuate a molar processing of subjectivity that targets,
solicits, and interpellates consciousness, representation, and the
individuated subject, whereas asignifying semiotics effectuate a
molecular processing of the same subjectivity, mobilizing partial
subjectivities, states of non-reflexive consciousness, perceptual
systems, and so on. We should again emphasize that the destitution of
the subject and his semiologies through capitalist deterritorialization
"still does not invalidate human semiotics." The recourse to
"human" semiotics has a well-defined goal: to control and modulate
the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization realized
and assured by the asignifying semiotics of technico-sciemifi.c systems,
economics, and the collective resources of the State, destroying
previous existential territories, their values, and their way of life.
An example of the non-reactionary use of signifying semiotics is
that of the workers' movement. In the nineteenth century, the latter
was able to invent a revolutionary reterritorialization that, rather
than simply defending those whom capital was destroying, went
beyond capitalist deterritorialization: proletarian internationalism,
mutualization, and transnational class solidarity went beyond man
in the singular.
The ambiguities, uncertainties, and upheavals which periods of
great change, like ours, have experienced can be in part explained by

this twofold movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
In the Marxist language Guattari employs, the "worker" is deterri
torialized in "production" by asignifying semiotics and can thus also
be the agent of revolutionary rupture as well as of reactionary
reterritorialization.
Capitalism produces crises, indiscriminate and concomitant
advances toward a post-human world as well as spectacular retreats
toward man. It moves to a world "beyond the human," and it must
reterritorialize itself according to that which is most petty, most
vulgar, and most cowardly in "man" (racism, chauvinism, exploita
tion, war) . And this incessantly renewed return to "man" (with no
possibility of humanism) is justified by the obsessive fear that
through deterritorialization and asignifying semiotics, by taking
advantage of them as well as acting against them, one might con
struct a politics beyond the human, in other words, beyond
exploitation, racism, war, and colonization, beyond man's power
over women and over all other existents (living and non-living).
6. Pasolini and Neo-Capitalism's Semiotics of Immanence
On the one hand, we have an infantilization of the products of

subjectivity with a standardization and homogenization of modes
of expression and relations with the world, on the other hand, an
exponential expansion of non-denotative functions of language.
Children and adolescents do not understand their develop
ment, at least for the most part, by way of signifying discourse.
They reson to what I call forms of asignifying discursivity: music,
clothing, the body, behavior that signals recognition-as well as
to all kinds of machinic systems.
-Felix Guattari, Revolutions Moleculaires
Mixed Semiotics / 1 25
This language of production and consumption-and not the lan
guage of man-appears as implacably deterministic. It only wants
to communicate functionally; it doesn't want to perorate or exalt
or convince-advertising slogans see to all that.
-Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism
Pasolini is surely one of the first authors to have grasped the nature
and functioning of the sign systems of "neo-capitalism." The way in
which he frees himself from the limits oflinguistics and semiotics as
those fields developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
intersects, at many points, witli the work of Guattari.
The "general semiology" he looks to elaborate recognizes the
continuity between nature and culture modernity had broken by
concentrating all subjectivity on the subject and by depriving the
object of all capacity for expression. Drawing on his experience in
film, he created, following Peirce's example, a new semiology
starting from the question of the image. By refusing to view the
latter as a production of the brain or the result of our system of
perception, he is able to overcome the dualisms of the image and
things, of consciousness and the object. The shot ofJerry Malaga's
hair and Umberto Eco's "real" eyes are part of the same continuum
of images that constitute a world that is, consequently, a cinema
in itself, a cinema in nature, a metacinema. As in the first chapter
of Bergson's Matter and Memory, the eye is in things themselves;
things are luminous by themselves with no consciousness illumi
nating them.
By situating the eye in things, cinema undermines the anthro
pomorphic conception of expression and action. Things express
themselves by themselves, constitute focal points of subjectivation;
they have a power of expression, a "luminosity," a capacity for

proto-enunciation and action specific to them and that in no way
depends on man.
I. The Langu.ages of Comumption-Production
"What interests us in Pasolini's "general semiotics" is how the lan

guage of things functions as a "nonverbal discourse," as a power for
the proto-enunciation of reality itself and, therefore, as a site of
subjectivation. As with Guattari, expression is not reserved only to
linguistic signs. On the contrary, in capitalism, expression and
enunciation belong first of all to asignifying and symbolic semiotics.
For Pasolini language is "one of the many possible systems of
signs" and not "a privileged system unto itsel"50 Action, behavior,
and physical presence are semantic fields, sites of non-linguistic
communication. The physical presence of Rome's or Bologna's
rundown suburbs and their architecture "speak," just as in Guattari;
they function as vectors of subjectivation. Things are sources of
discursivity, "dumb, material, objective, inert, merely present,"
which act as vectors of enunciation.51
Things are "iconic signs," images, which communicate or
express something. This sensitivity to the language of things them
selves comes from Pasolini's work as a filmmaker rather than from
his work as a writer. The gaze, aided by the camera, forces him to
become conscious of and to catalogue all the things that a film shot
contains. The writer transforms things into words, that is, into
symbols, into the signs of a verbal system which are "symbolic and
conventional while the 'signs' of the cinematographic system are
nothing more or less than the things themselves in their materiality
and reality."52 It is as a film director that he was confronted with the
immediacy of the "expressive presence" of things.
Nonverbal discourse is "endowed with a persuasive power which
nothing verbal possesses."53 We can forget what we have been
taught through words but we can never forget what we have learned
through things.
The first image from Pasolini's life is a white curtain, and this
image spoke to him "objectively" and communicated the world of
his bourgeois childhood to him, the universe in which he was
living. We also find a curtain, although "red," in Guattari, which
also speaks, communicates, and expresses something.
The somber red color oLmy cunain enters into an existential

constellation with nightfall, with twilight, in order to engender
an uncanny effect that devalues the self-evidences and urgencies
which were impressing themselves on me only a few moments ago
by letting the world sink into an apparently irremediable void.54
Guattari specifies the color's modes of expression, in other words,

the way in which a thing can function as a focal point or vector of
subjectivation. Even if we cannot say that the color red "speaks," it
nonetheless constitutes, by arranging human elements (perception,
memory) and non-human elements (the curtain, dusk) , the exis
tential foundation of all expression and all speech: "What is in the
curtain, what is in the twilight, what is in my memory, is given as an
enunciative nucleus. Yet it couldn't be said that representation is
involved. The latter is present solely as part of an existential func
tion. [ . . ] This existential function is organized in a way totally
.
different from that of denotation and signifi.cation."55

The particular assemblage (color, curtain, evening, memory,
perception, etc.) effects an aggregation, a condensation, of existential
elements which, although non-discursive, are at the basis ofenunciation.

As with Guattari, although the language of things is unable to
establish invariable and stable significations, it can produce models
of behavior which possess the force of example and the self-evidence
of physical presence. Nonverbal semiotics, asignifying semiotics (the
operative technico-scientific languages of industry) and symbolic
semiologies profoundly transformed Italian subjectivity during the
1960s and 1 970s. Neo-capitalism is the "second and final bour
geois revolution'' whose "culture produces codes that engender
behavior."56 Codes do not first act through verbal language and its
functions of representation, denotation, and signification. Neo
capitalist culture puts models of desire into circulation and imposes
models of subjection (models of childhood, the father, the mother,
etc.). "It launches (subjective) models the way the automobile
industry launches a new line of cars."57 Capitalism manufactures the
individual, molding his body and his psyche, equipping him with
modes of perception, semiotization, and an unconscious, endeavoring
to introduce a "bourgeois property-owner in every worker."
Since the 1960s, capitalism has required from the "deterritorialized
worker, someone who goes beyond his professional expertise, who fol
lows technological innovations or even develops a certain creativity, a
certain interest. Furthermore, a consumer is needed who can adapt
to market developments."58 Pasolini offers the existential version of
the new type ofworker laid out by Guattari. "Power needs a different
type of subject" endowed with what Pasolini calls "existential flexi
bility''-the counterpart to the economic flexibility of the labor
market-an "absolutely formal elasticity in 'existences' so that every
one becomes a good consumer."59
The cultural model offered to the Italians (and to the rest of the
world), a model to which they must conform (in the way they dress,
the shoes they wear, their hairstyles, their actions and gestures),
bypasses representation and the cognitive dimensions of subjectivity
to affect existence itsel
"It is above all in lived experience, in the existential, that we find
conformity to the model, and thus in the body and behavior as
well."60 The semiotic efficiency of nonverbal discourse is formidable
because it affects existential functions (Guattari) through domesti
cating effects: "What has to be educated, shaped, is the flesh itself,
the flesh as mold of the spirit."
These models of conduct and subjectivation are imposed
through a "physical language," a "language of behavior," which,
because nonverbal, "is no longer rhetorical in the humanist sense,
but pragmatic in the American sense."61
Neo-capitalism asserts the primacy of languages of clarity, pre
cision, functionality, and instrumental and pragmatic efficiency by
vacating them of the expressive dimension of humanist languages.
During a historical period in which verbal language has become
completely conventional and empty, subjected to the translatability,
the centralization, and the imposed equivalency of languages of
infrastructure, "this physical and gestural language is of decisive
importance."62
Neo-capitalism always acts and expresses itself through "mixed
semiotics," albeit by reversing the semiotic hierarchies in which
languages of superstructure (school, law, university, etc.) were
once dominant.
The culture of a nation like Italy is expressed above all through

the language of behaviors or physical language, plus a certain
quantity-completely conventional and extremely vacuous-of
verbal language.

Together with the spread of non-denotative language acting through
mimetic contagion, through affect, arises the molding of language
through "technique." "The technological phenomenon, like a new
spiriruality, permeates language from the roots to all its extremities,
all its phases, and all its particularities."63
At the same time as a national language, a sole and unique
signifying substance is imposed, in particular through the educa
tional system and television; the collective structures of the State
and mass communications carry out a centralization of symbolic
semiotics through a new culture of the image, producing a new,
paradoxical, hideous "expressivity." The hold on . subjectivity is
therefore less due to speech, language, representation, ideology, or
consciousness than to the languages of production and consumption
(to the asignifying semiotics of economics and the symbolic
semiotics of consumption) .
2. Intolerance and the Italian "Cultural Genocide"
Without a collective assemblage of "revolutionary'' enunciation

deployed at the level of neo-capitalist development, the effects of the
languages of infrastructure (industrial, media, bureaucratic, etc.) are
catastrophic since Italians become the victims of the consequent
anthropological mutation. Following the Marx of the Communist
Manifesto, Pasolini speaks even of "cultural genocide."
Deprived of their popular culture, the "new poor" live the dis
parity between the new neo-capitalist culture of mass consumption
and their own economic conditions. It is impossible for them to
acquire what mass consumption dangles before them "because of
the poverty that persists, disguised by illusory improvements in the
standard of living." The disappearance of the old popular cultural
Mixed Semioiics I 1 31
models and the socioeconomic disparity produce the frustration,
violence, guilt, and aggressiveness that Pasolini identifies above all in
the behavior and presence of young people's bodies.
Before neo-capitalism incorporated and subordinated society in
its totality, the poor experienced a "segregation and marginality''
that allowed them to conserve, reproduce, and reinvent their culture
and forms of expression. The lurnpenproletariat of the 1 950s were
"blacks" in all but name, over whom the bourgeoisie limited its con
trol to police repression without bothering to "evangelize" them, in
other words, without bothering to impose cultural models or models
of subjectivation. From this point of view, fascism was still a part of
the world of the first capitalism, or more specifically; it stood at the
intersection, at the threshold, of the old and the new capitalism.
The languages of production and consumption represent a more
considerable internal revolution of fascist dictatorship.
Fascism offered a monumental, reactionary model, although it

went unheeded. The various distinctive cultures {of the peasants,
the lumpenproletariat, the workers) continued undisturbed to
identify with their own models, for repression was limited to
getting them to acquiesce in word alone.64
With its "languages of infrastructure," neo-capitalism strikes at the

roots of existence. It does more than demand submission or obe
dience, it molds and modulates individuals' subjectivity and lives.
Government is a government of "souls," as Foucault later writes.
Various forms of fascism had transformed them into puppets,

servants, and perhaps in part into true believers, but it didn't really
reach the depths of their souls, their way of being. Consumption

touched their innermost selves, it gave them other feellngs, other
ways of thinking, living, other cultural models. Unlike under
Mussolini, there was no superficial, scenographic regimentation,
but rather a real regimentation that altered and robbed them of
their souls. 65
Historically, fascism had exploited rhetorical values like heroism,

patriotism, and family, whereas the "new fascism is [ . . . ] a pragmatism
that acts as a cancer on all of society-the national tumor of the
majority."66
By imposing familialist forms of life and sexuality, the new
fascism of culture, public relations, and mass consumption is
"almost racist," producing a "false tolerance." The "new tolerance"
of consumption, public relations, and mass culture threatens to turn
into a new and more disturbing "intolerance."
The "new tolerance," today's "political correctness," produces
paradoxical effects, since, although within neo-capitalism "the elites
are much more tolerant toward sexual minorities than in other
periods, by way of compensation the vast majority has become
more blatantly intolerant, more violent and revolting than ever
before in Italian history."67
This intolerance, which spread like a micro-fascist cancer only a
short time after Pasolini's death, has found its macro-political
expression in the Northern League, the party of every intolerance
and every reactionary reterritorialization.
Pasolini was undoubtedly the first to grasp the power oflanguages
of production and consumption and especially those expressed
through television (which he in fact demanded be temporarily shut
down). Power destroyed the old freedoms, those of "the poor,"
workers, and the proletariat, and created others by appropriating
lv1ixed Semiotics / 1 33
"the demands-let us say the liberal and progressive demands--of
liberty and, by making them its own, changed their nature and
made them worthless."68
The normalization, standardization, the leveling of ways of life
and behavior are no longer exclusively the result of discipline and
confinement (of which the Roman "borgate" were a paradoxical
example), but rather the work of the "most subtle, cunning, and com
plex'' technologies of power to which semiotics surely belong. The
latter express and institute consumer society's "mass hedonism," an
apparently more tolerant and liberal power that is in reality, according
to Pasolini, more intolerant and more destructive than fascism.
3. The Death ofthe Sacred and Machinic Animism
Pasolini is very much aware of the paradoxical situation capitalism

creates. On the one hand, it destroys popular cultures and their
sacred "animist" vision of nature, things, and the cosmos. On the
other hand, through machinic assemblages, it creates the conditions
for delineating new continuities between subject and object,
between nature and culture. Like Guattari, Pasolini registers these
contradictory tendencies: first, the objectivation and complete
rationalization of nature and the cosmos that makes them
exploitable; second, the possibility of a machinic animism that
might make them sacred again (Pasolini) or "re-enchant" them
(Guattari) .
Pasolini has brilliant theoretical intuitions he gained as a film
maker. Destined to disappear under the capitalist contagion,
"popular" culture paradoxically possesses an understanding com
mensurate with capitalist machinism and, especially, filmic
machinism. Before the "language of reality" became "natural,"

before it was overtaken by filmic apparatuses, it was beyond the
reach of our consciousness. Now, as in animist traditions, cinema
operaes an acculturation, an animation,69 and a "subjectivation" of
nature such that it is impossible to distinguish it from culture.
Capitalism profoundly transforms subjectivity by destroying the
"oral" culture of dominated classes. The symbolic semiotics which
were once used in primitive societies (ofwhich a large part had been
reproduced in the peasant and lumpenproletariat communities of
modern Italy) and which, at the time of the first industrial revolu
tion, manifested worlds, values, ways of life heterogeneous to
capitalism, are fated to disappear.70 The culture and language of

infrastructures (the language of "production-consumption''), super
imposed on other cultural and linguistic strata, transform them
until they are eliminated. "Subaltern class culture [almost] no longer
exists: only the economics of subaltern classes exists."71 The culture
that was dying under Pasolini's eyes was peasant (and "lumpen
proletariat") culture, transnational and trans-epochal culture, which
came from the depths of history (or better, from the absence of
history). To have an idea of what capitalist deterritorialization has
meant, one need only be familiar with the abrupt drop in the
West's rural population,72 an exodus which has quickly spread to
other parts of the world, marking the end of a phase begun in the
Neolithic period.
The peasantry's disappearance has brought with it the disap
pearance of processes of subjectivation and animist and polytheistic
beliefs that survived despite the capitalization and expropriation
carried out by the Church. But what touches Pasolini the poet most
is the effacement of the "sacred" and the loss of the attitude toward
the world and toward others which the animist conception of the
world holds.
The "characteristic feature of peasant civilizations is not their
finding nature 'natural,"'73 but rather "animated," subjectivated,
sacred. Where capitalism seeks to desacralize things and people, to
make them objects in order to measure, exchange, and capitalize
them, Pasolini looks instead to "resacralize them as much as possible."
Against the capitalist process that requires us to perceive only the
"inanimate, mechanical". appearance of things, against the "objective
and scientific" conception of reality, Pasolini opposes the "subjec
tive" consistency of the same reality.74
Some of this "religion" ended up in his "semiotics," for, as with
Guattari, there is no break, fissure, or abyss between sign and reality,
between content and expression, culture and nature. Pasolini's
animism is a kind of expressionism since the sign is immanent to
the real. In his polemic with Umberto Eco, Pasolini asserted that his
semiotics does not naturalize cultural codes but "transforms nature
into cultural phenomena: it transforms all life into speech."75
Nature as culture is expressive nature; it speaks to itself because
there is a "continuum without any solution of continuity" between
a person who says "oak tree" and the oak tree itsel The latter is not
the referent of the sign "oak tree," but a sign itself, an iconic sign,
just as the living person is not the referent of the sign "person," but
a "living-iconic" sign itsel A person and an oak tree are the "im
signs" of reality which cinema merely reproduces.
Subjectivated nature, animated culture, is a "Vedic-Spinozan'' God,
says Pasolini, which speaks with itsel Everything that exists, whether
plant or rock, expresses, sings, the glory of this immanent "God."76
Even if man were to lose his "imperialist" claim to be endowed
with what all other existents lack-the power of enunciation and
expression-"the nonverbal is nothing other than another ver
baliry" such that the signs of verbal languages do no more than

translate the signs of nonverbal languages and in particular lan
guages of action.
\Yhat we have lost with the disappearance of these non-anthro
pomorphic cultures and religions we can reinvent with the equally
non-anthropomorphic machinisms of capitalism.
The cinema reveals that reality is not a collection of
" res" but of
"actions." Action {as much Lenin's as that of an obscure Fiat
employee, Pasolini would say), the first and primary language of
people and things, is the source of all other forms of expression. The
image does not only represent, it acts pragmatically on the real and
on subjectivity; for it makes us see, intervenes, acts on what "man''
and "human" subjectivity cannot see and do.
Science, industry, and art have used the image "diagrammati
cally" for a long time. Computer-assisted imagery, for example,
captures, as in a dynamic diagram, the functional articulations of a
situation or system which it allows one to anticipate, forecast, and
intervene. It participates directly in the production of its "object."
This function of the image, an iconic mapping that both registers
and creates possibilities, is also identified by directors like Godard,
who denounces the way in which the film industry cancels it out.
Society maintains the possibility of using the cinema and its images
as science uses diagrams and microscopes to "see" the infinitely
small or the telescope to "see" the infinitely large that escapes man
and his language in order to construct "iconic cartographies" that
multiply possibilities for action. Like a diagram in movement, the
cinema: in order to see, decide, choose, and act.
Confronted with and attracted by filmic machinism and its
"animism," Pasolini offers us a political reading of "diagrammatic,,
action and its possibilities. The action of the image is indubitably
"machinic" {or diagrammatic), in the process of "moving away from
classical humanist ideals" and of being lost in what Pasolini calls the
"pragma'' of languages of infrastructure. Along with other audiovi
sual techniques, cinema seems to be the language of this pragma; it
seems to function in complete harmony with capitalist deterrito
rialization. But cinema can also represent a chance for salvation,
a possibility for a change of course, precisely because it expresses this
pragma-"and it expresses it from the inside; by producing itself, by
taking it as its starting point, by reproducing it."77 The cinema
machine is completely inside the real. But what makes it an apparatus
for subjection and enslavement can also be turned into new processes
for subjectivation provided that one recognize the nature of
machinic assemblages, that one abandon the anthropological and
humanist perspective that imbues so much of critical thought.
The immanent power of im-signs prefigures the formidable
political power of audiovisual machines like television. Signs do not
exist in the world of superstructures but make up operative semiotics,
power signs, which act on both the real and on subjectivity.
Action-images can also sing the glory of the "Lord," like the
little birds in The Hawks and the Sparrows, in other words, they can
sing the emergence of a new political subjectivity or sing the glory
of capital, that is, vulgarity, arrogance, and the impotentized power
of the machinic image like Berlusconi's, whose rise Pasolini had
anticipated with surprising lucidity.

4
Conflict and Sig n Systems
I am convinced that if extraterrestrials landed in Sao Paulo tomor

row, there would be expens, journalists, and all sons of specialists
to explain to people that, really, it is not such an ordinary
extra
thing, that the possibility had already been considered, that a

special committee on the issue has long been in place, and, most
important, that there is no reason to panic, because the authorities
are here to take care of things.
What semiotics are brought into play in political conflict? What

meanings, stories, and signs do journalists, expens, and scholars
produce? Is it an ideological battle? We will attempt to problematize
these questions starting from a specific case: the 2003 labor dispute
among precariously-employed French cultural workers-the "inter
mittents du spectacle."1
The motto of the Coordination des Intermittents et Precaires,2
"We are the expens!" raises two different kinds of question. The first
concerns the nature and functions of the expert or specialist: "Who
is an expert?" and "What do specialists know and what can they do?"
Faced with the increase in expertise, studies, data, and statistics,
1 39
whose rise is directly proportional to the intensity of the conflict,
intermittent workers have asked themselves, on the one hand, what
special experience and what legitimacy the experts have that allow
them to develop and build knowledge with regard to their practices.
On the other hand, they have questioned what the experts "can do,"
in other words, the ways in which the experts participate in decision
making and in the socioeconomic choices that bear on labor,
employment, and unemployment conditions.
The second set of questions the motto raises reflect on the Coor
dination's own practices: ''"What do we know?" and "What can we
do?" In other words: What is the value and import of our experiences
and our words in the production and distribution of knowledge
about us? Why are our words and knowledge limited and niive and
thus disqualified while "specialist" knowledge represents "objectivity"
and "universality"? What power do we have as a group, a collective,
an association, to play a part in the decisions that concern us? Why
is our speech institutionally termed "non-political"?
In short, the motto "We are the experts!" puts into question the
composition and legitimacy of the assemblage that "knows" and the
composition and legitimacy of the assemblage that "decides." The
issue can be put like this: "Why don't we have the right to partici
pate in the collective arrangement that problematizes and explores
the possibilities our work, employment, and unemployment repre
sent? And who has the right and the legitimacy to make decisions
about our lives?"
The mobilization of intermittent workers seems to follow the
two paths typical of "minority" struggles which question both the
procedures of the production of democracy and the procedures of
the production of knowledge. The fight against cultural-labor
market reforms constitutes a critique of the knowledge produced by

institutions (the State, trade unions, business organizations, the
media, the social sciences, etc.) which assert what must be taken for
"true" and "false" with regard to economics, social rights, and
culture. It also constitutes a critique of the procedures through
which the institutions governing unemployment insurance define
problems, come up with solutions, and make decisions.
The Coordination's struggle foregrounds and contests the exis
tence of the three transversal practices crisscrossing apparatuses of
knowledge production, those of the production of democracy and of
the production of communication: division, delegation, monopoly.
The division of the population into experts and laymen, into repre
sentatives and represented, into communications professionals and
the public, implies, on the one hand, the delegation of knowledge,
power, and speech to the experts, representatives, and communication
professionals; on the other hand, it ensures the centralization of and
monopoly over the production of knowledge in laboratories and
think tanks, the centralization of political decision-making within
institutions, and the centralization of the production of public
speech within media newsrooms. The production of knowledge is
legitimized through agreements among specialists made behind
closed doors. Political representation entails the centralization of and
monopoly over decision-making such that political arrangements are
made and unmade among the few. In the same way, a small number
of journalists ensure a monopoly for themselves over what is said in
the media and what information goes out. By way of these three
main practices, which constitute techniques for controlling behavior
and technologies of subjection, the roles and functions, the rights and
duties, the freedoms and constraints of our societies are divvied up.
The battle waged by intermittents over speech, categories, and
discourses ran up against a new strategy and new semiotic techniques:
Conflict and Sign Systems I 1 41

silence the non-expert, the "citizen," and the public by making them
speak; arrange for their exclusion by making them participate; keep
them at a distance by consulting them, by listening to their grievances
through an army of journalists, experts, and researchers. We live in a
"common world" designed by the semiotics of marketing, advertising,
consumption, television, and the Internet. Access to these shared
semiotics is not only not denied, it is imperative: one must join in,
one must take an active part. The exclusion of the governed and the
neutralization of their singular speech result from the inclusion of
their form of expression within a given common semiotic space. In
surveillance societies, a shortage of speech is not the problem but
rather its overabundance, the consensus and conformism that its
circulation presupposes and produces.
Public space is saturated with a circulation of signs, images, and
words and with a proliferation of mechanisms of subjection which,
while encouraging and soliciting speech and expression, prevent
singular expression and neutralize heterogeneous processes of
subjectivation. For singular speech to be possible, shared commu
nication must first be interrupted, one must leave the infinite
chatter of the media consensus, force ruptures in public space, just
as, in order to "see," one must remove oneself from the incessant
bombardment of visual cliches. In other words, for one to exist
politically and to exist at all, rather than enter the common world,
the latter must be singularized, that is, one must impose existential
and political differentiation by creating new cleavages, new divi
sions. The specificity of a common world, its singularity, and its
difference, must he asserted "at a time when the leveling effects of
information and social participation are every day reinforced."3
Singularity, division, and difference are not given in advance: they
have to he invented and constructed.

Semiotic regimes play a strategic role in the building of this
common world that they did not have, or that they had in a different
way, n disciplinary societies. After Archeology of Knowledge, Fou
cault returned to the production of utterances only in his last
lectures. In his lectures at the College de France,4 he briefly
examines the relationship between economic control and the con
trol of public opinion. Liberal government of society is a
government of the population whose dual aspect must be taken into
account. First, it is a government of the "biological" reproductive
conditions of the human species (regulation of births and deaths,
demographic management, regulation of production, risks, etc.) ;
second, it is a government o f the public, over public opinion. As
Foucault points out, economists and publicists emerged at the same
time. Since the eighteenth century, the governing of society bears
on both the economy and public opinion. In this way, governmental
action has extended from its biological roots in the species to the
surface created by "the public." From the species to the public:
therein lies an entire field of new realities and, consequently, new
ways of acting on behavior and opinions in order to modify the ways
of doing and saying of the governed.
Today's semiotic governmentality relies on the differential
management of the public (subsequently transformed into audiences),
which replaces the hegemonic management of opinion in discipli
nary societies. The optimization of "semiotic" differences aims at
the homogenization of subjectivity (a leveling of heterogeneity
which has no precedent in human history)5 and takes the form of a
new conformism of difference, a new consensus of plurality.
It is in this new context that intermittent workers began a
struggle focused on the statements and meanings of categories of
unemployment, employment, and work in a shared public space
Conflict and Sign Systems / 1 43

occupied by the semiotic regime of journalists, experts, and
researchers. The categories of unemployment, employment, and
work serve as so many catchphrases, so many cliches, which regulate
and limit our ways of acting and thinking. The awesome assemblage
of university laboratories, consulting firms, democratic institutions,
and media chiefs stands as a veritable semiotic wall against which
the intermittents collided.
In the conflict, signifying semiotics which mobilize consciousness
and representation come into play at different levels. They put into
discourse the problems important to a society and time period by
constituting them as catchphrases and deploying them in worlds and
universes of meaning. They then ensure the interpretation and trans
mission of these catchphrases and universes of meaning for more and
more differentiated publics by at once giving speech ro and stripping
it from the governed. Finally, they make these catchphrases and
worlds and universes of meanings the conditions for individuals'
subjection, the conditions for their production as subjects.
Problemati.zation
Given that we arrive at the solutions the questions we ask "deserve,"

Foucault and Deleuze make determining problems one of the major
stakes of politics. Dominant utterances, representations, and
meanings function as a "grid" that affects our way of perceiving,
feeling, and understanding. Everything that happens, everything
one does and thinks, everything that one could think and do within
the social and economic field, is passed through this grid of state
ments and meanings that makes up the horizon of interpretation
and expression of the world. To call employment and unemploy
ment "the" problem of an age means defining a framework that sets
1 44 I Signs and lvlachines

the limits of the possible, stating what is important and perceivable,
defining what is legitimate and what is not, and circumscribing
forms of political action and speech. It is in this way that, for Fou

cault, the power to formulate questions is a power of politicization,
that is, a power to introduce new objects and new subjects within
the space of politics and to make them the stakes of a polemic and
a struggle. 6 Problematization introduces into public space not only
new objects and subjects, but also "rules of action, modes of relation
to the self,"7 in other words, modes of possible subjectivation. The
intermittent movement, by breaking the conceptual framework of
the institutional consensus between the unions, bosses, and the
State, by emphasizing "new social rights" rather than "the right to
work," directly attacked the "monopoly'' on problematization,
introducing new problems and new questions and thus completely
new stakes for thought and action.
The right to problematize employment and unemployment is
reserved for "social partners" alone (the "co-determination'' between
employers and workers). Here, as in other domains, decisions are
made within institutions that have long abandoned the public
sphere of political division and confrontation. The ways of evaluating
and measuring deficits, costs, and investments as well as the ques
tions relative to their import and purpose have been removed from
all public problematization, from all controversy, and entrusted to
specialists {economic interest groups, experts, researchers, State
administrators, etc.). The institutions for mutual aid and solidarity
born from workers' struggles, managed and co-managed by mem
bers' representatives (employers' and workers' unions), have long
stopped promoting the "democracy of labor" or the "democracy of
production." The democracy of labor and production has been
transformed into the "oligarchical" power of certain union and

management players. The co-determination of French universal
health care based on the Fordist model of industrial relations fails to
take into account the "interests" of all these new subjects (the unem
ployed, precarious workers, women, the sick, handicapped,
students, etc.) and neglects the new social and political divisions
which neoliberal differentiation has produced since the late 1 970s.
The power struggle provoked by the intermittent workers'
movement created a brief opening in and disruption of this monopoly
on problematization.
Moreover, the worse the "jobs" and "unemployment" "crisis" has
become, the more these words have paradoxically ceased to denote
realities worthy of examination and instead have changed little by
little into stock phrases for thought and action, helping produce the
cliches of consensus. The latter now pass for the "truths" (those of
liberalism) that one is supposed to believe: If employment is uni
laterally considered the right question, then it is the right solution.
Thus, to raise employment, taxes on business must be reduced, to
increase labor-market flexibility, the level of social protections must
fall, and so forth. None of these "truths" has ever been demonstrated
for the simple reason that they are indemonstrable.
The watchwords on employment and unemployment consti
tute the unnamable and unspeakable focal points from which the
narratives and discourses of power issue, from which the possibility
of speech and knowledge of those governing is born. They represent
the unarticulated and inarticulatable presuppositions of discursive
practices (the non-discursive focal points of enunciation). Like
discourses pertaining to the "reform" of unemployment insurance,
economic discourse is first of all structured by a non-discursive
reality that reflects power relations, the desire for wealth, inequality,
exploitation, and so on.

