Lines of Flight: For another world of possibilities 9781472507358, 9781474251464, 9781474274920

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LINES OF FLIGHT

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY Being and Event, Alain Badiou Conditions, Alain Badiou Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Molecular Revolution, Félix Guattari Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Félix Guattari The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri Althusser’s Lesson, Jacques Rancière Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancière Mallarmé, Jacques Rancière Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière The Five Senses, Michel Serres Rome, Michel Serres Statues, Michel Serres Art and Fear, Paul Virilio Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio

FORTHCOMING FROM BLOOMSBURY Ecosophy, Félix Guattari

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LINES OF FLIGHT For another world of possibilities

Félix Guattari Translated by Andrew Goffey

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Originally published as Lignes de Fuite, © Édition de l’Aube, 2011 © Félix Guattari 2011 English translation © Andrew Goffey, 2016 Félix Guattari has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : ePDF: epub:

978-1-4725-0735-8 978-1-4742-7492-0 978-1-4742-7493-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Guattari, Félix, 1930-1992. [Lignes de fuite. English] Lines of flight : for another world of possibilities / Felix Guattari ; translated by Andrew Goffey. -- 1 Edition. pages cm. -- (Impacts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-0735-8 (hardback) 1. Capitalism--Philosophy. 2. Political science--Philosophy. I. Title. HB501.G73813 2015 330.12’2--dc23 2015015236 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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CONTENTS

Translator’s introduction ix

PART ONE SEMIOTIC SUBJECTION AND COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENT 1 1 The unconscious is not structured like a language 3 The machines of the unconscious 3 The dictatorship of the signifier 5 A non-reductive analytic pragmatics 9

2 Where Collective equipment starts and ends

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General function of Collective equipment 11 The myth of human nature 12

3 The capitalist revolution

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After the ‘black hole’ of the thirteenth century, the ‘Peace of God’: a religious machine 15 The mystique of chivalry and free enterprise 17 Bourgeoisie and feudalism 19

4 Bourgeoisie and capitalist flows

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The bourgeois machine 23 The new bourgeois ‘sensibility’ 26 The withering of the aristocracy 28 Bourgeois reterritorialisations 32 v

5 Semiotic optional matter

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Semiotisation of libidinal investments 35 Rhizomatic semiotic research 37 Example of rhizomatic research: the semiotic factory of childhood 41

6 Equipment of power and political facades

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The institutional simulacra of instituted politics 45 The mega-network of miniaturised equipment 47 The facialities of power 49 Molar powers and molecular potentials 52 ‘Collective analytic’ interventions and the social unconscious 54

7 A molecular revolution

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The third industrial revolution 57 Abstract machines 59 Bureaucratic socialism, the highest stage of capitalism 63 A new type of struggle 65 An analytico-militant labour at all scales 68

8 The rhizome of collective assemblages

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The collective assemblages of desire 71 A rhizomatic cartography 74 The macro-assemblage of audiovisual means 81

9 Micro-fascism

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Micro-struggles 83 The politics of fascist and Stalinist equipment 87 The micro-fascisms of capitalist societies 88 Liberatory options, micro-fascist options at the molecular level 91

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10 Self-management and the politics of desire

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Methodologies of rupture 95 Singularities of desire 97 The traps of ideology 99 Prospects for self-management 101 Social transversalities 104

PART TWO PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE SOCIAL UNCONSCIOUS 107 11 Introduction to principal themes 12 Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics

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Semiotically formed matters 117 The order of things and the order of signs 118 Abstract machine or signifying abstraction 121 The assemblage of content and expression doesn’t come out of the blue 124 Four kinds of expression-content assemblage 127 Semiotic enslavement 132 Competence as instrument of power 135 Do ‘pragmatic universals’ exist? 137

13 Pragmatics: a micropolitics of linguistic formations 141 Stratification, stages, and abstract machines 143 A micropolitics of desire 147 There is no language in-itself 150 The unconscious as individual or collective assemblage 152 Tracings and trees, maps and rhizomes 155 Generations and transformations 157 An analytico-militant pragmatics 170

CONTENTS

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PART THREE EXAMPLE OF A PRAGMATIC COMPONENT: FACIALITY TRAITS 177 14 On faciality

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15 The hierarchy of behaviour in man and animal 16 The semiotics of the grass stem

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First series 210 Second series: the Australian finch 211 The traits of matters of expression 216

17 The little phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata Notes 245 Index 273

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TRANSLATOR ’S INTRODUCTION Planetary equipment: from institutions and assemblages to integrated world capitalism Félix Guattari has not been well-served by the academic machine. He was marginalised almost from the start of his joint work with Gilles Deleuze, who was generally seen as the brains behind Anti-Oedipus, the book that procured for them a certain amount of renown (if not notoriety). And the extraordinary growth in critical scholarly commentary on their joint writings has tended to revolve around an appreciation of Deleuze’s work, whose claim to the production of a metaphysics has all too often been addressed with scant regard for the important role that Guattari played in their construction of a philosophy in the years between May 1968 and Guattari’s death.1 Of course, seeing Deleuze as a quirky metaphysician presents some interesting and fascinating problems for professional philosophers and there is no doubting the immense subtlety and nuance of his thinking and the scope of his engagement with the history of philosophy. Yet there was always an institutional – and experiential – challenge embodied in their double-headed writing machine that all too easily falls by the wayside when Guattari’s role is downplayed, especially when what is preferred is an inscription of their thinking within canonised scholarly problematics (that Deleuze for one was always quick to repudiate). As thinkers together of an unconscious that invested directly in the movements of history – schizophrenic delirium, with its ‘world historical, political, and racial’2 content serving for them as something of a starting point for understanding both the ‘diabolic powers’ knocking on the door, as well as the compromises established with those powers by psychoanalysis – it would be all too easy to find in their work the traces of a rather romantic lionisation of madness that was common currency in the tumultuous France of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, there is more to Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation of the importance of the experience of psychosis ix

than the judgement that they romanticise (or aestheticise) schizophrenia would allow – and it is Guattari’s work that makes this point blindingly obvious. From a rather early stage in his work, Guattari evinced a desire to escape from what he saw as the ‘methodological individualism’ of psychoanalysis, its reliance on one-on-one dialogue and its lack of engagement in the difficult, ongoing task of treating psychosis in the institution. There was an absence of sustained direct involvement with psychosis on the part of Freud (Schreber, through his writings, Little Hans through his father) and only a minimal involvement on the part of Lacan (the Papin sisters, for diagnostic purposes), and this, for Guattari, was a problem.3 It limited the value of the idea of the ‘foreclosure of the name of the father’ and, on the basis of a much closer – indeed daily – involvement with psychotics led to far greater emphasis being placed by Guattari not just on institutional facts, on collectives, and the non-autonomy of language, but also on the transindividual processes that are put into play in and by an unconscious that is somewhat refractory to apprehension within the enunciative space-time of ‘ordinary’ analysis.4 The phony ‘contractualism’ of the analytic relationship, with its ostensible exclusion of third parties and focus on the individual, was not something that found a very positive response amongst institutional psychotherapists, by virtue of the broader institutional qualities of the delegation of the treatment of madness to particular groups of people in society (to say nothing of the concrete realities of institutional situation). And the historical experiences of progenitors of institutional psychiatry such as Tosquelles during the Second World War (the need to work with non-professional staff, the use of the Saint-Alban hospital to shelter members of the Resistance, and so on) would mean that La Borde was a propitious domain for Guattari’s own background of militancy in the student movement. In his early writings, Guattari’s conceptual displacement/relativisation of analytic ‘transference’ by institutional ‘transversality’ is one particularly fruitful outcome of the complex encounter between politics, therapy, psychoanalysis and the psychiatric hospital, and it sustained a rethinking of the unconscious in a social direction, breaking down the tacit hierarchy – inside and outside the institution – on which the ‘contract’ rested, and re-instating – first with the idea of the institutional object, then with the idea of the desiring machine – the third party putatively excluded in oneon-one dialogue. In addition to generating a perception of the importance of the group, of relations between groups (as in the division of labour) and of concrete institutional arrangements themselves (the institution as a ‘modelling clay’ for the treatment of psychosis), it also, more broadly, leads to what might be called a ‘de-professionalising’ of access to the unconscious, x

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accomplished through the generation of conceptual tools that reframed the analysis of desire in directly political terms. Guattari repeatedly returns to the view that the conceptualisation of the unconscious he was engaged in would be an unconscious within reach of anyone! Guattari’s endeavours to tackle the role of the group in relation both to analysis and to politics was clearly something that interested Deleuze, who saw in the theoretical contributions of Guattari to ‘institutional psychotherapy’ a set of notions that had a precise practical orientation – that of ‘introducing into the institution a militant political function, constituting a sort of “monster” that is neither psychoanalysis nor hospital practice, even less group dynamics, and which aims to be applicable everywhere, in the hospital, the school, in militancy – a machine to produce and to enunciate desire’.5 That one of the first fruits of Guattari’s collaboration with Deleuze was AntiOedipus, a sort of Rabelaisian high-point in the theorising that took place in the aftermath of 1968, should not obscure the institutional experience to which Guattari’s work always sought a certain kind of fidelity. Nor, of course should it obscure the links between the approach to writing taken by Deleuze and Guattari and his co-author’s understanding of the instititution of philosophy. After all, Deleuze’s ‘conversation’ with Claire Parnet, Dialogues, involves a quite explicit appraisal of the institution of philosophy and the function that the image of thought played in codifying thinking – an appraisal that in many respects continues the discussion of ‘Intellectuals and Power’ between Foucault and Deleuze from earlier in the 1970s. And it is worth noting here, as if in passing, that Deleuze’s otherwise rather improbable reference in this latter text to Proust for his understanding of the new role of the intellectual is itself heavily dependent for its understanding of the function of the writer’s ‘oeuvre’ on Guattari’s conceptualisation of transversality.6 That Guattari’s writings were not only heavily marked by but also aimed to remain faithful to his own experiences – of working at La Borde, continuing an analytic practice, as well as working tirelessly in the field of politics – is a point that has been made succinctly by one of Guattari’s colleagues at La Borde, Jean-Claude Polack, who points out that he ‘always stayed as close as possible to his everyday experience’,7 an observation that holds true even – perhaps especially – where his writings seem most avowedly experimental. Consistent with his work’s contestation of the sufficiency of language and its perpetual re-commencement from the unassignability of the expression/ content distinction, it is difficult to separate out Guattari’s theory from its ‘objects’. So, when Guattari returns, in a short text written in the wake of a visit he made to a hospital on the Greek island of Leros in 1989, to the four ‘imperatives’ that guide his approach to ‘enunciative hyper-complexity’, we would do well to see this as a statement of what it is that shapes Guattari’s TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

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approach to his own activity of ‘doing theory’ as such: irreversibility – there’s no going back after the ‘evental’ encounter, singularisation – the need for a permanent readiness for the advent of any rupture of sense, heterogenesis – the searching for the specificity of the ‘ontological’ terrain on which subjectivation occurs, necessitation – the way that affects, percepts, or concepts must be incarnated in an ‘existential territory’.8 In fact, this text – in which Guattari reflects on his lifetime of work at La Borde – points us towards a kind of ‘de-institutionalising’ of theory accomplished, oddly, through an acknowledgement of its much closer connection with institutions. ‘Theoretical modelling, as he puts it, has an existential function. In this respect, it cannot be the privilege of theorists. A right to theory and to metamodelling will one day be inscribed at the entrance to every institution that has something to do with subjectivity.’9 In some respects, this is a view that directly continues both his strictures against Althusserian theory (in the late 1960s), and, in the present text, against the Gramscian theorisation of the organic intellectual. ‘We do not think that there is any place, in effect to set up a specific group and praxis the function of which would be to synthesise Theory and Action. The very form of the division of labour between militancy, the analysis of the unconscious and intellectual activity should wither away, to the extent that the practice of theory gives up basing itself on systems of universals – even if they are dialectical and materialist – and action establishes itself in the extension of a liberatory economy of desire.’10 The reader can follow the train of thought leading Guattari to this argument for him- or herself. But there is a more general point here, which is that contrary to a fairly widespread view, which would hold that ‘theory’ and ‘experience’ are opposing, even antinomic terms, for Guattari they are in fact indissociable: like his friend Deleuze, albeit in a slightly different way, Guattari maintains the connection between theory and singularity, an ‘irreversible adventure’. Guattari’s ‘discovery’ of the dimension of transversality had for him entailed an ongoing theoretical and practical critique of the undue ‘privileges’ that might accrue to the analyst in the institution, a critique given broader scope in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari are keen to contest the ‘underhand powers’ founded on the transference – a point noted by Foucault in his Preface to the English translation of that book. But more important perhaps than the obvious critical scope that the concept permits is the way in which it helps to prepare for the development of the later concept of the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ as the constructive element that institutional analysis brought to light. Whilst in their own presentation of this latter concept, Deleuze and Guattari use Kafka as their reference point for what they are trying to address – his novels serve as a xii

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

privileged point of articulation for the concept, both in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature as well as A Thousand Plateaus – we would do well to note that Guattari was already talking of ‘collective agents of enunciation’ as early as 1964. Conceptualising the subject as a ‘collective agent of enunciation’ was, in Guattari’s view then, indispensable to avoid reifying the institution as a structure. Substituting a variable distinction between subject- and subjugated groups for the problematic notion of structure would, he argued enable the total (and totalising) character of the institution to be shattered, giving way to the possibility of a praxis necessary to the generation of analytic ‘effects’ (i.e. enunciating desire), through the ‘subjective consistency’ of groups able to address their own transitory, finite existence.11 There is much that might be said in turn at this point about the connections between Guattari’s consistent emphasis on the importance of (group) practice and the concomitant critique that Deleuze and Guattari have proposed of ‘the’ signifier in their writings. But contrary to the view that sees these thinkers as apologists for the simple spontaneity of ‘flows’, Guattari himself retained two key ideas throughout his work: that a determined praxis was always necessary to open up the possibilities that the homogeneous registers of meaning production occluded, and that linguistic, or linguisticised conceptions of structure blocked any real analysis of the kind required to effectively open up the possibilities ‘encysted’ in any situation. However rather than pursuing this line of argument it is perhaps more interesting in the present context to connect the experimental approach to practice that these explorations of transversality gave rise to with another dimension of his work – his activities with the FGERI (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Research, founded in 1965) and slightly later CERFI (the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Development, in 1967). The notoriety acquired by some of the publications issuing from these initiatives has been commented on elsewhere, both from more or less negative12 and more obviously positive13 points of view, and Guattari’s defence in court following the publication of the ‘Three Billion Perverts’ issue of the journal is particularly interesting not least for the way it shows him trying to problematise the links between research, desire, and the State. In any case, the numerous issues of the journal provide a written trace of the ways in which Guattari’s collective, transversal analysis of desire was, in the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s, extending beyond the immediate scope of the La Borde clinic and into what might now be called ‘interdisciplinary’ research. Interdisciplinarity is an idea that is rather familiar in academic circles these days14 – sufficiently so, perhaps that, as is the way with familiarity, it tends, not always rightly, to breed contempt. That TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

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such contempt is typically expressed by the well-territorialised professionals of traditional disciplines, with their institutional apparatus of key journals, special conferences, accepted ways of asking questions, and so on, is not especially surprising, and it serves here as a reminder of the difficulty of separating out knowledge production, institutional power, and subjectivity, a knotty set of ties which Guattari’s approach to the possible ‘creativity’ of the institution sought to counter. The collective research projects in which Guattari was involved were thus in some respects rather different from what is now held to be interdisciplinary research, not least because the kind of interdisciplinarity at which CERFI aimed had an intensely libidinal component, for better or for worse (Dosse, not entirely fairly, thinks the latter), traces of which can sometimes be found in the presentation of material in the issues of Recherches to which these projects gave rise. But Guattari’s ‘interdisciplinary’ research practice with CERFI is also of interest here because of its more or less direct bearing on the present text. Originally titled ‘Collective equipment and semiotic subjugation’ and not discovered until after Guattari’s death, Lines of Flight seems to have been written at much the same time that Guattari was working on A Thousand Plateaus with Gilles Deleuze, a connection that the reader will be able to confirm by dint of the numerous passages here that are also to be found in that text. But the text was also written as a report for the Ministère de l’équipement, a relatively new ministry that was first created under the government of Pompidou in 1960, out of a series of separate ministries – for transport, for public works, and for construction. And it was with regard to the heterogeneous matter of ‘collective equipment’ that the French State provided funding for a CERFI research project that in addition to involving Guattari and his other CERFIsts – François Fourquet, Lion Murard, Anne Querrien and Liane Mozère, amongst others – also involved Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.15 Several issues of Recherches were devoted to presenting the findings of this project, including two issues in 1973, grouped together under the heading the ‘genealogy of capital’, a title that captures both the influence of Foucault as well as the (sometimes overlooked) genealogical elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Engaging specifically in the study of issues that might now be considered the province of urbanism, town planning or urban geography, the first of the issues of Recherches exploring this loosely conceived genealogy included two interviews with Foucault, and whilst the discussions had are not entirely conclusive they do point towards some of the ways in which Guattari was extending his understanding of the social unconscious (the latter is flatly identified, in the first of two discussions with Foucault, with ‘collective equipment as such’).16 But the project on collective equipment is also xiv

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

interesting here because of the way that it feeds quite directly into what will become A Thousand Plateaus. Whilst references to ‘collective equipment’ are almost entirely absent from that text, it is evident from Lines of Flight just how much that research mattered. Here, Guattari not only picks up on aspects of the work carried out in relation to the ‘genealogy of capital’ but he also draws on Anne Querrien’s research into schooling – first published as ‘L’Ensaignement’ and since republished as L’école mutuelle: une pédagogie trop efficace? – and on Judith Belladonna’s research into prostitution, which also appeared in Recherches, and in so doing points to the close proximity between a Foucauldian approach to subjugated knowledges and what A Thousand Plateaus would no doubt refer to in terms of ‘minoritarian becoming’. All of this, of course, is history and would probably be of little more than passing interest, except for what it says, once again, about some of the collective dimensions of the research practice in which Guattari was engaged and what this tells us about the philosophy he was constructing with Deleuze. Lines of Flight should, in many respects, be considered a group project, an incipient collective assemblage of enunciation in its own right, even if few of Guattari’s collaborators in CERFI here are mentioned by name. It is thus advisable not to separate the theoretical challenge presented by the concept of the collective assemblage of enunciation when thought through the work of Kafka – rethinking the virtual presence of the collective within the solitary writing practice of the intellectual – from the practical experimentation of which it is a part. And so one might in turn say of Lines of Flight what Guattari says, with Deleuze, of the ‘K-function’ in Kafka’s novels. ‘It is pointless to ask if “K” is a subject – “he” is more a general function that proliferates by itself, or rather “K” is less a general function assumed by an individual than the functioning of a polyvocal assemblage of which the solitary individual is a part.’ Next to nothing has been said here about the substantive content of Lines of Flight. That’s quite deliberate, but maybe one or two words on where this book leads are called for, just to finish. Despite the term’s absence from A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari himself repeatedly returns to the idea of ‘collective equipment’ in his later writings. This may in part be a function of the pliability of the term ‘équipement’ itself, which allows it to operate as a sort of shorthand (and not incidentally renders it difficult to translate accurately).17 However, in a different context, the anthropologist Paul Rabinow has helpfully indicated the historical connections between the idea of ‘équipement’ and the French State, and points in passing to the rather all-encompassing reference of the term, which ‘included everything that was not a don gratuit of the soil, subsoil, or climate’, at least in the 1942 ‘Plan TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

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d’Équipement National’,18 a breadth that Guattari certainly, if not explicitly, picks up on. This discursive link with a broadly conceived notion of an environment makes it unsurprising to find that it is in the context of his grappling with the problems posed by the ‘three ecologies’ that Guattari should call once again on the idea of ‘collective equipment’. In a text on ‘Ecosophic practices and the restoration of the subjective city’, for example, Guattari considers the role of urban mentalities in relation to the collective refinalising of human activities. The possibility of this refinalisation taking place is, he suggests, largely dependent on the possibility of a shift in urban mentalities. Referring to the work of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean world and the proliferation of city states in the sixteenth century, Guattari argues that within the context of a nascent capitalism, this proliferation could only be considered to hold itself together when understood as ‘so many components of a single network of collective equipment’.19 And he goes on to note, anticipating by some years arguments made by geographers, political theorists, sociologists, etc., that the situation today is one in which that same network of ‘material and immaterial equipment’ has woven itself together at a much greater scale. The more this network is planetarised, the more it is ‘digitalised, standardised, homogenised, uniformised’, the more it constitutes a ‘hegemony of major cities or, more exactly, of subsets of major cities connected by telematic and informatics means.’ Much has been written, invoking assemblages, spaces of flows, networks and so on since Guattari’s death that is consonant with this kind of analysis, but some of his lessons, particularly concerning the connections between rhizomes, assemblages and subjectivity seem to have been filtered out along the way. It is as much in his life-long engagement with the micropolitics of institutions and his collaborative research practices as in the better known work with Deleuze that we can find the seeds of Guattari’s prescient conceptualisation of an integrated world capitalism. Integrated world capitalism is at work today in the pipes, cables and circuits of global data networks, the algae-like proliferation of property developers and global rentiers, as well as our dreams and nightmares, but it finds many of the tools Guattari elaborated for thinking practically against it, ‘in favour, I hope, of a time to come’ here, in this book. Andrew Goffey

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TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

PART ONE

SEMIOTIC SUBJECTION AND COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENT

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2

1 THE UNCONSCIOUS IS NOT STRUCTURED LIKE A LANGUAGE

The machines of the unconscious Current definitions of the unconscious – in particular that of the structuralists, who aim to reduce it to the symbolic articulations of the order of language – do not allow the passageways between individual desire and the semiotic productions of every kind that intervene in social, economic, industrial, scientific, artistic structures, to be grasped. We will endeavour to show how a study of libidinal processes in all these domains is genuinely incompatible with the structuralist postulate that consists in affirming that the unconscious is ‘structured like a language’. If it was still necessary to talk about structure with regard to the unconscious – which is not self-evident, a point we will come back to – we would say instead that it is structured like a multiplicity of modes of semiotisation, of which linguistic enunciation is perhaps not the most important. It is on this condition that one can remove the shackles of the subjective, consciential and personological individuation through which the unconscious and desire have been imprisoned – considerations regarding the ‘collective unconscious’ amounting most of the time to metaphysical constructions concerning the analogical or sublimatory ‘destiny’ of the drives. The unconscious is neither individual nor collective, it is everywhere that a labour of signs bears on reality and constitutes a ‘vision’ of the world, what Roger Chambon calls an appearance [parution] of the world and which, according to him, should be distinguished from a simple representation, so as to be understood as a ‘productive perception’.1 3

Let’s start from a simple example, or rather, from an example that we will deliberately simplify so as to make ourselves understood: that of the interpretation of money by psychoanalysts. It’s pretty widespread, so there’s no need to go into it in detail. Let’s simply recall that in its most vulgarised version, this interpretation considers that the relation of an individual to money is a symbolic equivalent of his or her relation to faecal matter as an infant. In fact, the method consists of placing the constellation of objects of desire particular to one period of life and its corresponding mode of subjectification into correspondence with, reducing them to, those of another period. The point of view that we are proposing is completely different: we consider that in this affair there is no ‘matter’ for any translation of this kind, for any interpretation, any symbolism. Effectively, a monetary activity as such brings into play semiotic components and a pragmatics of deterritorialisation which, at the outset, are very different from those that can in any case exist either in the register of the body, or in that of the image, or that of language. So, for us there doesn’t exist any necessary passage between, for example, a ‘fixation’ on faecal matter and an attachment to money. The modes of semiotisation corresponding to the supposed ‘anal stage’ (touch, smell, a certain kind of playful provocation with regard to one’s family circle, etc.) can, under certain conditions, enter into connection with the semiotic components of monetary exchange, or those ‘iconic’ and perceptual components that are put into play by the dream, or even those that are implied by psychoanalytic interpretation and its particular type of meta-language. But it seems absurd to us to consider that such connections can be programmed on the basis of psychogenetic stages, archetypes, signifying chains or ‘mathemes of the unconscious’. Rather than considering that one is dealing here with objects, ‘stages’ and psychic agencies [instances] that would constitute the invariants of an unconscious, structured in the manner of a syntax, we propose, on the contrary, to start from particular kinds of assemblage of semiotic components, which, at a given moment, in a given situation, manifest the true structures of the unconscious, or rather what we prefer to call the machines of the unconscious. The characteristic of these living machines is to tend constantly to free themselves from preformed encodings or fixations on childhood memories. The unconscious is in action, turned towards the future, within the reach of a pragmatics operating on real situations – even when the latter can apparently only end up in neurotic reiterations or impasses. For example, when a psychoanalyst interprets a dream by applying his all-terrain equation money = shit2 he, quite happily, it seems, confuses the pragmatic components of diverse assemblages of enunciation which, in the example that we evoked, might be distinguished according to the following three ensembles: 4

LINES OF FLIGHT

a

The assemblage of desire corresponding to the activity of a child playing with its poo and which is inseparable from a whole family strategy, a whole world of objects and relations surrounding it.

b

The assemblage corresponding to the fact that a patient recounts a dream to a psychoanalyst (a dream in which it is a question of poo or of money), and which is inseparable from translation techniques for discursive utterances and iconic representations arising from: 1. The patient’s own interpretative grids on waking up; 2. Those interpretative grids that have been elaborated by the psychoanalytic institution.

c

The unconscious assemblage corresponding to a real handling of money, which evidently entertains specific relations with the modes of social and economic subjection of a given society. In fact, it is probably a matter here of a multiplicity of assemblages, the ‘monetary relation’ between a psychoanalyst and his patient, a mother and her child, a grocer and a child, etc., not being at all the same.

The dictatorship of the signifier Psychoanalysts are led by their syncretism to traverse and crush the different kinds of assemblage of enunciation with which they are confronted, and to confuse the semiotic components that they put into play. They claim to remain in the field of the ‘symbolic’ and consider that in essence the reality of situations, everything that ‘makes a difference’ from the point of view of social stratifications and of the materiality of modes of expression and production, doesn’t interfere with their field. In practice, they purely and simply leave to one side the political and micropolitical3 stakes that are implied by their ‘object’, they turn away from the real complexity of contexts, the relations of force, the specific technologies of power, which, it is true, no universal interpretation could give to them! The slippage that a psychoanalytic interpretation accomplishes in passing from a child’s game to a dream or to an economic relation loses the unconscious economic dimensions that are the basis of each one of these situations. Every micropolitics of desire that sets out to take the opposite course to this confusion of planes, this generalised semiotic collapse, this ‘dictatorship of the signifier’, would, in our view, necessarily have to break with conceptions of the unconscious that attribute a [une] structure to it, a homogeneous structural consistency. We cannot repeat it enough: one never deals with the THE UNCONSCIOUS IS NOT STRUCTURED

5

Unconscious with a capital U, but always with n formulae for unconsciouses, varying according to the nature of the semiotic components that connect individuals to one another: somatic and perceptual functions, institutions, spaces, equipment, machines, etc. On this question of the relation of the unconscious to language, Freud had been more prudent than today’s structuralist current in French psychoanalysis. He had taken care at a topical level to distinguish thing representations (Sachvorstellung) – of an iconic order, as one might say today, from word representations (Wortvorstellung) – of a linguistic order. But he nonetheless affirmed the supremacy of the word over the image, the unconscious primary process never managing to free itself entirely from thing representations (treating words as things in dreams or in schizophrenia, for example), and the preconscious-unconscious system alone being capable of bringing these two kinds of representations into connection.4 To be sure there is no doubt that such supremacy can exist, but only in certain cases, only in the context of particular power formations, those of the normal, civilised, white, phallocratic, educated, hierarchised, waking world that we would globally characterise as capitalist, thereby designating the ensemble of social systems functioning on the basis of a generalised decoding of flows. In effect, one of the characteristics of these capitalistic formations is their recourse to a particular kind of semiotic machine that overcodes all the other semiotic components, allowing flows, whatever they are, to be manipulated and orientated, as much at the level of production as at the level of social field or the individual. The deterritorialised chains put into play by these machines do not signify as such (in the case of the syntagmatic chains of language, the machines of scientific, technological, economic, etc. signs, for example, we will even call them a-signifying), but they entertain particular relations with signifying contents. They hierarchise them, order them on the basis of a unique semiotic grid that fundamentally functions as a machine of subjection at the service of power formations (the school, military, legal, machine, etc.), and secondarily as a significant mode of expression. The paradox is that it is precisely these asignifying chains put into play by capitalist formations that structuralists characterise as signifying. They wish to make of them a sort of universal constituent of structures. According to them, everywhere there is structure, one should find this kind of signifying material: this is how one finds oneself dealing with the same systems of articulation at the level of language and of the unconscious, at the level of the chains of genetic code and at the level of the elementary relations of kinship in primitive societies, at the level of rhetoric, stylistics and poetics, at the level of the mode of functioning of 6

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consumer society and at the level of the mode of cinema, even of the discourse of the sciences, etc. For our part, it seems to us entirely necessary and urgent to disaggregate this agglomeration, which is presented to us today under the category of the signifier or of the symbolic and which, for numerous researchers, seems to have become a basic notion, an obvious starting point. In effect, we consider that every kind of assemblage brings about the concatenation of semiotic chains that are fundamentally different from one another and which at the outset function not as a signifying discourse but as so many machines of a-signifying signs.5 What one is dealing with at the heart of productive processes and social groups are always semiotic procedures, regimes of signs for which it is absurd to want to propose master keys. One never encounters the ‘signifier’ in general: ‘on the ground’ one is always confronted with semiotic compositions mixing genres, mixtures, constellations, that are open to a possibility6 that cannot be calculated in terms of structure, what we call a machinic creativity. By bringing about the loss of the polyvocity of components of expression in a sort of semiotic collapse, the imperialism of the signifier reduces all the modes of production and all social formations to the semiotics of power. Thus our problem is not solely one of doctrine but is also practical: the signifier is [not] just an error made by linguists and structuralist psychoanalysts, it is also something that lives in everyday existence, that subjects us to the conviction that somewhere there exists a universal referent, that the world, society, the individual and the laws that rule over them are structured according to a necessary order, that they have a profound meaning. In fact, the signifier is a fundamental procedure for the dissimulation of the real functioning of power formations. Following the linguists and semioticians, icons, diagrams or no matter what other means of so-called pre-verbal, gestural, imitative, corporeal, etc., expression, are considered as necessarily being dependent on a signifying language. They are ‘lacking’ something. It is as if they were condemned to waiting for the signifying chains of language to come and take charge of them so as to check, interpret, mark off the authorised paths/voices, the forbidden directions/meanings, the tolerated distances. And yet anthropology and history furnish us with many testimonies to the functioning of societies that have done without this kind of semiotic subjection! Their system of expression was no less rich for it, quite the contrary: it seems that the mode of interaction that they realised between speech and other modes of (ritual, gestural, musical, mythical, economic, etc.) semiotisation corresponded much better to a collective expression of desire and to a certain kind of social homeostasis. Is it a matter of stages that have been surpassed or of a micropolitical choice that is always current, as the diverse currents that can THE UNCONSCIOUS IS NOT STRUCTURED

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be linked to the ‘new culture’, to ecology, to consumer movements, etc., seem to think? For us, this ‘fixation’ of archaic societies on pre-signifying semiotics is less an affair of fidelity to origins or an innate taste for spontaneous expression than the consequence of a defensive attitude participating in a whole series of apparatuses against the emergence of a certain kind of power which, from chiefdom to the State, requires all modes of the social division of labour to be executed to the profit of castes and exploiting classes. From this point of view, the absence of writing in ‘primitive societies’ should be related less to a lack, to a deficiency, an under-development, than to an unconscious collective resistance to a certain kind of deterritorialised machinism (this is how, in modern African states today, vernacular languages sometimes serve as a refuge for the expression of a mode of life that is literally ‘encircled’ by the growth of the equipment of capitalism).7 But the survival of modes of semiotisation that manage to escape, even only partially, from the ‘dictatorship’ of the scriptural signifier, is posed in our societies too, by childhood, madness, creation . . . And even at the heart of the most ‘policed’ sectors, an analysis of collective formations of desire would lead to new light being shed on a multitude of ‘compensatory’ practices and spaces, the constitution of secret or shameful zones as much as of ‘breathing spaces’, according to Koestler’s expression, for taking a step back, if only for a few moments, from the different forms of social neurosis which sum up systems of domestic life, hierarchical relations, bureaucracy, organised leisure time . . . The privileged objects of such an analysis could just as easily be the functioning of gangs of teenagers in the basements of HLM [Habitation à Loyer Modéré (rent-controlled housing)] as the ‘discrete charm’ of bourgeois orgies, ‘ballets roses’,8 or just simply the ethnography of relationships in a bistro or homosexual nightclub. Residual marginal activities, the inevitable price to be paid for any social organisation, it will be said! But activities which do not in any way justify the taming of drives, a signifying gridding of sexuality! It is a fact that the institution of current diverse modes of economic and social subjection would rapidly become impossible if it wasn’t staged through this ‘dictatorship’ of dominant significations and checks, which imposes its norms at the root of all semiotisation, which roots the sense of prohibition at the heart of the mind and body, which triggers machines of culpabilisation that are so powerful that they end up mobilising the bulk of the libidinal energy of the individual. A certain kind of language and certain individuated and culpabilising modes of semiotisation thus appear as being entirely necessary to stabilise the social field of capitalism. They imply in particular the power takeover by a national vehicular language of the dominant laws and system of values 8

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and reduce dialects, special languages, infantile, ‘pathological’ modes of expression to a marginal status or quite simply annihilate them. Certainly it is a matter here of factual givens, which can hardly be contested but which structuralists tend to turn into givens by right. A micropolitical analysis of the semiotic components put into play in concrete situations would lead us to show that this ‘structuralisation’ of diverse semiotic components – that is to say, the fact of being constantly ordered to comply, to have to be accountable, to be translated/brought before9 the tribunal of syntaxes, semantics and pragmatics of dominant power formations, themselves translatisable into a national linguistic competence, is not a natural fact, the consequence of linguistic universals or of a necessary symbolic structuration of human relations.10 It can also be combatted and be defeated, and not just in societies ‘without a State’, to borrow Pierre Clastres’s expression,11 not just in archaic, pathological or marginal situations . . .

A non-reductive analytic pragmatics Look at what it is in current linguistic and semiotic theories that ‘authorises’ reductive signifying interpretations, whether they arise from linguistics, psychoanalysis or everyday life. Linguistics and semiotics have for a long time lived by following the model of phonological analysis. Following the Chomskyan current, the accent has been placed on syntactic, then semantic models and more recently attempts at theorising enunciation have surfaced. In our opinion, this trajectory will only attain its fullest scope when a veritable pragmatic analysis allowing the micropolitics of desire in the social field to be explored can be constituted. But that will only be possible to the extent that in the domains of linguistics and semiotics, structuralist prejudices, which, let us note, have sometimes become very close to those of psychoanalysis, have been sufficiently cleared away. In the second part of this research, we will propose a classification of semiotic components that will endeavour to respect their differences of nature; we will try to sketch out the major lines of the approach that might be taken by a non-reductive pragmatic analysis. We think that to the extent that they put into play a very extensive range of encoding and semiotic components, collective equipment will be able to constitute a privileged point of application for this pragmatic approach to the economy of desires in the social field. At its beginnings, psychoanalysis was only able to develop on the basis of the study of monographs. It should be the same for this new kind of analysis of the unconscious, the objects of which should be approached from angles and using methods, concepts and assemblages of THE UNCONSCIOUS IS NOT STRUCTURED

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enunciation, that are radically different not just from those of the psychoanalysis of the ‘consulting room’ but also from those of university sociology. It is no longer a question here of starting from ‘complexes’, from universal structural knots or simple parameters that are constitutive of complex fields, like those that Kurt Lewin proposed, for example, in constituting his psycho-sociology, or more recently the Palo Alto group around Gregory Bateson, when he tried to treat intra-family communications in terms of information theory.12 To the extent that it fastens onto complex institutional objects such as Collective equipment [Guattari sometimes capitalises the ‘E’ in this expression – Equipement collectif – we have capitalised the ‘C’ where this is the case], at the heart of which semiotic components of all kinds interact (economic, political, administrative, and legal, arising from the State; economic, urban, technological, scientific, arising from diverse levels of public and private institutions; somatic, perceptual, affective, imaginary, arising from individual and infra-individual levels, organs, functions, behaviours, etc.), an analytic pragmatics would never be led to cut itself off from the specific modes of collective enunciation of each one of the constellations realised by its components, and it would tend to constitute itself as an ‘analyser’, an analytic group-subject.13

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2 WHERE COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENT STARTS AND ENDS

General function of Collective equipment No human group, however ‘primitive’ one might consider it, can organise itself, in effect, independently of a series of types of ‘collective equipment’, the first of which is to be sought in its capacity, particularised at the level of each ethnic group or its modern equivalent, of the marking out and expression, by means of diverse ‘sign machines’, of its cosmic and social outline, the form of its internal relations, of its ‘foreign politics’, all things that we have gathered here under the rubric of collective modes of semiotisation. The semiotic formation of the collective power of labour, in the context of capitalist systems, doesn’t depend solely on a central power imposed by the constraint of relations of exploitation. It equally implies the existence of a multitude of intermediary operations, machines for initiation and semiotic facilitation that can capture the molecular energy of desire of human individuals and groups. These machines, of every kind and size, converge in the same semiotico-libidinal productive function that we will call the general collective equipment function. Before being particularised in institutions and types of collective equipment in the usual sense, this function is implanted within the modes of semiotisation, subjectification and praxis of human groups. It establishes a whole network of connections between: ●

What we have described elsewhere under the name of molecular desiring machines; 11

●

Interpersonal molar relations (relations of sex, class, age, etc.);

●

Economic relations (division of labour at the level of the process of production, stratification of relations of production, etc.);

●

Formations of social and political power.

Much more than simple elements of an ideological and political ‘superstructure’,1 types of collective equipment ought to be considered as machines that produce the conditions of possibility for all capitalist economic infrastructure. Before the exchange value–use value couple is instituted, the collective equipment function produces a desire value–use value couple by successively deterritorialising: 1

Infra-individual values of desire that it transforms into sexual, family, friendship, neighbourhood, etc. use values;

2

Use values that it transforms either into capitalist exchange values or into collective assemblage values (able to connect once again to desire values).

The myth of human nature The individual doesn’t constitute the ultimate object of the ‘programming’ of this sort of equipment. In effect, if it is true that one finds the individual at one end of the chain of equipment as a whole, as its terminal ‘product’, as well as at the beginning of the chain, as its basic constituent, it is also true that things don’t stop there. In our view, this image of circularity even risks closing the capitalist processes of alienation onto identifiable entities, a little too quickly and a little too easily, calling for the ‘good sense’ of denunciations of the kind ‘the relations between man and the city, man and machine, etc. need to be rebalanced’ and for a myth of a human essence which can escape modern technologies for modelling individuals come what may. The individual is entirely fabricated by society, in particular by its collective equipment. The idea of a transcendental subject that is irreducible to processes of semiotic contamination and subjection is a fiction. It is better to give up expecting anything from a supposedly free, autonomous and conscious individual subject (putting to one side a residual territory – an opaque and reactionary ego – that serves as a support for undertakings to annihilate every collective project), if nothing of the order of what we are calling here the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’ is put into place to resist subjection and divert it from its goals. But scholarly thinking, as much as 12

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‘profane’ thinking, concerned to preserve human values – in reality, a certain kind of value, a certain kind of society – doesn’t cease taking refuge behind the idea that one is entitled to hope for a reprieve for, the taking in hand of the individual human, whatever the manipulations of which it is the object. One imputes the disordering of society and the bad uses of science and of technique to the ‘bad side’ of the individual – always the Manichaeism of good and bad drives – whereas one expects a rectification of the problem from his ‘good side’, his ‘basic goodness’. Although a caricature, this conception of the role of the individual seems to us to correspond, more or less, not just to the practical attitude of the upholders of bourgeois thought but equally to that of the majority of Marxist militants. Before discussing the nature and the scope of, for example, the ‘role of the individual in history’, is it not worth calling into question the very concept of the individual? In truth, the functioning or dysfunctioning of society are never the affair of individuals as such, they arise from complex assemblages that cannot in the slightest be reduced to collections of individuals, to humanist ideologies, an accumulation of individual responsibilities and volitions. Although it has served as a justification for all social regimes, including the most implacable fascism, although it has been denounced as such by Marxist theorists, the humanist postulate of the ultimate reality of the individual, of an unalterable, autonomous, foundation cut off from nature and inaccessible to the accidents of history of a human order, is in fact continued by the contemporary Communist movement when it considers itself as the repository of a universal human model, when it misunderstands the mutations, the revolutions, of desire that work over the social field, when it aims to establish – through the power of organisation and by collective suggestion – priorities, orders of urgency, between the ‘serious’ and the secondary levels of action, which can only intervene as an additional force or as suitable to reserve for ‘later’, or indeed which one must turn away from because they would not be ‘understood by the masses’ and would result in ‘distractions’ (the liberation of women’s desire, or children’s desire, homosexual desire, etc.). But the growing efficacy of technical and scientific systems, methods of collective subjection put in place by capitalist societies – bureaucratic socialism itself being on the point of becoming the ‘final stage of capitalism’ – leads us to think that nothing can be subtracted from the machinations and facilities of the collective, not even the most intimate, the most inaccessible components of the individual: his perception, his desire, even his consciousness are on the point of becoming ‘Collective equipment’. One is thus equipped with ‘models’ of perception, motricity, intellection, imagination, memory, that differ depending on the ‘post’ that is attributed to us, and as a function of the caste, class and environmental WHERE COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENT STARTS AND ENDS

13

appurtenance that has been affixed to us. Certainly today these setups are ‘personalised’ (as one says of cars!). Manual labourers and bureaucrats are equipped with different kinds of perception, housewives and managers with different modules of desire. But all the basic elements come from the same sort of factory, the same kinds of collective equipment: it is only on the basis of their composition that one will succeed in establishing a (functional and promotional) diversity that corresponds to the necessities of capitalist social organisation and to the type of division of labour that corresponds to it. (Later we will come back to the fact that the adaptive capacity of this ‘fabrication of individuals’ implies a constant miniaturisation, which we will call a deterritorialisation, of these basic elements.)

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3 THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION

Fundamental political and micropolitical stakes are ‘negotiated’ through this Collective equipment function in so far as it retains a preponderant place in the formation of the collective power of capitalist labour. But the transformation of ‘polymorphous’ desire into useful activity, into deterritorialised labour and the exchange over which it presides, doesn’t go without saying. Capitalism has only been able to realise this transformation – and thus to place the libido in its service – under particular historical conditions.

After the ‘black hole’ of the thirteenth century, the ‘Peace of God’: a religious machine The birth of labour that can be exploited capitalistically was doubtless contemporaneous with the appearance of a new kind of war machine, a new kind of religious machine and a new system of linguistic and social segmentarity, starting in the eleventh century. Georges Duby insists on the role played by the religious machine in particular in this ‘normalisation’ of the right to pillaging by armed gangs, after the political, economic and semiotic collapse of the old territorialities and central powers inherited from the Roman and Carolingian empires. The fixing of an external objective – the repulsion of barbarian invasions, then the expansion of Christianity – thus contributes to the birth of a new warrior caste.1 Instead of dispersing and exterminating the peasantry they will be savagely exploited, they will build 15

castles and roads, they will relaunch a process of accumulation that will re-create the conditions for an urban, commercial and artisanal re-equipping. In thus succeeding in fixing the new rules of play, the Christian religious machine in some way substituted itself for the old imperial powers. But although its power is more ‘spiritual’, more deterritorialised, it is no less effective – quite the contrary in fact! Doubtless it is here that the first great mystery of the power takeover by capitalist flows resides. An abstract machine, the ‘Peace of God’, establishes its law and stabilises social segmentarity. In each province, ‘councils summoned by prelates met together in each district, and magnates and their warriors took part. These assemblages, falling back on constraints of a moral and spiritual nature, aimed to curb violence and to lay down rules of conduct for those who bore arms.’ In the prolonging of this ‘Peace of God’, other precepts will allow for the rest of society to be ruled over ‘it would no longer be permissible to fight – any more than to handle money or to indulge in sexual intercourse – except within precise limits’.2 With the progressive reappearance of a monetary economy, it will thus result that feudal lords no longer extract the labour power of the peasantry by means of corvee, but through their adaptation to a system of deterritorialisation of exchange: ‘the seigneurs did not cease to appropriate most of the goods the peasants produced. They seized them by other means, with an adaptability that markedly increased the velocity of monetary circulation’.3 The rule of antique slavery then progressively disappears before that of modern economic exploitation. But this first monetary deterritorialisation will not be able to find its ‘realisation’ in the framework of a social system centred on feudal relations that are still too territorialised, but only in that of an economic system controlled by the bourgeoisie (bourgeois royalty). Expropriated by money of its direct relation to slavery, the nobility will deterritorialise itself, will have itself emptied of its substance by bourgeois social formations that are better adapted to the specific modes of semiotisation of the new capitalist order. The emergence, not of capitalism, but of the hegemony of capitalist flows is thus, in our opinion, inseparable from not just the temporary respite from epidemics and large-scale barbarian invasions – the ebb and flow of nomad military machines, an internal demographic growth, a relative stabilisation of the feudal order, a certain economic, commercial and monetary ‘takeoff ’ – flows of merchants, flows of pilgrims. It is also inseparable from the ‘launching’ of major operations by the Church against heresies, against the infidels, which enabled the military aristocracy to be channelled into deterritorialised objectives: the ‘Holy land’, the holy shroud, etc. The proliferation of churches, cathedrals and monasteries in the twelfth century can itself be considered a first stage of capitalist deterritorialisation. 16

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It constitutes in some way a first ‘takeoff ’ of Collective equipment of a new kind, the principal mission of which could be broken down as follows: on the one hand they have to ‘produce’ one of the most deterritorialised gods in history, a god which, on the other hand, they have to reterritorialise onto a segmentary social order that is ‘regressive’ in relation to that of classical Antiquity, in that it continues to rely on ‘archaic’ systems of filiation and ethnic organisation. Unlike the ‘reasonable’ gods of Greek and Roman citizens, the new ‘Asiatic’ god pins his passional and universal values – that is the paradox – to the heart of barbarian aristocracies.

The mystique of chivalry and free enterprise As the feeling of belonging to a City and to an Empire has been definitively lost, a deterritorialised nomadic feeling haunts the mystique of the knight and, once the segmentary context and feudal anarchy is stabilised around provincial and royal powers, it indirectly prepares the path to the spirit of adventure and the ‘free enterprise’ of the owners of ships, the merchants and the capitalists of the ascendant bourgeoisie. In effect, if it is true that everything separates feudal lords and bourgeoisie, from the outset the grand religious ideals of feudalism brought their interests together. For example, the conduct of the Crusades is inseparable from innumerable ‘secondary benefits’ that both groups can draw from them: a war of pillaging, the opening up of commercial circuits, etc. When all is said and done, for whom does the Collective equipment of the Church ‘work’? It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer this question. We will come back to the ambiguity of the relations between Church, aristocracy and bourgeoisie later. Let us note simply that if it is true that Collective equipment does not simply form ‘superstructures’ but produces the semiotic conditions of divisions into castes and classes, then the question of ‘belonging’ can no longer be posed in the same terms. Not only is the religious machine the ‘bearer’ of the social divisions that are contemporaneous with it, but in addition it prepares the differentiations to come – in the sense that Newtonian theory of gravitation ‘prepares’ the Einsteinian theory of relativity. That is how the abbey at Saint-Denis, for example, was conceived by Suger as the first great form of religious equipment for the ‘bourgeois royalty’. Its function was no longer that of the monastic Roman churches: ‘the simple superstructure of a hyogeum, a martyrium, of some dark, enclosed, underground place where terrified THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION

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pilgrims descended in single file and groped in the darkness until at last, in the light of tapers, they perceived the martyrs’ sanctified remains . . .’4 It assembles [agence] a collective semiotisation, an incarnation (through its light, its splendour, its precious stones, the iconography of its stained glass, its liturgy, etc.) of the relation of God to men and to royalty. Incarnation is opposed here to the ‘dualist seductions’ of heresy, but also to aristocratic anarchy, the place of the God of the bourgeoisie is on earth; the ‘Peace of God’ has to guarantee work, commerce, urbanisation and the centrality of power. The religious collective equipment of the Middle Ages will ‘work’ at the development of capitalism in its own way, in so far as it will add a certain number of quanta of deterritorialisation to the modes of semiotisation and subjectification of the ruling strata (the new sensibility of the aristocracy, its code of honour, initiation rituals, etc.). Although less rational than that of Antiquity, the human model that it puts into circulation is, in fact, more universal, more capitalist. Straightaway this presents itself as more easily adaptable and transposable – in limits fixed by the councils – to the ensemble of ethnic and national components, and the limits that it imposes on its new adherents are infinitely less constraining than those of the ‘rallying’ to the Roman Empire, for example. In contrast, its spiritual demands, its subjective mutations, will in the course of time turn out to be more and more tyrannical. To our mind, it is from the formation of this new model that it is advisable to ‘make’ the spirit of modern capitalism ‘start’, and not from the later reforms of Lutheranism and Calvinism, as Max Weber proposed.5 The Reformation only accentuated a movement that had been launched much earlier. From our point of view, its originality resides in the fact of having put into place a new network of even more deterritorialised religious equipment, the function of which was no longer to massively clear the path for capitalist flows, but that of adapting to other networks of economic and social equipment that were already solidly implanted, of taking a more modest, less cumbersome place amongst them by miniaturising the priestly apparatus and thus of accentuating the interiorisation and individuation of religious feeling. René Grousset considered that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Flanders was already functioning as a ‘factory that expects exporters to come to it to take delivery of manufactured products’; Hansa Teutonica as ‘a transport enterprise, a house of commerce in which merchandise are simply warehoused and in transit’; Florence as a manufacturer, a bank and employers federation, whilst Venice and Genoa experimented with capitalism ‘as far as the end of its programme, as far as naval and territorial imperialism, as far as colonialism’ and prefigured the England of the nineteenth century.6 18

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To create the conditions allowing for the formation of a new kind of work and exchange compatible with the ‘takeoff ’ of an economy based on the primacy of capitalist flows, the interaction of a considerable number of deterritorialising factors was thus necessary. Let us enumerate some of them, without in any way pretending to be exhaustive: 1

The collapse of the urban and state systems inherited from the Late Empire;

2

The emergence of a religious machine with universal, deterritorialised objectives but which has at its disposal a ‘central’ direction and an ‘international’ language, local and regional Collective equipment – churches, cathedrals, monastic, Benedictine machines, etc., finances and a significant secular political weight;

3

The determination of a ‘foreign policy’ organised around deterritorialised objectives (the Crusades);

4

The reappearance of a deterritorialised circulation of money and the development of international commercial flows;

5

The differentiation of new social orders – fundamentally, the nobility and the Church (we will come back later to the fact that the Third Estate, which is a much later notion, is not to be put on the same level, to the extent that it covers much more heterogeneous sociological and political realities);

6

The appearance of a new, aristocratic, style of life – suzerainty, knighting, adelphopoiesis, courtly love, etc.7;

7

The autonomisation of Romance languages, etc.

Bourgeoisie and feudalism It seems well established that after the collapse of the social systems inherited from the Late Roman and Carolingian empires, the reconstitution of a relatively coherent social fabric was contemporaneous with the resumption of a process of urbanisation and of a development of techniques in all domains. The bourgeoisie and its (administrative, fiscal, corporate, religious, commercial, etc.) collective equipment was thus well and truly born at the same time as feudalism.8 And this contemporaneity might even lead us to formulate the hypothesis of a structural interaction between the basic technologies of semiotic initiation of the feudal nobility and those of the new bourgeoisie. One can put the origin of the phenomenon as THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION

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far back as one wishes (for example, from the eleventh century on, when the knighthood closed its ranks in a sacred and hereditary caste), but it will have to be admitted that they appeared as two different but interdependent ‘races’. One is thus no longer in the presence of a simple opposition here, like that which separated the ‘race’ of citizens from the rest of the population in Antiquity. Citizenship is deterritorialised here, it has absorbed something from the nomads and from the barbarian war machines of serf technologies, and has divided into two power formations: the ostentatious and arrogant formation of the feudal lords, and the hardworking but ultimately triumphant formation of the bourgeoisie.9 This dissymmetry and interdependence between the two social stratifications since the birth of feudalism, that is to say, the birth of ‘modern times’, goes beyond the simple framework of the putting into place of a new type of dependency of vassals and of the emergence of a social segmentarity surmounting the old, weakening political orders; it is, above all, the expression of the emergence of a new system of the economy of flows, of a new kind of society, a new way of living, thinking, and feeling the world. Throughout the ‘black hole’ of the tenth century, in the meshes of a society in decline, a society which, in the normal course of things, would have disappeared under the impact of barbarian invasions, segmentary machines of all kinds started, on the contrary, to proliferate and to set to work on their own count. Although they were more or less subjected to the powers of the nobility and the Church, the equipment of the bourgeoisie that would come out of this turmoil would not stop reconstituting their capital for semiotisation and production. Like in Germany after the war, everything started again almost from zero. Deterritorialisation must be understood in the proper sense [i.e. literally]. In effect one must not forget that the economic and urban collapse of the West had been almost total (to get a measure of it, Yves Barel reminds us that in the tenth century, Rome – which was without a doubt the biggest Western city – can’t have had any more than 25,000 inhabitants, whilst the figure for Paris was around 5,000). The ‘miracle’ derives from the fact that the basic semiotic equipment – capitalised and worked on in the ‘monastery-factories’ in particular – managed to slip through the net of the disaster. One witnesses a miniaturisation, a deterritorialisation of old semiotic and technological forms: artisans and scribes follow the barbarian armies, merchants wander the highways at their own risk, protected solely by the letters of safe-conduct granted to them by the powerful, monks look after and copy manuscripts as if they were relics, the monastic machines hang onto metal tools as if they were treasure, and push for an improvement in agricultural techniques . . . 20

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Willingly or not, the peasantry will be swept along by this semiotic deterritorialisation, diagrammatised behind the bourgeoisie. But it seems important to us not to put them on the same plane as the other ‘classes’. They constitute the basic fabric of society and of production. Economically they are everything, and politically, nothing. At this stage, the essential mutations are thus to be located in the birth of a new kind of power, which crystallises around urban classes, around human assemblages that are arranged in proximity to Collective equipment of a new character. In particular, one cannot insist enough on the key position of ecclesiastic Equipment and the highly ambiguous relations of Church people with regard to what will much later be called the Third Estate. The religious and lordly aristocracies were certainly indissolubly linked to one another. But from the point of view of the restarting of basic Equipment, from the point of view of the birth of a new process of urbanisation, the monks and the mass of Church people may be considered as participating in the same social group as the bourgeoisie. Sometimes it is around monastic equipment that retained a minimum of cohesion (collective organisation of labour, use of writing, maintenance of international contacts, etc.) that certain towns were created or started to grow again, and sometimes it is around centres of artisanry or legal equipment. The nobility thus entered gradually into dependence on social strata that capitalise a knowledge, a technology. The construction of its chateaux, the preparation of its military equipment, implied a minimum of stabilisation of professional urban corporations. The nobility and the Church aristocracies would themselves fall into dependence on the mercantile bourgeoisie to be able to keep their ‘expenditure’ – in the sense given to this word by Georges Bataille10 – at an appropriate level. It is the constitution of a network of collective equipment held by parliaments, corporations, guilds, brotherhoods, etc. – whatever the control and exploitation the nobility may have exercised over them – that catalysed the processes of urbanisation and which started to create a new kind of power formation distinguishing itself from the aristocratic values of ‘expenditure’. This did not, incidentally, prevent a part of the bourgeoisie from depending for its power on, or living indirectly from, its wealth. In spite of being marked by the spirit of corporatism and its dependency with regard to political and religious authorities, bourgeois initiation established itself in connection with the ensemble of lines of deterritorialisation of the epoch, (whether technical, scientific, artistic, commercial, etc.), because of its aptitude for producing models for ‘training’ and relatively supple and effective processes of institutionalisation that ruptured with an overly territorialised (magical, even sacred or charismatic) conception of the THE CAPITALIST REVOLUTION

21

filiation of power, for which it substituted a filiative system that rested essentially on the much more abstract power of capital and the real position of individuals in relation to capitalist flows. In so doing, the bourgeoisie acquired a secular vocation that had potentially much greater universality than the Christian churches.

22

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4 BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS

The bourgeois machine One ought to distinguish here between the apparent Power [Pouvoir] of the nobility and the real power [puissance] of the bourgeoisie. At the molecular level, the real power of processes of deterritorialisation tends to escape from molar Power. The tacit equilibria, the networks of interdependence, didn’t stop being worked over, called into question, by the deterritorialised semiotic budding of the urban bourgeoisie. From this point of view, the ecclesiastical theory of ‘three orders’ (the division of society according to a divine plan into workers, warriors and people of prayer is an illusion: it is the expression of an ideological attempt at reterritorialisation) endeavoured to deny the growth of another deterritorialising force traversing the whole of the social body, and which could not be grasped at all in the framework of existing religious categorisations. In fact, it wasn’t a case of homogeneous classes that can be compared with and opposed to one another. By linking its divisions with the prolongation of the orders and estates of the Ancien Regime, by transposing its representation of society onto that of bourgeois parliamentarianism, bourgeois historians and, to a certain extent, the socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, have skirted round the issue of the existence of social assemblages of a different nature, and avoided a political problematic that is reborn today with the struggles of minorities of all kinds. Before being crystallised into ‘coherent’ political and economic groups that can be grasped on the basis of more or less universal modes of categorisation (whether of a religious origin or not), the socius differentiates itself according to an unconscious sexual, ethnic, social, micropolitical and microeconomic economy. The military, aristocratic and religious machines 23

of the Middle Ages cannot be placed on the same plane as the peasantry, which was neither a class nor an order in the Middle Ages, but society in its entirety as a basic productive machine. And ‘from the outset’ it was essentially a matter of residual systems pursuing their mad trajectories and Brownian movements according to their own laws of semiotic inertia. The machinic cornerstone, the operator that would effectuate the conjunction of all the lines of deterritorialisation would be neither a caste nor a mass and not yet a class, but a social formation with contours that are difficult to delimit, clinging to the same urban rhizome of power functions, technical competences, institutions, equipment, monetary flows, flows of knowledge and merchandise . . . It is the bourgeoisie that would ensure that everything will hold together, or rather that everything will start holding together again. Minor from the political, religious and military point of view, powerful only in its ‘machinics’ and its deterritorialised semiotics, it is the bourgeoisie that will ‘hold together’ the mutations of the capitalist unconscious, it is on the basis of its collective assemblages and its equipment – which are scarcely differentiated at this stage – that the new lines of force of society would be semiotised and deployed. Before being a class, the bourgeoisie is thus a certain kind of molecular collective equipment. Subsequently it will put together gigantic semiotic cyclotrons from this equipment, associated with industrial combines, megalopolises, a world market, etc. But its ‘visible’ historical stages will not stop being doubled by ruptures, the extension of systems of deterritorialisation, followed by their taking back in hand, by reterritorialisations endeavouring for a while to overcome the same original semiotic collapse, which will only become more marked from one crisis to the next, constantly calling back into question previous ‘gains’. The capitalist combinatory will thus be enriched to the extent that its basic modules are deterritorialised and miniaturised like a Lego playset or, rather, like the passage in the physicochemical domain from successive analyses and syntheses that first start with molecules and atoms and then with atomic and nuclear components. History will deploy the potentialities of deterritorialised capitalist formulae, which will initially appear ‘ready-made’ at the molecular scale and in a microscopic space. For a long time, before they make their territory, they will be able to remain in an endemic state, like viruses that wait years for the appearance of conditions that are favourable to their expansion. As we have seen, this is how capitalism started to ‘take’ from the high Middle Ages in Pisa, Genoa and Venice, and a fusion was even sketched out between the urban bourgeoisie and the landowning aristocracy. In this regard, Yves Barel has talked of ‘deterritorialised city principalities’. A capitalist nobility, supported by craft guilds and ship owners, succeeded here in taking control 24

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of urban development, of the economy and of political power, in the context of a so-called ‘aristocratic republic’ system. But let’s emphasise that it was only a matter here of exceptional cases, of ‘miracles’ resulting from the conspiring of very particular circumstances, that is to say, the ‘accidental’ bringing into conjunction of a whole series of deterritorialising factors (the meeting point of different worlds, opening onto the sea, a favourable condition for picking up of commercial flows and, in the case of Venice, its particular situation on a lagoon as a result of pressure from the Franks, etc.). In fact, neither the Italian capitalist cities, nor the capitals of bourgeois royalty, will form the crucible in which a fusion between the old aristocracies and the ascendant bourgeois elites could be brought about. Whether the too territorialised feudal segmentarity managed to impose its inertia on the new segmentarity or inversely the latter, too deterritorialised, relied on the former, the fact is that the urban integration of aristocratic equipment will only have been highly relative, very partial. Even when the embourgeoisement of fractions of the aristocracy attached directly to the functioning of the power of the Royal state and to capitalism results locally in the constitution of a sort of aristocratic bourgeoisie, it will still only be a matter of a relative fusion, with a character that is, above all, functional. This is the case, for example, with the ‘Colbert Lobby’ – as Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Journet call it. More than three-quarters composed of nobility (whether from birth or from the exercise of some ennobling responsibility), who, according to these authors, nevertheless had to be brought together under a group of financiers whose positions and functions had, since the start of the eighteenth century, ‘with the discrete, effective and interested support of the powerful, played an eminent role, which placed them at the centre of the life of the State, in the surrounding monetary and economic system’, that is to say, a capitalist social formation that, despite its rupture from the landowning aristocracy, does not for all that belong to the bourgeoisie.1 It is also worth being prudent with regard to the over-hasty assimilation of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Whatever their alliances might be, it is a matter of two kinds of heterogeneous reality: the bourgeoisie results from a conservative social stratification – which intended to retain the rights it had gained – whereas capitalism results from a conjunction of machinic components that tends, on the contrary, and as if in spite of itself, to destratify the social field. This discrepancy will go on growing and it will become particularly visible with contemporary developments of state capitalism, in East and West: the same rhizome of technocratic and capitalistic castes tending to take possession of the world by negotiating its economicopolitical strategy at its heart, over the heads of the old bourgeoisies and the old national bureaucracies. BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS

25

In a general manner, the processes of the urbanisation and equipping of the great national capitalist entities will not result in the institutionalisation, the codification of fixed models of power formations, as was generally the case in the cities of Antiquity. The bourgeois town – and this is what gives it its strength – is anything and everything.2 Forcing things a bit we can say that it is a molar epiphenomenon, whilst bourgeois and corporate equipment for their part represent the true molecular process of the urbanisation and rise of productive forces.3 Whilst the powers of the lord, the earl, the bishop, the king, etc., were quarrelling over the military, political and fiscal control of towns, the capitalist molecular revolution for its part secretly took control of the whole of the social body. Indirectly it will take control of the nobility and the Church, by means of its collective equipment of production and commerce, its ungraspable semiotic machines, which it won’t stop making proliferate, and which will transform the tendencies of thinking, feelings, religion, architectures, science . . . The particularities of the ecclesiastic and noble aristocracies will only be able to stay afloat by adapting to the relative universalism of the bourgeoisie and only in so far as the interests of the latter will lead it to developing its semiotic differentiation in comparison with them.

The new bourgeois ‘sensibility’ Throughout the development and conjunction of these processes of capitalistic deterritorialisation, a different conception of the human, and of childhood in particular, starts to appear. A certain economy of traditional aristocratic values lost its consistency to the extent that the chivalrous feeling of love – the idealisation of the Lady – was deterritorialised. Don Quixote and Corneille’s heroes participate in the same rearguard action, whereas a certain childishness in Racine’s characters announces the supremacy of bourgeois sensibility. In effect, after the rise of the Lady in the novels of chivalry and courtly romances, it is the child that comes to the front and centre of the stage in the eighteenth century. If the faciality of the Lady focused the nobilitarian deterritorialisation, it seems that it is that of the child that will, quite literally, submerge that of the bourgeoisie, and that remains true to the present day.4 This doesn’t, in any case, imply an improvement in the fate of childhood, not even bourgeois childhood! Things will play out in a double register: ●

26

On the one hand, one sees a privatisation, a closing up of the family on the child again, a growing insistence on the mother–child LINES OF FLIGHT

relation (which will be transposed onto the husband–wife relation, and that between lovers, etc.). ●

On the other hand, a reinforced semiotic gridding, a more and more precocious, generalised control, sometimes of an unbelievable harshness: the school of Christian Brothers having transposed the prescriptions formulated by Ignatius Loyola for monastic discipline for use by children (privation of wealth, of nature, of human conversations, satisfactions of the mind, giving up one’s own freewill, one’s own judgement, the condemnation of the pleasures of the senses, which make one the same as animals, faithfulness to the rules or practices of the community, etc.)5

The deterritorialisation of human work that modes of manufacturing and industrial production will carry out corresponds not just to a deterritorialisation of the spaces of life linked to the rural exodus, urbanisation, etc., but also a deterritorialisation of ‘sentiment’ translated by the appearance of a new kind of relationship to work – ultimately, the disappearance of the ‘love of one’s trade’ – and of a new kind of leader. The man of power in capitalism will no longer be equipped with the traditional aristocratic values. The ideal of valiance, loyalty, generosity and courtesy transmitted through the myths of chivalry will be succeeded by that of an efficacy and a cynicism that paradoxically is associated with a childishness of feeling the expression of which will be manufactured ‘serially’ by Romance art and literature]. Two kinds of semiotic factory could be opposed: ●

That of an aristocratic formation, which starts from territorialised basic elements (the identification of lineage and of house,6 the role of blood, of the earth, of the coat of arms, etc.) and ends up with a relatively homogeneous style, as in the example of the king’s court.

●

That of a capitalist formation, which begins from relatively more deterritorialised basic modules at the outset, implying a much more precocious ‘treatment’ of childhood semiotics in order to separate them from their ‘native lands’, so as to bend them to abstract codes. By carrying out differentiated ‘montages’, it produces men for all occasions, more functionally adaptable than the too stiff, too ‘semiotically crystallised’ aristocrats could be.

The formation of new dependencies, new hierarchies, new bureaucracies, adapted to the evolution of capitalist relations of production, presupposes, in our view, a double deterritorialisation of nobilitarian initiation: BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS

27

●

●

On the one hand, a diachronic deterritorialisation that is manifested by the fading and loss of semiotic components linked to traditional arts and values (a certain relationship to oneself and to the world, the sense of honour, of filiation, personal belonging, the learning of certain kinds of postures and behaviours through horse riding, the arts of combat, good manners, etc.). On the other hand, a synchronic deterritorialisation that will place the world of the aristocracy – the nobility ‘present at the court’7 – in a semiotic (and economic) dependency with regard to bourgeois society that is more and more marked.

