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Signs and Machines - Review by Michael Maidan

Maurizio Lazzarato
Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Semiotext(e), Los Angeles CA, 2014. 280pp., £12.95 pb
ISBN 9781584351306

About the reviewer

Michael Maidan

Michael Maidan studied philosophy in Buenos Aires, Haifa and Paris-Ouest (Nanterre). He published several
papers on the history of modern and contemporary social and political philosophy. Since 1990 he has lived in
Miami, Florida.

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Review
Maurizio Lazzarato is best known for his essay “Immaterial Labor and Subjectivity” (1991) and for his more
recent The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (2012, reviewed 2013). As in
his prior works, Lazzarato sets up to study the changes in the relationship between subjectivity and what is
known in the Marxist tradition as the “mode of production”. He also wants to criticize other similarly oriented
attempts that fall short, in his view, of the main features of these changes. This general orientation is colored
by the insight that the relationship between production and subjectivity that he had diagnosed earlier has
become dysfunctional to the extent that “today the weakness of capitalism lies in the production of
subjectivity” (8).

What explains such a weakness is the dual nature of the production of subjectivity in Capitalism. Following
Deleuze and Guattari, Lazzaratto differentiate two dispositifs (apparatuses): “social subjection” and
“machinic enslavement”. “Social subjection” is the way in which we are fitted with an identity (sex, body,
profession, nationality, etc.). This is what makes us individual subjects. We also experience a process of de-
subjectivation—which acts both at the pre-individual and supra-individual levels—that dismantles the
individual subject. Lazaratto calls this process “machinic enslavement”, a concept that generally refers to a
configuration in which two or more devices are set up in such a way that one has unidirectional control over
the others. Lazzarato understands “machinic enslavement” as a relationship in which a subject becomes “the
slave” of a machine. He writes: “Capitalism reveals a twofold cynicism: the ‘humanist’ cynicism of assigning
us individuality and pre-established roles … in which individuals are necessarily alienated; and the
‘dehumanizing’ cynicism of including us in an assemblage that no longer distinguishes between humans and
non-humans, subject or object, or words and things” (13 emphasis added). “Social subjection” and “machinic
enslavement” are objective processes, not ideological distortions of reality.

Lazzarato finds in the work of Foucault, Guattari, and in Marxist and Leninist practice, a form of
subjectivation that is “irreducible to power and knowledge relations” (14). This is the form of subjectivation
that Foucault names “care of the self”, and Guattari names “self-positing and existential affirmation”. These
practices have been obscured by the logocentric and linguistic turn operated by analytic philosophy and by
contemporary theorists such as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Paolo Virno, and Slavoj
Zizek. In opposition to their reliance on the structural features of language (langue), Lazzarato champions
the “act of enunciation” which he endows with quasi-divine features. Enunciation —not be confused with
performative or illocutionary speech acts—“as any other act of creation” emerges as a “power of self-
positioning, self-production and a capacity to secrete one’s own referents” (18). Examples of enunciation are
the Christic or Leninist “refrain” (ritournelle), which corresponds to a production of subjectivity at the level of
the collective (208). The famous “occupy Wall Street” slogan is neither a description nor a performative, but
the call to the constitution of a collective subjectivity that, contrary to traditional emancipatory political
practice, dispenses with consciousness.

Accordingly, Lazzarato rejects the ascendancy of language, or signifying semiotics. Lazzarato claims that
there is a broad range of expressive performances, of which signifying signs are only a subset. Primitive
societies, e.g., have different expressive strata that are not hierarchically structured. Speech interacts
democratically with these other forms of expression. In more complex ones, speech becomes a form of
general equivalent to the multiple semiotics systems (70-1). This becomes more pronounced in capitalist
society, were the multiplicity of semiotic systems is subsumed to the logic of capital.

Following Guattari, Lazzarato differentiates between signs that owe their efficiency to their passage through
representation and consciousness, which he refers to as “impotentized signs”, and “power signs”, which do
not owe their influence to the mediation through representation. When a card is swiped on a payment
terminal the process of reading the encoded signs and its effects on reality seem to bypass denotation,
representation and signification (85). The notion of an “assignifying semiotics” can be applied, therefore, to
the study of machine and machinism. Machines are no longer things, as they were in the past, bur rather
semiotic “assemblages”, which may consist of human beings, mechanical or electronic devices, and
incorporeal elements. A factory would be an example of such a “machine”. As the devices become more
capable of intervening directly into the real, we develop a capability to act directly in interaction with such
devices. When driving a car, we do not require the intermediation of a symbolic system.