The institutionalization and selection of problems and solutions
operated by signifying semiotics establish an initial split between
government and the governed. Those who govern have the power to
defie problems and formulate questions (which they term "the
possibilities") and establish in this way what is noteworthy, impor
tant, relevant, feasible, worth acting on and speaking about, whereas
the freedom of expression of the governed is exercised within the
limits of already codified "doing" and "saying," both already settled
by the problems and solutions of those who govern.
As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, problems and significations
are always the problems and significations of the dominant reality;
the communications machine of signifying semiotics exists only to
produce and repeat this self-evidence. The problems and frame
works of statements and dominant significations represent real
semiotic barriers to the intermittent workers' movement. All that
fails to fit within the consensual definition of employment and
unemployment is literally inaudible, incommunicable, and untrans
mittable to journalists, experts, and researchers. As one could
easily see throughout the conflict, beyond most journalists' bad
faith or intellectual poverty, the issue was not cognitive but ethico
political. Even the most open and well-informed people literally
did not understand what was going on because the Coordination's
words, in order to be understood, presupposed a modification, a
displacement, of the problem.
The Interpretation and Transmission of Catchphrases
With the catchphrases "employment" and "unemployment" and the

consensus that results, the semiotics of journalists, experts, and
researchers set in motion an enormous interpretative and narrative

machine as well as a powerful machine for subjection from which
the universe of significations and sense of liberalism emerge. In the
past, the exclusive privilege of the politician-namely, speech
which determines and states problems, which establishes limits on
saying and doing, is today constituted at the intersection of the non
discursive practices of the market and an assemblage of statements
reducible-without great exaggeration-to an assemblage of
experts, scholars, and journalists. Everything that has happened, is
happening, and will happen is interpreted by these three according
to the "grid" of problems and statements of modern-day capitalism
(jobs, growth, the market, competition, etc.) .
But why in our security states does the assemblage of the jour
nalist, the expert, and the scholar replace the politician? Why does
their expertise tend to replace the space in which the political
confrontation of differing perspectives once occurred? Because the
contemporary democratic system functions according to the belief
that there is no dispute, no dissent, possible concerning the implicit
presuppositions of the social consensus. If there is agreement that
the fundamental social issue is employment, the difference in opinions
between the labor union (to guarantee the rights of non-executives)
and business management (to guarantee the prerogatives of "human
capital") can easily be reconciled by the expert. His mediation/
interpretation is largely sufficient in itsel
The pacific machinery assigning roles and functions among
politician, expert, scholar, and journalist only breaks down when,
as happened during the intermittents' struggle, the consensus (on
employment) is repudiated, when a political force (the associa
tions) retracts its assent to the implicit presuppositions conveyed
by the dominant catchphrases-statements and produces "another
collective assemblage of enunciation" from which singular speech

can be deployed. To do so, it is not enough to "liberate" speech
from the apparatuses of power; it must be constructed. That is
when the networks of power are confronted with a completely
new situation.
Freely drawing our inspiration from the work of Michel de
Certeau, we can describe the constitution, interpretation, and trans
mission of catchphrases produced by the assemblage of experts,
researchers, and journalists in the following way. The researcher has
the task of interpreting the statements that define what is important,
what is noteworthy, for society and, if needs be, to explain them
using his specialized knowledge. The expert acts as a mediator and
translator of this specialized knowledge in the language of political,
economic, and state-administrative decision-makers. In turn, the
media selects, interprets, and transmits the researcher's and expert's
statements by reformulating them in the language of public opinion,
by circulating them within the shared semiotic space among different
audiences. The discourse on employment, unemployment, and
work thus has its speakers, interpreters, and translators as well as its
"shifters," which ensure the coherence between different types of
statements (the concepts of scholars, the judgments of experts, and
the opinions of journalists) and between the apparatuses that pro
duced them (the university, the media, the think tank, etc.).
We can slightly adjust de Certeau's theory in asserting that the
balance of power between the journalist, scholar, and expert weighs
largely in favor of the first, since the media calls less and less on
outside analysis {of the intellectual or expert). Indeed, scholars and
experts "are thus forced to become journalists if they want to
conform to the norm" of modern-day communications.8 With the
assemblage of scholar, expert, and journalist we have a first "regime
of signs" of interpretation and communication. The regime entails
Conflict and Sign Sysiems / 1 49

certain conditions: First, that signs refer to. signs indefinitely, since
the discourse produced is absolutely tautological and arbitrary;
second, that there are categories of specialists (researcher, expert,
journalist) whose "job it is to circulate these signs, to say what they
mean, to interpret them, to thereby freeze the signifier"; and third,
"there must still be subjects [different audiences] who receive the
message, who listen to the interpretation and obey."9 It should not
be hard to see that by way of this assemblage we are describing a
metamorphosis of "pastoral power," a new "priest" and a new
"flock." The assemblage takes the public in hand employing the
semiotic technologies of a "government of souls."
The Scholar of Conflict
The work of Pierre Michel Menger, head of research at the Centre

national de la recherche scientifique, research director at the Ecole
des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, director of the Centre de
sociologie des arts, and "specialist" in the sociology oflabor and the
arts, perfectly matches the description of how these assemblages
function, since his work provides the media with statements ready
made to be passed along, "sound bites" perfectly adapted for
governing public opinion so as to ensure the success of "reform." On
the one hand, they make intermittent employment an "exception of
the job market," and, on the other hand, permanent employment
the instrument and measure of the need to regulate the "far too
many'' intermittent workers overwhelming cultural production. By
making the category of permanent employment the goal and
essence of social and economic activity, Menger sets the limits on
possible and reasonable activities on the cultural job market (every
thing outside his framework is disqualified as niive, irrational,

utopian, etc.). The employment policy for the cultural sector this
scholar proposes poignantly shows how disciplinary apparatuses are
supposed to work in a surveillance society. His most recent book is
based entirely on the disciplinary distinction between normal (stan
dard employment and unemployment) and abnormal (occasional
employment and unemployment), as its title clearly indicates: Inter
mittent Workers: Sociology ofan Exception.10
For Menger, "just as these jobs are not ordinary, we are not
dealing with ordinary joblessness [ . . ] . The rules governing inter
.
mittent workers' unemployment cover atypically atypical risk. But

exceptional flexibility has considerable consequences."1 1 Extraordi
nary unemployment and employment, atypical risks and coverage
of atypical risks, exceptional flexibility-this is the language of the
disciplinary "exception." Menger wraps his arguments about the
cultural sector and intermittent status in a scholar's formalism that
aims to reduce and confine the issues raised by the intermittents'
movement to the reassuring framework of the abnormal, the excep
tional, and the atypical. The job policies to implement must
eradicate the exceptional and reestablish the normal functioning
of the job market, which provides for both the return of the entre
preneur's function (his autonomy) and the reimposition of the
employee's (his subordination) in order to assign each their place
("their rights and duties," in the politician's and scholar's jargon)
within the division of labor. To put it in Durkheimian terms, a
"direct and organized hierarchy'' must be reestablished in a job
market made unruly by behavior out of line with the norm of
capital-labor relations. We know that the normal functioning of
the job market is not "natural" but rather must be produced and
reproduced via the continuous intervention of job policies. This is
what "reform" is meant to do.
Conflict and Sign Systems I 1 5 1

Undaunted by paradox, Menger even manages to blame inter
mittent employment for neoliberal policies: "There is no use
condemning widespread job insecurity if we fail to realize that it is
the system of intermittent employment itself that creates insecurity
[ . .] . The failure of the job market is part of the very principle of
.
intermittent work."12 The assertion neglects the fact that over the
last thirty years insecurity has also spread to all sectors of the economy.
In any case, his remarks are disproven by the reality of those working
in the job market's cultural sector who are not covered by intermittent
workers' unemployment insurance. I 3
I n professions whose .?.ctivities d o not provide the rights of
intermittent employment the same (but worse) phenomena of
underemployment and insecurity have also emerged. Without a
compensation regime like that of intermittent workers', individuals
either have recourse to basic welfare benefits or must take on several
jobs in order to survive. To turn Menger's viewpoint on its head, we
might say that if inequality is more acute in these sectors of the
cultural job market (and in every sector where discontinuous
employment exists), it is precisely because of the absence of a com
pensation regime that accounts for the discontinuity of employment
and the forms of work and training in a flexible economy. Poverty,
underemployment, and enormous disparities in income are not a
function of the intermittent regime but of the flexible organization
of the culture industry and the way its job market functions.
What is happening here is what has already happen:ed in other
parts of the economy over the last thirty years: a policy of full
employment (creating "real," stable, full-time jobs) that neglects the
actual conditions of production and divides and fragments the job
market by creating a growing disparity among incomes. It serves
only to further differentiate, to further multiply, inequalities and thus

to create the ideal terrain for neoliberal control of the job market so
that it can further install itself and extend its reach. Employment
policies are subordinated to the logic of liberalism because they do
no more than segment and subsequently differentiate and increase
the competition between "guaranteed" and "non-guaranteed" work,
between secure and insecure employment, and in this way enable
the policy of "optimizing differences," of differential management
of inequalities, of control of behavior on the job market.
Unemployment and Invisible Work
"Unemployment" plays a strategic role in neoliberal significations

and narratives. Neoliberal analysis ends up at the same disciplinary
distinction between normal (unemployment benefits as instituted
after the war) and abnormal (unemployment benefits as used,
abused, and appropriated by intermittent workers). AB with all the
experts of cultural-sector employment policies, Menger would like
to bring the unemployment benefits whose use has been perverted
by intermittent work (because the benefits finance cultural and
artistic activity as well as intermittent workers' lives) back to their
so-called natural function of simple coverage against the risk of job
loss. But Menger, like most experts, seems to ignore that within a
system of "flexible accumulation," unemployment changes meaning
and function. The clear and distinct separation between employment
and unemployment (unemployment as the wrong side of employ
ment) established within a very different system of accumulation
(the standardization and continuity of production and, thus, sta
bility and continuity of employment) has transformed into an
ever-narrower imbrication of periods of work, periods of unem
ployment, and periods of training.

"When we look at the cultural sector, the first thing that jumps
out is the discrepancy between labor and employment. The dura
tion of the latter covers the duration of real work only in part.
lntermittents' labor (education, apprenticeship, the circulation of
knowledge and know-how, the forms of cooperation, etc.) includes
periods of employment and unemployment without it being
reducible to either. 14 The time of employment only partially
corresponds to the labor, education, and cooperative practices
intermittents undertake. The developments are not recent but date
back to the 1 980s. Hence, unemployment cannot be reduced to a
period without labor activity. Unemployment benefits not only
cover the risk of job loss but also guarantee income continuity,
serving to produce and reproduce the overlapping of all these prac
tices and temporalities for which the worker is in this case not
totally responsible as he would be in other sectors.
Menger's focus on ("cultural") employment and the type of
solutions he advocates prevent him from grasping the economic
changes we are now living through. Given the situation of intermit
tent workers, the CERC (Council for employment, incomes, and
social cohesion) report on job security1 5 is completely right. For it
considers the phenomena we observe among intermittent work the
rule rather than the exception or an abnormality: "The straightfor
ward split between employment and unemployment, between
salaried work and free-lance work, has been replaced by a kind of
'halo' of employment, a fluid status, at once unemployed and
salaried, for example, or free-lance and salaried, while the types of
labor contract have multiplied (regular short-term, intermittent, or
interim work contracts) ." 16 The supposed "exception'' of intermittent
work is becoming the rule of the salary-based system, just as the
intermittent associations have been arguing since 1 992. The

"ordinary" or "traditional" categories Menger would like to reestablish
for the system of intermittent work hardly function even within
"normal". sectors of the economy. Contrary to his assertions, the
difference between intermittent unemployment and unemployment
in other sectors represents a difference in degree and not in kind.
The "grand narrative" of employment (or full employment) is thus
interpreted, spoken of, and staged according to two non-contradic
tory discursive logics: the protection of long-term salaried workers
and the protection of the entrepreneur and business. The reason
these discourses are not contradictory is that they condemn the
system of intermittent employment but for different reasons. On
the one hand, neoliberals do so because, although they exploit the
system's mobility and flexibility, they do not want to pay the price
for it in terms of unemployment insurance ("It kills competition," "It
makes people lazy") . On the other hand, with increasing precarity,
there is the risk that the continuity of income and rights that
intermittent work guarantees (even partially) despite discontinuous
employment could be imitated in other sectors of precarious work.
Unions and the left, for their part, want nothing to do with the
interrnittents either, since their objective is full employment, in
other words, "real jobs" for "real artists" and "real professionals"
(though they leave this last part out) . Intermittent work is only a last
resort that must be eliminated on the way to the "stable employ
ment" with which the unions are more comfortable.
It is not hard to understand the role the "scholar" Menger has
played in the battle over discourses and signs. The theoretical con
cepts and interpretations of the conflict he has advanced have been
picked up by the media because his discourse on employment in
the cultural sector, the deficit, the necessary regulation and stan
dardization of the "far too much," and so on, has synchronized

perfectly with the crucial moments of the intermittents' struggle
and with the interpretive &amework of journalists, experts, politi
cians, and union bosses. His concepts have provided the
watchwords that circulate in the media, reinforcing and validating
by way of this circulation their accuracy and staying power.
The press and, above all, radio and television feed these inter
pretations into the discourses and speech circulating within
institutional and social networks. They select experts' statements
and their content, translate them into a language for everyone,
making the information both attractive and easily digestible. They
are in this way active agents !n its appropriation and transformation.
The statements the media chose throughout the intermittents'
struggle in order to channel, transmit, and anchor them in social
networks, public opinion, and ordinary language are (no surprise
here) those which translate those statements on employment, the
law of supply and demand, and business in terms reflecting the
"necessary'' and "inevitable" regulation of the "too much."
The media also chooses among statements &om the intermittent
workers' movement, erecting what we have called veritable "semiotic
barriers" on the Coordination's demands, limiting them to claims
for the protection of unemployment insurance specific to "artists."
The media barely picked up on the "spectacular" week-long occu
pation of the roof of the French national employers' union's
headquarters. This was because the Coordination had climbed up
there demanding an overhaul of the State agency on employment17
and, specifically, a thorough review of the unemployment system
and not only that part of it relating to intermittent work, a demand
far exceeding the context of a cultural and artistic exception in
which journalists were happy to confine the intermittents' struggle.
Although one could find in the media some sympathy for and interest

in those "artists" who fought with the determination of a bygone
age, there was nonetheless a complete black-out on everything that
went beyond the idea that the same media had of the functions and
roles of art and artists in society. The multitude of "lay'' voices
expressing themselves throughout the conflict held almost no .
weight among the media chiefs who used them at best for man-in
the-street public opinion. For the media, a legitimate, expert voice
was enough to silence the jabberers who failed to understand that if
the job market is regulated, it is only for its own good.
The Narrative-Function of Signifying Semiotics
The media does more than communicate catchphrases. It actualizes

them, deploys them, in worlds and universes of images, words, and
signs through stories and narratives that constitute the real rather
than describe it. De Certeau effectively synthesizes this new narra
tive-function of signifying semiotics: "The media transform the
great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a
secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information,
statistics, and surveys are everywhere. No story has ever spoken so
much or shown so much. [ . . . ] Narrations of what's-going-on
constitute our orthodoxy. Debates about figures are our theological
wars. The combatants move forward camouflaged as facts, data, and
events. They present themselves as messengers of a 'reality.' [. . . ] But
in fact they fabricate [it], simulate it, use it as a mask, accredit them
selves by it, and thus create the scene of their law."18 The injunction
conveyed by the asignifying semiotics of figures, statistics, and
deficits is translated into a discourse that issues the command to "Be
quiet!" This is what, between the lines, journalists in the press, the
television host, and political representatives express with the help of

statistics and surveys: "'These are the facts. Here are the data, the cir
cumstances, etc. Therefore you must . . . ' Narrated reality constantly
tells us what must be believed and what must be done." 19
Stories and narratives actualize employment and unemploy
ment into worlds and universes of discourse and meaning.
Unemployment is at once interpreted and narrated as an illness of
the social body that must be cured through employment and as the
event of security societies thatmust be continually talked about and
continually staged through the figures and statistics that call on and
appeal to the speech of experts, scholars, and the unemployed them
selves. And all this serves no other purpose than to internalize
__
through the public relations machine the inequalities the economy

exacerbates. "Narratives" have a conjunctive function ince they
compensate for the growing "disjunctures" created by the division of
labor, the differential treatment instituted by public employment
policies, and strategies of segmentation of the job mark.et. While
communicating fear, discourses on unemployment also promote a
project for m?bilizing the public for the future. Signifying semiotics
produce restorative meaning by providing through employment a
common frame of reference for the multiplication of "differences"
(inequality of status, income, access to insurance, etc.). The common
reference is meant to bind the differences together to establish a
common goal. In the battle for employment, discourses, stories, and
narratives produce the possibility for a reality reconciled with
itself. They provide the image of the rediscovered unity of society
(against social conflict) , the image of security (of employment) that
erases fear.
Unemployment thus allows for the unrelenting repetition of
narratives that constitute individuals as victims of the market and
globalization (the political and left-wing trade union version) or

as responsible for their situation because of their own behavior
(the neoliberal right-wing version) . But the "grand narrative" of
employment does not have the same power of subjection and inter
naliiation as the story of the "nation" or "progress." It is a little
"dream" of security that requires the mobilization of the entire society
for infinitesimal changes in unemployment whose calculation itself
is subject to every kind of manipulation imaginable.
The Subjection Machine
Do you know what you have to do to keep someone from speaking

in his or her own name? Have him say "I."
-Gilles Deleuze, Two Regi.mes ofMadness
I know very well that people in favelas couldn't care less about
psychoanalysis, Freud, or Lacan. But the abstract machines of
subjectivation produced by psychoanalysis through the media,
magazines, films, and so on, are certainly also present in what
takes place in the favelas.
A final function exercised by signifying semiotics has to be examined.

The latter are not limited to constructing, interpreting, and trans
mitting catchphrases. The functioning of the semiotic machine
for interpreting and transmitting them is indistinguishable from
the functioning of a subjection machine. One might even say that
the purpose of interpretation and transmission is the production of
subjection.
In security societies a plurality of sign regimes coexist. .We
have already analyzed one of them, the circulation/transmission of

"statements-watchwords." The process of subjection represents
another. Here, signs no longer refer to signs within a circle closed
upon itself but rather to the subject. Signs, significations, and state
ments do not refer to their own reproduction but to the limits of
their circulation constituted by the use the subject makes of them in
order to act on and for himsel It is a major failing in all of post
modern communications theory (Baudrillard, Virilio, etc.) that it
restricts itself to only the first system of signs while neglecting the
specificity of the process of "subjectivity production" and the
relation to the self. If the latter is the source of new forms of
domination, it can also be an opportunity for a radical break with
the relations of power and knowledge of security societieS: In this
second semiotic regime, signs and their functioning are one of the
conditions of the process of of subjectivity production.
Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of psychoanalysis can also help
us to understand how semiotic subjection machines function.
Psychoanalysis represents a process of disciplinary subjection;
because of its incitement to speak, it functions as an apparatus that
is able, on the one hand, to "pin" the subject-function on the body
of the individual and, on the other hand, to prevent singular state
ments from being formulated. Psychoanalysis emerged and
developed at the moment when disciplinary societies began to turn
into control societies. Thus, while the psychiatric hospital is a disci
plinary apparatus practicing its techniques on the bodies and mental
reality of the sick within a closed space, psychoanalysis is a security
apparatus exercising power through speech on the bodies and
mental reality of the "sick" within an open space.
Such as it is analyzed in Anti-Oedipus, psychoanalysis invented
strategies for the construction of the subject which were deployed
in two principal ways: by "discrediting" the singular speech of

the individual through interpretation and, once discredited, by
reconstructing it as a "civilized" subject's speech in accordance with
the behavioral model of subjects within the "family." Everything the
"patient" says is interpreted through a particular framework or a
small number of utterances (papa, mama, phallus, castration, or
signifier, the symbolic, or lack in the more deterritorialized Lacanian
version) meant to uncover the repressed meaning of singular speech.
Starting from the discrediting interpretation which relocates the
origin and the sense of the utterance in the familial triangle or in
the signifier, and by basing itself on the patient's enunciation,
psychoanalysis resocializes the subject by constructing him as an
individual who accepts, adapts to, and identifies with the dominant
model of individuation of capitalist society (the family) and its
psychic apparatuses (id, ego, superego).
What interests us in Deleuze and Guattari's work is the fact that
the generalization of this apparatus of subject production is not
guaranteed in completely developed security societies by psycho
analysis but rather by the "pastoral" communication and techniques of
the welfare state. The functions of control over and standardization
of enunciation and the functions of subjection assured by psycho
analysis (as described in Anti-Oedipus) are picked up, unified, and
generalized by mass communications as a material apparatus and by
linguistics and analytic philosophy as a theoretical apparatus (dealt
with in part in A Thousand Plateaus}. Psychoanalysis put the final
touches on a series of "technologies for the construction of the
subject" which in turn spread to the social sciences and today
constitute in a simplified and impoverished form the ways in which
the media functions.2 Focusing on television, we can sketch out a
broad outline of how these security apparatuses of subjection work,
apparatuses which act on and through speech by "shutting up" the

public and making it speak according to the rules of the common
space of communication.
Like psychoanalysis, television functions based on a small num
ber of already codified statements (its "grid") about the dominant
reality (in our example, this means the economic statements of the
market, competition, and employment/unemployment), which it
seeks to make the statements of individual subjects.
There is nothing natural about the subject-function in commu
nications and language. On the contrary, it must be constructed and
imposed. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the individuated sub
ject is neither a condition 9f language nor the cause of utterances.
In reality, the latter are not produced by us, as subjects, but by
something else entirely: "multiplicities, masses, and mobs, peoples
and tribes, collective arrangements; they cross through us, they are
within us, and they remain unknown to us."21 This multiplicity that
exceeds the individual makes us speak; and it is from this multiplicity
that we produce utterances. There is no subject, there are only
collective assemblages of enunciation that produce utterances.
" [T]he utterance [is] always collective even when it seems to be
emitted by a solitary singularity like that of the artist."22
The television machine extracts from these collective assem
blages, from the multiplicity of verbal and nonverbal semiotics that
traverse and constitute them, a subject of enunciation who must
mold himself to a subject of utterance, in other words, a subject
caught up in statements corresponding to television "reality," and
who must adapt to a fixed framework of prefabricated enunciations.
Television pushes us to speak as subjects of enunciation as ifwe were
the cause and the origin of our statements, whereas we are spoken by
the communications machine ofwhich, as subjects of utterances, we
are no longer anything more than one of the effects. 23

If, for example, you are interviewed on television (whether on a
literary program, a talk show, or a reality show), you are instituted
as a subject of enunciation and subject to a machine which takes
over 'your speech and remotely guides your singular expression
through a semiotics attaching you to the dominant utterances. AB in
psychoanalysis, television is able to pass off utterances that conform to
the dominant reality of capitalism as the utterances of individuals by
dint of interpretation (and discrediting) and subjection machines.
Television uses all the linguistic and non-linguistic, verbal and
nonverbal, constituents of the enunciation. First, you fall under the
control of a non-discursive machine that interprets, selects, and
standardizes your attitude, movements, and expressions before you
even start speaking. Television functions based on a small number
of ready-made utterances as well as on a selection and imposition of
nonverbal semiotics (a certain intonation, a certain length and
cadence of speech, certain behavior, a certain rhythm, certain
gestures, certain clothes, a certain color pattern in the design, "cos
tumes," a certain arrangement of the space in which you speak, a
certain framing of the image, etc.). As a subject of enunciation, you
are flt to a prefabricated audiovisual semiotics. Your voice, your
gestures, and your intonation conform more or less amenably to
codified apparatuses of expression.24 AB soon as you open your
mouth, you pass through the interpretations of the discursive
machine. The journalist is but one terminal which, with the help
of other terminals of the interpreting machine (the expert, the
specialist), determines the possible remaining gaps between your
enunciation, your subjectivation, your signification, and the
utterances, the subjectivation, the significations, expected of you.
Nothing unexpected ever happens on television, and if it does, even
something slightly out of place, it is immediately noticed-that is

how thoroughly everything is codified. At the end of the interview,
you are a subject of utterance, a subject caught in utterances in con
formity with televisual logic, an effect of the semiotics of the
interpretation machine, whose experience is that of a subject of
enunciation, the absolute cause and origin of what is said.
With regard to psychoanalysis, Deleuze speaks of the "crushing
of enunciation" by a preexisting code. This is not suffered negatively
as repression but rather positively as encouragement to speak up, as
a prompt to express oneself, such that the subject "has the impres
sion of talking [ . .] but he will never be able to get to what he really
.
"
has to say. Try as one might, the entire interpretive and subjectivation
machine "exists to suppress the conditions of real expression."25
The more you express yourself; the more you speak, the more you
become part of the interactivity of the communication machine,
the more you give up what it is you have to say because the com
municational apparatuses cut you off from your own collective
assemblages of enunciation and connect you to other collective
assemblages (television) which individualize you as a split subject, as
a double subject-both the cause and effect of utterances.
Psychoanalysis experiments with techniques for controlling and
producing subjectivity. By concentrating on the enunciation rather
than utterances, these techniques then migrate to other domains,
especially the media, management, the individual monitoring of the
unemployed and welfare recipients, and so on: "While, to achieve
their ends, religions act by direct suggestion, by the imprint of
standardized representations and statements, at least to begin with
psychoanalysis gives free reign to a certain individual expression
[ . . . ] . While religion, dare I say it, straitjackets subjectivity in the
open air, psychoanalysis gets rid of some of the ballast of statements
in order to concentrate its efforts on remodeling enunciation. [ . ] . .