The withering of the aristocracy At the end of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary ruptures between the aristocratic powers and the bourgeoisie probably originate less in the explicit revolutionary will of the latter than in an extension of the components of deterritorialisation that work over the ‘Atlantic world’ and a conjunctural crisis – a sort of new historical ‘black hole’ of the same level of importance as that of the tenth century, but in which the barbarian flows were, in an inversion, replaced by that of the Napoleonic armies and the expansion of capitalist flows ravaging all the old territories in their passage. The grand financial and capitalist bourgeoisie had everything to gain from a ‘change in continuity’. It must be admitted that the theatre of aristocratic ‘expenditure’ and the hateful, but subjugating, fascination that it exercised over people for centuries only presented it with disadvantages. What point was there in crushing the residues of a landed nobility that, for better or worse, continued to ‘hold’ the world of the peasantry? Let’s not forget that the movements in the countryside during the French Revolution were aimed indifferently at both the feudal nobility and the urban bourgeoisie, both of whom, albeit by different means, hadn’t stopped pressurising them.8 Let’s add to that the fact that, as we have seen previously, the fusion between the bourgeois aristocracy and a ‘capitalist’ fraction of the nobility was already largely under way . . . Thus it is not the bourgeoisie as a class that ‘made’ the French Revolution, but the capitalist components of deterritorialisation of which it was the bearer. Also, and perhaps principally, from an evental point of view, the reterritorialising reactions of the urban masses against these components, in particular against the tendencies of the new ruling strata to overturn old regulations, the old corporations, to manipulate money, to promote a ‘liberal’ economic segmentarity. Thus, by considering things 28

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from the point of view of the capitalist revolution, one may consider that numerous days of insurrection amongst the artisan and shopkeeper sansculottes were in some way ‘counter-revolutionary’, ‘Poujadist’. Without a well-determined political base, the bourgeoisie of the Lumières didn’t stop ‘jumping onto the bandwagon’ in one direction or another, on the side of the ‘great Atlantic revolution’, in Jacques Godechot’s expression,9 or the side of the decentralising and autonomist particularism of the Parisian sections and the provincial federations. The proliferation of bourgeois Equipment, in our view, then, appeared in the meshes of the powers of the nobility and of royalty; its function was to convert the primary surplus value that the ruling castes extracted from the work of the peasants and artisans into capitalist labour power, to the benefit of those castes. But in return, like a mushroom, it hastened the rotting of its support. As the bourgeoisie implanted and stabilised its de facto power over territorial entities constituted according to economic norms, and not the ‘logic’ of filiation and alliance that presided over the parcelling out of baronetcies, earldoms, duchies and kingdoms, this equipment was miniaturised and polymerised in such a way as to generate macro-equipment able to respond to the technological, economic and political demands of modern States.10 Thus the proliferating anarchy of micro-equipment bears within itself a central state power (the institutional axiomatic of which was systematised by Bonapartism: creation of major ministries, the grandes écoles, etc.). Little by little, a double-headed network of collective equipment – with a semiotic micro-head infiltrating itself everywhere and the macro-head of a state with an overall hold – started to grid the slightest nook and cranny of the social field. The processual character of this phenomenon ought not to mask the fact that it is from the outset, that is to say, from well before the crystallisation of macro-equipment, that the question of State power, which can be identified here with the question of the power of the bourgeoisie, was posed. In this regard, let us come back to the equipment relative to the semiotic formation of the nobility. In appearance they are specific to the nobility, fundamentally they concern only them, and secondarily civil servants and bourgeois artists attached to the king’s court. But one can equally consider that by taking over from the abbey at St Denis five centuries later in subjecting an already considerably fading aristocracy to a new ‘Peace of God’ – this time baroque and rococo – Versailles will have been the first collective super-Equipment of modern times, a sort of abscess of/for fixation, a camp for regrouping and reduction, an apparatus essential to accelerating the transfer of real powers to the profit of the Parliamentarians, jurists, technocrats and bankers of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the feudal BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS

29

nobility had been taken in charge semiotically since birth by the equipment of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie was in some way the semiotic machine for the new aristocracies since its birth. It is not a matter here just of counsellors, scribes, poets, tutors and confessors, but also of a syntax, a logic, a machinics, an entire new sensibility. As long as an unconscious complicity existed between the aristocracy and the other social strata, as long as the nobility and the higher clergy could be considered to be castes that specialised in ‘expenditure’, as long as their wealth and their style of life, whilst abhorred by those who suffered their effects, were accepted as being part of the ‘rules of the game’ and expressed in some way a collective, ‘irrational’, desire, then the symbiosis between bourgeoisie and nobility will retain its ‘utility’, by manifesting the social exploitation in a system with two faces and two powers. The nobility will constitute the alibi, the lightning rod, the diversion for growing capitalist exploitation. But when it stopped being felt by the mass of the people to be a foreign body, when it lost its fascinating strangeness, its sacred aura, then all that will remain is to isolate it, to park it in its specially reserved spaces – Versailles, etc., to ‘expel’ it across the frontier (in a transitory way, it is true, but the ‘Restoration’ would never restore to it its earlier prerogatives). The final way in which the nobility will be of service to the bourgeoisie is as a scapegoat; by cutting off heads, the bourgeois revolution will attempt to make the problem take flight into the collective imaginary: ‘the heretics are to blame, the blue-bloods, the international Jewry, the fifth column, Trotskyist spies, Beria’s clique, Lin Biao’s gangs . . .’ With this kind of procedure one seeks to exorcise the real nature of a crisis, one that involves not just the ‘responsibility’ of the whole social body but also mobilises its libido, by localising it, by territorialising it on a particular constellation of faciality traits. The ecclesiastic and noble aristocracy will thus tumble, from the moment that its diverse modes of territorialisation – by which we understand its sumptuary equipment as much as its relation to money and to work, its style of life, its ‘etiquettes’, its postures – stop serving as nourishment for the semiotic, libidinal and institutional equipment of the most deterritorialised fractions of the bourgeoisie. However far back one goes in the political and literary history of feudalism, it seems that one finds the originary terms of the libidinal division of labour between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, a division that is correlated with the double political game of the latter. Whilst the aristocracy carries its fall haughtily, like a destiny, the bourgeoisie slyly arranges its own inevitable triumph – if only to expel its most unbearable faciality traits by projecting them onto the image of Lombard or the greedy Jew. Yves Barel has pointed out from the eleventh century on, the 30

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bourgeoisie alternately relied on feudal segmentarity and provincial and royal centralising powers in a sort of complex ballet, in which earldoms, towns and nobility are allied two against three (‘If the rules of the game stayed the same, the alliances that were made were as effective as they were temporary and changing.’). That is how the territorial establishment of the deterritorialised machines of the bourgeoisie not only progressively emptied the old power formations of their substance but in addition produced a series of replacement models to ensure the continuity of their social repressive frame. Let us note nevertheless that long after the French Revolution, and even as a residual territoriality, the aristocracy continued to maintain a place amongst the new castes of notables that wasn’t negligible. But paradoxically it will be in the form of a deterritorialised archaism that it will traverse contemporary history and will continue to play, to the present day, a very significant role in the popular imaginary such as it is manipulated by the so-called ‘sensationalist’ press (royal marriages, etc.). Moreover, another part of the old aristocracy was converted into a certain number of ‘modern’ economic, military and political sectors: we know that even today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, has remained one of its privileged poaching grounds. But there too, the key thing is not to go searching on the side of territorialised powers but rather on the side of libidinal conversions, mutations of value, experiments with new kinds of bosses with which the aristocracy has got mixed. In effect, starting from the moment that one agrees to envisage historical phenomena not just from their large-scale political and social angle but equally at the level of their molecular libidinal metabolism, considering that bourgeois semiotics purely and simply annihilated those of the aristocracy becomes less evident. No more, in any case, than the proletariat would succeed in making those of the kulaks and the bourgeoisie, or even those of the old ‘oriental despotism’ (which Stalinist bureaucracy seems quite naturally to have ‘rediscovered’!11) decay after ‘Red October’. The machines of Collective equipment, capitalist semiotic machines can coexist perfectly well with the ‘archaic’ machines of the aristocracy or the ‘progressive’ machines of the workers’ movement. The politics of modern states consists in making all that hold together: a certain conception of public service, of welfare, of planning, etc., of pressure groups, lobbies, mafias, micro-fascist systems of value such as those that animate historical filiation – the France of Du Gueslin and Joan of Arc, the Germany of the Teutonic order, Tsarist Russia, Zionism’s promised land, etc. In this domain of the collective economy of desire, history doesn’t necessarily proceed according to a linear progression through earlier ‘stages’. It conveys blocks of the past without any Aufhebung, it opens up the future at the same BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS

31

time as it closes it down, it works on itself through zones of collapsing and reterritorialisation. Everything stays in the same place, the best and the worst, the possible and the impossible. One can say that at one and the same time it knocks everything over in its passage, that it transforms everything irreversibly and that it changes nothing, that it piles stratifications up on top of one another.

Bourgeois reterritorialisations The capitalist revolution hasn’t stopped detaching new ruling classes and new kinds of bureaucracy from the old power formations. Starting with the French Revolution, its institutional proliferation took on a new character in relation to that which had engendered the bourgeoisie of the Ancien Régime. It no longer only concerned an urban space and a codified economic field, it no longer just concerned itself with differentiating cities, ‘conditions’, revenues, habitats, benches inside churches, but also – and more fundamentally – libidinal and semiotic mechanisms. The old bourgeoisies controlled power over social and economic sectors that were easy to find. The new bourgeoisies invaded everything. Man has become universally bourgeois. The old complex – absolute distance of conditions and imaginary symbiosis of the nobility and the people – has been liquidated. The formal unification of conditions (‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’) is in fact accompanied by an extinguishing of the old personological and affective values. Coded personological relations, of the lord-valet, master-apprentice, kind, disappeared to the profit of a regulation of general ‘human’ relations, founded in the main on abstract systems of quantification bearing on work, on salaries, ‘qualifications’, profits, etc. In the last instance, the socius isn’t ‘anyone’s’ affair, but is an affair of decoded flows. The capitalist revolution attacks all the old territorialities, it dislocates rural, provincial, corporate, communities, it deterritorialises feasts and cults, music, traditional icons, it doesn’t just ‘colonise’ the old aristocracies but also all the marginal or nomadic strata of society. But its systematic enterprise of deterritorialisation of social groups is accompanied by a production of replacement territories adapted to its functional requirements and to the maintenance of its power.12 This reterritorialisation is carried out according to two modalities: by a negotiation, a permanent compromise with the residues of territories that had been ‘surpassed’, and through the ‘launching’ of new territories, through the equipping of the socius with new models allowing desire to continue to ‘cling on to something’. One might consider that the first task would be 32

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devolved onto stable (political, legal, religious, etc.) public institutions and the second onto the proliferating network of collective Equipment. In fact, interactions and a complex combinatory result in a constant entangling of these two kinds of component. But schematically, one can distinguish two domains to which the same process of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation applies, miniaturising and functionalising the elements that it concerns: that of capitalist equipment and that of archaic institutions and social stratifications. An example involving the first domain: the bourgeois-religious proto-equipment of the Middle Ages, which had succeeded in making the politics of the so-called Peace of God prevail, will be internalised and universalised to result, in the eighteenth century, in the miniaturisable equipment of the ‘spirit of laws’ or of Kantian morality. An example involving the second domain: the great territorialised social entities that were globally invested with a magico-religious character – Royal power, the power of the Church, the nobility, the rural community, the corporations, etc. – will be worked over ‘from inside’ and redeployed for other functions; the libido will now attach as a priority – although always more or less in resonance with the old systems – to residual territories such as domestic space, family feeling, a certain cult of childhood, the faciality traits of the bureaucrat, the policeman, the doctor, the teacher, etc., without forgetting those of the unconscious superego, which psychoanalysts characterise as maternal (one might well ask oneself why). But the new function of capitalist equipment will not for all that manage to stabilise society by making it crystallise according to clearly delimited entities and by imposing on it a properly coded functioning. ‘Behind’ its institutional relations, assemblages, unforeseeable lines of flight that threaten it from inside, will not stop appearing, in a sort of inflation of innovation or which will set off mechanisms that will, in return, block it up in itself. Thus it will always be possible for these two domains of the equipmental function (that of capitalist equipment properly so-called and that of the residual stratifications that it cuts out or of the artificial territories that it produces) to be called into question through the function of a collective assemblage that, in a very different mode, crystallises not persons but machinic ensembles of signs and infra-personological organs, that effects of which concern the big molar groups and/or the microscopic segments of the socius at the same time. This assemblage function, as we will see later on, could either accelerate that of the equipment – by reinforcing its repressive capacity, for example13 – or it could work against it by pushing capitalist deterritorialisation beyond its internal limits and by creating the conditions for a taking charge of all possible equipment by collective assemblages of revolutionary desire. BOURGEOISIE AND CAPITALIST FLOWS

33

34 ●

●

relative stability of the rural community and of feudal segmentarity

magic-religious characteristics attached to king, to trades, etc.

●

●

Residual institutional and libidinal stratifications

development of the family sentiment and the cult of childhood (faciality traits of the bureaucrat, the policeman, the doctor, the teacher, the superego)

expropriation of old territories to the profit of economic and political segmentarity (free enterprise, radical-socialist republics, deviationism, gulags, etc.)

The ‘spirit of laws’ and conscious morals controls a universal individual ‘from the inside’. State capitalism keeps a hold of all the cogs of society on the basis of a proliferating network of deterritorialised equipment

The ‘Peace of God’ codifies social orders that are radically distinct from one another. Royal power is in the position of external arbitrator vis-à-vis the territories of the nobility, towns, corporations, etc.

Bourgeois and bureaucratic regime

Capitalist equipment

Old regime

Table summarising the two domains of application of the equipmental function and the process of deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation-miniaturisation of equipments and residual stratifications

5 SEMIOTIC OPTIONAL MATTER

Semiotisation of libidinal investments By way of an exploratory hypothesis, we have been deliberately vague about the delimitation of the ensemble that is covered by the notion of collective Equipment, with the aim of drawing towards them the semiotic mechanisms that associate the power functions of the modern State and the struggle over interests between social classes with collective formations of desire that, until now, have scarcely been considered by the specialists of ‘grand’ history and ‘grand’ politics. What effectively interests us in this immanence and omnipresence of Collective equipment is less their evolving utility, their modelling or their current distribution, and more their particular function in the capitalist economy of desire. At the root of ‘modern’ processes of urbanisation, they make metastases of power proliferate, which contaminate the entire social field, well beyond the limit of the city, which traverse the old castes, the new classes, modelling sexes, ages, tastes, perceptions. How do these machines for the deterritorialisation of flows (material flows, flows of work, semiotic flows of all kinds) succeed in articulating amongst themselves the diverse components that result in the launching of a certain kind of individual or a certain kind of socius? What sort of machine or equipment produces stereotyped behaviour, relational and perceptual schemas? What sort of semiotic components interact in the production of goods, but also in the production of different kinds of subjectivity? How does Collective equipment manage to make these diverse comments ‘assimilable’ to one another? Do certain components play a particular role in bringing about their generalised submission to semiologies 35

of language and the signifiers of the dominant powers? Can the function of Collective equipment move towards the liberating function of a collective assemblage or is it fundamentally antagonistic to this by its very nature? In our opinion, all these questions can be reduced to a more fundamental line of questioning: what is this sort of ‘optional matter’, this sort of basic political choice that ‘precedes’ every manifestation in signs, in space, in the life of a group, an institution or an equipment? Is it true that at all levels, economic, social and political, the question of a collective taking of the floor [prise de parole] or of an abandonment to the arrangements, the alienating equipments, of desire is posed? Might the collective Equipment that take possession of individuals in their most intimate point thus have as their mission that of the expropriation of desire from its ‘original’ territories, or let us say, rather, from its territories that are not yet subjected [assujetties] by capitalist flows, that of speaking in its place, fixing new aims for it, putting it to work, adapting it to hierarchies and systems of exchange, and all of that by means of a particular semiotic technology? To go further in this direction, it is necessary for us to return to Collective equipment in the customary sense of the term, to show in detail, on the basis of concrete examples, how this option machine is produced and mobilised, behind the supposedly neutral architectural and institutional facades of this equipment. To show: by what particular techniques of semiotic predisposition, the libidinal investments of fundamental choices are made in the name of the collective, by what procedures situations that are apparently open are played out in advance; and that the real margin of choice can nonetheless subsist for people who want to escape from the system. Given a gridding of equipment, what politics of a collective assemblage is it possible to envisage? Where to begin? Obviously only the preparation of collectively elaborated monographs could allow such questions to be suitably tackled! So, in the present study we have no other ambition than to seek to appreciate what the conditions for a new analytic method could be, one whose task would not be limited in this domain to an external examination, to ‘expert’ interventions, but which would have to facilitate the collective taking in charge in determinate micropolitical domains. Let us repeat that this exploration of the conditions for a new analytic praxis cannot be synonymous with a search for universal ‘foundations’. Whatever the theoretical renewal that it sets out might be, it accepts its limit immediately. It even vindicates as its point of departure an undecidable axiom that we could call the ‘axiom of political choice’: whatever the extent to which one segments an economic or social group, one will always be able to form a new micropolitical group, which cuts across it everywhere, on the 36

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basis of these segments. It may seem to ‘go without saying’ that the current proliferation of Collective equipment leads to an irreversible alienation in the economy of desire. Theories of destiny, of necessity, of the structural inscription of progress in the economic order, of desire in the symbolic order, etc. then become founded. But the inverse evidence could equally impose itself, that a collective assemblage function, an optional matter that is more subtle than all other semiotic, social and ‘material’ matters could undo the repressive character of the equipmental function. Certain nomadic societies have systematically refused to territorialise their power formations on Collective equipment and others have even deliberately destroyed all manifestations of such territorialisation (the armies of Ghenghis Khan, for example, weren’t satisfied just with razing to the ground the cities that they invaded: they filled up the ditches and canals, burst the dikes so as to return the ground to the state of nature after they had passed through . . .).1 And yet they have in their own way nonetheless contributed to what is usually called the general development of civilisation! That being the case, we will not propose them as a model, as our second and final axiom consists in refusing all references to a model or to a transcendent and universal system of categories!

Rhizomatic semiotic research When we note the fact that semioticians (with some notable exceptions, such as Christian Metz, for cinema) have hardly bothered with setting out the specific traits of the encoding procedures and diverse modes of semiotisation with which they are confronted, we must add straightaway, in their defence, that they aren’t alone! The majority of researchers in the human and social sciences seem implicitly to accept the idea that the status of strongly syntacticised languages, with paradigmatic axes that are solidly codified by their ties to a writing machine, ought to constitute the a priori framework, the framework that is necessary for all other modes of expression, indeed for all other modes of encoding. All of contemporary semiological research seems haunted by a single preoccupation: the founding of a general semiology. However, it is not self-evident that such a science can or should be constituted! We will try to show that, on the contrary, the characteristic of modern modes of semiotisation perhaps resides in the fact of referring to the set of different scientific, technical and social systems, without ever managing to find a foundation in a system that would be proper to them. Whatever the case may be, this undertaking is marked by a doubtful a priori, it proceeds according to an unhealthy SEMIOTIC OPTIONAL MATTER

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method, it is the symptom of an infantile, even a constitutional, disorder. In the domain of the natural sciences, or even in the so-called exact sciences, the vitality of research has never developed in the exclusive optic of the constitution of a, for example, general geography, a general physics, a general chemistry, even a general mathematics, etc. In fact, the ‘branches’ of scientific research have always had a tendency to go off in directions that are heterogeneous at the beginning – less like the branches of a tree and more like a rhizome. Systems for the classification of the sciences have remained the concern of philosophers (or of scientists to the extent that they set to philosophising). In the life of scientific research itself, it is always on the basis of the lengthy accumulation of work, and in a retroactive fashion, that syntheses at the most general level are accomplished, syntheses that are, in any case, provisional and always susceptible of being called into question by the facts. Hitherto it seems that it is above all as examples that semiological research has addressed itself to gestures, spatial perception, advertising, fashion, music, etc. In fact, it reduces its objects of study to the state of being an example. It doesn’t really take into account their richness, the particular traits of expression that they put into play, the collective assemblages of enunciation that they imply. It takes itself as a hegemonic theory from the outset. The least one can say is that this is how today it exports its models into domains that are little prepared to receive them. In this regard, the case of semiological research into urban space would show, to the point of caricature, the sterilising effects of such an operation. Taking as its object gesturality in general or even Collective equipment in general, a different kind of semiotic research would have to set out the formulae for semiotisation specific to such and such a kind of equipment or particular institutional constellation. It would then be a matter of going beyond the method of exemplification by endeavouring never to reduce the specificity of the object considered. In fact, it is the epistemological prejudice regarding the supposed necessity of the generality characteristic of the object of study that would here be called into question and, as a consequence, the very status of research and of the researcher. The study of an object of desire implies not losing the singularity of its mode of enunciation en route. In these conditions, the enunciation of the study itself cannot remain independent of the modes of enunciation relative to its ‘object’. Analytically and politically neutral as it wishes itself today, research in the human sciences can only miss the collective economy of desire, in its most essential wellsprings. Only desire can read desire. We therefore cannot insist enough on the necessity of a certain transference of enunciation: the subject producing a study must be ‘meshed’, in one way or another, with the mode 38

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of enunciation of the subject concerned by the study. In the absence of a certain assemblage of enunciation between the knowing subjects and the subjects to be known, research can only become sterile, or what is worse, take its place amongst the oppressive systems of power. But the fact of renouncing the generality characteristic of the scientific object, its function of exemplification, doesn’t in the least imply abandoning every method of scientific investigation. The singularity of desire, historical mutations, the event that comes ‘from outside’, the emergence of new machinic ramifications, the springing up of what we call concrete machines, thus characterises what, following Jacques Lacan, we designate as being the status of ‘conjectural sciences’. What is difficult to get people to admit today, but which seems essential to us, is that independently of their relations of subjection to the dominant languages, the dominant modes of production of signification, a taking into consideration of the semiotic components of a system is not necessarily synonymous with the point of view of a return to natural values, a fixation on the past, the cult of the archaic. Amongst these components we have cited: dance, the imitative expression of modes of somatisation, the perception of space, semiotic components at the heart of which biological codings intervene . . . But it would be worth adding to that ‘modern’, asignifying or post-signifying components, putting into play batteries of deterritorialised signs like those that one is dealing with in money, the ‘writing’ of the stock exchange, musical writing, systems of scientific, computational formalism, etc. It is true that these components also, in one way or another, remain more or less tributary to signifying semiologies, but at the level of their intrinsic functioning they escape from the redundancies that fashion the everyday. In a general fashion, we may consider that all these components of ‘natural’ coding (genetic, hormonal, humoural, perceptive, postural, etc.), pre-signifying components (iconic, gestural, mimetic, etc.), or post-signifying components (digital codes, economic signs, mathematics, etc.)2 can encounter (or constitute) signifying semiologies, but only in so far as they find in them the path to their impotentiation. The fact that we are led to place the accent on semiotics that escape language must therefore not be understood in question begging terms in favour of an instaneist and spontaneist mode of communication, a return to the origin of the type proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but simply as the result of an observation, which is that in a uniquely linguistic framework, the study of semiological systems cannot but make us miss its pragmatic openings, not only onto the real life of social groups but also onto numerous modes of semiotisation relative to the cosmos, scientific creation, artistic creation, revolutionary action, etc. SEMIOTIC OPTIONAL MATTER

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In other words, in every economy of desire, understood in a very broad sense as a system of flows traversing the relations between individuals and assembling the set of possible connections between the objects and the machinisms that constitute ‘the world’ for an individual. A world which – everyone everywhere repeats – is more and more artificial, more and more alienating! But the two things do not necessarily go hand in hand. Artifice and deterritorialisation are perhaps today the two surest values of a liberating desire! And references to nature, to the evidence of faces and landscapes, are perhaps the most underhand allies of dominant systems of signification, in so far as they frame them around a lost past and on imaginary territorialisations at an impasse! In fact, the true productive relations that can exist between signs, things and the socius do not pass via the same kinds of instances as those that engender our ‘everyday significations’, those on which the enterprises of mediocritisation of power and the self-importance of its representatives are based. The signs of the body as much as the signs of science and of the arts do not attain pragmatic effectiveness other than on condition of circumventing the dominant system of redundancies in one way or another. What we would like to establish is that the way in which these sign machines, considered at the level of their work on the real, and no longer just at the level of their functions of subjective representation, effectively thwart the values of power relative to individual, family, state, territorialities, etc., and mobilise a sort of molecular semiotic energy, constituted of quanta of sub-human articulations, systems of potentialities, rather than stratified systems. This is the process that we are endeavouring to outline with the notion of diagrammatism in what follows. Perhaps we will be reproached with wanting to put semiotics everywhere and of no longer being in a position to delimit our object precisely. But provisionally, we prefer to run this risk rather than the risk that would consist of missing the essential dimensions of the functioning of this domain of Collective equipment, from the point of view of the economy of desire in the social field, and thus of explicitly legitimating their alienating function. Applied to this particular domain, the kind of pragmatic approach whose foundations we would like to sketch out here, should even, in our view, make the necessity of a reorganisation of the field of semiology evident and urgent. From the moment that one is confronted with the diversity of components of coding and of semiotisation effectively put into play by a Collective equipment, one is led to ask oneself about the nature of the system that presides over their concatenation and over the passageways that lead from one to the other. And it is no longer just on speculative grounds but also on a practical terrain that questions concerning the 40

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systems of ‘causality’, which under certain conditions places one of them in the dominant position in relation to the others, permanently rest. Are there infrastructural determinations or a particular practice that might permit the semiotic toolings that are carried out by the school, prisons, the prefecture, the banks, etc., to be oriented in a de-alienating direction? In numerous disciplines, one senses the necessity of escaping from the simple categorial oppositions that have led traditional medical semiology, for example, to make a symptom depend either on the body or on the ‘mind’, that is to say, either on objective biological sciences, or interpretative, symbolic systems, etc. In effect, these dichotomies of ‘good sense’ always in the end result in making arbitrary groupings, or even in putting everything in the same boat: behind the diversity of modes of encoding, the same principle of formal organisation, in which an all-powerful generative formula is supposed to ‘inhabit’ the biological as its soul, or inversely, to make the mind function according to a mechanics the models for which have been copied from external scientific schema (which are, in any case, often outmoded!) The objects of study having thus been delimited and stratified, it is no surprise that research imprisons itself in spatialised and ahistorical frameworks. Every time that one brings about this kind of dichotomous reduction, one loses the unity of functioning, the fundamental movement of the creative virtualities of the object studied. Psychiatry has arranged its own impotence by dissecting symptoms and syndromes in such a way as to make them enter into tableaux that are closed in on themselves – something which, it is true, gives well-informed practitioners the opportunity to exercise their ‘authority’ over their novice colleagues, by constantly overturning the categories of the school [in question]. In fact, they declare, one only every deals with limit cases, which border lines, a hysteria equally presenting the traits of paranoia, a schizophrenic tableau not being incompatible with depressive syndromes, etc. In a more general fashion, one may consider ‘simple’ and ‘logical’ alternatives almost inevitably operate by strong-arming reality.

Example of rhizomatic research: the semiotic factory of childhood One cannot, for example, say that the disciplinary economy of the school is solely in the service of the learning of language, writing, calculus, the transmission of knowledge that is ‘useful’ for the child, or utilisable by society, all things that could in the last analysis be described in terms of SEMIOTIC OPTIONAL MATTER

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information theory. One cannot say either that it is solely a dressage of attitudes based on competition, mutual surveillance, etc., or a learning of the rituals of submission to dominant values. One cannot dissociate the discernible Collective equipment (with its walls, its urban situation, etc.) from the social fields of force in which it bathes, from the State power on which it depends, or from its interactions with families and diverse other modes of sociality with contours that are more difficult to discern, such as the classes of age, professional, cultural, sporting, etc. interests. It is important not to let oneself get caught up here in the logic of genetic chains or that of containers of the macro-social/micro-social kind, or even that of difference of levels between infrastructures and superstructures. No genetic or structural programming drives the modelling of the child; the action of the family, for example, doesn’t come ‘after’ that of school. As Anne Querrien has remarked, one is in the presence of a veritable system of interaction: the school playing an important role in the modelling of the family as such, dictating to adults the behaviour they will have to adopt in order to become ‘good parents of pupils’, and family authority not ceasing to be exercised, in all sorts of ways, over the teaching personnel and the mode of functioning of the school. The interaction between school and State doesn’t depend on a one-way fit either: the State controls the school by means of the Ministry for Education, its inspectors, its missives, etc., but inversely it is itself largely ‘infiltrated’ by the teaching body. It is enough here to evoke the importance of the role of the teaching body in the so-called ‘radical socialist’ period of the Third Republic, and its still current power, via organisations such as the Ligue d’enseignement, the Freemasons, etc. Can one nonetheless maintain that because school is only supposed to deal with words and attitudes it thus only arises from ideological superstructures, from ideological state apparatuses depending ‘in the last instance’ on economic infrastructures? But doesn’t the semiotic tooling of labour power which it carries out constitute a fundamental cog, not just in the relations of production of capitalist societies, but also in their productive forces as such? Is not the first of primary matters, before coal, steel and electricity, this semiotic matter that is produced through academic and university equipment? It isn’t just the competence of workers, of technicians and executive, in the matter of reading orders, deciphering plans, the articulation of complex operations that depends on it, but also the adaptation to the discipline of the workshop and the office, acceptance of hierarchies – an acceptance that is as ‘active’ as possible. It is in the family-nursery-school complex that the basic semiotic components of capitalist labour power are manufactured and that the essential schemas of the division of labour, the 42

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division of castes and of classes, sexual and ethnic segregations, etc., are preformed. That is what produces what Gilles Deleuze and I have attempted to determine around the notion of a ‘bureaucratic eros’,3 this ascetic jouissance that capitalist societies seem to have inherited from the old monastic machines, as the ‘credo’ elaborated by the Société pour l’amélioration de l’instruction élémentaire as a ‘guide for the use of inspectors’ in 1817 tends to show us.4 Two kinds of readings can be proposed of such a document: ●

One would consider it as being nothing more than a lay manual of repression for the gridding and militarisation of childhood.

●

The other would additionally try to bring out a curious bureaucratic religion from it, imprinted with a sort of administrative poetry.

Literary research will perhaps one day be led to make a compilation of this kind of production and to show its articulation with major literature. Rather than misrecognising the micro-fascist seductions that it harbours, we should on the contrary try to clarify what it might bring to its ‘users’, what sort of inadmissible pleasure they can take from it.5 A jouissance centred on the master, as the Lacanians might say! But on which master and in what conditions? In whatever domain one might come to apply it, psychoanalytic abstraction can only lead to the avoidance of the real fields of power. An exploration of the libidinal functioning of the school, for example, ought on the contrary to envisage the nature of the entirety of investments that operate there, beginning with those that exist between the children themselves. Here, one is perhaps effectively in the presence of an informal ersatz of what is institutionalised in primitive societies, at the level of the rites of passage that mark the entrance of children into a range of different classes of age. Additionally, an institutional analysis of the libido of the school would have everything to gain from an appeal to ethnologists rather than to pedagogues, for it is true that it is archaic societies that have the most to teach us about the modes of crystallisation of the socius preserving the libidinal components of the school, this time concerning the very particular sexual activity that develops there between adults and children: a mysterious crossroads of ‘adult’ semiotics of seduction, authority, suggestion, and the ‘world of children’.6 One might then try to extract a specific matrix function from this kind of Collective equipment, which consists in capturing the sexual energy of children – an energy that at the outset is territorialised on the body and on what Winnicot has called ‘transitional objects’7 or on animals and becomings-animal,8 toys and games, on what Fernand Déligny calls ‘near space’9 so as to deterritorialise it, to ‘sublimate’ SEMIOTIC OPTIONAL MATTER

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it, as psychoanalysts would say. In fact, it is so as to impotentiate it, to make it fall into power’s zones of collapse – what, in the third part of this work, we will designate with the term ‘black hole’, and finally to place it in the service of capitalist systems of semiotic enslavement (family, bureaucratic, industrial, cultural, systems, etc.). A non-reductive analysis of school would show us that when all is said and done, the ‘matter’ that is tooled behind its walls is doubtless less an affair of teaching, of information or of power than a libidinal matter that is constitutive of the collective power of labour, and which implies a ‘superegoic’ investment of professional roles and hierarchical functions. For a large part, it is this same libidinal tooling that one comes across as the basis of the modelling of phallocratic sexual behaviour in the couple or the politics of repressive introjection with regard to the sexed body. In the machinery of the School, everything converges on this generalised subjection: systems of relations as much as the organisation of space – which Michel Foucault has described as a miniaturisation of the ‘panoptic machine’ – the system of timetables, the rhythms of work, the constraints imposed on the exercise of speech, the control of movement in space, and even – very often – the pure and simple forbidding of components of corporeal, musical, plastic expression, etc. Nor should one forget the absence of any system of funding, which has as its consequence the maintenance of children and teaching personnel in an attitude of passive dependence with regard to the administration and to the family.

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6 EQUIPMENT OF POWER AND POLITICAL FACADES

The institutional simulacra of instituted politics A certain number of people are starting today to become aware of a general crisis in Collective equipment. In the aftermath of the ‘events of May 68’, agitations of varying degrees of intensity and kind haven’t stopped weakening their institutional foundations. But after having in the course of time more or less recognised the ‘gravity’ and the significance of the phenomenon, the political class in its entirety has woven a fabric of forgetting or of misrecognition around it. ‘Sure, May 68 was important, but basically it didn’t change anything . . .’ Or it has made the event banal: it pretends no longer to be surprised by the crises that since then haven’t stopped following on one after another, and finds it normal that one day prisons are burning and soldiers are forming committees, and that another day prostitutes are invading the churches or, inversely, the clergy are dying of emotion in the corridors of brothels! It is a matter here of accidental occurrences, internal jolts that do not fundamentally call institutions into question. Even when the most vigilant of observers start to admit that it is perhaps a matter here of symptoms that announce a deeper crisis, they refuse to consider that what can happen in schools, prisons, the barracks, etc., can call into question anything other than the intermediate links, relays between the power of the State and social classes. Political and university modes of thinking, on the left as much as the right, refuse to accept the idea that something really important might develop from this ‘little side’ of 45

history. In March 1968, no-one could imagine that ‘student agitation’ would end up threatening the established order and would constitute a sort of test bank – perhaps the first of its kind – of what a socialist revolution in a developed country might be! The only people who really had the political measure of the collective vertigo, the only people who really envisaged a revolutionary outcome, were neither leftist militants nor the professional revolutionaries, but the most senior men of State, beginning with de Gaulle, Pompidou and the leaders of the military. The origin of the blind point, of the conceptual gap that made politicians, militants and numerous researchers miss the sense of such events, it seems to us, resides in the fact that from the point of view of the molecular functioning of the socius, they did not spot that ‘visible’ entities like the State, the city, the family, the individual had the characteristics of simulacra. Unlike these latter, Collective equipment and the collective assemblages of enunciation are never the result of simple interactions between homogeneous domains – national, regional, family, individual sets, etc. In the first place they mesh/are plugged into capitalist flows as deterritorialised flows that traverse and decompose archaic territories (for example, international flows of exchanges, flows of credit money, informatics flows, flows of scientific and technical, medical knowledge, etc.). All the old facades of the State, all the venerable facialities of traditional powers – the power of the father, the boss, the school, religion, medicine, etc. – are so decrepit that it has now become necessary to reequip each institutional domain with a safety territory, an artificial faciality, that of the banker on the billboard, for example, who proposes the friendly image of a capitalism ‘entirely at your service’, that of the receptionist in the social security office . . . The ‘welcome’ has become very important for power! People are so lost, so maddened by the deterritorialisation of the gears of the social, of space and time, like frightened animals, power feels the need to calm them down, to put [soft] music in lifts, to make them parade and to channel them in a continuum of spaces modelled by design techniques. If it happens, whether by accident or by lack of foresight, that a national faciality of the kind that has been put in place in France with the advent of Gaullism is not erected at the summit of the audiovisual edifice of the Power of the State in good time, then the whole of the social imaginary will vacillate, as in Italy for some time now or more recently in the United States. In effect, what cannot be tolerated is that the fact that State power is only a facade become too bluntly obvious, everywhere preceded and exceeded by pressure groups, lobbies, parallel police forces, mafias, military-industrial complexes, ‘supranationals’, etc. The intervention of these infra- and supraState machines is manifestly much better meshed with contemporary social 46

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and economic realities than governments and parliaments, the formal ‘coordination’ and technocratic planning that occupies the foreground. What the political class has not yet realised is that the consistency of the social fabric, its syntagmatic weft, no longer results from the composition of homogeneous groups of individuals, families, classes or nations, but of heterogeneous assemblages that are not only constituted of human persons but also of organs, of modes of semiotisation of territories, of machines, semiotic flows, international connections of every kind . . . If ‘political’ representation is thus only a screen on which what we call institutional simulacra, which it constitutes as homogeneous but empty sets, are projected, if it misses the heterogeneous assemblages that give real consistency to the socius – assemblages which, let us repeat, do not result from simple systems of interaction between human persons, but put into play a complex metabolism of organic and perceptual functions, modes of semiotisation and of subjectivation, machines and flows of all kinds – this isn’t the result of ideological ‘errors’ because, from this point of view, all the ideologies of left and right are equivalent, but of the mode of enunciation that it promotes. In other words, a congenital incapacity to grasp anything other than that for which it has been put together, that is to say, icons, personae, stereotypes without any real hold on flows of desire and economic flows. Political life is played out at the level of collective assemblages of desire and of the equipment of power. That these latter today occupy the foreground to the detriment of the former ought not to mask the problematic that they harbour, that is to say that the new technologies of social alienation that they put to work appeal to, and to a certain extent, render possible, radically new modes of restructuring of revolutionary struggles.

The mega-network of miniaturised equipment Modern collective equipment can no longer be considered to be merely parts that are adjacent to the previous social systems. With them, one is no longer dealing with institutional objects functioning as simulacra – or as ideological state apparatuses. On the contrary, to the extent that the old power formations have been miniaturised and are concentrated on them, and form the basis on which most of the deterritorialised flows that are able to transversalise and re-stratify the diverse segments of the socius are tooled, they from now on play a fundamental role in the delimiting, the control, the neutralisation and the recuperation of new revolutionary EQUIPMENT OF POWER AND POLITICAL FACADES

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powers, the embryos of collective assemblages that correspond to them, and equally in the ‘redefinition’ of personological simulacra of all kinds – the new fashion of playing one’s role as a father or a mother, or the style of the PSU whizz-kid or UDR go-getter1 . . . Thus the ‘optional matter’ that is treated by the collective equipment before any social or economic functionality may be reduced to the differentiation and articulation of old territorialised powers into two kinds of new State powers: a molar political power and a molecular semiotic power. Let us specify that in this last modality State power will not just intervene on the ‘small scale’, at the local, family, individual or infra-individual level, but also on the large scale, so true is it that the ‘grand politics’ can enter into a dependence on a ‘micropolitics’ of desire under certain circumstances. Inversely, molar State power will be incarnated as much in major forms of equipment as in semiotic micro-montages. In fact, we are in the presence of the same network of equipment at every level, which ensures the control of the deterritorialisation of capitalist flows and the reproduction of the reterritorialising models that are related to it. It’s not governments, councils, unions or political parties that have a ‘hold’ on Collective equipment but a sort of Super Equipment that is at one and the same time everywhere and nowhere, which crosses national borders, linguistic barriers, antagonisms of class, race and sex, the constellations of families, bodies, organs and even mental ‘faculties’.2 As a network of Collective equipment, the capitalist State has taken charge not just of development and production that would not be economically profitable – the equipping of infrastructure, certain primary matters in energy, communication networks, production of flows of knowledge, the reproduction of the flows of educational training, the accumulation of ‘knowledge capital’3 – but it has equally taken over the relaying of the production of values and of the ‘normalising’ icons of social libido that had hitherto remained the privilege of traditional territorialities and old religious machines. State power is no longer content to be an internal means of arbitration and an external means of coercion for capitalism. It now intends to function on an equal basis in the heart of capitalists and in that of the proletariat, in the hearts of men and women, those of the young and of the old . . . It isn’t just its police, its armies, its administrators who are on display on every street corner, interfering in every sequence of everyday life, and who don’t stop trying to kit the territory as a whole out as a super-equipment-gulag, but it infiltrates itself everywhere in a molecular form, in schools, the family, in the unconscious. In order to be everywhere at once, it multiplies its one face, with its central-black-holeeye, which dispenses universal guilt, or delegates to different personae the 48

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concern with chanting refrains which, although apparently antagonistic, in reality play on the same range of faciality traits. For example, through circulars from the Ministry of Education, the molar power of the State recommends stopping giving homework to children, whilst the molecular power of the State at the heart of the family, which generally results from a highly problematic compromise between the father and the mother, will demand of teachers that they re-establish it! In reality ‘constituted’ powers merely float alongside this super-machine, like pilot fish around a whale, without obstructing anything essential in its functioning. What they think are big decisions on their part generally reduce to a taking into account of tendencies that are sketched out elsewhere, to a registering of statistical changes and to the scaffolding, on that basis, of predictions and plans that are inscribed within their direction. The ‘true’ power of the State is not political, in the customary sense of the term. It is not the affair of men who, ‘in their heart and soul’ – according to the consecrated formula, produce a rational discourse on society and the public good. The discourse of opinion, the Brownian movements that give the ‘lives’ of ministers and the ‘life’ of politics in general their apparent consistency, tend to create the illusion of a coherent political field. In fact, each subject of enunciation, each political spokesperson, is more or less manipulated, like a puppet by complex machines, the outlines of which escape him or her: bureaucratic, financial, economic, military, technical, urban territorial machines, etc. Rational human discourse no longer constitutes anything but an element that is adjacent and sometimes entirely marginal in relation to the diverse machinic (material, semiotic, demographic, ecological, etc.) processes concerned. And it is no surprise that politicians turn out to be agents – of the CIA , for example. In every circumstance, they are never anything but the agents of one machine or another!

The facialities of power To save appearances, in a system that is no longer made of anything other than appearances, it has become primordially important that a facade of rationality find its cornerstone in a faciality of power, if possible, that of a head of State with a clenched fist but a gentle face, who knows how to keep his subordinates, who are themselves highly important, in their place, and who know in turn, etc. Thus the unity of the socius is reconstituted on a mirage: the gaze of the head of State, behind which is outlined that of the chief of police, that of the boss, the teacher, the father, the gentle superego. EQUIPMENT OF POWER AND POLITICAL FACADES

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The consistency of the socius has thus become an affair of resonance, a knot of imaginary reterritorialisation on the basis of which defeated territorialities attempt to reconstitute themselves by propping themselves up on one another, in the same game of fiction. In the third part of this work, as examples of these ‘aberrant’ components, we will set out modes of semiotisation that operate on the basis of what we will call faciality traits and which, although entering a particularly miniaturised formation of power, carry their effects to the broadest social ensembles. We have effectively come to consider that, to the extent that they are ‘treated’ by the machines of Collective equipment, realities that are apparently as ungraspable, as fleeting, as ‘subjective’, as facial expressions do not simply constitute ways of ‘adorning’ discourse, but are fundamental semiotic components of capitalistic systems. Everywhere and at every moment, a faciality of power hangs over institutions and social relations of power. We know that faciality now plays a primordial role through the intermediary of television, in political struggles, during presidential elections, for example, but it also participates in the labour of producing dominant significations on many other occasions. Rather than relying on psychosocial or psychoanalytic simplifications, the analysis of a social situation or some Collective equipment, ought to grasp not ‘identifications’ in general but the constellations of faciality traits, the collective tics, the stereotypes that model a local power formation. To what point can one look a superior in the eye or smile at him? What is the typical interval that is tolerated in such and such a situation, as a function of the hierarchical scales of age, sex, race, etc.? In short, there is an entire micropolitical ethology that should be explored and experimented with here, because, once again, Collective equipment is not just walls, offices, circulations, transmissions of orders and information, but also and above all, a modelling of attitudes, of rituals of submission that are imposed across multiple semiotic components. The personalisation and the faceification of powers in contemporary societies do not stop being important. Paradoxically, as production is internationalised [deterritorialisées], it seems that we are witnessing a particularisation (a reterritorialisation) of the relations of production and of social relations on the nation, the region, ethnicity, the individual, etc. This reinforcing of the individuation of enunciation doesn’t in the least signify that now it is individuals who are tending to take control of the power of the State, the power of the business, who are giving history, the economy, its direction . . . One brandishes phrases from Mao Tse-tung, one establishes his face so as to justify directions that are sometimes absolutely contradictory . . . One brandishes the face of a reassuring president to try to create the ‘psychological conditions’ likely to 50

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‘cool down’ overheating money markets! But every time, there are complex social apparatuses [instances] with outlines that are very difficult to define, which utilise a faciality of power. Sometimes it is enough to show a face to change the dimensions of a problem (to ‘make an example’, to set off a scandal: what happened with the presentation of the desperate face of Mme Claustre on television). In fact, what is functioning here is neither the person nor the face as such.4 The face belongs to a complex constellation. It only functions in so far as it puts into play dominant systems of redundancies, that is to say, in so far as it arises from the general equipment function that we are talking about here and which in practice implies its dependency with regard to a particular network of equipment and a specific capacity to set off miniaturised equipment on which the power of the bourgeoisie and of capitalist bureaucrats rests. To present the faces of starving children from Bangladesh on television has practically no effect, because it is a faciality that doesn’t make any dent in the imaginary of affluent, Western societies, because it doesn’t interest the machinism of the dominant power! What is the real function of the power formations of faciality equipment in Collective equipment? What is the meaning of this personification of power? Can one conceive that, one day, other relations will succeed in establishing themselves between the State, institutions, collective equipment and users? Can one still conceive of a withering away of this personalisation, this hierarchisation of roles and responsibilities, in the extension of the ‘withering away of the State’ that for Marxists pre-Stalin, the index of socialist societies towards communism? Despite the development of struggles arising from what we call the molecular revolution and the disquiet of public powers in this regard, despite the large numbers of studies in the domains of history and sociology bearing on everyday life, the family, school, professional relations, etc., the majority of ‘serious’ people persist in considering that everything that touches on these questions of desire can only be a matter of literature or of anarchist daydreaming, and some even affirm that it is a matter of ‘demobilising’, even ‘neo-fascist’ themes! And we should also reflect more on the question of knowing if such a viewpoint really does ‘follow the direction of history’, or if it is synonymous with a dissolution of every organised society, all social and economic ‘progress’. To our mind, it represents the only possible escape route from the concentration camp-like world of industrial societies, the sole point of connection with the rhizome of another possible world. But a few local examples of contestation, a few minoritarian practices, don’t make a world! What will ‘hold together’ this new world, where, in particular, will it draw the consistency of its collective power of labour from? EQUIPMENT OF POWER AND POLITICAL FACADES

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Molar powers and molecular potentials Capitalist equipment is the locus for the intersection of two types of political struggle: macro-political struggles that can be located at, for example, the electoral or union level, etc., and micropolitical struggles that can be situated at the same level, including that of the State, but which everywhere exceed social stratifications, institutional and legal limits (that is how sometimes ‘insignificant’ events can set off considerable upheavals, or contribute to the blockage of political situations. For example, the Watergate leaks or blackmail over one’s private life, the tax affairs of important figures, etc.). It is impossible to say once and for all that one of these types of struggle conditions the other. In fact, they play out in different registers and are constantly interacting. Although they are often the result of statistical effects relating to molecular evolution or mutation, molar political struggles equally have at their disposal their own margin of autonomy, and can in turn influence the former. If it is true that microscopic ‘accidents’ or slow statistical transformations, of collective sensibility, for example, can make history topple one way or another, it is equally true that ‘major’ events, like epidemics, crises, wars, invasions and revolutions, can set off or accelerate metamorphoses at the molecular level. Molar power relations have as their function the ‘framing’, the hierarchisation of the social fabric, whereas relations of molecular potential constitute its warp and its weft, but in the living mode, as a function of collective assemblages with changing contours and of praxes that rebel against sociological and economic invariants. Being centred less and less round the individual, the family, the school, the town, etc., the dynamic reality, the energy and drives of the socius can be crystallised around sometimes minuscule elements – an organic symptom or a corporeal semiotic trait, the red cheeks of an employee who a foreman ‘has a word with’, for example – which are required to appear in certain circumstances as a function of certain relations of force and somehow ‘independently’ of the persons concerned. It can be organised according to large-scale groupings putting into play multiple economic, social, political, legal and institutional groups . . . as is the case, for example, with what today is called the ‘crisis amongst the youth’, the ‘crisis in the army’, the ‘crisis in justice’ . . . Rather than fixing this reality as does the collective equipment, rather than codifying and institutionalising the relations between molar powers and molecular potentials, the collective assemblages implicated in these microscopic crystals or these vast group movements do not stop calling them into 52

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question. They disorientate the systems of cause and effect, the polarisation of objects and subjects, they undo limits, contaminate new fields, miniaturise their effects, ‘work’ deterritorialisation in every possible direction. Where they manifest themselves, it quickly becomes illusory to pretend to circumscribe a problem to a definite object or a responsible subject, an equipment or a ministry (Monsieur Prostitution, Madame The Condition of Women . . .). How could one fail to think that the emancipation struggles of women will only find their full scope on condition that they manage to call into question at the same time the everyday and sexual lives of couples, family relationships with children, the relationship to production, to creation, etc.? The collective assemblages that are manifest in raised consciousness and struggles cannot have one axis alone, a fixed root, on the basis of which ‘solutions’ might be deduced, according to an ‘arborescent’ logic. It is only at the end of a process of living institutional analysis, that is to say, of a politically and micropolitically engaged analysis that one can discern what sort of ‘rhizome’ they correspond to. We cannot insist enough on this point: from the moment one comes into contact with this type of machinic and institutional assemblage, all the micropolitics contaminate each other, that of the observed and that of the observer, that of the judge and that of the delinquent, that of the militant and that of the ‘militated’ . . . The stakes become political at the deepest level of libidinal investment: either one opts for the stratification of power, one’s most intimate being included, or one agrees to follow the lines of flight of desire and to rid oneself of pre-established equipment, dominant redundancies, constraining significations . . . To our mind, it is against this question that, failing to recognise in it their genuine ‘optional matter’, every current problematic of social change, innovation and collective experimentation stumbles. Envisaged from the point of view of this micropolitical analysis, the question of Collective equipment would thus have to be distinguished from the traditional functionalist approach, but it ought also to find its articulation with the ‘archaeological’ approach. Michel Foucault has shown us to what extent this is able to renew problems like those of the psychiatric hospital, the prison, the school, etc. Foucault himself indicates this direction: ‘one day we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parentschildren cell, have become “disciplined”, absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal.’ 5 We could thus schematically characterise two types of approach, according to whether they propose either: EQUIPMENT OF POWER AND POLITICAL FACADES

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to bring to light an external archaeology of power formations whose functioning is exercised on the basis of the extrinsic systems of redundancies of explicit codes, manifest repressive instances: for example, the constitution of educational, medical, psychiatric powers, which model the family, the body, the individual, desire ‘from the outside’ as a function of particular micropolitical and micro-physical technologies; or

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discern the emergence of these same power formations on the basis of molecular networks of desiring machines that traverse the levels of the body, the individual, the family, the school, the army, etc., in a much more subterranean way.

Neither of these two viewpoints can have any anteriority or priority over the other. Nothing is ever definitively gained on either side. If it is true that the basic objects of the social economy of desire are no longer – supposing that they ever have been6 – territorialised groups of individuals and families, but transpersonal multiplicities tending to escape well established stratifications and contexts/frames, it is equally true that these same multiplicities can be taken up again in the play of molar apparatuses [instances] precisely because they have been felt to be threatening by these latter and nevertheless haven’t succeeded in setting off collective assemblages that call them into question in a decisive way.

‘Collective analytic’ interventions and the social unconscious In a more general way, it has to be admitted that, whatever the nature of the relations of force that they manage to establish with the equipment of power, these assemblages of desire cannot completely escape from relations of signification and social relations, understood this time in the usual sense. Also, the analytic entry route at the ‘intermediary’ level of Collective equipment that seems necessary and possible to us is not to be opposed to the ‘massive’ political pathways, or to the very small scale analytic pathways. It should be a matter of complementary interventions calling each other into question. The ‘political’ interferes with the micro-social, the familial, the inter-individual, and the infra-individual, whereas the ‘libidinal’ interferes with the political at whatever level one takes it. And at the level of each of these types of interference, a collective pragmatics can be put in 54

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place. Thus institutional reformism without any revolutionary horizon and revolutionary movements without any immediate praxis of everyday life must be questioned together. It is always possible to delimit a field of analysis and micropolitical intervention that allows the rhizome of collective assemblages of desire to make an advance. What we criticise both the militants of groupuscules and psychoanalysts for is that in all sorts of ways they impede the putting into place of such assemblages. And they do this in the name of their knowledge, their programme, their apparatuses, their specialisms, their particular knack. The molecular revolution is not hostile to political movements, whether classically contestatory or protest. It simply makes them take flight from inside, and opens them up onto other outsides. It isn’t hostile either to relatively localised practices of institutional analysis (in domains and with objects that doubtless don’t correspond to those of administrative nomenclatures, but which are delimited as a function of the fields of intervention, the army, the prisons, ‘madness’, etc.). Thus a certain number of groups are endeavouring today to renew an approach to the ‘school’ phenomenon by considering it conjointly, on the basis of points of view that are very different from one another. For example, its treatment of spaces – the wretched dreariness of walls, corridors, ‘play’ grounds, etc.; its treatment of noise and of speech – the semiotic collapse of all gestural, postural, mimetic, etc., components; its micro-social, microeconomic relations; even its affective misery and the confusion of children, linked to the isolation of families, the neuroses of teachers, etc. What then circumscribes the outline of an analytic pragmatics is the capacity of analysing group-subjects, however embryonic they may be, to remain closely meshed with these different components. It may be a matter of very modest enterprises, like the intervention of those educational psychologists in primary school teaching, who conceive their role in a very different mode to what it was a decade ago: they refuse to test, to stay confined in an office, and endeavour to work directly with the children and teachers in the classroom, in order to promote the starting of collective projects. There’s nothing really revolutionary about that! But the simple fact that they break something in the collective routine sometimes succeeds in catalysing processes of the opening of the local group eros and to set off a chain of entirely unforeseen phenomena of disinhibition that in any case have no common measure with what might have been the result of individual interviews or serial psychotherapy, such as are dispensed in medico-pedagogical centres in their current form. In a very different domain, a group like that set up by Michel Foucault and a certain number of militants and intellectuals around the problem of prisons – the Groupe d’information sur les prisons (GIP ) – may be EQUIPMENT OF POWER AND POLITICAL FACADES

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considered as a collective analytic and militant assemblage of this kind. At the outset, its action was limited to the distribution of questionnaires to prisoners and to information work. Then its contacts ramified and it was in a completely different light that possibilities for struggle appeared, resulting in a significant calling into question of the condition of prisons, the role of the law and of prisons, of the attitude of public opinion and militant group with regard to ‘common rights’ . . . Certainly it wasn’t the GIP as such that ‘set off ’ the spectacular crisis that resulted in the setting of half of all French prisons on fire! But the political importance that the revolts of the inmates took was certainly not without relation to its interventions. Besides, these latter induced others, in other domains, in the same style, which quite naturally contributed to linking together questions that had previously been separated (those concerning immigrants, homosexuals, drug-users, prostitutes, etc.). To my mind, the characteristic of this new mode of action articulating political struggle with everyday life, the slogan [mot d’ordre] to research, the intellectual and the militant to common law, to prostitutes, etc., is a ‘collective analytic’ intervention into the social unconscious, even if such a project is not made explicitly as such. The object of ‘militancy’ doubles up: it is on the side of the domain of intervention, but also on the side of those intervening. It is a matter of working permanently on militant collective enunciation, not just on the statements produced. What is important is never to aim to guide or interpret actions. When collective enunciation goes wrong, when the group closes in on itself or takes a position of leadership, then such groups will prefer to break up! Their rule of conduct is in effect never to substitute themselves for processes of the collective enunciation of desire and for that reason, not to cut themselves off from any mode of semiotisation that plays an important role in the economy of desire of the social field, whether it intervenes at the level of the individual, the body, a process of ideation, of perception, etc., whether it is ‘intelligible’ or not, useful or not, for ‘the cause’ . . . In these conditions, it is not surprising that the rhizome of semiotic components is not simply polarised according to vectors that go from the family to the socius or, inversely, from the socius to the family; it will be organised according to much more complicated ensembles, branchings, maps that bypass traditional entities and problematics. It will be able to put into play heterogeneous components without any immediate relation with the usual system of cause and effect in the domain in question.

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7 A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

The third industrial revolution The breaks between professional life, leisure and education, between private life and public life, the valorisation of serious mindedness, even being self-sacrificing, when it is a question of labour, seem to constitute the very foundations of every society. Despite the evolution of the techniques and modes of organisation of production, in ‘experimental’ sectors in particular, the traditional imagery of the ‘world of work’, the faciality traits of the manual labourer of the nineteenth century – those of the miner or the railworker for example – continue to serve as the basis for the stereotypes concerning labour, such as it is conveyed in primary school, amongst other places. If the labour is boring and repressive, it is not fundamentally because of a mode of production founded on the exploitation of workers, it is, above all, because it has to be this way, because the difficulty and the obstacles offer an opportunity to overcome laziness and innate bad habits. But if these clichés and allegories inherited from the first steps in the industrial revolution continue to provide a recipe for schools and for the mass media, they in fact correspond less and less to the libidinal models required by its current steps, which are sometimes characterised as a ‘third industrial revolution’ and which are centred on the chemical industry, atomic energy, automation and informatics. A coherent use of systems of machinic enslavement (optimised and adaptable commands, direct numerical control, self-learning systems, etc.) might permit the accelerated replacement of systems of human enslavement bearing directly on the body, the limbs and organs of workers. On the contrary, the system of production seems to reinforce the alienating constraints on work, as 57

if for the sake of it, even in the most modern, the most automated of branches of production! Technical and scientific development as a whole tends towards the liquidation of fragmented, production line work, of the despotism of the jobsworths, and to a profound reorganisation of the break between hourly and monthly paid work on the one hand, and that of technicians and managers on the other. In reality the discipline and hierarchy that were essential to the ‘armies of workers’ of the twentieth century, only correspond today to the maintenance of repressive relations of production. In fact, they run counter to the development of production processes which are led to call on not just the body, the adeptness and the craft of workers, but also on their mind and, to a certain extent, their libido. The extraction of the deterritorialised schemas1 required by the new forms of the division of labour, the new organisation of society and the generalisation of the regime of decoded flows imply a particular treatment of the collective power of semiotisation and of labour. The Chinese communists experienced this when, in 1949, immediately after taking power, and having decided to reinforce the numbers of the Chinese working class, they made a great many peasants come to the cities and the factories. These peasants were so disorientated and frightened by the noise of the machines and the agitation of the workers that it was decided that for a certain period of time, the newcomers would have no other task than to move freely around the workshops so as to get used to their new working conditions, to ‘semiotise’ their new environment. Collective mnemotechnics, in which ‘Man could never do without blood, torture, sacrifices’,2 after the rule of ‘ascetic priests’, monastic discipline, after aristocratic ‘etiquette’, after the confinement of manufacturing and schools, after the reign of cramming and of ‘competition animals’ began to transfer the basic essentials of its ‘memories’ and a part of its logical mechanisms into informatics machines.3 This doesn’t in the least signify that informatics will be led to seize hold of the controls! It is even the contrary that might occur, the informatics revolution bringing unprecedented means for clearing the field of empty repetitions and opening up the possibility for the focusing of human labour on decision-making processes that by nature escape from the gridding of informatics, which arise, that is, from the economy of desire.4 It will thus be less and less necessary to learn the list of subprefectures or soon even the multiplication table: diagrammatic machines will tend more and more to take over such operations. A new sort of indolence, a ‘right to laziness’,5 a ‘right to madness’,6 is opening up for us. As stringency can be referred to machines, the machines of desire will be able smoothly to take up the path of efficacious molecular connections again. To be sure it is only a matter of 58

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a point of view that is objectively possible here, because in fact the politics of implanting repressive equipment doesn’t stop thwarting and sabotaging the collective assemblages of desire that would allow it to be realised on a large scale. In order to be affirmed, the new machinic memory, the new social organisation – for which decision-making centres will be arranged in a network and no longer subjected to one another hierarchically – will thus not be able to make do with the mass rejection of repressive equipment, especially the miniaturised equipment like the power of the school, medical power, the couple, the superego. It will have to take into account the particular reproductive power of which they are the bearers. It is condemned, in some way, to itself produce modes of semiotisation and assemblages that not only expropriate them of their current powers but which, in addition, will continuously de-phase the incessant return of the function of capitalist equipment.

Abstract machines What then would happen if the hierarchies, the bureaucracies, the phallocracies, the gerontocracies, were obliged to ‘let go of the control levers’? What would the new consistency of the social field be? To try to advance with this question, we must return once again to the distinction that we proposed between the function of Collective equipment and the function of collective assemblage (machinic assemblage and assemblage of enunciation). The putting into play of these functions – in particular at the level of the networks of Collective equipment – has allowed us to show that the consistency of the social field doesn’t rest on any system of transcendental invariants, any more than does that of language or the libido. What makes a ‘passage’ possible from one level to another – from an economic to an ‘ideological’ level, for example, what guarantees what we have called social transversality, doesn’t depend on principles, categories or elements that are delimited once and for all. Everything is to be remade, every time. Or, more exactly, it falls to networks of concrete machines that manifest, in a more or less transitory way, what we will call systems of abstract deterritorialisation machines, to establish this consistency and this transversality in given historical periods and conditions. The abstract machines around which the concrete assemblages and equipment – to which we will return in the third part of this book – crystallise are not external to social temporality, they traverse, produce and reproduce it. They negotiate the regulation of coefficients of deterritorialisation specific to each semiotic component and to each encoding component. But in passing from Equipment to A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

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Assemblages, one passes from one regime of abstract machines to another. With Equipment, abstract machines in their entirety depend on a single command – Capital – around which an entire general staff is organised, which grids the coordinates and values of the social field in its entirety in a dualist fashion: the Signifier and Non-Sense, the Useful and the Useless, Reason and Madness, the Beautiful and the Ugly, Music and Noise, etc. With Assemblages, the abstract machines and consequently the concrete machines that actualise them aren’t organised according to systematic computerisable ‘implication trees’, but in a rhizomatic fashion according to formulae that are irreducible to the binary decomposition that could only make them lose their specific traits to the matters of expression and matters of encoding concerned. One cannot ‘translate’ the machinic traits of a biological process into physiochemical or astrophysical traits. One can compare them, one can make numbers, topologies, formalisations of every kind pass into one another but not the position that it occupies in the phylum of machinic mutations. Hierarchies of invariants always remain external to the processes themselves and it is the same with the institutions of equipment and of the theories that are founded on them. One has, on one side, the Law, Theory; on the other, praxis, experimentation. But a theory-praxis functioning in the living parts of a society rupturing with the hierarchy of pre-established values will articulate systems of abstract machines deterritorialising onto themselves – and thus not in any way eternally – connecting to one another in an infinite rhizomatic expansion, not so as to fix and stratify the socius but to ensure its transitory regulation. What makes desire work in a group, what makes a theory work, an experiment, an art form? What makes everything topple into the clutches of a repressive power formation at a given moment? What makes a certain kind of abstract machine – whether the arborescent abstract machines that refer in the last instance to Capital or the polycentric, polyvocal abstract machines that function according to a whole entangling of open lines – ‘take power’ in particular circumstances? When abstract machines succeed in escaping the regime of the capitalist economy of flows (that is to say, when they free themselves from the institutional supervision, the equipment of power that hierarchise, ritualise and reterritorialise them according to an abstract and transcendent universal order), it is because they have ceased to be assimilable from near or far to Platonic ideas, Kantian noumena, Hegelian or Marxist dialectical moments, Lacanian structural mathemes of the unconscious, indeed even the modest ‘states’ of systems theory,7 in which forms they emerged from different theoretical horizons. On this side of the spatio-temporal coordinates and the specific traits of different 60

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components of expression and encoding, then, they crystallise the knot of a problem, they guarantee the consistency of a ‘state of fact’ which, at the level of concrete machines, will find itself fixed, ‘contingenced’ in history and the social field. They metabolise passageways between different strata, they model the process of subjectivation – without it being a question here of a universal subjectivity – they open up or close down the possible, either by allowing sometimes minuscule lines of flight of desire, to escape, or by setting off revolutions in chain reaction, or by allowing themselves to be taken over by systems of stratification. In the case of the collective equipment functions and of collective assemblage functions that it is a question of here, their role is one of problematising the political matter of expression with which the group is confronted, what we have called its ‘optional matter’, and not one of staging or of representing. There are no political universals, no ‘optional matter’ in general. At the heart of every particular situation, of every disciplinary machine, of every surveillance system, a certain type of micropolitical virus is at work, a certain constellation of abstract machines is subjected to a power formation. Although they entertain certain relations with historical, pre-war fascism, the different strains of micro-fascism that are at work in the United States and the countries of the East, rich countries and poor countries, Arab countries and Israel, are, in the paths they follow, infinitely differentiated. Thus no global response is possible, no ‘broad antifascist front’ to block the way of this new threat: fascism has already taken place/passed! It oozes from the pores of capitalist societies. Consequently one must seize hold of it where it has taken up residence, in its specific forms, and that implies a generalised struggle of every instance on a multitude of ‘fronts’. The politics of desire essentially concerns these assemblages of ‘particles of possibility’ that abstract machines constitute, as much at the level of a group, an institution, or a theory as of an art form. There is, then, no struggle for freedom in general but the construction at every level of liberation machines. Why talk here of abstract machines? Because if one allows micropolitical problems to depend exclusively on concrete machines, that is to say, on social institutions, equipment of all kinds, systems of interaction between individuals, or systems of semiotic interaction, on ready-constituted theory, on programmes, etc., one ends up reducing them so that they are nothing more than ideological superstructures or apparatuses in Althusser’s sense.8 Consequently, whatever system of over-determination one cares to imagine so as to recover a hold on the real, will be worthless. The infrastructures which in the current state of the sciences are generally conceived as necessarily being ruled by invariant laws, will always have the last word. A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

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Our ‘detour’ via abstract machines doesn’t imply any idealist mediation. In effect, it is not a question here of a system of ideas being related to an instance closed in on itself! Abstract machines bring about a direct passage between states of signs and states of things. With them, mental reterritorialisations pass into the background. The short-circuit that they bring about between the deterritorialisations of material flows and the deterritorialisations of semiotic flows – in other words, diagrammatic processes – occur flush with signs and flush with the ‘material’. Abstract machines work the real, they fabricate it on the basis of topologies, equations, multiple sets of references, but they also work the systems of signs so as to place them on the same level as historical and cosmic realities and, under certain conditions, can prevent them from falling into the fixist world of universal paradigms – what elsewhere we have called ‘paradigmatic perversion’. So we consider that before being an affair of material strata, of energy, of forms or structures, the ‘being’ that is at the foundation of the ‘existent’ – at least in the social field considered from the point of view of its economy of desire – arises primarily from this ‘optional matter’ such as it is treated by the abstract machines. In other words, being is not reduced here to anything identifiable or localisable in eternal and universal coordinates! It is a question here solely of collective assemblages putting into play interconnection machines, coding machines, semiotisation and subjectivation machines, cutting out problematics, arranging territorialities, tranversalising biological, ecological, economic, personological, institutional, etc. strata. Such assemblages cannot be considered as being the subjects of a structure. They both take part and are a part that is taken in the ‘machinations’ that play out at multiple levels: 1

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Abstract levels at which either: ●

New ‘constructive’ deterritorialisations, or

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Reterritorialisations on the part of centralist despotic machines such as Capital, the Signifier, etc., are brought about.

Concrete levels at which either: ●

Balancing of relations of force, ritualisations, relative naturalisations of diagrammatic processes resting on the miniaturisation of the equipment of power, on increasingly tentacular programming and planning, or

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Liberating tactics and strategies tending to optimise the collective assemblage function to the detriment of the equipment function, are brought about.