Chapter three introduces the notion of “mixed semiotics”. According to this, the distinction between signifying
and asignifiying semiotics is analytical, while in actual modes of expression we find a combination of both.
The objective here is to show, on the one hand, the shift from individuated subject to a subjectivation carried
out by capitalist machinism and, on the other, that Guattarian theory is a faithful interpretation of the reality of
capitalist machinistic subjectivation. Mixed semiotics allow us to understand phenomena as different as infant
subjectivity, the stock market, cinema, the organization of the service sector of labor, etc. Describing the
stock market, Lazzarato places at its center the figure of the trader, which has been both lionized and
demonized in popular descriptions of contemporary capitalism. Lazzarato observes the many semiotics
realities in the trading room, such as economic indicators, data on the current evolution of the market,
simulations of different scenarios, etc. The trader “establishes the focal point of proto-enunciation both in the
… price differentials of assets and in the productivity differentials of the ‘real’ economy … these differentials
represent nodes of proto-subjectivation in which human subjectivity … came to fit and combine with machinic
proto-subjectivity” (96-7). The trader is the rallying point at which all the machinic proto-subjectivity (data,
scenarios, share prices, etc.) comes together.

The following three chapters are case studies, which apply the notions developed in the precedent chapters
to recent social and political struggles. In chapter four Lazzarato refers to the struggle of the “precariously
employed French cultural workers” in defense of the rights to full unemployment benefits while between
assignments. In chapter five Lazzarato refers to Nicholas Sarkozy’s infamous depiction of the population of
Paris suburbs and urban ghettos as “scum” and of his ministerial action as “pressure cleaning”, and reflects
on the nature of such political sloganeering. Lazzarato defends an understanding of such language that is at
odds with the performative interpretation embraced by Butler and Zizek. Chapter six reflects on the nature of
recent political mobilizations in Europe, which Lazzarato interprets as a rejection of the political model of
representation, and as experimentation with new forms of organization.

In the concluding sections of the book, Lazzarato returns to some of the issues presented in the first
chapters. He insists on the parallelisms between linguistic and political representation (202), and on the need
to explore ways in which speech and signs operate in the constitution of the self, bypassing linguistic and
political representation. He also elaborates on Guattari’s notion of “existential”, a function of language that
constitute the speaker as a subjective entity (205), and which is similar to what Foucault calls “the
parrheseistic”. The discursive and the existential respond to two different logics, which are “dissymmetrical
functions of subjectivity” (209). Discursive logic operates with a dichotomy between subject and object, I and
You. Instead, in existential ensembles we have “threshold-crossings” and “gradients of intensity”. But the
non-discursive is not of an irrational or ineffable nature; the non-discursive is neither formless, nor in need of
symbolic organization by language. It is also not the product of economic, sexual, linguistic or social
infrastructures (210), i.e., it is not of the domain of the ideological or the superstructural. The subjectivation
process is an act of self-affection, which repositions and reconfigures the economic, sexual, etc.,
infrastructures. In these last sections, subjectivation takes on a more positive role. The role of language in
subjectivation is presented as a ”cartography for localization and access to processes of subjectivation”
(211). Writing about Marx and Freud, Lazzarato explains that their role was not the formulation of a true
description of an objectively existing reality, but the action by which “they crystallized, gave consistency and
transversality to the emerging, mutant ‘focal points of subjectivation’ of capitalism” (213).

Lazzarato claims that the current crisis consists in the inability of capitalism—but also of the working class—
to articulate technical, social, and economic machines or flows with subjectivation process (existential
meaning). Such an articulation is not a form of knowledge; this one comes to only afterwards. An artist that
does not wait for inspiration to visit—i.e., to have instrumental knowledge of what he wants to achieve—but
“must invent tools and procedures of experimentation” (219). If knowledge has a role, it is primarily negative
and critical, the task of tearing down what makes obstacle to a politics appropriate to the current crisis. For
this we need a new “cartography of the production of subjectivity”, and radical break from analytical
philosophy, Lacan, linguistics, and even from a certain type of Marxism (224).

My main concern with Lazzarato’s approach has to do with his account of subjectivity in the times of
postmodernity. Does not doing away with the subject in favor of a flow of signs and affects obliterates the
subject of resistance? This is an issue that preoccupied the last Foucault and which explains in part his
interest in “practices of the self”. Is Lazzarato’s account of the flows of “assignyfing signs”, which he
exemplifies with the processing of a credit card in a payment terminal or the flow of information in the trading
room, really direct interventions of signs on the real? Would these descriptions make any sense without the
notion of a payment system or of a stock market, i.e., without the expectations and habitus of individuals?
This is even truer of his description of the stockbroker, who in Lazzarato’s account is the only (minimal)
subject involved in a stock market transaction. But this is clearly wrong. Any transaction has nominally two
parties, and a whole lot of individuals involved, each one with its own expectations, wishes, and delusions.
To what extent is it helpful, from a cognitive and from a practical point of view, to reduce them to mere
supports of mechanized flows of information? Is the liquid subject—to borrow Bauman’s apt portrayal of
contemporary society—a better foundation for resistance and emancipatory practice than a thick one?