[S] o-called 'free interpretation' is rapidly channeled by a pitiless
semiotic remote control."26
De Certeau comes to the same conclusions: the proliferation
of sttements, messages, and signs prevents the conditions for a
singular enunciation from emerging. The continuous drone, the
incessant circulation of words and signs from the common semioti
cally standardized world, "create an absence of speech." Public space,
saturated with signs, communications and discourse apparatuses,
makes it impossible for people to form an enunciation that might
be called their own.27 ln order to articulate a "real" enunciation that
re-singularizes a "shared semiotics" which has the capacity to create
new rifrs, "polemical" points of view with which we might express
ourselves, we must interrupt the circulation of the languages, signs,
and media semiotics meant for "everyone, but true for no one."
All the apparatuses of enunciation in our security states (sur
veys, marketing, elections, union and political representation, etc.)
are, on the one hand, more or less sophisticated variations of the
independent and responsible speech production of the "individuated
subject" ("human capital") and, on the other hand, refashionings of
the creative/destructive process of its "free speech." As a voter, you
are called on to express your opinion and to exercise your freedom
of choice as a subject of enunciation; however, at the same time, you
are spoken for as a subject of utterance, since your free expression is
limited to choosing between possibilities that have already been
codified by others, between alternatives ("right" and "left") that pre
vent you from exercising the power ofproblematization. Am I being
asked the right question? Does it concern me? Is it really important
to me? For a long time now voters have answered "no"; they abstain
or they vote to eliminate the least worst choice others have already
made. If a small gap remains between your enunciation and that
Conflict and Sign Systems / 1 65

which is expected of you, opinion polls are there to steer you in the
right direction. 28
With the proliferation of opinion polls, your voting decision
ends up fitting into prefabricated molds, not instantaneously (during
the election) but over time. In the same way, marketing and adver
tising provide daily training in the choice to make between
alternatives set and offered by the market and business. Elections,
marketing, and advertising mutually reflect and reinforce each
other.29 Like opinion polls, like marketing and union and political
representation, elections presuppose prior consensus and agreement
on problems and issues. Given this, it is understandable why the
communications machine might function as a huge collective psy
choanalysis. It translates what you say into another language, it
shifts the origin and the sense of your words and explains to you
your true utterances and actual desires (by giving them voice),
which businesses can then plug into.
Television perfectly exemplifies how security apparatuses of
power function in the way that Foucault describes, since it assures
the governmentality of souls through the production of "free
dom" (of speech and expression). Free speech is not a natural
given one needs only to respect and protect. It is a correlate of the
apparatus of power which must be produced and reproduced.
The art of governing has "the function of producing, breathing
life into, and increasing freedom" but through "additional control
and intervention."30 It is necessary, Foucault says, to "produce
freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations,
controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats."31
Security apparatuses at once produce and destroy freedom. The
freedom they produce is one of enunciations and expressions
codified and homogenized by the media. The freedom they

destroy is that of inventing, creating, experimenting with singular
forms of expression and speech.
On the rare occasions when activist groups have been invited to
televised debates, we see how the subjection machine works. The
"freedom of speech'' and expression exercised within such strictly
codified limits and conditions transforms into an injunction to
conform speech to the prefabricated models of communication, to
shape activists' statements to fit the template of statements and
forms of thought of the journalists and experts with whom they are
often faced.
For media to work, it needs individuals to accept, actively or
passively, their implicit presuppositions, their forms of enunciation,
and codes of expression. If this does not happen, as with an inter
mittent association member during a live interview on French
television, the interviewer immediately senses the threat of alterity
and, although usually calm and civilized with guests who accept the
implicit presuppositions of televisual enunciation, he goes stiff,
displaying a verbal aggressiveness and violence that betrays his fear
of a non-preprogrammed broadcast. Because what frighten the
members of the media are events they do not create themselves.
They must immediately translate everything that happens into their
own vocabulary. That is why, when confronted with a "real" event
like the intermittent movement, the media's first objective is to
isolate the person speaking from the connections that make up his
collective assemblage (assemblies, collective action, the Coordina
tion) and force a spokesperson, a representative, a leader, out of
him, someone who both speaks for the others and expresses himself
according to the media's codes, temporalities, and syntactical and
lexical constraints (he will then, according to journalists, be "under
stood" to the public) . The media is composed of apparatuses

conceived and constructed to be always "at home" in the "common
world" of democratic speech and expression, whatever happens and
wherever they appear. During one of the intermittent workers'
collective actions, for example-the occupation of a television news
program-intermittents demanded the "right to blunder" when
communicating, in other words, they refused the media codes
governing speech and expression and refused to be caught in the
apparatuses of subjection, to allow themselves to be cut off from
their own assemblage. In this way, they revealed the conditions in
which singular speech can be spoken.
The communications machine is thus a selection machine,
implicitly following the same rules as those of co-determination,
which sets limits on political and union representation and therefore
on legitimate speech. If one wants to have a spot between "legiti
mate" representatives and the mere man-on-the-street the media
normally welcomes in order to mask its flagrant lack of "reality," one
has to make a lot of noise or make oneself known through "unruly''
activity to be on the news. In any case, inevitably this will still not
be enough since the media can only communicate within the limits
of the "issues" it has defined in advance.
The political task before us is to discover, deploy, and give
consistency to collective logics, to the people who are in us and who
make us speak and thanks to whom we produce utterances.
This is what Deleuze and Guattari have in mind when they set
"a whole field of experimentation, of personal and group experi
mentation" against both psychoanalysis and traditional political
organizations. 32

5
"Scum"1 and the Critique of Performatives
We govern one another in conversation through a whole series

of tactics.
-Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits, vol. 4
The relationship established between replies in a dialogue-the

relationship of question-response, assertion-objection, a.ffirmation
agreement, offer-acceptance, order-execution-is impossible
between unities of language.
-Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
What is the relationship between social machines and discursive

machines? We are going to examine this relationship within the
specific context of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2005 French presidential
campaign, which unofficially began while he was still Interior
Minister. Our hypothesis is the following: discursive machines are
something other than language [la langue ou le langage] since they
imply a multiplicity of signifying and asignifying semiotics, tech
nologies, functions, and so on, that do not operate according to
performative logic but in a completely different register. They intervene

in the social as part of a strategy of governing conduct that functions
as the event-generating dynamic of an "action upon an action."
1 69
In order to account for the political function of language, both
the theories of certain feminists in the United States and post
operaist theories in Europe draw on analytic philosophy - and
especially on performatives in such a way that understanding
linguistic agency seems to me very difficult. Since the mid-1 990s
we have seen a return in force of analytic philosophy and Saussurean
linguistics at a time when few would have expected it given the post
structuralist critiques of the 1 960s and 70s and the political
critiques of the semiotics of power.
1. The ''.Absolute" Performative
The turn to performatives by post-operaist Italian theory (Paolo

Virno,2 Christian Marazzi,3 and to a lesser degree Negri/Hardt4) is
quite surprising given that it seems to have resulted from a misun
derstanding about the very definition of performatives. Thus its
avatars seek to radicalize performative theory by introducing the
category of "absolute performative" (Virno). Yet it retains only a
portion of J. L. Austin's definition,5 namely that the enunciation
accomplishes rather than describes an action. By saying "Court is
hereby in session," "I order you in the name of the people . . . " "I
promise you . . . ," one does not observe a situation or a state of affairs
but rather does what one says.
According to Austin's theory, the force of the performative is
that it entails a "social obligation" (in the case of a promise, it
engages the person who says it at the risk of "losing face"; in the case
of a question, the person to whom the question is addressed is sup
posed to respond at the risk of interrupting the conversation) . In
accomplishing the performative utterance, the speaker assigns him
self a role and assigns his listener a complementary role. The force

of the performative resides in the distribution of "rights" among
speakers. The performative determines obligations such that lan
guag functions as a kind of vast institution "incorporating an array
of conventional roles that correspond to the range of socially recog
nized speech acts."6
What is strongly emphasized is the "conventional" function of
language as a reproduction of social obligations, in other words, its
function of reproducing already instituted social relations.
This second and fundamental condition of the performative is
inexplicably abandoned in the post-operaist theory of language
such that the utterance "I speak," which is not a performative, is
transformed into an "absolute performative," a verbal form that,
according to Virno, characterizes "today's communication society
from top to bottom."
In fact, "I speak" cannot be a performative since the result of the
utterance is mere information from which no "obligation'' follows.
It institutes no "right," no convention, no role, no distribution of
powers. 7 Even if it accomplishes what it states, it is nevertheless not
a performative. "I speak'' is an utterance that communicates some
thing but it does not act on the "other." It does not create a new
situation for an interlocutor which would oblige him to account for
the fact that the utterance was addressed to him (by responding,
obeying, not obeying, respecting a promise, not respecting it, etc.).
If we stick to Austin's theory, I see almost no case in which "I
speak'' might be considered a performative.
The definition of "absolute performative," reduced to the
simple function of foregrounding the "event of language" without
institutfug an obligation (the fact that one speaks, that one inter
venes, that one establishes an intersubjective relation), totally
neutralizes the importance and implications of Austin's theory.
scum" and the Critique of Pertormatives I 1 71

Performative theory upended both the categories of linguistics
and Austin's theory itsel For one must remember that the theory
was criticized and surpassed by its very inventor. After having dis
tinguished the performative (what one does when one speaks) from
the constative (a description of a state of affairs), Austin abandoned
the opposition: all utterances are performative, since even consta
tives serve to accomplish a speech act.
After some hesitation, he argued against considering performa
tives a linguistic exception and introduced a new category, the
illocutionary act, which encompasses the performative as a particular
case. In this second version, all of our utterances (and not only
performatives) serve to accomplish a certain social act that insti
tutes an obligation.
Although linguists accepted the first version, they, like Ben
veniste, rejected the second. Because it puts the former radically in
question, linguistics has by and large failed to exploit its possibilities.
This is what we will attempt to do.
2. Emancipation Through the Performative
Judith Butler emphatically underscores what Virno neglects: the

assignment of roles and ranks to which the performative attaches
speakers.
In the United States, the "performative" is used by activists
fighting against pornography and racist "hate speech." Austin's
categories leave the musty halls of the university for the court
room. According to defenders of women's rights and of ethnic
minorities, pornography and hate speech are performative utterances
insofar as they are not merely the expression of a point of view or
an opinion (and as such protected by the First Amendment of the

US Constitution); they go beyond describing a situation. These
utterances act on listeners by constituting those to whom the
speech is addressed as dominated. The utterances do not simply
reflect a social relation of domination, they describe, establish, or
reestablish that power structure through the sole power of speech.
By assigning women and minorities specific social roles, the per
formative utterance is thus similar to an action that neutralizes the
agency of people to whom it is addressed and who, as such, might
be brought before a judge.
Judith Butler's politico-linguistic program of rethinking the
performative in order to appropriate the "political promise of
emancipation" it holds seems to me problematic.
We will develop an initial critique of this return to the perfor
mative and its supposed emancipatory promise by drawing on
Foucault's work. In his 1 982/ 1 983 lectures, published as The
Government of Self and Others, he took the performative as the
"counterexample" to the political rupture initiated by someone
rising in an assembly in order to "tell the truth'' [dire vrai]. The per
formative represents a "form of enunciation which is exactly the
opposite ofparrhesia."8
Parrhesia constitutes a rupture with the dominant significations,
an "irruptive event" that creates a "fracture" by creating both new
possibilities and a "field of dangers." The performative, on the other
hand, is always more or less strictly institutionalized such that its
"conditions" as well as its "effects" are "known in advance." In this
way, it is impossible to produce any kind of rupture in the assign
ment of roles and distribution of rights (to speak). The irruption of
true distourse "determines an open situation, or rather opens the
situation and makes possible effects which are, precisely, not
known." Inversely, the conditions and the effects of the performative
"Scum" and tl1e Critique of Performatives I 1 73

enunciation are "codified." "Parrhesia does not produce a codified
effect; it opens up an unspecified risk."9
Just as the performative codifies enunciations, utterances, -and
their effects, it also institutionalizes speakers and listeners, their
respective roles and ranks, and the public space of their acts. The
"subjects" that emerge here take no risks and do not engage them
selves "personally." They fit their speech and their subjectivities to
the established forms of linguistic conventions.
To accomplish a performative utterance, the "status of the sub
ject" is indispensable, yet if I baptize someone, the only thing required
in order for it to be performed is the "priest function," whether or
not I believe in God. What makes "Excuse me" a performative is
what I say. Whether I am sincere or not is of no importance.
In other words, the performative "ritual" in no way engages or
commits the subject, whereas truth-telling [dire vrai] establishes a
"pact of the speaking subject with himself" and a pact with the
listener. "He says that he really thinks this truth, and in this he
binds himself" as much to the content of the utterance as to the act
of enunciation itself, and he assumes all the risks and consequences
of doing so.10
The parrhesiastic enunciation not only produces effects on others
but firstly affects the enunciating subject, producing a transformation
of his condition (an existential transformation, according to
Guattari) . "I think it is this retroaction-such that the event of the
utterance affects the subject's mode of being [ . . . ] that characterizes
a type of facts of discourse which are completely different from
those dealt with by pragmatics."1 1 With the performative, there is
no invention or transformation of the subject possible.
Subjectivation is a power of affectation of the self by the self
which, as such, is not linguistic. It defines a self-positioning, a

self-existentialization (as Guattari would say), which, although
employing words and propositions of language, radically removes us
from the laws of linguistics and even those of pragmatics. Foucault
cy dear: "With parrhesia we see the appearance of a whole family
is ve
of completely different facts of discourse which are almost the
reverse [ . ] of what we call the pragmatics of discourse."12
. .
The ontological consequences of the relation to self, which

Butler completely neglects, are what allow Foucault to depart from
the logic of power as well as from the structuralism of language
(and even from his own work on "sex"). If one seeks a politics of
emancipation, it is here and not in the appropriation and reversal
of the performative that we will find it.
Former Interior Minister Sarkozy's definition of suburban
Parisian youth as "scum'' ("Have you had enough of this scum?
Well, I'm going to get rid of them for you!") seems to reveal the
wrongheadedness of positions invoking "performatives" in order
to explain the power of words. It also makes one rightly suspicious
of the capacity of the theory to account for the political "force"
of language.
What were the effects of the "hate speech'' then-Interior Minister
Sarkozy uttered before the television cameras? While the word
"scum'' did not neutralize French suburbanites' agency, it did acti
vate that agency on a scale unimaginable prior to the enunciation.
Instead of constituting the young residents of the projects as domi
nated, the enunciation mobilized them as rebellious, insubordinate,
based precisely on their refusal to accept the assignation "scum."
The force of the revolt did not depend on "another kind of perfor
mative'" or on its appropriation, as Butler maintains, but on an
existential affirmation (Guattari) first manifested through a suspen
sion of dominant meanings and social functions. It entailed a
"Scum" and ihe Critique of Performatives / 1 75

relation to the self (Foucault), in other words, an act that exceeds
the linguistic or pragmatic framework.
Similarly, it is difficult to understand why Butler considers per
formative Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white man.
There is nothing performative about it, or if there is, then we have
to change the meaning of the term. It is an act of resistance, of
self-positioning, of affirmation, showing itself in a gesture of
refusal without speech. The act precedes both thought and
speech; it constitutes the breaking point in dominant meanings
and the negation of the distribution of roles and social functions.
Subjective mutation is not primarily discursive, since it touches
the focal point of the non-discursive in subjectivity beyond which
there is no going back. It is starting from this existential dimension
that subjectivity emerges and takes on consistency through, only
secondarily, a multiplicity of semiotics which also includes lan
guage, myths, and narratives. But it is only starting from the
asignifying, unnamable, untellable dimension that there can be
meaning, language, and narrative.
Still, the theory of the performative represents an important
shift in linguistics. Contra Saussurean doctrine, we can no longer
admit the separation between language [langue] and speech (parole],
the former supposedly establishing meanings prior to any kind of
use and the latter restricted to communicating them according to
the speaker's intentions. We can no longer accept the definition of
language as a means of communication, as an exchange of information.
Instead of moving beyond the movement Austin inaugurated,
Virno and Butler, even if in different ways, close off the enunciation
from language, as if language [langue] could exist autonomously,
secrete meanings through syntactic, phonetic, or grammatical
structures, generate agency over others, and explain the force of

transformation of language [langage] and signs. They accredit the
initial theory of the performative which even Austin abandoned.
3. Bakhtin and the First Theory of Enunciation
Life can only be understood as an event

-Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Our second series of criticisms of the performative draws on

Guattari's and Bakhtin's work. Instead of starting from language
[langue] in an approach to the enunciation, one encumbered by
huge difficulties and obvious reservations, as if the enunciation
were, as Guattari says, language's "far-off suburb," these authors
follow a path exactly opposite the one taken by linguistics. The
pragmatics of the enunciation precedes phonology, syntactics, and
semantics. The enunciation, and in particular its non-discursive
component, represents for Guattari the "active core" of linguistic and
semiotic creativity. Whereas for Bakhtin an approach to the enun
ciation that is not exclusively linguistic is indeed possible, 13 Guattari
argues that, in order to think the production of subjectivity, a radical
split has to be made between the "production of meaning and sense"
and "existential production."
Turning to Bakhtin as a critic of the performative may seem
paradoxical, since the essential features of his theory of enunciation
were elaborated immediately after the Russian Revolution and
therefore well before the invention of performatives. Paradoxical as
well because in his theory the performative quite simply has no
place; as in Austin's later work, "every speech act," and not only
performatives, "is a social act" which engages speakers, creates
obligations, and assigns roles.
"Scum" and the Critique of Perfomiatives I 1 77

Despite the homology of the terms they use, there are remarkable
differences between Austin's theory and Bakhtin's. First of all, the
latter establishes a difference in kind between language and gram
mar on the one hand and enunciation on the other, between the
word and proposition of language and the utterance, between the
(linguistic) meaning and the sense (of the enunciation).
He finds a new "sphere of being," the "dialogic," unknown to
linguistics and the philosophy of language and not limited to mere
replies between speakers in a dialogue. A dialogic relation can also
be established between texts, scientific theories, and works of art
separated in space and time.
In the dialogic sphere, relations are relations of sense
expressed through language and signs yet remain irreducible to
either. The dialogic relation is a specific relation that is part of
neither a logical nor a linguistic system as in the structuralism of
Saussure or Lacan; nor is it part of a psychological system,
because it cannot be detached from the individual subjective
consciousness of the speaker. The relation presupposes a language
(and a logic, a semiotics, or psychology) but does not exist with
in the system of language (or in a logical or semantic system or
psychology).
The force, expressivity, and agency of language [langage] do not
derive from langue, from its grammatical structure; they do not
emerge from differences or from a combinatory of signifiers but
from the dialogic relations whose language constitutes a necessary
but not sufficient element.
In order for words, propositions, and grammatical rules to form
a complete enunciation, a "speech act," a "supplementary element" is
needed (an ethico-political element and, more specifically and more
radically, an existential element, an "existentialfunction," as Guattari
1 78 / Signs and Machines

would say) that "remains inaccessible to every linguistic categorization
or determination, whatever it may be."
Separated from the enunciation (from the "speech act"), words,
grammatical form, and proposition are "technical signs," "material,"
simple "possibilities" in the service of an only potential meaning.
The individuation, singularization, and actualization of this
potentiality of language which allows words and propositions to be
transformed into a complete enunciation, into a "whole," are realized
by pre-personal affective forces and post-personal ethico-political social
forces external to language but internal to the enunciation.
It is impossible to isolate a category like performatives because
every speech act is addressed to someone or something, responds to
someone or something, entails an "obligation," and presupposes a
.
"response" (or a "responsive attltu
de") . The "response" ("one can
agree or disagree with it, execute it, evaluate it, and so on") is a
constitutive element of the utterance. For the enunciation, "nothing
is more terrible than a lack of response."14
Butler seeks to oppose the performative command with the
possibility for unforeseeable and uncodifled response and reac
tion. 15 This can only come up short since the problem of the
"response," that is, the possibility of acting differently when
addressed concerns all enunciations and not solely performatives
(which is the same conclusion Austin comes to while neglecting
some of its consequences). On the other hand, the command can
not be countered by a different type of performative act but only
through a dialogic relation that exceeds all linguistic categories,
whether performative or not.
Eve'n if the response's syntax is inscribed in the "structures" of
language, it is not produced by language but rather by the dialogic
relation with the other. The "end" of the utterance, its realization
"Scum" and the Critique of Periorrnatives I 1 79

(accomplishment), which makes it a request, an order, and so forth,
is given by the dialogic relation and not by linguistic forms, whether
or not performative.
The first and foremost criterion for the finalization of the utterance
is the possibility of responding to it or, more precisely and broadly,
of assuming a responsive attitude toward it (for example, executing
an order) . This criterion is met by a short everyday question, for
example, "What time is it?" (one may respond to it), an everyday
request that one may or may not fulfill, a scientific statement with
which one may agree or disagree (partially or completely), or a
novel, which can be evaluated as a whole. 16
There is - indeed a grammatical "end" and "finalization" of the

propositions of language that make them intelligible. But grammatical
intelligibility is a necessary but not sufficient condition of the
verbal exchange. An intelligible, effectuated linguistic proposition
within the linguistic order "cannot evoke a responsive reaction."17
Only the speech act and not linguistic propositions has the
property of accomplishing an enunciation, for it is through address
and response that it expresses values, points ofview, emotions, affects,
sympathies, and antipathies with regard to the situation, to the other, to
utterances and, in particular, to utterances referring to the ''-true, the
just, and the beautiful."
The response is always a self-positioning, a self-affirmation, and
it is only through this positioning that one can respond, speak, and
express onesel
Every speech act is an ethico-political act because it aims for
"agreement" or "disagreement." Every speech act is a "question" asked
of others, oneself, and the world. Bakhtin's theory of enunciation

implicates the world as a problem, an event, as something that
always remains to be accomplished. This is unlike Austin's theory of
the performative and illocutionary act, which considers the world as
a set of conventions, as an institution, as a distribution of powers,
rights, and duties to be reproduced. By its nature, every speech act
and not only the performative acts on others by restructuring the
possibilities for action.18 The speech act is an event which creates
indetermination by opening possibilities that "subjectively'' engage
speakers in a singular relation occurring "here and now." Every
enunciation is an historic event even if it is "infinitely small."19
Unlike structuralism, which attempts to confine the enuncia
tion within the combinatory rules of language, and unlike Austinian
speech act theory, the enunciation represents a "micro-politics"
and/or "micro-physics" of relations between speakers. The enuncia
tion is not produced according to the linguistic model via a speaker's
active speech process and a listener's passive processes of perception
and understanding. On the contrary, the latter takes full part in
accomplishing the act. As in Foucault's late theory of power rela
tions, the other is "active" and "free."20 In the event of enunciation,
the other establishes its dynamics and orients its actualization.
Enunciation is a co-production of a polemical and/or cooperative
co-actualization of linguistic virtualities, worlds of values, and the
existential territories in which they occur.
Like the Foucauldian strategic relations of power, the dialogic
relations of enunciation open a field of possible responses/reactions
that can only he determined, can only he actualized, in and through
the "doing" of enunciation.
In this way, it is easy to see that the nature of the enunciation
is not performative but dialogic, "strategic," and event-generating.
Bakhtin, like Foucault, has an "agonistic" and "polemical" view of
"Scum and the Critique of Perionnatives I 1 81

the enunciation; the latter resembles a "battle"2 1 between speakers
or, better still, it functions as a "strategy" for governing the behaviors
of others manifested through a whole series of techniques ansl
linguistic and semiotic tactics.
The parallel Foucault establishes between the course of a con
versation and the governmental techniques we noted at the start are
perfectly expressed in Bakhtin's description of the dynamics of the
enunciation, which have nothing to do with the institutionalization
or distribution of roles implied by the performative.
When constructing my utterance, I try actively to determine this

response. Moreover, I try to act in accordance with the response I
anticipate, so this anticipated response, in turn, exerts an active
influence on my utterance (I parry objections that I foresee, I
make all kinds of provisos, and so forth) . When speaking I always
take into account the apperceptive background of the addressee's
perception of my speech: the extent to which he is familiar with
the situation, whether he has special knowledge of the given
cultural area of communication, his views and convictions, his
prejudices (from my viewpoint), his sympathies and antipathies
because all this will determine his active responsive understanding
of my utterance. 22
4. The Micro-Politics ofVoice and Gesture
We already find in the Bakhtin Circle's first articles published in the

1 930s this micro-political (polemical and/or governmental) relation
of enunciation. Where linguistics and Lacanian structuralism see
differential relations between signs or between signifiers, Bakhtin,
like visionaries, idiots, or madmen, "hears voices and their dialogic

relationship" and the self-affirmation, the existential territories
(Guattari), and the values maintaining them.
In an important article in which Bakhtin is considered at length,
Guattari observes that, according to the Russian philosopher's
theory, in each enunciation there are both "pre-individual voices,"
which express "volitive-emotional" evaluations ("sensible affects," in
Guattari's terminology), and "social voices," ethico-political voices
which express the beautiful, the just, and the true-universes of
"values" in Guattari's vocabulary. These voices extend beyond articu
lated language. Voice/intonation, not yet caught in the "phonetic
abstraction'' of language, is always produced "on the border of the
verbal and the nonverbal, the said and the unsaid" and "it endows
everything linguistically stable with living historical momentum and
uniqueness."23 It is through the voice that the address to the other is
made. And this address is first affective and ethico-political before it
is linguistic. "Intonation makes it sound as if the world surrounding
the speaker were still full of animate forces-it threatens and rails
against or adores and cherishes inanimate objects and phenomena."24
In voices we flnd the animation of nature, of the cosmos
(animism) , Guattari describes. Contrary to what linguistics and
the philosophy oflanguage claim, pre-signifying corporeal semiotics
(gestures, bodily attitudes, movements, facial expressions, etc.)
here play a decisive role, since it is through the body that values
first emerge. "Intonation and gesture have a close interrelation
ship" that originates in the body, that furnishes "the originary raw
materials for this expression of values."25 The notion of gesture
must be understood in a "broad sense including miming as facial
gesticulation."26
Gesture, like intonation, "always has latent within itself the
germ of attack or defense, of threat or caress." This is the reason why
"Scum" ancl the Critique of Performatives I 1 83

every enunciation always makes the speaker play the "role of ally or
witness," "enemies, friends."27
The voice works with, uses, and organize5 linguistic and semiogc
elements not only by choosing and combining, but also by operating
a singularization of language which can be defined as strategic,
since it distributes and "names" the speakers according to a proto
political model structuring the space of speech according to power
relations between speakers.
The voice expresses itself, feels, and vibrates within a "sympa
thetic atmosphere," one of "complicity," "confrontation," or
"discomfort" vis-a-vis the addressee.
In each voice, there is a twofold address. The voice is addressed
not only to the addressee but also to "the object of enunciation,"
which acts as the third element in enunciation such that the
addressee is called on to be both "judge and witness" and, therefore,
"ally" or "enemy."
Even the poet, Bakhtin says, must "continually work with his
listener's sympathy or antipathy, agreement or disagreement."28
Only when the voice penetrates and appropriates words and
propositions do these latter lose their linguistic potential and
transform into an expression that appeals to friends and wards off
enemies, that threatens or Batters, repels or pleases, opening to the
risk and indetermination of enunciation.
5. Discursive Strategies
It is now easy to understand why in the case of Sarkozy's utterance

("You are scum-") we are in no way dealing with a performative but
with a "strategic" utilization of enunciation within the given power
relations the former minister was attempting to modify to his

advantage. "Hate speech" ought not to be understood, as Americans
do, as a force accomplishing what it says but rather as an "action
upon possible actions," an action opened to the unpredictability, to
the indeterminacy, of the response-reaction of the other (of others) .
The enunciation "You are scum" takes place within a given
sociopolitical situation in order to modify that situation. By
appealing to "friends" and designating "enemies," the enunciation
threatens the latter and reassures and reinforces the former. It seeks
out allies, and in order to build new alliances it conjures up as ene
mies the immigrant, suburban youth, the "lazy," the "unemployed,"
"thugs," etc. It looks to reconfigure political space by calling on
others as "judges and witnesses," obligating them to position them
selves, to express a point of view, to make a value judgment, which
is always at once affective and ethico-political. Finally, it seeks to
construct a public space in which fear of, rather than friendship
with the "other" prevails.
The space-time opened by the enunciation is not that of the
performative; it is the space-time of indetermination, unpredictability,
the d.ialogic event, the "battle discourse," which seeks to hold
sway over others, over their behavior, by restructuring their field
of action. The effects are not predetermined as with performatives,
where the speaker, the utterance, and the listener are already
instituted.
Here the speaker and the "audiences" he addresses on television
(enunciation and machinic speech, we should emphasize) are open
to the becoming of the event. Would the insulting enunciation
allow Sarkozy to win the presidential election through a strategy
meant to weaken the other candidates of his own or the opposing
camps? Would he win votes among the xenophobic electorate of the
extreme right? Would he succeed in forcing the "Left" to respond by
"Scum" and the Critique of Performatives I 1 85

accepting the political debate over security? He had no idea himself
{even if in the reactionary and fear-ridden Europe in which we live
the strategy had and has been proven to work) .
In any case, the "response-reaction" of the "scum" highlights the
dialogic nature of every speech act.
As we know, every enunciation implies understanding, a
"response-reaction," "active responsiveness," "taking a position," a
"point of view," an "evaluative response." And this one provoked
them all beyond what even their author could have hoped.
Revolt occurs first of all as an asignifying existential crystalliza
tion, as the emergence of focal points of suhjectivation that take on
consistency through a multiplicity of materials of expression. The
crystallization of the response, the singularization of "understanding,"
takes place not only linguistically-far &om it. The materials of
expression are not solely linguistic; the vectors of subjectivation, the
focal points of enunciation, are multiple. They are not limited to
language and to linguistic interlocution, as Ranciere would have
it.29 Revolt is in itself the sign of the capacity to interrupt, suspend,
the dominant significations and to create "gestures," acts, signs, and
perhaps even words according to modalities which may not be those
of the speaker. There is an ontological difference between "asking"
and "responding," as Bakhtin reminds us; for the two belong to
absolutely irreducibly unique space-time blocs, two existential
territories, two very different ways of speaking.
Well before Sarkozy's remark, the youth &om the projects had
inverted, just as Butler would hope, the meaning of the term "scum"
with which power addressed them. Their way of speaking was
defined by the same people as "speaking caillera," suburban slang
for racaille ("scum") . They did not have to wait for the supposed
performative of Sarkozy's words to "twist" the insult.