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Bureaucratic socialism, the highest stage of capitalism We refuse to separate relations of production from relations of semiotisation, as the majority of theoreticians who invoke Marxism do. The control of the means of production by the exploiting classes or castes, is indissociable from the control of the collective means of semiotisation which, although less visible, is no less fundamental. The more and more marked de-phasing of the relations of production and productive processes therefore does not, in our view, depend solely on an economic infrastructure. It even only constitutes one particular aspect of that which develops more generally between the ensemble of social relations and the collective libidinal economy; these latter, for their part, don’t specifically arise either from a superstructure determined ‘in the last instance’, according to the consecrated expression – by the economic base. Whatever names are given to societies founded on the exploitation of labour and of the libido, whatever the historically discernabilised classes or bureaucratic hydra, with difficult to determine outlines, who profit from it, one is in the presence of one and the same system of collective purpose: the reduction of useful production onto market value and the reification of the value of desire as use and exchange value. Today, societies that call themselves socialist, like those that invoke profit and capital, are constrained to cling more and more tightly, sometimes against the wishes of their most enlightened leaders, like Khrushchev and Kennedy, to modes of semiotic ‘subjection’ that run counter to the direction of history, and that in spite of all their attempts at adaptation, institutional innovation and miniaturisation of the equipment of desire that they inject into the masses. Thus, for quite some time already the conditions for revolution have reached maturity without any social class appearing on the horizon to attempt to adjust the socius to the immense deterritorialisation that is traversing it and to redirect productive forces that on a global scale are the object of fabulous squandering. From the point of view of the economy of desire and semiotic integration into the dominant values, the working classes have never fundamentally set themselves apart from the bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats, and everything leads one to think that they will be led to do this less and less. In fact, they tend everywhere, to differing degrees, to collaborate actively in the enterprises of subjection of capitalist societies. The fundamental objective of taking political power at the level of the State, by the ‘avant-garde’ of the proletariat, is considered by Marxist-Leninists A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

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to be the condition sine qua non of an autonomous coming into consciousness of itself by the working class. In fact, this objective hasn’t in the slightest avoided the contamination of the working class by bourgeois ideology. On the contrary, it is by way of the integration of the ‘avant-garde’ into the rules of the political and union game established by State power that it was possible for this contamination to be extended into broad layers of the population. The bureaucrats of the worker’s movement have been in some respects the initiators of the semiotic integration of the working class. As such, one can legitimately consider them as Collective equipment, in the broader sense that we have given the term here. Thus today one can only conceive of a struggle against State bureaucracy and, in a more general way, against all concrete manifestations of State power, on condition that one envisage in parallel the dismantling of the bureaucratic structures that are paralysing the workers’ movement, popular and minority movements of every kind. State power is everywhere and it is worth everywhere giving oneself the specific means of flushing it out, including in the heads of the ‘masses’ and their leaders. But if such dismantling were carried out in conditions of demoralisation and without putting into place other kinds of assemblages of struggle, it would bring about an immense social regression. The places where this new problematic is emerging are thereby on the point of becoming the new hot points of social and political struggle. The kind of analytic-militant struggle that is becoming possible in a certain number of kinds of Collective equipment, administrations, social sectors, etc., will not always be considered marginal in relation to the major struggles in workerist citadels: Renault, the railways, etc. And already there seems little doubt that if one day a revolutionary surpassing becomes possible, it will notarise from these citadels but probably from one of those sectors that appear today to be secondary in this eyes of the militant representation and morality. By substituting political ‘optional matters’ for globalising sociological categories, one is in a better position to follow the contaminations that are brought about between power formations of all sizes, and to grasp how absurd it is to aim to change society, to want to construct an economic order that no longer rests on the exploitation of one class by another, by contenting oneself with transferring State power from the representatives of one class to those of another and by wishing that the State then progressively lose its usefulness as coercive force, starting to ‘wither’ of its own accord. State power is not just the existence of coercive forces that are exercised at the level of large social groupings; it is equally at work at the level of the microscopic cogs of society. This doesn’t in the least signify that it is advisable to except everything from a simple calling into question of the individual, or from a massive negation of the family! Thus the fact that not 64

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only does centralised power have a politics concerning the conjugal couple and the family,9 but that a micropolitics of the State functions within them as well does not for all that signify that these institutions can be condemned as such and be rejected out of hand! Even if it is only for a little while when they get together, a couple can function as an assemblage of desire: that is the time when every hope of a liberation from parental tutelage is permitted. And even when a family seems to have been converted once and for all into a phallocratic machine, despite the worst outbursts of phallocratic authoritarianism, despite the worst fits of jealousy, despite the micro-fascist climate in which its members are very often shrouded, it can let minuscule lines of hope be reborn, fleeting tendernesses: ‘let’s go on holiday, everything will be better, things will change . . .’ And thinking about it, everyone knows that given the state of chronic dependency that social formations as whole reduce individuals, no matter what tyranny ends up seeming better than solitude! State power, the exploitation of work, the alienation of desire are not secreted solely by the grand capitalist or social-bureaucratic formations that work over diverse social groups, the State and individuals. The two big antagonist myths of the socialists at the start of the century – that is to say, that of the education of the masses and that of their Bolshevik militarisation – should be placed back to back: education controlled by State power working towards an adaptation of the workers to the libidinal models of the bourgeoisie, and in particular to an individuation of their enunciation; and their ‘militantisation’, under all sorts of modalities unfailingly playing into the hands of bureaucratic centralism and diverse forms of technocracy.

A new type of struggle A new type of struggle is trying to find its feet, less as a model than as a demonstrable ‘precedent’ that another field of possibility is well and truly open. The abstract machine that is in question here could announce itself in the following way: yes it is possible to do something in all these situations which, today, seem to be completely blocked, like in days past at Lip10 or today with the judicial system or prostitutes . . . Yes it is possible for a couple to ‘change its way of living’ or to do the same with children, when one confronts oneself directly . . . In the sector of social Equipment, that devoted to childhood in particular, a whole series of often confused and contradictory microscopic conflicts with regard to collective life, the role of educationalists, psychoanalysts, teachers are played out within establishments. Here too it would be wrong to think that it is a matter of A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

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struggles without any importance. When one approaches such questions with union representatives or politicians, they generally respond that such struggles don’t concern them, that they belong to the initiatives of the rank and file. But in discussing further with them, one notices that all the problems of physical and mental health, education, life-style, etc., have a well-anchored reality in the dominant redundancies, the self-evident facts generated by power, such as they are conveyed by the media: to look after the sick, you need doctors, nurses, hospitals – who would dare claim the contrary! To look after the mad you need psychiatrists, psychiatric hospitals, and also – why not – psychoanalysts; to educate children, the teaching body of schools is needed, but also active methods; to maintain social order, a body of policemen is needed, etc. And that all requires funding, equipment, good administrators, good democratic control by elected politicians, on the part of the childrens’ parents, etc. The optional matter here consists in the fact that no matter what ‘social problem’ can be drawn towards the equipment and distanced from potential collective assemblages. Without noticing it, one makes it the concern of specialists, programmes, norms, budgets, supervision, etc., and one refuses to envisage that it might be articulated with collective experiments, the life of a neighbourhood, a taking in charge by ‘users’. Now it is only in an everyday struggle, at the level of everyday life, that relations of force can be altered between on the one hand specialist knowledge and the political authority of the representatives of the established order, and on the other, this side of constituted persons and objects, the sometimes embryonic desire, which is finding itself through a discourse that is initially inaudible (that of children, the mad, delinquents or marginals, etc., for example). Rather than accepting as destiny the excessive growth of social condensers – a sort of semiotic combine in which individuals and social relations get machined – which grid and control the four corners of the social field, can one not imagine the passage to an active de-equipmentalising and collective reassembling that bypasses too massive institutional structures: ministries, bureaucratic oversight, factitious hierarchies? A multi-centred system of social control would be enabled, having a maximal proximity with conditions of all kinds, respecting singularities of desire and making State power wither here and now? In claiming to establish itself as a new science, Marxism supposed itself to be different from all other doctrines. It sought to base the authority of its statements – and, between the lines, the authoritarianism of its practices (and that since the establishing of the First International) – on the prestige of other sciences. Next to it, utopias of all kinds, generous ideas, became ridiculous and dangerous. ‘One can only mislead the masses if one’s 66

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viewpoints on struggle are not founded on a scientific basis.’ Not only did Marxism want the revolution to be backed up by the sciences, but equally on the growth of the forces of production. Thus besides the working class, the major motors of history have for it become the sciences and technology, and the working classes of the nineteenth century no longer exist today except in the heads of ideologues and retro militants! It’s not a matter of saying that the molecular revolution will be made against progress and the well-being of the working classes. It simply seems to us that in large measure it will happen alongside them, allowing them to evolve, even decline, following their own paths. A certain dogmatic ideal of the sciences and a certain ascetic, moralising ideal of workerist ideology no longer coincides with the realities of today. Other scientific assemblages, other social assemblages, open up other points of view. The revolution to come will not be inscribed in the moulds of the past, it will not be synonymous with a ‘step backwards’ or with the freezing of the current situation, like that which is envisaged by the new technocratic mythology that is centred on the theme of a return to ‘zero growth’! We think, on the contrary, that it will be entirely compatible with a tumultuous development in the sciences, of the forces of production, artistic creations, experiments of all kinds, rupturing radically, it must be emphasised, with the forms that they had yesterday! Let us note, in passing, that the promotion of a different myth, by Ivan Illich,11 concerning a necessary return to human-scale tools, seems to go in precisely the direction of the alienating miniaturisation of equipment that we are condemning here. The ideal of socialism at the ‘human scale’, opposed to the existence of mega-machines is, to our mind, a bad utopia. What is in question according to us is not the size of the tools, machines or equipment, but the politics of human assemblages as much at the scale of microscopic desires as of grand power formations. The more the family and the school, for example, have been miniaturised in the course of development of the last two centuries, the more tyrannical they have become, at the unconscious level in particular. When, today, psychiatry starts to desert the ‘walls of the asylum’ so as to become invested in equipment outside the hospital, or even on the psychoanalyst’s couch, the alienation of deviance doesn’t for all that lessen any: it becomes focused on new kinds of practices, personae, and institutions, which are on the point of serving as a reference model for the elaboration of an ‘advanced technology’ of power.12 In certain circumstances, Collective equipment on the large scale, like universities – semiotic subjection machines for the selection, the modelling, of an elite adapted to the semiotics of power, to the style and attitudes of future executives – have started to function in the register of struggles of desire and have served as a support for the emergence of collective assemblages of enunciation. During A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

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the 1960s, one saw American universities become focal points of revolutionary effervescence at the same time as they continued, more or less, to play their habitual role as an equipment of normalisation. In these conditions, it is understandable that traditional political organisations find it impossible to appreciate the exact significance of the movements that can develop there!

An analytico-militant labour at all scales One could multiply the examples illustrating the incapacity of sociological classifications to account for the politics of desire: let us consider, for example, the functioning of an urban mega-machine – to borrow Lewis Mumford’s expression – like the agglomeration of New York. One may think that it is incompatible with any liberatory assemblage of desire at all! And yet, it seems to us that despite (or because of) its crowding and subjection effects, despite the misery and violence that rules there, despite the dismay and solitude that seems to mark every one of its inhabitants in one way or another, even this urban continent, a gigantic semiotic cyclotron, produces a certain kind of economy of desire, which is inimitable, irreplaceable, and is felt as such by those who are attached to it as if to a drug. What comes into play here, from the point of view of the economy of desire, is not the conurbation, the air pollution, the absence of green spaces, nor even – to a certain point – the concentration of decision-making and bureaucratic centres, but the way in which all these things are semiotised, the way in which in this respect the assemblages of enunciation are tangled and disentangled. Before knowing what a ‘social project’, to use the fashionable expression, ought to be, it would be worth pinpointing what collective life projects might be and, before equipping society, concerning oneself with the turn that the assemblages of desire are taking. Micro-fascist crystallisations of desire, applied to the apparently most rational, the most harmonious, of projects, transformed the USSR and China into continentwide gulags, whilst micro-revolutionary crystallisations of desire have, for their part, started to ‘change life’ at a small and sometimes not so small scale, for the inhabitants of certain dilapidated neighbourhoods in San Francisco. Once again, this is not the level of priority and there is no order-word of the type ‘get your own house in order before you try to change society!’ We are simply affirming that change in institutions and equipment at the largescale calls, at the same time, for a change in the molecular equipment and 68

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micropolitics of desire. It is here and now, everywhere and at all scales, that an analytico-militant labour is necessary so as to escape from the cogs, the snowballing phenomena likely to accumulate micro-fascisms. But the large repressive formations, which have a ‘hold’ on the social field and which don’t stop injecting back into it the micro-fascist drugs that they carry, must be combatted at the same time and without delay. One of the roles of collective assemblages at ground level (at ‘grassroots’, as the Americans like to say) would consist precisely in making such relations permanently evident. Not so as to make headlines from them or photos, which would be consumed in a sort of contemplation-digestion the final function of which is an assimilation of every singularity of desire to common values, the dominant redundancies; but rather to make them act either in the social real or the modes of semiotisation of the unconscious. The putting into relation will not be the result of a manipulation by power which, in the end – on reading a magazine or newspaper – will bring about a forced association in people’s heads, conditioning them mechanically to make the ‘connection’. Nor will it result from the speculative hypotheses of researchers or the inspired intuitions of psychoanalysts; it will become an analytico-militant programme13 that consists in ‘learning/teaching’, let’s say, semiotising collectively, the original conjunctions that have taken place in a particular situation between sectors of very different struggles. One is then dealing with something that doesn’t take place only at the level of a formal solidarity, but at the level of the intelligence and of the heart (there are examples in Bellochio’s film Fou à délier, about the hospital in Parma, of the workers in a steel mill looking after mentally retarded and Downs patients; in a completely different domain: during the imprisonment of the poet Yann Houssin,14 on the pretext of creating soldier committees, there was the constitution in Nimes of a network of people concerned as much with military affairs as with poetry and regional struggle). What separates a Corsican from a Breton or a Parisian are, apparently, socio-economic, linguistic, even ecological characteristics, but in reality, it is micropolitical crystallisations that are incarnated at the molecular level, like two ways to love, to perceive the cosmos, to speak, to dance, read and write, etc. Grasped from this angle, certain semiotic components of the ‘Corsican question’ can join up with those of the Bretons or those of women’s liberation, the liberation of children, of homosexuals, etc., rather than closing shut, as is the case with a certain number of autonomist movements, in an opaquely idiosyncratic and reactionary space. There are not two successive times, one of which would consist in first changing society and the other in [then] concerning oneself with what happens in real life. The politics of rhizomes and maps, which we will A MOLECULAR REVOLUTION

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oppose in the second section of this book to those of trees and tracings, apply to the same objects and, most often, concurrently. They aim as much at the large systems of social subjection as at the miniaturised power formations that are at work in small groups, the family or individual. In these conditions, there is no salvation to be expected from prioritising a return to nature, to good feeling, tools within arm’s reach, ‘convivial communities’ . . . Cities exist, so do armies, police forces, ‘multinationals’, centralised parties, industrial complexes, electoral traditions. There is no question of evading all that by waving a magic wand! But one can at least try not to be taken prisoner by it, not to be the active accomplice of such mechanisms, and beyond, and start to make this type of object and molar relation, de-exist! Is it possible to hollow them out from the inside when one cannot avoid them, and to dismantle them from the outside when the opportunity presents itself – even if it means carefully preparing such opportunities? In a word, is it possible to undo the supposedly objective laws of a society that claims to ‘lay down the law’?

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8 THE RHIZOME OF COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

The collective assemblages of desire In order to legitimise its enterprise of ‘tutelarising’ abstract machines in their entirety, the capitalist Law gives itself the trappings of destiny. It is prepared for that by launching takeover bids for every system of laws, divine laws as much as those of thermodynamics or of information theory! All laws, whatever they may be, fall, could fall, or ought to fall under its exclusive control. Collective assemblages, for their part, dread the establishment of this kind of law, founded on a hierarchy of transcendent essences, as if it was the plague! They mean to give themselves and take back their laws as a function of the historical contingencies and singularities that are proper to them. To be sure they may be led to extract general laws, but always in a transitory way. It is understood, from the outset, that the law of today should disappear tomorrow in the face of other laws and assemblages. The legal code has always been conceived as necessarily depending ideally on a set of axial principles articulated according to a central arborescent system. For their part, sociological laws are equally conceived as necessarily arising from transcendent universals. It is not a matter here of advocating, counter to such a method, of ‘taking one’s desires for reality’, of claiming to make the social field fall under the rule of a universal fantasy or an arbitrary combinatory, but simply of noting that the movement of societies doesn’t depend on fixed constellations of ideas or on general laws of ‘dialectical progress’ any more than do living species. The social field arises from the double register of molecular mutations that are accessible to collective 71

praxis and to the interactions of molar groupings which block and stratify it. So, either institutions and equipment that cling on to a system of laws and orders in an arborescent hierarchy, or a rhizomatic process of social production circumventing these same institutions, this same equipment, working at the level of collective assemblages of desire. Given a situation in which desire one day lays down the law, could it construct a more incoherent, more unjust society than that which is secreted today by the morbid rationalism of the castes and classes that intend to impose their norms and their conceptions of order on everyone? We are constantly brought back to this same line of interrogation: is the individual and collective expression of desire compatible with effective social coordination, with the large-scale regulation of economic life, with a respect for people? Is not desire, as such, the bearer of a violence that is universal, the antagonistic essence of man? If one mechanically identifies desire and the body, if one fails to understand that the modern forms of human desire are deterritorialisations that traverse the socius, then one finds that it is impossible to escape from a head-on libidinal confrontation that classically opposes social good will with bad animal instincts. Cut off from every creative context, reduced to just corporeal semiotics, sexual desire is constrained to invest in a micro-fascist politics. Desire that is cornered – that of de Sade, for example, but also that of Little Hans, a prisoner of familial and psychoanalytic dogmas – tumbles ineluctably towards forms of tyranny, and if the opportunity presents itself, is ripe for investing in repressive formations on the largest scale. But desire that is free to construct its connections, that is free to articulate semiotics of all kinds, escapes this infernal logic of the investment and overinvestment of power. Can it be doubted whether desire can found a human law, participate in coherent systems of regulation, rather than being incessantly brought before the Law? It is enough to observe the functioning of multiplicities of desires working flat out – a mad love, a revolution under way – to note that efficacy and regulation, even harmony, really do go together with them! As for responsibility . . . But what is responsibility, what is this ‘responsible before the law’? Here one ought to go back again to what Nietzsche called the ‘long story of how responsibility originated’ again! And also to what he wrote with regard to guilt: ‘the chief trick the ascetic priest permitted himself.’1 A taking into consideration of collective assemblages of desire – which constitute the very reality of the social fabric, but which equipment functions to mutilate, fracture permanently – would have as its corollary the extinguishing of the institutions for reponsibilisation and the inducement of guilty feelings, amongst which we have to count not just the visible tribunals of justice, 72

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education, etc., but equally those that are invisible, unconscious (the superego, inhibitions, neuroses, etc.). Whatever they may be, human behaviour – a-social, mad, delinquent, marginal – implies nothing other than such assemblages, which, beyond relations between persons, associate group organs, economic processes, materials and semiotics of all kinds. Though not ‘equipped’ with transcendent Laws or representatives of the Law, despite not being organised in the bipolar fashion of self-enclosed subjects-objects, which can easily be sized up, which can be held responsible and made to feel guilty, such assemblages nevertheless constitute the place where everything that remains alive in the socius takes refuge and from where everything can start off again in the construction of another world. We do not stop running up against the myth of the decision taken by a boss, someone in charge, a delegate ‘in his heart and soul’: the juror, for example, who is called on to follow his ‘deepest convictions’ to erase from society someone who he estimates is guilty. It is from the depths of oneself that one claims to extract a truth in the interests of the collective, it is interiority that claims to speak and act in the name of the community. What an absurdity! To be sure, one day or another everyone is, by force of circumstance, as one says, led to take themselves more or less seriously and even, sometimes, to become a little megalomaniac with regard to their role, to ‘lay it on a bit thick’, to take the initiative ‘in the name of.’ Why not! But in the name of what? The Law, one’s conscience or soul? Or better still a mission that history would have bestowed on your organisation? And why not, very simply, ‘at our own risk’, this latter option not in the least implying a choice made gratuitously, any irresponsibility, but on the contrary demanding a constant recourse to an ‘earthing’ [prise de terre] – in opposition to a reference to universals fixed in the ‘heaven of ideas’ – that is to say, a return to the territorialities of desire, in particular to those that commit those who are in a position to make decisions ‘in the name of ’? And it belongs to collective analysers to ensure the permanence of this return to earth – not in the naturalists’ sense but rather that of electricians. It is therefore no longer just a matter of democratic control or of psychoanalytic control but of a collective libidinal assemblage: ‘OK , we accept you speaking and acting in our name’ but only to a point! To the extent that the micropolitical assemblage that we constitute retains its consistency of desire. If you claim to go beyond, you want to gain power over us. And this power, as is known, will not cease to echo all the other forms of power and will lead us, little by little, to the worst alienations. If someone has to coordinate collective functions, this cannot be because of an economy of power, but as a function of arrangements, techniques that are as close as possible to a collective economy of desire. It may, for example, THE RHIZOME OF COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

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be necessary that one (or several) people are charged with deciding who speaks in a discussion, or with dividing up work for a collective action – without which some people will never be heard or will be the victims of an implicit division of labour, reproducing old alienating segregations. But when everyone stops finding a president – on the rostrum, on television – or no matter what leader, big or small, funny, then there ought to be the means within reach of making him give way. In a collective assemblage, the individual, the self, responsibility, will always be considered as an effect, a result at the end of the chain. The function of such an assemblage therefore doesn’t simply consist in ‘making everyone agree’ on common objectives, but in articulating the entirety of the material, semiotic, economic and social components that produce a collective desire, a group eros, capable of extricating itself from fascisising micropolitics of every kind – phallocratic, racist, capitalist, etc. Micropolitics and desire here are one and the same. The elaboration of a collective project – what we will call the map of the group, in opposition to the tracings of dominant redundancies – will endeavour to grasp the points of articulation between the diverse components and of producing diagrammatic knots enabling the passage from one point of deterritorialisation to another, undoing the strata, without for all that precipitating the ensemble of residual territorialities into a black hole effect. And the more the map of the assemblage is worked over, the less the alienating effects of desire will be in a position to ‘lay down the law’. Passions, madnesses, will be led, as if by themselves, to turn away from objects such as the domination of groups, the possession of the insignia of power, the control of the gears of production, to be oriented towards more deterritorialised objects traversing the systems of personological, phallocratic, narcissistic alienation. It’s on condition that such a micropolitical analysis attach itself to the productions of desire in nascent state and at the level of their most immediate semiotisation that the snowball phenomenon of micro-fascisms which we have evoked, can be avoided and an organisation, a centrality recognised as transitorily necessary, can become tolerable.

A rhizomatic cartography The cartography of collective assemblages will therefore not be reduced to simple bipolar options of the kind: either equip with walls, institutions, conditioned reflexes and facialities, or assemble with material flows and flows of desire. Once it is posited, such an alternative can only explode into a multitude of other systems of options: 74

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●

equip macro-social groupings;

●

equip micro-social and infra-individual groupings;

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assemble macro-social groupings;

●

assemble micro-social and infra-individual groupings.

As an illustration of this ‘complexification’ of rhizomes and excusing the slightly formal character of this kind of exercise, we thus propose to distinguish schematically: 1

2

Two domains (a simplification, of course!), as a function of the size of the social groupings considered: ●

infra-individual and micro-social groupings,

●

macro-social groupings.

Two politics of desire, each concerning these two domains: ●

A politics of so-called molecular potential, a politics of social de-stratification that we have been calling ‘micropolitics of desire’ and which arises from a collective assemblage of production and enunciation function.

●

A politics of molar power that equips, stratifies the socius and is supported by power formations, and takes on an equipmental function, implanting a Collective equipment network. Size Micro-social of molecular potentials of desire

Macro-social

(1) (2) Micro-assemblage of Macro-assemblage of enunciation enunciation

Politics of molar power

(3) Micro-equipment of power

(4) Macro-equipment of power

The table of intersections between these two domains and these two politics leads us to examine four pragmatic options, as markers (but which, let us stress, must not be considered as the basic elements of a systematic politics that unfolds through successive dichotomies, through arborescent engendering: in effect, by graduating the size of the groupings considered, by modulating the potentials and the powers, one would arrive at a political map, a rhizome whose basic compositions would be infinitely richer). THE RHIZOME OF COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

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Composition 1: micro-assemblage of enunciation A molecular politics of desire applied to a micro-social or infra-individual grouping. For example: the assemblage for oneself for a small group of a machine to ‘change life’ (an artistic machine, a system for the ‘disordering of the senses’, the establishing of the least possibly alienating community).

Composition 2: macro-assemblage of enunciation A molecular politics of desire applied to a macro-social grouping. For example, the brief sequence of May 1968, when the whole of the social body felt that ‘something was shifting’, without really knowing what, without having got the measure of the phenomenon, the moment in which ‘everything seemed possible’, as repressive forces of all kinds that habitually intervened by means of the government, parties, unions, groupuscules, had not yet got a grip on themselves so as to recuperate and extinguish the movement.

Composition 3: micro-equipment of power A politics of molar power applied to a micro-social or infra-individual grouping. For example: the fact of equipping a child with a repressive superego (the suicides of children in Bavaria ‘because of low grades’, the equipment of faciality: the head teacher, the school inspector, the social worker . . .).

Composition 4: macro-equipment of power A politics of molar power applied to a macro-social grouping. For example: the army, the police, the state education system, political parties, unions, etc. Now let us consider the binary relations between these elements – also marked in terms of the same arbitrary fourfold division as our first schema – that is to say, the way in which one politics is applied to another, takes possession of and transforms an assemblage or equipment.

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Composition 1 → 2 Micro-assemblages of desire snowball and ‘trigger’ major social upheavals. For example: ‘March 22nd’ at Nanterre, which ‘reveals’, catalyses, struggles of a new style in the University sector as a whole and in numerous other sectors: the atelier des Beaux-Arts or the Situationist atelier at the Institut pédagogique national, which produces posters and texts that emphasise the style of the movement as a whole.

Composition 2 → 1 Collective macro-assemblages of enunciation ‘trigger’ molecular revolutions within individuals, couples, families, modes of semiotisation that were apparently definitively stratified. For example: in France after May 1968 (or the USA in the 1960s), renowned researchers, senior civil servants, who ‘drop everything’ so as to adopt another way of life, altering not just their relationship to work, money, sex, institutional systems, but equally their relationship to time, to the body, perception, etc.

Composition 1 ← 3 A micro-assemblage of enunciation calls into question a micro-equipment of power. For example: a new way of being a pupil upsets the pedagogic equipment that give teachers ‘ballast’.

Composition 3 ↔ 1 It was seen previously that the relations between the micro-assemblages and micro-equipment (of molecular revolutions and small scale fascisms) could easily be reversed. That is why, to return to our previous examples, a veritable war of attrition between these two kinds of micropolitical compositions appeared in the secondary school system a number of years ago. The molecular power of the State multiplies its attempts at recuperating the molecular revolutions of desire, by implanting reformist microequipment at the level of visible social space, and equally, at an ‘invisible’ level, by the implanting of superegoic and neurotic mechanisms: inhibitions in the face of schoolwork (‘that don’t go anywhere’), which sometimes have as their effect a veritable decomposition of the behaviour of the most aware, the most combative, of pupils; introjection of the selection machine, which frequently triggers phenomena of panicky fear before assessments and THE RHIZOME OF COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

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exams, but which result more generally in a general fading of other semiotic components (the loss of a taste for ‘something else’). The effects of this politics of mediocratisation – the objective of which is the fabrication of good workers, good, submissive, well-integrated administrators evidently does not spare those who are its agents! Hence the unbelievable rates of absenteeism amongst teachers for depression and ‘mental troubles’. Under these conditions, the micropolitical assemblages of a certain proportion of adolescents convert into an active, well-integrated micro-fascism. A ‘ruling elite’ is thus selected by the reinforcement of systems of self-repression and by the promotion of segregatory models that result in a contempt for those ‘who are unable to follow’ and by the targeting of the teachers, who are still not well adapted to the system or who refuse to play the game of repression. This micro-fascist ‘initiation’ of a non-negligible part of the collective labour force certainly constitutes one of the most important tasks of the Collective equipment belonging to the state education system, which in this domain has long picked up the baton from the Church and the Army. Another ‘example’ of the reversibility of the politics of revolutionary desire and of micro-fascism as the scale of small social formations: ‘life changing’ communities that fall, sometimes from the moment that they are created, for the charm and the iron rod of a narcissistic and phallocratic despot.

Composition 1 → 4 Micro-assemblages of desire revolutionise a macro-equipment of power. For example: the Portuguese expeditionary force in Africa, contaminated not just by revolutionary ideas but a revolutionary style of guerrilla warfare.

Composition 4 → 1 Macro-equipment of power that produces and controls micro-social assemblages of desire. For example, the formation of a commando esprit de corps, ‘Bigeard style’2: ‘Our lads want it, they end up loving their leaders as much as their mothers . . .’

Composition 1 ↔ 4 When things are clear, when stratifications are well stabilised, an interaction of this kind between large-scale equipment and molecular assemblages of desire is less probable. But it exists in the pores of the system, in phantasies, without taking on an operative character. For example, in the matter of 78

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molecular revolution, nothing happens, at least nothing visible, in the Ministry of Finance – aside from a perverse modernist style finding itself: ‘whatever happens, the representative of the Ministry will always have the last word!’ But in the bodies, which are even more ossified, such interactions become very important. To get away a bit from the earlier scheme of categories, let’s consider the particularly ambiguous example of the Magistrates’ Union. Is this the classic equipment of the union or a molecular assemblage? A macro- or a micro-social formation. All of them at once, no doubt, but to different degrees depending on level and time. What gets called the ‘crisis in the justice system’ is expressed today on the one hand by readers of Parisien libéré demanding that magistrates be tougher, a reinforcing of repressive equipment, and, on the other, by the development of militant attitudes and contestatory assemblages amongst judges, lawyers, prisoners, educational specialists, etc. But all these components interpenetrate: sometimes members of this union turn out to be the most repressive, while the traditional Equipment is relatively ‘liberal’. That is why one sometimes hears it said today that it is ‘better’ to go to prison than into a secure psychiatric unit.

Composition 2 → 3 A macro-assemblage of desire undoes the micro-equipment of power or produces new equipment. First case: in the panic of the ‘events of 68’, foremen, the ‘little bosses’ change their style, but without moving in the direction of a ‘molecular revolution of desire’. When they get back home after work they are worse than ever (‘after all I’ve had to put up with at work today . . .’). Second case: production of a new kind of micro-repressive equipment: the militant who really loves being part of the security for the Communist League; the playboy bureaucrat types in the PCF [Parti Communiste Français (French Communist Party)]; even the long-haired policeman in the neighbourhood of Huchette in Paris, or the ‘Columbo’ style of certain police commissioners.

Composition 3 → 2 It is hardly likely that the micro-equipment of power can directly engender revolutionary macro-assemblages of enunciation. Such a composition implies a prior de-equipping, of the 1↔3 kind, resulting in what we have called the ‘snowball’ phenomenon, of the 1↔2 kind. One could repeat here the same example of the decomposition of the old master–pupil relation, which triggers large-scale movements. THE RHIZOME OF COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

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Composition 2 → 4 A macro-assemblage of enunciation leading to large-scale equipment of power. For example: after multiple shifts, the passage from Lenin’s communist party to the system of gulags.

Composition 4 → 5 Macro-equipment produces macro-assemblages of enunciation. But here too it is doubtless only a matter of a relation that implies other intermediary micro-social interactions. For example, in Latin America, state or army unions out of which come the mass revolutionary assemblages (which was never really the case during the first phase of the Portuguese revolution).

Composition 3 → 4 and 4 → 3 The classic interaction between the repressive micro-equipment and the macro-structures of power. For example the faciality of school teachers, the ‘pedagogic’ attitudes and enormous machine of the state education system; psychiatric and psychoanalytic nosography and the ‘heavy’ equipment of psychiatry; literary prizes; the mannerisms of taste and the instances of central power . . . It is only as illustrations of the molar-molecular and micro-macrosocial relations that we have presented these examples. Evidently a ‘rhizomatic’ analytic method would not proceed in this way! It would start from concrete situations so as to construct its own maps, to locate its tracings, its arborescences, its potential connections, etc. As a consequence, even when using the schematic modes of categorisation that we have just outlined, it would never lose sight of their relative character. Let us consider, for example, the so-called ‘dual power’ phenomena that appear during certain revolutionary periods – the Soviets in Russia in 1917 and the military power of the Bolsheviks; the grassroots committees in 1968 and the ensemble of political, union, and state forces. Under such conditions, the 1 ↔ 2 system between micro-assemblages of enunciation and revolutionary macro-assemblages described previously, is led to enter into interaction with the 3 ↔ 4 system of micro and macro-social equipments of power. We then have: [1↔2]↔[3↔4] 80

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One final example: the prostitute movement (in France, but perhaps in California above all, where it has taken a more emphatically political turn). It puts into play an operation of power of the kind 3 → 1, of repressive micro-equipment (brothels, pimps, the micro-fascism of clients) on molecular assemblages of desire, and doubtless not uniquely at the level of clients but also at the level of the prostitutes themselves, and society as a whole beyond.3 Besides, it starts up a relation of the [3 → 1] ← 4 kind, which associates the level of the primary subjection of desire with that of the macro-equipment of power (collusion between the power of the police and politicians, the mafia milieu, etc.). But one would still have to take into account the fact that this assemblage functions as a safety valve, an outlet to neutralise the sexuality of the déclassé, of those who do not manage to adapt or do not have access to normative family systems. Thus one would be led to bring to light one of the functions of the equipment of prostitution, which consists in ensuring the reproduction of dominant moral norms: ‘Look where sexuality leads, once it is exercised outside the stable heterosexual couple . . .’ One can see that this kind of system of equipment in its entirety returns to other equipment of the same kind. We have: [(3 → 1) ← 4] → 3 It is true that for a long time, anarchist polemicists had exposed the fact that the brothel, hookers and pimps worked, on power’s behalf, on this ‘moral equipping’ of the nation. With the current prostitute movements, what is relatively new is that prostitutes are no longer the object of humanitarian or militant entreaties: the Californian movement, for example, is in constant relation with the feminist and homosexual movements that in a certain way it carries along with it. Thus the formalisation of our map tends to complexify even further. We have: [(3 → 1) ← 4] ← 2

The macro-assemblage of audiovisual means A new macro-assemblage of enunciation is in the process of asserting itself in the field of struggles of desire. And equally in the field of power. In particular, that of the media, who thoroughly exploit the charges of collective libido that power bears. A priori denunciations of such risks of THE RHIZOME OF COLLECTIVE ASSEMBLAGES

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recuperation matter little here. What counts is that measures to detect, combat and neutralise such risks are taken, as and when required by the development of the movement. Journalists in the mainstream press are about the only people today who make the intuitive link between news items and the libidinal investments of which they are the object. But they do so only in the context of the machines of the press, which have no other aim than to manipulate the audiovisual sensibility of the public at large, by launching ‘pseudo-events’ around murders, kidnappings, rapes; concocting stories about the secret lives of public figures in such a way that the collective imaginary only invests in traps, and finds here a sort of outlet.4 Nevertheless, let us recognise that in this domain, on condition that they aren’t too ‘attached’ to their hierarchies, certain journalists are sometimes much more perspicacious than professional politicians and sociologists. In connection with this irresistible growth of human interest stories in the headlines, revolutionary groups now frequently spend their time popularising their existence by linking their action to highly spectacular scenarios, such as political abductions, plane hijackings, etc. And in a more general fashion, one can observe that the big subjects that preoccupy the political class and mobilise the media are increasingly tributary to minuscule leaks which at the outset one might think would have no significant consequences; a ‘mislaid’ tax return, tape recordings that have been ‘discovered’ . . . Thus, beyond the controlled manipulation of power, a sort of global taking charge of the facts of desire in the social field, although confused and contradictory, seems to be in the process of putting itself in place through the fabulously tentacular network of the media. And that makes one think that in this domain the machine could just as easily start to play against the State, against bureaucracy and its audiovisual Machiavellianism. From this point of view, a crisis like Watergate will have marked a spectacular turning point. And one sees today how a handful of intellectuals in the USSR are starting to exploit this kind of instrument in their struggle against the most conspicuous forms of repression.

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9 MICRO - FASCISM

Micro-struggles As we remarked previously, with regard to the events of 1968, it seems that those who really took seriously the multiple forms of molecular revolution were ‘liberal’ conservative politicians and technocrats. Unlike the classic right, the traditional left reformists and archaeo-revolutionaries, they have given up clinging to the socio-economic dogmas of the nineteenth century. To try to face up to the social mutations that might one day submerge them, they are endeavouring to make some of the questions that do not call into question the essential foundations of capitalist powers less weighty. But it appears more and more clearly that, failing to unblock society by triggering its vital forces, the principal effect of the timid reforms that they are proposing consists in ‘antagonising’ the most conservative layers of the petite-bourgeoisie. In any case, they estimate that this kind of reaction constitutes the best justification of their politics. They feel that they are ‘modern’ against the right and left wings that this non-negligible part of the electorate take their lead from. That their points of view lead to the systematic expropriation of old modes of habitat, work, commerce and relations to the environment, modes that are relatively more territorialised than the new, seems to them the inevitable cost of ‘progress’. To the extent that the equipment which they favour setting up is manifestly more oppressive than what it replaces, this is absurd! In fact, the objective of their reformism is, above all, to make the contemporary forms of super-alienation ‘tolerable’. What they are aiming at is the putting into place of new means for the control and recuperation of the lines of flight of social desire. Some of them in particular, have clearly become conscious of the necessity of miniaturising repression, of getting it accepted ‘smoothly’ and, if possible, with the active assistance of those on whom it bears, hence their new 83

mythology of working together with the ‘users’. And it must be acknowledged that the enterprise of recuperating the micro-revolutions that are at work amongst a certain number of the young, women, homosexuals, soldiers, drug-users, the rural, the mad, ecologists, Corsicans and wine makers,1 has hitherto been accomplished without too many difficulties! But these techniques of ‘recuperation’ will turn out, in the long run, to be double-edged swords. They only ‘sort things out’ in appearance. Because they have been quickly recuperated or because they seem to carry within them the route to their own recuperation by power, a certain number of contestatory movements, such as those of the school students or prostitutes, have been passed over too quickly. With more or less difficulty, things end up being taken in hand, calm is re-established, the authorities manipulate certain leaders . . . But at root that changes nothing! How many times has one heard it said ‘most of the time, students don’t even know why they are rebelling’? And it is true that they often don’t know the programme of demands of the organisations that claim to represent them. Must one for that reason oppose their rebellions to serious revolutions? Equally, the troublemakers are denounced on their demos as ‘divisive’; but perhaps one should ask oneself about the reasons that lead them to express themselves in this way. Their actions are not absurd or reactionary because organised movements and public opinion don’t understand them, nor because those concerned themselves are often effectively incapable of formulating clearly what it is they are aiming at (it has to be said, in their defence, that the ‘education’ they have received in this domain via school, the press, etc., has hardly helped them)! When all is said and done, perhaps it is because these struggles aim at more fundamental social objectives than those of the organisations that dismiss them and that through them it is in some way the whole of the social body that is interrogating itself about questions that it has not yet managed to comprehend: what is the law, justice, equality? To what end does knowledge, hierarchy, the reproduction of dominant roles and functions serve? What is the relationship between sexuality and money, well beyond the classic prostitute–client–pimp–copper pattern, at the heart of the couple, or quite simply, ‘when one goes shopping’, when one watches adverts on telly . . . In short, what is desire, today? One cannot properly appreciate such movements in terms of success and failure, revolutionary purity, and recuperation. All sorts of equipment and assemblages are in play here. The State ‘recuperates’ but, in certain cases, lets go of things that could in turn be recuperated for the development of the struggles of desire. Parties and unions participate in the reproduction of dominant models, but in certain cases, their ‘quantitativist’ struggles – protecting salaries, maintaining hierarchies, the demand for collective 84

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equipment – will be able to support the action of the minorities of desire. The whole question is to know how the latter will succeed in hijacking the functions of State power, the functions of recuperative equipment, to the benefit of collective assemblage. Sociologists have, for example, brought to light the existence of an inegalitarian development of collective equipment, to the detriment of the most disadvantaged populations. How is such a disparity to be appreciated from the moment that the alienating character of this equipment is brought to light? Ought one start to oppose the setting up of crèches, youth clubs, etc., in immigrant neighbourhoods, for example? An untenable position! But the question is poorly put. It is not a type of equipment as such that must be judged, but the use that is made of it. It isn’t the walls, the funding for equipment and its function, but a politics of training, of the division of labour in so far as it prohibits the development of a collective assemblage function. Also, before knowing what must be demanded, it is necessary to determine who is doing the demanding! Funds, yes; equipment, perhaps! But to do what with? To reinforce the power of teachers, educationalists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts to grid, control and normalise and that of other agents who maintain order? Or the powers of local collectives? Or those of the repressive structures of the family? Funds for ‘childhood’ sure, but not for model crèches! Funds so that adults contribute to the setting up of collective assemblages relative to the desires of children, but not for the establishment of new ‘specialists’, who will only accentuate their tutelage Today, children don’t ‘need’ more and more specialised educationalists, psychoanalysts or super-organisers, but space, social vacuoles where they will at last be able to start to exist according to the singular economy of their desire. This doesn’t mean that nothing needs to be done and that it is better to let them get on with it by themselves, on wastegrounds or in the basements of HLM ! Natural spaces as fields of spontaneous expression are in the process of disappearing irreversibly, whether one laments the fact or not. To open up spaces to desire now implies means that are sometimes highly sophisticated, hence the entire, highly elaborate, technology that has recently been created for green spaces (see for example those that have been produced in Rennes), ‘adventure playgrounds’, collective games, etc. The question is not one of condemning them as such, but of calling into question the political and micropolitical role of those who are responsible for ‘dealing with’ them. It is perfectly easy to imagine that adults ‘in the vicinity’ might intervene to help children get round the obstacles that their projects are up against – negotiation, support, if it is felt necessary in relation to the different instances of power, intervention so as to extract material and financial means, even the transmission of knowledge, or showing how to MICRO-FASCISM

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appropriate it, always if that corresponds to the desire of individuals and groups. But all that implies a veritable anti-pedagogic, anti-psychiatric, antisociological, anti-criminological training on the part of these adults. It should be accepted from the outset that no-one knows anything about the desire of children and that no specialist will seek to understand it and recuperate it from an adaptational point of view en route. Connecting, constructing, assembling, experimenting, in so far as one is called on to do so, but called on by whom? Not by Power or Knowledge, the imperatives of Security, of Adaptation or of symbolic Integration, nor even from the points of view of an engagement in just causes, or under militant orders! But simply by what is happening at the level of the assemblages of desire and what in truth constitutes the surest vectors of ‘progressive’ social transformations in all domains. If it is true that at this molecular level there are no grounds for expecting that systems of one-way causality might be established, or that by a sort of boomerang effect, the toxins of repression might themselves start to decompose and contaminate in turn the major sectors of power, it nevertheless remains the case that the ‘recuperative’ equipment essentially continues to do its work, either running on empty or by serving as an outlet for attempts to innovate (the new benevolence of the national education system with regard to new education movements is entirely significant in this regard). As long as no large-scale experiment in self-management, as long as no process of expansion of creative micro-assemblages has been brought to light, or demonstrated its credibility in a convincing fashion, the diverse drives in this direction will equally run on empty and fall over, leaving large zones of demoralisation behind them. And it must be acknowledged that national programmes in self-management – of the Yugoslavian or Algerian type – have hitherto turned out to be rather disappointing, although it is difficult to distinguish clearly between what it is appropriate to impute to impasses relative to their internal functioning and what results from economic and political resistance relative to the general context in which they developed. But why be surprised? Why should social machines as complex as this be easier to get working than material machines – the strange, heavier than air, flying machines of the Belle Époque? Hundreds, thousands of attempts of all kinds will perhaps still be necessary before one succeeds in making viable self-management systems ‘take off ’ decisively! And it is licit to imagine between now and then that there will be time for the curiosity of numerous amused observers – who at the moment feel unconcerned by these problems – to change into serious anxiety when there is no longer any doubt that the future of humanity on this planet depends on their success! 86

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The politics of fascist and Stalinist equipment Over the last fifty years, the only regimes to have succeeded in mobilising the molecular energy of the masses have done so by subjection, constraint, and in the framework of the most frighteningly oppressive structures. From this point of view, it would be interesting to study the filiation of a certain number of forms of contemporary repressive equipment with those that were ‘invented’ by the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.2 In effect, everything leads us to think that the politics of fascist and Stalinist collective equipment constituted a sort of test bed for the Western powers during post-Second World War reconstruction. Quite apart from the famous autostrada, it would be necessary to make an inventory of the institutions, corporate systems, equipment of all kinds that was thus ‘transmitted’ from fascism (which in certain cases had previously imported them from the USSR) to the ‘democratic’ regimes. The following hypothesis could be maintained: at the outset, it wasn’t material systems of constraint or – misleading or demagogic – ideologies that succeeded in capturing the desiring energy of the masses, but equipment which, although imperfect and condemned to disappear in the short term, was of a new kind. The national socialist parties, inclined towards their Duce and their Fuhrer, were a relay for the Stalinist machine that issued from the Leninist-Bolshevik party. Under conditions that were proper to them, the fascist mass movements followed down a slope that was in some way parallel to that which led to the degeneration of the mass organisations of the 3rd International. While the Soviet branch developed the role of the repressive organisation of unions for the ‘young’, etc., one saw ‘popular’ assault divisions develop into robotic SS armies – after a very particular ‘tooling up’! The emergence and filiation of these new kinds of equipment evidently have to be studied as a function of the characteristic of their particular terrains and their specific modes of subjectivation, in so far as they lead to a different conception of the young, of the role of men and women, the race, the body, the corporation . . . and to a partial reordering of the traditional models of family, union, sporting, military organisation, etc. In this condition, one might then begin to note which sorts of semiotic components they really contributed to transforming. There is effectively nothing more illusory than to imagine that these changes in model are mechanically linked to changing ideas or indeed to changes in political regime! They are in fact the result of new practices, made possible by the emergence of new micro-equipment of semiotisation. Ideas merely register – if we can put it like this – such transformations in the pragmatic field. This is MICRO-FASCISM

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the only way to understand how so many people were able to ‘function’ within fascism, despite the fact that they could be conscious of its catastrophic character. (For example, the traditional rightist Germany military and a section of capital which, after having encouraged Hitler, who they thought they could control, were overtaken by events and constrained to follow them.) One may ask oneself if the network of equipment that these regimes constituted was not one of the fundamental supports allowing them to stay in place for so many years. One would have to examine in detail, case by case, how it succeeded in concentrating the energy of desire, which it channelled into some of the most reactionary, the most archaic of attitudes, institutions and myths one can imagine. We have already evoked what we have called the collective black hole effects that capture the energies of desire in an infernal process of deterritorialisation, trigger a mad desire for the extermination of everything that escapes the common norm and which even leads to a will to self-destruction, in the ultimate paroxysm of an explosion of desire. But these absolute black holes of fascism did not vanish with the victory of the ‘Allies’. They changed form, size, and disposition. In the most developed of capitalist countries, they have been miniaturised and are no longer organised around a central black hole focusing the desire of the masses, but around a multiplicity of micro-black holes that enter into resonance with one another. Consequently, the necessity of having a central conductor orchestrating fascism is not felt as much – except in circumstances of exceptional crisis that threaten the cohesion of the system. By contrast, in somewhere like the Soviet Union, in which economic and social sectors continue to experience very unequal modes of development, bureaucracy must maintain a highly centralised despotic system, in spite of the ‘liberal’ aspirations that might come to light within it, and despite presenting a number of inconveniences, as much in the internal as on the external planes. Also, the persistent recourse to the politics of the Gulag rather than to the soft drugs of the West, with their micro-equipment infiltrating the social field as a whole and facilitating the internalisation of repression, is doubtless the expression of a congenital weakness in such a regime, and ultimately the bearer of major social crisis.

The micro-fascisms of capitalist societies At the level of historical fascism, molar fascism, collective desire was captured by an infernal machine – the network of fascist equipment: 88

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party-police-army-industry-work camp-extermination camp, etc. – articulated around a central black hole: the Fuhrer’s gaze. It took off massively and manoeuvred radically round the objective interests of the masses. But at the level of contemporary micro-fascisms that haven’t yet ‘snowballed’, that haven’t crystallised at the molar level – and will not necessarily do so – the relationship between desire and systems of objective interests is much more ambiguous. It is not dealt with by completely stabilised Equipment; it operates through assemblages and micro-equipment that have a certain capacity for adaptation available to them. All capitalist systems have experienced forms of psychological micro-fascism that consist in making the balance of interests fall alternately either in a ‘negative’ direction from the point of view of the libido, by turning it back against the individual – systems of inhibition, guilt, etc., or against ‘others’, thus making the repressive vector ‘positive’ – phallocratic, persecutory, interpretative, jealous, attitudes as a system for taking power over one’s entourage. But modern, institutional, fascism, the fascism that is equipped, has been led to seek new paths for the appropriation of the desire of individuals and masses. Technocratic fascism assembles, negotiates the relations between interests and desires at a small scale, in a much more subtle way. Because of its much greater malleability, it succeeds in placing them in the service of a reactionary social order in a much more effective fashion. Western micro-fascisms no longer have the rigidity of national-socialism and Stalinism: in molecularising, they traverse social barriers even better. They are capable of innovating and even, if needs be, of destratifying, but only to the point necessary to adapt and survive. And today, this kind of self-regulating fascism, the methods of which do not cease to ‘improve’ in countries with the most cutting edge technologies – the USA, West Germany, France, Japan – is the envy of the repressive regimes of the rest of the planet! The great superiority of the micro-fascist black holes of democratic societies thus resides in the devolution of equipment on the large scale and in their being at work in all the pores of the social unconscious. Since the end of the process of selection that resulted in the elimination of the Italian Fascist, National Socialist and Stalinist models thirty years ago, we have witnessed the putting in place of a sort of segmentary system that stabilises the points of turbulence of the social field. Maintaining order tends to depend less on military and police machines than on these kinds of systems of regulation and normalisation that are closer to the people. Putting to one side a few wildcat strikes and a certain irreducible percentage of delinquents, manipulated as they are by the mass media, people stick to the right path all by themselves, by monitoring one another from out of the corner of their eyes. The alternatives between good, evil, the social, the anti-social tend to MICRO-FASCISM

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be less clear-cut than they used to be. And the darkest fascism, that of the crooked cross and the death’s head, has less opportunity to take off. Certainly it subsists everywhere a bit, but it remains relatively scattered. One might recall the Doriotism which, after an intermediary phase around 1934, when it was still reactionary and revolutionary at the same time, ended up falling irreversibly into Nazism, and in the end, in a complete impasse. Today, capitalist societies endeavour to find less clear-cut, apparently less catastrophic responses. Their modes of control are more sophisticated. In the USA , there is no Doriotism but a union system and a dividing up of ghettos by massed gangs that precisely succeed in preventing protest movements and revolts from ‘rising up’ as far as the constitution of grand revolutionary machines. This is how certain black, Puerto Rican or Latino gangs have come to organise a certain popular opposition to the selling of ‘hard’ drugs in the neighbourhoods they control, whilst dealing in other neighbourhoods! Their behaviour, on this point is, moreover, parallel to that of the police force, when it redistributes drugs it has seized, sometimes in considerable quantities, such as happened in New York a few years ago, when it oversees the dealers, when it gives cover to significant leaders, or when it imposes by force the use of substitute drugs, such as methadone, on the pretext of detoxification. All the illegalities – to borrow Michel Foucault’s expression – agree. And in a more general fashion, it is rather difficult to distinguish actions that are in favour of the ‘public good’ from those that tend towards the destruction of the community. The mass gangs that are scatted throughout most of the poor neighbourhoods of big American cities today can be considered as being at once both progressive and fascistic, to the extent that, on the one hand they manage to establish a minimum of self-defence, of a collective taking charge and ‘organising’ of the young people that they control and, on the other hand, they do so by employing the worst methods of violence and subjection. The miniaturised equipment of current capitalist regimes draws its strength from the micro-fascist politics, which it encourages at every level, seeming to constitute the last possible of routes towards a reappropriation of the territorialities of desire that might allow those who have recourse to them to escape from repressive systems of encirclement. This social and political dimension of neuroses has hitherto been, if not completely misunderstood, at least systematically avoided by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Nonetheless it exists at the level of the apparently most ‘apolitical’ of troubles. In this regard, the example of Little Hans, Freud’s original case study in the psychoanalysis of children,3 illustrates well the successive phases of such a mechanism of encirclement. The opening onto the street, in particular playing with his neighbours, being forbidden to him for reasons of bourgeois 90

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propriety, the child withdraws into the house, then his parents’ bed and the mother’s caresses. Then it is new prohibitions, this time of a psychoanalytic inspiration, that lead him to curl up with masochistic phantasms, to the point that a ‘diagrammatic’ deterritorialisation is attained, and in such a way that the ensemble of the repressive system is turned against the ‘oppressors’: Little Hans ‘then turns his neurosis into a weapon’; in turn he becomes a despot, persecuting his family with his phobic symptoms.4 We see how micro-fascisms can echo, resonate together, and prop each other up. But in all other domains, as much those of psychopathology as of everyday life, one could find this same entangling of social, individual, and biological components. On condition of course that one doesn’t deliberately avoid it! ‘Before’ being taken in hand by the police, the army, and the administration, society finds its consistency, its inertia, its lines of stratification, in this sort of self-intoxication that is constituted by the putting into circulation of reactionary imaginary formations that will lead to down-and-outs hating the Arabs and the ‘dagos’ as much as socialites condensing their bitterness at having to be women under the conditions of the luxurious phallocracy of the dominant classes, whatever benefits they might otherwise draw from it. The micro-fascisms of which it is a question here, the phallocratic micro-fascism, for example, do not arise, at the outset, from the antagonism of social classes. But the positions of the workers’ movement are far from being clear on this point. And many militants today would continue to recognise themselves in the attitude of the servant Matti when he humiliates Mr Puntila’s daughter in a gratuitous and odious fashion, after she admitted her love for him.5 (In theory he does it so as to illustrate a good revolutionary cause, but in fact it is so as to satisfy his phallocratic sadism on the cheap.) Sexual oppression began well before the class struggle. It might even be at the origin of the social division of labour, the constitution of the first machines of power and the first collective war machines. Without doubt this is what investigations into archaic societies would show if they weren’t almost always carried out just by men who, generally, do not ask themselves this kind of question and who, in any case, would have the greatest difficulties in accepting female accounts in this domain.6

Liberatory options, micro-fascist options at the molecular level To consider, as we are doing, that at the molecular level there is a sort of continuum between liberatory formations of desire, modes of semiotisation MICRO-FASCISM

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and the equipment that we are characterising as micro-fascist, doesn’t in the slightest imply that it is a good idea to confuse the political forces that play the game of reaction and fascism with those that are opposed to it. To compare bureaucratic micro-fascist secretions that paralyse the workers’ movement and the micro-fascist productions of State power doesn’t in the least imply that we are putting everything in the same bag: bosses, unions, police officers and security services! Relations of force, ‘fronts’, common actions, have their own logic, which demands to be appreciated according to each situation. But that is not our objective here. We are simply affirming that if the large-scale opposition between fascism and revolution is still pertinent, at the micro-fascist level, by contrast, desire and repression can only find their dividing line by way of a particular analytic labour that is able to spot the beginnings of paranoid deviation, bureaucratic stems, etc. The nature of the ‘analysers’ that would have to be put in place to fulfil such a function matters little! It could just as easily be a matter of analytic groups properly speaking, in different units of life, production, ‘leisure time’, etc., as of systems of organisation endeavouring never to reproduce the reification and hierarchisation of roles, functions, and persons, and that are able to transmit information and operative statements in a completely different mode to those that currently exist. The analysis of the ‘social’ unconscious – but there is no other unconscious! – should not be ‘reduced’ so much here to a group or organisational activity. One can perfectly easily imagine that it might be carried out starting from a core of two people, for example, but on condition that no specialist claims to be the exclusive repository of good interpretations (the current rule being that nothing valuable in the unconscious can be admitted/heard without passing via the transference and the silent discourse of the psychoanalyst – finances permitting, it goes without saying!). And it could equally arise, as already exists in fact, from a solitary activity (which implies, let us note in passing, a certain number of means, as much on a material as on a semiotic plane: how many children have at their disposal the minimum ‘quiet little corner’ so as to write poems or play guitar? How many more don’t even have any idea of this?). The common feature of all these analytic assemblages is that they will never separate what happens in the socius, with its semiotic and material flows of all sorts, from what happens in people’s heads, in the form of flows of language, images, and affects. The ‘optional matter’ of such analyses cannot in any way be reduced to exclusive alternatives, to mechanical choices. It will therefore not propose any adherence, once and for all, to the good orientation of ‘leftist schizo opening’ or the bad orientation of ‘rightist paranoid stratification’. It will remain powdery, it will deploy its intensive zones, subject to sudden reversals, without any technique of interpretation, any political 92

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programme, any organisational structure ever being able to guarantee once and for all that one has adopted the correct orientation, that one has moved into the‘correct path’, of rhizomes, self-management, and collective assemblages of enunciation. A molecular State power – a micro-fascist, paranoid, economy of desire, whatever one wants to call it – can in effect always contaminate social groups of every size; reciprocally, a molar political economy, a despotic State power, can always seize hold of micro-social structures so as to ossify and stratify their living parts. And it will always remain possible, even in this case, that new assemblages, whether revolutionary or micro-fascist, can start to proliferate from inside these ossified parts, in such a way little by little, the ambiguity of the molecular options of desire succeeding in sorting itself out, an apparently definitively stratified molar assemblage comes to ‘start up’ again. In a crèche, for example, or a sports club, the two types of State power can coexist perfectly well – the molecular State power that captures and models the desire of the children or athletes, and the classic repressive State power of the teacher in charge or the pontificating coach. The libidinal economy of assemblages and equipments thus constantly experiences a see-saw effect between surfaces of stratification and lines of flight, so as to ‘change life (a bit)’. And most frequently the decisive divisions take place less because of a conflict of ideas or organisational problems than on the basis of certain faciality traits – those of an authoritarian head or a seductive teacher. What is important, it seems to us, is never to lose from view that this kind of microscopic ‘optional matter’ can serve as a support for the expression and manifestation of a possible way of getting beyond local situations. Rather than relating to character traits, the complexes of parents, or difficulties in communicating, they imply the calling into question of other assemblages such as the government, the university, parent-teacher associations, etc. Whereas the role of Collective equipment was to make all this hold together, to make molar State power and repressive molecular powers function synchronically, that of the collective assemblages of desire becomes one of preventing the repressive components from crystallising together and snowballing. This point is fundamental, because it helps us as a consequence understand (that is to say, to indicate to us possible lines of intervention) the fact that the politics of capitalism forms of Collective equipment can only impose themselves at the molar scale to the extent that State power has already positioned its pawns on the molecular chessboard, without us being able to speak for all that about an ‘infrastructure’ of desire that conditions an institutional superstructure. This is because the converse is true – the implanting of a molecular State power at the heart of the subject equally depends on the fact that the large repressive formations, the big semiotic accelerators, have succeeded in deterritorialising individuals, organs, functions, and social groups. MICRO-FASCISM

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10 SELF - MANAGEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

Methodologies of rupture A politics of self-management, accompanied by an analytic militancy (or a militant analysis, as one wishes) can therefore only be established on condition that instruments of semiotisation capable of dealing with sign systems without remaining imprisoned in dominant redundancies and significations of power are put in place. But what often disorientates militants and specialists of the social thing is that their micropolitics of desire and their conceptual materials make them miss the semiotisation of the libidinal economy of the social field, in so far as that semiotisation doesn’t stop shifting its intensities around a continuum the existence of which challenges in advance systems of options that are crystallised in terms of a logic of totalised objects, responsibilised persons, closed sets. If they do not ‘focus’ on the real in this domain, this is, paradoxically, because the notions that they use are at once both too general and not abstract enough.1 Capitalist flows do not, in effect, work with general, territorialised, categories (for example, men, cities, nations) but bring into play deterritorialised functions that imply the most abstract of modes of semiotisation in the economic, scientific, technical order, etc. Under such conditions, thinking ‘modernity’ can, in our opinion, only signify a rupture with every system of general categories, which only ever juts out over the real, which only succeeds in carrying out a formal inventorying of its original socalled elements, supposedly to organise them ‘logically’ but in fact so as to stratify them in pragmatics with political repercussions that are never made explicit. Thinking minority in the order of desire presupposes a direct meshing 95

with the semiotisation of a real in action, in other words, the fabrication of new lines of reality. Equipment functions depend systematically on general categories that tend to take a hold of collective processes so as to reterritorialise them on power formations, whereas assemblage functions, on the contrary, endeavour to connect semiotic flows directly to the abstract machines that are borne by the deterritorialisation of flows. The marking out of this type of connection, through processes of diagrammatisation will enable us to better found the opposition between the politics of equipment – in so far as it depends on a regime of signs that function in the mode of representation, of representatives of enunciation and of icons of power – and the politics of collective assemblages that function on the basis of modes of semiotisation that make signs work ‘flush with’ things, bodies, and flows of all kinds. In the first case, one will be dealing with interactions between objects, subjects who are distinct from one another, a causality that operates on discernabilised strata; in the second case, one will be dealing with interactions that traverse and undo strata, crystallise intensive multiplicities, polarise modes of subjectivation that by rights cease to be attributable to individuated persons, but which remain adjacent to constellations of organs, organic functions, material flows, semiotic flows, etc. But where do such diagrammatic assemblages currently become manifest? Certainly not in civil society or politics, the codification of which clings on to pre-capitalist personological laws. Rather it is in domains like the sciences, industry, military and artistic machines, etc., that one can best see them at work, to the extent that the systems of signs that they put into play already form an intrinsic part of the material of their production. Until now, those attempts at self-management or communitarianism that have tried to struggle against this kind of deterritorialised machinism have remained powerless in face of the complexity of semiotic integration at which they arrive. It is of course obvious that invocations of a ‘return to nature’, a ‘return to Zen Buddhism’, to the defence of the environment, to zero growth, etc., as such, will never be enough to stop the mega-machines that are currently sweeping everything away in their passage: nature, bodies, minds, original forms, ‘morals’ . . . A revolutionary resumption of machinic processes can therefore not content itself with a critique of ideology that articulates general notions that do not engage with the diagrammatic processes that ensure the real power of capitalist regimes. Only the creation of other types of semiotisation machines that reorient the economy of deterritorialised flows, undoing dominant redundancies and the stratifications of established powers, could begin to respond to such an objective. Lenin was amongst those who had understood the necessity of such a creation when, becoming conscious of ineffectiveness of social-democratic, 96

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economistic, humanist or anarchist discourse, he devoted his energy to the construction of an absolutely new genre of revolutionary machine. It was essentially over problems of organisation that he conducted his struggle against social-democracy, the programmatic divergences seeming in some way to have become depending on the priority of this rupture with old union and social-democrat practices. Thus the Bolshevik party fixed as its primary task the forming of a new type of militant as the support for a specific consciousness of the working class and the constitution of a sort of war machine capable of tackling the existing political, economic, police, socialdemocratic union practices head on. To do that it had to be in a position to extract signs, order-words, to semiotise diagrammatically a new workerist avant-garde and sketch out the revolutionary deterritorialisation of the Russian peasantry, which had remained deeply rooted in Asiatic despotism. How the Leninist machine got itself surrounded by imperialism before sinking into Stalinism is a different question! Although it remained too territorialised because of its implacable centralism and its party nationalism, although it got recuperated by the Soviet State, by military and police machines, although the type of party that it produced became a supplementary repressive equipment the world over, the Leninist ‘experiment’ nonetheless resulted in one of the most important collective assemblages of enunciation of modern working classes. What must be remembered here are not the models that Leninism created but the methodology of rupture that it enacted. Although the Leninist party no longer corresponds at all with the necessities of contemporary social struggles, although those who aim to reproduce its orderwords and organisation indefinitely are situated completely outside historical development, the abstract machine that Leninism put in circulation, the questions that it asked, that is to say, those concerning a new way of life, a new morality, a new way of assembling militant practices and holding a discourse on politics and society remain vital. In fact, the attempts at going back to social-democratic practices have only ever resulted in the worst compromises. Only a going beyond of this problematic will enable the impasse within which the workers’ movement finds itself to be unblocked. But there too, the question of the miniaturisation of war machines and the constitution of multiple ‘micro-undergrounds’ [micro-maquis] allowing class struggles and struggles of desire, in their molecular aspect, to be faced with new weapons.

Singularities of desire All existing definitions of the avant-garde, of the function of revolutionary intellectuals, of apparatchiks, of mass militantism, are to be called into SELF-MANAGEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

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question. Let us note in particular that as interesting as they are, Gramsci’s analyses relative to the division of labour between intellectuals and militants do not seem to us to advance the question decisively. One may recall that he expected the enunciation of a theory that would become the ‘flesh and blood of the proletariat’2 from the constitution of ‘collective intellectuals’. It is evident that what we have designated with the expression collective assemblage cannot coincide with this new race of ‘organic intellectuals of the working class’. We do not think that there is any place, in effect to set up a specific group and praxis the function of which would be to synthesise Theory and Action. The very form of the division of labour between militancy, the analysis of the unconscious and intellectual activity should wither away, to the extent that the practice of theory gives up basing itself on systems of universals – even if they are dialectical and materialist – and action establishes itself in the extension of a liberatory economy of desire. The incessant dynamic of the semiotic and pragmatic components of collective assemblages, relative to the struggles over interest and the investments of desire, effectively tends to make the traditional poles of social representation (the oppositions: men-women, young-adult, manual-intellectual; rank and file-leadership; normal-mad, heterosexualhomosexual, etc.) lose their formal identity. Also the determination of the conditions under which the working class will have to take control of the State, or, in a formula of Gramsci’s ‘make themselves the State’ will no longer be posed in those terms at all, as the question of the withering away of State power will no longer be pushed back to the end of a long historical process but will be of the order of the day at every step of every struggle. It’s the whole of the Marxist-LeninistMaoist casuistry of principal and secondary contradictions that must be called into question here. To consider, for example, that the contradictions between men and women, children and adults, are secondary in relation to class contradictions in a capitalist regime corresponds neither to history nor to current concrete situations. Attempts at hierarchising contradictions at a doctrinal level always imply a micropolitics of the subjection of the struggles of desire to the ‘serious matter’ of class struggle, that is to say, in the last instance, to the party leadership. One can admit that during major social struggles, the working class has a determining role to play, but that doesn’t in the slightest imply that workers’ organisations can lay down the law on women’s movements, the movements of the young, artistic, intellectual, regionalist currents, sexual minorities, etc. This loss of identities, of roles and of specialisms within ‘collective assemblages of enunciations’ ought not, therefore, entail the dissolving of the singular characteristics of each pragmatic ‘region’, quite the contrary. 98

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Without differentiating distinct races of militants, intellectuals, artists, etc., it will become possible that the same person can legitimately pass from one type of activity to another and radically change system of reference without that creating mental or social difficulties for him. It is, in effect, clear that every attempt at homogenising pragmatic fields, at smoothing over the singularities of desire relative to each type of semiotic component, always goes in the direction of an accumulation of repression (something that can be spotted today when considering the affinities that exist, above all at the level of institutional practices, between power formations such as the leadership of centralised parties, those of groupuscules, of psychoanalytic societies, literary cliques, academic pressure groups, etc.). Diagrammatic assemblages already exist everywhere in capitalist societies: they constitute the very motor of their semiotic potential. But every effort is made to channel their creativity into the dominant territorialities of the system. Thus deterritorialising diagrammatism is ceaselessly recuperated, reterritorialised, hierarchised, impotentiated. Paradoxically, capitalist and bureaucratic socialist societies cannot do without semiotic procedures for the capture of libido, which, moreover, they find intrinsically threatening. Collective equipment is thus the seat of a complex metabolism for the capitalisation, but at the same time, neutralisation, of diagrammatic assemblages. It thereby forms the junction between the old civil society and the machinic revolution.

The traps of ideology Whilst endeavouring not to escape the context of Marxist orthodoxy – but one would have to look at this more closely – Louis Althusser has attempted to determine the specificity of those machines of collective semiotisation that he has called Ideological State Apparatuses.3 It may be recalled that he distinguishes between a component of State power, which, he says, ‘functions through violence’ in the functioning of repressive powers, and an ideological component which functions softly, in some way. Also, in order to arrive at a systematic gridding of the social field in every domain (religion, education, the family, law, politics, unions, information, culture, etc.), these Apparatuses are led to effectuate subtle combinations of violence and ideological ‘deception’. The fact that Louis Althusser detaches apparatus that arise from the private domain from what he calls the ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ seems to be of the greatest interest, but we part company from him when he characterises the former as being fundamentally ‘ideological’. The problematic that we have ourselves sought to outline, with collective SELF-MANAGEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

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assemblages of enunciation, diagrammatic machines and Collective equipment functions, has, on the contrary, led us to consider the existence of a continuity between the blatant forms of public repression and the innumerable ‘private’ modes of internalisation of repression. The State is everywhere and before being incarnated in repressive instruments, it functions in the libido. We really do mean libido, because the movement of ideas, in this domain above all, cannot be separated from the metabolism of the social unconscious. So we cannot follow Louis Althusser when he localises Ideological State Apparatuses at the level of ideological superstructures, thus repeating the old nineteenth century metaphors about the ‘edifice’ of causalities. According to us, the economic base does not constitute an infrastructure that necessarily imposes itself on the libido and on ideas. Everything can become infrastructure! Under certain conditions, legal-political doctrines, machines for injecting ideas, religious representations, etc., can play a determining role. Under other conditions, they float outside any social reality. And it isn’t even enough then to say that they are ‘ideological’ and depend on an economic base. That would still be to accord them too much respect. At the limit, they no longer depend on anything! They no longer exist except as empty redundancy. Louis Althusser has made ideology too general a category, encompassing and confusing radically heterogeneous semiotic categories. In identifying it, following the classical tradition, with logos, he wanted to underline that it could not constitute a productive force. And on this point we can only part company from him. In fact, it is an entire conception of language and of production that is in question here. An analytic approach to social libido would require that one not restrict oneself solely to the visible parts of equipment such as schools, prisons, stages, etc. In effect, a fundamental element of their functioning derives from their aptitude for capturing not just interests, but also individual and collective desires. If one restricts oneself to their manifest discourse (legal, regulatory, etc.) one misses an essential element of the iceberg of repression in capitalist regimes. To make do with analysing the ideological character of these discourses risks making us lose not just its implicit dimensions – something Freudians have tried to locate with their opposition between manifest utterances and latent contents – but more fundamentally, the metabolism of the coding components and the non-linguistic semiotic components of assemblages of enunciation that correspond to them. Ideology is a trap in two ways: at the level of its content, it gives consistency to empty redundancies, and, at the level of its very existence, it endeavours to give credence to the idea that it itself plays a major role. Thus everyone pretends to believe that the future of society depends on the fact that 100

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leaders, parties, newspapers, etc., convey such and such a doctrine, whilst in reality today theoretical points of view – social projects – only have an insignificant part to play in the real decision-making processes of the capitalist world. Only pragmatic assemblages that are directly engaged with reality on the basis of their own diagrammatic machine will be able to bring effective responses to contemporary social problems, without there being much to expect from the group and leaders who claim to have something to teach the masses. People have been taught to clap in time – vote, opinion poll, demonstration, etc. – in front of the overly brightly lit scenes of ideology, with their characters and their Manichean options: left or right, socialism or barbarity, fascism or revolution? But the projectors of real history are shifting now, irreversibly, it seems, towards an entirely different problematic: left and right, inextricably mixed up, socialism and barbarity, fascism and revolution. That is to say, at the same time both the Chilean national stadium, at the molar level, and the ‘politics of the public square’ at the molecular level, to use Paul Virilio’s felicitous expression, that is, a micropolitics of generalised gridding.4 Repressive institutions have a hold on us everywhere, they mobilise us at every moment in our lives – even dreams, parapraxes, lapsus have to be accountable, under the regime of psychoanalytic surveillance that is starting to be put in place in a certain number of institutions! The ensemble of conceptions that are relative to the high points of struggle in periods of upswing and downswing, all systems of strategic choices of the type ‘we need more time to allow the power of the Soviets in the USSR to be consolidated’ or tactical calculations of the kind ‘Elections first, then our demands’ tend to lose their signification. A molecular revolution, leaning up against molar revolution, so as to divert capitalist societies from their catastrophic ends, to seize control of the economy of deterritorialised flows that they have succeeded in putting at their service, could only be permanent and be established on every front at the same time. Not only will it ‘capitalise’ all the vectors of deterritorialisation, it will ‘lay it on’ to the extent that it will devote itself to undoing bourgeois reterritorialisations, amongst the ranks of which should be counted all today’s retro nostalgia!

Prospects for self-management Numerous indices of this kind of revolutionary renewal can be noted, but is this really the direction which history is taking? During ‘social crises’ of the SELF-MANAGEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

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kind that marked the USA at the end of the Vietnam war, for example, or Portugal during the collapse of the regime of Salazar, attempts at selfmanagement and communitarian projects of all kinds appeared, then got bogged down in their internal difficulties and general indifference. In France, self-management has become a bit fashionable with the business of the LIP cooperative, that is to say, precisely in relation to a company that is implacably surrounded by capitalism, the power of the State and the unions, and who as a result had no chance of surviving. But, it will be said, these kinds of intersections are found more or less everywhere! And every attempt of this kind will always end up being taken in hand or liquidated. Practically everything that was set in motion in May 1968 has been recuperated. But an immense fissure between repressive equipment and the collective energy of desire has revealed a new problematic, and set into circulation new abstract machines and has opened up new prospects for innovative militancy which little by little are transforming the general conditions for social struggles. Whatever the case may be, it seems to us that one of the major obstacles to a self-management orientation gaining ground on the political chessboard in a decisive fashion, is that for the most part its defenders and promoters only think of it as something that must be limited to the sphere of economic and material problems. Thus in the eyes of opinion they are as people seeking above all to sort their own issues out, as a function of their own concerns, as a function of their own desires, and not so much as a function of those of the rest of society. We come up against the myth of spontaneity here: seen from the outside, this is interpreted as a politics of ‘everyone for themselves’. To free the thought of self-management from spontaneism is thus not only an affair of ideology but a fundamental problem of orientation concerning crucial theoretical questions – a certain definition of the unconscious – as well as very practical questions of everyday life and militant organisation. Self-management can be neither anti-management nor a ‘democratic’ adjustment of planning, as currently conceived by the left. Before being economic, it should concern the very texture of the socius, through the promotion of a new type of relationship between things, signs and collective modes of subjectivation. In itself, the idea of a ‘model’ for selfmanagement is thus contradictory. Self-management can only result from a continuous process of collective experimentation which, whilst always taking things further in the detail of life and respect for the singularities of desire, will nonetheless be capable, little by little, of ‘rationally’ ensuring essential tasks of coordination at the broadest social levels. Let us put it bluntly: it doesn’t seem very honest to us to promise selfmanagement today for electoral tomorrows, without starting to put it into 102

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practice everywhere that it is already possible. It must be put to work straightaway, in the party, in the union, in private life! The collective neuroses that become manifest with investment in bureaucracy, the magical recourse to leaders, to stars, champions . . . are not just a fact of class enemies. They are perpetuated in us and around us. And one cannot pretend to deal with them elsewhere if one does attack the points where they most paralyse us, that is to say, at the blind spots of our own micro-fascisms. Selfmanagement cannot be a synonym for a generalised autonomism, for a closing up onto territorialities that are jealous of one another – the family, the community, the party, race: on the contrary, it is about deterritorialising, connecting old stratifications, opening up to the prospect of a planetary management that isn’t centralised, that isn’t about planning, which multiplies decision-making centres and frees the libidinal energies that have, hitherto been prisoners of racial, national, phallocratic, etc. investments. Thus as we have tried to show, it cannot be separated from the putting into place of analytic-political assemblages that only have distant relations with what a certain number of ‘non-authoritarian’, Rogerian, psycho-sociologists have classified in terms of ‘analysers’. It is not, in effect, a matter of proposing a new recipe for the ‘running’ of small groups, but of envisaging the conditions for a micropolitics of desire, itself indissociable from a ‘large-scale’ politics concerning the ensemble of class struggles.5 To have done with the dialogue of the deaf that opposes ‘centralists’ who call themselves democratic, from ‘spontaneists’ who are scarcely more so, it is at a practical level that militants of self-management will have to take charge of the intersections of power formations and machines of desire with which they are confronted. But under current conditions of capitalist alienation, which spares no-one, it is difficult to imagine such analytic-militant groups falling from the sky! They will not be made to proliferate overnight, by making the right resolutions, by opting for the right programme! And even in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary conditions, which are in principle favourable to the establishment of systems of ‘dual power’, one cannot expect that they will start to germinate by themselves in the soil of popular spontaneity! They can only be born from properly experimental embryos, from sometimes entirely microscopic collective assemblages that are capable of combining working problematics of economic management, everyday life, and desire. In order to be produced, such assemblages will, on condition that they have managed to engage with reality, will have no need of being put in print or ‘propagandised’. In effect, once a new form of struggle or organisation6 succeeds in resolving a problem, one notices that it is transmitted at the speed of audiovisual. Once again, it is not a question here of putting a model SELF-MANAGEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF DESIRE

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into circulation! The growth and expansion of ‘social innovations’: can only be accomplished along the lines – a rhizome – of creative experimentation. What continues to be rewarding in the work of Célestin Freinet, for example,7 is less his ‘methods’ or the movement that invokes them (sometimes in quite a dogmatic fashion), than the fact that they contribute to the catalysing of other efforts, in other contexts – in the urban context with institutional pedagogy, for example8 – or that it announces the idea of a much more radical calling into question of the existence of school as such.9

Social transversalities One can never say about a particular situation of oppression that it offers no possibility for struggle; inversely, one can never claim that a society or a social group, as such, is definitively protected against the growth of a new form of fascism. Molecular semiotisation works over molar stratifications and, inversely, these latter attempt to render molecular assemblages impotent. Macroscopic or microscopic territorialities, massive deterritorialisations or minuscule lines of flight, paranoid local or largescale fascist reterritorialisations do not cease penetrating each other according to a general principle of transversality, in such a way that, for example, micro-fascist conjunctions of power can spring up all over the place, as we see in France, Germany, and Italy today, without the modification of legal rights, constitutional guarantees, or consolidated gains. In these countries until now micro-fascist conjunctions seem not to have to crystallise at the molar level. But nothing ensures that it will always be like this! We haven’t forgotten the declarations of the generals in Chile, on the eve of the coup, who affirmed that their army was the most democratic in the world! What took place then, not just in their heads, but above all in the heads of those who ‘believed in’ them? Were we not already in the presence of a fascist seizure of power, at the level of a phenomenon of collective belief? Michel Foucault has clearly shown that one cannot consider the political power of the State simply to be the result of a hierarchy of coercive organisms. He has brought out what he has called the ramified anatomy of disciplinary power: ‘discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a “physics” or an “anatomy” of power, a technology.’10 The whole question is one of knowing under what conditions this technology can be neutralised and this anatomy 104

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defeated/undone! It is thus not a matter for us of opposing two types of origin, a genealogical origin of major social formations, and a microphysical emergence of the socius on the basis of desiring machines. What is in question here is, rather, the liquidation of every idea of origin and that having taken into account the practical impossibility that active agents of enunciation – and not ‘objective’ and external observers – generally find in determining the number and intensity of the semiotic components which, at a given moment, in a given situation, are likely to intervene in the transformation of a social formation. Our intention is not at all to promote a metaphysics of indeterminacy here, but to criticise political ideas that think social causality in static terms – even when they claim to be dialectical or to be inspired by thermodynamic concepts.11 With their ‘engines of history’, their ‘weak links and strong links’, their ‘transmission mechanisms’ it seems that a certain number of Marxists really are fixated on what we could call the ‘steam engine complex’! Rather than clinging too simplistic models of causality between clearly distinguished objects and as a function of energy parameters that are distinct from one another, they would do well to take inspiration from more recent ‘models’, those of interaction in contemporary physics, for example.12 Inspiration has to be understood here in the poetic sense or that of walkers who need a change of scenery. Evidently it is not a matter of proposing new tracings, or the compulsive search for a ‘scientificity’ of concepts in these domains – something that seems to arise more from obsessional neurosis than from a theoretical analysis connected with social realities.

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PART TWO

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11 INTRODUCTION TO PRINCIPAL THEMES

Previously, we recalled the different modes of interaction that exist between the molar and the molecular levels. But because we didn’t go into sufficient depth regarding the nature of the semiotic drivers of these interactions – the function of abstract machines in particular – our description remained essentially on a synchronic and spatial plane. It would thus be necessary also to envisage the existence of diachronic interactions that undo the mechanistic systems of causality on which reasoning in terms of evolutionary stages is founded. But how can the way that what comes ‘after’ determines what comes ‘before’ be conceptualised? Every traditional mode of thinking is opposed to the idea that an effect can go against the grain of time! Also, such interactions can only be conceived on condition that they be envisaged at a level we will characterise as ‘machinic’ – without specifying its material and/or semiotic nature – in which they function outside of human spatio-temporal coordinates. Such is precisely the role that we intend to make abstract machines and the machinic plane of consistency onto which they ‘fasten’ themselves play. Neither transcendent Platonic ideas nor Aristotelian forms in proximity with an amorphous matter, these abstract machines make and unmake stratifications of all kinds. They therefore do not function as a system of coding that would be fixed onto existing stratifications from the outside; they ‘hold’ them from the ‘inside’. In the context of a general movement of deterritorialisation, they constitute a sort of ‘optional matter’ whose crystals of possibility catalyse the connections, the destratifications, and the reterritorialisations that work the living world as much as the inanimate world. In sum, they mark the fact that deterritorialisation ‘precedes’ the existence of strata and territories. Also, they cannot be ‘realised’ in a logical space, but only through contingent 109

machinic manifestations. With abstract machines it is never simply a question of a simple combinatory, but of the assemblage of intensive components that are irreducible to a formal description. So, without implying the recourse to any sort of background world, their necessity follows from a reversal of perspective leading to the processes of coding and of ‘instruction’ independently of a deixis and an anthropocentric logic, and it has as a consequence the reshuffling of the ‘hierarchical’ relations between the singular and the universal. The singularity of a matter that is semiologically unformed can claim universality. And inversely, the universality of a coding procedure or a signifying redundancy can fall into particularism. Neither universal, nor singular, the sign-particles that constitute the abstract machines charge up singularities, not with the power of universality but with a certain potential for traversing the universe of stratifications. Thus marked in their own colours these singularities and the stratifications that they bring about become available for the work of a semiological assemblage. Correlatively, every utterance or instance of power that claims universality finds itself weighed down with a facticity or a historicity that lends them to a possible pragmatic reassembling. But just as they have tried to annex semiotics, linguists today intend to control the development of a possible pragmatics. As a form of content, pragmatics is bracketed off or, when it is acknowledged, its political tenor is neutralised. What the structuralists did for the signified – a massive operation of neutralisation – is repeated at another level by generative linguistics and the linguistics of enunciation. Certainly there is now a certain acknowledgement of semantic contents and pragmatic contents, but always on condition that they are distanced from the collective assemblages of enunciation on which they depend. Now, in our opinion, the essential object of a pragmatics ought to be the study of micropolitical formations relative to these assemblages and their impact on discourse and language. In whatever way one considers it, contemporary linguistics continues to model pragmatic and semantic fields on the syntagmatic field. Even when it claims to know nothing of language itself – as with the distributionalists or with Chomsky – it remains imprisoned in a certain type of discourse on the basis of which it claims to deduce all the other possibilities of semiotic competence. Hence the imperious necessity which it finds for itself of affirming, as an intangible preliminary, that the types of langue and competence that it studies – normal, masculine, heterosexual, adult, and most frequently, white and capitalist, language – are essentially based on systems of universals. The abstraction of models here simply masks the historically contingent character of the powers in play. But the reproach that one may level at these theories is not that they are too abstract but on 110

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the contrary that they aren’t abstract enough and do not account for the kind of singular – and not universal – abstract machines that are put into play by languages, in the context of particular relations of production. We consider that any idea of a linguistic universal, at the level of the form of expression (guaranteeing the autonomy of the grammatical) or at the level of the form of content, has the role of dodging pragmatics in its power functions and of cutting it off from the social and historical field. Here we will oppose something that is not a model, which we will call ‘rhizome’ (or ‘lattice’), to the model of the syntagmatic tree. It will be defined by the following characteristics: ●

Contrary to Chomskyan trees, which begin at the point S and proceed through dichotomy, rhizomes can connect any point whatsoever to any other.

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Each trait of the rhizome does not necessarily refer to a linguistic trait. Semiotic chains of all kinds are connected here to the most diverse modes of coding, biological chains, political chains, economic, etc., putting into play not just every regime of signs but also everything that has a non-sign status.

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The relations that exist between the levels of segmentarity within each semiotic stratum, are to be differentiated from interstratic relations, and operate on the basis of the lines of flight of deterritorialisation.

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Pragmatics will give up any idea of deep structure; the pragmatic unconscious, unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, is not a representational unconscious, crystallised into codified complexes and distributed according to a genetic axis; it is to be constructed like a map.

The map, as the final characteristic of the rhizome, can be taken apart, connected, reversed and can be modified constantly. There can be tree structures within a rhizome. Inversely, the branch of a tree can start to bud in a rhizomatic form. Pragmatics is divided into two series of components: 1

Interpretative transformational components (that can equally be called generative), which imply the primacy of semiologies of signification over non-interpretative semiotics. They are themselves divided into two general types of transformation: INTRODUCTION TO PRINCIPLE THEMES

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analogic transformations arising from iconic semiologies, for example;

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signifying transformations, arising from linguistic semiologies.

Two types of ‘seizing power over contents’ through reterritorialisation and subjectivation correspond to them, which depend either on territorialised assemblages of enunciation or on an individuation of enunciation. 2

Non-interpretative transformational components which can overturn the power of the preceding two transformations. One can divide them into two general types of transformation parallel to the interpretative transformations: ●

symbolic transformations arising from intensive semiotics (on the perceptive, gestural or mimetic level, etc.);

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diagrammatic transformations arising from a-signifying semiotics, which operate through a deterritorialisation that bears jointly on the formalism of content and on that of expression, and through the putting into play of abstract machines manifested by a system of signs-particles.

Remarks: 1

We are not employing the expressions ‘generative component’ and ‘transformational component’ in the same sense as the Chomskyans. For them, the generative capacity of a system functions like a logico-mathematical axiomatic, whereas we consider that the generative constraints (of a language or a dialect) are always intrinsically linked to the genealogy of a power formation. It is the same with the notion of transformation. The Chomskyans conceptualise it in a way that is identical to that of algebraic or geometrical transformations (it will be recalled that the transformations of an equation change its form whilst maintaining the ‘deep’ economy of the relations present). We are talking here in a sense that could be connected to the sense in which in the history of theories of evolution, transformism (or mutationism) was opposed to fixism. But perhaps there is only a tiny bit of derision and provocation in our ‘abusive’ use of the Chomskyan categories, because in fact they have served as a guide a contrario.

2

Contrary to the historical decision of the International Association of Semiotics, we propose, with the same arbitrariness, to maintain (and even to reinforce) a distinction between:

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Semiology, as a trans-linguistic discipline which examines systems of signs in relationship with the laws of language (Barthes’s point of view); and

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Semiotics, as a discipline that aims to study systems of signs following a method that doesn’t depend on linguistics (Peirce’s point of view).

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12 PRAGMATICS , THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

The problems posed by pragmatics are in the process of acquiring a central place in the preoccupations of contemporary linguistics. With linguistic structuralism, contents were tributary to signifying chains that could always be described in terms of chains of binary oppositions. Information theory had established itself in some way at the heart of the machine of linguistic expression. It seemed to go without saying that its purpose was the transmission of information, the rest being mere noise and redundancy. With language having no other content than information, it was not a question for linguistics of interpenetration with the social field and its political problems. The object of linguistics, the ‘objective’ object that was supposed to constitute it as a science, was this atom of information (a sort of quantitative unit of form), whereas the problems of communication were relegated to a question that remained rather marginal, that of enunciation. Imitating scientific objectivity, linguistics thus believed it could keep its distance from any difficult social problematic. Psychoanalysis had proceeded in the same way, but by relying not on information theory, but on biology, linguistics and, recently, even logic and mathematics. Chomskyan linguistics wanted straightaway to distinguish itself from structural linguistics, which it reproached for not taking into account the creative characteristic of language. In its first version, it considered that the phonological machine could only intervene in the final formulation of utterances, at a so-called surface level. On the basis of a syntactic deep structure, its first linguistic model was supposed to generate and transform utterances without losing any nuance, any semantic ambiguity. But along the 115

way the ‘semantic question’ has only deepened the mystery of the operations that are supposed to be accomplished at the ‘deep’ level. For orthodox Chomskyans, a mathematical machine – a syntactic topology – is relied on to produce semantic compositions, whilst for the ‘generative semantics’ current, this same task is entrusted to a particular logic, a so-called ‘natural logic’ that articulates abstract ‘semantic atoms’ (‘atomic predicates’) and the ‘postulates of meaning’ that link them together.1 Seeking to free itself from the narrow formalism of structuralism and Chomskyanism, a linguistics of enunciation is today endeavouring to find its own path. Its explicit object is the consideration of the pragmatic components of communication. Unfortunately, it still seems to go without saying, for the linguistics of enunciation, that one can only take these components into consideration in so far as they have an impact on the structures of language as such, that is to say, in so far as they have already been syntacticised and semanticised. And once again the question of the status of the micropolitical fields of power that the research of the phonological and generativist currents had evacuated makes its appearance. One has the impression that once more the wastebasket of linguistics – to borrow an expression from Chomsky2 – has merely been shifted. With the binary reduction of the structuralists, semantics was the wastebasket. With the topologism of the ‘generative semanticists’, semantic contents were apparently taken in hand, but they are studied without the social assemblages of their enunciation ever being worried about; thus the political wastebasket is pushed back towards a pragmatics with undefinable limits. With the linguistics of enunciation, one finally turns to pragmatics, but it is constituted in a restrictive way. It is treated as a signifying content. In the same way as semantic fields, pragmatic fields are flattened, structuralised. They remain dependent on syntactic and phonological machines. To be sure these are more complex than those of Martinet’s structuralism, and they have to be inserted at one point or another in the branching of the deep structures or surface structures of the generativist kind, without the idea that they might have their own system of staging, their own micropolitical fields of enunciation, ever being accepted. Linguists seem to accept as self-evident that semantic fields and pragmatic fields can be binarised in a similar way to machines of expression that convey ‘digitalised’ information. One might say that they are wary of content and context and that they only agree to take them into consideration on condition of having the guarantee that they can control them on the basis of a rigorous formalisation relying on a system of universals, which protects them from historical and social contingencies. For example, Nicholas Ruwet considers that the creativity of language can only be exercised in the framework of an axiomatics. He refuses the open perspective of Hjelmslev, 116

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that it might begin at the more molecular level of the concatenation of figures of expression and figures of content (we will try to define the first as being a-signifying diagrammatic, and the second as a-signifying semantic). Certainly this author doesn’t completely exclude the existence of this kind of work within language, but he relegates it to a marginal position that seems to echo, on a linguistic plane, that which the mad, children and poets experience on the social plane.3 Under these conditions, how can one still hope to preserve the creative dimension of language? How is one to understand that deviants, group-subjects, can invent words, break a syntax, change significations, produce new connotations, action words, political order words, engender revolutions as much in society as in language?

Semiotically formed matters With Hjelmslev, the project of a radical axiomatisation of linguistics at least presented the advantage of not specifying the irreversible opposition of content and expression. ‘The very terms plane, expression, and content have been chosen according to current usage, and are entirely arbitrary. By virtue of their functional definition, it is impossible to maintain that it is legitimate to call one of these magnitudes “expression” and the other “content”, and not the other way round: they are only defined through their solidarity with one another, and neither can be defined more precisely. Taken separately, they can only be defined through opposition and in a relative fashion, as the functives of a single function that opposes them to one another.’4 Of course it is regrettable that in fact this axiomatised opposition of expression and content coincides with that made by Saussure between signifier and signified, and as a consequence, the ensemble of semiotics are made to depend on linguistics again.5 Whatever the case may be, at the most essential level of what the glossematicians call the ‘semiotic function’, the form of expression and the form of content are articulated so as to constitute a ‘solidarity’ that radically relativises this classic opposition between content and expression.6 This latter finally only reasserts its rights at the level of substances (the meaning of content and the meaning of expression). Correlatively, one can therefore only talk of form to the extent that it is manifest, functionalised in substances. Now, what we are trying to show is that non-linguistic semiotic metabolisms work these substances ‘before’ the constitution of a machine for ‘making significations’, without it being possible to establish a relation of priority or hierarchy with regard to them in relation to the latter (metabolism, PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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symbolic, diagrammatic, etc.). It is by semiotising diverse basic ‘matters’ that this solidarity of forms – which we will call here an abstract machine – constitutes substances of expression and content. What differentiates substance from matters is precisely their being semiotically formed. The distinction that Hjelmslev establishes between the system and the process of its syntagmatisation does not imply that this latter remain a prisoner of autonomous forms – of the Platonic idea type. No form can exist for itself outside of processes of formation. These processes do not necessarily refer to universal codes, closed in on themselves; in certain cases, they remain inseparable from characteristics proper to the base materials that they put into play, what Metz, with regard to cinema, has called the pertinent traits of matters of expression.7 The whole question is one of seeking to determine what gives a creative function to a semiotic component and what takes it away. Languages, as such, have no privilege for semiotic creativity; they even function, most often, as encodings of normalisation. Inversely, nonlinguistic semiotics can perfectly easily be creative and even break the lead weight of conformity of dominant linguistic significations. The operation of semiological overcoding of semiotic processes in the ‘free state’, which reduces them to the status of linguistic component, or to a dependency of language, consists in isolating the traits that are useful to power formations for every one of them, and of neutralising, repressing, and ‘structuralising’ the others, by means of the signifying linguistic machine. We will therefore not take up the distinction maintained by Hjelmslev between sign and symbol again. What we will designate with the expression ‘sign machine’ will cover both Hjelmslev’s sign and symbol systems (Prolegomena p. 142). As a consequence, we will not endeavour to determine what characterises the productions of signification and symbolic or iconic productions at the level of figures of expression, but at the pragmatic level of assemblages of enunciation relative to these sign machines. Thus pragmatics will in a way move into the first rank of components responsible for semiotic micropolitics.

The order of things and the order of signs In our terminology, we will say that by semiologising itself in a language, the abstract machine, or if you wish, the machine extracted from the base of semiotic components, the sign machine in what makes it most machinic (that is to say, deterritorialised), brings about a reterritorialisation of these 118

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components by their regrouping into two homogeneous planes, that of expression and that of content. In fact, these two planes are not homogeneous at all: they only give the illusion of being so through the double articulation, the polarisation, the structuralisation of the constitutive elements that they set up, in relation to one another. Once they have been homogenised, planified, these ‘base’ components could be called semiological, and no longer semiotic. This semiological super-substance, which has been put in place behind the variety of semiotic substances, this dualist signifying substance, or this super-sense, is only in a position to ‘take in hand’ the intensive multiplicities put into play by the different semiotic vectors on condition that it grids and hierarchises them by this system of double overcoding – overcoding of power at the level of content and logicoaxiomatic overcoding at the syntagmatic level. The ideal of order, of the general formalisation of all modes of expression, of the delimitation and control of intensive flows of semiological substances, is an ideal that is never completely reached because in reality, as we will see later on, language leaks all over the place. This ideal is that of exhaustive dichotomous analysis, the binary reduction, the radical ‘digitalisation’ of all semiotic praxis, the model for which was elaborated by information theory, and it continues to function (in the company of behaviourism and Pavlovianism, with which in any case it has certain affinities) as a veritable repressive war machine in the field of the sciences of language and the human sciences. It is considered, coldly, ‘scientifically’, that reductive binary analysis could by rights be applied to no matter what kind of social fact. And if some or other artifice seems to give success in this, then one is persuaded that the essential point in question has been grasped, one can be satisfied, stop and move on to something else! In this direction, and by pushing things to the extreme, one might then start to consider that because every event can be expressed in terms of the probability of its occurrence, no matter what structure itself results from an originally accidental deducting [prélèvement], or is commanded by a universal logical imperative, the ‘goal’ of which is the constitution of a local nucleus of diminishing entropy in the probabilistic system that is the starting point. The universals that are supposed to weigh over history and its power struggles are thus at the join between two operations, which consist in 1) probabilising events along a diachronic axis; and 2) structuralising events along a synchronic axis. But the true goal of this entire operation consists in making socio-machinic assemblages, which in the last instance constitute the sole effective producers of rupture and of innovation in the semiotic domains that interest us here, disappear under the table. Chance and structure are the worst enemies of freedom. Both proceed from the same conservative ideal of a general axiomatic of the sciences, PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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imported from mathematics starting at the end of the nineteenth century, the same philosophical tradition of the transcendental subject as knowing subject, opaque to the contingencies of history, and which is prolonged today in the ossified and pernickety discourse of epistemology. Every time it is the same magic trick: by means of the defence of a transcendent order founded on the supposedly universal character of the signifying articulations of certain utterances – the cogito, mathematics, the ‘discourse’ of science – one seeks to support a certain kind of stratification of powers that guarantees the status, the material comfort and the imaginary security of its scribes. There are thus two possible attitudes, two possible politics, with regard to form: a formalist position which sets out from transcendent, universal forms cut off from history, which come to be ‘incarnated’ in semiological substances; and a position which sets out from power formations and assemblages of enunciation, which extracts semiotic components and abstract machines on the basis of machinic processes such as are offered up by history. Sometimes, more or less accidental conjunctions between ‘natural’ codings and sign machines get the upper hand in a given period, but in fact, these conjunctions are inseparable from the assemblages, which in any case constitute the nucleus of their enunciation. Not, as one might be tempted to say, their reenunciation. In effect, there is no meta-language here. The collective assemblage speaks ‘flush’ with states of things and states of fact. There is not, on the one hand, a subject that speaks in the void, and on the other, an object that would be spoken in ‘the full’. The void and the full are ‘machined’ by the same deterritorialisation effect. Connections are only possible at the points where ‘natural’ things and the linguistic things are deterritorialised and make possible the connection of their deterritorialisation. Thus, assemblages are not offered up to chance or to an axiomatic of universals: they arise from a general ‘law’ of deterritorialisation: it is the most deterritorialised assemblage which has the potential for resolving the impasse in earlier systems of enunciation and the stratifications of the machinic assemblages that correspond to them. But this ‘law’ doesn’t in the least imply a pre-established order, a necessary harmony. Just a machinic diachrony without any dialectical guarantee. If we believe it necessary to insist on this second point of view – that of abstract machines and not transcendent forms – it is because it seems to us to be the sole possible way out of the impenitent and disempowering dualism in which linguists, and following them, semioticians and structuralists, are imprisoned. But it is not an ideological optional matter. In effect, these two points of view coexist and interact with one another incessantly. From the side of intensive multiplicities, machinic lines of flight tend to deterritorialise semiotic processes, to open them up, to connect them to other matters of expression, whilst stratified codings, on the side of the 120

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order of ‘things’, of the dominant worldlinesses tend to syntacticise them and to cut them off from any meshing with the intensive real. On the first side, desire, which is in a perpetually nascent state, follows its own line with respect to semiological stratifications; on the other side, it starts to turn round and round in power structures, in this ‘silent order’ which, Michel Foucault tells us, subjects us to a grid that is prior to linguistic, perceptual and practical grids, to the extent that it neutralises them by doubling them.8

Abstract machine or signifying abstraction Exiting from the ghetto of linguistics, from the ghetto of significations, depends on whether abstract machines function with signification or independently of it, in what we call a diagrammatic effect (at the level of ‘pre-’signifying symbolic semiotic components, we will not yet talk about an abstract machine but only of a machinic index). When they are liberated from dualist signifying substance, which they avoid or get around, abstract machines do not arise from a particular stratum, constituted – as it happens – from the articulation of a plane of expression with a plane of content, to manifest themselves. With the diagrammatic effect they are organised on the basis of a single plane: the machinic plane of consistency or plane of machinic immanence.9 All the points of deterritorialisation, all the machinic surplus values, are inscribed on this plane. They constitute in some way a sort of machine of abstract machines (and of machinic indices), the place for the potentialisation of all potential machinic assemblages. Abstract machines cease to be slotted into (or encasted in), segmentarised in the strata. On the contrary, now the strata depend on it, in so far as they knot the points of deterritorialisation of their material and semiotic components together with the machinic-semiotic surplus values of the plane of consistency. The strata are thus doubled, haunted by a field of possible on the horizon: that of the upsurge of new machinic assemblages. At this level, the distinction between semiotic machines and their referents ceases to be pertinent, and it is that which motivates our use of the expression ‘abstract machine’. Machines here are no longer either material or semiotic. They are machines of pure potentiality. Not empty potentiality, because they do not start out from nothing, but from the points of potentialisation of machinic assemblages, considered at a given point of the machinic phylum, in a given historical context. Machines are abstract in that they extract the points of connection between lines of destratification. They PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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establish the univocity of possible connections, where the strata seemed to have to maintain separations eternally. With abstract machines and their plane of consistency, ruptures between the strata are brought to light and a passage for the most deterritorialised energy is made possible. But this univocity of abstract machines remains fundamentally metastable. They are, we repeat, nothing, as such, they have no mass, no energy of their own, no memory. They are nothing but the infinitesimal, super-deterritorialised indication of a possible crystallisation between states of things and states of signs. One might compare them to the particles of contemporary physics, which are ‘virtualised’ by theory and retain their identity for an infinitesimal period of time, an identity which in any case it is not necessary to prove on an experimental plane, as long as the theoretico-experimental complex can continue to function by presupposing their existence. It is this metaphor that leads us to speak, with regard to the diagrammatic effect, of a putting to work of sign-particles: the abstract machine is ‘charged’ either with signification or with existence, depending on whether it is fixed and disempowered in a semiological substance or it is inscribed on the machinic plane of consistency by the process of diagrammatisation. In the first case it serves as a point to which lines of potential destratification cling, which it reterritorialises by folding them back on themselves, by putting them into bi-univocal correspondence, by overcoding or axiomatising them. For the lines of flight it then becomes a vanishing point [un point de fuite], in the pictorial sense this time, a point of closure for representation, which totalises a virtual point of view, that puts an end to all the leaking of desire, a sort of drain for a whole series of contents that are constituted as a dependency of an empty container. Whereas in the second case, the processes of semiotisation will traverse all the strata, will avoid the knots of redundancy that are the effects of signification, the personological poles, the fixation on faciality traits, etc. Whatever its mode of existence and the semiotic compositions which it enters the heart of might be, the abstract machine will no longer be linked to fixed and universal coordinates, but to a becoming with multiple potentialities. When such a diagrammatic effect does not manage to constitute itself, the system collapses and one gets recuperated by dualist substance. The ‘mentalisation’ of signifying contents consists in reifying a real, in paradigmaticising signifieds and syntagmaticising an expression, according to an economy of semiotic normativisation and subjection. As Hjelmslev has demonstrated so well, the diverse modes of semiological formalisation depend on the fundamental break between expression and content in signification. After a first step in which the two breaks between expression and content and form and substance are ‘contracted’ at the heart of the machine of semiotic disempowerment that the famous signifier-signified-referent triangle constitutes, the second step is 122

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to award honours to the production of signification, proclaiming its superiority over all other semiotic productions, to the extent that it alone would be able to be defined as a semiology of communication. But a communication of what between who, if not disempowered informational residues between fictive poles of subjectivation, radically cut off from intensive multiplicities? The subject is thus not a simple effect of a signifier, as the celebrated Lacanian formula ‘the signifier represents the subject for another signifier’ proclaims; it results from the ensemble of processes that converge on the disempowering of modes of semiotisation. The individuated and consciential subjectivation of enunciation corresponds to the particular assemblages of a series of disempowering breaks: ●

at the level of sign machines between the signifier and the signified;

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at the level of discourse, between the signified and the referent;

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at the very level of the process of subjectivation, by the establishment of a redundancy of redundancies, of a formalisation of formalisms constitutive of one’s presence to self, of the splitting of the self, by the threat of the loss of identity in the double, by the opposition between the subject and the other and, beyond – and always recentred on the same system of empty resonance – by all the systems of bipolar values (masculine-feminine around the phallus, singular-plural around the whole object, true-false, good-evil, etc.).

When the energy of desiring intensities is captured by the infernal machine of the semiological triangle (signifier-signified-referent), the abstract machines, connected in a closed circuit as if in a sort of cyclotron, lose their open machinic function so as to become signifying abstractions. Instead of being organised according to machinic indices, lines of power (machinic surplus values) or machinic assemblages, intensive multiplicities are structured according to spatio-temporal coordinates, substances of expressions and inter-subjective positions for which these abstractions will be the cornerstone. Thus, signifying abstraction, the abstract machine, machinic indices and assemblages – to which we will return in what follows – do not crystallise ‘spontaneously’ but only because of particular assemblages of enunciation. Abstraction partially crystallises with the territorialised assemblage of enunciation, but above all and most fully with the individuation of enunciation. It implies the erection of a transcendentalised subject, of a transcendentalised object, of a transcendentalised other and of a transcendentalised signifier. All the flows are thus stratified, dualised, grasped in systems of echoes.

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The assemblage of content and expression doesn’t come out of the blue The semiologisation of an abstract machine, its fixation as an abstraction, implies an autonomisation and a disempowering of deterritorialisation: an empty deterritorialisation, turning around on itself, is constituted with the process of consciential subjectivation. This empty system of redundancies of the consciential machine corresponds to this system of the double articulation of signifying chains: a machine for emptying out intensities, a machine to produce the void, lack and the break of representation. Abstraction simulates a passageway between sign machines and real intensities; this semiotic simulation of real articulations implies that all the effective connections between the sign machine and the referent have been cut off, emptied out, such that relations of denotation appear arbitrary and relations of signification unmotivated. But it is a matter of a forced arbitrariness and a forced motivation, an active politics of the break and of the autonomisation of the plane of the signifier. The void must be continuously remade, isolation must be reproduced, the risk that the leaking of desire might re-establish a direct connection between machinic expression, the formalism of content and the traits of expression of the matters constitutive of the referent must be combatted incessantly.10 The task of emptying out and avoiding desire falls to this machine of empty redundancy, this consciential machine. Consciential subjectivation is essentially linked to a certain kind of organisation of society, a system of law and of signification which imposes a space of representation that is separated from the world of affects and of real assemblages. All encoding must pass through the central programming machine. And for that to happen, every intensity must be constrained to renounce the connections that would be established outside of the ‘coherence’ of dominant significations and coordinates. Far from being a given in itself, the signifier therefore has to be incessantly reproduced by the consciential machine and signifying simulation, incessantly prevented from transforming itself into a diagrammatic becoming that would set off direct interactions between the sign machines, affects and field of ‘material’ intensities. Speech and writing are not impotent as such, but also because of a repressive syntagmatisation and paradigmatisation that overcode them. But this disempowering is constantly demolished by the fact that – at the level of the ‘deep’ articulations of its figures of expression – the deterritorialised machine of expression tends to escape this repression, as if of its own accord.

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The homogenisation of the processes of formalisation that arise from content with those that arise from expression, do not drop out of the sky! It results from a unification brought about by the ensemble of power formations. In ‘depth’ there is neither unity of form nor duality of substance, but a multiplicity of intensities of machinisms with no distinction between expression and content, form and substance. At the level of social stratifications, exchanges will only be tolerated if they are duly overcoded – that is the regime of relative deterritorialisation. In these conditions, abstraction should no longer be considered a ‘cooled down’ abstract machine but rather as an active system for the neutralisation of machinic assemblages and the extinction of machinic indices. And it always goes hand in glove with a power formation. The abstractions of religion, for example, or those that found personological, ethnic, national identity, etc., create a sentiment of belonging, of participation in a common reference territoriality. All paths lead to the transcendent point of significance to which the diverse religious, moral, political, economic, cosmic value systems are linked. This knot of redundancy, which marks the optimum tolerable of processes of deterritorialisation, has as its function ‘doubling’ and putting an end to the threat of their overflowing. Thus it fixes an objective, point of view, to the lines of flight opened up by the machinic indices and assemblages; the first will have constantly to remain on this side of an abstract horizon, whereas the second will have constantly to return to the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations. With the abstract machines thus fixed like butterflies to the sky of abstract ideas, the energy of desire can be put in the service of a world order that will for its part be completely terrestrial! It is not a question of bringing desire to the side of the concrete and of excluding it from the side of the abstract. Only an investment of desire in the power formations that produce abstract representations can explain the alienating potential of the latter. The paradox of these transcendental pseudo-mediations which only end up in the void and powerlessness, whilst the true operators are within reach, in the practical assemblages that can, at every moment, restitute power to the signs of the earth and confer an unbelievable superpower on the sign-particle machines of the collective assemblages of enunciation (on theoretico-experimental complexes, on music, etc.). From the point of view of a pragmatics (semiotic or not), one should be led to consider the contingent character of the components of the semiotic triangle, which we are presented with as being grounded on universals, but for which none is independent of particular power formations: on the side of the signifier, scientific and economic assemblages of diagrammatic power; on the side of the signified, assemblages of power in PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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politics, schools, etc.; on the side of semiotics of the referent, systems of the enslavement of modes of perceptual or audiovisual coding, etc.11 (One only perceives objects of consumption, for example, to the extent that one has access to them through monetary semiotics – ‘buying power’, advertising, etc.; if one passes by them without seeing them, one merely dreams about them.) For Hjelmslev, the substance-form couple was primary in relation to the expression-content couple, whilst from our point of view, it is the possible articulation of these two couples and of the matters of expression of the ‘referent’ by an assemblage of enunciation, that one must start from. The foundation of expression is not to be sought in a transcendental formalisation, but in the constitution of a machine of expression, the modes of subjectivation of which could be symbolic, analogical, signifying, a-signifying, to different degrees, as a function of the assemblage of semiotic components putting more or less deterritorialised, discretised, digitalised, syntacticised batteries of signs to work. In fact, Hjelmslev did not completely free himself up from a linguisticocentric point of view; he only retained the case of expressioncontent complementarity of the recto–verso type, that is to say, the case of total reversibility between a form of expression and form of content. But the rule of a generalised formalism of this kind could only be established on condition that real operations have been effectuated prior to the convertibility of the value systems concerned. It will be a matter, in the first instance, of State power as the locus for a general convertibility of macro-systems of economic and symbolic values, but also of the tentacular rhizome of power formations and of Collective equipments linked to social groups of all sizes – which miniaturise and deepen this convertibility to attain a systematic control of all singular systems of values of desire. The industry of the spectacle, for example, supported by the mass media, will organise loci for the convertibility of all imaginary representations; whilst the family and the school charge themselves with the semantic translatability and the signifying sectioning of every expression by the child. What passes from expression to content and inversely are relatively deterritorialised forms, forms for which deterritorialisation has been standardised, cut off from its potential dynamism. The convertibility of systems is always synonymous with impotentialisation and power: impotentialisation of desire by the stratifying power of signifying semiotic formations that succeed in localising, ‘identifying’, formalising it, in a system of empty redundancy. Let us consider the case of a complete reversion between a signifier and a signified during the learning of a foreign language: the fact that a denoted object can serve to indicate an unknown word implies that an element of the referent, or of representation, passes into a signifying 126

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position, whilst the chain of phonematic or graphematic expression passes into a signified position. What is happening? Is there the transmission of a form? Of information? Is it not rather the putting into place of a new component of perceptual encoding, in which the sign-percept thing will be the correspondent of the thing said or murmured? What is in question here is therefore not a simple linguistic technology of the translateability of a form but an assemblage of enunciation that may or may not render possible such and such a micropolitics of discourse.12 A child can very easily manage to machine words and things without cutting them off from desiring intensities. Little Hans, for example, will avoid formalising a paradigm around the penis – he will speak instead of the function, of the ‘wee-wee maker’ (wiwimacher), which he will find at work a bit everywhere. But once the power of the adult, the family, the school, is established at the heart of its mode of semiotisation, everything changes: the energy of desire will have to be invested in the syntacticisation of utterances, the identification of objects, classes, coordinates of all sorts: the child must at all costs give up his or her question-machines and accept the fixed order of things, that is to say that neither women nor trains have wee-wee makers. Thus the dichotomising formations of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement, of the addressor and addressee, of the inanimate and the living object, of the masculine and the feminine, etc. will be fixed and stabilised, although for the child innumerable passageways between these stratifications exist.

Four kinds of expression-content assemblage The individuation of the process of enunciation and the semiotic discernibilisation of another from oneself are correlative to the taking off of a plane of content that is transcendent in relation to the ‘natural’ territorialities of desire and in relation to the plane of immanence of machinic intensities. The splitting of enunciation is inseparable from the splitting of signification. The subject of enunciation, the Other, the Law and the plane of content always correspond to the setting out of the object of power. Content crystallises a world, not a universal world, but a worldliness that is marked by contingent fields of force. Here would be the place to clearly distinguish the different modes of structuring of formalisms as a function of the fact that they do or don’t imply the existence of an autonomised plane of expression radically separating the object expressed from the machine of expression. In effect, the formalisation traits of different ‘matters’ of expression, in

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Hjelmslev’s sense, are not necessarily structured in such a way that they are translateable. When they are, it is because they have been treated in an appropriate way. But it would also be worth distinguishing between diverse modes of translateabilisation, depending on whether they have a scientific proposition or a common-sense utterance as their object, whether they are effectuated by an aesthetic machine or by a revolutionary social machine, etc. It would be illusory to think, for example, that the structure given to musical forms in the baroque era contains the axiomatic of the development of romantic music ‘in potential’. To be sure there are constants, logical correspondences, but the passage from one era to another is not made up of that alone. Many other factors are to be attributed to the social, historical and technical field, etc. No formal structure presides over the different semiotic strata, except in the minds of theorists of art or epistemologists. Even in the case in which a style, a theory, even an axiomatics, succeeds in imposing itself, like a dogma, and seems to mark its era with its imprint, real changes, in fact, always result from the tangling together of components that everywhere exceed the domain in question. Also, once the structural couple substance of the signifier/ substance of the signified finds itself threatened by the irruption of an internal line of flight – a diagrammatic component – all the traits of the matters of expression tend to reassert their rights and return to their intrinsic mode of formalisation (which is manifest with the semiotic compositions of the dream or of anxiety). Thus, relativising the traditional signifier-signified opposition, as we propose to do, doesn’t necessarily imply giving up on applying the content-expression opposition to other kinds of structural assemblage. As Oswald Ducrot suggests, the identification of semantic reality with signification isn’t completely self-evident, to the extent that the pragmatic dimensions of content exceed signification in its customary sense.13 In these conditions there is perhaps something to be gained by reserving the use of the notions of semantic content and semantic field for the particular case of interpretative analogical components, by taking up the outline of a classification of semiotic components that we proposed earlier. One would then have: ●

Analogical generative components, the semantic contents of which would entertain relations of ‘envelopment’ with the referents that they interpret, and would generate fields of interpretance. Their mode of enunciation would arise from territorialised collective assemblages (the classic or transitivist example of childhood ‘before’ language).

●

Generative semiological linguistic components the interpretation of which operates on the basis of a syntagmatic ‘studding’ of the plane

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Transformational noninterpretative

Generative interpretative

Performative and indexial Of sense a-signifying

Diagrammatic

Signifying

Semiological linguistic

Symbolic intensive

Semantic

Functions of content

Analogical

Semiotic components

Subject, collective and territorialised

Assemblages of enunciation

Plane of consistency

Lines of flight and of destratification

A-subjective machinic

A-subjective performative

Plane of significance (double Subjective, individuated, articulation) egoic

Fields of interpretance

Articulations of content and expression

of content (the plane of significance). The referent here being distanced from the signifying representation, the mode of enunciation would arise from individuated subjective assemblages that are relatively more deterritorialised than the preceding case (function of the ego). ●

Intensive and a-subjective symbolic transformational components, the contents of which index referents and enunciative coordinates (machinic indices, line of flight and performative function). They desubjectivise, ‘machinise’ enunciation, deterritorialise personological strategies, without for all that catalysing the diagrammatic processes of deterritorialisation of sign machines. They would operate by the reassemblage of semiotic components without creating any new ones properly speaking (for example: mystical or aesthetic desubjectivation). One will speak here of a collective assemblage of enunciation even in the case in which a single individual is expressing him or her self here, because he or she will be considered as a non-totalisable intensive multiplicity.

●

A-subjective diagrammatic transformational components, the a-signifying contents of which not only deterritorialise the assemblages of enunciation but equally the machines of expression, semantic formalisms but would also enter into a direct connection with the modes of encoding proper to different stratifications of the referent (which implies a common ‘reference’ at the most deterritorialised level: that of the machinic plane of consistency). One will speak here of a machinic assemblage of enunciation.

One will note that the collective assemblages such as we have envisaged them in the first part of this work exceed the diverse cases in our table: they can be territorialised and arise from a predominantly analogical component (primitive societies, groups of adolescents, etc., for example); they can participate in intensive symbolic components (the experience of drugs, for example); they can be adjacent to a machinic enunciation (the chorus in relation to the orchestra in a modern opera, for example); or they can remain dependent on an individuated economy of enunciation (the sliding of groupsubjects towards subjugated groups). In a more general fashion the terms of the fourfold division that we are proposing must not be considered as if they were the nuclear elements of a semiotic ‘machinics’. In effect, each one of them puts into play a particular diagrammatic function so as to attain its point of effectiveness (even when it is a matter of a point of signifying impotentiation), and to one degree or another, they develop an indiciary semantic and signifying function. Everything is a matter of assemblage here, 130

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of accent, of the dominant tone, in a word, of semiotic micropolitics. One is therefore only ever dealing with mixtures associating these different kinds of component. A poetic assemblage of enunciation, for example, will result in symbolic concatenations and modes of subjectivation associating different regimes of signs, about which one could say that they are at one and the same time semiologically formed – although partially a-grammatical14 – and asignifying, although bearing pre-coded semantic contents. Let us also note, with regard to this table, that it seems to us that the linguistic categories of Benveniste, of interpretance and significance, which for this author correspond to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes respectively, can be transposed here to a semiotic level, but on condition that they are disjoined from one another. Interpretance here becomes a component that can be autonomised: ●

Applied in isolation to an intensive symbolic component, starting from that component it generates an analogical semiotics (without any intersection between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, but with the development of fields of semantic interpretance and territorialised assemblages of enunciation).

●

Applied to a diagrammatic component (a sign machine of linguistic origin, for example), it transforms that component (or retransforms it) into a signifying semiology, taking on the significance function itself, through the intersection of paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, correlative to a process of subjectivation (or of re-subjectivation).

The degree of grammaticality proposed by Chomsky would therefore be a function of the degree of dependency and counter-dependency established in the framework of a signifying linguistic assemblage between, on the one hand, the ‘latent’ semantic contents of the analogical and performative components of the symbolic components implicated in it, and, on the other hand, the ‘potential’ diagrammatic components of the a-signifying machine that is put into play here. The a-significance of an utterance could therefore result from two types of transformation: it either succeeds in avoiding the despotism of signifying formalisms at a morphematic level, and is enriched by new indiciary ‘charges’ – the polysemic or homonymic proliferation that opens it up in different directions, for example (this is the case with the passage from a semiotic assemblage dominated by a signifying mode of generation to a symbolic transformation); or, at the ‘glossematic’ level of its figures of expression (phonemes, graphemes . . .), it manages to insert itself in a semiotic assemblage dominated by a diagrammatic transformation, the

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content of which escapes any system of analogical representation or signifying overcoding. Consequently, the diagrammatic utterance will participate directly in a machinic assemblage, by ceasing to put into play semiologically formed substances, but [rather] the pertinent traits of a matter of expression constitutive of ‘scientifically formed’, musically formed, etc., a-signifying chains.15 For us, these distinctions should lead us to lift the ambiguities that, for example, result from Charles Sanders Peirce’s amalgamation, under the term icon, of ‘images’ and ‘icons of relation’, the images arising from semantic and indiciary contents and the icons of relation from diagrammatic contents – or even from oppositions between lexical signification and grammatical signification, these latter equally arising from the diagrammatic components proper to language. The diagrammatic sense that we propose here could equally be brought into proximity with the operatory sense that Klauss opposes to eidetic sense.16 For this author, operatory sense puts assemblages of signs into play that represent sequences of phonemes or semantic configurations, whereas eidetic sense remains prisoner of the triangle of signification, sign-concept-object represented. But in our opinion he still over-valorises eidetic sense, which he makes into a sort of secret reference for operatory sense. That is why, when he quite rightly considers that concatenations of symbols in abstract calculations are operations endowed with a certain kind of sense, he adds that it is a matter of a sense that is ‘less rich’ in possibilities as regards the possible handling of objects that they represent. We consider, on the contrary, that the sense without signification that is produced by a diagrammatic economy of signs is capable of thwarting the impasses proper to semiologies of signification, in so far as it introduces a supplementary coefficient of deterritorialisation into semiotic assemblages, enabling [these] semiotic machines to simulate, to ‘double’, to effectuate the relational and structural knots relative to material and social flows, precisely at the points which an anthropocentric vision is blind to.

Semiotic enslavement The fascination that Chomskyan formalisation has exercised over the last fifteen years doubtless derives from the topological constructions that are associated with it: one manipulates its trees and symbols, one discernabilises ambiguities. Chomsky’s first approach certainly immediately touched on something of the abstract machine that functions in language. But the succession of models proposed and the attempt by psychologists, semanticists and logicians to recuperate the model have tempered the very 132

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abrupt character of this abstract machinism. What is perhaps best in Chomsky’s work are his very first intuitions.17 Certainly today the supporters of generative semantics can easily contest his opposition between deep and surface structures and re-establish a continuity between syntax and semantics. In sum, they restore the reasonableness of Chomsky; but they can only do so to the extent that they continue to agree never to leave the framework of signifying semiologies. In fact, by trying to carry along the orthodox Chomskyans with them, into a linguistics that is further than ever from a pragmatic micropolitics, they really only get bogged down themselves. Perhaps one should deepen the initial intuitions of Chomsky, by considering that his first models of abstract machines were not yet abstract enough, that they still remained too reliant on the signifying articulations of language and the grammaticality that he sought to grasp, far from having to be alienated in a ‘semantic logic’ should, on the contrary, be understood as one of the modalities of the abstract power that is put into play by the most decoded of capitalist flows (that is to say, a-semantic and a-signifying diagrammatic flows).18 What is grammaticality? To what does this categorical symbol that dominates all phrases, this sign S19 and this first axiom of the generative structure of Chomsky’s syntagmatic trees, which forces all derivations to go back to a unique point of origin, correspond? Must it be considered simply as the generative kernel of the first grammatical significations, or rather as one of the most fundamental markers of the asignifying pragmatics inherent in a certain kind of society? Without doubt it participates in both dimensions. S is a mixed marker: in the first place it is a marker of power, and secondarily it is a syntactic marker. Forming grammatically correct phrases is the prelude for a ‘normal’ individual for all submission to social laws. No-one can ignore the principle of grammaticality, any more than they can the law, or they belong in special institutions set up for sub-humans, children, deviants, the mad and maladjusted; the individual is [referred to] sub-systems of grammaticalisation; one is interpreted, translateabilised, adapted. The putting into circulation of normativised agents of production happens above all by the semiotic enslavement of every individual as a speaker-listener capable of adopting the linguistic behaviour that is compatible with the modes of competence that he or she is assigned by virtue of his or her particular position in society and production. The axiom S, the signifying first principle of language – the production of phrases that correspond to the norms of grammaticality – seems to us to arise first and foremost from a fundamental micropolitical principle of capitalist societies. These societies are constituted in such a way that by rights no-one can escape from the despotism of decoded flows: flow of abstract labour, as the PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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essence of exchange values; flow of monetary signs, as the substance of expression of capital; flow of linguistic signs syntagmaticised and paradigmaticised in such a way as to correspond to normalised modes of inter-human communication. Certainly the threat of a power takeover by decoded flows doesn’t begin with capitalism; it already existed in the most ‘primitive’ of societies. (One should distinguish here between what Pierre Clastres calls societies with and societies without a State, which don’t have the same defensive attitude towards the accumulation of power in a State apparatus.)20 As we tried to show in the first chapter of this study, primitive and ancient societies are already traversed by capitalist flows, which they attempt to ward off; one has to wait until the ‘accident’ of the Middle Ages in the West, and the Renaissance to see the appearance of societies that really do lose control of the decoded flows, in a sort of generalised – economic, political, religious, aesthetic, scientific – baroque, processes that will lead to capitalist societies. The semiotic enslavement of flows of desire which capitalist societies carry out does not tolerate the autonomy of any intrinsic encoding, and no desiring machine can escape being overcoded by the signifying machine of the State. The signifying power of the national language and State power tend to coincide. The molecular segments of expressions are substituted for the old segmentary structures of the socius, so as to constitute the plane of content that conveys at the same time the imperatives of both moral and civil laws. It is by the lifting up of this plane that the intensities of desire take off from their old territorialities and receive the polarity of subject and object. They are mediatised, gridded and become social need, demand, necessity and submission. They only exist to the extent that, on the one hand, their expression enters into redundancy with the principles of State organisation as the locus for the recentering and capitalisation of power, and on the other, they fold in on themselves, are translateabilised, that is to say that when all is said and done, they give up their character as an a-subjective nomad flow without object. The State machine of semiotic enslavement in fact constitutes the fundamental tool enabling the dominant classes to ensure their power of the agents and means of production. Everything apparently begins with the dichotomies engendered on the basis of the axiom S, which organises phrases that can be divided into nominal and verbal syntagms, which seem to correspond to one of the fundamental requirements of the human condition, although in fact it is only a particular semiological transformation, the signifying transformation, which forces discourse to bend to the activity of predication. But capitalist power cannot content itself with the semiotic assemblage of intensities in the infinitive mode alone.21 Intensive infinitives 134

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must be modulated, they must place themselves in the service of a predicative pragmatics and a deictic strategy that is compatible with the dominant system of significations (coding of hierarchical position, permutation of roles, division of sexes, etc.). Intensities will have to do their bit for the norms of the dominant system, and the more abstract and interiorised normative encoding is, the more effective it will be. In particular, what we call the ‘becoming-sexed-body’ will be negotiated in its relation with the ‘becomingsocial-body’ by the regime of pronominality and gender, which will axiomatise the subjective positions of female alienation.22 But it is equally in its slightest details that the composition of political and micropolitical powers will be indexed by language. This abstract economy of power and its implications for the modes of generation of the transformation of syntactic, lexical, morpho-phonological and prosodic components of language thus seems to us to be inseparable from the intersection of pragmatic fields of enunciation, from what Ducrot designates as the ‘polemical value’ (in the etymological sense) of language. Simply taking this into account ought to reduce any idea of founding the autonomy of language on a system of universals to nothing.

Competence as instrument of power Generative linguistics presents competence to us as a sort of neutral instrument in the service of the creative production of discourse. One gains access to the sky of linguistic universals outside of any social or historical contingency. And for every thing that remains obscure, one falls back on the miracles of heredity! But there is no grammaticality in itself, no competence in itself. Competence and performance are always relative. Any crystallisation of a competence as a norm, as a framing of diverse concrete performances, is always synonymous with the establishing of a position of power. There is no general competence, it is always linked to a particular – political, social, economic, religious, aesthetic, etc. – terrain. That doesn’t signify that it doesn’t put into play abstract means – abstract machines – which spring up like mutations of the machinic phylum of the human ‘branch’. But they do not depend on grammars based on structural universals (for a long time capitalist political economy has wanted to present itself as the general grammar of all possible economy!) There is no performance, that of a child at school, for example, other than in relation to the kind of competence that is fixed in the framework of educational micropolitics, of a given society in a given era. In a general fashion, every competence will involve political relations between nations, regions, political classes, castes, PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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ethnic groups, etc. Theories of the universality of competence rest on the in itself simple idea that the individual’s capacity for linguistic production exceeds his or her effective discursive production – his or her performances; in other words, that s/he has at his or her disposal a machine of expression that puts into play abstract schema, and that this machine is much more than the simple totalisation of the series of utterances it is capable of producing. No doubt! But the relations between this ‘competence machine’ and the productions that it performs can be inverted. The machine itself is produced by its production. How could it be any different? Where else could it come from? From an innate linguistic faculty? Competence and performance interact constantly. At a given moment, competence – the machinic virtuality of expression – holds the keys to the deterritorialisation of stratified and stereotypical utterances; at another moment, a particular semiotic production deterritorialises an overly rigid syntax. A competence that is territorialised on a given social space – a group, an ethnicity, a trade, etc. – can be relegated to the rank of a sub-competence, the effect of which will be to devalorise the different kinds of performance which are associated with it,23 then, as a function of the modification of relations of force that are present, or of a transformation of the local micropolitics of desire, this same competence can ‘take power’ in a bigger social space and become a regional, national or imperial competence . . . A style imposes itself, a patois becomes an aristocratic way of speaking, a technical language contaminates vernacular languages, a minor literature takes on a universal importance . . . Let’s be clear that the processes of political agitation do not just concern the diffusion of morphemes but put into play all the drivers of language. There is universality of speech acts and as language is inseparable from these acts, there is no universality of language. Every sequence of linguistic expression is associated with a network of semiotic chains of all sorts (perceptual, mimetic, gestural, imagistic, etc.). Every signifying utterance thus crystallises a mute dance of intensities that plays out on social and individuated bodies at the same time. From language to glossolalia, all the transitions are possible. There are no linguistic universals. The examples of universals proposed by the Chomskyans, such as the existence of the morpho-phonological organisation of double articulation on the plane of expression, for example, are machinic characteristics, which concern the conditions of possibility of language and which are as extrinsic to it as the range of phonic articulations on the basis of which a phonological semiotics might be established. These supposed universals are only the specific traits of a particular substance of expression, what Christian Metz calls the ‘pertinent traits of matters of expression’ on the basis of which semiotically formed substances are constituted. Heredity is often brought to the fore to 136

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explain the speed with which language is learned. But let’s consider the fact that in a milieu that is ‘impregnated’ with musical semiotics, a four-year-old can attain genuine musical competence: is one going to account for this on the basis of a hereditary ‘montage’ of the capacity to read and of the highly specialised capacity with one’s hands we know is needed, for each musical instrument? The idea is absurd! The hypothesis concerning universals at the level of content is even more fragile. The organisation of contents, the constitution of a homogeneous field of representation, always corresponds to the crystallisation of a power formation. Neither can any category, any mode of categorisation be considered as such as being universal and as being programmed by a hereditary code. It is always a social field, a micropolitical field that overcodes the cutting out of contents. Hereditary programming can only play on strata that are extrinsic to language and, besides, nothing allows one to consider that it is itself linked to a system of universals (unless one considers, for example, genes as such a system, but that would imply once again a misunderstanding of the role played by the other physico-chemical strata). What good is invoking universals if their existence in fact depends on contingent relations between heterogeneous strata? The stability that in fact obtains for the genetic code has nothing universal about it, any more than does the structure of matter. Its stratification, the fact that it is reverted to, that one finds it everywhere doesn’t imply the erecting of a transcendent formalism, but the putting into play of mutational abstract machines.

Do ‘pragmatic universals’ exist? In recent years, a certain number of authors, such as John Searle, Wunderlich, etc., have endeavoured to broaden the Chomskyan point of view, which never gets out of the system of language to turn towards the study of performance and ‘speech acts’. Foregrounding what, after Habermas, he calls ‘communicative competence’ (or even ‘idiosyncratic performatory competence’), Herbert E. Brekle24 is led to oppose this to a ‘systemic competence’ of the Chomskyan kind. The latter rests on abstract structures which, after the fixing of rules of formation and transformation, are closed onto phonetic chains, whilst the former are linked, according to dynamic self-regulating relations to a whole set of communicative competence factors that, according to the author, must be articulated at three levels: that of a ‘linguistic faculty’, that of language as a system, that of speech (‘idiosyncratic performatory competence’), with different kinds of problems of syntax, semantics and pragmatics arising at each of these levels. Such a project does at least have the advantage of freeing PRAGMATICS, THE RUNT OF LINGUISTICS

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the relations between competence and performance from the traditional oppositions of langue and parole, and expression and content. One would thus be dealing with a particular compositions of semiotic dimensions at different levels, the elucidation of which should be pushed to its limit: the description of real acts of speech in all their concrete dimensions (this would, in our opinion, probably lead to an unavoidable rupture with the Chomskyan technology of dichotomous trees, that is to say, with the intervention of a pseudo-mathematisation of language). Unfortunately in its current state, the pragmatics to which he refers and which should be the hinge between syntax and semantics at different levels is still conceived of as resting on universals. Whilst the existence of these universals already seemed to us to derive from a misunderstanding at the level of syntax and semantics, the claim to inject them into pragmatics seems to us this time, frankly, to be aberrant. Herbert E. Brekle is thus, at the level of a supposed ‘universal faculty of language’, led to adopt Habermas’s point of view regarding a ‘universal pragmatics’ that would have to account for the general structure of all discursive situations and for the constitution of the possible speech acts. According to Habermas, one would have to oppose a particular class of speech acts to these pragmatic universals, which they wouldn’t belong to but which would, on the contrary, serve to ‘represent actions or behaviour institutionalised in a certain culture or regulated by social norms’. The examples of the universals of ‘general structures of discourse’ that are proposed are: ●

personal pronouns, with a performative and deictic function: I, you, he . . .;

●

vocative forms and honorifics;

●

spatio-temporal deictics, demonstratives, etc.;

●

performatives, such as: to assert, to ask, to order, to promise . . .;

●

intentional or modal expressions such as believing, knowing, necessarily.

The examples of speech acts not belonging to pragmatic universals: ●

phrases introduced by verbs such as to greet, to congratulate, to thank, to baptise, to curse, to name, to condemn, to acquit . . .

What a curious conception of universality! How is asserting or knowing more universal than greeting, naming or condemning? And what place is reserved for non-individuated modes of subjectivation, the transitivism of childhood, the upheavals undergone or organised by dominant coordinates 138

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in madness and creation? Furthering the only part of this project that seems of interest to us, that of the idiosyncratic performatory competence, should lead its promoters to give up fragile categories such as ‘linguistic faculty’ transmitted to them by Saussure, and free themselves up for once and for all from this obsession with ‘universals’ that has been reactivated by Chomsky. It is not just a matter for linguistics of giving psycho-linguistic and sociolinguistic problematics their due in the analysis of the pragmatic dimensions of ‘linguistic behaviour’, but also of accepting the coming into force of the problematics of the micropolitics of desire.

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13 PRAGMATICS : A MICROPOLITICS OF LINGUISTIC FORMATIONS

If the autonomy of a linguistic competence cannot, any more than can the pragmatics of its performances, be based on universals, perhaps one might consider that it corresponds to a certain transitory crystallisation of a state of language in relation to which individual performances will have to determine themselves? How, then, is one to account for the nature of the constraints that ensure this stabilisation, constraints that phonologists have attributed to a structure that is intrinsic to language and generativists to hereditarily encoded universals? What is the crystallisation of a linguistic power formation? One can understand nothing of this question if one represents power as just being a social superstructure. Power is not just micropolitical power, it is also the power of the superego, the famous power over oneself, which makes one shake with fear, which engenders somatisations, neuroses, suicides, etc. The stability of a ‘state of language’ certainly always corresponds to an equilibrium between these powers; these latter of course, are not arranged in relation to each other in no matter what way – it is not a question of an amorphous matter. Thus one can only account for the stabilisation of a ‘stratum of competence’ on condition that one render homogeneous domains that are as different as those of: ●

the entirety of semiotisation activities (going from internal perceptions to modes of communication arising from the mass media);

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micropolitical levels (arising from the formation of bodies without organs);

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machinic indices and abstract machines (arising from the machinic phylum and the plane of consistency);

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which result in the putting into correspondence within each stratum of diverse systems of segmentarity and deterritorialising lines of flight.

Each pragmatic sequence involves a composition of powers at all levels and of every kind; its effectiveness depends on the dominant mode of semiotisation that it puts to work, due in particular to whether or not a diagrammatic semiotics liberates the functioning of certain abstract machines (financial, scientific, artistic, etc.). Thus we are led to define a micropolitical pragmatics as an activity of the assemblage of modes of semiotisation that everywhere exceed linguistic personology – towards corporeal intensities on the infra side, and towards the socius on the supra side. From this point of view, one would have to stop considering pragmatics as on the outskirts of syntax and semantics. Semiological (linguistic) pragmatics only represents a particular case of a more general semiotic pragmatics. The crystallisation of a signifying power, that we would put on the side of generative pragmatics (linguistic semiology), corresponds to a stratification of the libido, it coiling up into a system of redundancy of expression and redundancy of contents, the articulation of which has the effect of disempowering utterances of enclosing them either in the [worldliness] of an instituted power, or in an idiosyncratic system arising from madness or creation, for example. But before being stabilised as a language or a dialect, this kind of micropolitical competence is first experienced as a collective performance: every degree of fluidity is thus possible in the passage from an individual performance, even one that is marginal or delirious, to the completely sclerotic encoding of the dictionary or academic grammar kind. Besides naturalising the foundations of language, the brutal opposition of competence and performance squeezes [in English in the original] collective assemblages of enunciation – that is to say the groups that, in linguistic matters, are genuinely creative – to the profit of an alternative between an individuated or a universal subjectivity. One can approve the position of psycholinguists such as T.G. Bever, who consider that judgements of grammaticality are ‘forms of behavior like any other’1 without for all that falling into the trap of linguistic ‘psychologisation’. That a signifying grammaticalisation might take power over semiotic ensembles relative to capitalistic social fields, thus contributing to their stratification, doesn’t in the slightest imply that such ensembles can only be based on the universals that are supposed to rule over them. In fact, one is in the presence of the same type 142

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of universalisation procedure with a retroactive effect used by all power formations that wanted to give themselves the apparent legitimacy of divine right, and in particular those that sought to ‘justify’ the expansionism of capitalist exchangism. From the fact that one can always ‘structuralise’ monetary, linguistic, musical, etc. performances, that one can always discursivise them, binarise them, one considers that they have always been there, or even that their elements carried within themselves the seeds of the generation of the form of Capital, the Signifier, Music . . . But the process of power and the machinic mutations that have fixed and stabilised this form, furnished and delimited its creative potentialities, the metastable equilibria of its assemblages of enunciation and its group-subjects are, for their part, absolutely undecomposable, irreducible to a range of discrete and in principle discursive elements. If – as we will try to show later on – the abstract machines that are in question here can always be complexified, they can never, by contrast, be decomposed without losing their mutational specificity. And they aren’t [acquired] in little pieces, through learning or conditioning. They latch on to a process ready-made, they co-opt themselves in an assemblage that they can transform from top to bottom.