The political space opened by the enunciation changed before
our very eyes. Several "strategies" confronted each other: on the one
hand, the affirmation of "city youths" as political subjects, on the
other, the presidential candidacy. We saw the effects of the enuncia
tion unfold in real time, following the rhythms of the riots, the
positions of political forces, experts, unions, and intellectuals-the
whole thing orchestrated by media machines.
The results of the enunciation could not be anticipated in the way
they might be when a judge declares, "I find you guilty in the name
of law''; the enunciation continues to modify the social and political
body even now that the riots have been suppressed and the media is
no longer training its cameras and mikes on the suburbs. No one
knows what the "focal points of asignifying existential affirmation"
alit during the November nights of 2005 might one day produce.
6. The Reproducible and the Non-Reproducible
But let us return to the perforrnative and to the reappraisal Butler,

by way of Derrida, wishes to accomplish. The simple repetition
of the sign (not of its semantics but of its existence as mark) is
supposed to be enough to break with the distribution of roles, func
tions, and rights instituted by the performative. In order for it to
repeat itself, the sign-mark must detach from the context. The
autonomy of the sign-mark with respect to the context in which it
is made (which represents the core of Derrida's polemic with Searle)
is supposed to determine a "point of rupture" with "dominant
meanings." Her position, which equals in its formality and abstrac
tion the differential logic of language (Saussure) and of the signifier
(Lacau), gives us a misleading picture of how rupture and repetition
function in and through language. 3o
scum" and the Critique of Performatives / 1 87

In every enunciation, the "point of rupture" never follows from
the autonomy or independence of the mark but rather from the sin
gular speech act, from subjective affirmation, and from _the
ethico-politicalpositioning that founds and supports it.31
We can distinguish in the enunciation between what is repro
ducible (all the elements of language, the mark as well as the syntax:
and the semantic content) and what is not (the subjective act of
enunciation).
These two dimensions-reproducible and non-reproducible
can be easily discerned both in the address and in the response to
which the enunciation gives rise. Guattari draws attention to a text
from 1 924 in which Bakhtin distinguishes five linguistic (repro
ducible) and extralinguistic (non-reproducible) constituents of the
enunciation:
(1) the phonic side of the word, the musical constituent proper; (2)
the referential meaning of the word (with all its nuances and varia
tions); (3) the constituent of verbal connections (all the relations
and interrelations that are purely verbal); (4) the intonational (on
the psychological plane-the emotional-volitional) constituent of
the word, the axiological directedness of the word that expresses the
diversity of the speaker's axiological relations-ethico-political and
more specifically social values (pre-individual voices and post
personal social voices); (5) the feeling of verbal activeness, the
feeling of the active generation of signifying sound (included here
are all motor elements-articulation, gesture, facial expressions,
etc.-and the whole inner direcredness of my personality).32
The first three constituents of enunciation, constituting the linguistic

and semiotic elements, represent its "reproducible," reiteratable parts,

whereas the remauung two are non-reproducible elements, the
absolutely singular elements created for the first time through and in
the act of enunciation. The fourth constituent is the specifically
dialogic one since it expresses both affective evaluation ("the emo
tional-volitional") and social evaluation (the axiological).
The last constituent, the feeling of the creative activity of
speech, expresses the relation to the self, the ontological force
affirmed through existential positioning. It constitutes the non
discursive element that generates not only the physical reality of the
word but also "meaning and evaluation." Through the utterance,
the speaker occupies an active position (he realizes an existential
self-positioning, as Guattari would say) with respect to the world
and to others: "that is, a feeling of moving and assuming a position
as a whole human being-of a movement into which both the
organism and the meaning-directed activity are drawn, because
both the flesh and the spirit of the word are generated together in
their concrete unity."33
If we now move from the "polyvocity" and heterogeneity of the
semiotic linguistic and non-linguistic elements of the address to
those of "understanding," we encounter the same multiplicity of
reproducible and non-reproducible features. In understanding,
which is an active "reaction-response," we find a series of elements
realized through the extralinguistic forces of the dialogic relation:
(1) Psychophysiologically perceiving a physical sign (word, color,

spatial form). (2) Recognizing it (as familiar or unfamiliar),
understanding its (general) reproducible signification in language.
(3) Understanding its significance in the given context (immediate
and more remote). (4) Active-dialogic understanding (disagree
ment/agreement). Inclusion in the dialogic context. The evaluative

aspect of understanding and the degree of its depth and uni
versality. 34
The final, properly dialogic element is the most important because

it singularizes, gives "existential" consistency to, the reaction
response. From this, one selects, orders, and finalizes the
enunciation.
Linguistic understanding is not the same thing as dialogic
understanding. The latter always entails taking a position, making a
judgment, an action-response within dialogic relations. Responses
express a "sympathy, an antipathy," an "agreement, sympathy,
objection, execution, and so forth."35 Every response "refutes,
affirms, supplements, and relies on''36 preceding utterances.
At the end of his introduction to John Searle's Speech Acts, Ducrot
asks, "Do the elements oflanguage, besides their polemical value, have
independent conceptual (and semantic) content? Is there in language
a nucleus of meaning irreducible to the activity of enunciation?"37 Is
there an expressiveness to language independent of enunciation?
Bakhtin gave his answer in the 1 920s, as Peirce did38 before him: the
enunciation logically and practically precedes langue.
7. Language That "Precedes and Exceeds the Subject"
If we start from the enunciation rather than from language, if we

start from the speech act rather than from the autonomy, the "exte
riority," and "supremacy" of the signifier (or, in the contemporary
version, of performative "force"), if we start from what is repro
ducible and what is not reproducible in the enunciation, we can put
the matter differently of what, in language, "precedes and exceeds
the subject."39 Butler can only conceive language as a transcendence

that precedes and exceeds us because we become a subject only by
entering into the normativity of language and following its rules.
With Bakhtin, there are indeed linguistic elements (phonetic,
gratical, syntactic, etc.) and chains of utterances that precede
the subjectivation and individuation process. Yet, contrary to Butler,
they cannot exceed that process because the realization of the enun
ciation is not accomplished through its conformity with the rules of
grammar {Wittgenstein) or the institutional distribution of perfor
mative roles, or for that matter through a chain of signifiers (Lacan),
but rather through event-generating dynamics. What "precedes" us is
always and necessarily activated in the enunciation and is each time
"transfigured in what is created" by the speech act, which establishes
a dialogic relation in which the subjective forces of existential
affirmation alone accomplish (complete) the utterance.
An utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of some

thing already existing outside it that is given and final. It always
creates something that never existed before, something absolutely
new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation
to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth). But
something created is always created out of something given
(language, an observed phenomenon of reality, an experienced
feeling, the speaking subject himself, something finalized in his
world view, and so forth). What is given is completely trans
formed in what is created.40
Despite Butler's preoccupations, we can conceive a "non-essentialist"

thought without positing the preexistence of language as a "radical
and originary dependency." The subject, his means of expression,
the objective of his discourse, the relationship with others and their
"Scum" and the Critique of Performatives I 1 9 1

utterances, and the utterances that circulate in public space occur
and transform in and through the event of enunciation. There is no
originary subjectivity because the subject and the relationships
prevailing in the subjectivation process are always yet to be realized,
actualized, and constructed. The subject is not an effect oflanguage;
language is not the cause of the subject. For the subject is not
constituted through a preexistent linguistic structure but through a
self-positioning, a self-affirmation, matched with words, others, and
the world.
An object is ready-made, the linguistic means for its depiction are

ready-made, the artist himself is ready-made, and his world view
is ready-made. And here with ready-made means, in light of a
ready-made world view, the ready-made poet reflects a ready
made object. But in fact the object is created in the process of
creativity; as are the poet himself, his world view, and his means
of expression.41
With Bakhtin, we can push our critique still further. In reality, what
precedes the subject is not language, grammar, and their rules, but
what Bakhtin calls "speech genres." We can only learn language by
way of "chains of concrete utterances" whose use, in differentiated
verbal spheres, develops relatively stable types. We learn to speak, we
"become a subject" not through grammar and syntax, but through
immersion in these genres of which the first are those of colloquial
discourse.
Speech genres operate at the intersection oflanguage "structure"
(what is reproducible) and then each time singular enunciation
(what is non-reproducible). Through these language enters life and
life enters language.

The "chain" of speech genres does not act as a structure or a
molar constraint in the way that "chains of signifiers" do in Lacan.
They function as an assemblage composed of a multiplicity of ways
of speaking, responding, disagreeing, and cooperating. The "chain
of utterances" is open, fractal, constantly changing, and it provides
more or less freedom to the "intention" of the speaker. Although
just as normative and prescriptive as language, speech genres are
much more "changeable, flexible, and plastic."42 Speakers discover
in speech genres the possibility of forming their expression and their
"intention'' (address, response, position, etc.) in more or less creative,
more or less stereotypical, ways.
The difference between speech genres has firstly to do with the
degree of "freedom'' or "constraint," of standardization or creation, of
reproduction or novelty, they encourage or thwart in relationships
between speakers. Bakhtin classifies what analytic philosophy
regards as performative among the most standardized, the most stereo
typical speech genres, for they entail the reproduction of political
relations and of existing linguistic conventions.
[I]n certain spheres of everyday life (questions that are purely

factual and similarly factual responses to them, requests, orders,
and so forth), in certain business circles, in the sphere of military
and industrial commands and orders, we encounter verbal spheres
in which speech genres are maximally standard by nature and
where the creative aspect is almost completely lacking.43
If class relations introduce a major difference between the address

and the response of speakers, they are still and always relations
marked by conventions (speakers' hierarchical positions, social
standing, rank, wealth, fame, etc.). For enunciation and creative

expression, a space-time is needed other than that of conventions,
hierarchy, and subordination, one where sympathy, trust, and
mutual understanding prevail, where the other is perceived and felt
co be a friend and of the same status.
In addition to these standard genres, of course, freer and more

creative genres of oral speech communication have existed and
still exist: genres of salon conversations about everyday, social,
aesthetic, and other subjects, genres of table conversation, inti
mate conversations among friends, intimate conversations within
the family, and so on. [ . ] The majority of these genres are
. .
subject to free creative reformulation (like artistic genres, and

some, perhaps, to a greater degree).44
Creativity is not a product of language but an ethico-political

assemblage of which language is only one constituent part. "Free
dom" requires that a discourse be infused with deep trust, with
sympathy, sensitivity, and the benevolence of one's responsive
understanding, in other words, with a politics other than that of
standardization.
The colloquial and intimate genres are linguistic apparatuses
that encourage creativity because the speaker and addressee "per
ceive their addressees in exactly the same way: more or less outside
the framework of the social hierarchy and social conventions,
'without rank,' as it were. [ . ] In familiar speech, since speech con
. .
straints and conventions have fallen away, one can take a special
unofficial, volitional approach to reality. [ . . ] Intimate speech is
.
imbued with a deep confidence in the addressee, in his sympathy."45

Creativity or the simple reproduction of the enunciation
depends on the presence or absence of relations of hierarchy or

subordination, sympathy, or "discomfort,'' the affects of friendship and
enmity, trust or distrust. Standardization or creative differentiation
depends on the micro- and macro-politics of the enunciation and
not on the structures of language or performatives.
8. Transcendence and Guilt in Language
In the new "critical" versions of performative theory (Zizek, Butler),

the speaker still seems burdened by the transcendence, error, and
guilt of the religious man. He finds himself in a relation of "radical
and orginary dependency." The latter no longer exists with regard to
the divinity but to "a language whose historicity exceeds in all
directions the history of the speaking subject"46 such that our
power to act depends "paradoxically'' on the power of language (on
its exteriority, on its autonomy, etc.).
Given that the subject engages in and through language and
that the rules of language transcend us, subordination to language
and, more generally, to the laws of "power and knowledge" in place
is the condition of possibility for speaking. Butler unjustifiably and
inexplicably attributes the point of view to Foucault, when in fact it
is a verbatim reiteration of Lacan, for whom the "freedom" of the
subject "becomes bound up with the development of his servirude."47
As in Lacan, the "negative" (castration, repression, lack, loss, etc.)
does not manifest the contingency of power relations but rather a
universal necessity of the human condition, a condition of our very
existence, which one must assume and surpass dialectically. 48
According to Bakhtin, however, the speaker does not experience
language as "servitude" because he is immersed in a living and hetero
geneous world different from that described by Butler and Zizek.
In the utterances in which he is immersed, he hears the voices of
"Scum and the Critique of Perforrnatives I 1 95

normativity and injunction but also the voices of creation and free
dom. He hears the heterogeneity of points of view, judgments,
and values; and in this way, he hears the struggles, registers the
sympathy and antipathy, agreement and disagreement, and trust
and distrust they express.
For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an

abstract syscem of normative forms bur rather a concrete heteroglot
conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession,
a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person,
a generation, an age group, the day and the hour.49
The speaker does not find himself thrown into one space-time "satu
rated" with power one can escape solely through the dialectic
pirouettes of the work of the negative. Instead, he exists in a multi
plicity ofpower relatiom, in a great variety of space-time blocs in which
the voices and harmonics of standardized speech genres as well as
those of the "intimate and familiar" genres resound, in which rela
tionships among them and with utterances are conducive to creativity.
The development of space-time blocs of one or the other kind does
not depend on language (Saussure), grammar {Wittgenstein), or
performatives (Butler and Zizek), but on the micro- and macro
politics of language (the centrifugal and centripetal forces-of
which linguistics and structuralism are obviously a part-that shape
language) and on micro- and macro-politics tout court.
9. Variants and Invariants
The chain of utterances configured as a fractal multiplicity of

non-totalizable speech genres within a structure is an evolving

reality. In the reality of verbal exchange, syntactic forms and speech
genres do not have the stability of grammars and dictionaries. These
are onstandy varying, always in the process of being made and
unmade.
[S]ome forms are undergoing gramrnaticalization while others are

undergoing degramrnaticalization. It is precisely these ambiguous,
borderline forms that are of the greatest interest to the linguist:
this is precisely where the developmental tendencies of a language
may be discerned.50
Hence the impossibility of confining these relationships to a linguistic

structure (Saussure's and Lacan's structuralism, Wittgenstein's
"grammar," or Austin's illocutionary acts) . The organic link between
language, speech genres, and speech acts "cannot become lexical,
grammatically stable, and fixed in identical and reproducible forms,
i.e., cannot itself become a sign or a constant element of a sign,
cannot become grammaticalized."51
Linguistics appears obsessed by the desire to reduce the indeter
minacy, risk, and instability created by the event-capacity of
enunciation to a fixed grammatical or syntactic structure, to norms of
enunciation, to the invariants of the official language. Bakhtin's
theory, on the other hand, calls for a "science of singularity'' whose
object is the organic link between the reproducible and the non
reproducible, between linguistic and non-linguistic elements,
between the given and the created, an organic link which is "attained
in the concrete historical act of the utterance, exists only for the given
utterance, and only under the given conditions of its realization."52
Before Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Bakhtin turned from
constants to the consideration ofvariants and variations. 53 Foucault

remarks that one must "reveal functions of discourse which are not
simply those of expression (a relation of forces already constituted
and stabilized) or reproduction (a preexisting social system)."54 The
decision to privilege variants or invariants is not only indicative of a
linguistic or stylistic affinity but above all a political move, since
language and grammar are primarily State policies conveyed by
centripetal, centralizing forces that format language politically.
10. Still More on "Scum"
The strategic or governmental nature of Sarkozy's enunciation can

now be refined using Bakhtin's categories. A concrete and singular
utterance is a "link in the chain of speech communication," to which
it is connected not only through contemporaneous utterances but
also through past utterances and those to come.
There is not only the synchronic dimension of language, of
signiflers, but also and especially the diachronic, temporal dimen
sion of enunciation and speech genres. An utterance must above all
be considered a response to previous utterances insofar as it refutes,
affirms, supplements, and relies on them, assumes that they are
known and, in one way or another, "counts on them." At the same
time, it is constructed in anticipation of a response to come, one
which the enunciation necessarily presupposes (a response that can
take place now or in the far-off future) .
Sarkozy's statement on immigration is not the first but rather
belongs to a chain of utterances with a long history. The target of
his words (the immigrant, the foreigner, the delinquent) is not new
either. "The object, as it were, has already been articulated, disputed,
elucidated, and evaluated in various ways. Various viewpoints,
world views, and trends cross, converge, and diverge in it."55

The chain in which Sarkozy's statement is a part belongs to a
linguistic "heritage" shared by the left and the right. It responds to,
relies on, and complements the French Communist Party's utterances
(the slogan "Let's make French!" proclaimed as French-made bull
dozers raze immigrant homes in Paris's "red" suburbs); those of the
National Front ("The French first!"); as well as those of the Socialist
Party ("We cannot be a home for the world's poor" or the "suburbs"
"feral children"). But we can also find more remote echoes and
resonances in the voices of the bourgeoisie defining the nine
teenth-century proletariat in the same way it does the suburban
youth of today: "scum."
The future president's insult was not only connected to racist
statements of the past but also to those to come. "Scum" is not a
performative injunction addressed to the young immigrants of the
suburban projects, but a speech act aiming to shape a situation
and the subjectivity ofthe "French'' who must subsequently position
themselves with respect to the utterance.
But from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while
talcing into account possible responsive reactions, for whose
sake, in essence, it is actually created. As we know, the role of the
others for whom the utterance is constructed is extremely great.
We have already said that the role of these others, for whom my
thought becomes actual thought for the first time (and thus also
for my own self as well) is not that of passive listeners, but of
active participants in speech communication. From the very
beginning, the speaker expects a response from them, an active
responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed,
as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response.56

The historicity of language does not include a past and a future
that "exceed in all directions the history of the speaking subject"
(Butler). Like grammatical rules, genres of discourse, and so on,
these temporalities constitute only the conditions of the event of
enunciation. In the here and now of the event, the past, present, and
future coexist (the present of the past, the present of the present,
and the present of the future, according to Augustine's formulation).
Temporalities are put back into play and "transfigured" in the event
of enunciation. History and its temporalities, language and its tem
poralities, are but the conditions the event reconfigures in order to
create something new.
The former president's enunciation revealed at once a continuity
and break with the utterances that preceded it. "Scum" is the repe
tition ("refrain" [ritournelle]) of the power that holds these disparate
(linguistic and extralinguistic) elements together through an exis
tential {reactionary) affirmation that sees in the nation, in the fear
of and the contempt for the foreigner, in work, authority, and order,
his universe of values and "existential territories."
It is therefore impossible to discover significations, the power
of transformation and subjectivation, simply from the semantic,
phonetic, or grammatical structures of language.
To accomplish an enunciation always means asserting power
over extralinguistic constituents that are at once somatic, ethological,
mythographic, institutional, economic, political, and aesthetic.
200 I Signs and lvlachines

6
The Discursive and the Existential

in the Production of Subjectivity
But why do they have to continuously return to this irrational,
religious, etc., stuff? Why? In a given state of subjectivity, there
is no other way [ . . . ] . If in order to exist we absolutely have to
have recourse to this kind of thing, it isn't surprising that people
rush headlong into it, even if they know that rationally it doesn't
hold water.
There's no getting rid of molar strata. Schizoanalysis cannot
replace organizations.
-Felix Guattari, "Machine abstraite et champ non-discursif,"

Seminar of March 12, 1 985
1. The Existential as Machinism
The collective forms of today's political mobilization, whether

urban riots or "union" struggles, whether peaceful or violent, are all
motivated by the same issue: on the one hand, the refusal of repre
sentation and, on the other, the experimentation with and invention
of forms 'of organization and expression in rupture with the modern
political tradition founded on the delegation of power to represen
tatives of the people and classes.
201
Representative democracy has progressively transformed into a
mechanism of the State; political parties and trade unions have
become, through a process spanning the entire twentieth century, an
integral part of State institutions. The crisis affecting the West since
2007 has subsequently transformed political democracy and social
democracy. The former is completely subordinate to the logic of
neoliberalism to the extent that Marx's remark, which has too often
been ridiculed, that "the State is but a committee for managing the
common affairs of the bourgeoisie," has again become relevant. One
needs only change "bourgeoisie" to "creditors" and you have the func
tion of political representation in a nutshell. Even a weak political
democracy like ours is still too democratic for neoliberal politicians.
Social democracy, on the other hand, does no more than represent
and defend the social strata of full-time employees, and in particular
retirees, without, however, really managing to succeed.
The protests that have exploded more or less everywhere on
the planet reveal that within representative democracy "there are
no possible alternatives." In this regard, Guattari opens more than
one avenue for reflection, uniting a critique of representative poli
tics and a critique of the representational functions of language.
Signifying semiotics (language, writing) claim to "represent" all
other supposedly pre-signifying modes of expression (corporeal,
gestural, iconic) as well as asignifying ones (money, scientific
equations, etc.). The latter supposedly lack something only lan
guage can provide in the same way that citizens and the social
lack something that only political representation can provide.
In reality, linguistic "representation," just like political represen
tation, constitutes a seizure ofpower, overcoding, hierarchizing, and
subordinating other semiotics and other modes of expression. The
two forms of "representation" in the systems of signs and political

institutions go hand in hand and any kind of political break with
them demands that both one and the other are overcome.
at are the conditions, besides those of analytic philosophy,
structuralism, and Lacanianism, in which speech and signs operate
in the "constitution of the self' in a way that bypasses both political
and linguistic representation?
Examining the relationship between the discursive and the exis
tential, Guattari redefines processes of subjectivation both on the
macro- and micro-political levels. Paradoxically, by making the
"existential," which is neither linguistic nor semiotic, an essential
condition of enunciation, he carries out a major shift which neu
tralizes the power of representation.
While Bakhtin disillusions us with regard to the performative
thanks to a conception of the enunciation that eludes every kind of
structural or combinatory formalization of language, Guattari radi
calizes the break with linguistics and pragmatics by examining what
Bakhtin failed to examine in sufficient depth, namely, the relation
ship between the linguistic and the extralinguistic. The latter cannot
be reduced to intersubjectivity (Bakhtin) or to social or economic
infrastructures. Very late in his work, Guattari called this extra
linguistic dimension existential.
According to him, we are living a paradox and a challenge to
thought which linguistics is incapable of identifying or responding to:
We are thrown into discursive systems and, at the same time, we

are dealing with focal points of existential affirmation that are not
discursive [ . ] . When a love machine or fear machine is activated,
. .
it k not due to the effect of discursive, cognitive, or deductive

statements. It happens immediately. And this machine gradually
develops different means of expression.1
The Discursive and the Existential in t11e Production of Subjectivity I 203

Linguistic competence is not at the basis of the enunciation but
rather an apprehension and existential appropriation of self and
world, and it is from this existential/affective appropriation that
language, discourse, knowledge, narrative, artworks, and so forth,
become possible.
Speech thus has a dual function: to signify, communicate, and
declare "politically," but also and especially "to produce assemblages
of enunciation able to capture, territorialize, and deploy the singu
larities of a focal point of existential subjectivation and give
consistency and durability to them."
On the one hand, the crystallization of subjectivation
processes "is not the exclusive privilege of language; all the other
semiotic components, all the other procedures of natural and
machinic encoding play a part as well."2 On the other hand, sub
jective mutation is not primarily discursive; to become discursive,
it must reach the "focal point of non-discursivity at the heart of
subjectivity [ . . . ] . In order to make stories, describe the world and
one's life, one must start from this indefinable point, the breaking
point of sense, the point of absolute non-narrative, the point of
absolute non-discursivity."3 Along with the signifying and deno
tative functions Guattari introduces the "existential function,"
which, although non-discursive, acts as the creative force of the
enunciation.
Following the linguistic turn and Lacan's structural-linguistic
psychoanalysis, Butler reduces subjectivity to the result of signifying
operations. Guattari determines instead to map the various com
ponents of subjectivation in their fundamental heterogeneity by
carrying out "the radical divorce between the production of sense,
the production of signification, pragmatic production, and finally
the production of subjectivity."4

The same semiotic links can work to "produce discourse" and to
"produce existence,"5 "the same statements that signify something in
dream are taken in their subjective assemblage, giving them, rather
than a meaning, existential significance."6 They constimte the
speaker as a subjective entity.
Unlike discursive pragmatics, existential pragmatics has to
do with the production of the self, with the "ontological singula
rities of the self-appropriation of the self, the singularities of
self-consciousness."7
Existence is a matter of self-positioning, self-affectation. Guattari's
path runs parallel to Foucault's, who, practically at the same time,
comes to the same conclusions. There is a difference in kind
between the parrhesiastic enunciation that expresses the affirmation
of the "self" and the discursivity of pragmatic linguistics, be it that
of the pragmatics of the performative. In both cases, we use words,
propositions, we make use of language, but the underlying logic is
radically heterogeneous.
The constimtion of the self is able to break with dominant
meanings; it does not primarily bring signifiers, discourse, and
meaning into play, but rather a power of self-affectation, a relation
ship of forces with itsel In Guattari this self-affirmation takes on a
particular hue, since the "for self'' (pour soi] and the "for others"
(pour !es autres], the focal points of enunciation, the vectors of
subjectivation, are not exclusively human. Existence follows a
"machinic logic," "in any case, something that doesn't in any way
function according to the logic of discursive ensembles, but which
I've just recently been calling the logic of existentialization."8
The words and propositions of language function according to
the logic of sense by referring from one sense reference to another
or according to a diagrammatic logic that bypasses representation,
The Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity I 205

consciousness, and the "I" of the subject. Going beyond Bakhtin,
for whom the word is almost everything in human life, Guattari
introduces non-human semiotics and assemblages capable of initiating
and organizing existentialization, action: "Speech remains an
essential medium, but it's not the only one; everything which
short-circuits chains of signification, postures, facial traits, spatial
dispositions, rhythms, asignifying semiotic productions (relating,
for example, to monetary exchange), machinic sign productions,
can be implicated in this type of analytical assemblage. Speech
itself-and I could never overemphasize this--only intervenes here
inasmuch as it acts as a support for existential refrains."9
In the same way that material flows and social, economic, etc.,
flows, semiotic flows exist within actualized spatiotemporal coordi
nates, whereas the "relation to the sel'' "existential territories," and
"universes of value" constitute the incorporeal, affective, intensive
dimension of the assemblage which is not governed by ordinary
space and time coordinates.
The existential eludes physical determination and causality and
constitutes a non-energetic, non-informational "machinism." The
transformations that take place in existence are incorporeal and,
unlike the transformations studied by science, do not involve
energetic and informational processes.
2. Disjunction and Conjunction ofthe Discursive and Existential
The relation to the self represents an incorporeal existential focal

point, an autopoietic machine whose consistency, durability, and
development depends, secondarily, on the multiplicity of actualized
elements that it traverses and reconfigu,res (the discursive, the cogni
tive, but also institutions, the social, the economic sphere, etc.).

The "subjective matter" of "existentialization'' uses discursivity
in order to "appear to itself, to manifest itself to itself as a body
without organs, as a pseudo-unity, but one which is in no way a
totalization like that of the logic of ensembles." 1 0
By establishing a difference in kind between the discursive (and
the conceptual) and the existential, Guattari conceives not only the
disjunction but also the conjunction of these two-disparate logics:
"semiotic logic" and "ontological pragmatics." 1 1
Let us quickly enumerate the "dissymmetries" between these
two logics. First, the discursive and the existential function based
on heterogeneous "referents." The semiotic or discursive dimen
sion "is part of a system of extrinsic references, in other words, it
always implies that every element is discursive relative to another
element which constitutes its referent," in such a way that its
"truth, its essence,'' is external to its existence. According to exis
tential logic, on the other hand, "the singular element is itself its
own reference and generates its own reference, it secretes its world
of reference." 1 2 Existential pragmatics is "self-referential, self
productive of reference." 1 3 Existence "produces itself within its
own movement." 1 4
Second, discursive logic is linear; there is one element, then
another. It develops according to the temporality indicated by the
"arrow of time." Existential affirmation is circular; it continually
comes back to itself, it intensifies and gives consistency to ex,istence
or it disappears because incapable of crossing certain thresholds.
Starting from this circular return, from the agglomeration, from the
consolidation of this focal point of existentialization and this
subjective emergence, existential affirmation transversalizes the
actualized dimensions (economic, political, social, linguistic) by
configu.ring them differently.

The third dissymmetry: repetmon in discursive logic always
produces discourse, combinations of discourse, whereas in existen
tial logic repetition ("ritournelle") produces changes in subjective
states which mold subjectivity. To say that existence is self-productive
of reference means that "it is repetition relative to itself that is the
reference."15 The refrain {"empty speech"), unlike Derrida's and
Butler's formal repetition of the sign-mark, has an existential
function: it gives consistency to the relation to the sel In refrain
repetition, it is not the semantic content that is important but the
repetition itselfwhich produces a change in subjective state. Christie
or Leninist refrains16 are not. defined in terms of sense but by the
change in subjectivity they effect, the consistency, the crossing of
the threshold, the agglomeration, and the transversality of subjec
tivity they make possible and engender. Christie or Leninist refrains
initiate "a kind of universe, a framework, a stage, which corre
sponds to a production of subjectivity at the level of the
collective." 17 Existential refrains may have a semantic content and
constitute systems of expression, but they also function as a mode
constitutive of another kind of universe that brings with it a "surplus
value of possibles."
A fourth difference. Discursive ensembles articulate distinctive
oppositions {speaker/listener, content/ expression, subject/ object,
etc.) and personological oppositions ("I"/"you''), unfolding within
extensive spatiotemporal coordinates of representation. Existential
ensembles, on the other hand, follow a logic of intensities and
affects established prior to the distinction of identities, persons, and
functions. Affects, while non-localizable with regard to both their
origin and their destination (fear or joy affect the speaker and the
listener and make up transitional subjectivities18), can be precisely
located based on the threshold of consistency they determine.

Existential pragmatics cannot easily be circumscribed by the logic
of discursive ensembles, since content and expression are reversible
(there is no background against which expression can be isolated,
"an ything can be content and anything expression''); the agents are
not subjects and objects, but "subjectivities and objectivities," mutant
entities-half-object, half-subject-which have neither inside nor
outside, but generate interiority and exteriority. "They are becomings
understood as nuclei of differentiation."19 The distinctive features of
existential ensembles are not the subject and object, the "I" and the
"you," but the threshold-crossings, the gradients of intensities.
Discursive logic implies exchange, whereas in ontological
pragmatics existence is not exchangeable. "Existence is attached to
its topos, totally; no form that would be a form of existence can ever
be prized away. You are either there or you're not [ . . . ] and there is
no existential negativity. Existence alone is itself every existent. And
then, if existence is not, if nothing can be said _about it, it cannot be
called non-existent."20
Ontological or existential pragmatics is processual, irreversible,
singular, and event-generating, whereas discursive logic is reversible,
structural, ahistorical, and universal. The two logics are thus dis
symmetrical functions of subjectivity. It remains to be seen how the
conjunction between these two very different series comes about.
3. The Aesthetic Paradigm
The non-discursive does not denote the powerlessness of the ineffa

ble, of the unsayable or irrational; it is the power of the virtual, the
incorporeal, intensities, and affects that constitute so many focal
points of proto-enunciations. The non-discursive is not formless
matter waiting for differentiation, disciplinarization, or signifying

or symbolic organization from language and "the Law" (both
Lacanian). There is nothing mysterious about the non-discursive as
there is in Wittgenstein. On the contrary, it is traversed by very rich
semiotic and expressive dynamics, affects that function as existential
territories, "emerging selves," focal points of human and non
human mutant subjectivations and proto-enunciation, that make
up different self-producing machines.
How, then, must we articulate the relationship between the
discursive and the machinic existential, the actual and the virtual,
the possible and the real? A "scientific," "cognitive," or "bi-univocal"
relationship cannot be established between these two levels because
a radical asymmetry exists between the "discursive" and the "exis
tential." The relationship can only be approached by what Guattari
calls an "aesthetic paradigm."
The subjectivation process is not the effect of economic, sexual,
linguistic, or social infrastructures (which would mean it has a
referent external to itself) . Instead, self-positioning, self-affectation,
and self-referentiality-as openings to processuality, as the creation
of possibles, as the imperus to becoming and mutation-are origi
nary. But these autopoietic focal points take on consistency only by
transversalizing, repositioning, and reconfiguring all the domains
considered to be "structural" (the economic, political, social, linguistic,
sexual, scientific, etc.) .
Subjective self-references "are obviously not sustainable as such,
since they have no external referent, come under no extrinsic
reference [ . ] . They cannot be maintained by themselves, they can
. .
only be maintained through a reinitiation of discursivity."21 The

enunciation of the relation to the self and the existential territories
that support them always depends on a detournement of narrative
whose primary function is not to produce rational, cognitive, or

scientific explanations, but to generate complex refrains ("mythico
conceptual, phantasmatic, religious, novelistic") which give consistency
to the emergence of new existential territories.
This does not mean a return to the irrational nor to the age of
myth; it is a matter of breaking with the scientific paradigm in
which the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Althusser
believed. Guattari turns to the aesthetic experience, not as produc
tive of the work of art, but as a pragmatics of the relationship
between the discursive and the existential, the actual and the virtual,
the possible and the real.
The paradox which aesthetic experience constantly returns us to
is that these affects, as a mode of existential apprehension, are
given all at once, regardless, or besides the fact that indicative
traits and descriptive refrains are necessary for catalyzing their

existence in fields of representation.22
The approach to existential territories is always realized by way of a

certain discursive or semiotic localization, with the caveat that the
latter is in no way scientific, objectivist, or rationalist. There is no
other way to access existence but through self-existentialization.
Knowledge of existence requires what Guattari, following Vico, calls
a "topical art," an art of cartographies.
The self-relation to the self, self-affectation, and self-positioning
draw on the signs, myths, narratives, and conceptualizations that,
rather than acting as a translation (which is in any case impossible)
of the existential into the discursive, serve as a cartography for
localization and access to processes of subjectivation and to exis
tential territories.
The Discursive and tile Existential in tile Production of Subjectivity I 21 1

Existence can be localized, mapped, and perhaps it fundamentally
involves, for its promotion, localization, and production, some
thing that is thoroughly antagonistic to the discursive process of
objectivist procedures.23
Before bearing or transmitting messages, before having a discursive

function, signifying semiotics act as existential "refrains." This does
not mean a depreciation of language, of the concept or conceptual
abstraction-far from it. The more abstract the cartography, the
more diverse the possibilities for articulating the discursive and the
non-discursive become; the .more arbitrary the cartography, the
more propitious the ground for their articulation.
According to Guattari, there are two types of cartographies.
There are "concrete cartographies directly productive of what I will
call existentialization, which generate a subjective territory at the
same time as the cartography is deployed [i.e., the existential car
tography of a person, group, or even a nation]; and then along with
these there are speculative cartographies which do not produce
territories, which are second-level cartographies, whose purpose is
to think, organize, and articulate the relation between these two
radically heterogeneous levels."24 Hence the fundamental impor
tance of theological, political, and philosophical debates.
The theological arguments at the dawn of Christianity or the
debates among Bolsheviks around 1 905 did not serve to establish
true statements but rather cartographies capable of opening up
possibilities for articulating the existential and the discursive, for
inventing refrains capable of seizing subjectivity, of making it pass
thresholds, of initiating a process.
The Marxist or Freudian theoretical discourses which claim
scientific bases did not receive their "social validation'' inasmuch as

they crystallized, gave consistency and transversality to the emerging,
mutant "focal points of subjectivation'' of capitalism.
Like Marx, Freud did not found a new science (Althusser) but
rather instruments for "mythico-conceptual"25 localization which
allowed, in the case of Marx, to create a "stage" (human history as
the history of the class struggle) for mythico-conceptual performers
(the proletariat as the subject destined to abolish waged labor and
social classes) capable of realizing and serniotizing the singularity of
subjectivity during the first industrial revolution. But always starting
from an indefinable point, an unrepresentable asignifying point,
which alone was supposed to enable the creation of subjectivation
mechanisms, not in order to "tell a story;" but so that history could
be made. Within this framework, stories, concepts, and "myths" do
not have a communicational, intersubjective, or cognitive function,
they have an "aesthetic/existential" one.
The relationship is paradoxical ("it is not related, but it is not
without relation"), since it is only through a certain use of discursive
categories that one has access to existential effects and mutations.
Here we find the source of Tertullian's paradox: it's because it is
impossible for the son to be dead, buried, and resuscitated, that
these facts must be held to be certain. It's because in many respects
Freudian theory is mythical that it can trigger refrains of mutant
subjectivation. 26
Speculative cartographies function not only as passive localizers, but

also as active initiators of subjectivation processes: "It is only
because I think of God that I have the courage to march off to war
and get myself killed [ . . . ] . And these can be completely abstract
operators (God is relatively concrete!). [ . . . ] [They] open a pragmatic
Tl1e Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity / 2 1 3

path to action, to existentialization, to an existential universe. That
is, these are not elementary empiricist entities."27
It is at this point that Guattari returns to the Christie, Leninist,
and Debussyst refrains as "thingamajigs" [trues] ("semiotic acts" in
the same way we say "speech acts"), which initiate subjectivation
processes, bring us into other universes of reference, and encourage
action. The discursive as such is not sufficient to grasp subjectivity,
to engage it, or to spur it into action. In order for it to do so,
discourses, signs, and concepts must function as access points to new
worlds, as the ''diagrammatic initiators" ofaction.
The sphere of action plays a central role in schizoanalysis.
The act can help us understand the relationship between the dis
cursive and the existential because its expression, which precedes
representation, and, being "itself its own expression," functions
as a "kind of cogito." A kind of cogito insofar as the act secretes
its own reference, insofar as it is impossible to isolate a form from
the act, insofar as it constitutes an emergent focal point from
which processuality is triggered, one beyond which there is no
going back.
For schizoanalysis, the act does not occur ex nihilo. It is not a
dialectical passage between "everything and nothing, following
binary logic," but a passage between heterogeneous dimensions.
There is no act in itself, but instead "degrees of consistency in the
existence of the act, existential thresholds relative to the act."
The conditions of the act are the actualized ensembles and
virtual ensembles of the assemblage from which the act derives.
Actualized ensembles constitute "the dimension of that which
connects the act to behavioral stratifications, structures, systems,
and segmentarities of every kind." With actualized ensembles, "the
act always appears as the prolongation of something already present

[d'un dija la] , of a certain representation of something already
present, and within a teleological perspective of a certain project,
itself represented as well." And yet, in the course of analysis, even
if "everything is interpreted, everything is clear. . . nothing
changes, nothing follows from this representation."28
Another dimension is needed in order for the act to occur, a
dimension of the act that escapes representation, a "diagrammatic
dimension," a machinic dimension. To act never means becoming
conscious, to be conscious of, or to possess the representation29 of
something.30 With existence and the act, "we no longer contem
plate" as we do in representational or significational logic, "we are in
a pragmatic relation; we articulate or aggregate it. It is the fact of
acting, the fact that signaletic systems involve material processes,
social, economic, and subjective mutations."31
The choice and the act refer neither to the subject's freedom nor
to the dialectics of necessity and chance, since both are machinisms.
For Guattari, the "existential" is machinic and the machinic is in no
way synonymous with mechanical determinism. On the contrary,
the machinism of the act means "producing modes of organization,
quantification, which open up a multivalent future to the process
a range of choices-the possibility of heterogeneous connections,
beyond already encoded, already possible, anticipated connections."32
It is machinism and not man that secretes options, matters of
choice, and possibles. It is therefore always necessary to bear in
mind that the act is neither anthropomorphic nor representative,
which does not, however, mean that one is freed of all responsibility.
Responsibility has other objects.
"When the orchid 'chooses' the wasp in order to, in a way, co-opt
p
it into its re roduction process, the wasp becomes a part of the
The Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity I 21 5

orchid's world. But this does not at all happen in a mode of
representation. It goes without saying that there is no m:emory
or representational record in the niind of the orchid. There is no
orchid brain! And yet, at the level of the orchid, a diagrammatic
expression makes it such that something of the wasp belongs to
the orchid. But what is that something? It cannot be located
within spatio-temporal coordinates; it doesn't involve a quantity
of movement. It is an incorporeal. The wasp-orchid marriage
develops, then an incorporeal which is a certain machinic choice
[ . . . ] . There was 'n' possibility before this machinic choice, but
from the moment the choice was made, progressive development
follows from there. 33
The choice and the act both depend on machinism and on a certain
kind of consistency of assemblages. Guattari often cites Lenin's
example in order to account for the relationship between existential
(revolutionary) affirmation and the consistency of collective, social,
and political assemblages. The act is causa sui et non ex nihilo
because in a singular situation there are thresholds, "actance
crystals" (a certain political situation, a certain stage in the organi
zation of the party, a certain phase of subjectivation of the working
class, etc.), which, while they are not the cause of the act, deter
mine the consistency of "optional matter" [matiere a option]. In
schizoanalysis there is no determinism because the act occurs only
when there is a surplus value of possibilities, when there is a "possi
bility of playing a completely new tune, when there are relative
fields of potential creativity established."34 Potentialities and possibles
that must be created.

4. The Current Crisis
The essence of the "current crisis" lies in the incapacity of capitalist

forces to articulate35 the discursive and existential dimensions, in
the impossibility of assembling ensembles of actualized economic,
social, and technological flows and the virtual and incorporeal
dimension of subjectivity production, existential territories, and
universes of value. If the production of subjectivity is not part of a
social field, a "product," a politics, a language, and so forth, we are
faced, as is the case today, with a pathology of subjectivity (racist,
xenophobic, individualist, confined to one's own interests, etc.) .
The watchwords concerning employment, full-employment, wages,
labor, the defense of the welfare state, and so on, which ought to be
connected to subjectivity, do not lead to subjectivation processes,
for they do not open onto new worlds, do not constitute optional
matter for modern-day subjectivity.
The political problem lies in the articulation, the concatenation,
of "processes converging to make technical, social, and economic
machines and subjectivation processes work. If there is not this
quadruple convergence, it doesn't work."36 Subjectivation must
occur within a system of flows that allow one to be "within material
effects," those of economic, social, linguistic, production, "which at
the same time have to give you the production of subjectivity."
Neoliberal capitalism (and what remains of the workers' movement}
has been unable to articulate the relationship between economic,
social, and technological flows and the changes and becomings
of subjectivity emergent in modern-day capitalism. Nor has it
succeeded in articulating discursive meaning (economic, social,
institutional) and existential meaning, because under current
conditions, as much for the subjective figure of the entrepreneur as
The Discursive and the Existential in tl1e Production of Subjectivity I 2 1 7

for the wage-earner, "there's no mythical consistency, and nothing
makes you want to leave on the Crusades or start another Octobr
Revolution!"37
The articulation between heterogeneous levels does not happen
spontaneously, it must be constructed, invented, worked on. The
articulation is singular but not necessary; nor is it a work of chance.
We are always living a paradoxical situation. The mutations of
subjectivity are sudden, occurring at "infinite speeds," says Guattari.
What happens is given "straightaway, then, secondly, discursively;
one says to oneself: Isn't it boring here? Isn't it nerve-racking? Isn't
the ambiance great? This firs given constitutes a disposition or a
situation which is that I'm here, in the room, and the enunciation
takes on consistency."38
What arises in these condensations, in these agglomerations,
in these kinds of "enunciative clumps," is not on the order of
knowledge. Existential crystallization makes it such that there is "a
certain disposition between the way in which one arranges signs,
sees plastic forms, feels time: it's organized like that prior to any
other construction." These points of crystallization, condensation,
and agglomeration are sufficient in themselves. They subsequently
require "aesthetic" and "ethico-political" completion. ''.Aesthetic
because there is an obviousness to the enunciation when there is
a relationship of love or hate. That is how Spinoza puts it: we're
never wrong, as I always say, even a dog immediately knows
what's going on; he doesn't speak but clearly sees that we are
about to hit or pet him." At the same time, "there is an ethico
political dimension because this matter is not only aesthetic, but
is also wrapped up in transversal relationships with other completely
heterogeneous levels,"39 whether political, social, economic, artistic,
and so on.
2 1 8 I Signs and Macl1ines

Work on these emergences is carried out according to a
methodology of the "aesthetic paradigm," of the topical art of
cartographies. Just as the artist must not wait for whatever kind of
insphation is going to come, political action must construct and
invent tools and procedures of experimentation, research, and
intervention aimed first of all at the production of subjectivity
rather than at the economic, the social, or the linguistic.
The relationship between the discursive and the non-discursive,
between the conceptual and the existential, instead of leading to
silence ("What can't be said, mustn't be said"), must be worked on,
conceptualized, semiotized, staged, told, and so forth, beginning
with the unrepresentable. Rather than siding with Badiou's retrospec
tive fidelity (fidelity to the event once the event has taken place), one
must intervene in the emergence of focal points of proto-enunciation
and proto-subjectivation.
Emerging crystallizations, condensations, and agglomerations
reach their aesthetic and ethical completion at both the micro
political level ("Work on a point of subjectivation that is not
discursive, a point of subjectivation that is melancholic, chaotic, or
psychotic") and at the macro-political level (a point of revolutionary,
reactionary, fascist, group, etc., subjectivation).
As existential functions, asignifying crystallizations are
"wrapped up in meanings and denotations like in the dough of a
Turkish delight." To work on means liberating them from the layers
imprisoning them and putting them " in a position to proliferate
[ . . . ], that is, to establish connections, associative networks of pro
duction, passages to other registers."40
"Languages" and signifying semiotics make up neither the con
ditions of production (cognitive capitalism) nor the conditions of
politics (verification of equality a la Ranciere) . Like those of a
The Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity I 21 9

potential politics, the conditions of production arise instead from
the production of subjectivity and its articulation with the instini
tional, the economic, the social, the linguistic, and so on.
The great merit of Guattari's work lies in its problematizing the
relationship between the discursive and the non-discursive, exploring
the modalities of articulation of the existential with economic, social,
and political flows. It highlights the weaknesses of contemporary,
supposedly critical or revolutionary, theories. On the one hand, we
have, with Badiou or Ranciere, subjectivation that has no need to be
articulated with social, economic, or cultural flows since it stands
all by itself Politics is considered independent, autonomous, with
respect to what Ranciere and Badiou call economics, simply because
the view they have of economics and of capitalism in general is a
caricature of the one proffered by economists themselves. Capitalism's
force does not lie in the objectivism of "the laws of the market" but in
the capacity to articulate economics (and communication, con
sumption, the welfare state, etc.) with the production of subjectivity
in various ways. As we have argued extensively, what Badiou and
Ranciere call economics implies and exploits subjectivity through
social subjections and machinic enslavements.
To say, with Badiou and Ranciere, that political subjectivation
cannot derive from Capital is obviously completely different from
examining their paradoxical interdependence. In the first case, you
have the illusion of a "pure" politics, since subjectivation, left adrift,
never attains the necessary consistency to exist. In the second, you
open up sites for experimentation and construction since subjecti
vation must, if it is to exist, take on consistency, retraverse and
reconfigure the social, the political, the economic, and so on.41
Cognitive capitalist theories also fail to articulate the produc
tion of subjectivity and the heterogeneity of the discursive, the

economic, the social, and so on, because everything is steered back
to the actualized flows of "knowledge," to the linguistic, cognitive,
and representational dimension, to the preverbal, pre-cognitive, and
non:..reflexive dimension. Knowledge is supposed to fulfill the
functions-as multiple as they are implausible-of the creation
of possibilities, aesthetic creation, and the production of subjec
tivity that have to do instead with the existential machinic.
The inventor of the new definition of capitalism shows unbri
dled faith in knowledge: "The cognitive experience is always
a-small or large-process of world-making," of creating possibles,
says Enzo Rullani. The "cognitive experience" also develops "world
views, aesthetic codes" which, as they spread, "change people's values."
"Knowledge" is not only at the basis of economic and aesthetic
values, but also those of subjectivity production. Through cognitive
experience, "we open to the possibility that it can change our per
ception of the world and ourselves, our actual identity."42 He, like
his disciples, blithely confuses the production of subjectivity with
the production of knowledge.
Knowledge, information, and languages, as such, have no ability
to create possibilities, to multiply optional matter. Knowledge like
information and semiotic flows always function in a single direc
tion: "They always discursivize." On the one hand, this means that
they always remain on the same plane, never reaching the existential
territories where the mutation of subjectivity takes place.
On the other hand, so-called cognitive capitalism has made
concrete the concept of "anti-production,'' because it has saturated
the public sphere with ignorance, commonplaces, and subjective
impoverishment without precedent.
Anti-production is no longer limited, as in disciplinary societies,
to the exclusive prerogatives of the State (army, police, etc.). In
The Discursive and t11e Existential in tl1e Production of Subjectivity I 221

modern-day capitalism, anti-production is everywhere pervasive
and no more so than in "cognitive production." It "introduces a lack
where there is always too much," that is, it carries out a veritable
destruction of the knowledge, cultures, and understanding that are
not beholden to capitalist logic. The cognitive divestments that the
"knowledge society" has enacted across the board in education,
research, culture, art, and elsewhere, represent operations of power
that require privatization, competition, hierarchization, profitability,
and company spirit. They are part of an "anti-production" program,
that is, a program for the homogenization and standardization of
knowledge, understanding, and cultures.
Anti-production "doubles the capital and the flow of knowledge
with a capital and an equivalent flux of stupidity [ . . . ] . Not only lack
amid overabundance, but stupidity in the midst of knowledge and
science."43 Cognitive capitalism endows subjectivity not with know
ledge but with stupidity, even when it is qualified (BA, MBA, PhD,
etc.), even when it takes pride in the artistic, the cultural, and so on.44
"Cognitive" divestments ensure both economic impoverishment
(precarity, underemployment, miserable wages for the new "cogni
tive" proletariat) and conformism with the business culture in
knowledge, art, politics, and communication.
It is less a matter of cognitive or cultural capitalism, the
knowledge society, and so on, than of the power and knowledge
relations that seek to mold the subjectivity of the population on
the whole such that it is capable of adapting and submitting to the
techniques, modes of labor organization, consumption, commu
nication, and urban and life environments governed by profitability
and "stupidity."
The creation and production of the new are not made possible
through knowledge, information, or communication, but through

an existential mutation, a transformation, which involves the
non-discursive focal points of subjectivity, of these existential territories,
of these modes of subjectivation. That cognitive capitalist theory is
unable to explain its own objects of study (innovation, the creation of
something new, new knowledge) is synthetically demonstrated by the
tautology advanced by one of its theorists, who defines this economy
as "knowledge production through knowledge."
"Out of the mere processing of linguistic, cognitive, economic,
etc., flows new subjectivity cannot emerge," nor new knowledge,
nor any kind of innovation.
Even scientific and knowledge production is shifted from a
scientistic or "cognitivist" paradigm to an aesthetic paradigm, in
other words, science and knowledge are beholden to an act of
subjectivation in Bakhtin's sense in a text Guattari cites: "'from
within the world of cognition, no conflict is possible, for in that
world one cannot meet with anything axiologically different in
kind. Not science, but a scientist can enter into conflict, and do so,
moreover, not cathedra, but as an aesthetic subiectum for whom
ex
cognition is thepeiformed act ofcognition."45

Only a rupture with the mode of subjectivation can secrete an
existential crystallization productive of new references, and new
self-positionings, which, in their turn, open the possibility for
constructing new languages, new knowledge, new aesthetic prac
tices, and new forms of life. To break with the dominant
significations and the established forms of life, we must pass
through points of nonsense, through the asignifying and non
discursive which in politics manifest themselves in the strike, revolt,
or riot. The latter suspend time for a brief moment and create other
possibilities from which, if they take on consistency, other subjecti
vations and existential crystallizations might proliferate.

In th.is alternative logic I'm superimposing on the discursive, the
same elements of semiotic discursivity are taken in the opposite
sense and, at that point, it's insofar as they produce-not discur
sivities compared among themselves-but insofar as they produce
existence, sensible territories and universes. According to this
logic, the constellations that emerge conserve the same elements,
but in one case you have semiotic productions and in the other
subjective productions.46
This cartography of the production of subjectivity, which breaks

radically with analytic philosophy, with Lacanianism, linguistics, and
a certain type of Marxism, profoundly changes the perspective from
which to conceive a politics commensurate with the current crisis.

7
Enunciation and Politics
A Paral lel Reading of Democracy:

Foucault and Ranciere
Revolutionary discourse plays the role of parrhesiastic discourse
when it takes the form of a critique of existing society.
-Michel Foucault, The Courage ofthe Truth
The refusal to delegate to political parties and unions representation

of that which divides society (property, wealth, power, and so on) as
well as to the State representation of that which is common (citizen
ship, community) originates in a new conception of political action
that came out of the "revolution" of May '68. The struggle for "an
other life" and "an other world," the fight for political transformation
and the transformation of the sel must go beyond both political
representation and linguistic representation in favor of new forms
of organization particularly attentive not only to the utterances
produced but also and in particular to their modes of production.
Foucault's last lectures resonate with Guattari's aesthetic para
digm, with his understanding of politics as invention and
experimentation, as well as with one of his fundamental conditions
for this; the overcoming of the semiotics of subjective rupture. As a
force for self-positioning and self-affirmation, the "existential
function," while non-linguistic, constitutes an essential element in
225
every-and especially political-enunciation. At the core of this
new and original point of view bearing on non-representative
"democracy," one finds the relationship between the existential and
enunciation, between self-affirmation and political speech.
1. Two Equalities
In an interview given to a center-left revue, Jacques Ranciere argues

that Foucault was never interested in political subjectivation "not at
the theoretical level in any case. He was concerned with power."1
This is a somewhat hasty and offhand judgment since political
subjectivation represents the fulfillment of Foucault's work. Indeed,
we are faced with two radically different conceptions of political
subjectivation. Contrary to Ranciere, for whom ethics neutralizes
politics, Foucauldian political subjectivation is indissociable from
ethos-poiesis (the formation of ethos, the relation to the self). The
necessity to conjoin the transformation of institutions, laws, and the
transformation of the self, others, and existence represents, for
Foucault, the problem ofpolitics itself in its post-'68 configuration.
The two different concepts of subjectivation reveal two rather
heterogeneous political projects, as can easily be seen when com
paring the authors' readings of Greek democracy.
The two approaches show remarkable differences not only in
their conception of politics but also of language and enunciation.
For Ranciere, Greek democracy has demonstrated once and for all
that the exclusive principle of politics is equality and that linguistic
equality (the minimal equality necessary for comprehension
among speakers) contains the principle of verification for political
equality. Speech, whether it issues a command or poses a problem,
presupposes agreement in language. Political action must augment

and effectuate th.is power of equality, however little there may be,
contained in language.
In Foucault's reading of th.is same democracy, equality constitutes
a necessary but not sufficient condition of politics. Enunciation
(truth-telling [le dire vrai]-parthesia) creates paradoxical relation
ships since truth-telling introduces differences of enunciation
into the equality of language. This necessarily implies an "ethical
differentiation." Political action is carried out within the context of
"paradoxical relationships" between the equality of language and
differences of enunciation, and between equality and the production
of new forms of subjectivation and singularity.
2. "Truth-Telling" (Parrhesia}
Foucault examines democracy by way of truth-telling (parrhesia),

in other words, the "seizure of speech" of someone who rises in the
assembly and takes the risk of stating the truth concerning the
affairs of the city. In analyzing democracy, Foucault returns to a
classic theme of one of his masters, Nietzsche, that of the value of
truth, of the will to truth or, still more, the question: "who" wants
the truth?
The relationship between truth and subject is here no longer
posed in the terms Foucault uses in his work on power. He asks:
Through which practices and which types of discourse does power
attempt to speak the truth of the mad, the delinquent, the incarcerated
subject? How has power constituted the "speaking subject, the
working subject, the living subject" as an object of knowledge?
Starting in the late 1 970s, his perspective shifted, articulated in the
following terms: What truth discourse is the subject "susceptible
and capable of saying about himself?"
Enunciaiion and Politics I 227

The line of questioning that runs through his reading of Greek
democracy is oriented by a typically Nietzschean question which in
fact has to do with present circumstances: What does "truth-telling"
mean after the death of God? Unlike Dostoyevsky, the problem is
not how to behave in life if "everything is permitted," but rather: "if
nothing is true," how should one live? If the concern for truth
consists in its permanent problematization, what "life," what powers,
what knowledge, and what discursive practices can respond to such
a concern?
Capitalism's answer to the question is the constitution of a "mar
ket of life" in which people purchase the existence that suits them. It
is no longer philosophical schools, as in ancient Greece, nor Chris
tianity, nor the revolutionary project of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, that furnish modes of existence, models of subjectivation,
but rather corporations, the media, the culture industry, the institu
tions of the welfare state, unemployment insurance, and so on.
In modern-day capitalism, governing inequalities is inextricably
linked to the production and governing of modes of subjectivation,
to forms of life. Today's "police" operate through both the division
and distribution of roles and the allocation of functions and through
the injunction to conform to certain modes of life. All income, every
benefit, and every wage are part of an "ethos" that prescribes and
engages certain conduct, that is, a way of doing and saying. Neo
liberalism represents at once the reestablishment ofa hierarchy founded
on money, merit, and inheritance, and a genuine "life fair" in which
businesses and the State, by replacing the schoolmaster or the confessor,
prescribe how to behave (how to eat, live, dress, love, speak, etc.).
Modern-day capitalism, its private enterprises and institutions,
prescribe a care for and work on the self that are simultaneously
physical and mental, a "well-being" and an aesthetic of existence,

which mark out the new frontiers of the capitalist subjection and
economic valorization indicative of an unprecedented impoverish
ment f subjectivity.
Foucault's last lectures provide an invaluable tool for problema
tizing these questions. His analysis first of all demands that one not
isolate the political act as such, as Ranciere does, for, according to
Foucault, in doing so one runs the risk of missing the specificity of
capitalist power. The latter articulates the political and the ethical, the
unequal division of society, the production of models of existence and
of discursive practices. Foucault asks us to bring together the analysis
of forms of subjectivation and the analysis of discursive practices
and "techniques and procedures for directing human behavior."2 In
short, subject, power, and knowledge must be thought both in their
irreducibility and in their necessary relation. In moving from the
mode of political subjectivation from which it derives to the sphere
of personal ethics and the constitution of the ethical subject, par
rhesia offers the possibility of thinking the complex relations
between these "three distinct elements none of which can be
reduced to or absorbed by the others, but whose relations are
constitutive of each other."3
3. Parrhesia, Politeia, Isegoria, Dunasteia
In his last two lectures, Foucault demonstrates that parrhesia (the

truth-telling of someone who rises in the assembly) , politeia (the
constitution that guarantees the equality of all citizens), and isegoria
(the statutory right of anyone to speak, regardless of social status,
privilege of birth, wealth, or knowledge) establish paradoxical
relationships between them. In order for parrhesia to exist, in order
for truth-telling to be effected, both politeia (the constitution
Enunciation and Politics I 229

guaranteeing equality) and isegoria (all may speak publicly and have
their say in the affairs of the city) are necessary. But neither politeia
nor isegoria say who will actually speak, who will in reality express a
claim to truth. Anyone has the right to speak, but it is not the equal
distribution of the right to speak that makes one speak in fact.
The effective exercise ofparrhesia depends neither on citizenship
nor on legal or social status. Politeia and isegoria and the equality
these two declare represent only the necessary but not sufficient
conditions for speaking publicly. What effectively makes one speak
is dunasteia: the power, the force, the exercise, and the real effectuation
of the power to speak that mobilizes the speaker's singular relations
with himself and with those whom he addresses. The dunasteia
expressed in enunciation is a force of ethical differentiation because
it means taking a position in relation to the self, to others, and to
the world.
By taking sides and dividing equals, by bringing polemic and
dispute into the community, parrhesia is a risky and indeterminate
act. It introduces conflict, agonism, and contest into public space,
which may end in hostility, hate, and war.
Truth-telling, the claim to truth voiced in an assembly (and we
might also think of those assemblies in contemporary social and
political movements, since Greek democracy, unlike modern
democracy, was not representative), presupposes a force, a power, an
action upon the self (to have the courage to risk telling the truth),
and an action upon others in order to persuade them, guide them,
and steer their conduct. It is in this sense that Foucault speaks of an
ethical differentiation, a process of singularization initiated and
opened by the parrhesiastic enunciation. Parrhesia implies that
political subjects constitute themselves as ethical subjects, capable of
taking risks, posing a challenge, dividing equals according to their

positions, in other words, capable of governing themselves and of
governing others within a situation of conflict. In the act of political
enunciation, in assuming public speech, a power of self-positioning
manifests itself, a power of self-affectation, subjectivity affecting
itself, as Deleuze very rightly puts it with regard to Foucauldian
subjectivation.
Parrhesia restructures and redefines the possible field of action
for the self and for others. It modifies the situation, it opens a new
dynamics, for it indeed introduces something new. "Even if it
implies a status, I think parrhesia is connected much less to status
than to a dynamic and a combat, a conflict. So, a dynamic and
agonistic structure of parrhesia" that surpasses the egalitarian
framework of right, law, and constitution.4
The new relationships which truth-telling manifests are not
contained nor anticipated by the constitution, the law, or equality.
And yet it is through them and only through them that political
action is possible, that it occurs in reality.
Truth-telling thus depends on two heterogeneous regimes, one of
right (ofpoliteia and isegoria) and one of dunasteia (power or force),
and it is for this reason that the relationship between true enunciation
(discourse) and democracy is "difficult and problematic." By intro
ducing de facto difference within equality, by expressing the power of
self-affectation and self-affirmation, parrhesia institutes a twofold
paradox. First, "there can only be true discourse through democracy,
but true discourse introduces something completely different from
and irreducible to the egalitarian structure of democracy,'' that is,
ethical differentiation. Second, "the death of true discourse, the
possibility of its death or of its reduction to silence,''5 is inscribed in
equality, for competition, conflict, agonism, and hostility threaten
democracy and equality. Such has effectively taken place in Western

democracies where there is no longer any space lefi: for parrhesia.
Democratic consensus neutralizes parrhesia, cancels the risk of truth
telling and of the subjectivation and action that follow from it.
4. Enunciation and Pragmatics
The difference between Ranciere's and Foucault's positions emerges

still more clearly when one further examines the relationship of lan
guage and enunciation with politics and political subjectivation.
For Ranciere, when those who have no part in the community
("les sans-parts," the demos or proletariat) speak, this does not imply
an awakening consciousness, the expression of a specificity of the
person who speaks (his interests or his membership in a social group),
but rather the equality of the logos. The inequality of domination
presupposes the equality of speakers, since in order for the master's
orders to be carried out by subordinates, master and subordinate
must understand each other in a common language. The act of
speaking, even in the case of highly asymmetrical relations of power
(Menenius Agrippa's speech on the Aventine which aims to legiti
mate the hierarchical differences of the society), presupposes
understanding within language, presupposes "the notion that the
standard of equality is the law [ . . ] of the communitarian body."6
.
For political action to be possible, it is first necessary to posit an

equality that functions as the measure and ground of the argumen
tation and demonstration of the dispute between the rule (of
equality) and the specific case (the inequality of the police) .7
Once equality has been declared somewhere, its force must be real
ized. Once inscribed somewhere, it must be expanded and reinforced.
Egalitarian politics founds its legitimacy and arguments in the
logic and structure of language. Politics consists in creating a "stage

around any specific conflict on which the equality and inequality as
speaking beings of the partners in the conflict can be played out."8
For Ranciere, there is indeed a logic of language, but this logic
is upset by the duality of the logos-"speech and the counting of
speech." Speech is at once the site of a community (speech that
states problems) and a division (speech that gives orders) . Against
this duality, political enunciation must argue and demonstrate "that
there is one single common language" and establish that the ancient
demos, just like modern proletarians, is composed of beings who,
through the very fact of speaking and arguing, are capable of reason
and speech and, by dint of this, equal to those who command them.
The quarrel has nothing to do with more or less transparent or
opaque linguistic contents; it has to do with consideration of
speaking beings as such.9
"Whereas Ranciere plays with universals and discursive rationality

("The first requirement of universality is that speaking beings uni
versally belong to the linguistic community''), 10 while at the same
time distancing himselffrom them, Foucault describes subjectivation
as an immanent process of rupture and constitution of the subject.
For Foucault, parrhesia, to borrow a phrase from Guattari, "exits
language," but it also exits pragmatics such as analytic philosophy
defines it. There is no rationality or discursive logic because enuncia
tion is not indexed to the rules of language and pragmatics, but
rather to the risk of staking a position, to "existential" and political
self-affirmation. There is no logic of language; there is an aesthetics
of enundation in that enunciation does not verify what is already
present (equality) but opens to something new arising for the first
time through the very act of speaking.