Stratification, stages, and abstract machines Abstract machines thus have nothing to do with the supposed ‘stages’ that it is claimed punctuate the ‘development’ of the child. The passage from one age in life to another doesn’t depend on the developmental programmes constructed by psychologists or psychoanalysts. It is linked to original reassemblages of different modes of encoding and semiotisation the nature and linking together of which cannot be determined a priori. The ‘stages’ in question have nothing automatic about them; as an individuated organic totality, the child only constitutes an intersection between the multiple material, socio-economic, semiotic, sets that traverse it. The intrusion of the biological components of puberty in the life of an adolescent, for example, is inseparable from the micro-social context within which they appear; they trigger a series of machinic indices that have been put together elsewhere, they liberate a new abstract machine that will be manifested in the most varied of registers: the reorganisation of perceptual codes, turning in on oneself and/or poetic, cosmic, social externalisation, opposition to paternal values, etc. But in reality this triggering is not unilateral, other ‘external’ semiotic components can likewise accelerate, PRAGMATICS

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inhibit or reorient the effects of the biological semiotic effects of puberty. Under these conditions, where do the interactions between the biological and the social start and finish? Certainly not with the delimitation of an individual, considered as an organic totality or a sub-set of a family group! Little by little, all the machines of the socius are called into question by such phenomena, and reciprocally, biology in its entirety, at its most molecular level, is concerned with the interactions of the social field! On the plane of the individual, one thus ought not to separate the manifestations of puberty, considered in their organic, family, educational, context, from the upheavals which, on a broader social plane, call back into question the collective economy of desire. How can one fail to recognise that society in its entirety is constantly traversed, in its most intimate fibres, by these phenomena of biological change, which tirelessly sweeps childhood and adolescence away, generation after generation? It is true that the flights of desire of which they are the bearers are kept systematically in hand by the codes of the family, the school, medicine, sport, the army, and all the regulations and laws that are supposed to order the ‘normal’ behaviour of the individual. But it nevertheless happens that they managed to make collective machines of desire crystallise at the largest of scales (from neighbourhood gangs to Woodstock or May 68, etc.). And what were only scattered machinic indices, the quickly disempowered outlines of deterritorialisation, then become abstract machines able to catalyse new semiotic assemblages of desire. Let’s return to the relative positions and functions of machinic indices, abstract machines, and semiotic assemblages on the basis of some different examples. In the first place, let us consider the embryonic writing that is manifested in the drawings of children, until the age of three or four. One can only talk about an index of writing here. Nothing is played out, nothing is crystallised, everything is possible still. But taken in charge by the educational machine, this index undergoes a profound reorganisation. Drawing loses its polyvocity. There is a disjunction between, on the one hand, drawing, which is impoverished and imitative, and, on the other, a writing that is directed entirely towards adult expression and is tyrannised by a concern for conformity with the dominant norms. How does the assemblage of semiotics in the school thus manage to take power over the child’s intensities of desire? Previously we have evoked the insufficiency of explanations that are content to consider the repressive action of equipments of power over the machinic indices ‘of ’ the child. What one must try to grasp is why, in one case, this repression achieves its goal, and in another, it misses it. Once again, it seems to us to be impossible to avoid the intermediary instance constituted by abstract machines. If the crystallisation of an abstract machine tied to repression fails, the assemblage of power will lack its effect, subjects will 144

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become maladjusted, retarded, disturbed, psychotic etc., all things that supporters of the established order will blame on a deficit, although it would be easy to see that under non-repressive conditions, these same children incessantly enrich their ‘pre-school’ semiotic creativity. The passage to the stage of ‘working normally’ in class, the acquisition of an average competence in matters of reading, writing and arithmetic, etc., thus do not depend on the mechanical triggering of sensori-motor schemas internalised in the course of various ‘stages’ in the development of language. The stages in question here are not of a psychogenetic but of a repressive-genetic order. Instead of considering a ‘latency period’ which is as if destined, with the ‘waning of the Oedipus complex’ to punctuate the child’s life, it would doubtless be more advisable to study concrete social constellations and their particular technologies of semiotic subjection, in so far as they lead to the child’s surrounding by the family and education at a decisive moment of his ‘entering the world’ (one might talk here of a ‘school-barracks’ complex, to borrow Fernand Oury’s expression). Abstract machines, which the supposed ‘psychogenetic’ stages put into play, cannot be assimilated to general schema at the level of perception, memory, logical integration, the structure of behaviour. In fact, they crystallise heteroclite components, they mix up ‘regressive fixations’ and archaic modes of territorialisation with ultra-deterritorialised semiotic components. A child who wets the bed, for example, comes up against an abstract formula – a body without organs – in which, in the same repressive formulation, a postural semiotics directed towards a turning in on oneself is associated with an affective semiotics directed towards a dependency on one’s family, and sado-masochistic educational and therapeutic machines, running from special beds to behavioural techniques so-called for the ‘reinforcing of the right reactions’ or the tyrannical interpretations of the psychoanalytic apparatus. But the abstract machine of ‘wetting the bed’ nonetheless retains the singularity of its mute dances, which will always remain more or less irreducible to the discursive-repressive analyses of therapists of every stripe! The possible good will of the child nevertheless always risks being found to be at fault. Even if he plays the game of repression, even if he invests it explicitly, the dimension of singularity of his system of abstract machines will allow him to escape from it partially. In any case, repression doesn’t seek to completely submerge the child as an organic totality, but to graft itself onto the elements that are constitutive of his modes of semiotisation. Thus there isn’t purely and simply an application of the repressive ensemble to the ensemble of desiring machines, but processes of mediatisation by way of the abstract machines traversing the socius and the individual. When, as a secondary symptom, the bed-wetter PRAGMATICS

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manifests an inability to do division at school, for example, that doesn’t signify the existence of a deficit of logical competence – on the contrary, one notices that he is very frequently capable of dealing with very difficult abstract problems – but only that he has organised for himself a repressive jouissance in the framework of the rhizome ‘school-teacherparent-notational system-repressive faciality traits-prohibitions bearing on masturbation’, etc. His refusal of a certain kind of logical discursivity manifests his desire to globalise the assemblage in question. He thus furnishes a sort of extra-corporeal erogenous zone for himself, territorialised on a particular stopping point: the division question thus becomes a machine point, the index of a potential line of flight. Under other circumstances, the same child could just as easily become mute or start to ejaculate on reading the statement of a problem . . . In fact, the machines of family and educational power can only find their efficacy to the extent that they manage to cling on to such bio-psycho-social zones, which do not inevitably take the form of labelled symptoms. The adaptive and recuperative therapy that consists in enlarging, in normalising, the semiotic conjunctions called into question by, for example, a child who territorialises a zone of stuttering, seeks to convert his libido to a relatively more deterritorialised zone: an anxiety linked to competitiveness at school, without for all that completely paralysing him. Thus, by way of abstract machines, the libido doesn’t cease circulating between instances of social repression and those of individual semiotisation. But there is nothing automatic about this circulation, nothing necessary. It must always bring together two conditions to be possible: 1) ‘individual’ desire must crystallise its indices, its machinic points, on an abstract machine; 2) it must be possible for certain elements of the repressive socius to be connectable to this abstract machine. With an abstract machine, the possibility of a different assemblage of the world unfolds emptily. On leaving childhood, for example, an adolescent will see, as if in a flash, all the richness and threat that is harboured by the new system of enunciation in which he is engaged and which he both takes part in and is taken up by. Equally, the abstract machine constitutes a fundamentally metastable instance between the intensities of desire and the dominant semiological stratifications. However, unlike the machinic indices, which only anticipate their crystallisation, abstract machines subsist in the virtual state, even when they do not consolidate their pathways to manifestation. Whilst indices can be scattered at any moment and allow the forceful returning of old stratifications to establish itself, abstract machines will, under all circumstances and everywhere, continue to threaten them with a possible revolution. This is how a capitalist abstract machine has haunted every social system from the moment that a despotic State power succeeded in taking off from the archaic 146

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territorialities of the Neolithic (Urstaat). It is by a sort of immediate semiotic contamination that the most deterritorialised abstract machinisms are transmitted from one system to another. But whilst there is a potential transmission of abstract machines from the adult world ‘to’ the world of childhood, from the civilized world ‘to’ the barbarian, on the side of childhood ‘without’ adults, savages ‘without’ the civilized, there are only indices – of writing and the capitalist economy, for example. At this level, nothing has been played out definitively; everything depends on the constitution of collective assemblages of enunciation; a new assemblage can close up around a closed system of semiologisation – a dualist signifiersignified substance, or it can set off diagrammatic chain reactions, machinic flights/leaks of desire that will cross the ‘wall of significations’ and bring about direct connections between the points of deterritorialisation of sign machines and those of material and social ensembles. One might say that the abstract machine ‘materialises’ a triple possibility: ●

either its own dissolution and a return to the ‘anarchy’ of machinic indices;

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or a relatively deterritorialised stratification in the form of abstraction by the putting into play of a significative semiology;

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or an active destratification, by the diagrammatising effect and putting into circulation of a-signifying particle-signs.

A micropolitics of desire An abstract machine thus does not belong to one amongst a number of stages; it can participate in several stages at once, in one modality or another: at the level of indices, where it represents the potential for a machinic integration at a ‘higher’ degree, which will or won’t be recuperated by a stratum; and at the level of the strata, where it represents the potential for a destratifying diagrammatisation.Pure quanta of potential deterritorialisation, the abstract machines are everywhere and nowhere, before and after the crystallisation of the oppositions of machine and structure, representation and referent, object and subject. Thus the abstract machines make the threat of a reifying totalisation weigh on multiplicities as much as they do the possibility of a deterritorialising multiplication of stratifications that they open up. Independently of the appearance of an autonomous semiotic machine that distributes signs, things and representations over the separated planes of content and expression, their existence prohibits us from reducing them to a logico-mathematical system or to a priori forms. Their existence PRAGMATICS

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after the stratification of signifying semiologies, on the other hand, prohibits us from considering them as simple structural invariants of stratification or transcendental abstractions. Although the strata are nothing, for them, but the provisional residues of processes of deterritorialisation, being nothing in themselves from the substantial point of view, in order to become manifest they are constrained permanently to stratify and destratify themselves. But for all that they are not restricted to a disempowering face-to-face of the form-matter kind. There is thus a fundamental dissymmetry between the closed formalism of the strata that are ‘established’ in existence, and the active, open formalisation that is piloted by the abstract machines at the level of machinic indices and diagrammatic effects that mark the at once both creative and irreversible character of processes of deterritorialisation. Under these conditions, a homeostatic equilibria of strata will never be guaranteed: they are threatened from the ‘outside’ by the work of interstratic deterritorialisation of the abstract machines, which can result in the reshuffling, assemblages and creation of new strata, and from the ‘inside’ by the metabolism of lines of flight criss-crossing them everywhere. Before the manifestation of the possible in semiotic structures or social material stratifications, the possible doesn’t exist as a purely logical matter; it doesn’t start out from nothing, either. It is organised in the form of quanta of freedom, in a sort of system of valences, the differentiation and complexity of which gives nothing away to the chains of organic chemistry or genetic codes.2 It puts into play matters of expression that are differentiated as a function of their degree of deterritorialisation. The plane of consistency, which deploys the infinite set of machinic potentialities, constitutes a sort of sensory plate for the locating, selection and articulation of points of active deterritorialisation within the strata. There is no possibility in general, but only by starting from a process of deterritorialisation which must not be confused with a global and undifferentiated nihilation. Thus there exists a sort of matter of deterritorialisation, a matter of the possible, which constitutes the essence of politics, but a trans-human, trans-sexual, trans-cosmic politics. The process of deterritorialisation always leaves remains, either in the form of – spatio-temporal, energised, substantialised – stratification, or in the form of the residual possibilities of the line of flight and of the generation of new connections. Deterritorialisation never stops when under way, that is how it differs from a nothingness that one represents as closed in on itself, maintaining disempowering mirror relations with the stratified real. The system of abstract machines thus constitutes an active limit, a productive limit beyond the most deterritorialised limits, and on this side of a nothingness as the terminal point of all process. Abstract machines are thus not a scientific affair, nor an affair of culture, ideology, or education, but an affair of the 148

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politics of desire before subjects and objects have been specified. It is not a question here of a freedom linked intrinsically to the human condition, of a freedom of the ‘for itself’ in a radical opposition with an ‘in itself’ that is stratified and thereby with no connection with anything other than its own impotence. In passing from one assemblage to another, one receives or one loses a certain quantum of deterritorialising connection; deterritorialisation cannot be assimilated to a necessary causality, it can be vectored either along the lines of a stratification or along the lines of an open ‘possibilisation’. Let’s come back once again to the supposed ‘latency’ period which, according to the Freudians, marks the ‘development’ of the child. It would be manifested between six and eight years by a ‘childhood amnesia’ that results from a repression bearing on the whole Oedipal and pre-Oedipal past of the child. But, Freud tells us, all memory is not, for all that, abolished: ‘vague, incomprehensible memories’3 remain all the same. Incomprehensible for who? For the civilized, normal, white adult! In fact it is not a matter of memories here but of the entirety of the modes of semiotisation of the child, of its sensations, its feelings, its sexual impulses, which receive a formidable snuffing out. Why would one find the existence of a mechanism for the intrinsic repression of the development of the drives of the child – which will subsequently be linked to the universal antagonism between Eros and Thanatos – if not so as to mask the entrance on stage of repressive social assemblages? Why does the semiotic politics of the child invert itself, why does it take the side of repression? Why do the factors of deterritorialisation, which unbalance the earlier territorialities instead of opening the process up to a greater semiotic creativity, vectorise the child to the abstractions of the dominant system? As soon as one attempts to give up the schematic responses of psychogenetic determinism, the questions change completely and are enriched. In the context of the repressive powers of the family and school of a given society, as a function of what particularity does a child resist or succumb to the ‘temptation’ of an investment in repression? In the case of the ‘latency period’, on the very concrete terrain of existing systems, what sort of educational abstract machine connects to the abstract machines of the child? In what ways do the semiotics put into action by nurseries continue the [extinguishing] actions of the ‘educational’ interventions of the parents? (We know now that it is from the nursery on that the division between work and ‘play’ time is put in place.) In what way does learning a writing that is detached from any living use, at school, sterilise the ulterior possibilities of a creative diagrammatism? How do the semiotics of educational space and time (division between school days and holidays, division between the space of the class and the space of the teacher, the PRAGMATICS

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space of the playground, the street, etc.), how do the semiotics of discipline (sitting in rows and ranking, grades, emulation, punishments, etc.) succeed in crushing the ‘pre-school’ semiotics of the child, sometimes definitively? And how do they outline the semiotic conditionings of the factory, the office and the barracks? As we have tried to show previously, the compulsory schooling machine doesn’t have as its primary goal the transmission of information, of knowledge, a ‘culture’, but the top to bottom transformation of the semiotic coordinates of the child. In these conditions one can consider that the real function of the ‘latency period’ is a modern equivalent of the initiation camps in primitive societies, which fabricate complete ‘persons’, that is, adult males who meet the essential norms of the group.4 But here, instead of lasting fifteen days, the initiation camp lasts fifteen years, and its objective is to enslave individuals to capitalist systems of production, right down to the least useful fibre in their bodies. Childhood amnesia, correlated to the latency period, thus marks the extinction of semiotics that are not subjected to the signifying semiologies of the dominant powers. And if the neurotics, like ‘pre-Oedipal’ children, escape its net, this is precisely because, for one reason or another, the systems of encirclement by these powers have failed to get a hold over them. Consequently, childhood intensities continue to work away and to upset them, to turn them against ‘normal’ values and significations. The role of memory – either the natural memory of the adult who recalls his childhood nostalgically or the artificial memory of psychoanalytic anamnesis – consists in doubling up the first erasing of these intensities and in recognising childhood according to a set of norms.

There is no language in-itself To have a grasp of reality, the assemblages of discourse are required, in whatever way it might be, to free themselves from the constraints of language, considered as a system closed up on itself. And it is the classic break between langue and parole that a pragmatics will, at a minimum, have to call into question. But although the linguistics of enunciation has already oriented itself in this direction, no micropolitical analysis of these assemblages, at the level of their collective or individual unconscious effects will become possible if it doesn’t call into question more fundamentally the concepts that delimit the different disciplines arising from what are usually called the human sciences. To succeed in constituting itself, a pragmatics of the unconscious will thus not only have to free itself from the dominant ideologies and universals of psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis, but equally from a certain 150

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conception of the unity and autonomy of language, considered as plane of expression as well as a social entity – that is to say, in short, from the key ‘conquests’ of linguistics since Saussure. For our part we consider that there is no language in itself. What is specific about the phenomenon of language is precisely that it never refers to itself, that it always remains open to all the other modes of semiotisation. Whenever it closes up round a language, a dialect, a patois, a specialised language, a delusion, this always results from a certain kind of political or micropolitical operation. There is nothing less logical, less mathematical, than a language. Its ‘structure’ results from the petrification of a sort of rag-bag, whose elements come from borrowings, amalgamations, agglutinations, misunderstandings – a sort of underhand humour that presides over its generalisations. It is the same with linguistic laws as it is with anthropological laws, those bearing on incest, for example: seen from the distance of the grammarian or the ethnologist, they seem to have a certain coherence, but as soon as one gets a little closer, everything gets tangled up and one notices that it is a matter of systems of arrangements that can be pulled in numerous directions or turned around in all sorts of ways. The relativity of the relations between concrete semiotic performances and a structural linguistic competence, or between languages themselves, is thus imposed not just on the synchronic but also the diachronic plane. The unity of a language is inseparable from the constitution of a power formation. One never finds clear frontiers on the map of dialects, only borderlands or zones of transition. There is no mother tongue, but phenomena of semiotic power takeover by a group, an ethnic group or a nation. Language stabilises around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It evolves by flows along river valleys or train tracks; it spreads like patches of oil.5 But the fluidity of the competence-performance relation makes it something on this side of dialect. One may consider that every individual passes constantly from language to language. He successively speaks as ‘father to son’, as a teacher or as a boss; to his lover, he speaks an infantilised language; while sleeping he is plunged into an oneiric discourse, then abruptly returns to a professional language when the phone rings. Each time a whole set of semantic, syntactic, phonological and prosodic dimensions are put into play – not to mention the poetic, stylistic, rhetorical and micropolitical dimensions of discourse. Studying linguistic change, Françoise Robert notes that linguistic mutations are manifested by ‘gradual modifications, not of the phenomena themselves . . . but of their frequency, their establishment in language’.6 And it is true that one does not observe the sudden ruptures that are implied by the clear-cut distinction between synchrony and diachrony (a point on which Chomsky did not distinguish himself from Saussure, who only intended to take into account innovations at the moment when ‘the collective welcome PRAGMATICS

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them’7). Thus the autonomy of a pragmatic micropolitics is unfounded if the break between the exercise of individual speech and the coding of language in the socius is maintained. For Chomsky, as Françoise Robert also remarks, the reference to an ideal locutor-auditor, who belongs to a completely homogenous linguistic community, in fact results in investing the separation between competence and performance with a normative function. And, in the last resort, this norm is reduced to that of the linguist himself.8 In our opinion then, the apparent unity of a language doesn’t depend on the constitution of a structural competence. According to Weinrich’s formula, language is an ‘essentially heterogeneous reality’.9 In the final analysis, its homogeneity can only result from phenomena of a political order, independent of the structural decompositions that can otherwise be carried out on it. And what characterises a political event is its being the bearer of a historical singularity that is undecomposable or that an analysis will necessarily decentre in other dimensions, other registers. Things happen in the same way as in the chemical analysis of a biological phenomenon, or in the economic analysis of a social phenomenon: there is no more a chemical structure of a biological fact, or a chemical competence with regard to a biological performance, than there is a capitalist or socialist structural competence with regard to economic or monetary performances. There are no biological or economic universals. And yet at each one of these levels, abstract machines are differentiated, manifested, and stratified at different crossroads-points of the machinic phylum, without depending on any transcendental formalism, any heredity, any linguistic essence, any economic fate. Our hypothesis, of a mutational phylum of abstract machines, should allow two kinds of obstacle in the domain of pragmatics to be avoided: ●

a pure and simple pinning of linguistic machines onto social structures, as in the linguistic dogmatism of Marr, or as in certain contemporary psycho-linguistic currents;

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a structuralist or generative formalisation, which cuts the production of utterances off from the collective assemblages of enunciation.

The unconscious as individual or collective assemblage The differential relations between what we will call the tracings of performance and the maps of competence do not play just at the level of 152

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diverse kinds of segmented encoding. We consider that the relative structure of ‘competence’ in one domain in relation to another in fact depends on whether or not it puts into play a segmentarity that is finer, more machinic, more molecular, more deterritorialised than the more molar segmentarity of the second, which thus finds itself taking a ‘performative’ position. A hierarchical relationship of double segmentarity is thus established, which fixes the possibilities for semiotic innovation within a strict margin. Only the appearance of a deterritorialising line of flight (the diagrammatic use of signs with a linguistic origin in aesthetic or scientific domains, etc.) can overthrow such an equilibrium. We have seen that at the level of past-ified, spatialised or semiologically substance-ified strata, equilibria, relations of force, can only manifest themselves on the basis of a relative deterritorialisation, the placing into correspondence of at least two systems of segmentarity (for example, the molecular segmentarity of the figures of expression of the second articulation), whilst at the level of machinic mutations, the strata are undone or reorganised by diagrammatic processes that put into play a deterritorialisation that is quantified by systems of abstract machines. But the lines of diagrammatic deterritorialisation do not definitively transcend segmentary stratifications. Mad vectors of possibilities, which cannot be realised in the existing context, as well as veritable machinic mutations, can result from their interactions with stratified systems.10 As we have seen, not only are abstract machines not outside history, ‘before’ my spatial, temporal and substantial coordinates – deictic performances, one might say – but they do not result in the unification of diverse modes of semiotisation.11 Abstract and singular machines, they make history by undoing dominant realities and signification; they constitute the umbilicus, the point of emergence and creationism of the machinic phylum. Thus there cannot be an abstract set of the abstract machines. No logical category can subsume machinic consistency (hence the difference that we have already signalled between logical and machinic consistency). Being undecomposable on an intensional plane, one cannot insert abstract machines in an extensional class.12 Given that there is no abstract machine hanging over history, no ‘subject’ of history, and that machinic multiplicities traverse the different strata both on a diachronic and on a synchronic plane, one cannot say that the general movement of their line of deterritorialisation manifests a universal and homogeneous tendency, because it is interrupted at every level by strata of reterritorialisation, onto which microscopic buds of deterritorialisation are grafted once again. In these conditions, a pragmatic approach to the unconscious would have to escape from two kinds of pitfall: PRAGMATICS

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1

An analysis that is centred exclusively on a verbal material and tends to a ‘significantisation’ of behaviours and affects by means of a systematic gridding of semantic contents and enunciative strategies (politics of transference), based on a meta-syntactic interpretative grid.

2

A return to the analysis of personological strategies, as is the case with Anglo-Saxon family therapies, and a return to lived experience, to corporeal abreaction, etc.

Before its engagement in the detail of utterance production and modes of semiotisation, the abstract machine has to determine the micropolitical lines creating the ensemble of assemblages of enunciation and power formations at the most abstract level. In other words, in each case and in each situation, it has to construct a map of the unconscious – with its strata, its lines of deterritorialisation, its black holes – open to opportunities for experimentation (and that in opposition with the infinite tracing of Oedipal triangulations, which merely make all previous impasses, all modes of signifying subjection, resonate together). In effect, we consider that the pragmatic articulation of encoding strata closed in on themselves always leave open the possibility of a passage from one stratum to another, by way of the abstract machines traversing different modes of territorialisation, The different kinds of consistency – biological, ethological, semiological, sociological, etc. – therefore do not depend on structural or generative super-stratum; they are worked from the ‘inside’ by a network of machinic connections. Machinic consistency is not totalising but deterritorialising. It guarantees the always possible conjunction of the most different of systems of stratification, and it is in this respect that it is in some way the basic element out of which a pragmatic can constitute itself. After having relied on psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiology, will the normative gridding of the human sciences shift to a new field of combat, that of pragmatics? The latter is defined by Herbert E. Brekle as the ‘condition for the production of speech acts’. And straightaway it is associated with communication: pragmatics is the communicative dimension of language. Communication being inseparable here from the bipolar speaker-listener axis, pragmatics thus finds its fate is linked to the existence of the stratum of individuated subjectivity and the individual/socius opposition. A different condition for the possible extraction of the autonomy of pragmatics will thus consist in specifying, positively this time, its specific modes of semiotisation, its particular way of freeing itself from the semiological modes of ‘structuralisation’ of the languages of power. Here the collective character of machinic enunciation is opposed to the individuation of signifying enunciation, and the politics of sense to that of signification. Such 154

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a pragmatics thus presents two faces: one that links it to the stratum of subjectivation and alienates it in communication, and one that links it to collective assemblages capable of producing utterances that mesh directly with machinic processes. The always possible bogging down of modes of semiotisation would thus form an intrinsic part of pragmatic components. And the pragmatics of enunciative linguistics, in which language is closed in on itself in a function of disempowerment, would thus be just a particular case of a more general (diagrammatic) pragmatics, open to the ensemble of non-linguistic modes of encoding and semiotisation. In sum, the autonomy of pragmatics will be founded on the essential impossibility of guaranteeing its own autonomy. And rather than seeking to give itself a pseudo-scientific status, it will define itself as an activity of micropolitical assemblage.

Tracing and trees, maps and rhizomes What might the characteristics of a generative and transformational pragmatics be? In the first place, its modes of engendering would not be trees, but rhizomes (or trellises). A priori there would be no reason for a pragmatic chain to begin at point S so as then to be derived by successive dichotomies; any point whatever of the rhizome can be connected to any other point. Besides, no trait will necessarily refer to a linguistic trait. A linguistic chain can be connected here to the chain of a non-linguistic semiology, or to an assemblage that is social, biological, etc. Segmentary stratifications will be correlated here with deterritorialising lines of flight. A rhizome cannot, therefore, be formalised on the basis of a logical or mathematical meta-language. It will not be indebted to any structuralist or generative model. As a process of machinic diagrammatisation, it cannot be reduced to a system of representation, and it implies the putting into play of a collective assemblage of enunciation. The preparation of the pragmatic rhizome arising from such and such an assemblage will not have as its goal the description of a state of fact, the re-balancing of inter-subjective relations, or the exploration of the mysteries of an unconscious hidden away in the shadowy corners of memory. On the contrary, it will be turned entirely towards an experimentation flush with the real. It will not decipher an always already constituted unconscious, closed in on itself, it will construct the unconscious. It will contribute to the connection of fields, the unblocking of stratified, empty or cancerous bodies without organs, and to their maximal opening onto the machinic plane of consistency. It will be led PRAGMATICS

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to put into play diverse semiotics and modes of coding, of a biological, sensory, perceptual order, on the order of a thinking with images, categorical thought, semiotics of gesture and word, political and social fields, formalised writings, arts, music, refrains . . . Unlike psychoanalysis, which always seeks to reduce each utterance and each libidinal production to an overcoding structure, a schizo-analytic pragmatics will have as its objective, the pinpointing of their repetitive elements in what we will call systems of tracings, which can be articulated with a map of the unconscious. The map is opposed to structure here; the map is open, it can be connected in each of its dimensions, it can be torn up, it can be adapted to every kind of setup. A pragmatic map can be put to work by an isolated individual or by a group, one can draw it on a wall, one can conceive it as a work of art, one can conduct it like a political action or as a meditation. What matters is to determine how, given a kind of performance, a particular assemblage of enunciation, a redundant tracing, does or doesn’t modify the unconscious map of a local pragmatic competence.13 These maps of competence do not depend in an absolute fashion on a broader competence. Just as there is no universal competence, there is no universal cartography: such and such a map, which serves as a marker for one collective performance (that of an anti-psychiatric community or a groupuscule, for example), could be valid as a performance for such and such other social group (psychiatry in France as a whole, or the ensemble of political movements, for example). One rediscovers the subject-group/subjugated group alternative here, which must never be taken as an absolute opposition. The relations of alienation between fields of competence always imply a certain margin, which it falls to pragmatics to localise and utilise. In other words, in no matter what situation, a diagrammatic politics is always possible. Pragmatics refuses any idea of fatalism, whatever name one gives it: divine, historical, economic, structural, hereditary or syntagmatic. By taking into account the entirety of his semiotic productions, studying the unconscious in the case of Little Hans would have consisted in establishing which kind of tree or rhizome his libido would have been led to invest. How, at such and such a moment, the branch of the neighbours was cut off, following what manoeuvrings the Oedipal tree contracted, what role Professor Freud’s branch and its deterritorialising activity played, why the libido was constrained to take refuge in the semiotisation of a becoming-horse, etc. In this way, phobia would no longer be considered a psychopathological result but as the libidinal pragmatics of a child who was not able to find any other micropolitical solution to escape from familial and psychoanalytic transformations. Pragmatics would thus imply, in the first place, an active refusal of every conception of the unconscious as a genetic stage, as structural destiny. For a group, it would 156

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necessitate a permanent searching for investments of desire able to thwart the reifications of bureaucracy, leadership, etc. ‘Working’ the map of the group would consist in carrying out a reshuffling and transformation of the body without organs of the group – that is to say, the locus of investment of desire ‘anterior’ to any specification, any organisation centred on an object – necessitated by a micropolitics compatible with these investments. One cannot just give such a pragmatics its part to do: it can only challenge the hegemonic vocation of linguistics, psychoanalysis, social psychology, the entirety of the human, social, legal, economic sciences.

Generations and transformations What is the nature of the relations between the two kinds of components – generative and transformational – of pragmatics, the existence of which we have simply evoked? As we have said, pragmatics has, hitherto, been considered as a domain that can only be adjacent to linguistics. This was true for Austin and Searle, and it is still true for Ducrot, despite the fact that he calls into question communication as the essential characteristic of language, and despite the richness of his analysis of presupposition, which opens linguistics up to a veritable new micropolitical field.14 We have seen that whilst the pragmatics that we are envisaging is essentially aimed at the ensemble of nonlinguistic semiotics fields, it nevertheless entertains a particular relationship with linguistic semiologies, this domain being defined as that of generative pragmatics. Pragmatics would thus be divided into two components – and not two regions, as these components will constantly recompose themselves: a generative pragmatics corresponding to the modes of ‘linguisticisation’ of semiotics and a non-linguistic, non-signifying, transformational pragmatics. The question was already posed at the level of the independence of ‘analogical’ semiotics. Should one accept their fundamental dependence on linguistic semiology, like the majority of semioticians, accept their fundamental dependence on linguistic semiology? Or should they be considered as autonomous modes of semiotisation, able, under certain conditions, to pass into the control of a signifying transformation? Should one not, on the contrary, consider that what could be called the ‘axiom of structure’ (which has, since Saussure, consisted in separating language from acts of language and expression), is just a particular case, resulting from a contingent semiotic conjunction? Does the normal, terminal, regime of symbolic semiotics depend on the linguistic machine of expression? On the contrary, we previously indicated that we consider that there is nothing ineluctable, nothing universal, about signifying transformations, and that they are linked PRAGMATICS

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to a certain kind of regime of individuation, enunciation and inter-subjective communication. These signifying transformations derive their power from their reliance on a certain kind of a-signifying machine of expression (double articulation machine, which can be described in terms of syntagmatic trees or more abstract formalisations), which organises and stabilises the entirety of semiotic compositions as a plane of content and plane of expression. The strength of the machine for signifying disempowerment resides in its capacity to crush, to neutralise all contents. The function of the signifying transformation is to generate, to structuralise semiotic productions of all kinds. By means of which systems of institutional constraints is what Herbert E. Brekle designates as ‘communicative competence’ determined? These are the questions to which a generate pragmatics must respond. Let us return now to the relations between the different semiotic components, which we presented in the table on p. 129 , and let us examine in particular the fact that non-interpretative (symbolic, diagrammatic) transformational components are able to break the hegemony of interpretive (analogical and signifying) generative components.

1. Intensive symbolic transformations The anthropological study of phenomena of acculturation shows us that the putting into place of a signifying transformation never goes without saying. Primitive societies can even actively oppose it. It is in this way that certain mythographic systems have long been able to resist the exclusive domination of a semiology in which the expression-content relation is structured according to syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. In the domain of myth, kinship relations, political anthropology, etc., symbolic semiologies cannot be automatically reduced to the dichotomous relations of a signifying economy. There is a big danger here of a hasty ‘structuralisation’ of ethnographic data, consisting in interpreting kinship relations in terms of a generalised exchangism, for example. The installing of invariant15 significations doesn’t go without saying. In symbolic semiotics, the planes of content are linked to one another, slide around in relation to each other, without being organised on the structured plane of the signified. It is only with the accomplishment of the hegemony of capitalism, in the nineteenth century, that the ‘absolute stability of signifieds, under the proliferation of relations of designation [. . .] so as to be able to found the comparison of forms’16 imposed itself definitively. A certain kind of dictatorship of the signifier thus seems linked to a certain historical context and, as a consequence, cannot be considered either as immutable or as universal. This signifying power can be neutralised, even overthrown by 158

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transformations. This is what happens in contemporary African societies, for example, where a fixation on tribal modes of solidarity, or sudden returns to animist practices, serve as a counter-weight to the expansion of semiologies of the Western kind. Equally, at an individual level, with the ‘taking power’ by an oneiric semiology, of perceptual semiotics, linguistic semiologies, etc., under the effect of sleep, drugs, amorous exaltation, etc.

2. Diagrammatic transformations Another general type of pragmatic transformation can bring about a semiotic freeing up of the disempowering signifier-signified couple: diagrammatic transformation. Two kinds of semiotic system, the distinction between which had nevertheless been outlined by C.S. Peirce, have generally been confused under the category of icon:17 a

Images, in which the sign functions through analogy, by evoking the object denoted (in the case of a semiotic functioning on the basis of spatial elements, these generally put into play at least two dimensions).

b

Diagrams, which function in such a way that the elements of the form of content are transferred onto the plane of the form of expression by means of what we will call a sign-particle system that simulates the process denoted, and that generally according to a linear mode of coding.18 Peirce defined diagrams as being ‘icons of relation’. The diagrammatic sign doesn’t imitate objects, but articulates properties, functions.19 Content is deterritorialised by its mode of formalisation. Symbolic semantic and semiological signifying redundancies are emptied of their substance (a polyphonic and harmonic formalisation in music, mathematics in physics, axiomatics in mathematics).20

Thus diagrammatism does not objectify a world, the representation of which it would stabilise, but assembles a new type of reality. It ruptures with the organisation of dominant significations. Diagrammatic semiotic processes in fact constitute components that are indispensable to the machinic assemblages of human societies. For example, it is impossible to conceive the assemblages of a scientific experiment without the putting to work of such a process (in the form of plans, topological, mathematical, axiomatic, informatics descriptions, etc.). That such sign machines can function directly within material and social machines, with the mediation of processes of significant subjectivation, is something that has become PRAGMATICS

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daily more evident; but the decisive step that it seems to us to be necessary to take, in order to found a pragmatic politics, is to see that the common essence of semiotic and material machines results from the same kind of abstract machine. Positivist realism has led to the crushing of the creative dimension of diagrammatism, reducing it to the general category of analogy; first, diagrammatism is recuperated as a sub-product of the icon, then, second, the icon is recuperated under the category of analogy, itself considered as a sub-product of signification. But – and we can’t insist on this enough – the relation of signification (signifier-signified), is only a particular case of the mechanism of semiotic machines, which function by prolonging one another. In this regard, Bettin and Casetti have pointed out how reductive the commentary on Peirce’s writings has been, because, unlike their habitual presentation, his categories are never closed in on themselves, and there is no irreversible break between the systems of signs and their object. An iconic sign can always be the sign of another system, and the systems of objects themselves already function as a sign machine in a society’s knowledge, inserting themselves into what he calls, the ‘progressive chain of interpretative definitions’. And the establishment of a stabilised system of significations in effect indeed seems to us always to be correlated with the placing under guard of symbolic semiologies in their diversity. As Lotman writes ‘the greater the distance between structures made equivalent to each other in the process of recoding, the greater the disparity in their nature, the richer will be the content of the very act of switching from one system to the other’.21

3. Analogic and signifying generation Analogy only constitutes the first level of this operation of levelling and translateabilisation of semiotic chains of all kinds (doubtless one ought to be led to consider ‘degrees of analogism’). Analogy and signifiance constitute two modes of the same politics of the reterritorialisation and subjectivation of contents. But whilst analogy organises them into relatively informal fields, articulated through relatively territorialised assemblages of enunciation, significance, with its doubly articulated chains, grids them in paradigmatic and syntagmatic coordinates that are much more strictly articulated with individuated assemblages of enunciation directly subjected to capitalist social systems. Analogic formalisation is less rigorous, less deterritorialised, than that of signifiance: it brings into view strata of expression that retain their own consistency, producing what we have called ‘fields of interpretance’. One symbol interprets another, which itself interprets a third, and so on, without 160

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the process hitting a terminating signified, the sense of which would be blocked in, for example, a dictionary, and without the chain being liable to respect a grammaticality that fixes rigorous rules of syntagmatic concatenation. The work of signifying generation on content brings an additional degree of deterritorialisation into play: it isn’t based on analogic motivations any longer, but on the ‘arbitrariness’ of a machine of a-signifying signs,22 which phonologises, graphematises, morphologises, lexicalises, syntacticises, rhetoricises them. Certainly, analogic transformations are not specific to one particular kind of assemblage of enunciation; they can equally be applied to diagrammatic semiotics. But in this case, the same signs are treated in terms of two generative and transformational semiotic politics: on the one hand, they function as symbols in an analogic mode, and on the other, as figures of expression in a diagrammatic mode. This mixed system corresponds precisely to the signifying mode of representation, which puts an a-signifying machine at the service of signifiance. Empty signs, without any semantic content, the phonic or graphic image of the word ‘table’, for example, are seen as a table.23 Thus, by territorialising artificial analogons, diagrammatisation closes up on a world of quasi-objects. But, unlike the world of symbolic representations, this world is ‘worked’ from the inside by syntax and logic, on which the formalisation of significations and dominant propositions rests. On the one hand, it invites us to insert ourselves into a reality that ‘goes without saying’, a reality of the everyday, and on the other, it draws us, as if in spite of ourselves, into the circle of its pragmatic implications, and its signifying chains alienates us in an immense social and technical machine, that of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. All libido is thus captured, functionalised, subjectivised as a function of the demands of the economy of capitalist flows. The generative components of analogy and signifiance are thus not to be placed on the same plane as the transformational components of symbolism and diagrammatism, and the distinction, now traditional, between ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ semiotics24 seems to us not to need to be maintained. We find ourselves in the presence of two general kinds of component: ●

Symbolic and diagrammatic transformations, which constitute semiotic domains that are distinct from one another, and the difference of which even gets accentuated to the extent that the process of deterritorialisation that marks the evolution of the second develops.

●

Analogic and signifying ‘generations’, which do not constitute distinct semiotic domains, but both participate in the same reterritorialisation and subjectivation function. The constraints that these components impose on the two previous components, when PRAGMATICS

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they are applied to them, have as their goal making them compatible with the values and coordinates of a particular vision of the world. They generate a world by making the possibility of the appearance of different worlds degenerate; thus we could call them degenerative components, in opposition to the pragmatic (symbolic and diagrammatic) transformations which, each in their own way, overthrows the dominant system of redundancies, reordering the vision of a world. Like the semiotic components that they put into play, pragmatic assemblages of enunciation cannot be reduced to the composition of standard elements, universal subjective positions of the kind theorised by Lacan, for example (discourses of the master, the hysteric, knowledge, the analyst). And the classification that we have set out in the table on page 129 is entirely relative! Thus, in fact, territorialised assemblages of enunciation only correspond to a dominance of analogical transformations of interpretance, and can equally put into play symbolic, diagrammatic and signifying semiotics (example: the discourse of primitive societies, in so far as it ‘refuses’ the reductive effects of signifying generation, bases itself on symbolic techniques relatively non-interpretative, but this refusal implies by contrast the existence of a threatening signifying economy). The individuation of enunciation, whilst being specific to the dominance of signifying transformations, equally puts into play deterritorialised and overcoded symbolic transformations (of the figure-ground kind) and a diagrammatic

Table summarising the formation of semiotic fields on the basis of transformational and generative components Transformations

Generations

k AC Interpretative semiology (e.g. magic)

A. Symbolic (e.g. dreams) m – analogical (interpretance)

g AD Signifying semiology (e.g. psychoanalysis)

k – signifying (signifiance)

g BC Interpretative logography (e.g. geomancy, tarot)

B. Diagrammatic (e.g. systems of graphemes) 162

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m BD Doubly articulated languages

redundancy organising symbolic formations according to a plane of content (consciential transformation). This second degree formalisation thus has as consequence the production of a new kind of effect, that one could call the effect of lack. Each content is doubled by a lack, it is ‘lacking’ the formalism that overcodes it. The unity of linguistic semiology thus becomes the formal signifying unity that Hjelmslev brought to light between the form of expression and the form of content. The fundamentally metastable character of this effect of lack produced through consciential transformation has as its corollary a sort of vertigo of unbearable, maddeningly anguishing, deterritorialisation. It must be filled without delay; and it entails the intervention of a certain number of reterritorialising pragmatic components: a transformation of faciality; transformation of the double, transformation of the couple, transformation of paranoid knowledge, etc. The mad vector of consciential transformation that this absolute deterritorialisation represents is thus conjured away through artificial reterritorialisations, which it is worth differentiating from the territorialised assemblages of enunciation evoked earlier. Now, there is no methodological necessity that forces us to consider that the semiotic components, on the basis of which we started our description, have real priority. A ‘rhizomatic’ analysis could just as well be carried out on the basis of less classically semiotic components, such as those that are knotted together around the black holes of anxiety, faciality, power formations, etc. It is the same with the machinic assemblages of enunciation that are characteristic of the domain of diagrammatic pragmatic transformations. They remain haunted by subjects of enunciation. But the representation of a locutor-auditor as fictive pole of the production of utterances becoming increasingly abstract with them, the fact that ‘it continues to speak’ through the mouths of individuals takes on an increasingly relative scope. The utterance is produced and understood through a complex assemblage of individuals, organs, material and social machines, mathematical and scientific semiotic machines, etc., which constitute the veritable nucleus of enunciation. That being the case, this kind of assemblage cannot be separated in practice from the artificial reterritorialisations of enunciation that are correlative to it and which are always manifested within mixed semantics. It is in reaction to the vertiginous deterritorialisation of the subject that is implied, either through consciential transformation, or by a desubjectifying diagrammatic transformation, that a system of collective ‘reassurance’ artificially reproduces a territorialisation of enunciation. Thus, after the collapse of systems of territorialised, familial communities, the illusion of a return to the territorialised assemblages of primitive societies could even be maintained (the illusion of a ‘return to nature’, of a return to originary significations). Thus an artificial PRAGMATICS

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conjugal nuclear family will be recreated or, faced with the internationalisation of production and of the market, one will witness a massive return to questions of nationality, of regional particularisms, racisms, etc.

Three limit cases of collective assemblages of enunciation Without losing from view the arbitrary character of the systematic classifications that we are proposing, let us now examine certain limit assemblages, such as they can be determined on the basis of the distribution of their components – this time of a different, ternary order. We will insist once again on the fact that a monographic approach – a ‘rhizomatic’ analysis – of real situations, would therefore not start from the simple to go to the complex, but, on the contrary, would begin from the complex so as to envisage the ‘elementary’ components only to the extent that such an undertaking would allow it to explore more precisely certain singular traits of these components, leading to an even greater complexification of the assemblages of enunciation, and permitting a richer, more open, creative experimentation to be envisaged. The triadic system that we are proposing here can therefore not be assimilated to a method like that of C.S. Peirce, for example. The association of five, seven or n components might, in principle, have been preferable for him. Nevertheless, it should allow us to examine the limit cases, which anthropologists, historians or economists would doubtless make into typical cases, structural archetypes. Assemblages of Machinic enunciation instances

Semiotic components

Composition a

Territorialised

Index

Symbolic

Composition b

Individuated

Abstract machine Signifying (abstraction)

Composition c

Collective

Machinic assemblage

A-signifying

Composition a: territorialised assemblages, machinic index, and symbolic component Numerous symbolic semiotics – those of childhood, of the mad, of primitive societies – are inseparable from the existence of stratified territorialities. 164

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Thus they do not depend, in the first place, on a substance of expression that would traverse and unify its different modes of semiotisation. They constitute a system of articulation of modes of encoding and formalisation in the raising up of a universal substance of expression. For example, in the territorialised assemblage of certain primitive societies, one will find an activity of mythographic formation developing on the basis of traits of matters of expression that do not enter into correspondence, that are not translateabilisable with those of gestural, perceptual, economic and other semiotics. That does not signify that these diverse modes of semiotisation are without relation to each other. But what brings about this relation is precisely the kind of territorialisation of the group, its internal topology, its translations into itself and outside its territory. Here, the territorialised assemblage of the group occupies the place that will become that of signifying substance in the system of despotic individualisation of enunciation. Primitive societies refuse, by warding off, the bringing to light of a signifying substance; their politics is that of a group enactment of semiotic conjunctions. Already it is a matter here of a sort of pragmatic rhizome, but a rhizome that seeks to contain, to dominate deterritorialising flights. The systems of indices precisely mark on this rhizome the inscription of such a threat, of such a refusal to fall into signifying abstraction or into deterritorialised machinic assemblages. One index would, for example, be the fact that the death of a cow first calls for a recourse to the practices of geomancy, then, to the extent that the right results have been obtained from this procedure, the recourse to a ritual sacrifice, then to a trial for witchcraft, a marabout etc., without a synthesis being effectuated at any moment between these different undertakings, without a paradigm stabilising their general signification being extracted. The group assembles the semiotics, it doesn’t interpret, it experiments. This real passage operates by respecting the particular traits of each matter of expression. Besides, and here is an essential difference with the rhizomes that depend on a deterritorialised machinic phylum, these territorialised assemblages do not hierarchise planes. Machinic deterritorialisations exist (for example: an embryonic writing) but they will be treated on the same plane as the territorialised assemblages. It is as if these societies entertained an active misunderstanding of the powers of deterritorialisation contained in certain indices. This kind of assemblage thus doesn’t exclude either the signifier, or diagrammatism, it simply refuses the power takeover by an overcoding instance or a deterritorialisation machine. A religious machine can be the bearer of universalising abstractions, but it will be prevented from escaping its territory, its totem, for example. It doesn’t aspire to a general translateability of kind of capitalist religions. It equally avoids PRAGMATICS

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symbolism falling into the equivalent of signifying translateability that iconism constitutes for it. The differential coefficients of deterritorialisation are not extracted from their territory, their original matter. These societies lead an active struggle against the erection of a signifying object on high, whether in the form of a capitalisation of power, at the level of the chiefs, or in the form of a concentration of systems of semiotic enslavement in technical machines or writing machines. In other words, they endeavour to ensure that all systems of deterritorialisation remain or return to the state of indices, qualitative indices that will be neither quantified nor systematised. It is only during the ‘passage’ to societies dominated by signifying semiologies or a-signifying semiotics that such a quantification, such an accumulation of effects of deterritorialisation can be put to work. Here deterritorialisations still remain directly plugged into the intensities of desire, the body, the group, the territory.

Composition b: individuated assemblage, abstract machine and signifying component Composition b corresponds to a process of evolution of the old territories that are traversed by machinic systems that hollow them out everywhere. Indices link together, accumulate. In the societies of the Pueblos, as with the Hopi Indians (whose ‘theocratism’, according to Levi-Strauss, evokes, in an unrefined form, Aztec civilisations), one begins to interpret indices in relation to one another; it is the reign of ‘dwelling on the past’, of bad conscience, of guilt.25 Abstract machines capitalise the indices and sketch out the constitution of machinic assemblages. In such conditions, these societies become vulnerable to contamination by abstract capitalist machines. But it is with societies that autonomise a despotic State machine that this signifying power will truly acquire its autonomy. How will the escalating deterritorialisations and systems of defence against capitalist flows be effectuated, what will they cling on to? What ceased to be possible in a territory will become so again in a system of semiological substance. The characteristics of this substance are disempowerment and dualism. What is retained by this substance are no longer intensities as such, but their differential character. Precisely the ensemble of these differential relations constitutes signifying substance. This signifying disempowerment is correlated with conscientalisation, the emergence of myths of the double, the totalisation of intensive effects on the person, the dualism of phallic power and already, in an embryonic fashion, systems of enslavement by semiotics of faciality and conjugality. Once it has crystallised, this substance contaminates all the old matters of expression. It constitutes a sort of sky 166

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that looms over intensities, pinning them down like butterflies, reducing them to the state of neutralised indices. It deploys a formal subjectivity that is substituted for deterritorialised assemblages. Unlike these latter, this subjectivity has no need of being enacted, as it haunts each intensive system as differential value; it functions as a capital of differences; it is the matrix of all the capitalisations of power, whether they concern the State, matrimonial or economic exchanges, and, in general, all the systems for the capitalisation of decoded flows that we have characterised as capitalist. The semiological substance of individuated (or individuating) assemblages of enunciation is dualist in that it deploys a surface of representation that is constantly divided into two sub-systems: a substance of expression and a substance of content. The ensemble of intensive effects is formalised, secretly kept in hand by the formalisation of expression. Inversely, the diagrammatic machines that are put into play by them are kept in hand by the organisation, the finalisation, of the significations of content. This process of the bi-univocalisation of all intensities has as its corollary a linearisation, a flattening, of the old systems of territorialised rhizomes. All the material intensities that contribute to the formalisation of expression must be put into order. It is no longer appropriate to speak by singing and dancing. What counts now is solely the assemblage of differential characteristics of the system as a whole, in so far as it contributes to the functioning of new deterritorialised powers. Under these conditions, the prosodic components that arise from song, from mimicry, from gestures, posture, etc., from ‘primitive’ speech can do nothing other than degenerate. One passes from one element to another according to a syntactic order and no longer the apparent disorder of territorialised assemblages. One compares, one measures, the coefficients of deterritorialisation of each fulfilling of form. The strata will have to submit themselves and to be hierarchised in this passage, there will not be any more contour, just a linear passage, constituting the most economic means of effectuating such a comparison and hierarchisation. In the absence of such a neutralisation, the possibility of the irruption of a system of intensity would subsist. But signifying substance is hegemonic, it cannot take such a risk. In fact, it remains in a metastable state, because in order to be able to semiotise the structuring and hierarchisation of power formations on which it rests, it must have recourse to a putter to work of diagrammatic machines, the effects of which also risk making themselves felt on the side of content by the triggering of new machinic assemblages. How, under these conditions, is one to keep such a sign machine in hand? At every moment, and for everything, it will be necessary only to retain from it what can be fixed in a system of abstraction and a formal syntax. For PRAGMATICS

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example, the appearance, in the history of music, of a polyphonic, then a harmonic, writing component, which threatened to make music explode in a kind of generalised baroque, was warded off for a long time by religious power, which endeavoured to retain only those traits of musical expression that were mathematisable. Thus a sort of universal syntax of musical writing was established, inseparable from the power formations weighing on musicians (teaching, patronage, etc.). It was only when other, more deterritorialised components, come on the scene and call into question the musical compromise called, paradoxically, ‘baroque’, that the continuous process of fragmentation that the evolution of modern music represents, will be sketched out. But this semiotic deterritorialisation of music is inseparable from those that have worked over the representations of the world in the religious, philosophical and scientific domains. And there too one will discover systems of reterritorialisation to check the proliferation of abstract machines and translateabilise them into a general conception of the world. Abstraction functions here as a locus for rebounding, a stopping point for semiotic systems susceptible of being organised into a machinic rhizome. The abstract machine corresponds here to the Hjelmslevian intuition regarding form, according to which it is, in some way, the same abstract machine that is manifested in the substance of expression and the substance of content. One might say that it is the same dualising substance that secretes abstraction and contains intensities in reductive systems of dichotomous trees. But the transcendent formalism, which results from what we have called a paradigmatic perversion, is nonetheless under threat from a double danger: on the side of content, the explosion, the flourishing, of intensive multiplicities; on the side of expression, the implacable diagrammatism of sign machines.

Composition c: collective assemblage, machinic assemblage, a-signifying component The figure-ground, form-matter oppositions of territorialised assemblages, and the dualism of the signifying substance of individuated assemblages, cease to be pertinent here. In appearance, one is returning here to a polyvocal expression of the kind of territorialised assemblages. But one is not dealing here with well localised assemblages of persons, techniques, myths, etc., with the enactment of bodies, organs and territories on the basis of a system of signifying subjection, but with a machinic assemblage, a non-human machine, at the heart of which the overcodings of despotic abstraction no longer lay down the law in the same way. What now looms over this semiotic 168

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system is no longer a territorialised assemblage or a formal subjectivity, but the plane of consistency of the ensemble of possible machinic assemblages. The machinic assemblage of enunciation re-articulates machinic indices at an intensive level, and no longer solely at a differential level. In addition it vectorises systems of stratification by polarising territorialised systems towards deterritorialised systems. One has thus left the register of the autonomy of territorialised assemblages or of the comparative dualism of intensities of signifying substance in individuated assemblages. The machinic rhizome is vectored and vectorising.A general vectorisation of destratification processes is substituted for global hierarchies. One is not for all that in the presence of an autonomised machinic substance: machinic components are not stratified: as they are enacted, they constitute a phylum that implies not just their actual state and the historical and logical links that have led there, but also their diagrammatic potentialities. The virtual, the theoretical and the experimental to come thus form a part of the machinic phylum.26 We will therefore not reintroduce a dualism between material and semiotic deterritorialisation at this level, because one is always in the presence of a multiplicity of matters of expression and semiotic systems corresponding to a diversity of particular modes of deterritorialisation. There is thus no place for grouping [together], for example, energetic, physic-chemical, biological, etc., intensities on the one hand, and aesthetic, revolutionary, scientific, etc., intensities on the other. The multiplicity of systems of intensity is conjugated, ‘rhizomatises’ over itself: the machinic assemblage brings about conjunctions between ‘scientifically formed’, ‘aesthetically formed’ matters, without giving them any privilege, in so far as they issue from an autonomised sign machine. No system has any priority over any other as of right; material components are not necessarily more territorialised than semiotic components. What is important here is not a particular differential index, nor a range of differential indices, it is the assemblage of quanta of deterritorialisation enacted. Certain intensive systems have quantum superpower in relation to others. A mathematical sign machine can temporarily become superpowered in relation to the system of deterritorialisation in play – in physics, for example, in conjunction with theoretical and experimental components. Inversely an intensive effect27 can become superpowered in relation to an entire sector of theoretical physics. Indices and abstract machines continue to exist in machinic assemblages but instead of the indices turning round and round in a territorialised assemblage, enacted by human collectivities in a given territory, or the abstract machines remaining tightly fixed to a dualising substance, they now only function in so far as they are bearers of certain quanta of deterritorialisation. This point is primordial, because, we repeat, PRAGMATICS

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there is no hierarchy between indices, abstract machines and machinic assemblages. For example, the ‘feelings’, the private life, of a scientific researcher, the fact that he falls in love or goes mad, can introduce a deterritorialising charge of the greatest in the machinic assemblage that constitutes his research. An erotic index, a libidinal charge, will perhaps be able to unblock systems of abstract machines and systems of experimental assemblages, or even throw them out of gear completely. Inversely, an abstract machine might fertilise a system of indices: it is perhaps the fact that an abstract machine, of a theoretical or experimental order, has been introduced into his system that makes our researcher ‘decide’ to fall in love or go mad. Passions, all passions, not just those of artists and scientific experts, whatever they may be, whatever they put into play, should cease being separated from oeuvres so that they can be related to the recipes relative to the interpersonal strategies that obsess psychoanalysis. Machinic assemblages are bearers of indices as much as abstract machines are. One may even consider that in a sense, there are only machinic assemblages, whether virtual or manifest, and that territorialised assemblages and abstract machines are already potentially machinic assemblages. We have only considered here limit situations that translate the fact that: 1

territorialised machinic assemblages at level a mark a fear and a warding off of deterritorialisation at level b;

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those of level b mark, in another form, a refusal and repression of the diagrammatic effects at level c, by way of the systems of abstract machines;

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the machinic assemblages of level c mark, on the one hand, a return to territorialised indices and, on the other hand, a beyond of the abstract machines of level b, in that they bring a deterritorialising charge to the indices that allows them to pass through the ‘wall of the signifier’.

An analytico-militant pragmatics ‘Do it’ could be the order-word for a pragmatic micropolitics. Not only can the Chomskyan axiom of grammaticality (S) no longer be accepted as going without saying, but it becomes the object of a sort of militant opposition. One refuses to consider that semiotic assemblages of all kinds have necessarily to organise themselves into phrases that are compatible with the system of dominant significations. A pragmatic order-word will therefore not seek to interpret, to reorganise significations, to compose with them; it will postulate 170

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that beyond their systems of redundancy, it is always possible to transform a semiotic assemblage. There is a primary political decision here, a primary axiom of pragmatics: the refusal to legitimate the signifying power manifested by the ‘evidence’ of dominant ‘grammaticalities’. The appreciation of a ‘degree of grammaticality’ then becomes a political matter. Rather than agreeing to remain prisoner of the redundancy of signifying tracings, one will endeavour to fabricate a new map of competence, new a-signifying diagrammatic coordinates. This is what the Leninists did during their rupture with the social-democrats, when they decided, with a certain arbitrariness, that on the basis of the constitution of a party of a new kind a split would be created between the proletarian avant-garde and the masses, the effect of which would be to radically transform their passive attitude, their tendency to spontaneity, and their ‘economist’ tendency. The fact that his ‘Leninist transformation’ later toppled over into the field of redundancy of Stalinist bureaucracy shows that in this domain, the systems of maps and tracings can always be inverted, that no structural foundation, no theoretical legitimation can definitively guarantee the maintenance of a revolutionary ‘competence’. Whatever the case may be, the Leninists made a new matter of expression rise up from the social field, a new map of the political unconscious, in relation to which all productions of utterances, including those of bourgeois movements, would be constrained to determine themselves. Another transformation of the unconscious map of the revolutionary movement had been produced by the Marxists of the First International, who literally ‘invented’ a new kind of working class, anticipating the sociological transformations that industrial societies were to experience (in effect, the class on which the communist movement of Marx’s era rested was essentially composed of artisans and journeymen: it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that it really began to be proletarianised). A micropolitical pragmatics will never accept systems of redundancy, which seem to be the most stuck in an ‘impasse’, as a fait accompli; it will endeavour to make processes of diagrammatisation emerge, ‘analysers’, collective assemblages of enunciation that will depose individuated modes of subjectivation and will form the basis on which previous micropolitical relations will be registered and reshuffled. But, once again, it cannot be a matter here simply of organisational, programmatic or theoretical instruments, but fundamentally of mutations in social pragmatics. The task of a revolutionary pragmatics will thus consist in bringing about connections between transformational systems able to annul the effects of signifying generation. One is thus in the presence of two micropolitical orientations concerning semiotic systems as a whole. Diagrammatic transformations are thus able to carry their effects into no matter what semiotic register: whether it is a matter of symbolic semiologies PRAGMATICS

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(with mimetic or transitivist effects, for example), signifying semiologies (with systems of expression based on a limited range of discrete elements: phonemes, graphemes, distinctive features, etc.), or even natural modes of encoding. In each situation the pragmatic objective will consist in setting out the nature of the crystallisations of power that operate around a dominant transformational component: the map of black holes, semiotic branches and lines of flight (in Asiatic empires, the establishment of a despotic signifying writing, for example, or the emergence of a systematic signifying delirium in paranoia). Overthrow by a new diagrammatic component will reduce the effects of signifiance and individuation and lead to enunciation being nothing more than one element amongst others in machinic assemblages (the emancipation of a writing machine from its signifying function in poetic, musical, mathematical work, etc.). Pragmatic transformations will assemble their composition synchronically as a function of diverse political strategies; but they will equally organise their mutations diachronically on a machinic rhizome. Although evolution goes globally in the direction of a growing deterritorialisation, punctuated by always more brutal reterritorialisation on artificial stratifications, one really cannot set out general laws concerning them. And that is how it should be! Pragmatic assemblages are machinic; they do not depend on universal laws properly speaking; they are subject to historical mutation. Thus one can speak of a ‘romantic complex’, of a ‘Popular Front complex’, a ‘Resistance complex’, a ‘positivist complex’, all of which have maintained their effects beyond their original historical localisation, without it being possible to give them the universal character that psychoanalysts accord to the Oedipus complex, or Maoists to the ‘revisionist’ complex. Pragmatic markers are not universals, they can always be called into question. Let us consider, for example, the fact that the most territorialised segmentarities have a ‘tendency’ to take control of more molar segmentarities. This is, in effect, a kind of law. But it only remains valid in the context of a given period, to the point when a revolutionary situation, overturning the maps of competence, reveals the existence of another machinism that was in the subterranean process of gnawing away at an earlier equilibrium. Differentiating coefficients of deterritorialisation ought nonetheless to allow political sequences to be vectorised – a ‘line’ of schizophrenisation versus a paranoid ‘line’ for example – in the struggle against bureaucratic transformations. But one will never be able to deduce from this, as some have believed they could consider so doing on the basis of Anti-Oedipus, that it is a matter here of a new Manichean alternative. It will only ever be a matter of a provisional orientation. Different kinds of entrance points must always be possible in a pragmatic system: that of performances of tracings or that of the competence of maps. In the first 172

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case, one will accept the repetitive character of deadlocked libidinal investments, one will even rely on them, so as to guarantee the minimal deterritorialisation of a body without organs on the basis of which other transformational operations will be possible (example: the positive aspects of regionalist struggles). In the other case, one will rely directly on a line of flight able to make the strata explode and bring about new semiotic branchings. Schematically speaking, and to borrow a different terminology, one can say of the generative pragmatics that it will concern itself specifically with empty and cancerous bodies without organs, whilst the transformational pragmatics will concern itself with full bodies without organs connected to the plane of consistency. But what brings these two points of entry together is that the simple fact of introducing a mode of semiotisation that concerns them in particular, the simple fact of memorising potentialities, of noting tracings and drawing up maps already sketches out diagrammatic effects: the simple fact of deciding to write down one’s dreams, for example, rather than passively interpreting them, the simple fact of sketching or miming them, could transform the map of the unconscious. One of the formidable traps of psychoanalysis is that it has managed to rely on the minimal transformation that the simple fact of having a discourse outside the habitual conditions of enunciation represents: the entire ‘mission’ of psychoanalysis having hitherto consisted in ‘extinguishing’ the diagrammatic effects of this transformation through the technique of the transference, and in pushing the discourse of the patient back into new grids of signifying redundancy. A pragmatics of collective assemblages of enunciation will therefore oscillate constantly between these two kinds of semiotic micropolitics, elaborating from them a sort of technology for the calling into question of dominant significations. Under these conditions, discourse itself could become a war machine, with the constant risk of the re-establishing of a system of signifying redundancy. Let us note that in effect, from the point of view of a transformational pragmatics, there is no fundamental difference between a war machine and diagrammatic linguistic machine, for the reason that at the level of the plane of consistency one cannot distinguish between the abstract machines that are manifested by a semiological substance of expression, and those that are manifested by the intensive traits of a more ‘material’ diagrammatic machine. Both are a part of the same kind of rhizome. Let us add that appreciating the effects of redundancy produced by a pragmatic transformation is not an unimportant objective; it is not, in effect, a matter of proposing a politics of novelty for novelty’s sake – a mimetic conversion to madness on the pretext of playing of a schizophrenic line against a paranoid line, for example! Pragmatic map-tracing assemblages intervene PRAGMATICS

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essentially at the level of the traits of matters of expression. In the last resort they are what determine the regime of coefficients of deterritorialisation, the rhythms of induction, the viscosity, the boomerang effects and so on, that are compatible with the fabrication of a body without organs (the injections of ‘caution’ so as not to bodge a body without organs). Tracking them thus doesn’t depend here on theoretical analyses but on a composition of systems of intensities. In sum, the redundancy of traits of the matter of expression relay a generative tree, a new rhizome can connect itself up and – this is perhaps the most general case – a microscopic element of a tree, a radicle, will outline the production of a new kind of local competence, whilst overcoded in a generative tree, one of the different semiotic components (perceptual, sensory, from thinking in image, speech, the socius, writing) will in any case crack. An intensive trait starts to work on its own count, a hallucinatory perception, synaesthesia, a perverse mutation, a play of images, detach themselves and in a single blow, the hegemony of the signifier is called into question.28 Generative trees, constructed according to the Chomskyan syntagmatic model, and which Jim McCawley, Jerrold Sadock, Dieter Wunderlich, etc., are trying to adapt for linguistic pragmatics,29 could thus open up and bud in all directions. A performative utterance, a promise, an order, can change the import of a situation – which is nothing to do with its signification – as a function of the appearance of a new transformation. It is obvious that a sermon does not have the same impact when it is given in the content of a transformation of conjugal, police or religious ‘power’. Saying ‘I swear’ before a judge or in a psychodramatic scene doesn’t have the same function, doesn’t involve the same kind of persona, nor the same kind of intersubjectivity. The question, then, is not only one of knowing if a pragmatic transformation intervenes at different levels – semantic, syntactic, phonological, prosodic, etc. – but of studying how it intervenes on a micropolitical plane. And in the instance that its impact is not seen, this is because the analysis has been taken to its terminal point! This attitude is exactly the inverse of linguists who seek to minimise the role of pragmatic components and only agree to take them into account when they can no longer avoid them. Here one is no longer interrogating syntax and semantics so as to detect whether they harbour pragmatic elements: one interrogates the pragmatic semiotic compositions of assemblages of enunciation so as to detect the paralysing effects of signifying redundancies. When Bukharin takes the oath, from the point of view of the militant persona that he intended to remain faithful to until his death, this ambiguity can already be sensed in the official accounts. There is every reason to think that a syntactic, phonological, analysis of his discourse would allow the effects of the transformation ‘Moscow Trial’ on his oral expression to be 174

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brought out, and the international success that this formula has experienced. (Evidently it would be absurd to consider that such transformations of power, linked to school, to the tribunal, the party, the family, can be typified once and for all, in so far as they modify the signification of a performative, for example, or to seek to extract ‘universals’ from them.) Generally acts of citizenship are considered to be the crowning point of a series that begins with a commitment to family values. Thus modes of mental organisation are staged, going from the most primitive of levels, like that of oral fixation, to the most ethereal of levels of sublimation. But in reality, things are not like that: every ‘stage’ can play a role at any time, and any one can come back on the system at a given point and blow it up. Let us repeat: no genetic finality, no general competence in a dominant adult language, will ever constitute a totalising reference for a particular performance. The objective of generative pragmatics is to determine in what way there is a coincidence between maps and what disjunctions might be utilised, what the scope of a power takeover by the signifier in a given system is, what the nature of the power formations that are plugged into the signifier S that organises and overcodes a corpus of utterances and propositions is. A repressive proposition, for example, doesn’t function in the same way when it is assembled in a molar military enunciation or in a molecular micro-fascist enunciation. Particular dialects, even idiolects, correspond to each situational rhizome. And in the case in which these are traversed by a language system, by a general grammaticality, it will always be a matter of a dominant overcoding instance functioning like Francophony in relation to the vernacular languages of the old French colonies, relayed today by new power formations.30