Parrhesia is a form of enunciation very different from that
advanced by the discursive pragmatics of performatives. Performa
tives are expressions, linguistic "rituals," which presuppose a more or
less institutionalized status of the speaker and in which the effect
that the enunciation must produce is already institutionally given
("Court is in session" declared by someone authorized to do so is
but an "institutional" rehearsal whose effects are known in advance).
Inversely, parrhesia does not presuppose any status; it is the enun
ciation of "anyone at all." Unlike performative utterances, it "opens
up an unspecified risk," "a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any
rate, an undefined eventuality." 1 1
The irruption o fparrhesia creates a fracture, marks an intrusion
into a given situation, and "makes a certain number of effects
possible" that cannot be known ahead of time. The effects of enun
ciation are not only always singular but affect and engage the
enunciating subject first of all.
The reconfiguration of the sensible firstly concerns the person
who speaks. Within the parrhesiastic utterance, the speaking subject
undertakes a double pact with himself: he hinds himself to the
utterance and to the content of the utterance, to what he has said
and to the fact that he has said it. The enunciation has a retroactive
effect on the subject's mode of being: "in producing the event of the
utterance, the subject modifies, or affirms, or anyway determines
and clarifies his mode of being insofar as he speaks." 1 2
Parrhesia manifests the courage and the p ositioning of the
person who tells the truth, who says what he thinks, yet it also
manifests the "interlocutor's courage in agreeing to accept as true
the hurtful truth he hears."13 The person who speaks the truth, who
says what he thinks, "signs, as it were, the truth he states, he binds
himself to this truth, and he is consequently bound to it and by

it."14 But he also takes a risk "which concerns his very relation with
those he addresses." Whereas the professor possesses a "knowledge
of tet:hnt' and risks nothing by speaking, the parrhesiast not only
risks provoking conflict, "but also hostility, hate, and war." He runs
the risk of dividing equals.
Between the person who speaks and what he says, between the
speaker and the person who accepts to receive his speech, an affec
tive and subjective link is established, a "belief" which, as William
James reminds us, is a "willingness to act."15 The relation to the self,
the relation to others, and the belief that binds them can be limited
neither by equality nor by right.
5. The Crisis ofParrhesia
Ranciere views the crisis of Greek democracy as a simple pretext for

aristocrats' desire to reestablish their privileges of birth, rank, and
wealth, whereas Foucault, without neglecting this aspect, views the
crisis of Greek democracy as centered around the relation between
politics and ethics, equality and differentiation.
The enemies of democracy put their finger on a problem which
the supporters of equality as the sole principle of politics (Ranciere,
Badiou) fail to see and which constitutes one of the pitfalls into
which nineteenth- and twentieth-century communism fell for lack
of practicable responses.
fu the enemies of democracy argue, if everyone can have their
say about the affairs of the community, there would be as many
constitutions and government as individuals. If everyone can speak,
then the insane, drunkards, and halfwits are authorized to express
their opinions on public affairs in the same way as those best suited
to do so-the experts, as many would have it today. In democracy,

competition, agonism, and conflict between equals who claim to
speak the truth degenerate into the seduction of orators who flatter
the people in the assemblies. If there is uncontrolled distribution of
the right to speak, "anyone can say anything or everything." Given
that, how can the good and bad orator be distinguished? How can
ethical differentiation be undertaken? The truth, the enemies of
democracy claim, cannot be told within a political field defined by
"a lack of difference between speaking subjects."
[D]emocracy cannot make room for the ethical differentiation of

speaking, deliberating, and decision-making subjects.16
These arguments immediately recall the neoliberal critiques leveled

at the "socialist" egalitarianism motivating demands for equal wage
increases and equal social rights for all: equality hinders freedom,
equality prevents "ethical differentiation," it drowns subjectivity in
the indifference of subjects of rights.
Like Guattari, Foucault warns us that one cannot oppose
neoliberal "freedom," a freedom which, in reality, expresses the
political will to reestablish hierarchies, inequalities, and privileges
through "egalitarian politics." That would mean making short shrift
of the critiques that political movements have leveled at socialist
egalitarianism, well before liberal critics did so.
Foucault does more than denounce the enemies of democracy.
Drawing on the Cynics, he upends the aristocratic critiques on their
home turf: that of ethical differentiation, that of the constitution of
the subject and his becoming.
Out of the crisis ofparrhesia emerges a "truth-telling" that is no
longer exposed to the risks of politics. Truth-telling moves from its
political origin toward the sphere ofpersonal ethics and the constitution

of the moral subject. But it does so according to an alternative: that
of a "metaphysics of the soul" and an "aesthetics of life"; that of
kno""'.ledge of the soul, of its purification, which allows access to an
other world, and that of practices and techniques in order to test, to
experiment, the self, life, and the world in the here and now. The
constitution of the self, not as "soul," but as "bios," as a way of life.
The alternative is already contained in Plato's text, but it was the
Cynics who made it explicit and turned it against the enemies of
democracy through its politicization. The opposition between the
Cynics and Platonism can be summarized thus: the former articu
late "an other life/an other world," thereby producing an other
subjectivity and other institutions in this world, whereas for the
latter there is "the other world" and "the other life," whose articula
tion would prove so profitable to Christianity.
The Cynics revoke the traditional theme of "true life" in which
truth-telling had taken refuge. "True life" in the Greek tradition "is
one which shuns disturbance, change, corruption, and the fall, and
which remains without change in the identity of its being."17
The Cynics counter "true life" by claiming and practicing "an
other life" "whose otherness must lead to the change of the world. An
other life for an other world." 1 8 They reverse the theme of the
"sovereign life (tranquil and beneficial: tranquil for oneself [. . . ] and
beneficial for others) by dramatizing it in the form of what could be
called the militant life, the life of battle and struggle against and for
self, against and for others," "battle in this world against the world."19
The Cynics go beyond the "crisis" ofparrhesia, the powerlessness of
democracy and equality, to produce ethical differentiation, by binding
politics and ethics (and truth) indissolubly together. They politically
dramatize and reconfigure the question of the relation to the self by
extricating it from the good life, the sovereign life of ancient thought.

6. Two Models of Political Action
These two readings of Greek democracy are informed by two very

different models of "revolutionary'' action.
For Ranciere, politics constitutes the reparation of a wrong done
to equality, a reparation realized through demonstration, argument,
and interlocution. In political action, those with no part in the com
munity must demonstrate that they are speaking and are not merely
emitting noise. They must also demonstrate that they do not speak
an unknown or minor language but express themselves in and master
the language of their masters. Finally, they must demonstrate
through their arguments and interlocution that they are at once
beings of reason and speech.
This model of revolutionary action, founded on demonstration,
argument, and interlocution, aims at inclusion, "recognition,"
which, however litigious, very much resembles dialectical recogni
tion. Politics brings about a division through which "they'' and "we"
oppose and take account of one another, in which two worlds split
while at the same time recognizing that they are part of the same
community. "The uncounted could make themselves count by
showing up the process of division and breaking in on others' equality
and appropriating it for themselves."20
If we want to find something resembling Ranciere's model, we
ought not to look at political democracy but rather at the social
democracy that came out of the New Deal and the postwar years.
The social democracy which one still finds in the co-determination
doctrine of French social security represents, in its reformist incar
nation, the "dialectical model" of the class struggle in which the
recognition and dispute between "us" and "them" constitute the
engine of capitalist development and indeed of democracy itsel

"What Jacques Ranciere defends in the social democracy of the
welfare state is a public sphere of interlocution in which workers
(reformist trade unions) are included as political subjects and work
.
is no longer a private but rather a public affair.
One feigns to hold as abusive gifts from a paternal and tentacular
State the institutions of solidarity and security born in worker and
democratic struggles and managed or co-managed by the repre
sentatives of contributors. Yet in struggling against this mythical
State, it is precisely non-State institutions of solidarity that are
attacked, institutions that were also sites where different capacities
were formed and exercised, capacities for taking care of the
common and the common future that were different to those of
the government elites.21
The whole trouble with Ranciere's position (and more generally

with the left's) lies in the difficulty he has in critiquing and seeing
beyond this model, a model which surely expanded democracy in
the twentieth century but which today represents a genuine obstacle
to the emergence of new objects and new subjects of politics. The
model is constitutionally incapable of including political subjects
other than the State, unions, and business associations.
Foucault's analysis of Greek democracy provides a completely
different model. "Why, in order to problematize political subjecti
vation, does he look to a philosophical school such as the Cynics', a
"marginal" school, a "minority" school, a "popular" philosophical
school without much doctrinal structure?
What Foucault suggests is the following: We have moved
beyond the dialectical and totalizing politics of the "demos."
"Whoever has no part-the poor of ancient times, the third estate,

the modern proletariat-cannot in fact have any other part other
than all or nothing."22
It is difficult to imagine the Cynics, j ust as it is post-'68 politi
cal movements (from women's movements to movements of the
unemployed), affirming "we are the people," we are both the "part
and the whole."
In Foucault's model, the issue is not ensuring that those who
have no part are counted, nor their demonstrating that they speak
the same language as their masters. The issue is a "transvaluation'' of
all values, which also and especially concerns those with no part and
their mode of subjectivation. Jn transvaluation, equality combines
with difference, political equality with ethical differentiation. We
meet up with Nietzsche again in the Cynics, those who entered the
history of philosophy as "counterfeiters," as those who debased the
"value" of money.
The Cynics' motto, "deface the coinage," refers both to the
debasement of money (nomisma) and to the debasement of the law
(nomos). The Cynics do not ask for recognition, they do not seek to
be counted or included. They criticize and scrutinize the institutions
and ways of life of their peers through self-experimentation and self
examination and the experimentation and examination of others
and the world.
The problem of the constitution of the self as an ethico-political
subject requires a specific truth game. " [N] o longer that of the
apprenticeship, the acquisition of true propositions with which one
arms oneself, equips oneself for life and its events, but that of the
attention focused on oneself, on what one is able to do [ . . . ] [T]hese
games of truth do not come under mathemata, they are not things
that are taught and learned, but exercises one performs on oneself:
self-examination; tests of endurance."23

Here the political truth games practiced in the constitution of
an other life and an other world are not those of recognition,
demonstration, and argument-based logic, but those of a politics of
experimentation that brings together rights and the formation of
ethos. The opposition between Plato and the Cynics inevitably
reminds us of the differences between Ranciere and Foucault.
7. Logos and Existence, Theater and Performance
For Ranciere, politics only exists through the constitution of a

"theatrical" stage on which actors perform the conceit of political
interlocution according to a double logic of discursivity and argu
mentation that is at once reasonable (since it postulates equality)
and unreasonable (since nowhere does this equality exist).
In order for politics to exist, a stage of "speech and reason'' must
be constructed on which one enacts and dramatizes, in the theatrical
sense of the word, the gap between the rule and the deed, between
police logic and the logic of equality. This conception of politics is
normative. All action in which public space is not conceived as inter
locution through speech and reason is not political. The actions of
Parisian suburban youth in 2005, which failed to respect this model
of mobilization, are not considered political by Ranciere.
The issue is not integrating people who, for the most part, are
French, but ensuring that they are created as equals. [ . . ] The

.
question is whether they are counted as political subjects,
endowed with a shared language. [ . . ] It would appear that this

.
revolt was not political, as I understand the term, it did not
constitute a stage of interlocution recognizing the enemy as
belonging to the same community as oneself.24
Enunciation and Politics / 241

It is true that contemporary movements actualize the political logic
Ranciere describes by constructing a stage of speech and reason in order
to demand equality through demonstration, argwnentation, and inter
locution. But in fighting to be recognized as new political subjects, they
do not make this form of action the only one that can be defined as
political. Still more important, these struggles play out within a context
that is no longer that of the dialectics and totalization of the demos, a
demos which is at once part and totality, "nothing and everything."
On the contrary, in order to impose themselves as new political
subjects, they must break through the deadlock of the politics of the
"people" and the "working class" such as it exists in the political and
social democracy of our societies.
Political movements play off and with these different forms of
political action, but according to a logic that is not limited to the
staging of "equality and its absence." Equality is the necessary but
not sufficient condition of the differential process in which "rights
for all" are the social bases of a suhjectivation that builds "an other
life" and "an other world."
The young "savages" of the French suburbs, as one socialist
minister called them, resemble in certain respects the Cynic bar
barians who, instead of the orderly dialectical games of recognition
and argwnent, preferred to leave the theatrical stage and invent a
different artifice, one that had little to do with the theater.
Rather than of the stage, the Cynics make us think of contem
porary art performances, where public exposure (in the double sense
of manifestation and risk of danger) is not necessarily carried out in
language, in speech, nor through signifying semiotics, nor even
through a dramaturgy with characters, interlocution, and dialogue.
How does the subjectivation process that opens to "an other
life" and "an other world" work? Not simply through speech and

reason. The Cynics are not only "speaking beings" but also bodies
that say something, even if the enunciation is not initially expressed
through signifying chains. Satisfying one's needs {eating, shitting)
.
and desires (masturbating, love-making) in public, provoking, scan
dalizing, forcing others to think and to feel, and so on-these are all
"performative" techniques that call on a multiplicity of semiotics.
The walking stick, wandering, begging, poverty, sandals, bare
feet, and so forth, through which the Cynics expressed their way of
life, are nonverbal forms of enunciation. Gestures, actions, example,
behavior, and physical presence constitute expressive practices and
semiotics addressed to others through means other than speech. In
Cynic "performances" language has more than a denotative and
representative function; it has an "existential function." It affirms
an ethos and a politics; in Guattari's terms, it helps construct exis
tential territories.
There are two paths to virtue in the Greek tradition: the long
and easy path that passes through the "logos," in other words,
through discourse and school learning; and the short but difficult one
of the Cynics, which is, "in a way, silent." The short or abbreviated
path, without discourse, is that of practice and experimentation.
Cynic life is public not only by virtue of language, speech, but is
exposed in its "material and everyday reality." It is a "materially, physi
cally public" life that immediately reconfigures the divisions
constitutive of Greek society, the public space of the polis, on the one
hand, and the private management of the household, on the other.
It is not a matter of opposing "logos" and "existence," but rather
of situating oneself in the gap between them in order to question
ways df life and institutions.
For the Cynics, there can be no true life except as an other life
which is "at the same time, a form of existence, manifestation of self,
Enunciaiion and Politics I 243

and physical model of the truth, but also an enterprise of demonstra
tion, conviction, and persuasion through discourse.25
Like most contemporary critical theorists {Virno, Buder,
Agamben, Michon, Zizek), Ranciere betrays a logocentric bias.
Despite his criticisms of Aristotle, we are still dependent on and
stuck in the theoretical framework of Greek philosophical thought:
man as the only animal with language and a political animal because
he possesses language. By attacking the "distribution" that the
logos establishes between man and animal, the Cynics attack the
foundations of Greek and Western philosophy and culture.
[I]n ancient thought animality played the role of absolute point of
differentiation for the human being. It is by distinguishing itself
from animality that the human being assened and manifested its
humanity. Animality was always, more or less, a point of repulsion
for the constitution of man as a rational and human being.26
The Cynics dramatize not only the difference between equality and
inequality but also the practices of the "true life" and its institutions
by exhibiting a shameless life, a scandalous life, a life that manifests
itself as a "challenge and exercise in the practice of animality."
8. The Distribution of the S ensible: Or, Division and Production
Despite Ranciere's opposition between the ethical and the political,

political subjectivation for him still implies an ethos and truth
games. It requires a mode of constitution of the subject through
speech and reason which performs the truth games of "demonstra
tion," "argumentation," and interlocution. Even in Ranciere (or
against Ranciere), politics cannot be defined as a specific activity;
244 I Signs and fvlachines

because it is joined to ethics (the constitution of a subject of reason
and speech) and truth (discursive practices that demonstrate and
argue) . It is hard to see how it could be otherwise.
But if it is impossible to make politics an autonomous mode of
action, it is also impossible to separate politics from what Foucault
calls the "microphysics" of power relations.
The dualisms of the "distribution of the sensible," which organize
the distribution of parts (the class division between bourgeois who
possess speech and proletariat who emits only noise) as well as the
mode of subjectivation ("us/them"), imply micropolitical relations.
Molar divisions presuppose and derive from molecular relationships.
To a certain extent, we are committed to Foucault's methodology
because in modern-day capitalism it is impossible to separate, as
Ranciere would like, "ethics" from "eco.nomics" and "politics."
The division of society into "classes" (or parts) is produced by the
assemblage of discursive practices (knowledge), techniques for govern
ing behavior (power), and modes of subjection (the subject). But this
"dualist" distribution is not only the result of the transversal action of
these three apparatuses (knowledge, power, subject). The latter are
themselves traversed by micro-power relations that make the distribu
tion possible and operational. Man/woman relations, father/children
relations in the family, teacher/student in the school, doctor/patient in
the health system, and so on, which developed by what Guattari calls
"collective facilities" of subjection, are transversal and constitutive of the
division into "parts." It is impossible to understand today's capitalism
without problematizing the relationship between the molar (the major
dualistic oppositions-capital/labor, rich/poor, those who command
and those who obey, those who have the credentials to govern and
those who do not, etc.) and the microphysical (power relations
based in, pass through, and are formed within those with no part) .

But it is above all impossible without appreciating how power
invests the relation to the self, care of the self, "ethics."
The examination of the Cynics' way of understanding bios, exis
tence, and "militant" subjectivation can provide the weapons for
resisting the powers of contemporary capitalism, which makes the
production of subjectivity the primary and most important of its
effects (Guattari).
Foucault tells us that parrhesia, in moving from the "political"
realm to individual ethics, became a technique for governing
behavior, in other words, a technique of power. "By encouraging
you to take care of yourselves I am useful to the whole city. And if
I protect my life, it is precisely in the city's interest."27
The techniques of government of the self and others, integrated
and reconfigured by the pastoral power of the Christian church,
have become ever more important in the welfare state.
In capitalism, the "great chain of concerns and solicitudes,'' "the
care for life,'' which Foucault talks about in regard to ancient
Greece, has been taken in hand by the State. To take care of the self,
to work on the self and on one's own life, means concerning oneself
with the ways of doing and saying necessary to occupy the place
allocated to us within the social division of labor. Taking care of the
self is an injunction to become a subject responsible for the function
to which power has assigned him.
The concepts of bios, existence, and life do not send us back to
vitalism, but rather force us to ask ourselves how to politicize these
micro-power relationships through subjectivation, through a rela
tion to the self, that breaks with subjections.
In Ranciere's definition of politics, he seems to neglect what he
analyses historically among nineteenth century workers: the work
on the self and the formation of an ethos.

The formation of the ethos, bias, the "militant" existence the
Cynics practice, is not a variety of "moral discourse." It does not
represent the teaching or expression of a new moral code. The for
matio of ethos is at once a "focal point of experience"28 and a "matrix
of experience" in which are linked "forms of a possible knowledge,
normative frameworks of behavior for individuals" (power), "and poten
tial modes of existence for possible subjects" (the relation to the self) .
Conversely, politics for Ranciere is not primarily an experience.
The "sensible" has nothing to do with an existential focal point
because politics is above all a question of form, a formalism of
equality. "What makes an action political is not its object or the
place where it is carried out, but solely its form, the form in which
confirmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute,
of a community existing solely through being divided."29
The problematization of these "focal points of experience" and
the experiments in political rupture and subjectivation that result
run throughout Western history, finally leading to the revolutionaries
of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and to the artists of
the same period.
9. Equality and Difference
Foucauldian subjectivation is not only an argument about equality

and inequality, a demonstration of the wrong done to equality, but
a genuinely immanent creation situated in the gap between equality
and inequality, reorienting the question of politics by opening up an
indeterminate space and time for ethical differentiation and the
formation of a collective sel
If politics is indistinguishable from the formation of the
"ethical" subject, then the question of organization becomes central,

although in a different way than in the communist model. The
reconfiguration of the sensible is a process that must be the object
of "militant" work, which Guattari, expanding on Foucault's thought,
defines as "analytical" political work.
For Guattari, the GIP-Groupe d'information sur les prisons
founded by Foucault30--can be considered a collective assemblage
in which the object of "militantism" becomes twofold: militantism
in terms of intervention, but also militantism in terms of those
who intervene. The new militantism is continuously at work, not
only on utterances produced, but especially on the techniques,
procedures, forms of expression of the organization, the subject of
enunciation that produces utterances.
Conversely, Ranciere has "no interest in the question of the forms
of organization of political collectives." He does not take into consi
deration the "alterations produced by acts of political subjectivation."
In other words, he views the act of subjectivation only in its rare
irruption, a subjectivation whose duration is nearly instantaneous.
He refuses to examine "the forms of consistency of the groups
that produce them,"31 whereas May '68 puts into question precisely
their rules of constitution and functioning, their form of expression
and democracy, for it is precisely the political act of intervening that
is inseparable from the act of constitution of the subject whose
subjectivation reconfigures not only molar divisions but molecular
relations as well.
If the paradoxical relations between equality and difference
cannot be inscribed in a constitution, in laws, if they can be neither
learned nor taught but only experimented, then the question of the
modalities of acting together becomes fundamental.
What must be experimented and invented in a war machine that
articulates the being-together and the being-against is what Foucault

argues is the specificity of philosophical discourse, and what, since
the collapse of the dialectical model of the demos, has become the
condition of contemporary politics. We must never pose "the ques
tion of ethos without at the same time inquiring about the truth and
the form of access to the truth which will be able to form this ethos,
and [about] the political structures within which this ethos will be
able to assert its singularity and difference. [ . . . ] [N]ever pos[e] the
question of aletheia without at the same time taking up again, with
regard to this truth, the question ofpoliteia and the question of ethos.
The same goes for politeia, and for ethos."32
For R.anciere, only democracy, as an apparatus of both division
and community, can reconfigure the distribution of the sensible,
whereas Foucault is much more reserved and less enthusiastic about
this model of political action. He recognizes its limits. Political
subjectivation, while dependent on equality, surpasses it. The political
question is, therefore: How can we invent and practice equality
under these new conditions of subjectivation?
With Guattari, we can pose the question directly by looking at
our current situation. How do we invent and practice both equality
and "ethical differentiation'' (singularization) while breaking with
the machinic enslavements and social subjections of modern-day
capitalism that have a dual hold on our subjectivity?
- September 20 1 0
Enunciation ancl Politics I 249

Notes
Introduction: Logos or Abstract Machines?

I. The present introduction was written following the publication of my book The
Making ofthe Indebted Man, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angdes: Semiorext(e),
2012), in the French original La fabriqtte de l'homme endette (Paris: Editions
d'Amsrerdam, 201 1). The chapters that follow were written prior to its publication.
2. Felix Guatrari in Jean Oury, Felix Guatrari, and Fran91is Tosquelles, Pratiq11es de
l'institutionnel etpolitiq11e (Vigneux, France: Mattice editions, 1985), 65.
3. Felix Guanari, La Revolution molimlaire (Paris: Union generale d'editions,
1977), 95.
4. Felix Guatrari, "La Crise de production de subjectivite," Seminar ofApril 3, 1984.
hnp://www.revue-chimeres.fr/drupal_chimeres/files/840403.pd
5. Karl Marx, Gnmdrisse, in Selected Writings, ed. David Mclellan (Oxford: Oxford
Universiry Press, 2000), 410.
6. Felix Guanari, Pratiq11es de l'instit11tionnel etpolitique, op. cir., 53.
7. Ranciere's and Badiou's political theories are utterly incapable of analyzing "rypes
of subjectiviry'' since for these authors there is only one subjectivation process and
ir is always the same, whether they are dealing with the Greek polis, the slave revolr
in ancient Rome, the French, Russian, or Chinese Revolutions, or May '68.
8. Felix Guanari, "La Crise de production de subjectivire," op. cir.

9. The political theories of Ranciere and Badiou are simply unable to articulate
subjective and political rupture with class composition and its enslavements and
subjections.
10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Universiry of Minnesota Press, 1983), 378.
1 1 . See the second chaprer of my book Expmmentatiom politiques (Paris: Editions
Amsrerdam, 2009) where the question of rupture is examined in relation to the rise
of political movements.
12. Ibid., 377.
251
I. Production and the Production of Subjectivity
I . Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1995), 180.
2. The "user" is only one of the forms of implication, activation, and exploitation of
subjectivity in the service-relationship maintained by business or the Welfare State.
Hence the limirations of all theories that make "use" the cornerstone of politics (see,
for example, the otherwise remarkable work of Michel de Certeau).
3. Michel Foucault, Disdpline and Pzmish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,
1995), 202. Foucault seems to forget this conception ofpower as a machine or diagram
when he rums to his analysis of the "relation to the self," "conduces," and the "govern
ment of men," when he moves .from disciplinary societies to societies of control.
4. Ibid., 205, 207.

5. "Coded personological relations, of die type nobleman-valet or master-apprentice,
are replaced by the regulation of generous 'human' relations essentially founded on
systems of abstract quantification of labor, wages, 'skills,' profits, etc. In the last
analysis, the socius is no longer a matter of the 'person' but of decoded flows." Felix
Guattari, Lignes defieite (La Tour d'Aigues, France: De !'Aube, 2011), 54.
6. Maurice de Montroollin, Les Systemes hommes-machines (Paris: Presses universi
raires de France, 1967), 138.
7. Ibid., 54.
8. "Whereas subjection involves the overall person, easily manipularable subjective
represenrations, machinic enslavement joins systems of represenrarion and meaning in
which individuated subjeccs become recognizable to and alienated .from one another."
Felix Guattari, La Revolution moliculaire (Paris: Union generale d'edirions, 1980), 93.
9. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesora Press, 1987), 456-457.
10. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967), 196.
1 1 . Ibid., 195, 192.
12. Ibid., 196, 197.
13. Ibid., 199.
14. Ibid., 201.
15. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., 458. Transla
tion modified.
16. Obviously, the claim "we have never been modern" (Bruno Latour) is no more
than a catchphrase, since the modern individuated "subject" and "roan'' are absolutely

indispensable to the functioning of power. The diametrically opposite position is
that ofJohn Holloway, for whom liberating man &om capitalist exploitation means
"to recover the subject negated by objectivity." His political program is Kantian
more than revolutionary since he argues for "the assertion of ourselves as our own
true sun," restoring "ourselves to the center of the universe," for "we humans create
the world in which we live." Subject and object are part of the same paradigm of
modernity and exploitation. John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (New York: Pluto
Press, 2010), 235, 242, 145.
17. For Badiou and Ranciere, the production ofsubjectivity poses no difficulty at all
since, whether we are talking about Greek society, 1948, the New Deal, or today,
subjectivity is always the same. Thus the complete lack of analysis of the processes
of subjectivation capitalism entails, the formalism of the definitions of power rda
tions, and the return of a politics emptied of politics.
18. "Our opposition between despotic signifying semiologies and asignifying

semiologies remains very schematic. In reality, there are only mixed semiotics,
which partake of both to varying degrees. Signifying semiology is always haunted by
a sign machine and, conversely, a sign machine is always on the verge of being
reclaimed by signifying semiology. Still, it is clearly useful to recognize the relations
of polarity the two define." Felix Guattari, La Revo/11tion molimlaire (Fontenay-sous
Bois, France: Recherches, 1977), 346.
19. Theories that make "language primacy" the key co how semiotics operate in our
societies risk missing how capitalism actually works. Capital functions &om a mul
tiplicity of semiotics and not only signifying and linguistic semiotics, as the theories
of "cognitive" or "cultural" capitalism claim.
20. Felix Guattari, Les Annees d'hiver: 1980-1985 {Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaites,
2009), 294.
2 1 . When one is no longer able to measure labor in time, as is the case in most areas
today, "automatic" and "objective" evaluators are replaced by the subjective and
continuous (in schools for students and teachers, in hospitals and public health
systems for services and "workers," etc.). Note, for example, the confilcr that erupted
in France at universities and hospitals when new methods of evaluation were intro
duced, methods part and parcel of neoliberal techniques of government.
22. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight ofthe Idols, in The Anti-Christ, &ce Homo, Twilight of
the Idols, tranS. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 169.
23. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., 492.
24. With. regard to sociology's anthropomorphism, see Emile Durkheim, for whom
the "vital forces ofsociety" recall Marx's "live labor," whereas "things," among which,
apart &om "material objects," "must be included the products of previous social
activity-the law and the customs that have been established, and literary and artistic
monuments" play the role of "fixed capital." Objects and products "are the matter
Notes I 253
to which the vital forces are applied, but they do not themselves release any vital
forces. Thus the specifically human environment remains as the active factor." The
Rules ofSociological Method, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: The Free Press, 1982),
136. In the work of his rival, Gabriel Tarde, can be found the conditions for a non
anthropocentric sociology.
25. In the industrial production of a large corporation like Fiat, the human labor
force accounts for only 7.5% of general costs. Guattari points out that the impact
of a completely automatized business would affect society on the whole rather than
workers alone.
26. "The real control of machinic time, from the enslavement of human organs to
the productive assemblages, cannot be effectively measured based on a general
equivalent. We can measure a time of presence, a time of alienation, a period of
incarceration in a factory or prison; we cannot measure the consequences on an indi
vidual. We can quantify the apparent labor of a physicist in a laboratory, not the
productive value he creates." Felix Guattari, La Revol11tion moleettlaire (Paris: Union
generale d'editions, 1977), 74.
27. "I would argue that the differential relationship between capital flows and labor
flows generates a surplus value that it would be accurate to call human, since the
latter is produced through human labor; the differential relationship between
financing flows and revenue flows is productive of a surplus value that should
specifically be called financial surplus value; and, finally, the third relationship
between market flows and innovation (or knowledge) flows generates a properly
machinic surplus value." Gilles Deleuze, Seminar of February 2, 1972,
http://www.le-terrier.net/ deleuze/anci-oedipel OOOplateaux/0722-02-72.hrm. In
any case, innovation/ knowledge as such never produces value. "The market flow,
which includes innovation and through which innovation turns a profit, is of a
completely different kind and of a completely different, non-commensurate power
[ . . ] : it is not the same form of money that pays for innovation and, furthermore,
.
determines the profitability of innovation." Ibid. The creation of machinic surplus

value does not directly depend on science and technique bur rather on capital; it is
added to human surplus value and with it offiets decreases in profit. "Knowledge,
information, and specialized education are just as much parts of capital ('knowledge
capital') as is the most elementary labor of the worker." Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, Anti-Oedip11s, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 983), 234. The capitalist machine
operates on two fronts, exercising a strong "selective pressure" on machinic inno
vations and introducing "not only lack amid overabundance, bur stupidity in the
midst of knowledge and science." Ibid., 236.
28. Whereas the theory of value in the first book of Marx's Capital is an additive
theory (the arithmetical sum of individual labor), and whereas surplus value is still
conceived as "human surplus value," in the Grnndrisse and Results ofthe Immediate
Process of Production, Marx describes machinic enslavement without, however,
developing a theory of "machinic" value. Guattari points out that the Marxian

conception of human surplus value corresponds to the accounting practices of
capital but certainly not to its actual functioning. Budget accounting is often
brought up again today in order to justify the counter-reforms aimed at pension
funds, because their financing is calculated based on individual employment and
wages; Only subjection is taken into account while enslavement does not enter
into it. A "cosmic swindle," Deleuze would say. It should also be added that Marx
was the first to make the collective of humans and non-humans (the factory) the
fundament not only of production but also of politics.
29. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., 458.
30. Ibid.
3 1 . Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., 492, 469.
32. "Consumers' participation in production is extremely heterogeneous [ . . . ] . We

have shown that each of these activities can be qualified as work in the economic,
sociological, and ergonomical senses of the term. They produce value for the busi
ness. [. . .] As with the salaried employee, the consumer's activity is highly prescribed
and regulated. It is often performed under the constraints of time, productivity; and
outcomes, using specific tools." Marie-Anne Dujarier, Le Travail du consommateur
(Paris: Editions la Decouverre, 2008), 230-231 .
33. Felix Guattari, La Revolution moltrulaire (Paris: Union generale d'editions,

1977), 80. "It would be completely arbitrary today to consider corporate employees
without considering the multiple systems of deferred wages, public assistance, and
social costs affecting, however you look at it, the reproduction of the labor force,
systems which bypass the monetary circuit ofthe business and are taken on by mul
tiple institutions and mechanisms of power." Ibid., 8 1 .
34. "The notions o f a capitalist enterprise and a paid job have become inseparable
from the entirety ofthe 'social fabric,' which is itselfproduced and reproduced under
the control of capital." Ibid., 90.
35. That desire equals possibility implies a new and revolutionary definition of
desire. Desire only emerges when, following the rupture of previous equilibriums,
relations appear that had otherwise been impossible. Desire is always identifiable
through the impossibility it opens and the new possibilities it creates. It is the fact
that a process arises which secretes other systems of reference from a world that was
once closed. To clearly register the rupture with the classical conception of desire,
Guattari emphasizes its artificial "nature." Artificial, deterritorialized, and machinic
desire means that it is not a "natural" or "spontaneous" force. Desire is not the
equivalent of what Freud calls "drive" or of what Spinoza calls conarus (striving):
"Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly
developed, engineered setup rich in interactions." Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat
tari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., 215. "There are no internal drives in desire, only
assemblages." Ibid. 229. Desire is not a matter of fantasy, dream, or representation,
but rather of production. To desire always means to construct an assemblage; to
Notes / 255
desire always means to act in and for a collective or multiplicity. Desire is not a mat- .
ter of individuals and does not result from the simple interaction of individual drives
or conarus (intersubjectivity). It does not come from within the subject, it always
emanates from the outside, from an encounter, a coupling, an assemblage. The
classical conception of desire is abstract, because it identifies a desiring subject and
an object supposed to be desired, whereas one never desires someone or something
bur always a person or a thing within a whole constituted ofa multiplicity ofobjects,
relations, machines, people, signs, etc. It is the assemblage and not the individuated
subject that makes someone or something desirable. One never desires only a
person or a thing but also the worlds and possibilities one senses in them. To desire
means to construct an a.Ssemblage that unfolds the possibilities and worlds that a
thing or person contains. "We always make love with worlds." Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedip11s, op. cir., 294. Desire is first of all collective though "col
lective" is not with the same as intersubjectivity. A collective assemblage is indeed "a
basis of relations and [ . . ] a means of assigning agents a place and a function; but
.
these agents are nor persons, any more.than these relations are inrersubjective." Ibid.,
47. Persons and things "intervene only as points of connection, of disjunction, of
conjunction of Hows and elements of this multiplicity." Ibid., 349.
2. Signifying Semiologies and Asignifying Semiotics in Production and in the

Production of Subjectivity
1. "We (teachers, shrinks, social workers, journalists, etc.) are workers in an ultra
modern industry, an industry that provides the subjective raw material necessary for
all other industries and social activity." Felix Guattari in Jean Oury, Felix Guattari,
and Frani;:ois Tosquelles, Pratiques de l'instittttionnel et politique (Vigneux, France:
Mattice editions, 1985), 5 1 .
2 . Felix Guarrari, Les Annees d'hiver: 1980-1985 (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires,
2009), 128.
3. Felix Guattari, "Schizoanalyse du chaos," Chimeres 50 (summer 2003): 23.
4. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 20 1 1), 68.
5. Pascal Michon, Rythmes, pottvoir, mondialisation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 2005), 289.
6. "It is a question of rediscovering in the laws that govern that other scene (ein
andere Scha11platz), which Freud, on the subject of dreams, designates as being that
of the unconscious, the effects that are discovered at the level of the chain of mate
rially unstable elements that constitutes language: effects determined by the double
play of combination and substitution in the signifier." Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans.
Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), 218.
7. Jacques Ranciere and Davide Panagia, "Dissenting Words: A Conversation with

Jacques Ranciere," Diacritics 30:2 (2000}: 1 1 7.

8. Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 20 1 1) , 73.
9. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K.
Barnett (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988), 63.
10. Ibid., 198.
1 1 . Ibid., 15.
12. Ibid., 43, 48.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1998), 23 1 .
14. Ibid., 4.
15. Ibid., 7.
16. Felix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Gaffey (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 2.
17. Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, op. cit., 43, 199. Translation modified.
1 8. The linguistic tum in philosophy and the social sciences, which concentrate on
human language {and, with Wittgenstein, the study of ordinary language, which
really changes nothing), completely neglecrs the specifically capitalist force of
asignifying semiotics, those expressed through the "languages of infrasrrucrures"
(economics, science, technique, aesthetics, etc.). The relationship between language
and forms of life, between ethics and enunciation, goes completely unnoticed.
19. Felix Guarrari, Moleett!ar Revolution, crans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Pen
guin, 1984), 164-165.
20. Emile Benvenisre, "The Semiology of Language," Semiotica 1 (1981): 10.
2 1 . Felix Guattari, La Revo!tttion mo!eettlaire (Fonrenay-sous-Bois, France:

Recherches, 1 977), 305.
22. Ibid., 178.
23. Felix Guarrari, La Rivol11tion mo!erolaire (Paris: Union generale d'editions,

1 977), 304.
24. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, op. cit., 38.
25. Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, op. cit., 65.
26. Ibid., 63. Guattari quotes Alain Rey, "Langage et temporalites," Langages, vol. 8,
no. 32 (December 1 97.3): 58.
27. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guarrari, A Thousand Plateaus, crans. Brian Massumi (Min
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 76.
Notes I 257
28. The subjectivity produced by consciousness "cannot be assigned purely and
simply to the order of representation." Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, op. cit.,
126. It manifests "man's specific capacity for deterritorialization that enables him
to produce signs for no purpose: not negative signs, but signs to play about with
for fun, for art." Ibid., 127. The autonomy and arbitrariness of the play of signifi
cations have "contradictory consequences: [they open] possibilities for creativity,
but [ . . . ] also [produce] a subject cut off from all direct access to reality, a subject
imprisoned in a signifying ghetto." Ibid., 92.
29. Felix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. Kelina Goeman (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2006), 258.
30. Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, op. cit., 1 69-170. Translation modified.
31. Felix Guarrari, The Machinic Unconscious, op. cit., 27.
32. Ibid., 67.
33. Felix Guarrari, Molecular Revolution, op. cit., 93. Guattari quotes Benveniste's
Problemes de linguistique generale II CP:iru: Gallimard, 1974), 68.
34. "Personological: an adjective qualifying moral relations within the subjective
order. The emphasis on the role of persons, identities, and identifications characterizes
the theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis. The latter's Oedipus brings persons,
typified persons, into play: it reduces intensities, projects the molecular level of
investments onto a 'personological theater.'" Felix Guattari, Les Annies d'hiver:
1980-1985, op. cit., 295.
35. Felix Guattati, Chaosmo_sis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 98-99.
36. Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Micropolitiques (Paris: Les Empecheurs de
penser en rond, 2007), 401 .
37. Felix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious, op. cit., 66.
38. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, op. cit., 58n. Translation modified.
39. His engagement with Deleuze's thought begins with the concept of the
"machine," which Guattari elaborated in the 1960s. Most philosophers who, like
Badiou, fail to recognize Guattari's original contribution to his and Deleuze's work
together miss the hugely important political shift in the concept of the machine.
40. Felix Guattari, "Balance Sheet-Progtam for Desiring Machines," trans. Robert
Hurley, Anti-Oedip1lf, Semiotext(e), vol. 2, no. 3 (1977): 1 17-1 18.
41. Felix Guattari and Olivier Zahm, "Entretien avec Olivier Zahm;' Chimeres 23
(Summer 1994): SO.
42. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, op. cit., 39, 40. "It is said that machines do not repro
duce themselves, or that they only reproduce themselves through the intermediary of

man, but 'does anyone say that the red clover has no reproductive system because
the bumble bee (and the bumble bee only) must aid and abet it before it can repro
duce? No one. The bumble bee is part of the reproductive system of the clover"' just
as man is part of the reproductive system of the machine. Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Min
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 284-285.
43. "We are misled by considering any complicated machine as a single thing, in truth
it is a city or society, each member of which was bred truly after its kind. We see a
machine as a whole, we call it by a name and individualize it; we look at our own
limbs, and know that the combination forms an individual which springs from a
single center of reproductive action." Ibid., 285.
44. Ibid., 286.
45. "Labor is not fuse and foremost concerned with objects, it aims at the dynamics
that animate objects. Labor is a relation of forces: the action of forces meant to orient
other forces. It is not directly concerned with possession but with becoming. [ . . . ] In
work, there is not on one side the subject and on the other the object. To work, one's
senses must adapt to the play of forces animating the object. [. . .] In work, a pre
reflexive relationship with objects is manifest, which 'precedes consciousness' and
'undermines a clear separation between subject and object."' Philippe Davezies,
"Entre psychique et social, quelle place pour l'activice?" La sante mentale en actes
(Toulouse: ERES, 2005), 123.
46. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, op. cit., 36.
47. Felix Guattari, MoleC11!ar Revoltttion, op. cit., 84.
48. Ibid., 127.
49. Money obviously has other functions that become clear through the interaction
with other semiotic systems: at the "symbolic" level, money functions as an imagi
nary subjection of the individual. His purchasing power "manipulates him nor only
according to codes of social srarus" but also according to perceptual and sexual
codes. The monetary economy "interacts constantly with the signifying encodings
of language, especially through legal and regulatory systems." Felix Guattari, La
Rivoltttion mo!iC11!aire (Fontenay-sous-Bois, France: Recherches, 1977), 295.
50. What one calls purchasing power is in fu.ct a non-power. Only the actions of the
dominated can transform these impotentized signs into signs ofpower by making them
function in a process ofsubjectivation independent of the economic law ofpurchasing
power. In the self-.valorization process of the dominated, they represent nothing other
than t!i.e independent self-positioning of their own production and reproduction.
5 1 . Felix Guattari, Schimanarync Cartographies, trans. Andrew Gaffey (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 168.
52. Felix Guattari, MoleC11!ar Revolution, op. cir., 76. Translation modified.
Notes / 259
53. "On one paper surface we combine very different sources that are blended
through the intermediary of a homogeneous graphical language," i.e., the diagram.
Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality ofScience Studies (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 66. Latour very hastily concludes that "we
have never been modern." Such is true only in terms of machinic enslavement. As
for social subjection, we have indeed been modern and even hyper-modern.
Capitalist deterritorialization continually reterritorializes itself on "man" and on the
"individualism" of the subject, the individual, homo economicus, etc., which, sys
tematically fulling, fulls back on the "collectivism" of nationalism, racism, fascism,
Nazism, machinism, class exploitation, etc. By neglecting the connection between
enslavement and subjection, Latour takes major political risks, for he is incapable of
accounting for the dramatic endpoint toward which capitalism systematically tends.
To say that "we have never been modern" is the symmetrically opposite error of
those who see only subjection (Ranciere, Badiou).

54. The panopticon "is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal
form [ . . . ] : it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached
from any specific use." Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Vmrage Books, 1995), 202, 205.
55. Ibid., 202.
56. "When you write a function 'x function of. . . ' it looks sratic, but these are signs
=
that function in order to grasp a series ofprocesses that are of the order ofreal time and
movement, that try to account for it." Felix Guattari, Chimeres 23 (Summer 1 994): 43.
57. Felix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, op. cit., 22. Translation modified.
58. Radio broadcasting does not furnish "the orientation, limits, and structure of
the space" of enunciation but only the relations among sound intensities. The
radio "uses sound fragments less as sensory qualities relating to an object than as an
unlimited series of modes and passive and active forces of affect." "'Sound carries
elementary forces (intensities, pitch, intervals, rhythm, and tempo) that have a more
direct impact on people than the meanings of words-that is the foundation of
radiophonic art."' Serge Cardinal, "La radio, modulateur de !'audible," Chimeres 53
(2004): 5 1-52. Cardinal cites Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: An Art of Sound (Salem,
Massachusetts: Ayer Company Publishers, 1986), 28-29. Speech along with televi
sion and computers are always being "machined."
59. Greek political orators would deliver a "speech meant to last a very brief period
of time, in a space never to exceed that in which the human voice could be heard,"
before a limited number of people "momentarily removed from all other prevailing
influences," a speech written by the orator in the same spirit. "The newspaper is
meant for a much larger, although dispersed, audience, made up ofindividuals who,
while they read their article, remain subject to all kinds of distraction, hearing the
buzz of conversations around them, among friends or in a cafe, ideas contrary to
those of the author." Readers, like radio listeners, never see the writer/speaker, nor
his gestures, bodily movements, or facial expressions, and, unlike the radio, they do

not hear his voice or intonation. With his speech alone the orator affeccs his audience.
On the other hand, several articles are needed to reach the same result, since an "arti
cle is but one link in a chain of articles, coming in general from multiple writers who
make up the newsroom." The newspaper cannot express a sec of coherent ideas, with
a harmonious display of arguments, as with the orator's rhetoric. "The newspaper
topic is made up of innumerable topics that are given every morning with the events
of the day or of the day before. It is as if, in the middle of one of Demosthenes'
harangues against Philip, messengers approached ac every instant co give him the
very latest news, and as if the story and the interpretation of all chis information
were co form the concenc of his speech." Gabriel Tarde, Les Transformatiom dtt
pouvoir (Paris: Les Empecheurs de penser en rond, 2003), 256-258.
3. Mixed Semiotics
1. The "accident" that hit Wall Street in May 2010 (the sudden 10% drop in share
prices which in just a few seconds made billions of dollars go up in smoke-in 14
seconds stocks changed hands 27,000 times} originated in computer and data com
munications machines. The transformation of operators from protagonists into
spectators was due to the technological and strucrural revolution of the American
stock market. The invention of ever more powerful computers has changed the way
in which investors interact with the marker. Today; more than 90% of orders made
on the New York Stock Exchange are automated. The largest part of transactions on
Wall Street are made automatically without human intervention, for the speed with
which people can calculate and act is much too slow relative to the mass of informa
tion and speed with which it circulates. "Since stock market transactions have been
completely taken over by computers, speculators' ultimate weapon is speed. IBtrarapid
buying and selling softwares, based on ever more complex algorithms on ever more
powerful computers are now critical tools. A cur-throat arms race is caking place
among traders [. . .] . The lead time {the delay between the issue of an order and its
execution) is around a millisecond, and che profits subsequently made amount to
billions of dollars every year. Supercomputers scan dozens of exchanges in order to
detect market trends, then place orders ac the speed oflighc, leaving the much slower
traditional investor in the dusc. They can also detect the ceiling price a buyer sets (the
price above which he won't buy a stock). As soon as ic is reached, the compucers buy
up all the available stocks before the real-life buyer has the time to act, selling them
ac a higher price, and generally at the highest price possible-that is, at one cent
below the ceiling [. . .] . In response to the demand for maximum speed, small systems
for automated cransacrions have emerged. They operate with the help of a few dozen
employees set up in inexpensive offices fur from Wall Street. Certain of these systems
have become formidable competition for the traditional scock market. In July 2009,
the No/ York Srock Exchange accounted for only 28% of marker transactions in the
Uniced States and the NASDAQ just 21 %. Two companies thac most people don't
know about, che BATS Exchange in Kansas Ciry, Missouri, and Direct Edge in
Jersey Cicy, New Jersey; are competing co become the third largest American
exchange, accounting fur 10% to 12% of the market depending how one measures."
Yves Eudes, "Les 'Geeks' a Ia conquece de Wall Street'' Le Monde, September 2, 2009.
Notes / 261
2. Felix Guattari, "Ricornellos and Existential Affeccs," trans. Juliana Schiesari and
Georges Van Den Abbeele, The G11attari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Cambridge:
Blackwell Publishers, 1 996), 158.
3. Recall, for example, the trial ofJerome Kerviel, the Sociece Generale trader, who
was judged the "sole" guilty party in the loss of five billion dollars.
4. Conversely; in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Gayatri Chakravorcy Spivak advocates

for a rerurn co the "theories ofideology." The essay is surprising in many respeccs, for
it manages an incredible number of misundersrandings and misinterpretations of
Deleuze/Guaccari's and Foucault's work. A claim like the following, chosen at random
among so many, makes one embarrassed for the person who wrote it: "In the Fou
caulc-Deleuze conversation, the issue seems to be chat there is no representation, no
signifier (Is it to be presumed chat the signifier has already been dispatched? There is,
then, no sign-structure operating experience and thus might one lay semiotics co
rest?)." Colonial Disco11rse and Post-Colonial Theory, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 74. According co the
French publisher, the essay represencs "a veritable publishing event." le remains a
mystery chat one can give rise to a debate around such a hodgepodge of "srupidicy."
5. Daniel N. Stem, The lnteipersonal World ofthe Infant fJ...ondon: Karnac Books, 1998).
6. Ibid., p. 71.
7. Ibid., 54.
8. Ibid., 67-68.
9. "The "sense of an emergent self' is also what the philosophers of difference (Berg
son, William James, Tarde) have examined since the lace nineteenth century. "Pure
experience" is the name James gives to "the immediate Hux of life which furnishes
the material of our later reflection with its conceptual categories" and its division
into subject and object, self and ocher, spatioremporal figures, etc. James further
remarks chat it is "new born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, ill
nesses" chat experience or offer the experience of chis emergent self and its
organizing processes. "A Pluralistic Universe," Williams fames: Writing.r 1902-1910
(New York: Library of America, 1987), 782.
10. Daniel N. Srern, op. cir., 27.

1 1. Ibid., 72.
12. Ibid. 128, 124.
13. Ibid. 133.
14. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), 67.
15. Daniel N. Seem, op. cit., 176-177.

16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), 103. Butler under
scores and indeed exacerbates a major difficulty in Foucault's thought: to maintain
that power appararuses are productive, that they are constituents of subjectivity, gen
der, etc., means that they come first, that they are originary. If they provide us with
a new conception of power as "production, in opposition to the juridical under
standing of the term, they no less imprison the theory in the web of power, as
Foucault himself recognized. Deleuze and Guattari offer a way out of the impasse:
"Of course, an assemblage of desire will include power arrangements [. . ], bur these
.
must be located among the different components of the assemblage. In short,

"power apparatuses do not assemble or constitute anything, but rather assemblages
of desire disseminate power formations according to one of their dimensions." Gilles
Deleuze, Two Regimes ofMadness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los
Angeles: Serniotext(e) , 2006), 125. Translation modified.
17. Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian
Holmes (Los Angeles: Serniot=(e) , 2007), 316.
18. Felix Guattari, Chaosophy, trans. David L. Sweet, Jarred Becker, and Taylor
Adkins (Los Angeles: Serniotext(e), 2009), 243.
19. Ibid., 242.
20. Felix Guattari, ''.Agencements. Transistances. Persistances," Seminar of December

8, 1981. http://www.revue-chimeres.fr/drupal_chirneres/files/8 1 1208.pd
2 1 . Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, op. cit., 263-264. Translation modified.
22. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hermetic Empiricism, rrans. Ben Lawton and Louise K Bar
nett (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1 988), 1 69.
23. Ibid., 172.
26. Ibid., 265, 267.
27. Pier Paolo Pasolini, op. cit., 172.
28. Felix Guattari, Les Annees d'hiver: 1980-1985 (Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires,
2009), 129.
29. Marie-Anne Dujarier, L'idialdzt travail (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006).
30. Ibid., 28.
3 1 . Ibid., 50, 1 08.
32. Ibid., 1 12.
33. Ibid., 1 1 5.
Notes / 263
34. The Althusserian interpellation constitutive of the subject who is addressed by
power ("Hey, you there!") would be totally ineffecrual without the work of asignifying
semiotics.
35. Ibid., 27.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 160.
38. Ibid., 161.
39. "There no longer exists a single official voice but multitudes of functional mea
surements deployed for the sake of the hierarchy, each independent of the other."
Ibid., 212.
40. Ibid., 164.
41. The Greek term 'hypomnemata' might be translated simply as "reminder." We

owe the term's rediscovery and use to Foucault: "Hupomnemata, in the technical
sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as
memory aids." Michel Foucault, "Self Writing," Ethics: Subjectivity and Trnth, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), 209. Hypomnemata are, insofu
as acts of self-writing, a modality of the constitution of the sel
42. Marie-Anne Dujarier, op. cit., 166.
43. Ibid., 29.
44. "Soon the processes themselves will be the major factor in evaluating work.
It may even be that, more than work, the evaluation of processes will become
the priority." Ibid., 1 64.
45. Ibid., 6.
46. As Marx remarks, in a quote Benjamin includes in his vicious critique of social
democracy's exaltation of work, "'the man who possesses no other property than his
labor power' must of necessity become 'the slave of other men who have made them
selves the owners."' Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History,"
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 259.
47. Christophe Dejours, "La critique du travail entre vulnerabilite et domination,"
in Travail et sante, (Toulouse: Eres, 2010).
48. As the former president Nicolas Sarkozy put it in a speech in 2007, "I am
proposing the following choice to the majority party: social policy, work, educa
tion policy, work, economic policy, work, fiscal policy, work, business policy,
work, immigration policy, work, monetary policy, work, budgetary policy, work."
"I am asking you to make work your policy."
49. Ibid., 1 72.

50. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hermetic Empiricism, op. cit., 265.
5 1 . Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (New York: Carcanet
Press, 1987), 26. In the past "what chose outskins of the city said to me in their
coded language was: here the poor live and the life chat goes on here is poor. But the
poor are workers. And workers are different from you middle-class people." In the
same places today, "chose outskirts will say to you in their coded language: 'There is
no more popular spirit here.' The peasants and the workers are 'elsewhere,' even if
materially they are still here." Ibid., 35-36.
52. Ibid., 31.
53. Ibid., 37.
54. Felix Guaccari, "Ritornellos and Existential Affects," op. cit., 160.
55. Felix Guaccari, "Ritournelles et affects existentiels (Discussion)," Seminar of Sep

tember 15, 1987: hccp://www.revue-chimeres.fr/drupal_chimeres/files/870915b.pd
56. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, op. cit., 39.

57. Felix Guaccari, La Revolution mollculaire (Paris: Union generale d'editions,
1977), 95.
58. Felix Guattari, La Revolution mo/ec11laire (Foncen,ay-sous-Bois, France:
Recherches, 1 977), 2 17.
59. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ecrits corsaires, trans. Philippe Guilhon (Paris: Flarnmarion,
1976), 256.
60. Ibid., 86.
61. Ibid., 82.
62. Ibid., 79.
63. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, op. cit., xix.
64. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ecrits corsaires, op. cit., 49.
65. Ibid., 269.
66. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Entretims avec Jean Dujlot (Paris: Editions Gutenberg,
2007), 182.
67. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ecrits corsaires, op. cit., 147.
68. Ibid.,145.
69. Sergei Eisenstein wrote remarkable texts on the animism in Walt Disney's
cartoons. See Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (London: Methuen, 1988).
70. One should recall chat in E. P. Thompson's The Making ofthe English Working Class
these same "oral" cultures play a central role, something Marxists all too easily forget.
Notes / 265
7 1 . Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hcrits corsaires, op. cit., 1 1 0.
72. In the early twentieth century, it was 60 to 65% peasantry; in 2000, nly 1 .8%.
73. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Entretiens avec jean Dzifl.ot, op. cit., 105.
74. Ibid., 36.
75. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, op. cit., 283.
76. Ibid., 279.
77. Ibid., 133.
4. Conflict and Sign Systems

1 . An "intermittent du spectacle" is a worker in the arts-artists or technicians in
cinema, television, theater, etc.-employed on an irregular basis. The term desig
nates a French legal starus: above a threshold of hours worked in these domains in a
given year, the "intermittent" receives public benefits when he or she is not
employed slightly superior to those of basic unemployment insurance. The French
word "intermittent" is retained throughout to indicate this specific type of French
worker. Translator's note.
2. The Coordination des Interrnittents et Precaires (Association of Intermittent and

Precarious Workers) was formed in 2003 in order to protect intermittent workers'
right to unemployment insurance which the government's national union for
employment (UNEDIC) had put under threat. The Coordination carries out
actions in defense of these workers' rights and against workers' (further) precari7.ation.
See http://www.cip-idorg/. Translator's note.
3. Michel de Certeau, Cult11re in the Plural, trans. Tom Conley {Minneapolis: Uni
versity of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1 1 1.
4. Michel Foucault, Serority, Territory, Popttlation: Lectttres at the College de France

1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell {New York: Picador, 2009).
5. Starting in the 1980s, consumption, mass communications, and mass culture have
been part of an integrating and co-opting process of "singularity" such that the
problem is now the following: How can one integrate singularities, differences,
minorities, in the standardizing and leveling system of capitalist valuation and accu
mulation? "Corporate leaders are trying to create conditions for at least some
singularization to be possible in the vectors of production. This means that in these
stratified structures an attempt is being made to create sufficient margins to allow for
these processes, as long as the system capable of co-opting them remains absolute." Felix
Guattari, Molemlar Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Clapshow and Brian Holmes (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 70. We are confronted with a multiplicity of choices,
options, and possibilities that account for "specific" issues in order to circumscribe,
block, and reincorporate certain problematics. This is why Guattari prefers to speak of
"processes of singularization'' rather than "singularity": "The whole problem comes

down to the cooptation and integration of singularity whose aim is to block and neu
tralize processes ofsingularization." Felix Guattati, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilee, 1992), 183.
6. "Problernatization [. . .] is the totality of discursive and non-discursive practices

that introduces something into the play of true and fulse and constitutes it as an
object of thought." Michel Foucault, "The Concern for Truth," trans. Alan Sheridan,
Politics, Philosophy, Cttltttre (New York: Routledge, 1988), 257.
7. Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" trans. Paul Rabinow, The Fottca11lt

Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 49.
8. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes ofMadness, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina
(Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 143.
9. Ibid., 15.
10. Pierre Michel Menger, Les lntermittents dtt spectacle: sociologie d'ime exception
(Paris: Editions de l'EHESS, 2005).
1 1 . Pierre Michel Menger, Profession artiste: extension du domaine de la creation