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PART THREE

EXAMPLE OF A PRAGMATIC COMPONENT: FACIALITY TRAITS

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14 ON FACIALITY

A particular pragmatic component (to which we will return at length), the component of faciality, seems to us to play an especially important role in the micropolitics of semiotic re-deterritorialisation, above all in a rhizome, when it is inserted between a ‘becoming sexed body’ transformation and ‘becoming a social body’. In effect, in the organisation of significant redundancies of the social order, there is always a time when the dimension of the face interposes itself so as to fix the limits between what is and what ceases to be permitted. And that is not just played out through explicitly significant faciality traits (of the ‘making eyes’ kind), but also at a much more a-signifying level: one way of talking will trigger the sentiment that one is dealing with someone who ‘really is one of us’, another that one is dealing with a stranger, even someone who is strange, bizarre, or dangerous. The territorialisation of significations works on the basis of a machine that is able to put types of accent, intonation, timbre, rhythm, etc., into play, as well as stereotypical contents. A voice is always related to a face, even when this face doesn’t show itself.1 The cornerstone of this territorialisation must, in our view, be sought in the eyes-nosemouth faceification triangle that gathers, formalises, neutralises and crushes the specific traits of other semiotic components. A certain module of faciality, with the typical intervals it tolerates, controls contents and traits of expression in their entirety. Faciality thus functions as a centre of resonance for micro-black holes that exist at the level of diverse semiotic components. As such, its politics consists in identifying and in being identified with a semiotic totalisation, the closure of which constitutes a ‘person’. This politics is fundamentally Manichean: either it is the person, for whom this face-voice is the cornerstone, or something different and, in effect, nothing. It is either completely me or nothing, As Ulysses answers: ‘it is no-one’ [personne]. The subjection of semiotics to the face is the politics of the void,

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of the referent, of figure-ground binarity, of responsibilisation, All the flows, all the objects, must be situated in relation to my personological totality, all the modes of subjectivation to my consciousness as ideal reification, as the impossible tangent of this politics of treatment by the void, the emptying out of all contents. As such, faciality ‘signifies’ nothing other than a micropolitics of semiotic closure that is translated by the necessity of permanently referring contents to dominant significations. It is a redundancy of redundancy, a redundancy to the second degree, an empty, yet territorialised, redundancy. The matter of empty significations is constituted around a face. The ultimate paradigm for the face is a ‘that’s how it is!’ expressing the semiotic seizure of power which shows that, whatever else, something will be signified, once and for all. The ‘thing’ will be situated, localised in the coordinates of diverse power formations, it will be kept in hand, it will not be allowed to take flight, escape from the dominant system of signification and come to threaten the social-semiotic order in place. To be sure, such a seizure of power cannot be separated from operations of power carried out on all the other planes, socio-economic and sexual, for example. We are placing the accent here on the faciality component that makes the signifying politics of a given power formation take body, because it is generally misunderstood or treated as secondary. But it would be worth determining its points of articulation with the components of the sexed body, and in particular, the phallic component. Schematically one might say that the face functions as the other side [l’envers] of the phallus. On its deterritorialising side, capitalist power puts the phallic function to the fore, subjecting the ensemble of affects and the contents of sexed bodies to an operational a-signifying system of the social division of the sexes – phallus/not phallus – whereas on its reterritorialising side, it presents faces that ‘personalise’ this reductionist operation, which restore minuscule territorialities to desire, either to its derisory and desperate refuge in a smile, the blinking of an eye, or to micro-bastions of power, around the repressive grimace of a father, a schoolmistress or even, and especially, the faceless superego. Reflexive consciousness must be considered to be one assemblage of enunciation amongst others, and even as a particular kind of semiotic equipment put together on the basis of a capitalist abstract machine. The idea of a pure a priori form for all formalisms, of a machine of pure empty redundancy, does not, in effect, arise from a universal mode of subjectification, but from a whole ensemble of systems of representation, social structures and productive machines, founded on an economy of decoded flows. Subjective consciential individuation can only be adjacent to the material, semiotic and social flows that participate ‘intrinsically’ in 180

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the capitalist ‘mode of production’. ‘After’ the components of faciality and phallic binarisation, those of conscientialisation thus constitute the third fundamental kind of element of the machinic montage of signifying power formations. The face, the phallus, consciousness of the self, turn around the same abstract machine for the reterritorialisation of decoded flows, which has as its function the fabrication, with the means that are available, of a feeling of appropriation, a power-over demarcating itself from a poweragainst. Therefore one cannot say that there is a consciousness of faciality, or a consciousness of the phallus. The three modalities of the same separating power that these three instances are bearers of – the typical intervals of faciality, the intentional objectification of consciousness, phallic dichotomies – do not operate on the basis, let us repeat, of universal mechanisms. If one finds them to be similar everywhere, it is because they have been standardised by power formations with a hegemonic mission. But with these powers overturned or avoided, they could equally be differentiated or follow different paths. One is not dealing here with functions like that of Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, conceived as a general matrix for the entrance of the subject into the ‘symbolic order’. There is no faciality ‘in general’ or entry into the order of faciality ‘in general’. The particular facialities with which we are dealing are linked to power formations that are themselves inseparable from the ensemble of interactions in the social field. They are particular montages of faciality that will give to the latter a more or less great importance depending on the development of the relations of force present or on the nature of the micropolitical options taken by the assemblages of enunciation concerned. The world and its faciality thus do not stop entertaining singular relations with each other. A face always inhabits a landscape as its cornerstone, to close it up on itself. Throughout the day, I pass incessantly from one faciality to another. And the faciality that dominates me at a given moment isn’t necessarily ‘mine’. Perhaps it is that of an other – and not necessarily that of another human, but equally that of an animal, a vegetable, a constellation of objects, a familiar space, an institution, the ‘a priori’ faciality of a doctor, a crazy person, a police officer, etc., for example. The same faciality could equally change its demeanour depending on whether it is oriented to a politics of the arborescent hierarchisation of semiotic components or towards their arrangement on a rhizomatic map that respects the singularity traits of each of the matters of expression, avoiding the micro-black holes of anxiety and guilt that they threaten to generate. The responsibilisation of enunciation, which occurs through the individuation of an addresser and an addressee as ‘respondents’ in the discourse that they are having (although in reality it is the discourse that ON FACIALITY

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has them) is inseparable from the power formations that effectuate it. A child who goes from one game to another incessantly, or a ‘pervert’ from one sex to another, will be considered as out of field, out of play, and will become dependent on the social formations charged with helping them. One can ascribe the fact that they don’t feel responsible for their actions, don’t identify once and for all with a role or a function, don’t capitalise the ensemble of their semiotic productions on the basis of one and the same consciousness of self, to a defect or to immaturity. But one can also consider their attitude as the consequence of an implicit refusal – perhaps in a provisional way – of the coordinates of the dominant powers. Signifying power draws its strength from its being in the position to ‘totalise’, to identify, to responsibilise the person, by mobilising libido and focusing it on making the ensemble of micro-black holes borne by the diverse semiotic components that converge on his or her life and its expression resonate. All these components are disciplined, uniformised, translateabilised, hierarchised; everything that they manifest will have to seem as if it emanated from a central point of subjectivation. As the first function of signifying conscientialisation is, furthermore, to mask the fact that there is nothing ineluctable in the triggering and linking of the operations that converge in processes of semiotic subjection, these operations will have to appear to go without saying and to participate in the order of the world. Consciousness of self and the feeling of belonging to a ‘mother tongue’ are one and the same, despite us moving incessantly from one mode of subjectivation to another, from one idiolect to another. At any moment, the politics of the dominant real, which is that of consciousness, will lead to it carrying out operations that take in hand the semiotic components that would try to regain their freedom of action. It will repel certain faciality traits, it will change the arrangement of certain others, it will impose its refrains, its icons, so as to neutralise the points of turbulence of desire. In a certain epoch, for example, it distanced or transfigured certain animal facialities of childhood, to the profit of that of the mother or the fairy, Rumpelstiltskin and Prince Charming, the father and the king, etc. But today, after the rout of territorialised assemblages and the capitalist hegemony of decoded flows, it falls to the mass media to produce ersatz ritual and totemic facialities that no ‘natural’ group is in a position to secrete through its own means. Consequently it is no longer a territory, an ethnic group but the entirety of sonorous and visual space that finds itself saturated by the standardised models of an essentially functional faciality. Let us note that this utilisation of certain facial prototypes by capitalist societies doesn’t imply that faciality can be reduced to a system of reifying icons, the support of alienating identifications. The manipulation of the imaginary by the 182

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media doesn’t just have a ‘sedative’ function, to calm and keep the drives of productive agents in place. More fundamentally, its intervention arises from a specific diagrammatic function of the capitalist mode of subjectivation. It is a matter of putting an operator of enunciation in place that is able to concentrate and miniaturise the semiotic components implied by the principal power formations. It neutralises the n animal, vegetable and cosmic eyes of the rhizomatic possible (such as they might subsist in residual territorial assemblages) so as to neutralise them. By emptying the world of the polyvocity of its contents, it installs behind each gaze an empty point, a black hole, from which a central signification will irradiate all local significations, such that nothing will be able to exist outside the mundanity of the human, nothing will be able to escape from the signifying contamination that constitutes an empty humanity as centre of the world, perpetually referring to systems of redundancy and self-enclosed hierarchies. Systems of formal equivalence that pilot and keep in hand every component, every production, every innovation in any domain whatsoever. In these conditions, no mystery point can escape from the imperialist gaze of the signifier any longer: all landscapes will be obscured by a basic faciality, which, although not necessarily being as spectacular as that of Big Brother or Idi Amin, will be no less omnipresent. Even in the extreme case of abstract painting, one will see such faciality crystallise: one will say to oneself, for example ‘Well now, here’s a painting that must be from Dewasne’s era, from the time of Denise René’s gallery . . .’ and straightaway one will be interpellated by a certain faciality of this era, emanating from the very texture of the canvas: ‘Is it really you who I knew back then, you who are claiming to “place” me, can you even be sure of having stayed the same, to intend to judge me, to assess in this way . . .’ When, on the beach at Balbec, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time gives up his first idea, which consisted in emptying all the maritime landscapes of any human presence, so as to devote himself to the passionate study of young girls ‘in bloom’2, one must not think that he is returning to a human faciality after a long period of renunciation. In fact, at no moment have the faciality systems of the dominant classes at the heart of which the Proustian semiotisation is deployed been escaped from. Here it simply changes heading: a politics of faciality-landscapeity that is too fixed, too classically literary, too romantic, too symbolist, is abandoned for another that is more virulent, that endeavours to grasp movements of desire and temporary ruptures in their ‘nascent state’3 amongst characters who are in other ways bound to the codes of society people. The procedure here, which, on the basis of the evocation of a singular trait, consists of triggering a process of semiotic germination that ON FACIALITY

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transforms the habitual coordinates of literary space, could be compared to the experience of drugs. Starting with a noise, a word, a movement, it too liberates a whole series of intensities of desire in the domain of perception and internal sensations that profoundly reorganise the ‘hierarchies’ presiding over the organisation of the everyday world.4 How does faciality succeed in functioning as a sort of key, a lock, for semiotic components as a whole? It seems that in primitive societies, it is far from playing such an important role. In effect, on the one hand it is detached by means of masks and circulates in the group without ever installing itself as universal faciality and, on the other hand, its functioning is inseparable from that of the body, with its tattoos and postures, the dancing that plays between all sorts of people and the productive and ritual activities that are at work, each appearing on its own count and according to its own rhythms. Let us try to study a bit more closely the binarisation mechanism that allows capitalist faciality to function as a diagrammatic operator of signifying semiologies. At the ‘outset’, in the context of the territorialised assemblages of a primitive, mad, infantile, or poetic enunciation, the world of contents is never homogeneous, the support polygon of signification has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. It encompasses the entire universe. To recentre the multiplicity of points of signifiance, faciality has to relate them to overcoding invariants which it will make itself the centre of. There is therefore a double movement: ●

On the one hand, the constitution of a deterritorialised facelandscape that is concentrated around a black hole as central point, of arborescence and closure, and the abstract displacement of this black hole that deploys a semiotic wall unifying the set of semiotic coordinates.

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On the other hand, the universalisation of paradigms, the accentuated arborification of their systems of organisation resulting notably in all the abstract machines being conjugated on the basis of a sort of mono-subjectivism, which finds it religious expression in monotheism (correlative to a degeneration of systems of animal abstract machines).

The black hole of faciality is in some way diffused across the totality of the semiotic screen that empty, reflexive consciousness constitutes, whilst recentring the set of significative facialities. To the extent that it contaminates all modes of semiotisation, the black hole shifts, invades the universe, and turns towards no matter what intensive point, so as to overcode it. All the points of closure, all the arborescent potentialities are conjugated, enter into 184

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resonance, and try to prohibit the rhizomatic impulses of the diverse singular traits that the semiotic components are bearers of by absorbing them in a central black hole. The constitution of a central machine of redundancies thus rests on the double phenomenon of the unification of subjective resonances and the setting into arborescence of all the local redundancies and their paradigmatic axes. Certainly the machine of consciential subjectivation, which presents itself as universal, is in fact the concrete manifestation of a particular system of power: white power, male power, adult power, heterosexual power, etc. The semiotic screen that it deploys in order to dissolve the territorial limits of an ethnic grouping – from the Indian shabono to the bar on the corner, or any other modality of the support polygon of signification – and its capacity to make all the paradigmatic systems resonate together around a central point of subjectivation, constitute the two fundamental elements of the individuated assemblages of enunciation that produce signifying substances of expression that overcode all the other matters of expression. At this ‘step’ with faciality, rhizomatic possibility has been systematically destroyed or overcoded, to the profit of an arborescent possibility. The entire order of the possible must inscribe itself on this substance of the signifier. The intensive matter of expression will no longer be able to organise itself freely in a rhizome. There are no longer n eyes in the sky or in vegetable and animal becomings, but a central eye radiating all the spatial, rhythmic, moral, etc., coordinates of the world. Thus a universal landscape is constituted on the basis of a universal face. The politics of the centring of faciality on the person, as is carried out by capitalist enunciation, uses the axis of symmetry of the triangle of faciality: eyes-nose-mouth, to which the first inter-subjective relations of the newborn baby cling, as psychologists have shown.5 It is this centralising machine of perceptual and behavioural deterritorialisation that allows the black points of subjectivation proper to each semiotic component, the diverse alienation strategies linked to them, and the diverse formations of power, to be framed. A surface for reference in general will thus be cleared by this sort of laser beam of semiotic deterritorialisation emitted by the central black hole of subjectivation, which neutralises all the rough edges of matters of expression, constituting a sort of circular white screen, multiplying the blind face-to-face double of the primary triangle of reification constituted by the ego, the other, and the object. The world, the human, and the intimate, never arise from a formal ontology or from the phenomenology of a ‘buried eideticity’, to borrow Gérard Granel’s expression.6 They are produced by concrete machines, by assemblages of semiotisation that can be historically dated ON FACIALITY

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and are localised in the social field. There is therefore no reason, in our opinion, to follow the Lacanians, when they make faciality a universal psychic instance which is triggered by the ‘mirror phase’ and behind which a ‘big Other’ would appear, as the matrix of all serial relations between the self and the other.7 It is on the basis of the singular traits of faciality that a micropolitics of desire and a social macro-politics of subjection to capitalist flows can be elaborated. To give up thinking of the subject, the object, and the other as the elementary givens of metaphysics or of the ‘mathemes of the unconscious’ does not necessarily imply a return to ‘primitive’ – magical, animist, participationist – conceptions of subjectivity. On the contrary, it is a matter of making a whole series of semiotic, economic, and political givens of the contemporary world enter into processes of enunciation, subjectivation, and conscientialisation, as essential components. The ‘objectification’, ‘subjectivisation’, and ‘otherification’ of enunciation are never given once and for all. They result from particular micropolitics in particular contexts. Their stakes concern the eyes of desire, everything in the cosmos, the socius and ‘interiority’ that can look at us, everything that means ‘it is looking at us!’ [nous regarde, also ‘concerns us’]. In the capitalist regime, all the points of flight, all the lines of desire, all the openings, the possible connections, are focused on a central point of signifiance that makes the ensemble of black holes of anxiety echo each other. All the stratifications, the segregations and inhibitions prop each other up in a politics of the generalised disempowerment of desire, of the break between productions of utterances and the singular lines of the components of expression, of the sabotaging of creative assemblages of enunciation and of the promoting of castrated subjects, empty and guilty consciences . . . The four-eye machine of the psychologists, for example, is recuperated as Collective equipment: from birth, a faciality machine is implanted in the subjectivity of the child, as the support for a certain modelling of reality, alterity and interiority based on an arborescent hierarchy of powers. But it is not [in]conceivable that another politics of faciality might appear in other micropolitical contexts.8 Whilst in primitive societies, the articulation of the subject with the cosmos and the living world is brought about on the basis of territorialised assemblages of enunciation corresponding to a collective territory of social, religious, sexual, playful, etc., activity, the ideal capitalistic subjectivity imposes a systematic deterritorialisation on the supports of expression – only to reterritorialise them on functional ersatz, such as the nuclear family, social status, etc. The multiform designs of the monotheistic god of deterritorialisation no longer converge on an ethnic group, an elect people, even his own son on the cross, or an empty point of consciousness. They converge on a sort of blank third eye which haunts the 186

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gaze of the white man of rich countries, which will extinguish all the creative powers of desire in knotting together the investments of power.9 In the continuum of movements of the face, the binarising faciality machine only retains passages to the limit, the exceeding of tolerated typical screen types. For example: ●

Beyond a certain limit too broad a smile becomes a mad grimace or insolent mockery.

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Submissiveness that is too affected becomes shifty.

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A pout that goes beyond the norm becomes a mark of contempt.

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Too old, too wrinkled, a face is frightening.

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Skin that is too dark will call foreigners to mind and will be fixed on a deviant accent.

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Additionally, one’s sex must be clearly asserted in one’s face, otherwise it will be felt to be a threat to phallocratic power.

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Etc.

In this way a universal normality is instituted that hierarchises and co-adjusts the diverse normative local activities of power formations. The signifying coordinates of a ‘normal’ world are deployed and regulated on the basis of a central faciality. Become ‘human’ as a function of a ‘normal’ faciality, the world is subjectivated on the basis of a concrete machine that coordinates the ensemble of abstract machines through a social syntax that presents its laws as arising from universal reason alone, as strictly associated with the order of things and moral good sense. There is no longer a simple warding off of rhizomatic possibility, as was the case with the territorialised assemblages of enunciation, but arborescencing, finalisation, ‘causalisation’, gridding, limiting and anticipation of everything that claims to escape from the dictatorship of signifying substance. Everything that threatens dominant faciality arises from repression. In 1968, a long-hair faciality shook the world. For a time, one might have had the impression that utterances were ‘walking on their hands’. Unthinkable propositions surged in all domains and the old self-evidence was emptied of its sense in the space of a few hours. The possibility of a new order appeared on the horizon. One no longer saw the same thing, one no longer loved in the same way, a different relationship to work, a different relationship to the environment, began to appear and a different childhood, a different homosexuality, etc., too. In ‘normal times’, that is to say at the current time, a feeling of everydayness is imposed on every perception of the world – even if one is living in a time of great suffering. And this ON FACIALITY

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everydayness is constantly modulated by the faces that come and go and manifest, in their indifference, that ‘nothing is happening’, that everything is normal. Average faciality functions like a normality indicator. One of the motives for the fascination for the ‘retro’10 occurs through the transitory disturbance of this sort of register of the everyday: ‘Well well, they found it perfectly normal to ride horses in the traffic; well, well, there were Germans, rickshaws, wooden heels . . .’ Above all else this normality is read on faces, on the gazes of the era, but also on objects, on the old wooden radio sets, in so far as they are bearers of the same faces and the same gaze. Thus everything that is played out on the body, in its posture, and so on, is recentred on the face: all faciality traits themselves are recentred on the black hole in which all signification production originates. Thus the normal landscapeity, the normal faciality, which contaminates the whole world, is itself dominated by an empty signification, a signification in itself, a general substance of expression from which no matter of expression can escape. A relatively deterritorialised system of values is thus projected over all contents and becomes immanent to every mode of semiotisation. When the Yanomami shaman ‘absorbed’ a paradigm, the risk that this might return to the sky or be blocked in a threatening animality always subsisted. Now, there is absolutely no chance that this sort of escape might occur. Regional paradigms are entirely tributary to the system of signifying arborescence deployed on the basis of a black hole of subjectivation. Territorialised assemblages of enunciation put into play a break between an inside and an outside, which separated a reassuring from a threatening possibility (only for a part of this outside to invest the inside and, inversely, for a reassuring inside to install itself outside the territory and organise its own circuits). Hence the break no longer passes between an inside and an outside, but is internal to signifying chains. The signifying break is potentially everywhere. It aims to impose its game of dominant significations everywhere. At every moment, a prototypical human face can surge up anywhere: the face of Christ in the clouds, at the heart of anxiety or in no matter what enunciation from a given era, or the face of ‘our President’ on television. An immanent faciality inhabits the world. Properly speaking there is no longer any facial alterity, as might exist in territorial assemblages which carry a specific faciality for each ethnic group, in such a way that others find themselves turned away immediately, towards the foreign, to animal becomings. An opposing value, one inhabiting the entirety of spatio-temporal coordinates, is substituted for this territorialised opposition by capitalist powers, one that opposes normal, universal faciality and dangerous, deviant faciality. No-one should ignore the law borne by the dominant faciality, all faces are in the position of being 188

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judged, of being assessed in relationship to a norm or deprecated and possibly taken control of, looked after, assisted, re-adapted or imprisoned by society.11 With all redundancies having been centralised and articulated in a universal system of signification, it falls to the power formations that are in a position to manifest the summit faciality to decide as to whether or not there is any signification, if it can pass or not. If the empty eye of power can say no, then it will be urgently necessary to mobilise the resources of all the syntagmatics and paradigmatics so as to fill, to recuperate, the lateral hole that has become manifest and which would otherwise risk emitting mutant flows on its own count, threatening the equilibrium between the complementary facialities that populate the social unconscious. Sense occurs through acquiescence to the faciality of power and circulates to infinity on the edge of the black hole of its single eye, or else it destroys itself in anxiety and is swallowed up by it. Sense or non-sense: it’s all or nothing. Such is the fundamental binary break, after which one can no longer pick oneself up again. Either it’s one of us or it isn’t – it corresponds to something or nothing – it can be said or it can’t be said – it stands up or it collapses – it’s French or it’s foreign and therefore hostile – it’s part of the family or people we don’t know. ‘Before’ faciality, there still subsisted polyvocal possibilities of approximation; ‘after’, there is the law of all or nothing. Endless discussions. Half-lies and half-truths are proscribed. The signifying break imposes its exclusive truth, its all-or-nothing truth on the basis of the feed-back system of faciality. An utterance only acquires its weight of signification, its truth value, to the extent that it latches onto the field that arises from the central oscillograph of faciality. If it deviates too much, it falls into non-sense, and a whole machinery of rectification is set to work. To function as the binary indicator of dominant values, faciality must: 1) be detached from the rest of the semiotic components; it must serve as a surface of reference onto which passages to the limit that occur elsewhere will be related, transposed, arranged, calibrated; 2) be neutralised, so as not to interfere with the components that it has to represent, coordinate, and hierarchise. In effect, if faciality set to work on its own count, as an autonomous matter of expression, everything would be lost. A ‘primitive’ polyvocity reappears, like one ‘finds’ with the grimaces, the mannerisms, of the schizophrenic, or with the ‘autistic’ child. The system of break, translateabilisation and hierarchisation that is instituted by the signifying faciality machine thus secretes a sort of political optional matter that invades not just all the possibilities to come but also reacts, in a kind of retroactive way, on ‘past possibility’. Nothing else was possible in the ON FACIALITY

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past than what submitted to signifying recording. Signifying possibility, arborescent possibility thus imposes itself definitively, to the detriment of all rhizomatic possibilisation. One is dealing here with the driving force itself of the signifying binarisation of all utterances. One can always reduce semiotic production to the moralising significations of faciality. Signifying power shakes its head and there is signification, or it says no, raises its eyebrows: there is nonsense and the set of paradigmatic equivalences has to recoil into its own system of gridding so as to find a solution to the problem posed. Thus no semiotic manifestation can escape this organised face-language machine, which is like a cyclotron around an immanent black hole making everything that happens resonate at the level of singular faces and institutional facialities. To each type of institution, each type of machine (military, religious, educational, etc.) there corresponds a dominant faciality. To consider that speech has no other function than to convey messages is, properly speaking, delusional. A language doesn’t speak on its own. It only speaks if it succeeds in assembling its propositions in the field constituted by the ensemble of power formations such as it is mediated by faciality. A discourse is always caught in a face that ‘manages’ its utterances and propositions, giving them a weight, ballasting them in relation to the dominant significations, or emptying them of their sense. Here we should return to the studies that have been made into the history of memory to show the evolution of modes of territorialisation of discourse, in particular before memory machines relayed mnemotechnic scenarios arranged in a reference space.12 The later deterritorialisation of iconic supports doubtless shifted the learning of memory onto dichotomous systems of judgement. ‘Modern’ techniques of examination through questionnaires consist less in the reciting of complex lists than in the statistical checking of the performance of a memory for judgement. What is above all else demanded of a candidate is not to be mistaken by the overall appreciation, the profile of a question, whether it rings true, whether it ‘passes’. In fact, what exams aim to select, in the last analysis, are candidates for power, more or less in conformity with the demands of the dominant system, and it is on the basis of a sort of pragmatic syntax that all the spatiotemporal and behavioural coordinates relating to other semiotic syntaxes, beginning with common grammar, find themselves centred around a faciality of power. When the Yanomami shaman missed a Hekua, which departed for its rock or into the sky, the syntax of the ritual was interrupted. With this system of universal syntax, with the infinite cross-checking of the informational gridding of the capitalist machinic assemblages, no escape of this nature is possible any longer. The signifier refers only to itself: according 190

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to Saussure’s intuition, it has become a substance that one finds everywhere and nowhere, but it is the very substance of the capitalist mode of semiotisation. The capitalist faciality machine doesn’t operate solely by global breaks, massive dichotomies, or the bipolarisation of contents that it constitutes. Its reductive binarising action bears equally on the texture of the matters of expression that are associated with it, and which it contributes to transforming into signifying substance. The hegemonic power takeover of linguistic systems founded on systems of distinctive oppositions articulated on the basis of a finite range of glossemes of expression is, in fact, the result of a long process of crushing diverse intensive systems of expression. Because of the structuring – in large measure, a-signifying – of their phonological, syntactic lexical organisation that has developed, the primacy of linearised and relatively autonomous signifying chains over the world of signified contents implies a whole prior work of semiotic subjection by power formations, and by capitalist faciality machines in particular (later on, we will, in addition, evoke the primordial role that is played in this regard by what we call ‘refrain machines’). This process results – or should result, from the ideal point of view – in no matter what expressive production submitting to a reduction, a translateabilisation in terms of quantities of information, that is to say, in the last analysis, a structured succession of automatised binary choices that can be treated exhaustively by a computer. It is certainly not a question here of claiming to keep some sort of ‘pure thought’ at a distance from the ‘ravages’ brought about by what gets called the information revolution in every domain. A humanist conception of science wrongly hangs onto the idea that some ultimate and radical division of labour between the scientist and machine reduces the possible field of intervention of informatics to the treatment of data previously elaborated by humans. Machinic semiotisation today is no less essential than that of humans. The computer, which has hitherto remained the concern of specialist technicians and developed out of a rather impoverished mathematics, is effectively on the point of being integrated into a complex of enunciation in which it will become impossible to ‘separate out’ human intervention and machinic creativity. It can now tackle certain mathematical problems that had been unsolvable through a lack of the quantitative means of semiotisation (the solution to the centuries-old four colour problem required 1,200 hours computing time to carry out the ten million calculations necessary13). And it is beginning to be capable of formulating original mathematical problems. It is therefore not in some ‘essence of human thought’ that the limit to the semiotic capacities of the machine will be found, but rather in the nature ON FACIALITY

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of the informatic language that presides over its current functioning and which results in current ‘processing’ missing the phenomena of rupture, destratification and desire – all the deterritorialisations that can only escape from the reductions of signifying binarity. It is a preoccupation of this order that leads certain biochemists today to call into question current theories concerning the origins of life, to the extent that their descriptions of evolution, which only measure situations on the basis of global parameters arising from thermodynamics or information theory, leave out essential elements of the mutational processes. Thus Jacques Nimier argues that ‘if the purely chemical evolution of a prebiotic soup is described, one cannot see where the fundamental biological categories of replication and information transfer will be introduced. If prebiotic systems are represented by means of the language of information, one cannot see a new property such as that of motricity will be made to arise on the basis of a purely mathematical treatment. More precisely, it cannot be excluded that properties can be made to appear which, at first sight, fall outside the conceptual field of the initial description, but on condition that they are explicitly looked for. So, we need an instrument that might help us see the unsuspected, because the intermediary states of organisation of matter could very easily have obeyed logics that are entirely different from the current logic of the living being.’14 In our view it will even be necessary, one day, to have done with the idea that the future can only be ‘calculated’ on the basis of the ‘tendencies’ of the past, or that the more differentiated necessarily has to depend on the less differentiated, or that productive-expressive assemblages have to be divided into superstructures that rest and depend on infrastructures. The ensemble of mechanist, finalist, idealist, dialectical, etc., conceptions of matter and history binarise the possible incessantly, close off the future through all sorts of procedures. Might they not instead seek to deploy the potentialities of the present and face up to the idea that the ‘new’ can surge up from the heart of the past? What else, in effect, are the sciences, the arts, the attempts at ‘changing life’ today doing, in their cutting edge research, if not discovering – projecting, inventing, in fact – a future, an unforeseen possibility, at the heart of the stratifications that seemed closed in on themselves for all times, petrified for all eternity? The categories of time and space, generally known as a priori and universal givens, despite the efforts of relativity, are the basic instruments that lead the capitalist mode of thought to polarise, to binarise, to ‘determinise’ its logical, scientific and political approaches. A ‘machinics’ rupturing with this mode of thinking would begin by refusing the dichotomy between semiotic and material processes, would be led, if needs be, to deploy time and causality ‘in reverse’ (this is already what happens in 192

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theoretical physics, with theories of quarks, partons or Boscovitch’s puncta), and in a more general fashion only to consider the deterritorialisations of space and time in relation to the assemblages that effectuate them. In the case of human and animal worlds, it would be a matter of de-objectifying the assemblages of semiotisation, by articulating the components that von Uexküll still divided up into Umwelt and Innerwelt, on the same rhizome.15 We repeat: faciality and refrain components do not fabricate space and time ‘in general’, but this time, this space lived in such and such an assemblage, in such and such an ecological, ethological, economic, social, political context. ‘Internal’ deterritorialisations – those that open up the eye to an internal-external world or those that put the sexual economy (once it is actively connected to other components), in a position to change the perceived world and the projects of an individual or a group – are inseparable from the ‘external’ deterritorialisations that work over the environment and history. Because this ‘external’ rhizome cannot be cut off from the internal rhizome, a desired partner could be simultaneously (or successively) a stake of power, a redundant faciality (identification), the support for certain diagrammatic faciality traits which will, by contrast, reorganise the assemblage as a whole from top to bottom, the quasiunavoidable imposition of reterritorialising refrains that reincarnate a ‘New’ self, a ‘new’ conjugality, a ‘new family’, a ‘new’ ethnic grouping, etc. Nothing is played out in advance, no vectoring between inside and outside, before and after, molar and molecular, supra and infra, can be calculated once and for all. Thus, if, for example, it is true that the machination of a gaze can appear ‘on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which look at me’ (to paraphrase Sartre in Being and Nothingness16), inversely, sightless eyes, a for-other cut off from any human Gestalt, can install itself right in the middle of the world, crack it and take possession of the reigning modes of subjectivation. This is the universe that Jean-Luc Parent explores when he describes eyes ‘on the surface of the solid SOLID matter that surrounds us’ and which are as much excavators clearing out what is before them, as ‘flying machines’, birds capable of going through the windows of the landscape (AND THE EARTH AND THE SKY NIGHT AND DAY WILL COME IN ).17 The reterritorialisations – refrains, eyes, faces, landscapes – that cover up the phenomena of resonance of black holes borne by semiotic components, cannot be classified or labelled as a function of general categories. They are only organised in the context of particular arrangements, which are proper to each type of assemblage, each of which itself escapes from any taxonomic systematisation. Not all components of an assemblage of enunciation have the same importance and the weight of one in relation to another can vary ON FACIALITY

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from one situation to the next. Certain components are organised amongst themselves so as to form constellations that will reappear in a cyclical mode (for example: sleep, wakefulness, meals, etc.). Thus they are centred and hierarchised around a point of arborescence, which in some way programs the regularity of this return of the same assemblages and the consistency of an everyday mode and a mode of subjectivation that for better or for worse is always recentred on the same self. Other components behave as ‘trouble-makers’ or rather as ‘reality-troublers’, and set themselves up at the limit of the tree of signifying implications, outline rhizomes, eluding the resonance phenomena of black holes, making certain refrains, certain faciality traits work for their own sake so as to undo the globalising redundancies of face, landscape, everydayness, and engage the energy of desire so as to make assemblages tip over, to subvert their customary functioning and connect them to one another in unforeseen constellations. For example: the ‘little phrase’ in Vinteuil’s sonata, for months a sort of linchpin for Swann’s love for Odette, but which, one day, opens itself up, reveals previously (literally) unheard of potentialities and makes this love drift towards other assemblages.18 The work of schizo-analysis will consist in particular in making the mutational components, which carry semiotic rough edges, deterritorialising point-signs that allow them to ‘pass through’ the stratifications of assemblages, a little like the ‘quantum tunnelling’ described by physicists,19 discernible. As a consequence it will thus not content itself with examining from the outside the relativity of the different points of view present, or – as the ethologists say, the ‘parallel and contradictory’ universes that coexist in the world, but will intervene actively so as to facilitate the internal mutations of assemblages and the passages from one assemblage to another. In other words, it will work flush with the trees and rhizomes that constitute assemblages of enunciation. Refrains, those crystals of time, facialities, those catalysers of space, belong at one and the same time to the trees and the rhizomes constituted by intra- and inter-assemblage relations. As concrete machines, junctions, loci for the effectuation of optional matters of all kinds, they can also move as much in the direction of conservative stratifications as in the direction of creative lines of flight. An individuated, signifying, consciential mode of subjectivation, could, for example, ‘cling’ to an animal faciality or to an obsessive contraction of time, which psychoanalysts would place in the category of phantasm or repetition compulsion. Consciousness and reason will, in sum, take the route of animality and neurosis. An oneiric or psychotic mode of subjectivation will turn out to be capable of dissolving familial and alienating facialities, of detaching certain traits from them so as to make them function in a 194

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creative, diagrammatic way – the big, life-changing decisions that one makes whilst dreaming, the grand inventions of visionary lunatics that transform the world . . . Under these conditions, a schizo-analytic cartography cannot content itself with the synchronic analysis of the components that constitute an assemblage at a given moment and polarise it towards such and such a behaviour, such and such an arborescent politics or rhizomatic connection. It will also have to initiate the diachronic marking out of the generation and transformation of assemblages. But the two analytic series will constantly intersect, the same series of questions effectively traversing them both: why does an assemblage close up and what components of semiotisation function so as to make it ‘loop’ back on itself, what black hole effects, adjacent to diverse components, resonate together or, by contrast, are resorbed and convert their metabolism into a non-arborescent line of flight; what components of non-semiotic encoding work to rupture homeostatic, intra-assemblage equilibria; at the inter-assemblage level are there closed circuits (of the train-work-bed kind) that reconstitute self-enclosed pragmatic stratifications; or, on the contrary, are there any links between assemblages that sketch out rhizomatic openings? It is only by taking into account inter-assemblage transformations that one will, to our mind, be able to make the true factors of rupture and mutation that work assemblages at the molecular scale and catalyse the ‘phase transitions’ or ‘percolations effects’ (to borrow the language of physicists) discernible, and thus be able to intervene.20 Furthermore, it is also only at this diachronic level that systems of articulation between natural encoding components and semiotic components that are very different from one another will be seen (those that come about by chemical or genetic coding, for example – linked to a reproduction assemblage, evolving through ‘selective pressure’, through ethological ‘imprinting’, programmed learning at certain ‘critical periods’, collective semiotisation, individuated and autonomous semiotisation, etc.).

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15 THE HIERARCHY OF BEHAVIOUR IN MAN AND ANIMAL

It seems that inter-assemblage relations are organised into aggregates that are all the more complex and all the more capable of adaptation and creativity for the existence of intra-assemblage relations that make deterritorialised components, specialised in transformations, in diagrammatic phase transitions appear – and not simply transcodings without any assemblage modification, that is to say, in the passage from one form to another, from one assemblage to another, through the decomposition of stratified form-substance relations. It is all this rhizomatic creativity that is systematically lacking, or lacking in the systems of information processing, signifying structuralisms, axiomatics that operate through ‘arborescent’ deductions. But before coming back to what seems to us to be their common characteristic, that is, a method of binary reduction of the specific characteristics of their components, let us examine – on the basis of examples taken from the domain of ethology – diverse modes of intra- and inter-assemblage organisation. This choice of examples will be oriented as a function of two kinds of preoccupation: 1

The concern to relativise the notion of a hierarchy of instinctive behaviours based on a hierarchy of nerve centres, such as has been developed following the work of N. Tinbergen.

2

The desire to group several suggestive markers concerning the assemblage of faciality and refrain components in the phylum of deterritorialised semiotics, and to demonstrate their position of transition between systems of reterritorialisation and diagrammatic 197

processes that produce new spatio-temporal, ecological, social coordinates, etc. In effect, it seems to us that a ‘rhizomatic’ conception of inter-assemblage relations (and not an arborescent one like that proposed by Tinbergen, with his celebrated schema1), should authorise an innovative opening up of the behavioural programming of the animal world as much as, if the case arises, a ‘determinist’ closure of that of the human world. Now, what it seems must be remembered with faciality and refrain components, is that they play in the human and animal registers precisely without having a rigid opposition between the innate and the acquired stuck onto them, without projecting a fictitious freedom onto the human or a strict determinism onto the animal. In our opinion, in the course of the ‘ethological misunderstanding’ a mechanistic coupling between inhibiting factors for a components and innate triggering mechanisms rules. All conceptions that result in arborescent descriptions of chains of behaviour rest on this basic binary operation – one that is, in addition, very close to that of the ideology secreted by information theory. In wanting to specify too positively the nature of ‘what inhibits’ or of ‘what triggers’, one ends up postulating a purposiveness, a teleological signification, or the existence of a soul to or for these chains. In effect, as they have been arbitrarily mechanised at the outset, one ends up being obliged to clamp on to them transcendent structures so as to make them function. It is always the same politics of worlds beyond or of ‘objects on high’, which only results in the reconstitution of linear causalities and in the process loses the points of singularity borne by abstract machinisms. Now one is perhaps dealing here with something similar to the action of catalysts in the domain of chemistry, the intervention of which is not linked to the chemical reactions proper to them but to the kind of molecular connections that they facilitate. What counts, in these ‘crystallisations’ of behaviour, is perhaps less the nature of such and such a – hormonal, perceptual, ecological, etc. – component, than the spatial apparatuses that determine the strategies and tactics, the linking rhythms that do or don’t succeed in being stabilised and triggered on the basis of ‘automatic’ codings, and the existence of certain deterritorialised (diagrammatic) components that establishes bridges, semiotic, transcoding exchangers, between these spaces and rhythms. This ‘machinics’, this biologico-behavioural engineering could engender chains of the ‘stigmergic’ kind (each sequence being articulated to the next without any ‘knowledge’ that would preside over the whole of a conscious project being implied), or chains that imply a semiotisation on the spot, a questioning regarding the ‘sense’ of an intentional arc, or even black hole 198

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effects, that is to say, the fact that a semiotic or ‘natural’ coding component turns around on itself emptily, issues in nothing, and no longer echoes anything except other systems of inhibition. Perhaps nothing is played out between inhibition and ‘triggering’ in an absolutely mechanical, ‘bi-univocal’ way; perhaps a rhizomatic opening always remains possible, if only at the microscopic scale, and it is always on the basis of minuscule creative lines of flight that evolution finally finds its adaptive path? Perhaps inhibiting black hole and rhizomatic connection should not be opposed, anyway. In effect, it is possible that it is precisely only from such a black hole that these minuscule lines of flight that will deterritorialise a stratified system can emerge. Perhaps it is inevitable that to be in a position to be triggered, certain innovative processes have previously to be engaged in blockages, black holes, that can only end up – outside of any ‘constructive dialectics’ – in ‘catastrophes’, in the sense given to this term by René Thom.2 (Examples: invasions, epidemics, the Hundred Years War, etc. on the eve of the great revolutions of capitalism.) And the ‘equipment’ of faciality and refrain perhaps have as their function precisely one of regulating new ‘rhythms of catastrophe’ and the unprecedented metabolisms for exiting the black holes of absolute deterritorialisation. Whatever the case may be, one comes across stases of inhibition associated with the triggering of crossroadbehaviours, which turn out additionally to be genetically programmed, everywhere in the animal kingdom. They can appear in the form of a pause, of blocked time – a sort of ‘time for comprehending’, to use Jacques Lacan’s expression – or the time of the palaver, of the festival or the sacrifice. A ‘spectacular’ example: the courting ritual of the peacock who holds the hen at a distance for a period of time through captivation: she pecks at an imaginary food at the focal point determined by the slightly tilted concavity of his black hole tail. What can be happening in that period of time? Although the existence of orgasm amongst animals is sometimes denied, isn’t that what it is a matter of here? An orgasm at a distance that attaches itself to the couple relation by means of an image and which probably triggers the hormonal components necessary to the sequences of events that follow. Biochemical causality, the survival strategies of the species, the ruses and improvisations of desire overlap each other incessantly in the same rhizome. One can only find one’s way here on condition that one determines one’s point of view, the kind of assemblage of enunciation one is seeking to account for here, at the outset. Whilst selective pressure brings to the fore and automates certain processes, it repels others, which as a consequence can only subsist in a trace state. This doesn’t in the slightest prohibit the existence of marginal assemblages which are trying to ‘find themselves’, seeking their own rules. And equally nor does it prohibit the THE HIERARCHY OF BEHAVIOUR IN MAN AND ANIMAL

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deployment of a whole economy of desire marked by the same freedom as that which characterises humans face-to-face, with the consciousness of finitude and death. It would be absurd to separate human desire radically from that of the animal, as certain structuralist psychoanalysts do, on the pretext of the privileged support of language and the Law. The ritualistic fascination of animal desire depends just as much on semiotic constraints that are adorned by ostentatious expenditure and gratuitous games. But will we find the same kind of individuated assemblage of enunciation or the same function of signifying subjectivation with the animal? Will we find the same sort of human politics of the abolition of desire, of black holes or aphanisis (to borrow Ernest Jones’s expression) amongst birds, for example? One frequently sees sudden reversals of behaviour amongst them (during fitful nuptial displays, in aggressive attitudes, rituals of submission, simulated grooming, etc.). It is as if behavioural sequences detached themselves in indivisible pieces, that have to be taken or left in their entirety, because of the ‘too’ territorialised character of their assemblage. In truth, one will find this same mode of semiotisation en bloc amongst humans – when someone, who has been interrupted accidentally whilst reciting something, has to ‘start all over again’ – but the blocs are less delimited, more open, as if they were chipped. It seems that this difference is particularly accentuated with regard to human assemblages of desire, which seem to be much more closely fitted to a certain kind of black hole impasse than with animals, one that can go as far as ‘apathy’ or even neurotic disturbances. Without even going as far as the ‘pathological’ excesses of myaesthenia, or neuroses, with their cortege of inhibitions, vertigo, somatisation, inhibition – the infinite looking backwards of the obsessive, the semiotic impasse of the phobic . . . – it is obvious that in the capitalist social field, human desire usually ceases to be a productive pause, a ‘time for comprehending’ and that its black hole micropolitics, at least on the scale of the individual condition, is well and truly stuck in a desperate contemplation of its futility.3 It is only on a much bigger scale that this heap of empty consciousnesses might succeed in launching super-deterritorialised modes of semiotisation, such as speech, writing, religious or scientific symbolism, that can create the conditions for a reversal of the situation. But in the last resort it is only on the scale of revolutionary – or perhaps one ought instead to say ‘transrevolutionary’ – collective assemblages that this excess of consciential deterritorialisation, this detachment of every thing, this de-short-circuiting of the real and of desire, can produce a new reality and a new desire. What separates the Umwelt of the animal from that of the human is thus perhaps the fact that for the latter, the diverse black holes carried by components of 200

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semiotisation resonate together more easily, because of the starting up of super-deterritorialised semiotic machines, which thus facilitate a general translateabilisation of all components – at the cost of unbearable anxiety, solitude, and guilt. Thus a central subjectivity, a grand, fascinating hollow whose focal point – unlike the peacock’s tail – is everywhere at once, like a laser beam of deterritorialisation, taking control of, hierachising,‘managing’4 all inter-assemblage relations, all residual territorialities, so as to extinguish and recuperate all possibilities in their nascent state. The animal world, with less difficulty, doubtless, avoided black hole effects and arranges them in a non-rhizomatic, arborescent way. (From this point of view, Tinbergen’s hierarchy might be considered an anthropocentric projection.) Certainly, starting from this kind of central machine of consciential subjectivation, human semiotisation seems to have multiplied its powers of intervention infinitely and to have created exceptional possibilities for human survival, through a sort of headlong flight outside the ‘usual’ evolutionary contexts. But it can just as easily be reduced to totalitarian systems of all kind, which (if nothing prevents them) tend to make the fate of industrial societies more closely approximate that of ant societies – production for production’s sake, generalised gulags, etc. We know that in general in the animal world, collective assemblages of territorialisation bring into play marking ‘techniques’ that are very different from one another – markers of smell, with excrement or special secretions, distancing, through ‘territorial song’, intimidating sexual displays, etc. Considered separately, these diverse intra-assemblage components seem only to arise from innate codings, functioning in the same way as reflexes or taxes. Anticipating an example to which we will return at length, it thus seems that the function of the highly coloured plumage of zebra finches studied by K. Immelman5 can be reduced to the inhibition of relations of proximity and to the ordering of the distribution of individuals in a given space. (In the case of the white birds of the same species, one effectively sees a collapse of this critical distance and a strengthening of groups.) But let us now examine a certain number of ‘methods’ for the deterritorialisation of inter-assemblage relations that allow us to glimpse the ‘play’ that is possible, the opening, the lines of flight, on which selective pressure will ‘bet’ (without, we repeat, any idea of progress being associated with this evolution, which can just as easily lead to a totalitarian specialisation of roles, of the sexes, of species . . .). Let’s return to an example of symbiosis made popular by Remy Chauvin, one which has been established between certain species of wasp and orchid.6 We know that in simulating a sexual act with the olfactory and morphological lure constituted by the orchid’s rostellum, pollen is freed up THE HIERARCHY OF BEHAVIOUR IN MAN AND ANIMAL

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and attaches to the wasp, which then transports it to other plants, thereby ensuring the reproduction of this species. The set of systems of transcoding that allows this back and forth between the plant and the animal kingdoms seems completely closed to any individual experimentation, any learning, any innovation. Selective pressure has retained encounters which were perhaps originally only accidental and improvised, sequences that it has succeeded in systematising, in controlling, on the basis of an abstract machinism closed on itself, stratified in the genome of the species, which ontogeny will only need to decipher and trace out mechanically. But one would be wrong, to our mind, to reduce such inter-assemblage systems to a simple ‘commonality’ of a certain quantity of information carried by the genes of each species respectively. How, then, is one to apprehend the passages between the innate and the acquired, the acquired and the experimental, between biological encoding, ecological adaptation and collective semiotisation? In fact, as we will try to demonstrate on the basis of the following examples, even (and perhaps above all) when interassemblage relations make such ‘mechanised’ encoding components intervene, they give a bit of ‘play’ to the intra-assemblage relations, they favour the appearance of new dimensions in the environment, they trigger processes of specialisation, of the ‘contraction’ of certain systems of coding or semiotisation, they create the conditions for an acceleration of deterritorialising innovations. In short, they open up new possibilities. Doubtless there is nothing to be gained by reducing the symbiosis between the wasp and the orchid to a simple linking together of two heterogeneous worlds. This encounter is certainly productive of what we have called elsewhere a ‘surplus value of code’, that is to say, a result that exceeds the simple totalisation of the codings in questions (the sexual goal of the orchid plus the feeding goal of the wasp). The new symbiotic assemblage functions as a mutant wasp-orchid species, evolving on its own count, redistributing genetic and semiotic components taken from both original species (morphological, physiological, ethological, ecological components, semiotisation of visual, olfactory, sexual lures, etc.), according to its own norms. A new evolutionary line of flight is thus created on the bio-ecological rhizome, which, moreover, finds itself hidden, gridded, by the genetic codes that limit the affection to species and phylogenetically circumscribed species. Only a constructive – one is tempted to say ‘constructivist’ – micropolitics of assemblages of desire and social assemblages, which sets out to discernabilise the deterritorialising components ‘of passage’ between assemblages or the components that are ‘predisposed’ to such a transversality function, in whatever domain that may be, of thwarting the too solid 202

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oppositions between the innate and the acquired, the biochemical and the ‘adaptive’, the individual and the social, the economic and the cultural, etc. To be sure, a destratifying transversality of this kind between behavioural assemblages is always found, to one degree or another, at every level of the animal phylum, but it is evidently easier to locate it in the most ‘evolved’ animals. Let us consider, for example, three types of social assemblage amongst baboons and vervets, which principally put sexual components and territorialisation components in the dominant position: a

An assemblage that particularly concerns the hierarchical relations internal to a group, fixing the place and the rights of dominant and marginal males, females and the young: ethologists underline the fact that the internal disputes that the functioning of this assemblage is likely to entail must be distinguished from external territorial disputes. As Eibl-Eibesfeldt, from whom we take this example, writes7 ‘disputes of a hierarchical order are not linked to territorial possession, rivals of different hierarchical ranks unite in a common action against foreign aggressors.’

b

An assemblage for the collective defence of the territory: certain male baboons act as sentries on the periphery of their group, turning their backs on them, whilst quite conspicuously displaying their highly coloured sexual organs (sometimes, when an intruder approaches, their penises become erect and rhythmically animated). But it has been observed that this collective assemblage only functions in relation to neighbouring fighters of the same species.

c

An individuated flight assemblage: in the case in which predators appear ‘each baboon is free again and flees as discretely as possible’.

The collective semiotisation of the defence of the territory is thus connected to ‘originally’ intra-assemblage sexual components and to ‘originally’ interassemblage faciality-corporeality components (the decisive role played by the fact of looking into another’s eyes as a trigger for aggression or submission, amongst monkeys). Other ‘formulae’ for other animal species demonstrate an inversion of this sex-aggression vector, in which simulated aggression becomes a component in seduction rituals. Whatever the case may be, one can already admit, against the good sense of those who only tolerate strict classifications, that the penis isn’t just related to a stratum of the organism or a reproductive function, nor is the hostile grimace solely related to a certain state of social tension and a communication function. THE HIERARCHY OF BEHAVIOUR IN MAN AND ANIMAL

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Both function as components of passage between particular assemblages – the sexual organ, in reality the image of the sexual organ, only intervenes at the level of individuated assemblages, as a sort of ‘survival discriminator’. The sexual organ and faciality ought not to be considered as part objects, in the Kleinian sense or as objects a little in the Lacanian sense, but as operators, as concrete machines for the collective and individual semiotisation of a certain exterior. They have become bridges or tunnels of deterritorialisation that articulate the assemblages of internal hierarchy, assemblages of collective defence (the external demarcation of a territory, the limit or border beyond which collective semiotisation ceases, and there is a black hole effect) and diverse individuated assemblages like those of flight. Imprinting by the image of a congener (or accidental imprinting by an intrusive faciality) during a sensitive period can only be dissociated from and opposed to the diverse modes of learning that accompany it in the context of experimental protocols that disorganise the entangling of behavioural components.8 A study that endeavoured not to crush the rhizome of socio-biological assemblages of animals would, in our opinion, make it possible to talk about ‘imprinting choices’ that coexist with ‘genetic choices’, ‘learning choices’ and ‘experimental choices’. Happily, though, ethologists have not fallen into the [trap] of most ethnologists, who divide up their ‘terrain’ into clearly separated parts (kinship relations, analysis of myths, politics, economics, etc.). And whatever the psychoanalytic temptations of some of them – in the domain of imprinting in particular, which they often compare to the ‘childhood fixations’ of Freudian psychogenesis, the idea of a signifying structuralism that would have to account for all behaviour still hasn’t made an appearance. (However, one can easily imagine an ‘interpretation’ of so-called ‘forced copulation’ amongst chimpanzees in terms of more or less repressed homosexual drives.) But in this domain the facts have not yet been submerged by theories, and complex behaviours such as submission rituals and courtship displays must be inscribed on the rhizome of innateness, imprinting, learning and individual initiatives. War and sex here still participate too heavily in a common economy of desire to be able to be separated into antagonistic drives.9 Is it really such a paradox to aim to inscribe components that arise from domains that are apparently as heterogeneous as those of: ●

the individual, with its biological rhythms, its reflexes, its conditioning, its improvisation, its dysfunctioning;

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the group, with its rituals, its collective movements, its ecological regulations, its modes of initiation and learning;

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the species, with its genetic mutations and adaptations, its demarcation techniques,10 its symbolic options, etc.

on the same ‘rhizome of choices’? Is affirming that a finality, an abstract machinism, a ‘thought’, if you wish, presides over the evolution of each branch of the animal phylum really such a paradox? Not a thought that is assembled individually, of course, but an n-dimensional thought in which everything thinks at the same time, individuals as well as groups, the ‘chemical’ as well as the ‘chromosome’, and the biosphere. Despite much methodological reluctance their conflict in the living rhizome of animal behaviour actually leads a certain number of primatologists to some ‘painful reappraisals’. To account for the facts observed, they have thus been led to hypothesise the existence of ‘altruistic behaviour’ amongst primates, a collective behaviour, which ‘implies a sacrifice in which the individual “renounces” its own opportunities to benefit in favour of those of a parent’.11 In other words, the molecular phylum of genes that moves across individuals, species, and milieus, is substituted for molar causalities, which imply individuals and clearly delimited functions. Freedom is not just freedom of the mind but also the rhizomatic play that can appear at the level of any of the components of an assemblage. There is a ‘grace’ for the nervous system or the digestive system, the existence of which is clearly perceived a contrario with tics and stomach aches! A semiotisation that has the task of generic regulation or that is automated by harmonious learning is evidently worth more than a perpetual questioning or a cascade of blockages that gnaws away at an intentional arc. ‘Machinic freedom’ begins at the moment that things which are boring or without interest can be accomplished as if ‘by themselves’ and where one can focus one’s capacities for life and for semiotisation on what moves, what creates, what changes the world and humans, that is to say, on individual or collective choices of desire, without falling into a generalised and blind automatism. The opposition between a pure individuated signifying subjectivity and a collective biologico-economic destiny that consciousness – class consciousness, for example – would have to take charge of from the outside, is not tenable: just like the opposition between freedom and innateness, it plays the game of power formations, which use it in order to select creative assemblages. Neither the absolute deterritorialisation of pure consciousness of self, nor the automatism of an ant society, freedom consists in playing and thwarting the quanta of deterritorialisation – refrains, faciality, etc. – borne by the ensemble of components of an assemblage, whether they are material or desiring, individual or group, public or private. And the fact that the obsessive cautiousness of researchers, who above all THE HIERARCHY OF BEHAVIOUR IN MAN AND ANIMAL

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else are concerned about falling into paradoxes that lead them to confuse ‘mind’ and ‘matter’, only drags along with it old dogmatic conflicts, ought not to mask the entirely actual political stakes of themes that they refuse to call into question and which we have previously evoked with regard to the false dilemmas between centralism and spontaneity, superstructure and infrastructure, public life and home life, conscious thought for the other and private unconscious. Because no struggle for freedom can be conceived today that does not engage the socius and the private realm at the same time, the ‘mental’ and the body, the economic and unexchangeable desire, the unconscious and deliberate programming . . .

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16 THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

For a certain number of species of birds (passerines, palmipeds, waders), the presentation of a blade of grass (or of straw or moss) to the female by the male during courtship rituals, as a tribute seems to play a specific role in the linking of behavioural sequences. For example: the male zebra finch first sings and dances so as to attract the attention of the female, he perches on a branch and whilst balancing on it, brandishes a blade of grass in his beak. Then he imitates the characteristic position of the young of this species seeking food, tipping his head to one side, seeming to offer the blade of grass but without letting go of it.1 This use of the grass stem index, which seems to entail no improvisation is especially interesting to us to the extent that it could be related to the functioning of human faciality traits such as those described by ethologists with regard to ‘flirting behaviour’ and ‘welcoming behaviour’. It is a matter of rapid imitations, the encoding of which is probably hereditary and the details of which can only be detected by slow-motion filming. In particular they include imperceptible phases of eyebrow raising and widening of the eyes, which last no more than two- to three-tenths of a second.2 The birds’ grass stem ritual evidently doesn’t put the same components of expression into play as flirtation and welcoming rituals amongst humans, and we should perhaps talk of silhouetting traits instead of faciality traits. The difference matters, because unlike what has happened with humans, there has not been any deterritorialisation of a face, that is to say, a surface of inscription, in relation to the snout of the animal in the case of birds, on which gestural, postural, sonorous traits of expression as a whole would reverberate, be concentrated, articulated and hierarchised, by way of the anatomic freeing up of the lips, the particular development of facial muscles, correlative to that of the phonatory apparatus. The ‘comparison’ must not be made here to the detriment of the analysis of the 207

specific traits of each assemblage. It would be relatively easy to interpret the bird’s grass stem and the faciality traits of the human on the basis of the same psychoanalytic algorithms: phallus, unary trait, bar of castration (without mentioning part and transitional objects, which are now a bit out of fashion!). It is by ‘examining’ the differences, that is to say, by really doing analysis (contrary to what psychoanalysts claim to do with their stereotypical interpretations) that one will perhaps succeed in making the existence of abstract machinisms that are not common – since unlike ‘complexes’ they cannot belong to anyone – appear, which participate in the same deterritorialising processes, the same adaptive headlong flight, the same kinds of semiotic solutions . . . By starting from some phylogenetic landmarks, we will therefore try to grasp the ‘machinic sense’3 of the functional evolution of this grass stem ritual. Ethologists explain to us that it is a matter of an archaic ‘residue’ that is related to nesting behaviour. This does not imply that it might be reduced to a simple function of representation, stimulus, or reflex trigger. Rather than talking of signs here we would like to talk of a concrete machine (a machinic index or diagrammatic operator) that participates in machinic assemblages without necessarily referring to the hierarchised systems of the reflex arc, to a signifying structure or even to a manifest assemblage of enunciation. What has to be accounted for here is thus not the application of a universal topics that would have to ‘localise’ contingent singularities, but a ‘machinics’ which brings into play components that are very different from one another (hereditary, acquired, improvised . . .) and which has crystallised in a mode that is irreducible to any general formula. Perhaps it will be objected that we are displacing the problem of ‘universals’, by ourselves postulating a universal deterritorialisation instead of an order of rational progress. But the difference resides in the fact that this deterritorialisation doesn’t have any order ‘in general’ and doesn’t participate in a progress that is inscribed in the order of things.4 The semiotics of the grass stem results from the ‘refining’ of a deterritorialisation, a territorialised nesting behaviour. We will see that this local deterritorialisation has as its ‘consequence’ a change in the abstract formula that articulates the semiotisation of territory and that of sexuality. But this mutation doesn’t as such involve any ‘political’ progress for the species or a liberation of individual desire. Abstraction and dialectical determination always remain coupled with semiotic unevenness, archaisms, stratifications that result from interactions between phylogeny and ontogeny, ecological and historical ‘Accidents’ that specify them, without irreversibly attaching them to a context or to an evolution that is fixed once and for all. 208

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This is the case, in particular, with what we might call the ‘abstract machine’ moving-towards-more-sociability. For certain number of species, the fact that it seems to involve the deterritorialisation of a series of components – as the following examples will suggest for finches – doesn’t automatically imply that they are linked to an idea of ‘progress’. Not that it might be necessary to give up on estimating the progress of inter-assemblage transformations, with all the risks that involves. But it doesn’t entail any univocal relation with one formula rather than another. If it exists, it is at the overall level of a rhizomatic process. It is political, not normative: in other words, it doesn’t arise from transcendental characteristics (example: individual freedom, which is manifestly lacking amongst ants), but it must be evaluated as a function of the rhizomatic expansion of assemblages, their lines of flight, their lines of creation, the elegance of their solutions – to talk in the way mathematicians do – and since we are not concerned to avoid the accusation that we are irresponsible idealists, why not also add that it must be evaluated as the function of a grace and a beauty to which it isn’t just human eyes that are sensible? The semiotics of the grass stem amongst birds, like that of faciality amongst humans, doesn’t just have a function of representing, triggering or inhibiting. With other less ‘spectacular’ components of the rhizome of assemblages (investments that are hormonal – which we will come back to with regard to the refrain – emotional, perceptual and also ‘political’ at the level of the territory and the species), it works directly at the production of a style of life, at the semiotisation of a world. To try to illustrate the nonrepresentational, a-signifying, diagrammatic character of this particular kind of semiotic component, we will now review two series of examples: the first taken from some very different species of birds, the second from among the variants of a very old species of chaffinch. However superficial our inventory may be, it should allow us to set out some hypotheses concerning the ‘machinic sense’ of this semiotics of the grass stem, which is to say that the deterritorialisation of the nesting behaviour into a symbolic ritual seems to be correlated with two other series of deterritorialisations, concerning: ●

the mode of semiotisation of territory amongst the most ‘evolved’ species, which tends to open up to a development of gregariousness and an intensification of social life;

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the specific refrain function, which also tends to become less ‘territorial’ and to place itself at the service of more intimist assemblages, like those of courtship rituals, or even to give rise to solitary improvisations for ‘the pleasure of it’. On the one hand, then, the opening up to the socius, and on the other, to the individual. THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

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First series In the mating season, the male grebe – a species of palmiped living in small groups, which nonetheless have a very strict conception of territorial defence – constructs a floating nest with the collaboration of a female. Throughout this activity, the courtship ceremony is punctuated by face-to-face intimidation, simulated grooming and the offering of bits of vegetation. The fact that this last form of behaviour is not ‘yet’ ritualised could be brought into relation with the relatively poorly developed sociability of this species.5 One finds a giving ritual that is already much more complicated amongst grey herons, a wader that lives in small colonies (although certain herons can boast up to one hundred nests) and coexists with sparrows as well as falcons and kites, without any problem. A spot for a nest having been chosen – already constructed or not – once a female has started to take an interest in the cries, the bobbing, the inclining of the neck, the ruffling of the male’s feathers, the latter stops his attempts at seduction so as to invite his partner to effectively participate in making the nest. To do this he holds out branches that she will place on the nest as it is being constructed: but any kind of sudden gesture or clumsiness can call everything into question and bring them to blows.6 One thus remains closer to reality than symbol here, and the conjugal assemblage (let us note in passing, so as to illustrate our previous remarks on this subject) has not yet been completely set on ‘genetic rails’: conjunctural tactics, improvisations on the fly can be associated here with innate codings and genetically conditioned learning. These last two examples seem already to indicate to us certain correlations between, on the one hand: ●

assemblages that open up the Umwelt of the male to the female (courtship ritual);

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assemblages that demarcate a territory for a couple and furnish a protected space for their young;

And on the other hand: ●

the territorialisation of the machinic indices of the grass stem offering; and

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a certain ‘disposition’ towards gregariousness.

With the Troglodytidae, the wren family, which constitutes one of the least sociable of the sparrows (although when it is very cold a dozen of them will gather together to keep warm), the activity of demarcating a territory brings 210

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into play what Paul Geroudet calls a ‘music box refrain’, that is to say a highly formulaic chant, aimed as a constant warning to possible intruders. After having taken possession of his territory, the male builds up to a dozen nests. When a female arrives in the vicinity, he lowers the intensity of his song, which is then reduced to a mere trill. ‘He goes to a high point in front of one of his nests, sings and puffs himself up, lets his outspread wings hang and shakes his outstretched tail, then returns to his nest, and sings whilst looking out from it, leaves and returns several times in a row. The invitation is clear: if the female consents, she answers with a little cry, bobbing jerkily several times, and finishes by inspecting the nest.’7 It was necessary to cite Paul Geroudet’s description here in its entirety to shows the richness of the semiotic interactions of this courtship assemblage, which, it will have been noticed, doesn’t include a grass stem component. We haven’t ‘yet’ arrived at the mimicking of the building of a nest, but only at the presentation of a nest that has already been built. The courtship and territorialisation assemblages remain autonomous of one another. But what it seems we must retain from this example is the role of the passage component of the refrain, and this for two reasons. In effect, we see here that it participates in two successive functions and in so doing perhaps ‘announces’ a supplementary degree of deterritorialisation that leads to a more pronounced autonomisation of the vocal semiotic and to its more individuated subjective internalisation.

Second series: the Australian finch In a general fashion the chaffinch is considered to occupy a special place in the finch family. They bring together species that are relatively the most ‘territorial’ in this family. Unlike other finches – canaries, bullfinches, etc. – chaffinches only live in groups for a part of the year: during mating the territorialisation component becomes autonomous and dominates the sociability component. Curiously, it seems that the male chaffinch defends his territory all the more ferociously for abandoning himself to limitless gregariousness outside of this assemblage of sexual territorialisation. The Australian finches studied by K. Immelman and M.F. Hall allow the evolution of the grass stem ritual to be followed across vestigial behaviours that are fixed amongst a whole range of species and constitute in some way a series of ‘living fossils’: ●

Males of the genus Bathilda and Aejintha cannot court females without actually having a piece of straw in their beak. But by contrast they only mimic the construction of the nest. THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

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Same scenario for the genus Neochmia, but the male uses a material that is different to what he will use when building the nest. The semiotisation of the grass stem has therefore become autonomous.

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The male of the genus Aidemosyne only uses a grass stem in the initial phases of the courtship.

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With the genus Lonchura it is only prior to deciding to court that a grass stem is sometimes carried.

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The male of the genus Emblema only pecks at grass stems but doesn’t use them.

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Courtship with grass stems only occasionally appears amongst the genus Poephila, especially young males.