(Paris: Texruel, 2005), 45.
1 2. Ibid., 59.
13. In 2005, a study by the Ministry of Culture showed that half of the artists
afftliated with the Maison des Artistes (an "association responsible for managing the
social security regime of artists in the visual and graphic arts") declared malting less
than 8,290 euros annually. If we look at one of the criteria for poverty (monetary
poverty) indicated by INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies),
we see that half of these artists declare income below the poverty line. We find
among the artists affiliated with the Maison des Artistes the same structure, in more
acute form, that we have observed for the job market of intermittents. In line with
a "widespread characteristic among arts professionals," income appears very concen
trated: half of the artists share a little more than 10% of allocated revenues;
conversely, 10% of artists enjoying the highest incomes share around 45% of total
allocated revenues." Looking at the same study, in which the Ministry of Culture
examines the changes in income of "creators" affiliated with AGESSA (the "associa
tion responsible for managing the social security regime ofartists") in the three years
1993, 2000, and 2005, we see "a significant increase, in every category, in the num
ber of artists whose incomes are below the threshold for membership." 30% of
photographers, 28% of software designers, and 30% of playwrights do not meet the
threshold for membership. Departement des Etudes, de la Prospective et des Sta
tistiques (DEPS), "Peintres, graphistes, sculpteurs . . . Jes artistes auteurs affilies a la
Maison des artistes en 2005," Culture Chiffres, activit!, emploi, travail (2007-6),
www2.culture.gouv.fr/deps. We should also note that the Maison des Artistes does
not ortly bring together artists in the fine arts but also a whole series of new profes
sions, which attests, in its way, to the changes in the figure of the artist and creator:
painters, graphic designers, sculptors, illustrators, cartoonists, textile designers,
engravers, ceramists, stained-glass artists, decorative painters, interior designers, etc.
Notes I 267
14. Menger, who boasts of his studying the field for thirty years, nonetheless sys
tematically and blithely confuses work and employment. Throughout his analysis
and recommendations, he limits himself exclusively to employment without ever

taking work imo account.
15. CERC, "La securite de l'emploi face aux defis des transformations economiques"
Ooh security and the challenges of economic change) (Paris: La Documentation
franaise, 2005), http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/var/storage/rapports
publics/054000141/0000.pd.
16. Ibid., 38.
17. UNEDIC, the State national union for employment.
18. Michel de Cerceau, The Practice ofEveryday Life, trans. Steven Rendell (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 185-186.
19. Ibid., 1 86.
20. "The social sciences consistently claim for themselves the unearthly power of
reestablishing meaning they fearlessly assert is hidden and that it is precisely their
mission to uncover. Psychologists, who are on the front lines in this, manage to silence
no one: to accomplish that objective would require armies of policemen, judges, and
social workers. They make do with changing the origin of speech, attributing it to irra
tional fears that must be explained, not in view of making a decision about those fears
but of accepting them." Michel Callon, Pierre Lascumes, and Yannick Barthe, Agir dans
un monde incertain. Essai sur la dbnocratie technique (Patis: Seuil, 2001), 158.
21. Gilles Deleuze, "Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis," trans. Alexander Hickox,
Desert Islands and Other Texts (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 275-276. Transla
tion modified.
22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Min
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 986), 83. Translation modified.
23. According to Deleuze, these apparatuses of speech production are a "strange

invention" that actualizes the "cogito" in a different way every time (psychoanalysis,
communications, marketing), constituting and splitting subjects, "as if in one form
the doubled subject were the cattSe ofthe statements ofwhich, in its other form, it itself
is a part." Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A ThottSand PlateattS, trans. Brian Massurni
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 987), 130. The two subjects corre
spond to and presuppose one another. The cogito, or the doubling of the subject,
represents the invention of a mode of signification and subjectivation that has no
need for a transcendent power in order to function. One is subordinated not because
one obeys an outside authority but because one obeys onesel The power of subjec
tion, of subordination, is thus an immanent power coming from the subject himself
24. Reality shows use these same techniques but on another scale (in the mass audi
tions that take place throughout the country and in front of a public who follows

the making of"stars" as it happens). It really is a formatting of gestures, facial expres
sions, the voice, the way of singing, carried out by "instructors" (dance, singing, etc.)
who must mold the individual's expression to the model of the "star" produced by
the culture industry.
25. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormina (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 274.
26. Felix Guattari, Schraoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Gaffey (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013), 43-44.
27. Michel de Certeau, Cttlture in the Plttral, op. cit., 137.
28. But these dynamics are far from unilateral. "The public is no longer there, it is no
longer circulating in these images or caught in their traps; it is elsewhere, in the
background, assuming the position of an amused, interested, or bored receiver. [ . . . ]
For the purpose of obtaining an inkling ofwhat the receivers of serialized messages
may be, what they think, or what they desire, polls begin to multiply. Market
research of this kind only yields answers by respondents who 'play' with the ques
tions; from the polls are extracted only fragments of the theatricalizacion in which it
is playing a role; the polls no longer affect the people who slip away and disappear
into unknown realms behind the 'reactions' of a 'public' that is now and again called
upon to walk onto the stage of a national commed.ia dell'arte." Ibid., 136-137.
29. The complicity between the social sciences and media also occurs at a less direct,
less immediate, level than what we have described with regard to intermittent
workers. The social sciences have invented a whole series of techniques which the
media have appropriated and reconfigured. They have experimented with "methods
of posing the 'right' questions allowing them to obtain the 'right' answers in opinion
polls, through their phrasing of questionnaires, or in ethnographic studies of native
populations. W'hat is awe-inspiring in the social sciences is that they are sufficiently
diverse and varied ro be able to both stop people from speaking and make them
speak." Michel Callon, Pierre Lascumes, and Yannick Barthe, Agir dans ttn monde
incertain. Essai sur la dimocratie technique, op. cit., 158.
30. Michel Foucault, The Birth ofBiopolitics, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 67.
31 Ibid., 64.
32. Gilles Deleuze, "Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis," op. cit., 276.
5. "Scum" and the Critique of Performatives
1 . The word "scum" translates the French racaille, which former French President
Nicolas Sarkozy, while still interior minister, used to describeyouth from impoverished
Parisian suburbs during the riots that erupted there and elsewhere in France in 2005
following the death of two suburban teenagers. Recorded live, the insult was well
covered by French media and a cause of much controversy. Translator's note.
Notes / 269
2. Paolo Virno, Q;1ando ii verbo sifa carne: linguaggio e natura umana (Torino: Bol
lati Boringhieri, 2003).
3. Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language, trans. Gregory Conti (Los Angeles:
Serniotext(e), 2008.
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004).
5. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with W'Ords- (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1976).
6. Fran<;ois Recanati, Meaning and Force (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987), 9.
7. "Thus the utterance 'I speak to you' is not a performative, although irs enuncia
tion emails that one speak." Oswald Ducrot, "De Saussure a la philosophie du
langage" (introduction to the French edition of John Searle's Speech Acts), Les actes
de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972), 12.
8. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, trans. Graham Burchell
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6 1 .
9. Ibid., 63, 62.
10. Ibid., 64-65.
1 1 . Ibid., 68.
12. Ibid., 68.
13. "The subject of linguistics is only the material, only the means of speech commu
nication, and not speech communication irself, not utterances in their essence and not
the relationships among them (dialogic), not the forms of speech communication, and
not speech genres. Linguistics studies only the relationships among elemenrs within
the language system, not the relationships among utterances and not the relations of
utterances to reality and to the speaker, nor between the utterances and past and
future utterances." Mikhail Balthtin, Balthtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,
trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986), 1 18.
14. Ibid., 68, 127.
15. "Instead of obliterating the possibility of response, paralyzing the addressee with
fear, the threat may well be countered by a different kind of performative act [. . . ] ."
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics ofthe Peiformative (New York: Routledge,
1997), 12.
16. Mikhail Balthtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, op. cit., 76.
17. Ibid.
18. Oswald Ducrot's definition of the performative's force is in reality the force
of every enunciation, every speech act, once the latter is understood as a dialogic
270 I Signs and lv1acl1ines

relation. The dialogic sphere opens che possibility for generating an event and
strategy among speakers. "In chis way, for che person to whom che enunciation is
addressed, che field of possible actions is suddenly restructured. A new dimension
emerges which brings to light a new measure of behavior. This reorganization is not
art empirical fact, an accident occurring because of che utterance." Oswald Ducrot,
"De Saussure a la philosophie du langage," op. cit., 22.
19. "In reality, practical intercourse is constantly generating, although slowly and
in a narrow sphere. The interrelationships between speakers are always changing,
even if che degree of change is hardly noticeable. In che process of chis generation,
che content being generated also generates. Practical interchange carries che nature
of an event, and che most insignificant philological exchange participates in chis
incessant generation of the event." Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev, The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship, uans. Alben J. Wehrle (Cambridge: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1985), 95.
20. For there co be a power relationship (and not simply violence), it is necessary
chat "'the ocher' (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized
and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and chat, faced wich a rela
tionship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible
inventions may open up." Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Huben
Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 220.
21. "This is first of all because discourse is a weapon of power, conuol, subjection,
qualification, and disqualification. Bartle discourse and not reflective discourse [. . .] .
Discourse-the mere fact o f speaking, o f employing words, o f using the words of
ochers (even if it means turning chem around), words chat ochers underscand and
accept (and possibly turn around chemselves)-chis very fact is a force. Discourse is,
wich respect to che relation of forces, not only a surface of inscription but itself
operates effects." Michel Foucault, Dits et ecrits, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 124.
22. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, op. cit., 95-96. Dialogism can be
understood quite well in che terms Foucault uses to describe action: "[T]he way in
which a partner in a cenain game acts with regard to what he chinks should be che
action of che ochers and what he considers che others chink to be his own; it is the
way in which one seeks to have the advantage over others." Michel Foucault, "The
Subject and Power," op. cit., 224. "Games" in Foucault are of a whole different kind
than chose we find in Wittgenstein.
23. V. N. Volosinov (Voloshinov), "Discourse in Life and Discourse in An (Con

cerning Sociological Poetics)," uans. I. R. Titunik, Freudianism: a Marxist Critique
(New York: Academic Press, 1976), 1 02, 106.
24. Ibid., 104.
25. Voloshinov quoted in Tzvecan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle,
trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 46.
Notes / 271
26. Voloshinov, op. cit. 104.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 107.
29. For Ranciere the 2005 riots were nor political because the "youth" fulled co insti
tute a space for incerlocution.
30. "[A] certain performative force results from the rehearsal of the conventional
formulae in non-conventional ways. [. . .] [A] formula can break with its originary
concexc, assuming meanings and functions for which it was never intended." Judith
Butler, F.xcitable Speech, op. cir., 147. Derrida identifies the "force" of the perfor
mative with a scruccural feature of the sign, every sign being obliged co break with
the context in which it is used in order co conserve its "icerabiliry." Here, the social
conventions do nor constitute the "force" of the performative, as in Austin, bur
rather the scruccural status of the sign-mk.
3 1 . The speech ace also requires a repetition bur an oncological one which muse be
distinguished from linguistic repetition. Thus the function of repetition in Guaccari's
existential pragmatics.
32. Mikhail Bakhcin, Art and Answerability, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin, Texas:
Universiry ofTexas Press, 1 990), 308-309. See Guaccari's commentary in Chaosmosis,
trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Universiry
Press, 1995), 15-18.
33. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, op. cit.
34. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, op. cit., 159.
35. Ibid., 69.
36. Ibid., 9 1 .
37. Oswald Ducroc, "De Saussure a l a philosophie d u langage," 34.
38. Linguistics distinguishes between the "locutionary ace," corresponding co phonetic

(articulation of certain sounds according co certain rules), grammatical, and semantic
activity; the "illocutionary ace," defined by the "rules of discourse" (when someone asks
a question, gives an order, threatens, warns, and so on, one also engages an obligation
of certain discursive behavior which restructures the ocher's possibilities for discursive
action); and the "perlocutionary ace," which goes beyond discourse and is defined by
the "effects" it has on the listener (it affects his feelings, thoughts, and actions). Among
linguists, the lase ace is non-linguistic, for effects are solely the secondary, psychologi
cal, and sociological consequences supplementing the enunciation. Only Bakhtin and
Guaccari challenge these linguistic principles. The theorist considered the founder of
semiotics follows the same path: "With Peirce, the perlocutionary effects (the face of
influencing or shaping the ocher's conduce), far from supplementing the ace of enun
ciation, are an essential pare of it. [. . . ] In sum, Peirce arrives at a theory oflanguage in

a more rigorous sense than Searle's." Christiane Chauvin!, Peirce et la signification
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 148.
39. The formulation is Butler's in &citable Speech, op. cir., 28.
40. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, op. cit., 120.
41. Ibid. As early as 1928 Bakhtin, using the same arguments, criticized the static model
of communication. "This scheme is radically incorrect. In real fact, the relationship
between A and R is constantly changing and generating, and itselfchanges in the com
municative process. And there is no ready-made communication X. It is generated in
the process of intercourse between A and R Furthermore, X is not transmitted from
one to the other, bur is constructed between them as a kind of ideological bridge, is
built in the process of their interaction." The FormalMethod in Literary Scholarship, op.
cit., 1 52. Since the performacive's rediscovery by critical thought, in particular in the
US, a current of "performative studies" has developed which identifies performative
and performance whereas their dynamics are diametrically opposed.
42. "Therefore, the single utterance, with all its individuality and creativity, can in
no way be regarded as a completelyfree combination of forms of language, as is sup
posed, for example, by Saussure (and by many other linguists after him), who
juxtaposed the utterance (la parole), as a purely individual act." Mikhail Bakhtin,
Speech Genres, op. cit., 8 1 . There is nor only a combinatory of language but also one
of speech genres, of ways of speaking.
43. Ibid., 77. "There are a great many everyday and special genres (i.e., military and
industrial commands and orders) in which expression, as a rule, is effected by one
sentence of the appropriate type. [ . . .] Bur for the moment we need only note that
this type of sentence knits together very stably with its generic expression, and also
that it absorbs individual expression especially easily. Such sentences have contributed
much to reinfordng the illusion that the sentence is by natttre expressive" (my empha
sis). Ibid., 89-90. The force and expressivity of the speech act never derives from
syntactic, grammatical, etc., forms, as Benvenisre believes, bur only from the dia
logic and evaluative relationships that support them. Command or expressivity are
not given via the abstract forms of language but through the "dialogic harmonics,"
through the voices that traverse utterances and that alone can express the "beautiful,
the just, and the true."
44. Ibid., 80.
45. Ibid., 97.
46. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, op. cit., 28. In these "critical" or even "revolutionary"
readings.of the relationship between language and power, one can still hear the "speech
genres" of the priest! Radical and originary servitude to "the Law" and to "Language"
[La Langue] (to castration, repression, to lack, in La.can's original fully-realized version)
replaces dependence on original sin. The repression of desire is the modem iteration
of the old faulr before the divinity. Now it is no longer humanity's sin against the
Notes / 273
divine order, but an "individual" sin against the patriarchal order a:nd the law of capi
talism. This Hegel-Lacanian rerurn smacks of the sacristy!
47. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 148.
Foucault always conceived power as a "relationship of power" (whether in the form of
war, battle, or government) in which acting differently is always possible. A way out of
power's grip is never sought in the magical Hegel-Lacanian exchange of master and
slave (if servitude to power is a necessary condition for emancipation, there is no other
solution but the dialectid), but rather in the ontology of the "relation to the sel''
48. Neoteny in Lacan, just as in all the other more or less reactionary social sciences,
manifests an originary "lack," a constitutive absence, an "incompleteness," and man's
"delay in development," which the signifier, language, and culrure cover over and
sublimate. Ibid., 152.
49. Mikhail Bakhtin. The Dialngic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin, Texas: University ofTexas Press, 198 1), 293.
50. V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Lang11age, trans. Ladislav

Matejka and I. R. Tirunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), 126.
5 1 . Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Medvedev, The Fonnal Method in Literary Scholarship,

op. cit., 121.
52. Ibid. "The question arises as to whether science can deal with such absolutely
unrepeatable individualities as utterances, or whether they extend beyond the
bounds of generalizing scientific cognition. And the answer is, of course, it can."
Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres, op. cit., 108.
53. "It is much easier to study the given in what is created (for example, language,
ready-made and general elements of world view, reflected phenomena of reality, and
so forth) than to study what is created. Frequently the whole of scientific analysis
amounts to a disclosure of everything that has been given, already at hand and
ready-made before the work has existed (that which is found by the artist and not
created by him)." Ibid., 120.
54. Michel Foucault, Dits et tfcrits, vol. 3, op. cit., 124.
55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres, op. cit., 93.
56. Ibid., 94.
6. The Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity
1 . Felix Guattari, "A propos des Machines," Chimeres 19 (Spring 1993): 94.
2. Felix Guattari, Soft S11bversions, trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman (Los
Angeles: Semiotext(e) , 2009), 299. Translation modified.
3. Felix Guattari and Olivier Zahm, "Entretien avec Olivier Zahm," Chimeres 23
(Summer 1994): 58. Nearly all of this chapter's quotations are taken from the
274 I Signs and lv1achines

uanscriptions of Guattari's seminars, which can be found on the Chimeres website
(http://www.revue-chimeres.fr/drupal_chimeres/?q=taxonoiny_menu/3/236).
These are informal discussions that the author did not plan for publication. They
offer a glimpse of his thinking as it was developing.
4. Felix Guattari, "Singularite ec complexice," Seminar of January 22, 1985.
5. Badiou would do well to read more attentively what Deleuze wrote with the "non
philosopher" Guaccari after Logic ofSense and especially what Guattari wrote alone.
Ic would prevent him from asserting falsehoods of the cype: "Deleuze's formula is
irrevocable: 'The event, that is to say sense.' From the beginning of his book, he
fashions what to my mind is a chimerical entity, an inconsistent portmanteau-word:
the 'sense-event.' Incidentally; this brings him far closer than he would have wished
co the linguistic turn and the great lineage of contemporary sophistry. To argue that
the event belongs ro the register of sense tips it over entirely onto the side of lan
guage." Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberro Toscano (New York:
Continuum, 2009), 386. Not only did Guattari steer Deleuze away from psycho
analysis but from scrucruralism as well. Foucault's lase lecrures equally put the lie to
Badiou's criticisms, according to which Foucault is implausibly supposed to have
systematized a "linguistic anthropology." Ibid., 35.
6. Felix Guattari, "La crise de production de subjectivite," Seminar ofApril 3, 1984.
7. Felix Guattari, "Singularice ec complexite," op. cit.
8. Felix Guattari, "Machine abscraice et champ non-discursif," Seminar ofMarch 12,

1985.
9. Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomingron,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1 995), 127-128.
10. Felix Guaccari, "Substicuer l'econciation a I'expression," Seminar ofApril 25, 1984.
1 1 . Felix Guattari, Seminar of October l, 1985.
12. Felix Guattari, "Singularite et complexite," op. cit.
13. Felix Guattari, Seminar of October l, 1985.
14. Felix Guattari, "Singularite et complexice," op. cit. Content and sense become
double: a semantic content and a pragmatic content, a semiotic sense and an exis
tential sense.
15. Felix Guattari, Seminar of October l, 1985.
16. "So it is chat for decades, a constellation of existential ritomellos [re&ains] gave
access to a 'Lenin-language' engaging specific procedures which could just as well be of
a rhetorical and lexical order as of a phonological, prosodic, facial, or other order. The
threshold crossing-or initiation-that legitimates a relation offull existential belonging
co a group-subject depends upon a certain concatenation and becoming-consistent of
Notes / 275
these components, which are thereby ritomellized." Felix Guattari, "Riroumellos and
Existential Affects," trans. Juliana Schiesari and Georges Van Den Abbeele, The
Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 165.
17. Felix Guanaci, Seminar of October l, 1985.
18. "The subjectivity of the collective assemblage of enunciation is characterized by

a subjective rransitivism: I fall and someone else cries; [ . . .] there is no attribution of
effects and affects." Felix Guattari, "Substiruer l'econciation a I'expression," op. cit.
20. Felix Guattari, "Machine absrraite et champ non-discursif," op. cit.
2 1 . Felix Guanaci, Seminar of Ocrober l, 1 985.

23. Felix Guattari, "Singularite et complexite," op. cit.
24. Ibid.
25. "Freud refers to various ancient myths in these connexions, and claims that his
researches have now explained how it came about that anybody should think or pro
pound a myth of that sore. Whereas in fact Freud has done something different. He has
not given a scientific explanation ofthe ancient myth. What he has done is to propound
a new myth." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology,
and&ligiotts Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 5 1 .
26. Felix Guanaci, Chaosmosis, op. cit., 65.
27. Felix Guattari, "Machine abscraite et champ non-discursif," op. cit.
28. Felix Guattari, "I.:acte et la singularite," Seminar of April 28, 1981.
29. "Things happen outside of representations, things that aren't the product of
chance but rather are highly differentiated, involving the entire economy of subse
quent choices. And the first of these things [ . . . ] is the fact of acting itsel Indeed, you
have the refrain of representation, right, I'm going to go now." And then, a
moment later, you're leaving but you have no representation whatsoever [ . . .]. The
'I'm going' somewhere got disconnected from the system of representation. And yet,
it has to do with representation; these aren't the reflexes of a decerebrated frog. [ . . . ]
Between representation and the act, a whole range of relationships are possible!" Ibid.
30. When "It's working" during a revolution, a struggle, a social change, etc., one is
not primarily dealing with "consciousness raising" but with an assemblage of dis
cursive and non-discursive elements which function and circulate in a diagrammatic
register; one is dealing with a revolutionary "war machine."
3 1 . Felix Guattari, Seminar of October 1 , 1985.
32. Felix Guacrari, 'Tacre et la singularite," Seminar of April 28, 1 98 1 .

33. Felix Guattari, "Crise de production de subjectivite," Seminar ofApril 3, 1984.
34. Felix Guattari, "Machine abstraite et champ non-discursif," op. cit.
35. 'other category must be thought up, because there is no link, because there
is no discursivity, because existential territories are blocked in a non-discursive
agglomeration, a non-discursive constellation." Ibid.
36. Felix Guattari, "Crise de production de subjectivite," op. cit.
37. Ibid.
38. Felix Guattari, "Ritournelles et affects existentiels (Discussion)," Seminar of

September 1 5 , 1987.
39. Ibid.
40. This relationship between the discursive and the non-discursive is always
contradictory and "inevitably contradictory. You cannot seek the ethico-aesthetic
completion of an affect. In saying this, I think of Deligny: we can see that his idea
of completion is, I mean, at bottom, for him, at the level of the smallest gesrure;
there is no room for words. At the same time, Deligny has a kind of enunciative
elegance, a written elegance. The ethical dimension is obvious too. Of course,
Deligny still developed formidable myths. His whole life, he wrote novels, even a
kind of mythology, at a certain point, of the unrepentant delinquent, at another
point, of the autistic child, because there was no other way." Ibid.
4 1 . The politics of the event they propose is a weak and stunted one since, in
reality, there is not one articulation between the existential and the discursive to
examine, bur three: before, during, and after the event of a struggle, a change, a
revolution. The relationship between subjectivation and economic, social, instiru
tional, and linguistic flows must be posed in a radically different way before, during,
and afrer political ruprure. This I attempted to show in my book Expirimentatiom
politiqttes (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2009),
42. Enzo Rullani, "La produzione di valore a mezzo di conoscenza. Il manuale che
non c'e," Sociologia del lavoro 1 1 5 (2009). One only has to think of the "cognitive
experience" of the soccer fan mentioned in Rullani's text to see that the experience
he has in mind has little to do with the cognitive.
43. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, crans. Roberr Hurley, Mark Seem,
and Helen R Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 235-236.
44. "Here Andre Gorz's double porrrait ofthe 'scientific and technical worker' cakes on
its fullmeaning. Although he has mastered a flow of knowledge, information, and
training, he is so absorbed in capital that the reflux of organiz.ed, axiomatized stupidity
coincides with him, so that, when he goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little
desiring-machines by tinkering with a television set-0 despair. Of course the scientist
as such has no revolutionary potential; he is the first integrated agent of integration, a
refuge for bad conscience, and the forced destroyer of his own creativity." Ibid., 236.
Notes / 277
45. Cited by Guattari in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, op. cit., 274n. Mikhail
Bakhtin, "The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal An," Art and
Answerability, op. cit., 278.
46. Felix Guattari, "La crise de production de subjectivite," op. cit.
7. Enunciation and Politics
I . Jacques Ranciere, interview with Eric Alliez, "Biopolitics or Politics?"Dissensus,

trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 93.
2. Michel Foucault, Ethics, crans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1997), 81.
3. Michel Foucault, The Courage ofthe Tmth, trans. Graham Burchell (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 201 1), 9.
4. Michel Foucault, The Government of Selfand Others, trans. Graham Burchell

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 201 0), 156.
5. Ibid., 184.
6. Jacques Ranciere, On the Shores ofPolitics, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso,
1995), 65. "The egalitarian logic implied by the ace of speaking and the inegalitarian
logic inherent in the social bond," ibid., 8 1
7 . The English-language translator of Ranciere's The Politics of Aesthetics defines

"Police or Police Order" as follows: "As the general law that determines the distribu
tion or parts and roles in a community as well as its forms of exclusion, the police is
fuse and foremost an organization of 'bodies' based on a communal distribution of the
sensible." Trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 89. Translator's note.
8. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1999), 51.
9. Ibid., 50.
10. Ibid., 56.
1 1 . Michel Foucault, The Government ofSelfand Others, op. cit., 62, 63.
_
12. Ibid., 68.
1 3. Michel Foucault, The Courage ofTntth, op. cit., 13.
14. Ibid., 1 1.
15. William James, The Will to Believe, in William fames: Writing,r 1878-1899, ed.
Gerald E. Myers (New York: Library of America, 1992), 458.
16. Michel Foucault, The Courage ofthe Tmth, op. cit., 46.
17. Ibid., 225.
18. Ibid., 287.

19. Ibid., 283, 340n.
20. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, op. cit., 1 16.

21. Jacques Ranciere, Hatred ofDemocracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso,
2009J, 82-83. I bought this book the day it came out (September 2005) while
returning from an action organized by the Coordination des Imermittents et Pre
caires (Association ofintermittem and Precaious Workers; see Chapter 4) . We had
first stormed then occupied the room in which one of the Ministry of Culture's
meetings on co-determination was taking place. The latter included government
representatives, unions, and management, who refused the sratus of political sub
jects to everyone except themselves. Looking over the book that evening, I was
surprised to read the passage cited here. Just because neoliberals attack the welfare
state does not mean that we should restrict ourselves to a defensive position and
silence critiques that came our of the political movements of the 1 970s (the pro
duction ofdependence on the State and the exercise ofpower over the body, etc.) or
the critiques political movements continue to put forward (the production of
inequalities, social and political exclusion, control over individuals' lives, etc.).
22. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, op. cit., 9.

23. Michel Foucault, The Courage ofthe Truth, op. cit., 339.
24. Jacques Ranciere, "Le Scandale democratique," interview with Jean-Baptiste
Marongiu, Liberation (December 1 5 , 2005).
25. Michel Foucault, The Courage ofthe Truth, op. cit., 3 14.
26. Ibid., 264.
27. Ibid., 90.
28. Michel Foucault, The Government ofSe!{and Others, op. cit., 3.

29. Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, op. cit., 32.
30. The Groupe d'informacion sur !es prisons was formed in 1971 upon the release
of its manifesto signed by Foucault, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet.
As the name indicates, the group sought to bring to light "one of the hidden regions
of our social system," in particular, the conditions of prisoners who until then had
little or no contact with the exterior during their incarceration. Translator's note.
3 1 . Jacques Ranciere, "La methode de l'egalite," in Laphilosophie diplacee: Atttozer de

Jacques Randere, eds. Laurence Cornu and Patrice Vermeren (Lyon: Horlieu Edi
tions, 2006), 5 14.
32. Michel Foucault, The Courage ofthe Truth, op. cit., 67.
Notes / 279
SIGNS AND
Maurizio Lazzarato
MACHINES Translated by Joshua David Jordan
"It is never an individual who thinks, never an individual who creates. An individual
who thinks and creates does so within a network of institutions (schools, theaters,
museums, libraries, etc.), technologies (books, electronic networks, computers,
etc.), and sources of public and private financing; an individual immersed in
traditions of thought and aesthetic practices-engulfed in a circulation of signs,
ideas, and tasks-that force him or her to think and create."
"Capital is a semiotic operator": this assertion by Felix Guattari is at the heart of

Maurizio Lazzarato's Signs and Machines, which asks us to leave behind the
logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Instead, Lazzarato calls
for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in
power apparatuses, and in the production of subjectivity
Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, Signs and Machines shows
how signs act as "sign-operators" that enter directly into material flows and into
the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algo
rithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic "motors" that
make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassing representation
and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements.
Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics with the political
theories of Jacques Ranciere, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and
Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fun
damental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political
and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents
the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the
specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity
undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we
construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold
of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions,
Signs and Machines takes on a task that is more urgent today than ever.
Maurizio Lazzarato is a sociologist and philosopher living and working in Paris,

where he studies immaterial labor, the breakdown of the wage system, and
"post-socialist" movements. He is the author of The Making of the Indebted Man,
published by Semiotext(e).
" IH IJl IJijl111111t11l1 1l1

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Maurizio Lazzarato-Signs and Machines - Capitalism and The Production of Subjectivity-The MIT Press (2014)

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Maurizio Lazzarato

Translated by Joshua David Jordan

Maurizio Lazzarato, 2014

This edition 2014 by Semiotext(e)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

2007 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057

Special thanks to John Ebert.

Design by Hedi El Kholti

Printed in the United States of America

1. Production and the Production of Subjectivity 23

2. Signifying Semiologies and Asignifying Semiotics in Production 55

and in the Production of Subjectivity

4. Conflict and Sign Systems 139

5. "Scum" and the Critique of Performatives 169

6. The Discursive and the Existential in the Production of Subjectivity 201

7. Enunciation and Politics 225

To say that desire is part of the infrastructure comes down to

At the time of Leninism, the government had to be overturned

In a seminar in 1984, Felix Guattari argued that the crisis affecting

8 I Signs and Machines

1 0 I Signs and Machines

1 2 I Signs and tv1achines

1 4 I Signs and Machines

It's an either/or: either someone, whoever it is, comes up with new

16 I Signs and Machines

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22 I Signs and Macllines

Production and the Production of Subjectivity:

Between Social Subjection and Machinic Enslavement

Of the two definitions of a manufacture given by Ure, and cited

It is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that

1. Social Subjection and Machinic Enslavement

Guattari and Deleuze bring to fulfillment the discoveries of

24 I Signs and Machines

Production and tile Production of Subjectivity I 25

26 I Signs and Machines

Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 27

is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference.

28 I Signs and Machines

2. Human/Machine Versus Humans/Machines

We find the dual presence of subjection and enslavement in

Produciion and the Production of Subjectivity I 29

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Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 31

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Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 33

4. The Functions of Subjection

Capitalism is characterized by a dual regime of subjectivity, subjec

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Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 35

36. / Signs and Machines

Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 37

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CAPITAL AS A SEMIOTIC OPERATOR: SIGNIFYING SEMIOTICS

Capital is not only a linguistic but also a "semiotic operator." The

Production and the Production of Subjectivity I 39

40 I Signs and Machines