What particularly interests us about the evolution of Australian finches is that parallel to a deterritorialisation that makes the grass stem more and more symbolic, even ending up in its disappearance, one witnesses the emergence of a new kind of refrain. Thus the phylogenetic articulation of the visual semiotics of the grass stem with the sonorous semiotisation of the courtship refrain is indicated. In this regard, Eibl-Eibesfeldt writes that ‘[c]arting nesting material for nest building evolved into the male courtship actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in some species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which originally served the function of staking out territories, also underwent a change in function. These animals are gregarious and hardly territorial. Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing softly while sitting next to the females.’8 In the previous chapter we insisted on the fact that the ‘matters of expression’ put to work by the assemblages did not simply play the role of something that ‘fills’ semiotic forms or the ‘channel’ of transmission, in the information theoretical sense. They participate actively, according to all sorts of modalities, in modelling, in catalyses, ‘choices of rhythms’, stratifications, lines of flight . . . They are ‘inhabited’ by abstract machines that ‘opt for’ one connection rather than another. In short, when we talk about the components of an assemblage, what is in play is not just forms and quantities of information or differentiations, but also irreducible material traits such as the ‘viscosity’ of a transmission channel, the rhythms, inertia, the black holes that are proper to a biological, social, or machinic stratum, etc. As soon as one tries to take the point of view of machinic assemblages, of formative assemblages, the brute opposition formamorphous matter has to be abandoned to the profit of a deterritorialisation that works forms as well as matter, deterritorialising forms and deforming 212

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matters. Certainly one can always account for the quantity of movement and the translation of forms on the basis of ‘purified’ spatio-temporal coordinates. But taking into consideration the intensity, the mutations, of regimes of deterritorialisation implies the intervention of other ‘existential’ coordinates, which one might call the coordinates of substance. What characterises components of passage like faciality and refrains is that they work within both norm and deterritorialisation: that is how they allow for the passage from one assemblage to another. They do not belong to space and time ‘in general’, they effectuate particular spaces and times. Let’s go back to our last examples concerning bird silhouetting traits and refrains: because of the ‘material’ characteristics that are proper to them, one can see that these components, which nevertheless sometimes have the same sort of function – in courtship rituals, for example – do not entertain the same kind of relationship with the deterritorialisation that traverses them both. Silhouetting traits are, in some way, ‘carried off ’ by a phylogenetic deterritorialisation that bears on nesting behaviours and grass stem rituals, and they subsequently tend to efface themselves to the profit of an indexical semiotisation which is integrated into other semiotic components (dance, posture, etc.). In sum, the effect of deterritorialisation is to dissolve them as an autonomous assemblage, an assemblage that was, at the outset, rather plastic, ‘sticking’ to the territorialities of the species that it concerned, thus putting into play highly heterogeneous (morphological, iconic, mimetic, postural, etc.) components, highly varied ‘tools’ and procedures (grass stems, twigs, mosses, fish, etc.).9 The situation is very different with the birdsong component. It is also ‘originally’ territorial but the more it is deterritorialised, the more refined, specialised and autonomous it becomes. It ends up playing a very particular role in processes of evolutionary selection, as it can be considered that amongst certain sparrows, for example, the consequence of the existence of different ‘dialects’ has been an ‘ethological isolation’ of different populations and the division of certain species.10 Besides articulating intra-species refrains – centred on the territory or on courtship, the ‘catalytic’ behavioural function of birdsong can also return in a much less specific system of warning cries. When birds of prey hover over them, for example, finches will emit cries that resembles those of other species of bird, trait for trait, who will, if they are in the area will not fail to make use of the information. The triggering of these relatively undifferentiated cries is highly progressive and it seems ‘conceived’ in such a way as not to allow the bird of prey to establish binaural comparisons helping it to locate the birds emitting the cries. The latter’s territorial song or courtship song, which are different for each species, because of the sharp variations of frequency that they put THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

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into play, are by contrast, easy to localise. The singing of the finches can thus play in two registers: one of alarm and territorial scrambling or of specification and localisation. But it also allows for combinations that make of it a sort of a-signifying language. But the song components can also enter much more elaborate rhizomatic combinations, which tend to function as a sort of signifying behavioural language. We have seen that in passing from territorial to courting behaviour, the wren could inflect its refrain – a lowering of intensity, reduction to a trill – this change of direction constituting a signalling and triggering system at the heart of the same component. We have also seen – in the phylogenetic order, this time – the refrain being substituted for the grass stem system amongst Australian finches. It thus seems that the most deterritorialised component – here that of the song – tends to impose itself at the heart of the rhizome of assemblages. Tinbergen’s description of the courtship behaviour of the albatross, the highly complex scenario of which is as if ‘crowned’ by a song component, seems to confirm this.11 Or equally that of Lorenz, for grey geese, where one also finds this same sort of ‘victory cry’ at the conclusion of their courtship ritual, marking the neutralisation of aggressive assemblages and the establishment of a ‘defence community’ at the level of the couple.12 The ritualisation of a behavioural assemblage is not synonymous with automation. A semiotisation can become machinic without for all that being mechanical. And all sorts of approximations, variants, lines of flight, black holes, always remain possible. We have evoked the [examens rates] of the wrens and the domestic scenes of storks but gratuitous acts such as the imitation of the song of the buzzard by the blue tit13 or the incredible chattering of the excited starling caricaturing – in the absence of a real talent for mimicry – the blackbird, the oriole, and even farmyard animals.14 Without mentioning the well-known exhibitionism of the nightingale, which leads to it taking the risk of exposing itself 5 or 6 metres from the ground so as to be sure its extraordinary vocal performance has the maximum impact.15 But nor is this ritualisation synonymous with a release of or a break with more ‘determinist’ components, even in the case in which superdeterritorialised components like that of birdsong are brought to the fore (and for humans, that of speech and religious rituals). Let us borrow a few more examples from ethology to illustrate this dependency, or rather this system of rhizomatic interrelations between components. Let’s come back to our first example, the zebra finch, who, it will be recalled, combined a ‘grass stem’ component and a ‘return to childhood’ component in its courtship ritual. To assemble its territory, it also uses two other semiotic components, to keep other males at a distance: one that is visual – highly 214

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coloured plumage,16 and one that is sonorous – a stereotyped refrain. Young zebra finches acquire this refrain by learning with their congeners. But if one amongst them is raised in a family of white-rumped munia (known in aviculture as the striated finch), it will learn the song of its foster father.17 Let us note that this learning is carried out during what is called a ‘sensitive’ period, long before the young bird is in a position to sing effectively. One must therefore distinguish between a purely auditory phase of semiotisation (through imprinting) and a phase of active phonic semiotisation. Additionally, ‘behind’ these two components biological components of an entirely different kind appear, as is shown by the fact that a female zebra finch, who doesn’t ‘normally’ have a territorial song, acquires one when given male sexual hormones. Obviously, she only reproduces the song of the species with which she has been imprinted during the thirty-five day ‘sensitive period’ of her life.18 That a component like the refrain is more deterritorialised than the others doesn’t in the least imply that it has taken its distance from more ‘determinist’ components like those of learning, imprinting, or endocrine transformations. And perhaps one is justified in expecting that the more a component is deterritorialised, the more closely it ‘meshes’ with more molecular components of behaviour and life itself. There is no doubt, for example, that for man, linguistic semiotics, in parallel with their magic conjuration function and of social subjection, have assembled a ‘omnipotence’ over his behaviour, his environment and numerous living species, of a new kind for him. And the supplementary degrees of deterritorialisation that the successive phases of deterritorialisation that the taking off of a ‘mecanosphere’ from the biological, linguistic and social order represent have taken on such an importance that without them, the survival of man would be inconceivable. (On a biological plane in particular, industrial man only ‘maintains himself ’ by his capacity to discernabilise, semiotise, to artificially diagrammatise the pathological agents that threaten him.) But how are things at the relatively elementary level we placed ourselves at, with a semiotic component like that of refrains amongst birds? We cannot insist enough on the fact that even in such a domain the relations that are established between biological and semiotic components do not function in one direction only. One can better understand the complexity of this kind of relation by examining a graph such as that proposed by R. Hinde19 to describe the interactions between different factors that intervene in the reproductive cycle of the canary, which put into play: ●

physical components such as the length of the day and the degree of light;

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biological and morphological component, production of hormones, growth of the gonads, development of the brood patch and oviduct;

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perceptual components, iconic stimuli emitted by the image of the male and his changes of posture;

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behavioural assemblages that are individuated such as egg laying, and social, such as courtship, nesting, etc.

In four points, the author thus makes explicit the ‘principles’ that regulate incontestably rhizomatic relations: 1

The causes and consequences of sexual behaviour are strictly linked to those of nest construction and one cannot consider them separately.

2

External stimuli (the male, the nest) create endocrine modifications the effects of which are added to these factors.

3

Hormone production is governed by diverse checks.

4

Hormones have multiple effects.

The traits of matters of expression The distinctions that we have been led to establish within behavioural rhizomes, between assemblages of semiotisation and semiotic or coding components, are entirely relative and do not imply any priority of one over another, no a priori hierarchy. Certain assemblages can be stratified, automated and ranked as components in another assemblage, whilst certain components can start to ‘bud’ and to produce new assemblages. In addition, certain hyper-stratifications can entail zones of semiotic collapse, black holes which, in turn, will generate super-deterritorialised lines of flight (example: the explosion of ‘Eternal Russia’ between 1905 and 1917). The connections between assemblages and the components of a rhizome thus do not necessarily respect the existence of layers that would be staged in a pre-established order – the order of deterritorialisations between the ‘physical’, ‘chemical’, ‘biological’ and ‘semiotic’ . . . There are certain ‘transversals’ that thus connect the ‘more social’ to the ‘more biological’ or to the ‘more ecological’ in the animal order. But isn’t this rhizomatic organisation ‘doubled’ by a less visible hierarchy which, this time, no longer concerns the assemblages and components, but the very texture of these latter, what (following glossematicians) we have called the traits of matters 216

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of expression and of coding? In this regard, one might consider that social faciality, which we have classified amongst Collective micro-equipment and to which it pertains to manifest the demarcations of power between the ‘acceptable’ and the ‘licit’ and which is charged with globally memorising the ‘graphs’ of binary choice borne by the dominant significations,20 in fact rests on the innate faciality traits that ethologists are currently studying.21 In another order of ideas, one might consider that the two kinds of memory that have been brought to light by psycho-physiologists – short-term memory, which capitalises information for a period of a few tenths of a second, and long-term memory – are entirely tributary to sensory memory, which retains information for two-tenths to three-tenths of a second. But to what extent does this molecular memory not also depend on the more molar memories, which seem to rely on them? The scientistic refusal to admit that the most deterritorialised of existents, such as faciality, refrains, ideational processes, abstract machines, are also just as real, just as closely ‘meshed’ with reality as the visibly material processes results in an a priori privileging of systems of linear causality and dualisms that go from the chemical towards life, from matter towards mind, etc. If they have any reality at all, one certainly cannot doubt that faciality and refrain components have something to do with the brain. One could even ‘localise’ them in an approximate way, along with other, globally visual and tactile memory components, in the left anterior part of the temporal lobe, in ‘opposition’ to the discursive memory components that intervene in language, ‘localised’ in the right-hand side of this same lobe.22 But, on the other hand, the inverse hypothesis, that faciality components, musical components can also intervene in the body, modify the brain, transform metabolisms would appear rather unscientific. And yet it is probably in this direction that ethological research will lead when it has finished with its infantile disorders (taxinomism, reflexologism, behaviourism, vitalism, etc.). We always come back to this same question: what makes assemblages and their heterogeneous components hold together? A transcendent hierarchy of spatio-temporal forms, a propping of physico-chemical effects, or the contingent montage of certain components which ‘take on’ specialised transcoding and deterritorialising functions (which we have been calling ‘components of passage’ or ‘diagrammatic components’)? In the background to the problem of the refrain, another problem, that of the synchronisation of biological rhythms is posed, which before resulting in a new science – chronobiology – has given rise to innumerable metaphysical developments. One of the founders of graphology, for example, Ludwig Klages, had been led to oppose a vital rhythm to more cultural cadences. He considered that the human alone was able to assemble THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

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elementary rhythms in free spatial and temporal cadences. ‘Life’, he wrote, ‘is expressed in rhythm: Mind, by contrast, forces the rhythmic impulse of life to bend to its law, by means of metric cadence.’23 But rather seeking to ‘attach’ trans-rhythmicity to mind and to culture, chronobiology endeavours, on the contrary, to derive it from a rhythmic composition with a molecular base. Thus it currently considers that circadian rhythms24 result from a generalised coupling of what A. Reinberg calls a population of molecular oscillators, with an inhibiting effect.25 It is interesting to find here the same method of research into ‘molecular packs’ as we have signalled with regards to memory. This ‘logic of packs’ certainly ought to help us escape from formal categories such as Life, Mind, Matter, but will it for all that allow us to progress with a problem such as that posed by Klages with regard to the articulation between vital rhythms and more complex ‘cadences’? The fact that heterogeneous systems are ‘traversed’ by the same kind of molecular element – infra-biological molecular rhythms, for example – indicates to us that between them there exist systems of articulation ‘from the inside’, as it were, but it doesn’t succeed in enlightening us on what makes qualitative differences crystallise at a molar level, or on what characterises the functioning of what we have called components of passage. To illustrate this kind of difficulty, one last example from the ethology of birds. In the course of his study of the chaffinch refrain, W.H. Thorpe has been led to distinguish two types of rhythmic and melodic level in its internal organisation: one which concerns a certain ‘finish’ in its structure, which allows the song to be differentiated into three strophes, and to be articulated according to a given order (true song).26 But as we will see, this distinction is far from intersecting with that of Klages, between elementary vital rhythms and socialised cadences! In effect, the basic material here is already highly elaborated on the ‘musical’ plane and it is, in addition, impossible to clearly distinguish between what would arise from hereditary programming and what would arise from social programming. Raised in isolation, young finches spontaneously discover the number and length of the basic syllables, but they also have available to them a sort of ‘recipe’ for learning or, more precisely, as Thorpe emphasises, selecting the melodies that they have to imitate. (If one gives them several different song recordings during their sensitive period, they will retain ‘those which, by the quality of tone and the form of the strophes, resemble the typical song of their species’.) Let us also signal that one part is also left for improvisation and competition, since, as W.H. Thorpe remarks, the details of the final phrase, with their fioritura, are apparently not learned, but ‘worked’ with other members of the group (‘worked out by competitive singing’). The diagrammatism of codings is 218

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manifested here by this constant entangling of heredity, learning, experimentation, and improvisation. And by means of this example, one may notice that what ‘passes’ from one domain to the other, are not just the basic materials or universal schema, but highly differentiated forms, sorts of singular keys for opening and closing a territory or a species, which we have proposed calling abstract machines. It shows us that the stage of an analytic, quantitative and statistical study of basic elements – of rhythm or faciality, for example – ought necessarily to be followed by a more qualitative stage, of the specification of assemblages and, correlatively, of the definition of machinic ‘procedures’ resulting in changes of form and mutations of structure. Having brought to light the back and forth of packs of molecules and signs that link together a set of chemical, biological, ecological, technical, economic components on the same machinic phylum, it remains for molecular analysis to determine the paths by means of which a living and social thing selects, assembles, and normatises the circuits and rhythms of these packs. But if it is true that the essence of the living being ‘sticks’ at one and the same time to ‘matter’ and to the ‘semiotic’, it will then necessarily be from the first moment – of the homogenisation of intensive molecular fields – that the question of the ‘reconstitution’ of spatio-temporal localisations, totalisations and stratifications will be posed. If the ‘molecular machine’ does not wish to crush and reduce all the material and semiotic rough edges in an undifferentiated continuum (the Cartesian res extensa27) parallel to the rhizomatic connections of flows and the generalised intersection of assemblages, it will have in effect to bring to light the kind of interaction that ensures that ‘there will be’ assemblage. We rediscover here a problem that is similar to the one that we evoked in the second part of this book, when we were led to relativise the distinction between ‘generations’ and ‘transformations’ in the semiotic domain, because in the last analysis it is indeed a question of the same micropolitical ‘optional matter’ it is a question of. One might even consider that the semiotic relation transformation/ generation is only a particular case of the molecular/molar relation that is established at the level of the ensemble of what we have called ‘machinic propositions’. Interactions between the molar and the molecular are constant but they result from assemblages that in certain cases majorise the ‘power’ of visible passage components to the molar state and, in other cases, ‘invisible’ molecular processes. Whatever the structuralist efforts to overcome the ancient separation between the psychic and the somatic might be (from Goldstein’s ‘structure of the organism’, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘structure of behaviour’ to Lacan’s ‘symbolic structure’ . . .), and to articulate what von Weizsaecker called the THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

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‘ontic’ and the ‘pathic’ in life, might be, they have been given ‘weight’ by the epistemological models of classical physics.28 They have considered that maintaining and even accentuating an opposition between, on the one hand the laws of matter and on the other, those of life, the mind and the socius, goes without saying. As material assemblages, assemblages of biological encoding, assemblages of enunciation, propositional assemblages, etc., constitute phenomenally distinct worlds, they have refused to venture into what for them would only have been a return to an outdated metaphysics, that is to say, the exploration of the ‘machinics’ that crosses through all these ‘regions’ of experience. Every system of enclosure, of the looping back onto themselves of physico-chemical laws and causalities in parallel prohibits any genuine opening up of the organism, the socius or the signifier onto reality. To our mind that is where the fundamental impotence of structuralist theories and their political responsibility resides: they accept much too easily the stratifications that they come up against in the order of components of material, biological, and social encodings. There is no escaping the primacy of a subjectivisation and an assemblage of enunciation that is based on a transcendental cogito with them. But once the principle of an exceptional existential status has been accorded to this kind of subjectivity, it is subsequently not surprising that no inter-component diagrammatic connection can be established without being haunted by it in one way or another. The Subject, Form, Structure, the Signifier relay each other in contemporary thought, so as to resist an inanimate matter which has, in any case, become imaginary in relation to effective scientific research. By means of the celebrated formula ‘a signifier represents the subject for another signifier’, the hegemony of the Lacanian signifier tends to make subjectivity proliferate universally. But not no matter what subjectivity, only that of individuated enunciation, of signifying centring, of power over the self – the myth of mastery by symbolic castration, the subjectivity, in fact, which serves as a relay for capitalist power formations and their tentacular network of collective equipments. Now, the subject, we repeat, is evidently not something that exists solely where there are autonomous individuals, conscious language, a responsible discursivity . . . Precisely, it will be objected, psychoanalysis has clearly seen that the subject did not coincide with consciousness or with the exercise of responsible discursivity. But to make unconscious subjectivity, which it is additionally claimed is being liberated, essentially depend on speech and the field of language, really does mutilate it.29 There is subjectivity in the group – whether territorialised or not, there is subjectivity in the economy, at the stock exchange, for example, in politics, in factories. There are also subjectivation functions that are deployed in living matter and in machines, 220

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with or without human hands, with or without a cogito. And of course, it is not a matter each time of the same subject, who would miraculously make messages, decisions and laws pass from one component to another. A little subject in my head, like a minuscule manager on the top floor of a building! Processes of subjectivation correspond to complex assemblages, knots of deterritorialisation that associate heterogeneous components – and thus never a pure and universal signifying substance opposed to a no less pure and universal matter of content. The serial production and massive exporting of the white, conscious, adult, male subject, master of himself and of the universe, has always had as its correlate the chasing away of intensive multiplicities which essentially escape any centring, any arborescence. But once one has decided to abandon the model of the cogito or its derivatives as the implicit reference of assemblages of semiotisation, it becomes possible to discern the real play of the machinic indices, lines of deterritorialisation, abstract machine, the infinite diversity of modes of subjectivation, reflexivity, and discursivity.30 It ceases to be surprising that molecular packs and populations ‘claim’ to machine a creative order at their own level. We must constantly guard against our conceptual instruments starting to function as simple blades that binarise objects and ‘arborise’ problems. Let us insist once again on the fact that the ‘molar’ must not be opposed here to the ‘molecular’ as the bigger and more passive would be opposed to the smaller and more active. There is a passive molar faciality – that of the imago and psychoanalytic identification – and an active molar faciality – that of schizo-analytic faciality traits. There is a ‘mechanical’ molecular faciality – that of ethology – and a molecular faciality that transmutes the coordinates of perception and desire – as described by Proust, for example, with the ten faces of Albertine, which get successively closer to the narrator, at the moment of their first kiss. But one can also pass from one component to another so as to safeguard an assemblage – further on we will examine the to and fro of Swann from a refrain to a faciality, for example. Besides, there are direct interactions, on ‘this side’ of closed assemblages and substantialised components, at the level of matters of expression. Thus whilst one can have the impression of remaining ‘in place’, of being established with a signification, a solid system of redundancies, one can be torn between warring components. This is what is shown by the results of English researchers into the interferences between auditory and faciality components in spoken language, which they have brought to light by modifying a message read on someone’s lips in relation to what is given to be heard.31 In effect, encoding components and semiotic components do not properly belong to one of these levels of analysis. Under certain conditions, as a function of certain THE SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM

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machinic formulae (abstract machines), certain amongst them can play an essential role in assemblages. Passage components, arising from refrains or facialities, can, for example, trigger new passional assemblages, make new components proliferate, block others, make black holes resonate and focalise their effects . . . The same components, under other circumstances, will fall back to the rank of intra-assemblage, subjugated, stratified components. In the same way as natural, territorialised assemblages or artificial technical assemblages, assemblages of semiotisation, assemblages of subjectivation, assemblages of conscientialisation, assemblages of ‘alterisation’ and so on, result from machinic montages that are localised over the ensemble of phyla of (semiotic and material) deterritorialisation, and territorialised on the rhizome of stratifications – on the plane of consistency of abstract machines having to make this diachrony of stratifications and this synchrony of deterritorialisations ‘hold together’. Thus one cannot pose the problem of the subject, or the Other, or consciousness, in general. This kind of assemblage will produce a black hole effect, the effect of a territorialised collective or individual subject, of subjection, etc. The cogito as empty consciential subjectivation corresponds to a black hole assemblage, a correlative semiotic laying bare of the growth of capitalist flows, whilst the subject of the Freudo-Lacanian unconscious marks a supplementary degree of semiotic deterritorialisation – monemes progressively giving way to phonemes, graphemes and ‘mathemes’. But other politics, other societies, other montages will assemble other subjectivations, other more social or more molecular semiotisations, or both at once, more ethological or more revolutionary, etc. As has been seen, a flux of hormones can ‘trigger’ an unexpected competence in the matter of refrains, a flux of DNA can transform a memorisation process, or enlarge circadian rhythms. Intersections, marriages, that are apparently the most unexpected, the most ‘against nature’, always seem possible, but on condition that they are compatible with a set of machinic propositions, the montage of which, without being properly speaking universal, as it is ‘dated’ (because it marks irreversible choices on the phylum of deterritorialisations), nonetheless imposes on them a sort of ‘reality threshold’.32 One corollary of the contingency of abstract machines is that no type of molecular population, no universal rhythm, no energy equation, can account once and for all for the infinite variety of what one might call ‘assemblage convertors’. Certain amongst them will seem of an elementary simplicity – like the ‘magnetic effects’ of rhythms that E. von Holst describes, the effect of which is to impose one rhythm on others,33 others of a great complexity – like the human brain, which not only selects schemas and rhythms so as to ‘paradigmatise’ them 222

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on deterritorialised mental representations and on systems for inducing ‘passages to the act’ but additionally make them susceptible of entering into a combinatory of unlimited richness. Is this to say that the scale of complexity of these convertors is parallel to that of phylogenetic evolution? Not at all. In fact we know that at apparently the least differentiated, the least ‘evolved’ level, extremely sophisticated systems of interactions of heterogeneous34 components can exist, whereas inversely, at the most differentiated, the most ‘evolved’ level, mechanisms of a wretched poverty can appear – fascist gregariousness, for example. The elementary, the binary, feedback, black hole-abolition are not the property of one evolutionary stage. The elaboration of complex codings can borrow many other paths than those of individuated, conscious enunciation. Why not admit that a genetic knowledge exists? Why not admit that a machinic consciousness exists – for example in the case of the enslavement of the driver to his machine? Grass stems, refrains, faces for birds and for our passions – but for our intelligence too – are instruments of knowledge, pragmatic operators, in the same way that spoken or written words, figures, graphs, plans, equations or informatic memories can be in a factory. Once one wants to grasp them outside of the dominant redundancies, the signification of the world, the sense of desire, demand that one broaden the range of the semiotics we resort to. A thousand machinic propositions constantly work over every individual, over and underneath his speaking head.35 If we place the accent on faciality and the refrain in the components of the passage of human desire it is because one of their principal specificities is in some way to take other components ‘against the grain’ by short-circuiting their rhizomatic connections, by recentring them on black hole effects, by making the latter echo one another. In as much as a certain abstract perception of time and space and, as a consequence, of work and the socius, rest on the establishing of these two components, essential components of capitalist subjectivation depend on the prior emptying of intensities of desire (the values of desire) of their substances and the prior reduction and gridding of rough edges of the world as a function of dominant redundancies and norms (the use-valueexchange value couple). We have tried to show elsewhere how, in order to explore the desiring coordinates of a new type of bureaucratic capitalism, an author like Kafka was led to becomings-animal, musical, perceptual deterritorialisations, etc. On the basis of the numerous pages of prodigious analytic work that Proust’s oeuvre constitutes, we now propose to examine the impact of certain capitalist mutations at the start of the twentieth century on an amorous passion, that of Charles Swann for Odette de Crécy.

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Developing principally from the extension of animal ethology, human ethology has so far devoted itself above all to the study of the most visible, the most territorialised components of human behaviour.1 But an inversion of this relationship of dependency is not inconceivable and every hope is permitted when an ethologist such as W.H. Thorpe happens to declare that characteristics of human behaviour as fundamental as articulated language, the handling of number concepts, the use of symbols, of artistic appreciation and creation are not in the slightest absent from the animal world.2 The prodigious expansion of biology in recent decades has mainly concerned its chemical and cellular foundations, but we are perhaps on the eve of a turnaround in the situation, which would lead to it bringing the study of behaviour and of the most complex modes of sociability to the fore, as its current joining up with ethology, socio-ecology, socio-biology, etc. testify. Such a reorientation would in fact put it in the position of being a ‘pilot science’ in relation to the human sciences as a whole, thus expropriating linguistics of this role, which structuralists claimed for it. Mechanistic approaches to human behaviour based, for example, on stimulus-response couplings, or rash psychogenetic explanations, ought to give way to in vivo studies, monographic descriptions that really do set out to enrich the information that we have rather than reducing it through simplification. And it must be acknowledged that considerable catching up in the observation, inventorying and classification of basic data of human ethology (in the domain of the most deterritorialised components of behaviour in particular) is needed. It is a long way from having at its disposal the stock of knowledge that the great naturalists bequeathed to modern biological 225

sciences at the end of the Middle Ages. With what the psychology and psychoanalysis has represented of ‘universals’ one almost has to start from the beginning all over again with the question of feeling and thinking. Therefore it is without much in the way of epistemological qualms that we will for our part address Proust – a specialist, if ever there was one, of the most deterritorialised mental objects – so as to begin to reflect on the articulation and the overlapping of faciality and refrain components in the matter of human passions. Before becoming an affair of words and ideas, the writings of novelists and poets is perhaps first concerned with the singular position of the assemblage of enunciation to which they belong, because of the exceptionally marked deterritorialisation of one or several of its historical, economic, sexual, or sensual components. We are brought back implacably to the poverty of the real means for analysis put at our disposal by the human sciences in their current state. Just one example to illustrate the accumulated delay in the collection of essential facts: it will soon be fifty years since von Weizsaecker recommended the systematic study of ‘perceptual overlap’, sensorial hyperaesthesia, synaesthesia, synopsia, etc. But to our knowledge, aside from some neurological and physico-pathological research on intoxication by hallucinogens – which are, moreover, extremely dry – it is best today to rely on the ‘research’ of Henri Michaux or of the American Beat Generation writers to have at one’s disposal even a minimum of information on these questions, which it is nonetheless essential to explore in order to broaden our horizon with regard to the diversity of modes of subjectivation and semiotisation. As an indication, but very briefly, schematically and relying on Sherrington’s old classification, for lack of anything better, one could ‘situate’ two authors like Kafka and Proust in relation to the particular position of certain of their ‘mutant’ perceptual components. A whole labour of distortion, enlargement, displacement, overlap, etc., of sensory coordinates, seems in effect to bear more specifically on: ●

proprioceptive components in Kafka, such as posture, balance, muscle tone, blood pressure, etc., entailing the expansion and contraction of space and time (taking into account his highly singular way of ‘drugging’ himself through fatigue and anorexia);

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exterioceptive (taste, heat, pain, light, digestion, taste and sound receptors) and secondarily interioceptive (respiratory, in particular), components in Proust.3

Swann did not ‘construct’ his love for Odette de Crécy on the basis of intrapsychic entities that arise from general psychology or psychoanalysis. It is 226

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his entire existence, in its most spiritual, but also its most social, and even most material of aspects that he ‘bet’, in one of those escalations that gamblers in a casino call a ‘rising’,4 and which will make him cry, at the height of distress, ‘I’m getting neurotic’ (I, 345). Two non-linguistic components (which are a-signifying in various ways) will play a role in the foreground of this passional assemblage: a short sequence of music of the time – ‘Vinteuil’s little phrase’ – and the portrait of a woman reproduced from a Botticelli fresco. Due to a deterritorialising matter of expression, the first will function as a component of passage opening up new connections, transforming the coordinates of Swann’s everyday world. The second will tend, inversely, to push the passional assemblage back, to reterritorialise it onto icons and affective territories that are closed in on themselves. An aesthete’s love, might one object? A mechanism of sublimation? We will try to show, on the contrary, that by reassembling itself on the face of a woman, before being ‘humanised’, this love of Swann’s really did arise at the outset from a non-human sexuality. Its object was neither a parental complex, nor a pre-genital part object, but a machinic musical formula that was revolutionary for its time. Music here is not a sublimatory ‘last resort’, a derivative symbolic pathway for the libido, or the mannerism of an aesthete, but the instrument of production of a different reality, a machine catalysing new semiotic components and giving their deterritorialising capacities their greatest potential, trigger at the same time nervous tensions for the ego, neurotic rituals that will themselves play into the hands of certain sociological ‘inertias’. Without explicitly developing a theory of incorporeals or abstract machines, Proust insists incessantly on the fact that the ‘musical effect’ and that of works of art more generally arises not from the imaginary but from reality: ‘this music seemed to me something truer than all known books. At moments I thought that this was due to the fact that, what we feel about life not being felt in the form of ideas, its literary, that is to say intellectual expression describes it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose it as does music, in which the sounds seem to follow the very movement of our being, to reproduce that extreme inner point of our sensations which is the part that gives us that peculiar exhilaration which we experience from time to time and which, when we say, “What a fine day! What glorious sunshine!” we do not in the least communicate to others, in whom the same sun and the same weather evoke quite different vibrations’ (III , 381). The whole of the ‘search’ will collide with this unclassifiable type of reality. Sometimes, Proust will assimilate it to a material entity, and he will compare the oeuvre of a musician such as Vinteuil with the work of a Lavoisier or an Ampère (I, 382). At other times he leans towards a realism THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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of ideas: ‘. . . Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadow, unknown, impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance’ (I, 379-80). But at certain moments he will be tempted to analyse the matter of expression of ‘Vinteuil’s little phrase’ in terms that will evoke what twenty years later will be the distinctive oppositions of the phonologists of the Prague Circle: ‘he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness.’ But, as if he were aware of the ‘reductionist’ abuses to which the structuralist interpretations to come will give rise, he pulls himself together straightaway and adds that ‘in reality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his mind’s convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become aware’ (I, 380). Without really relying on one theory instead of another, Proust circles around the same difficulty: he cannot accept the evanescent character, the vague waves of sensations that assail him. The inaugural event of his oeuvre, it will be recalled, was this carriage ride in Combray, during the course of which he succeeded in going all the way to ‘the core of my impression’ for the first time (it was a matter of making this ‘something analogous to a pretty phrase’ that the relative shifts of the bells at Martinville and Vieuxvicq harboured pass into language) (I, 197). He can affirm at least one thing of this reality in the nascent state, which is that it does not arise uniquely from a discursive analysis such as human language supports. On the contrary, it is even to this reality that one must address oneself in order to enrich language, to make it fertile and engender a new discursivity that is directly plugged into what we will, for our part, call the economy of desire. Far from allowing fantasy to reign, as one might have believed, the suppression of human words, he writes, still with regard to ‘Vinteuil’s little phrase’ had eliminated it: ‘[N]ever was spoken language so inexorably determined, never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies’ (I, 382). And years after the writing of Swann’s Love, Proust will return, in The Prisoner, to this question, which it seemed to him had never stopped pursuing him: ‘For those phrases, historians of music could no doubt find affinities and pedigrees in the works of other great composers, but only for secondary reasons, external resemblances, analogies ingeniously discovered by reasoning rather than felt as the result of a direct impression. The impression conveyed by Vinteuil’s phrases was different from any other, as though, in spite of the conclusions to which science seems to point, the 228

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individual did exist’ (III , 257). A science of the individual, this is what Proust’s thinking stumbles on, influenced as he probably was by the scientistic thinking of matter, which in any case was more dominant in philosophical and literary milieus than in the scientific milieus in question. Whatever the case may be, his religion is fixed, at least on one point: one cannot consider human subjectivity as something that is undifferentiated and empty, which would get filled up and animated from the outside.5 His entire analysis leads him to the grasping of trans-subjective and transobjective abstract machinisms, which he gives us a rigorous – and, it goes without saying, supremely elegant – description of. ‘Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned’ (I, 380-1), sometimes leading us to the borders of what we have been calling collective assemblages of enunciation, as he sometimes has this same little phrase speak instead in the third person. And is it not equally a collective assemblage of enunciation that is constituted before our eyes when ‘Vinteuil’s little phrase’ starts to speak in the third person, imposing its refrain on the angles of the subjective triangle on the basis of which In Search then deploys the intensive multiplicities of the loves of Swann, the narrator, and Proust himself, pen in hand, and beyond that, of the process of the open work on our own desire? (I, 379-80) Nothing predisposed Swann to fall madly in love with a girl like Odette. A regular in princely salons, it was a principle of his to balance out his liaisons with high society by courting servant girls with ‘healthy, abundant, rosy flesh’ (I, 209) so as to guard against attachments that were too exclusive. That at the time of their encounter Odette may have been a demi-mondaine – something he was not aware of or rather unconsciously refused to know – thus did not constitute an obstacle a priori to him having an ‘adventure’ with her: what distanced him from her was her kind of physical beauty, which, literally, didn’t ‘get to’ him: ‘her profile was too sharp, her skin too delicate, her cheek-bones were too prominent, her features too tightly drawn, to be attractive to him. Her eyes were beautiful, but so large they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood’ (I, 213). As Odette will admit to the narrator much later on, it was she who was passionately in love with him first. And every pretext to visit him or attract him to her would be okay for her. And that for a long time without any result! Her first success with Swann would be to get him to accept an invitation to visit Mme Verdurin, her protector and only true support in the ‘world’. Salons at THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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that time seemed to function a bit like ‘initiation camps’ for the diverse tribes that constituted the ruling classes, and Swann visited Mme Verdurin’s salon a little like an ethnologist might have visited an unknown clan, because the people who frequented it were very much below his level. But it would nevertheless be this slightly vulgar and sometimes clearly ridiculous bourgeois salon that would be the ‘semiotic convertor’ and even the infernal machine that would turn his existence upside down.6 This labour of conversion will bear on two points: Odette’s face and Vinteuil’s little musical phrase. Can the priority of one of these points over the other be detected? Certainly the refrain appeared before the fact, and one might even consider that the new type of amorous assemblage that crystallises in Swann fixated on it at the outset, from the first time that he heard Vinteuil’s music. But, Proust explains to us, for Swann this love for a musical phrase – one year before the encounter with Odette – is only the outline of a ‘possibility of a sort of rejuvenation’ (I, 229), an outline or machinic index that will only find itself starting to be realised with the passion for Odette.7 Ought one instead to seek this priority in the processes of deterritorialisation? It is true that from this point of view we will have a tendency to privilege the refrain component over the faciality component. In effect it seems, at least for Swann – and obviously it isn’t a matter of turning him into a general ‘case’ – that it is the refrain that works the ensemble of assemblages and which, in particular, hollows out and decomposes the faciality component. But there is no essential necessity of any sort presiding over such a dependency, and it cannot be a question of mechanically indexing each refrain to a deterritorialisation function and each faciality to a reterritorialisation function – in any case the refrain will play a very important role here in the later stratification of assemblages. Odette’s faciality also experiences its own lines of deterritorialisation. In the gestation period of Swann’s passion, we will thus see Odette’s face undergo a slow process of transformation: an ideal Odette will settle, become autonomous and even end up expropriating the Odette of real encounters, so as to ‘set itself up’ in solitary reverie.8 Manifestly, Swann is caught unawares by the machinic mutation of which Vinteuil’s little phrase is the bearer. Although he is not unaware of the profound upheavals that European music was then experiencing, not being a musician himself, he does not really live them from the ‘inside’. His situation is very different with regard to the iconic components, as he one of the most listened to art critics in the salons that he frequents and he follows the development of nascent modern art attentively. A new face could therefore not disconcert him for long; he even adopted a rather particular procedure so as to ‘fix’ it or to give it a supplementary attractiveness, which 230

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consists in associating it with a canvas that he knows particularly well. Proust explains to us that this is his way of warding off his regret at having ‘confined his attention to the social side of life’ (I, 223/268 citation modified). By making the frivolous world enter into art it thus seems to him that he exorcises it. But one might think that this procedure also has as its goal to protect him from transports of passion that would effectively lead him out of his world, and not just as an ethnologist of the Verdurin salon or by chasing after housemaids. By ‘aestheticising’ his encounters, he recuperates and neutralises all the semiotic rough edges, all the machinic indices, all the lines of flight and charges of desire of an iconic order. That is what he tries to do with Odette de Crécy, who will become Zipporah, the daughter of Jethro, who he extracts from a portrait in the fresco of the Sistine Chapel consecrated by Botticelli to illustrating the seven episodes of Moses’ youth. On this occasion, Swann even works out a sort of private ritual: he contemplates a reproduction of Jethro’s daughter, which he has placed on his study table, imagining that it is a photograph of Odette (I, 243), he utters a sort of magic formula: ‘Florentine painting’, and he thereby succeeds, Proust tells us, in ‘introduc[ing] the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering’ (I, 245). But instead of his passion being exorcised by this ritual, channelled by the to and fro between the time of dreams and the time of reality, on the contrary it only took on a body. Like the bas-relief in Jensen’s Gradiva,9 the face-icon of Odette-Zipporah will live and develop on its own account, detach itself from the rails that were supposed to control its trajectory, and disorganise the whole system of existing assemblages. The oscillation between on the one hand the reterritorialisations on the face of the real Odette, on her reproduction-icon in the study, on the quiet little evenings at the Verdurins and, on the other hand, the deterritorialisations of desire towards another possibility, a different music, a different class relation, a different style of life which would, for example, detach Swann from his role as Jew-fetish for the racist upper aristocracy, will not succeed in finding a point of equilibrium. With the motivating force of jealousy, it will, on the contrary, keep on accelerating and the sentimental ambivalence that was knowingly entertained at the beginning of the relationship will on the contrary collapse into a passional black hole that will lead Swann to the edge of madness. But what is the nature of this image transference? Is it a matter, on Swann’s part, of a regressive identification with a maternal figure? The consequence of the absence of a symbolically paternal pole that would prohibit him from ‘assuming’ his castration appropriately? It is enough to raise one’s little finger to trigger psychoanalytic delusion! After all, wasn’t THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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this Zipporah given to Moses by her father Jethro the priest, as security for his return to the God of Abraham? And was not the fresco in the Sistine Chapel conceived as a counterpoint between the life of Jesus and the life of Moses? There can be no doubt: Swann is fixated on an equivalent of the bad mother/whore because he is searching for and lacking his original father, who would alone have been able to impose the law and re-establish order. Is it not, in effect, following his marriage to Odette, that is to say, a procedure for sublimating his incestuous passion, that he will, on the occasion of the Dreyfus Affair succeed in assuming his condition as a Jew? What good is there in wondering any more about the singularity of this face, the matter of expression of this musical phrase, the assemblage of this salon, the circumstances of this political conversion . . . With a little authority and much bluffing, one could always make all these details fit into the framework of basic interpretations. What’s the use of doubting these explanations, which are good for everything, which no longer seem to be a problem for anyone? It is not a matter for us of claiming to improve them, or of substituting one grid for another, one that would this time guarantee that every time one would find the right ‘solution’. It is the very principle of interpretation that we intend to call into question. It seems essential to us to affirm that the analysis of the unconscious consists in following, at one’s own risk, all the lines of the rhizome that an assemblage constitutes, whatever it may be – the matters of expression of their components, the black hole effects that they trigger. And to do so without prejudice, whatever the implications, indeed the chain reactions, that such a process can entail, might be. We are not saying, in the case of Swann, for example, that identification is nothing. But we only consider it as one particular procedure functioning in the context of particular assemblages and on the basis of particular components and matter.10 Considered in isolation, they present no interest, they give rise to no interpretation a priori, and do not refer to any universal imago. Does such and such precise component of iconic identification play a diagrammatic role, the role of a passage component? Where, when, how, and in what context? What sort of component will take over from its intervention? That is our problem. ‘Vinteuil’s little phrase’ marks out the successive assemblages that constitute Swann’s love. As an a-signifying machinic index, it announces that love, a year before the encounter with Odette; as an essential component in triggering the love it will, over the course of time, degenerate into an ‘indicator’ of Swann’s entering the Verdurin territory; it will end up being his swan song, on the day that he returns, death in his soul, through idleness, to the salon of Madame de Saint-Euverte. And long after the disappearance of Swann, the narrator will continue to wonder about the nature of its 232

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power: ‘when his vision of the universe is modified, purified, becomes more adapted to his memory of his inner homeland, it is only natural that this should be expressed by a musician in a general alteration of sonorities, as of colours by a painter’ (III , 259). But would it not instead be the world itself and this ‘unknown homeland’ that the artist is ‘citizen’ of, that find themselves transformed by works of art? The stakes of this choice are decisive. In effect, depending on whether one makes artistic mutations the result of changes in the world or of intra-psychic agencies, or one admits that they can participate fully in their transformation, one will lean either towards a globalising analytic interpretation, closed in on itself, or towards a ‘rhizomatic’ and constructivist vision of these changes. On the one hand, one provides oneself ready-constituted structures waiting to be ‘filled in’, on the other, one accepts the idea that without recourse to any transcendent instance, assemblages secrete and undo the systems that totalise and stratify them. Example of a schizo-analytic problem: should one consider the Verdurin salon as being nothing but an empty frame to which characters and problems are attached? Is it not instead an active molar assemblage, a sort of semiotic cyclotron, which accelerates or neutralises the interaction of the molecular faciality and refrain components in the different phases of Swann’s love? On the other hand, what in particular in the composition of the Saint-Euverte salon allows it, as we will see, to undo the encystment of these two components, which had led to their launching into orbit around a black hole effect. For its part, along what sort of trajectory will the Verdurin salon develop to be led to play an important role in the Dreyfus Affair? Is there a link between characters such as Diaghilev, Nijinksy, the political ascendency of the radical bourgeoisie, the exacerbation of racism in the army and the aristocracy, etc., and the secret garden of Swann’s desires? In any event, a psychoanalyst would end up not being able to make head nor tail of it! What sort of abstract machinic mutations work the heterogeneous lines of the pre-First World War rhizome that the Proustian analysis explores? It is true that sometimes the analysis is tempted to have recourse to linear mechanistic interpretations and that it also experiences certain difficulties in elucidating the articulations between art and society, but the effective approach of In Search of Lost Time nonetheless continues its incessant to and fro between the molar and molecular levels. To our mind it even tends implicitly to privilege the fact that in a period of crisis, it is the most deterritorialised components (here Vinteuil’s little phrase or, in Combray, the morcel of Aunt Leonie’s madeleine) that ‘pilot’ the transformations of the most territorialised assemblages. The most fragile, the most immaterial, the most artificial, thus do not necessarily depend on external determinations THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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or psychological mechanisms. One can even, to the contrary, conceive that they might play an essential role in the ‘passage’, the semiotic diagrammatism, between the weightiest, the most redundant of formations – faces that span childhood, powers that relay and echo one another, racist, sexist, ‘fixations’, etc., and in the transformation and creation of assemblages that change life, disconcert the sexes and make one’s perception of the world mutate. We must now undertake a series of detours so as to try to broaden our understanding of the functioning of Vinteuil’s little phrase. The first will bring us back once again to the question of the diagrammatic passage between matters of expression in their most material aspect and optional matters, in their most political aspect. What is the nature of what happens in a musical phrase, a passional movement, a social problem, etc.? Is it a matter of a style, a form, a structure, or rather, as we think, of a crystal of a code, a semiotic diastase, a contingent abstract machine? But one can readily sense that our expressions remain too imprisoned in the general coordinates of time, space, and substance. In certain circumstances, things and signs take the same turn, the same twist; a refusal on their part to navigate the diagrammatic course leads to an impasse, either because of a black hole effect – a sort of semiotic collapsus – or because of a super-stratification effect. Caught up in a sort of vertiginous desire for abolition, the assemblage, in a totalisingtotalitarian mode, selects the only dimensions of the possible that square with the dominant stratifications and redundancies. As we know, social revolutions, aesthetic revolutions, do not just overturn ideas and what is given to be seen and heard, they also work on bodies, the most subterranean of organic metabolisms, perceptions of the world, formulations of intersubjectivity and even a certain presentiment of the future. We have seen that in Swann’s case the abstract machine that crosses all these registers first manifests itself in the form of a little musical phrase. But for someone else it could have ‘chosen’ to crystallise in a mathematical formula, a face, or something found on the shelves of a junkshop! Why did Swann hear this little phrase? Why did he not block his ears and understanding and align his judgement with that of most of his contemporaries, who found this kind of musical innovation unhealthy? ‘That’s not how one makes music . . . That’s not how mathematics is done.’11 The a-signifying event-phrase is the bearer of no message, no discernabilisable information. It crashes into the assemblages of semiotisation and subjectivation that ‘constitute’ Swann. Having recovered from the confusion of this first encounter, their respective essential components are contaminated by the phrase. But in order for this kind of abstraction mutation to be able to gain ground, was it not necessary for the ground to lend itself to it? The concrete musical machine reveals, manifests 234

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and makes operative an abstract machine of transversality. Proust’s concrete literary machine itself relays this machinic revolution. Something that is essential to our era and which goes well beyond a style or fashion is thus transmitted from one assemblage to another, from a narrative assemblage of content to an assemblage of expression, one assemblage of enunciation to another . . . The paradox is that by only retaining the significations that it conveys, Proust’s oeuvre appears instead as conservative, reactionary, even. But considered as such, the Proustian literary machine is, without contest, innovative, even revolutionary. And essentially that may be because of its extraordinary power of semiotic magnification, which shows us certain of the most deterritorialised aspects of desire, certain of its most troubling and virulent transversal dimensions, and that with an unprecedented ‘finegrain’, an unprecedented acuity. It is revolutionary, then, in the sense that one says that the telescope of the Palomar Observatory will have played a decisive role in the technicosemiotic apparatus that turned modern astronomy upside down. And rather than aspiring to read and re-read, interpret and judge an oeuvre like Proust’s by borrowing Freud’s or Marx’s glasses (or those of the leader of no matter what literary school), it would on the contrary perhaps be opportune to benefit from this sort of discovery’s capacity to magnify and illuminate lines of transversality so as to detect the vagueness and fudging of a certain number of essential questions regarding the micropolitics of desire in the oeuvres of these official revolutionaries, which serve those who invoke them as a justification to have them blocking History. We have endeavoured to show elsewhere that the abstract machinism which targeted Kafka and which he aimed at was that of a bureaucracy in its most modern of forms – whether it is a matter of that which works at the summits of the grand apparatuses of power, or that which makes a functionary one rung from the bottom of the ladder stiff-necked when he summons his subordinate. The concern of Proust, as everyone knows, is time. The time of childhood, doubtless, the archaic and reactionary time of the genealogies dear to the Duke of Guermantes, but also perhaps and above all, the capitalist time that doesn’t stop gnawing away at every other mode of temporalisation. A second detour into this aspect must now be undertaken, so as to better determine the machinic sense, the secret potential of Vinteuil’s little phrase. Time is not inflicted on the human as something that comes from the outside. One doesn’t deal with time in general and the human in general. Just as space is faceified according to dominant norms and social rituals, so time ‘beats’ in concrete assemblages of semiotisation (collective or individual; territorialised or deterritorialised; machinic or stratified). A THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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child humming to himself at night because he is scared of the dark seeks to take control of events that deterritorialise too quickly for his liking and start to proliferate in the direction of the cosmos and the imaginary. Every individual, every group, every nation thus ‘equips’ itself with a basic range of incantatory refrains. Trades and corporations in Ancient Greece, for example, possessed a sort of sonorous stamp, a short melodic formula called a ‘nome’.12 It was used to affirm their identity vis-à-vis the outside, to demarcate them spatially and socially and, one might imagine, as a means of securing internal cohesion; each member of the group knowing how to participate in the same sonorous shifter, with the refrain acquiring the function of the collective and a-signifying subject of enunciation. But everything we know about the oldest of societies shows us that unlike capitalist societies, they did not separate out the different components of song, dance, speech, ritual, production, etc. (For example, in African ‘tonal’ languages, a word changes meaning depending on whether certain of its phonemes are produced with a high or low pitch.) In fact, these societies refused a division of labour and a specialisation of isolated components that was too marked. They trust the effecting of diagrammatic passages between assemblages – at least those that had a marked collective importance – to heterogeneous assemblages that associated the ritual and the productive, the sexual and the ludic, the political, etc. Diagrammatism here thus doesn’t necessarily imply recourse to an autonomous signifying machine and to hierarchised power formations that keep it under their yoke so as to profit from capitalising all the ‘benefits’ of the social-semiotic division of labour. Let us note in addition that because of the primordial importance that their scriptural component in particular takes over other components of expression, the capitalist automation of signifying languages will be the correlate of a simplification, even a degeneration in certain cases, of the former. Thus the break in the West between speech, song, mimicry, dance, etc., has as its consequence a certain abandoning of prosodic traditions and a binarisation and territorialisation of musical rhythms, a purification of lines and timbres that can also be considered an impoverishment. This simplification of capitalist refrains, their reduction to a simple binary or ternary rhythm, at the limit, far from reducing their importance, will on the contrary lead to them taking an essential place amongst the components of semiotic subjection. Instead of being assembled on the basis of territorialised systems such as the tribes, clan or guild, subjectivation will be internalised and individuated on the deterritorialised territories that the ego, the role, the person, love, the feeling of ‘belonging to’ constitute. Under these conditions, initiation to the semiotics of social time no longer arises 236

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from collective ceremonies but from coding processes centred on the individual, which tend to accord a great part to television and discs. Thus, today, instead of the lullabies and nursery rhymes, it is a televisual teddy bear who – calibrated by the latest marketing methods – induces dreams amongst our children, whilst neuroleptic ditties are prescribed to our young people or young girls lacking love . . . These ditties, these rhythms, these theme tunes invade all our modes of semiotising time; they constitute the spirit of the times, which leads to us feeling ‘like everyone else’ and to accept ‘the way the world is . . .’ When Pierre Clastres evokes the solitary chant of an Indian facing night, he describes it as a sort of attempt ‘to escape the subjection of man by the general network of signs’,13 as a sort of aggression against words as means of communication. According to him, speaking is always about ‘putting the Other into play.’ But this kind of escaping from social redundancies, this ‘detaching’ of the other from dominant refrains and facialities, has doubtless become more difficult, even exceptional, in our societies, which live under a general regime of inter-subjective pulp, mixing these cosmic universes and investments of desire into the most derisory, limited, utilitarian everydayness. Can we even imagine a type of social life, like that of the Amazonian Indians, that would never exclude a solitary face-to-face with the night and the finitude of the human condition, whatever its intensity? Structuralist psychoanalysts did not consider it necessary to found the Subject and the Other on an exclusive relation with the linguistic signifier in vain! In effect it really is down this path that the evolution of ‘developed’ societies is going! Capitalist refrains, like faciality traits, should be classified as part of Collective micro-equipment such as was defined previously. The former work over and grid our most intimate temporalisations, whilst the latter model our relation to the landscape and to the living world. Moreover, they cannot be separated. A face is always associated with a refrain; a significative redundancy is always associated with a face, the timbre of a voice . . . ‘I love you, don’t leave me, you are my world, my mother, my father, my race, the linchpin of my organs, my drug, I can do nothing without you . . . What you really are, in fact – man, woman, object, social status – matters little. What counts is that you allow me to function in this society, that you neutralise in advance every temptation, every component of passage that would risk me going off the rails of the dominant system. Nothing can happen that doesn’t pass via you . . .’ How is this contradiction to be grasped? It’s always the same old song, the same miserable secret and yet the notes through which it comes to us always sound new, are always ready to open us up to new hopes. Since the Baroque era, Western music has aimed at becoming a universal THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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model, occasionally condescending to absorb themes from ‘folk’ music. Musics are no longer linked to the territories and seductions of the exotic. Henceforth there is just music. The musics that will be played in the courts and capitals of Europe will impose their law, certain types of scales, their rhythms, their conception of harmony and polyphony, their writing processes, their instruments . . . Seen from the ‘outside’ this pure – deterritorialised – music seems richer, more open, more creative than others. But how are things exactly at the level of individual or collective assemblages of ‘consumption’? On the contrary, aren’t the capitalist refrains of current consumption, those which go round inside our heads in the morning on the metro, impoverished, to the extent that they shrink onto a solitary individual and their production is ‘mass-mediatised’? One could call the ‘binarist illusion’ everything that leads us to estimate that our relationship to life, to time, to thought, to the arts is superior to those of ancient or archaic societies, simply on the basis that it is machinically ‘armed’, that is to say, that it puts into play innumerable instrumental and semiotic relays. Kafka, whose heroes are frequently thought to come up against their own solitude in a sort of unbearable whistling, and who himself suffered cruelly from the slightest noise, has described the emptiness of the sonorous answer to our relation to time (‘Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no-one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just piping?’14). The collapse of territorialised refrains thus threatens to make us fall into a black hole of whistling. A binary tune if ever! All of Western music might be considered the result of a sort of immense fugue, constructed on the basis of this one and only empty note. In any case, wasn’t filling in the black hole of his madness through more and more fleeting, more and more deterritorialised childhood refrains, being in a headlong flight through incessant melodic, harmonic, polyphonic and instrumental creations, the fate of Robert Schumann, who embodied one of the most decisive turns in the music of our time, even to the point of his final collapse?15 When today musicologists transcribe so-called ‘primitive’ musics using Western notation, they don’t fully consider to what extent they are missing the singularity of their object. Secret relations may exist between those musics and certain incantatory rituals, certain prosodic systems linked to ‘magic’ phrases.16 A specialist who, for example, establishes a survey of the complex rhythms that characterise certain of these musics will translate a rupture in rhythm as syncopation or the offbeat. For him, 238

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the foundations, the universal reference, is isorhythmics. But perhaps the primitives really didn’t function on the basis of the same abstract machine of rhythm! Perhaps the norm for them is a syncopated time! And perhaps their life is assembled according to rhythms of great amplitude, which we have lost any capacity to discern, haunted as we are by our own uniformly isorhythmic refrains. We could without doubt situate this problem in a relatively better way by referring to the times of our childhood, to the incessant ruptures of temporalisation that characterised it and which we harbour a nostalgia for . . . With school, military service and ‘entering’ capitalist life through big corridors oozing bleach, our rhythms and refrains have been purified, disinfected. And an attentive study of these phenomena would certainly result in a certain synchrony between the growth of what we are calling the binarist illusion and the process of public hygiene being brought out! We are not advocating here a return to the primitivism of childhood, madness or of archaic societies. What we are seeking to determine, from a schizo-analytic point of view, are not regressions, childhood fixations, but the functioning of childhood blocks, refrains, faciality traits in the adult world, such as it is organised in capitalist systems. In fact, everything is infantile in our societies, except perhaps the reality of childhood itself! Modes of subjectivation cling on to residual objects or semiotic ersatz in the measure that ‘original’ territorialities like those of the extended family, rural communities, castes, guilds, etc., have been swept away by deterritorialised flows. (A whole play of elective affinities or even of direct filiation between the Lady of courtly love, the puerility of romantic feeling, the Nazi fascination with Aryan blood and the ideal of social status that rules in developed societies could thus perhaps be brought to light.) The capitalist deterritorialisation of assemblages has brought about profound modifications in the modes of semiotising time. Thus new refrains and new musics, whose matters of expression have been selected in such a way as to lend themselves to what one might call the reinforcing of the politics of extremes, have been put in place. The new assemblages of temporalisation effectively go in three directions at once: 1

Towards a hyper-territorialised subjectivation, in the domain of the domestic economy in particular, by opening up a practically unlimited path to power operations bearing on the control of the rhythms of the body, of the most imperceptible of movements of spouse and children – ‘what’s up with you, you are out of sorts, what are your secret thoughts, what makes your jouissance (or your refusal of jouissance) . . .’ . THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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2

Towards a diagrammatism that is always more ‘profitable’ for the system, through the development of new technologies for the chronographic enslavement of individuals. The setting of labour power into refrains no longer depends on initiation in guilds but on the internalisation of blocs of code, blocs of standard professional becoming – everywhere the same kind of executive, supervisor, bureaucrat, technician, specialised worker17 – demarcating milieus, castes, deterritorialised power formations.

3

Towards a rhizomatic opening, deterritorialising the traditional (biological and archaic) rhythms and creating conditions that allow an entirely renewed relation to the cosmos and to desire to be envisaged.

The deterritorialisation of its writing, its executation and its listening have led Western music to detach its rhythms and tunes from their ‘native lands’. And, from this point of view, it seems one need not maintain that there is a difference between serious and popular music. Both tend to fill what we have called, roughly, the same lack of territorialised sonorous response. They are musics of expectation, of response, stopgap musics that only refer the subject to an exacerbated individuation, that tend to disconnect him from the socius or, at least they only integrate him into a purified deterritorialised socius. The expressive richness of chamber musics, of symphonic musics or of opera should leave one under no illusion in this regard. From the point of view of assemblages of consumption, they bring into play subjective ersatz that are similar on all points to elevator music. Even mass musics that require a certain participation from users – from a country dance to the spectacle of a mega-show participate, each in its own way, in this technology of the folding up of the self. Baroque rationalism tried to substitute a logic territoriality for the old regions and liturgies. But its incessant expansion led to its own negation and, at the limit, its abolition. From this point of view one can consider that the Schumannian lied will have marked a final desperate point of resistance. After him, a certain ‘natural’ relation between song and feelings will never again be possible, other than by ‘laying it on’ a bit or taking an infinite detour through the artifices, the contortions, even, of symbolism or neo-classicism. In Schumann, the childhood block always remains ‘at the limit’: an intensely expressive melodic reterritorialisation, it constantly threatens to shatter and dissolve as a basic element in highly elaborate harmonic and polyphonic constructions. Schumann himself was doubtless too gifted, and also too caught up in a deterritorialising madness, to accept that his refrains might remain passive prisoners of any kind of 240

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frame – as was the case for Chopin, for example, who never exits from a certain melodic outline linked to a nostalgia for childhood and a lament for the lost homeland.18 With the birth of the new French school, in particular with the music of Gabriel Fauré, we will find this same ‘restraint’ over the lied and chamber music, but in a very sophisticated form. Then it was a matter of forming a united front against the provocations of Wagner, which consisted in dissolving the very principle of classic refrains, which would consequently tend not to arise from this logic of basic elements, but to work as an intensive bloc of becoming on the basis of a fragmented melodic system – the Wagnerian arioso. Certainly it will still be very much a question of childhood and of a nostalgia for the past in French music, but in a different, less ‘basal’ way, more at the level of the form of content than of the form of expression.19 Whatever the case may be, deterritorialising torment will have quickly circumvented the French phenomenon: in the name of a new axiomatics, the Viennese will definitively shake up the credibility not just of the classical codes but also of every fixed form of code (including the return to old codes such as the pentatonic scales dear to the French), the Russians will liberate rhythms and sonorities, so as to produce assemblages that really had never been heard before,20 in the expectation that all the noises of the world would finally find their citizenship in the context of the generalised music towards which all contemporary developments are, in our opinion, leading. Stravinsky, Russian ballets . . . here we are again in the salon of Mme Verdurin, who Proust will make the accredited representative of Russian artists in Paris, in The Prisoner, their all-powerful ‘Fairy Godmother’ (III , 238). What we would like to pinpoint more precisely now is the nature of the relation that we sense between the role played by Vinteuil’s little phrase in Swann’s Way and the new revolution in the art of music. The hypothesis that forms our starting point, to wit, that the same abstract machinism passes through individual passions, social problems, questions of art, etc., would have hardly any interest if we contented ourselves with drawing from it the idea that we are only dealing with a simple transfer of form or a transcoding. Abstract machines do not just exist on the side of forms and molecular codes, but also on the side of matters of expression and molecular productions. And by taking our analysis in the direction of the latter, we will perhaps be in a better position to approach the reality of these diagrammatic passages. Let us return once again to the fact that Swann’s passion was first declared for the little phrase, before bearing on Odette. From the first moments of this encounter, he had the intuition that she would perhaps THE LITTLE PHRASE IN VINTEUIL’S SONATA

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have the greatest consequences for his life.21 How did that happen? Not as the result of reasoning or of an evocation of the past, but rather as a consequence of the discovery of a new relation to music, and more generally, a new mode of semiotisation of sonorous matter, which he made at that time. During this first hearing, in effect, Vinteuil’s little phrase was not given as already constituted – ready made22 – as might have been the case if it was a matter of a theme that announced variations or which was destined for fugato treatment. Swann, Proust tells us, at first only dealt with the material qualities of the sounds secreted by the instruments. And he adds: ‘and it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge upward in plashing waves of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight’ (I, 227). It is thus only at the end of this preliminary phase of semiotisation that he will learn to ‘catch’ something a bit more consistent, without for all that yet being in a position to distinguish whether what he had arrested here was a melodic phrase or simply a new sort of harmony. Let us note that the extreme difficulty that Swann had in freeing his first impressions of the music from a whole synaesthesic complex associating the lapping of liquids, the fragrance of roses, and arabesques, to sensations of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice (I, 228) will not be ascribed by Proust solely to his dilettantish nature.‘Perhaps it was owing to his ignorance of music that he had received so confused an impression, one of those that are nonetheless the only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant is, so to speak, sine materia’ (I, 227-8). For our part it is nonetheless of matter that we would like to speak in this regard. But of the matter of the form of expression, and that with the concern not to stick to the simplistic idea that in this domain matter is only an affair of instrumentation and sound waves. The abstract matter of Vinteuil’s phrase doesn’t have the same consistency, the same machinic characteristics as those of the music Swann was accustomed to. That is what disorientates and unsettles him and which, perhaps contributes to his being carried off to a different fate. It doesn’t constitute a strongly crystallised semiotic block. It offers itself, in some way, to the listening subject’s initiative. Or rather, it grafts onto the assemblage that it constitutes the new kind of machinism of which it is the bearer. And without a doubt this effect of open semiotisation – in reference here to what will much later be called an ‘open work’ – should not be assimilated to a simple ‘projective technique’ like that used by psychologists, for example, with the ink blots of the Rorschach test to 242

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capture a subject’s imaginary. Fundamentally, what interests Proust is not the result but the creative machinism that is put into play on this occasion. To be sure, Swann will end up stabilising a representation of the musical phrase by grasping ‘its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value’ (I, 228).

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NOTES

[TN] = Translator’s Note

Translator’s Introduction 1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13

Or, indeed, for Deleuze’s humour, since his affirmation is accompanied by a specific attention to what it is that philosophers do. See his letter to Jean-Clet Martin in Two Regimes of Madness. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (London: Athlone, 1984) p. 88. And it remained so throughout his life, as his comments in De Leros à la Borde, which is referred to later, show. This is an issue that has been explored at length in the work of Jean-Claude Polack. See for example his Épreuves de la folie. Travail psychanalytique et processus psychotiques (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Éditions érès, 2006). Gilles Deleuze ‘Trois problèmes de groupe’ preface to Félix Guattari Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris: La Découverte, 2003) p. x. The revised edition of his book Proust and Signs, published in 1970, is strongly marked by his encounter with Guattari. Jean-Claude Polack ‘Analysis between Psycho and Schizo’ in Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey The Guattari Effect (London: Continuum, 2011) p. 61. Félix Guattari De Leros à la Borde (Paris: Lignes, 2012). Guattari ibid p. 82. See the present volume p. 98 . Félix Guattari ‘La psychothérapie institutionelle’ in Psychanalyse et transversalité p. 47. See for example Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Julian Bourg From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2007). See the extensive discussion in Gary Genosko ‘Busted: Félix Guattari and the Grande Encyclopedie des Homosexualites’ in Rhizomes 11/12 (Fall 2005/ Spring 2006). Online at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/genosko.html [accessed 17 March 2015]. 245

14 For an up to date discussion see for example Andrew Barry and Georgina

Born (eds) Interdisciplinarity. Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences (London: Routledge, 2015). 15 Some of the links have been documented by Liane Mozère in her article

‘Foucault et le CERFI : instantanés et actualités’ in Le Portique 13–14 (2004). Available online at http://leportique.revues.org/642 [accessed 17 March 2015]. Mozère suggests in particular that Foucault acted as a ‘guarantor’ for this research project, the third CERFI project to have been funded by the State. 16 See Michel Foucault, in discussion with Francois Fourquet and Félix

Guattari ‘Premieres discussions, premiers balbutiements: la ville est-elle une force productive ou d’anti-production’ in Dits et Écrits 1: 1954–75 (Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001) p. 1316. 17 The term has no direct equivalent in English, translating variously as

‘facilities’, ‘equipment’, ‘supplies’, ‘kit’ or ‘gear’. Here I’ve followed the anthropologist Paul Rabinow in his book French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, who simply leaves the term untranslated. It’s worth pointing out here also that Guattari sometimes renders the term in the plural, sometimes in the singular. In a doubtless failed attempt at elegance I’ve exploited the property that the mass noun has of referring to things that can’t be counted as a way of conveying something both of the term’s extension and its multiplicity. Where doing that proved too ugly, I’ve adopted the convention of talking about a ‘form’ of collective equipment. 18 Paul Rabinow French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995) p. 2. 19 Félix Guattari ‘Pratiques écosophiques et restauration de la cité subjective’

in Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie (Abbaye d’ardenne: Lignes/Imec, 2013) pp. 36–7.

1 The unconscious is not structured like a language 1

Roger Chambon Le Monde comme représentation et réalité Paris: J. Vrin, 1952, pp. 165–71.

2

It will be objected that our example is too simple and that analysts today are much more subtle! But on closer inspection one would see that they still have recourse to the same types of universalising procedure; it’s just that instead of talking about father, mother, faeces, and complexes, they talk about the symbolic function, the imaginary, the Moebius strip, etc.

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NOTES

3

In this text the correct orthography for ‘micropolitics’ and related terms is not clear. Guattari sometimes has ‘micropolitiques’ and sometimes ‘micro-politiques’. In the absence of an obvious rationale for this difference, we have followed the general convention for Deleuze and Guattari’s work.

4

Sigmund Freud ‘Metapsychology’ translated by James Strachey Standard Edition volume 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74).

5

In the sense that Hjelmslev talks about the ‘figure of expression’. Cf. Louis Hjelmslev Prolegomena to a Theory of Language translated by Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963).

6

The French noun ‘possible’ – as in ‘un autre monde des possibles’ has been translated throughout as ‘possibility’ [TN ].

7

Thinking along the same lines, let us note that argots – the special languages used by vagrants and thieves to protect themselves from their external milieu – are a relatively recent creation. One finds no mention of them before the fifteenth century, that is to say, at the moment when urban and modern capitalist powers were busily expanding. Cf. Auguste Vitu Le Jargon du XV e siècle, Paris: Charpentier, 1884, and Lazare Sainean Les Sources de l’argot ancien, Paris: Champion, 1912.

8

‘Ballets roses’ is a name given to a 1959 scandal in which male members of the establishment had ‘ballets’ (striptease, posing nude, etc.) performed to them by teenage girls. There were rumours also of, amongst other things, sado-masochist orgies. Nowadays a ‘ballet rose’ tends to refer to criminal activities involving rape [TN ].

9

To be ‘traduit devant un tribunal’ means to be brought to a tribunal. But ‘traduit’ also means ‘translate’ [TN ].

10 Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1969). 11 Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley

(New York: Zone, 1989). 12 Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin-Bavelas, and Don Jackson Pragmatics of

Human Communication – A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes (New York: WW Norton, 1967). 13 In the sense defined in Psychanalyse et tranversalité Paris: Maspero, 1972.

2 Where Collective equipment starts and ends 1

Which would, in Louis Althusser’s view, arise from ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’.

NOTES

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3 The capitalist revolution 1

Georges Duby The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century translated by Howard B. Clarke (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1974).

2

Ibid p. 163.

3

Ibid p. 213 [translated slightly modified].

4

Georges Duby The Age of Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 translated by Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983) p. 102.

5

Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism translated by Stephen Kalberg (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).

6

René Grousset, preface to Régine Pernoud Les villes marchandes aux XIVe et XVe siècles, impérialisme et capitalisme au Moyen-âge (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1948).

7

René Nelli L’Érotique des troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1963) and ‘De l’amitié à l’amour ou de l’affrèrement par le sang à l’épreuve des corps’ Les Cahiers du Sud 347 1958.

8

Cf. Jean Gimpel The Mediaeval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976) and Yves Barel Une approche systémique de la ville (Grenoble: Institut de recherché économique et de planification May 1974).

9

This system of complementarity between a caste system and a growing class (the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) will, in some way, ‘find’ itself inverted in the dependent situation that bourgeois capitalists find themselves today with regard to union and state bureaucracies. Bourgeois power today only holds up thanks to the gridding of the working class by bureaucratic castes. As for the interdependence of the bureaucracies of the State capitalism of the USSR and American imperialism, it is now almost entirely institutionalised!

10 Georges Bataille The Accursed Share translated by Robert Hurley (New

York: Zone, 1988).

4 Bourgeoisie and capitalist flows 1

Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Jourent Le Lobby Colvert – Un royaume ou une affaire de famille? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975).

2

Fernand Braudel shows that the proliferation of ‘model’ cities is such, in the sixteenth century, that a typology can only be established on condition that one use a combinatory that brings into play heterogeneous factors

248

NOTES

which – aside from questions about size and rank of city – would refer to collective equipment functions, in the very broad sense in which we are considering them here. So, sticking just with the cities of Spain, one might say that Granada and Madrid are bureaucratic cities, Toledo, Burgos, and Seville mercantile cities, but Seville is equally bureaucratic, rentier, and artisanal; Cordova and Segovia industrial and capitalist cities; Cuenca, industrial but also artisanal; Salamanca and Jerez, agricultural cities; Guadalajara, a clerical city; others are more military, ‘sheep-farming’, rustic, maritime, cities of studying, etc. Finally, the only way of making these cities ‘hold together’ in the same capitalist grouping, so that they don’t fragment into a multitude of autonomous and antagonistic cities, is to consider them as arising from the same rhizome of Collective Equipment. Cf. Fernand Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II translated by Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972). 3

It is worth distinguishing here the aspect of the deterritorialisation of machines and equipments, in so far as they engender new forms of production and circulation, and the aspect of institutional, regulatory, and imaginary reterritorialisation, which attempts to put a brake on this movement through the system of corporations and guilds, etc.

4

Philippe Ariès Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life, translated by Robert Baldick (New York: Basic, 1962).

5

Anne Querrien, unpublished.

6

Jean-Louis Flandrin Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne société Paris: Hachette, 1975.

7

According to Albert Soboul, ‘the courtiers living at Versailles as part of the King’s entourage, represented about 4,000 families’. See Albert Soboul A Short History of the French Revolution translated by Geoffrey Symcox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

8

Paul Bois Paysans de l’Ouest (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).

9

Jacques Godechot La grande nation: l’expansion révolutionnaire de la France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1956).

10 Stock market equipment, for example, started to come into existence in the

modern form of product exchange and securities market from the end of the sixteenth century; but it is only at the start of the seventeenth century that they will acquire a gigantic size – sometimes, between 5,000 and 6,000 people gathering every day in the stock market at Amsterdam to follow the price of the East India Company. 11 Karl Wittfogel Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 12 Cf. the ‘great enclosure’ [of unreason] described by Michel Foucault in The

History of Madness translated by Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009).

NOTES

249

13 There is a case here for distinguishing fascist movements from reactionary

institutions. For example: the appearance of a Puritan movement, separating from the Anglican institution, and which gives rise to the formation, by the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower, of a sort of fascist community in New England – a new promised land that was to be built against the people of demons, that is to say, against the Indians.

5 Semiotic optional matter 1

Maurice Percheron Ghengis Khan (Paris: Seuil, 1962) p. 126.

2

It goes without saying that this classification is only proposed as a rough guide, because in fact, the majority of these components straddle different categories: perception and posture also pertain to a pre-signifying register; mimicry from a register of natural coding, etc.

3

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

4

Cited by Anne Querrien:

250

●

Does the school observe a sufficient general silence?

●

Is the teacher sufficiently silent, making himself obeyed through gesture?

●

Does reading occur in hushed tones?

●

Is the furniture in order and is the maxim ‘One place for one thing and each thing in its place’ evident?

●

Are the lighting and ventilation sufficient?

●

Do the pupils have enough room?

●

Is the attitude of the pupils acceptable?

●

Do the pupils have their hands behind their backs when moving, and do they walk in step?

●

Are the pupils satisfied?

●

Do the pupils have clean hands and face?

●

Are notices about punishments clearly evident and utilised?

●

Does the teacher permit himself to threaten to strike pupils?

●

Does the teacher exercise permanent surveillance of all pupils?

●

Are movements simultaneous?

●

Is the head monitor respected?

●

Are the monitors well chosen?

NOTES

●

Does the teacher dismiss poor monitors?

●

Do the monitors feel that they are sufficiently responsible? What are their exact responsibilities?

●

How are the pupils divided up?

●

How frequently does the teacher carry out a new ranking of pupils?

●

Do the pupils understand what they read?

●

Is there sufficient emulation?

●

Are the registers kept properly?

●

Are prayers given exactly?

●

Are songs sung correctly?

●

Are pupils overseen by a monitor when they go out?

●

Are the parents of absent children sent notes? Anne Querrien ‘L’Ensaignement’ Recherches 23 1976

5

Cf. in Kafka, the very lengthy expositions concerning arguments of an administrative or litigious character, which sometimes take on the quality of a ‘bureaucratic epic’; for example, the different modes of ‘acquittal’ in The Trial: real acquittal, apparent acquittal, unlimited deferral . . . See also the accounts given of the Moscow show trials, implacable machines resulting not just in the checking of every utterance with a diabolical and fascinating meticulousness, but also the acceptance of a logic of enunciation in which the key points about responsibility are based on the declarations of the accused, which as a consequence sometimes result in impasses similar to the ‘liar paradox’. For example: in his final declaration, Karl Radek, reacting to Vyshinky’s insults, says . . . ‘I have to recognise my guilt in the name of the general usefulness this truth must bring. And when I hear it said that quite simply those on the accused’s bench are spies and bandits, I have to take a stand against this assertion, not from the point of view of my own defence, from the moment that I recognise that I have betrayed justice . . . If you are only dealing with simple common law criminals, informers, how can you be sure that what we have said is the rock solid truth?’ Le Procès du Centre antisoviétique trotskyste (Moscow, 1937) p. 565.

6

Cf. René Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem ‘Co-ire: album systématique de l’enfance’ Recherches 22, 1976.

7

For example, the corner of a blanket, which will service as an object that is intermediary between a partial erogenous zone – the mouth, for example – and the outside world, to which the child is attached exclusively. D.W. Winnicott Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena (London: Tavistock, 1953).

NOTES

251

8

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

9

Fernand Deligny Cahiers de l’immuable 1 and 2, Recherches 8 1975 and 20 1975; Nous et l’Innocent (Paris: Maspero, 1975).

6 Equipment of power and political facades 1

PSU – Parti Socialiste Unifié – French socialist party formed in 1967, UDR – Union pour la défense de la République (the name adopted by the Gaullist party in France after the events of May 1968) [TN ].

2

The courts of royalty doubtless marked a transitory step in the putting in place of this Collective super-equipment. Still marked by the old formations of ostentatious expenditure, they nonetheless announced the deterritorialisation of traditional social formations and the erection of a new type of ‘personalisation’ of central power. One could here in this regard make a baroque eros and a bureaucratic eros into an extension of one another.

3

Alain Cotta Théorie générale du Capital, de la croissance et des fluctuations (Paris: Dunod, 1966).

4

The notion of the person [personne: also ‘no-one’] should be related here to its primary etymological meaning (of Etruscan origin), that of a theatrical mask; but now it is a matter of a theatre that covers the social field in its entirety.

5

Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977) pp. 215–16.

6

Following from the work of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins on the economy of the most ‘primitive’ of societies, Claude Meillassoux has elaborated the notion of a ‘domestic mode of production’. He opposes the existence of relations of social ‘adhesion’, that are first manifested at the level of the participation in activities of collective production, to the obsessions of structuralists and functionalists who try to base the consistency of these societies on relations of filiation that rest on universals of the exchange of women, incest prohibition type: ‘for the domestic community to reproduce itself, in effect, relations of filiation must be in conformity with the relations of dependency and anteriority established in production: relations of reproduction must became relations of production.’ This domestic mode of production is not, for all that, conceptualised as a genetic stage of humanity: it plays a fundamental role in the imperialist exploitation of its periphery, of archaic agricultural sectors and, at the heart of its system of reproduction, of domestic, female, labour. Claude Meillassoux Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspero, 1975).

252

NOTES

7 A molecular revolution 1

Which we will later describe as a ‘diagrammatic function’.

2

Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969) p. 61.

3

Memory, as Francis Yates shows us, has long depended on highly territorialised ‘memory’ machines (the architectural rhetoric machines derived from the Ad Herennium of Antiquity), or the highly sophisticated machines like those of Lulle (where concepts are represented by letters of the alphabet which turn around an axis, and figures by concentric circles on which the letters referring to concepts are found and which, when these wheels are rotated allow combinations of concepts to be obtained). See Francis Yates The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

4

Criticising the abusive export of the language of informatics outside its own domain, Cornelius Castoriadis asks himself whether the concept of order that biology and anthropology need is necessarily identical to that of physics (Castoriadis Science moderne et Interrogation philosophique Encyclopaedia Universalis Organum, 1975). In effect, and unlike the order of physico-chemical strata, ‘human’ orders seem to be inseparable from collective assemblages and formations of power, that is to say, from modes of semiotisation that expose, arrange, and guarantee them . . . independently of any transcendental guarantee.

5

Paul Lafargue The Right to Be Lazy (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2012).

6

Jean-Claude Polack and Danielle Sabourin La Borde ou le droit à la folie (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1976).

7

Ludwig von Bertalanffy General System Theory (New York: Basic, 1965).

8

See Chapter 10, ‘The Traps of Ideology’.

9

In numerous domains, it is the category of the family or household that constitutes the institutional object of reference. For example, national accounts continue to talk of a ‘household budget’ with regard to single people! On the genealogy of familialist intimacy see Lionel Murard and Patrick Zylberman ‘Le Petit travailleur infatigable’ Recherches 25, 1976.

10 Factory in Besançon that was the focus of a series of industrial upheavals

as well as an experiment in worker management in the 1970s [TN ]. 11 Ivan Illich Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 12 See ‘Histoire de la psychiatrie de secteur’ Recherches 17, 1975 and Robert

Castel Le Psychanalysme (Paris, Maspero, republished Paris 10/18, 1975). 13 The term ‘programme’ is not employed here in the sense that one speaks,

for example, of the ‘Common programme of the Left’ but in the sense that sado-masochists talk about a programme, that is to say as means for

NOTES

253

marking out an experiment that everywhere exceeds their own ‘predictions’, hence the mystery and the fascination, the impression of something that has ‘never been seen’ despite the ritualised character of programmed phases. In contemporary music, one talks equally of ‘programmed music’ when a significant part of the music is left up to the performers and the score gives nothing more than broad indications, general directions. 14 Tristan Cabral (Yann Houssin) Ouvrez le feu (Paris: Plasma, 1975).

8 The rhizome of collective assemblages 1

Nietzsche On The Genealogy of Morals p. 61, 140.

2

After Marcel Bigeard, a well-known General in the French Army [TN ].

3

Prostitution seems always to retain something of the religious basis of its ancient origins.

4

Cf. in this regard the excellent work of Jean-Marie Geng Information, Mystification (Paris: EPI , 1973), and Traité des censures (Paris: EPI , 1976).

9 Micro-fascism 1

And perhaps tomorrow of old people and school children. Cf. Mathusalem, le journal qui n’a pas froid aux vieux 1 March 1976 (BP 202, 75866, Paris Dedex 18); and for a new approach to childhood, the books of Christiane Rochefort Encore heureux qu’on va vers l’été Paris, Grasset, 1975 and Les Enfants d’abord (Paris: Grasset, 1976).

2

On national-Bolshevism in Germany: Jean-Pierre Faye Langages totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972) and Théorie du récit (Paris: Hermann, 1972).

3

Sigmund Freud ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’ translated by James Strachey in Standard Edition volume 10 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74).

4

Cf. the outline of a map of the neurotic rhizome of Little Hans in Félix Guattari L’Inconscient machinique (Paris: Recherches, 1979).

5

Bertolt Brecht Mr Puntila and his Man Matti.

6

See the extraordinary ‘reportage’ by Elena Valero, a Brazilian who was held captive for years by Yanomami Indians. Although carefully edited by missionaries, her account reconstitutes the continuing climate of bullying in which Indian women live. Ettoro Biocca Yanoama (Paris: Plon, 1968).

254

NOTES

10 Self-management and the politics of desire 1

In the second part of this book we will come back to Chomsky’s thinking, which to our mind precisely misses a certain level of abstraction in the functioning of language.

2

Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

3

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

4

Paul Virilio L’Insécurité du térritoire (Paris: Stock, 1976) A recent example: the government decision that creates departmental committees that make the placing of children in psychological medical establishments and sheltered accommodation under the direct control of the director for economic and social action, academy inspectors and local dignitaries. Psychiatrists and psychologists will be required to apply the decisions of these committees. After the age of 16, they will be able to transfer certain children, those they judge to be ‘backward’, directly into psychiatric hospitals, the wards of which today are very often, as is known, half empty. Let us be clear that these prominent people are found in the committees with oversight for these same establishments and psychiatric hospitals. Everything is connected!

5

Having myself initiated the themes of ‘institutional analysis’ and of analysers some fifteen years ago, I was led to make the following correction in the 1974 re-edition of a collection of articles Psychanalyse et transversalité, published by Maspero: ‘it was starting in 1961, during the meetings of the GTPSI (Groupe de travail de psychologie et de thérapie institutionelle [Working group in institutional psychology and therapy]) that I proposed situating institutional therapy as a particular case of what I have called “institutional analysis”. At that time this idea had few echoes. It was outside the psychiatric milieus, in the groups of FGERI (Federation des groups d’études et de recherches institutionelles [Federation of groups for institutional study and research]) in particular that it was taken up. The leaders of the institutional psychotherapy current hardly envisaged more than a slight extension of analysis in the domains of psychiatry and possibly pedagogy. To my mind, such an extension could only lead to an impasse, if it didn’t aim at the social and political field in its entirety. One of the essential points of the political application of this institutional analysis in particular seemed to me to be the phenomenon of the bureaucratisation of militant organisations, which ought to be a matter for “group analysers”. These themes caught on, analysers, institutional analysis, and transversality have been made to fit every occasion somewhat; perhaps one should see in this an indication that despite their approximate character they harboured a somewhat lively problematic. Far be it for me

NOTES

255

to defend any kind of orthodoxy with regard to the origin of these concepts! At this time the GTPSI ’s work of elaboration was collective; ideas were bursting out everywhere without belonging to anyone. Unfortunately, the climate has changed, and if I have been led to make these clarifications, it is because it seemed to me that they have escaped a certain number of people who are interested in this current of thinking today. To fill the hole in their memories or their lack of training, and in order to be precise, I therefore recall that nothing was said of or written about ‘institutional analysis’ and ‘analysers’ before the different versions that I have given of my report on ‘Transversality’. Published in 1964 in the first issue of the Revue de psychothérapie institutionelle. 6

Or, in other domains, a new mathematical machine or a new technical procedure.

7

Célestin Freinet Pour l’école du people (Paris: Maspero, 1969) and Élise Freinet Naissance d’une pédagogie populaire (Paris: Maspero, 1969).

8

Fernand Oury and Jacques Pain Chronique de l’école caserne (Paris: Maspero, 1972); Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez De la class coopérative à la pédagogie institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1970); Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez Vers une pédagogie institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1967).

9

A fascinating article that appeared in Liberation in September 1975 on parallel education networks, entitled ‘Living without school’ and in the journal Parallèle April–June 1976, published by the Groupe d’expérimentation sociale (Reid, Hall, 4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris), and an article by Liane Mozère ‘Projet d’hôtel d’enfants’.

10 Foucault Discipline and Punish p. 215. 11 See also the very surprising Lacano-Maoist metaphysics of Guy Lardreau

and Christian Jambet L’Ange (Paris: Grasset, 1976), which endeavours to distinguish a ‘discourse of the rebel’ from the Lacanian universals of enunciation, i.e. the four fundamental discourses: those of the Master, the University, the Hysteric, and the Analyst. Cf. Jacques Lacan On Feminine Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–73 translated by Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 1998) ‘Thus the speech of the Master must be purified of the simulacra that clutter it, not so as to bend to it but so as to tear it away from them’ (p. 73). At the risk of adding to their weariness (‘Do we have to keep on saying incessantly that the signifier is not ‘linguistic’ in the sense that it would be opposed to we don’t know what ‘libido’, thought in terms of intensity? Do we have to reaffirm the truism that the opposition of the energetic to signifying law is a pre-critical blunder that since Lacan has been impossible?’) we will continue to worry, along with some other pre-Lacanian asses, about the practical – political and analytic – consequences of the reduction of all systems of intensity, all energetics to the single register, so-called, of the ‘signifier’ (whether linguistic or not).

256

NOTES

12 Four types of interaction allow physicists to ‘pass’ from matter to energy:

gravitational interactions of the ‘weight’ type; electromagnetic interactions of the ‘light’ and ‘matter’ type; weak and strong interactions of the ‘nuclear energy’ type. Another subject for meditation could be the mode of articulation between quantum mechanics, at the microscopic scale, and statistical mechanics, at the macroscopic scale, or even the principles of relativity, which consist in never separating time and space measurements from the movement of the instruments that accomplish them, that is to say, from their ‘observer’, or, if one wishes, their assemblage of enunciation. But unlike the relativist ‘observers’, whose own movements and referential coordinates are ‘homogenised’ on the basis of the same principle of mathematical invariance, collective assemblages of desire never entirely give up the singularity of what physicists call the line of their ‘gauge space’. Cf. Banesh Hoffmann The Strange History of the Quantum (New York: Dover, 1959).

12 Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics 1

See Language 27, September 1972 p. 72 on ‘generative semantics’.

2

Bar-Hillel also talks about it as a ‘wastebasket’. See ‘Out of the Pragmatic Wastebasket’ Linguistic Enquiry 2/3 p. 71.

3

‘But first note that the utilisation of these unexploited possibilities, for creative ends, remains very unusual, even in poetry. One could indeed quote the “Jabberwocky” of Lewis Carroll, Finnegans Wake or certain texts by Michaux; but the least that one could say is that this type of creativity has only extremely distant connections with the creativity which operates in the ordinary use of language.’ Nicolas Ruwet Introduction to Generative Grammar translated by Norval H. Smith (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1973) p. 30.

4

René Lindekens Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage (Paris: Hatier, 1975) p. 85.

5

Hjelmslev defines language as a ‘semiotic into which all other semiotics may be translated – both all other languages, and all other conceivable semiotic structures’ Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage p. 109.

6

As René Lindekens writes ‘. . . the semiotic relation of absolute interdependence, which characterises the link between the planes of expression and content – from which the denotative power of sign systems issues – and which Hjelmslev calls a relation of solidarity, must be considered as contracted exclusively by two forms, from one plane of the sign to the other’, Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage.

NOTES

257

7

Cf. Christian Metz Film Language translated by Bertrand Augst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) and Language and Cinema translated by Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1974).

8

Michel Foucault The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970).

9

The notion of ‘machinic consistency’ is proposed here in opposition to that of ‘axiomatic consistency’ in mathematics.

10 This implies that one follow Greimas when he proposes to stop

considering the extra-linguistic world as an absolute referent and to treat it as a set of more or less implicit semiotic systems. A.J. Greimas On Meaning (Minneapolis MN : University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 11 Roland Barthes denounces the claim that denotation founds the “first

meaning”: ‘denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so; under this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the one which seems both to establish and to close the reading), the superior myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to language as nature: doesn’t a sentence, whatever meaning it releases, subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us something simple, literal, primitive: something true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature?’ Roland Barthes S/Z translated by Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) p. 9. 12 Paul Ricoeur thus opposes the possibility of translating the meaning of

one instance of discourse to the impossibility of translating the signified of a system of signs: ‘this logical function of meaning, carried by a phrase in its entirety, cannot be confused with the signified of any of the signs put to work in the phrase. In effect, the signified of the sign is solidary with the system of a given language; for this reason, it cannot be transposed from one language to another; on the contrary, the meaning of the phrase, which it would be better to call the “intended” than the signified, is a global thought content which one can propose to say differently within the same language, or to translate it into another language; the signified, then, is untranslatable, the “intended” is eminently translatable’ Paul Ricoeur ‘Signe et sens’ Encyclopaedia Universalis 1975. 13 Oswald Ducrot, preface to John Searle Les Actes de langage. Un essai de

philosophie de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972) p. 25. 14 In the terminology of Charles E. Bazell, here we should speak instead of

non-grammatical utterances. Bazell believes it necessary to establish a distinction between a-grammatical utterances and non-grammatical utterances. The first, of the ‘he seems sleeping’ type, are susceptible of rearrangement, of being translated back into ‘normal’ utterances: ‘he seems to be asleep’, for example. However, because the second, of the ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ type aren’t ‘missing’ anything, because they cannot be related to any crystallisation of a signified, and do not 258

NOTES

correspond to anything recognisable, avoid any possible correction, as if by themselves. But this distinction seems entirely relative to us: there are effectively many repressive intermediaries between the correction of grammar by a teacher and the incorrigible segregation of the text of the mad by psychiatry. Cf. Langage 34 June 1974. 15 Louis Hjelmslev La Stratification du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1971) p. 58. 16 Herbert E. Brekle Sémantique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) pp. 54–60. 17 One could make the same remark with regard to Freud’s first models. 18 Sebastian K. Saumjan opposes a system of abstract objects based on the

operation of application (AGM : applicational generative model) to Chomsky’s system of linear concatenation, but his formalisation seems not to lead him to having to account for the modelling of language on the basis of the facts of power. See Langage 33 March 1974 p. 22, 54, on Hjelmslev’s influence. 19 Abbreviation for ‘sentence’. 20 Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley

(New York: Zone, 1989). 21 The first verbal expressions of the child are past participles, for the past

(‘left’, ‘fell’) and infinitives for the future. Then periphrasis develops (‘I am going to go’) and inflections only come in the last place. Cf. Elizabeth Traugott ‘Le changement linguistique et sa relation à l’acquisition de la langue maternelle’ Langages 32 1973 p. 47. 22 Cf. Robin Lakoff Language and Woman’s Place (New York: Harper and

Row, 1973). 23 Cf. the study by Joey L. Dillard Black English, Negro Non-Standard English,

and Mexican (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). 24 Brekle Sémantique pp. 94–104, and also W.C. Watt, who is equally oriented

towards an ‘abstract performative grammar’ having to account for the functioning of what he calls ‘mental grammar’ in its relations to perception, memory, etc.

13 Pragmatics: a micropolitics of linguistic formations 1

Thomas Bever ‘The Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures’ in J.R. Hayes (ed.) Cognition and the Development of Language (New York: Wiley, 1979) vol. 279 p. 203.

2

Giving up the simplifications that tended to reduce genetic encodings and evolution to a capitalisation of information and a statistical selection in which the most complex elements entertained an ‘arborescent’ dependency

NOTES

259

with regard to the most elementary elements, certain theories now envisage the transfers of genetic information can be produced through viruses and in such a way that evolution can ‘go back’ from a more evolved species to a species that is less evolved or generative or the more evolved. ‘If such passages of information were revealed as having been very important, certain geneticists declare that we would be led to substitute reticular schema (with communication across branches after their differentiation) to the bush- or tree-like schema that serve to represent evolution’ Yves Christensen ‘Le rôle des virus dans l’évolution’ La Recherche 54, March 1975 p. 271. 3

Sigmund Freud ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’ translated by James Strachey. Standard Edition volume 7 (London: Hogarth, 1953).

4

Pierre Clastres Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Paris: Plon, 1972) and Society against the State, Jacques Lizot Le Cercle des feux. Faits et dits des Indiens Yanomami (Paris: Seuil, 1976).

5

Nathan Lindquist declares that linguistic innovations can attack important centres ‘like paratroopers’ and then radiate across neighbouring countryside. Cited in Bertil Malmberg New Trends in Linguistics translated by Edward Carners (Stockholm: Lund, 1964) p. 65.

6

Languages 32 December 1973 p. 88.

7

Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics translated by Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

8

And one doesn’t get the impression that the linguist is ready to be rid of it any time soon, as when, for example, this same Françoise Robert, frightened by her own audacity with regard to the ideas she proposes in relation to a ‘community grammar’, is disturbed that such a conception might lead to a representation of competence that would threaten to destroy the sacrosanct concept of langue. Malmberg New Trends p. 60.

9

Langage 32 December 1973 p. 90.

10 The distinction proposed by Julia Kristeva, within the process of

signifance, between the level of a semiotic chora and a symbolic level, besides perpetuating and universalising the signifying, also has the disadvantage of closing up diagrammatic transformation on itself, making it a sort of deep structure, an arche-writing, once again. With Julia Kristeva, the innateness of universals leaves the symbolic so as to emigrate into the semiotic. In these conditions, pragmatics risks getting bogged down on an interminable textual practice like psychoanalysis risks wandering between a symbolic phenotext and a semiotic genotext which despite being freed from the personological polarities of communication, nevertheless remains prisoner of the hypothesis of an ‘unconscious signifying’ subjectivity. Julia Kristeva La Révolution du langage poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1974).

260

NOTES

11 Regarding a possible tripart division of deixis, into time, space and socius,

see Langage 32 December 1973 p. 45. 12 They thus escape both sense and signification at the same time, in so far as

the first, as Brekle proposes, would be assimilated to the intensional content of a concept attached to a signifier, and the second to its extensional aspect. Brekle Sémantique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) p. 44. But from a ‘machinic’ (and not a logical) point of view, sense would mark the establishment of a diagrammatic connection that is independent of any representational or significational system. 13 In the same way as a group, an institution, or a much bigger social

grouping, an isolated individual can be constitutive of such an assemblage, which is never reduced to being just a totalisation of individuals, but which engages other, ‘non-human’ flows (non-human sexuality, economic flows, material flows, etc.). 14 John L. Austin How To Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1962), John Searle Les Actes de langage. Un essai de philosophie de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972), Oswald Ducrot Dire et ne pas dire (Paris: Hermann, 1972). 15 Information theorists define signification as ‘an invariant in the reversible

operations of translation’ (B.A. Uspenskij quoted by Juri Lotman The Structure of the Artistic Text translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1977) p. 34. 16 Alain Rey ‘Langage et temporalités’ in Langages 32 December 1973.

Jean-Claude Chevalier for his part writes that ‘the language of general grammar and repression; for the bourgeoisie, the predicative schema and its meta-language (and the pre-eminence of syntax is indeed an ideological decision); for the people, technical words and vocabularies and a spoken language abandoned to an indifferent freedom’ ‘Idéologie grammaticale et changement linguistique’ Langages 32 December 1973. 17 Charles Sanders Peirce Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce edited by

Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge MA : Belknap Press, 1965). 18 François Jacob considers that the linearity of a mode of encoding allows

much more rigorous control of the linking of encoded sequences. Francois Jacob ‘Le modèle linguistique en biologie’ Critique 322 March 1974 p. 202. 19 Without exposing the specificity of the diagrammatic sign, Bettini and

Casetti define its contour well. See Filippo Bettini and Francesco Casetti ‘La sémiologie des moyens de communication audio-visuels et le problème de l’analogie’ in Dominique Noguez (ed.) Cinema: Théorie, Lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973) p. 92. 20 Peirce classified algorithms amongst icons of relation, etc.

NOTES

261

21 Lotman The Structure of the Artistic Text p. 36. Content, for Lotman, is

synonymous with the signified. 22 In Hjelmslev’s terminology: figures or glossemes of expression. 23 The development of a semiotics of synaesthesias would, on this point, be

fundamental: how can sounds be seen, colours heard, words somatised . . . A propos of ‘intersensorial transpositions’, Merleau-Ponty wrote ‘the senses translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and are mutually comprehensible without the intervention of any idea’ Maurice MerleauPonty The Phenomenology of Perception translated Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 235 [The French text misquotes Merleau-Ponty – having ‘sons’ (sounds) instead of ‘sens’ (senses).]. 24 Semiotics operating by batteries of discrete signs, cutting up information

into successive dichotomies baptised ‘digits’. 25 See the different semiotisations of jealousy and vengeance amongst the

Crow and Hopi Indians, noted by Lowie and signalled by Levi-Strauss in his preface to Solei Hopi. Don C. Talayesva Solei Hopi (Paris: Plon, 1959) [French language translation of Sun Chief. The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian.]. 26 One could distinguish between level a) human enactment, level b) abstract

signification, level c) machinic enactment. 27 ‘effect’ in the sense in that in physics one talks of a ‘Compton effect’. 28 As in this ‘page of writing’ by Jacques Prevert, in which the ‘lyre-bird’s’

flying off into the sky liberates not only the semiotics repressed by school (singing, dancing, . . .) but also all the other modes of encoding and stratification: ‘and the windows become sand again, the ink becomes water again, the desks become trees again, chalk becomes a cliff, the pen-holder becomes a bird.’ Jacques Prevert Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949). 29 Langages 26 June 1972. 30 Cf. also the way in which the imposition of the ‘language of the Republic’

on ‘wild France’ acquired the character of a colonial campaign, such as it was inaugurated by the Jacobin method of the Revolution. One finds the same slogans here as marked their furrows across the colonial empire: ‘of routes and schoolmasters.’ Michel de Certeau, with Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les patois. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

14 On faciality 1

262

Cf. the myths of the man without a face, etc., and the fact that when a psychotic loses the ability to recognise his own face, the entirety of signification is modified.

NOTES

2

‘A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur’ – literally ‘In the shadow of young girls in flower’ is the title of part of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, translated by Montcrieff and Kilmartin as ‘Within a Budding Grove’ [TN ].

3

‘. . . I had always striven, when I stood before the sea, to expel from my field of vision, as well as the bathers in the foreground and the yachts with their too dazzling sails that were like seaside costumes, everything that prevented me from persuading myself that I was contemplating the immemorial ocean which had already been pursuing the same mysterious life before the human race . . .’ Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time v.1 translated by Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981) p. 963.

4

Cf. in this regard Henri Michaux’s film on drugs, despite its very poor production quality.

5

Cf. René Spitz’s description of the functioning in a newborn baby of a ‘Gestalt-sign constituted by the eyes, forehead, and nose in movement.’ From the second month, the baby follows the eyes of the moving face of the adult, and during breastfeeding, it fixes its eyes continually on the mother’s face. It smiles at a face (or a mask) but only on condition that it is seen head on. René Spitz De la naissance à la parole (Paris: PUF, 1968). See also Otto Isakower ‘Contribution à la psychopathologie des phénomènes associés à l’endormissement’ Nouvelle Revue de la psychoanalyse 5, 1972, and Bertram D. Lewin ‘Le sommeil, la bouche, et l’écran du rêve’ ibid.

6

‘In any case, that is to say whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, we are in the process of unifying the Earth and the peoples that it bears under the infinite production of reason in its “purity” and of consciousness in its “propriety” ’ writes Gerard Granel a propos of Husserl’s phenomenology (‘Husserl’ article Encyclopaedia Universalis volume 8). The whole question here is one of knowing if it is just a matter of taking note of the ravages of the capitalist crusade to unify modes of subjectivation or, indeed, of putting oneself at its service in the name of a metaphysics of being in the pure state and the universal truth, which one intends to turn into ‘a question, a place of combat and of decision’.

7

Jacques Lacan ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’ in Écrits. A Selection translated by Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 2004).

8

Other registers, that of refrains, for example, or constellations of sonorous and rhythmic traits occupying temporality – Vinteuil’s ‘little phrase’ for example – which impose a break between the world of speech and the world of song, would equally be called into question by a such a reorientation of semiotic assemblages.

9

Ethnologists ought not to content themselves with preaching against ethnocentrism, they ought also to devote themselves to making possible NOTES

263

the existence of a counter-ethnography that would give to the ‘primitives’ the means of developing their point of view on the Whites, who they very generally consider to be sad, inhuman, cadaverous. 10 The ‘retro’ phenomenon does not itself result from a passing fashion. It has

always existed, at least in the context of societies that are engaged in a process of the acceleration of history, that is to say, of the acceleration of processes of deterritorialisation (the Romans, for example, were fascinated by the traces of the Greek and Egyptian past). 11 See for example how the judges in court cases where the defendant

has been caught red-handed literally judge them according to ‘how they look’. Christian Hennion Chronique des flagrants délits (Paris: Stock, 1976). 12 Frances A. Yates The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,

1966). 13 Cf. the article by Maurice Arvong in Le Monde 1 September 1976. 14 La Recherche 66, April 1976. 15 Jakob von Uexküll Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer,

1909/21). 16 Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel E. Barnes

(London: Methuen, 1957) p. 258. 17 Jean-Luc Parant Les Yeux MMDVI Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976:

‘. . . the work that is the great builders of EMPTY holes that are the eyes WITHOUT WHICH THEY NOT THE EYES WOULD NOT BE ABLE EITHER TO FLY OR SEE AND THE EYES HAVE DUG HOLES IN ALL THE WALLS SIGHT HAS UNBLOCKED EVERYTHING like the pioneers OF EMPTY space who have beaten a path to life by hollowing out the night and the consistency THAT GRIPPED US LIKE A SKIN to the point of finding the EMPTY day and this void THIS VOID without which THE EYES we could neither FLY move or see and the eyes are submerged entirely in space and only ever return to the surface covered with their hard and creased membrane EYELIDS .’ 18 Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time p. 227 , 375 , 570 . 19 In the framework of quantum physics, ‘quantum tunnelling’ allows the

passage of a physical system from one ‘authorised state’ to another ‘authorised state’ via a succession of ‘prohibited’ intermediary states to be described. See La Recherche 58, July–August 1975. 20 Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology. The Biology of Behaviour translated

by Erich Klinghammer (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1970).

264

NOTES

15 The hierarchy of behaviour in man and animal 1

Nikolas Tinbergen The Study of Instinct (London: Oxford University Press, 1951).

2

René Thom Structural Stability and Morphogenesis translated by D.H. Fowler.

3

From this point of view, we cannot follow Michel Foucault when in The History of Sexuality v.1 he considers that there is a specific repression of desire correlative to the evolution of capitalism. It is true that he doesn’t talk about desire, but about sexuality, and that the target being aimed at having thereby been first reduced, it seems clear that in effect there must, all things considered, always be ‘as much sexuality’ in one epoch as another. But when sexuality-desire is subsequently broadened to the discourses and power formations that relate to it, it becomes less evident that there might not be a recuperative repression, which is miniaturised and interiorised more and more, that is specific to the methods of capitalist subjection.

4

In English in the original [TN ].

5

Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 143.

6

Remy Chauvin Entretiens sur la sexualité (Paris: Plon, 1965). Cf. the references assembled by Eibl-Eibesfeldt ibid pp. 158–9.

7

Eibl-Eibesfeldt ibid p. 323 and 450.

8

‘An entire study of animal behaviour (one could say as much of human behaviour) involves in the first place the determination of norms for the species under consideration, living in its natural milieu, or in conditions that reproduce them as faithfully as possible . . . whereas in the wild rabbits live in a society and manifest complex sexual customs, caged rabbits are limited to vegetative activity. There is no possible comparison between the behaviour of a rat free in the wild and a white rat living in the confines of a small cage. Man has selected the gentlest individuals, the least ‘rodent-like’ and created a being whose psychic level, compared to that of the wild rat, is that of a mongoloid idiot [sic] in relation to a normal human. When one thinks that the immense body of work accomplished by American zoopsychogists, with the aid of mazes and other tests, is based exclusively on the reactions of this idiotic white rat of the Winston or any other race, one is taken aback, to say the least . . .’ Pierre-Paul Grasse ‘Zoologie’ Encyclopédie de la Pléiade v.1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) p. 251.

9

The first ‘quantitative’ studies by primatologists (Washburn, DeVore) started out from the hypothesis of a direct relation between the strictness

NOTES

265

of hierarchical domination amongst apes and the degree of adaptation to life in the savannah, and have had to be reoriented. What has been given primacy is no longer simply the quantity of social relation (delousing, etc.), but the quality of their diverse assemblages and their order of appearance. For example, the graph of links of the four assemblages of two baboons (one dominant, one dominated): 1) combat; 2) presentation of posteriors; 3) the mounting of a sexual character; 4) social delousing. See Hans Kummer ‘Le comportement social des singes’ La Recherche 75, December 1976, pp. 10–12. 10 In this regard we will later turn to the use, for example amongst birds, of

specific refrains for the sexual ‘closure’ of a species (Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 24, 104) and to the more fundamental relations that exist between the semiotisations of rhythm and of territory. 11 Kummer ‘Le comportement social des singes’.

16 The semiotics of the grass stem 1

Jurgen Nicolai Vogelhaltung und Vogelpflege. Das Vivarium (Stuttgart: Franckh-Kosmos Verlag, 1965). Quoted by Eibl-Eibesfeldt.

2

Filmed at the rate of 48 frames a second and decomposed image by image, these expressions are also found in the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, France, Japan, Africa, amongst Indians of the Orinoco-Amazon region, etc. Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology pp. 436–42.

3

Which is opposed here to symbolic interpretation.

4

With regard to criticism of mechanically ‘progressive’ phylogeny, we can only repeat here what François Dagognet has said and transpose it from the botanic taxonomies of zoology: ‘. . . Simplicity does not stand as an index of primitiveness or ancestrality. In effect, it can be excluded that the flower was initially polycarpic and multi-petalled (cycadeoidea theory), as the oldest records of the Early Cretaceous (the Bennettitales) tend to suggest. Similarly, Monocotyledons would also be derived from dicotyledons and not the other way around, as an additive theory of evolution would have it, with regular movements from one to two. It is true that certain palaeobotanists are happy to admit dense and ramified lines, on the basis of a single complex, but this is another way of refuting the concept of a rectilinear and progressive movement. And these remarks show well enough the traps of a phylogeny understood too much in terms of a transition from the simple to the complex, although the abundance of spiral forms [. . .] may translate an earlier situation’ Encyclopaedia Universalis vol. 15 p. 764.

5

Paul Géroudet Les Palmipèdes (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1959) pp. 20–40.

266

NOTES

6

Paul Géroudet Les Échasseurs (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1967) pp. 31–40.

7

Paul Géroudet Les Passereaux (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, nd) vol. 2 pp. 89–94.

8

Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 193.

9

In proximate forms, one finds a courtship ritual that makes a reference to ‘nesting’ even amongst fish. For example, the male decorates its spawning area with [twigs] in such a manner as to produce a star effect that will attract females. Example given by Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 126.

10 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who also recalls the work of I. Nicolai concerning the

coevolution of Wydahbirds and the birds that they parasite (different species of Bengali finch, waxbills, etc.) on the basis of the fact that they imitate their host’s song: ‘it is highly probable that the traditional links of the wydahs with their host-species, which are maintained by the imitation of the latter’s song, has led to the evolution of different races from this group’ Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 162 and 194. 11 Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 130 and 136. 12 This ritual is composed of several assemblages:

Dancing: with their necks pushed back, the partners alternate in turning beaks, head to one side, in such a manner that the beak touches the shoulder pushed upwards; ●

clashing of beaks, which ‘imitates’ the search for food by the young;

●

banging of beaks, which evokes a threat;

●

crying towards the sky, which evokes instead an appeasement;

●

smoothing of shoulder feathers of the partner (always punctuated by a banging of the beak).

And at the end of each sequence, the order of which is not very strict, the two birds both bend towards the ground and emit ‘two sonorous syllables’ so as to seal a sort of ‘nesting contract’. 13 Paul Géroudet Les Passereaux vol. 2 p. 10. 14 Ibid vol. 3 p. 10. 15 An entire field of animal play ought equally to be explored. Eibl-Eibesfeldt,

for example, describes an extraordinary game of croquet between two Galapagos finches, pushing a small mealworm back and forth through a crack in a branch, into which they had probably previously inserted it. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 252. 16 K. Immelman has demonstrated that zebra finches with highly colourful

plumage, maintain a certain distance from one another, whereas the NOTES

267

all-white birds of the same species sit more closely to one another. Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 143. 17 Even at this level of biological fascination that imprinting constitutes,

there will continue to exist sorts of degrees of freedom or optional matters, as tends to be indicated by the fact that zebra finches who have been raised by female society finches will court society finches when adult if they are given the choice. If on the contrary they are forced to cohabit with a conspecific female they will appear to become ‘normal’ again: they court and breed with them as if there had been no imprinting. In short, the effects of imprinting seem to be imposed on the order of desire. 18 Research of K. Immelman, cited by Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 241. 19 Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt pp. 51–2. 20 It is to be noted that mathematical techniques of data analysis have for

some years had recourse to methods of transcription that appeal precisely to elementary faciality traits. Thus in Chernoff ’s method, parameters are represented by the mouth, the nose, etc., and one compares physiognomies so as to compare the objects studied. See Edwin Diday and Ludovic Lebart ‘L’analyse des donnees’ in La Recherche 74, January 1977. 21 According to them, all, or a part, of the behaviours of negation, approval,

welcoming, flirting, arrogance, intimidation, triumph, submission, rage etc., arise from codings that are transmitted through heredity. Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 440 et seq. 22 Let us emphasise that it isn’t ‘centres’ that neurosurgeons localise, but only

resection points that have as a consequence the disorganisation of the components in question. Everything leads us to think in effect that each real act of memorisation – in particular when it concerns long-term memory – puts into play the electrical potentials of a whole population of neurons, which cannot be ‘localised’ but which is ‘selected’ in the brain as a whole. Wilder Penfield and Brenda Milner ‘Memory deficit produced by bilateral lesions in the hippocampal zone’ Archive of Neurology and Psychiatry 1958. E. Roy John Mechanisms of Memory (New York: Academic Press, 1967). 23 There is rhythm in the beating wings of migrating birds, in the trotting of

wild horses, in undulating gliding of fish; but it is also as impossible for animals to trot, fly, or swim, in metre as it is for humans to breathe in time with a metronome. Ludwig Klages Expression du caractère dans l’écriture (Neuchatel: Delachaux-Niestlé, 1947) p. 41. 24 A rhythm of a period of 24 hours, playing a role that turns out to be more

significant the more it is studied, as much at the levels of cellular biology, pharmacology, the physiology of tissues, organs, and functions, as of ethology. The majority of rhythms of a greater periodicity – like that of

268

NOTES

migrations – result from a composition based on circadian rhythms, and thus, in the final analysis, from these molecular rhythms. 25 Alain Reinberg ‘La chronobiology. Une nouvelle étape de l’étude des

rhythmes biologiques’ Sciences vol.1, 1970; ‘Rhythmes biologiques’ Encyclopedia Universalis vol.14 p. 568; Julian de Ajuriaguerra Cycles biologiques et psychiatrie (Geneva: Editions Georg et Cie, 1968). 26 William H. Thorpe Learning and Instinct in Animals (London: Methuen,

1969) pp. 421–6. 27 ‘By a “body” I understand whatever has a definite shape and position, and

can occupy a region of space in such a way as to keep every other body out of it’ René Descartes Meditations 2nd Meditation. 28 Von Weizsäcker, for example, writes ‘In the case of physics, the law resides

in the action of forces, in the case of organic movement, it comes from form’ Viktor von Weizsäcker Le Cycle de la structure translated by Michel Foucault and Daniel Rocher (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1958). 29 And also, indirectly, specialists of psychoanalytic ‘pass’ words. 30 An example of a non-signifying and non-individuated system of

‘reflexivity’ carrying out highly complex discursive work: the duplication of the double helix systems of DNA that correspond at the molecular level with the duplication of chromosomes. 31 Cf. ‘L’oeil écoute. BABA + GAGA – DADA .’ Review of the work of Harry

McGurk and John MacDonald ‘Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices’ from Nature 26 December 1976, in Le Monde 26 January 1977. 32 For example, why is it that life ‘got going’ on the basis of carbon and not

silicon? 33 For example, Holst has established that the rhythms of the pectoral fins of

fish are always dominant in relation to the rhythms of the dorsal and caudal fins. Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 41. 34 A humorous example of an animal warding off of a ‘politics of black holes’

through the putting into play of highly sophisticated semiotic interactions: that of [male] insects which, in order to delay the fatal moment, at least whilst copulating, under threat of being eaten by their female mate during intercourse, offer them little alimentary gifts. Those of the species Hilaria even push the stunt as far as offering them an unconsumable object of some sort, wrapped in a cocoon that is particularly difficult to take apart . . . Noted in Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 127. 35 Kenneth W. Braly has shown, for example, that immediate ‘natural’

perception of complex forms was influenced considerably by learning on the basis of an unconscious perceptual memory. Kenneth W. Braly ‘The Influence of Past Experience in Visual Perception’ cited in Robert Frances La Perception de la musique (Paris: Vrin, 1972) p. 52.

NOTES

269

17 The little phrase in Vinteuil’s sonata 1

For example, faciality traits trigger attention behaviour amongst the young, reactions to the ‘baby’ schema (Lorenz, Spindler . . .) or the effects of suggestion like those exploited by Milgram with his torture experiments, graduated, simulated, and ordered by a hierarchical authority. Cf. EiblEibesfeldt Ethology p. 446 and 448.

2

Thorpe Learning and Instinct in Animals p. 469.

3

‘[L]ike that cup of tea, all those sensations of light, the bright clamour, the boisterous colours that Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination, insistently but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something that I might compare to the perfumed silkiness of a geranium. But whereas in memory this vagueness may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil (like that of the steeple of Martinville), one would have to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which he “heard” the universe and projected it far beyond himself ’ (III , 382).

4

Proust himself was a passionate gambler and at several points in his life lost large sums of money playing baccarat.

5

The field opened up by music cannot be restricted to seven notes on a keyboard, but to an incommensurable keyboard that is still almost entirely unknown . . . The great artists discover new universes and show us ‘what richness, what variety lies hidden unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void’ (I, 380).

6

Proust gives a remarkable description of the worldly salons as collective assemblages of enunciation, in Cities of the Plain in particular: ‘salons cannot be portrayed in a static immobility which has been conventionally employed up to this point for the study of characters, though these too must be carried along as it were in a quasi-historical momentum’ (II, 769)).

7

‘The abundance of impressions which he had been receiving for some time past, even though they had come to him rather through the channel of his appreciation of music, had enriched his appetite for painting as well’ (I, 244). But this new lease of life for painting will be short lived; it too will subside in the black hole process of semiotic collapse that will characterise his passion for Odette.

8

Each one of Odette’s visits ‘revived the sense of disappointment which he felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the

270

NOTES

interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite of her youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to him, that her really considerable beauty was not of the kind which he spontaneously admired’ (I, 215). 9

Sigmund Freud ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva’ in Standard Edition volume 9 (London, Hogarth, 1959).

10 A differential analysis would perhaps be led to show that photographs do

not have the same function for Proust as for Kafka (for Proust, the photograph is related to the portrait, whilst in Kafka, the portrait is related to the photograph). 11 The same objection was made against partisans of a mathematician such

as Henri-Leon Lebesgue. 12 Cf. ‘Histoire de la musique’ Encyclopédie de la Pleiade volume 1 p. 1168. 13 Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley (New

York: Zone, 1989) p. 107 et seq. 14 Franz Kafka ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk’ in Complete Short

Stories (London: Penguin, 1983) p. 361. From this point of view, let us also note that for John Cage, a politics of sound should not be an obstacle to silence, and that silence should not obscure sound. He envisages a sort of ‘recuperation’ of nothingness, as the following extract from one of his interviews with Daniel Charles shows: JC :

Nothingness is nothing but a word.

DC :

Like silence it must suppress itself . . .

JC :

And one thereby comes back to what is, that is to say, to sounds.

DC :

But don’t you lose something?

JC :

What?

DC :

Silence, nothingness . . .

JC : Look, I’m losing nothing! It isn’t a question of losing anything in all that, but of gaining. DC : Coming back to sound is thus to return to sounds ‘accompanied’ by nothingness, this side of all structure. JOHN CAGE Pour les oiseaux (Paris: Belfond, 1976) p. 32 See also the comparison that John Cage establishes between going beyond what is called music and what is called politics: ‘politics is the same thing. And I can even talk about “non-politics” the way that with regard to my work, one spoke of “non-music”.’ Ibid. p. 54. 15 Cf. the fine homage by the musician Jacques Besse ‘Robert Schumann was

sectioned’ in La Grande Pâque (Paris: Belfond, 1969).

NOTES

271

16 In certain African musics, a phrase can be drummed without being

articulated verbally. 17 In fact, this new deterritorialised relation between labour power and

power formations doesn’t just concern leading economic sectors, it also has an effect on older sectors, on the public function; it also traverses the milieus of the unions, politics, universities, the judiciary, etc. 18 Other creators, such as Berlioz, will also use their own inadequacies so as

not to cross a certain threshold of deterritorialisation. 19 One need only think of Debussy’s Children’s Corner, La Boîte à joujoux,

the role of childhood in Pelleas and Melisande, or of L’Enfant et les sortilèges by Ravel. But what specifies the position of childhood in these works, to our mind, is that it no longer functions as a basic refrain, as a generative bloc, as a bloc of becoming; at the end point of a generative process of a different nature, it no longer appears as anything other than a redundant theme. In any case, Claude Debussy very frequently only characterised the content of his works after the fact by giving them expressive titles (for example, the symphonic poem La Mer). 20 Cf. Pierre Boulez’s analysis of rhythmic cells in Sacré du printemps: Relèves

d’apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966). 21 ‘. . . when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into

whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the image of a new beauty which deepens his sensibility, although he does not even know her name or whether he will ever see her again. Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation . . .’ (I, 229). 22 In English in the original [TN ].

272

NOTES

INDEX

a-signification 6, 39, 130 and assemblages 7 and birds 209, 214 and faciality 179 in Proust 232, 234 abstraction 124–5 See also machines, abstract adolescence 8, 78, 130, 247 stages of life 143–7 alienation 40, 47, 57, 65, 67, 73–4, 103, 135, 156 tolerability of 83 Althusser, Louis xii, 99–100 analogy 160–1 analysis: conditions for a new method of 36 and faciality 50 institutional xii, 43, 53, 55 micropolitical 9, 53, 55, 74 militant 56, 69, 95, 98, 103 poverty of means for 226 pragmatic 9–10, 54–5 in Proust 233 rhizomatic 80, 163 schizo- 194–5, 233, 239 and unconscious 92, 232 and universals 36 See also pragmatics animals 198–205 altruistic behaviour 205 baboons 203 birds 207–16, 218 birdsong 213–15 courtship 210–12

chimpanzees 204 and humans 193, 200 and orgasm 199 wasp and orchid 201–2 See also ethology anxiety 86, 128, 146, 163, 181, 186, 188–9, 201 archaeology 53–4 archaic societies 91, 158, 162 and capitalism 134, 186, 236 and expression 7–9 and faciality 184 and music 238 refuse signification 162, 165–6 and rhythm 238–9 and school 150 and territorialisation 37 and writing 8, 166 aristocracy See nobility artifice 40 assemblages 52 and a-signification 7 and desire 54–5 and deterritorialisation 120 and equipment 33, 36–7, 59–60, 96 and expression 61 heterogeneous 47 inter- 194–5, 197–8, 201–3, 209 and machines 62, 119, 132 manifestation of 96 and micropolitics 53 possibility of 36 273

revolutionary 200 territorialised 165 and unconscious 4 See also collective assemblages; desire; enunciation Barel, Yves 20, 24, 30 baroque 168 Barthes, Roland 113 Bataille, Georges 21 Bateson, Gregory 10 beat poets 226 Belladonna, Judith xv Bellochio, Marco, Fou à délier 69 belonging 17 Benveniste, Émile 131 Bettin 160 Bever, T. G. 142 bi-univocalisation 122, 167, 199 binarisation 119, 181, 184, 187, 190, 192, 197–8, 236 binarist illusion 238–9 See also dualism black holes 44, 48, 74, 88–9, 154, 163, 179, 181–5, 188–9, 193–4, 198–201, 204, 212, 216, 222 and capitalism 186 body 179–80, 184, 188 bourgeoisie 19–22 and collective equipment 19, 21, 24, 29 invade everything 32 and nobility 23–6, 28–31 sensibility of 26–7, 30 and workers 63–4 Braudel, Fernand xvi Brekle, Herbert E. 137–8, 154, 158 Bukharin, Nikolai 174 capitalism: and archaic societies 134, 186, 236 274

INDEX

and black holes 186 and bourgeoisie 25 and childhood 239 and collective equipment 11–12, 17–18, 26, 33, 50 and deterritorialisation 16, 18–20, 32–3, 95 deterritorialises everything 32, 48 everything organised around 60 and faciality 180–2 and family 42 and fascism 61, 88, 90 historical development of 15–19, 24, 26, 28–9 integrated world capitalism xvi and Kafka 223 and language 8–9 as only economy 135 refrains of 236–8 and rhythm 236–7 school as enslavement to 150 and semiotic components 6, 42 and semiotisation 8, 99 and signification 158 and signifier 190–1 and workers 63 at your service 46 Casetti, Francesco 160 causality 41, 56, 86, 105, 109, 149, 192, 198–9, 217 and machines 192 CERFI (Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Development) xiii–xv Chambon, Roger 3 chance 119 change 68 Chaplin, Charlie, Modern Times 161 Chauvin, Rémy 201 childhood/children 4, 53, 126–7 bed wetting of 145 and bourgeois sensibility 26–7 and capitalism 239

in Chopin 241 and desire 85–6 drawings of 144 and enslavement 150 as escape from signifier 8 and faciality 182, 186 and freedom 92 modelling of 42 in Proust 235–6 and repression 144–6, 149 and school 42–4 in Schumann 240 stages of life 143–7 worked from inside 33 See also Freud, Little Hans Chomsky, Noam 9, 110–12, 115–16, 131–3, 137–9, 151–2, 170, 174 early intuitions of 133 Chopin 241 Christ 188 Christianity 15–16 churches 16–17, 19–22 citizenship 175 Clastres, Pierre 9, 134, 237 collective assemblages 71–4 cartography of 74–81 identity loss in 98 See also assemblages; desire; enunciation collective equipment xiv–xvi, 35–8, 40, 42–3, 47–8 and bourgeoisie 19, 21, 24, 29 and capitalism 11–12, 17–18, 26, 33, 50 crisis in 45 and desire 13–14, 67, 93 and deterritorialisation 46 and enunciation 67 and fabrication of individuals 12–14, 33 and faciality 50–1, 186, 237 function of 11–12, 34 and humans 11

and machinic revolution 99 and micropolitics 52–3 and possession of individuals 35–6 and pragmatic analysis 9–10 and repression 100 See also equipment communication 115–16, 123, 134, 154 competence: communicative 137, 158 in general 175 and performance 135–9, 141–2, 151–2, 175 computers 191 conscientialisation 123–4, 163, 180–2, 186, 194, 200–1, 222 and power 185 and signifying power 166 contingency 116 and subject 120 couples 44, 53, 193 and state power 65 cynicism 27 Deleuze, Gilles ix, xii, xiv, 43 Anti-Oedipus ix, xi–xii, xiv, 172 Dialogues xi and institution of philosophy xi ‘Intellectuals and Power’ xi Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature xiii A Thousand Plateaus xiii–xv Déligny, Fernand 43 democratic regimes, and fascism 87–91 desire: alienation of 37 and archaic societies 7 and assemblages 54–5 and children 85–6 collective assemblages of 33, 47, 59, 72, 93 INDEX

275

and collective equipment 13–14, 67, 93 control of 126, 144, 182, 186 and deterritorialisation 32 economy of 40, 54, 56, 58, 62–3, 68, 73, 98, 228 energy of 125, 127 and escape from signifier 8–9 and everyday 237 expropriation of 36 extinguished by white male gaze 187 human and animal 200 and language 3 and law 72 leakiness of 124, 147 lines of flight of 53, 61 and micropolitics 74, 202 micropolitics of 5, 9, 48, 69, 75, 95, 103, 136, 139, 147, 186, 235 politics of 61, 68, 75–6, 149 and power 81 in Proust 235 and repression 60, 92, 99 and research 38–9 and ‘serious’ people 51 and state power 65, 85, 93 struggle of 81, 97 and value 12 See also machines, desiring Dessert, Daniel 25 destiny 37, 66, 71, 156, 205 deterritorialisation 14, 48, 53, 109 and abstract machines 62, 121 and archaic societies 166 and artifice 40 and assemblages 120 and birds 211–16 and bourgeoisie 24–6 and capitalism 16, 18–20, 32–3, 48, 95 and collective equipment 46 and desire 72 276

INDEX

and fascism 88 and labour 58 and music 240 of nobility 27–8 and politics 148 as possibilisation 149 and semiotic components 59 of sentiment 27 and subjectivity 201 diagrammatism 40, 58, 62, 74, 91, 96, 99–101, 121–2, 124, 128, 131–2, 147, 149, 153, 155–6, 159–61, 173, 195, 197, 209, 218, 236 diagrammatic transformation 159, 171 diagrams 159 disciplines (academic) xiv, 41, 150 interdisciplinarity xiii–xiv See also research; scholarly thinking discourse 135, 138, 190 rational 49, 72 dominant: redundancies 51, 53, 66, 69, 74, 95–6, 162, 223, 234 significations 8, 40, 50, 118, 124, 135, 153, 159, 170, 173, 180, 188, 190, 217 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 26 Dosse, François, xiv drawing 144 See also painting drugs 88, 90 dualism 120, 166, 217 See also binarisation Duby, Georges 15 Ducrot, Oswald 128, 135, 157 ecology xvi education See school Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus 203, 212

enslavement: audiovisual 126 chronographic 240 machinic 57, 223 by school 150 semiotic 44, 133–4, 166 enunciation 186 assemblages of 4–5, 9–10, 39, 68, 123, 126–7, 131, 154, 162–4, 167, 169, 174, 186, 220 collective assemblages of xii–xiii, xv, 12, 38, 46, 67, 97–100, 110, 125, 130, 142, 147, 155, 173, 229 individuation of 50 linguistics of 116 militant 56 psychoanlaysis crushes 4–5 and rational discourse 49 and research 38–9 and responsibilisation 181 splitting of 127 environment xvi equipment xv, 53, 65–6, 83 and assemblages 33, 36–7, 59–60, 96 and fascism 87–8, 90 See also collective equipment equivalence 183 escape 69, 72, 133, 188, 237 ethnology: and ethology 204 and faciality 207 ethology 208, 214, 218, 225 and ethnology 204 everyday 9, 53, 56, 91, 102, 161, 184, 187–8, 194 and desire 237 and struggle 66 and subjectivation 194 evolution 192, 205, 208 expenditure 21, 28, 30 experience xi–xii

experimentation 66, 103–4, 154–5, 165, 202, 219 exploitation 11, 15–16, 21, 29–30, 57, 63–5 expression 185 and archaic societies 7, 186 and assemblages 61 and capitalism 8–9, 186 and collective equipment 11 and content 117, 119, 122, 125–8, 138, 142, 167–8 foundation of 126 and order 119 and school 44 and semiotics 157 and signification 188 and syntacticised language 37 faciality 93, 146, 163, 179–94, 197–9, 203, 213, 223 and archaic societies 184 and bourgeoisie 30 and capitalism 180–2 and children 182, 186 and collective equipment 50–1, 186, 237 decay of 46 and enslavement 166 and ethnology 207 and institution 46, 50 and labour 57 and normalisation 187–9 and politics 181 and polyvocity 189 and power 49–51, 180–1, 187, 189 and Proust 183, 221, 226, 230–2 saturated by standardised models of 182 and semiotic components 182–4 and signification 179–80 and teachers 80 white male gaze 187 INDEX

277

worked from inside 33 and world 181, 183 family 48–9, 53 and capitalist production 42 and miniaturisation 67 and normality 53 and state power 65 fascism 74, 223 and capitalism 61, 88 and democratic regimes 87–91 micro- 68, 78, 89–91, 104 as possibility 104 and revolution 92 Fauré, Gabriel 241 feeling 33 passions 170 feudalism 17, 19–20, 30 FGERI (Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Research) xiii finitude 237 Foucault, Michel xiv, 44, 53, 90, 104, 121 ‘Intellectuals and Power’ xi and prisons 55–6 Fourquet, François xiv freedom 205–6 Freinet, Célestin 104 Freud, Sigmund x, 6 Little Hans x, 72, 90–1, 127, 156 future 192 and revolution 234 gangs 8, 15, 90, 144 revolt prevented by 90 Gaulle, Charles de 46 gaze, white male 187 Genghis Khan 37 Géroudet, Paul 211 God, Peace of 16, 18, 29, 33–4 Godechot, Jacques 29 grammaticality 133, 135, 142, 170–1 and pragmatics 171 Gramsci, Antonio xii, 98 278

INDEX

Granel, Gérard 185 group x–xi and semiotics 165 Grousset, René 18 Guattari, Félix ix–xvi Anti-Oedipus ix, xi–xii, xiv, 172 early work of x foci of xi Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature xiii Lines of Flight xiv–xvi marginalisation of ix A Thousand Plateaus xiii–xv ‘Three Billion Perverts’ xiii guilt 48, 72–3, 89, 166, 168, 181, 186, 201 Habermas, Jürgen 137–8 Hall, M. F. 211 heredity 136–7, 207, 218–19 heterogeneous: assemblages 47, 236 components 56, 217, 221, 223 Hinde, R. 215 history 153 Hitler, Adolf 87–8 Hjelmslev, Louis 116–18, 122, 126, 128, 163, 168 Holst, E. von 222 Houssin, Yann 69 humans: and animals 193, 200, 225 and bourgeoisie 32 and collective equipment 11 and machines 191 ideology, and state power 99–100 Ignatius of Loyola 27 Illich, Ivan 67 images 159 Immelman, K. 201, 211 individual: enslaved by school 150 fabrication of 12–14, 33

infra- 10, 12, 48, 54, 75–6 and political 54 possession of 35–6, 223 in Proust 229 and psychoanalysis, x ‘serious’ people 51 and state power 50 and world 40 See also personalisation; subject industrial revolution, third 57 infantilisation 239 information theory 10, 42, 71, 115, 119, 191–2, 197–8, 212 infra-: individual 10, 12, 48, 54, 75–6 personological 33, 142 institution x–xvi and crisis 45 and faciality 46, 50 institutional analysis xii, 43, 53, 55 reform without revolution 55 integrated world capitalism xvi intellectuals, and militancy 97–8 interdisciplinarity xiii–xiv disciplines xiv, 41, 150 interpretance 131, 160 interpretation 232 Jones, Ernest 200 Journet, Jean-Louis 25 Kafka, Franz xii–xiii, xv, 235, 238 and capitalism 223 and Proust 226 Kennedy, John F. 63 Khrushchev, Nikita 63 Klages, Ludwig 217–18 Koestler, Arthur 8 La Borde, x–xiii labour: and deterritorialisation 58

division of xii, 85 and faciality 57 Lacan, Jacques x, 39, 162, 199, 219 mirror stage 181, 186 language xi and capitalism 8–9 creativity of 116–17 infinitives 134 and information 115 in itself 150–2 leakiness of 119 and normalisation 118 and politics 136 and power 141 in Proust 228 and speech 190 and state power 134 and unconscious 3, 6 and universals 135–7 See also discourse; enunciation; expression; grammaticality; polyvocity; semiotics; speech acts; writing law 70–3 and desire 72 leaders 101, 103 politicians 66 Lenin 96–7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 166 Lewin, Kurt 10 life, origins of 192 lines of flight 33, 53, 61, 93, 104, 111, 120, 122, 125, 129, 142, 148, 155, 172, 194, 199, 201, 209, 212, 214, 216, 230 control of 83 linguistics 110 and Chomsky 9 of enunciation 116 generative 135 object of 115 and pragmatics 157 INDEX

279

and structure xiii See also grammaticality; pragmatics literature, minor 136 Lorenz, Konrad 214 Lotman, Yuri 160 love 19, 26 machines: abstract 59–62, 96–7, 109–12, 120–5, 143–9, 152–4, 170 and assemblages 62, 119, 132, 170 and bourgeoisie 30 and causality 192 coexistence of 31 concrete 39, 59–61, 185, 187, 194, 204, 208 definition of 121 desiring 11, 54, 58 and humans 191 machinic sense 208–9 mega- 67–8, 96 and rational discourse 49 religious 15–17, 19, 23, 165 revolutionary 97, 99 and semiotisation 214 and subjectivity 35 and unconscious 4 war 15, 20, 91, 97, 119, 173 madness, as escape from signifier 8 Manichaeism 13, 101, 172, 179 Mao Tse-tung 50 map, and unconscious 156, 173 Marxism 105, 171 and sciences 66–7 See also socialism masses, energy of 87 May 1968 45, 76–7, 79, 102, 187 McCawley, Jim 174 media 57, 66, 81–2, 89, 126, 182–3, 238 television 50–1, 84, 237 280

INDEX

memory 149–50, 190, 217 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 219 metamodelling xii Metz, Christian 37, 118, 136 Michaux, Henri 226 micropolitical: analysis 9, 53, 55, 74 ethology 50 group 36 struggle 52 micropolitics 52–3, 61, 65, 98, 101, 110, 116, 118, 127, 131, 133, 137, 152 and desire 74, 202 of desire 5, 9, 48, 69, 75, 95, 103, 136, 139, 147, 186, 235 and pragmatics 155 militancy 56, 102 and intellectuals 97–8 and workers 97 See also analysis, militant miniaturisation 14, 18, 20, 24, 33, 44, 53, 67, 83, 126 and faciality of power 50–1, 183 and fascism 88, 90 and revolutionary powers 47 and struggle 97 minor literature 136 minorities 23 modelling xii, 37, 42, 50, 87, 93, 102–3, 132, 182, 212, 237 modernity 95 molecular revolution 51, 55, 67, 77, 79, 83, 101 and capitalist development 26 See also revolution money: and capitalist development 16 and psychoanalysis 4–5 Mozère, Liane xiv Mumford, Lewis 68 Murard, Lion xiv

music 137, 218 and archaic societies 238 baroque 168 as calming design 46 and deterritorialisation 240 in Proust 227–8, 230–5, 241–2 See also rhythm Mussolini, Benito 87 mutations 83 nature 40 disappearance of 85 return to 70, 96, 163 Nietzsche, Friedrich 72 Nimier, Jacques 192 nobility 16, 19–21 and bourgeoisie 23–6, 28–31 deterritorialisation of 27–8 norms/normalisation 89, 133–4, 138, 144 and faciality 187–9 and family 53 and language 118 and universities 68 order, ideal of 119 origins 105 Oury, Fernand 145 packs 218 painting 183 See also drawing Parent, Jean-Luc 193 Parnet, Claire, Dialogues xi passions 170 feeling 33 Peace of God 16, 18, 29, 33–4 peasantry 24, 28, 58 Peirce, C. S. 113, 132, 159–60, 164 perception: appearance of world 3 and collective equipment 13–14 performance, and competence 135–9, 141–2, 151–2, 175

personalisation 50–1, 180 infra- 33, 142 plane of consistency 109, 121–2, 129–30, 142, 148, 155, 169, 173, 222 Polack, Jean-Claude xi politicians 66 leaders 101, 103 politics: of archaic societies 165 and deterritorialisation 148 and faciality 181 and language 136 polyvocity 7, 60, 144, 168, 183, 189 and faciality 189 Pompidou, Georges 46 possible 148, 185, 190 possibilisation 149 power 6 and bourgeoisie 23 calming designs of 46 and competence 135 and conscientialisation 185 constituted 49 and desire 81 disciplinary 104 and faciality 49–51, 180–1, 187, 189 and language 141 molar and molecular 48–9, 52, 93 psychoanalysis avoids 43 signifying 166 and structure 7, 9 See also state power pragmatics 9–10, 54–5, 110–11, 115–16, 125, 138, 152 definition of 142, 154–5 generative 157–8, 173, 175 and grammaticality 171 and linguistics 157 and micropolitics 155 revolutionary 171 and rhizomes 155, 165 INDEX

281

and unconscious 9, 153–4, 156 and universals 138, 150 primitive societies See archaic societies prisons 55–6 production 57–8 and semiotisation 63 prostitution 81 Proust, Marcel xi, 194, 226–35, 241–3 analysis in 233 and capitalism 223 extraordinary semiotic magnification in 235 and faciality 183, 221, 226, 230–2 In Search of Lost Time 183, 229 and Kafka 226 music in 227–8, 230–5, 241–2 The Prisoner 228 Swann’s Love 228 psychiatry: impotence of 41 outside the hospital 67 psychoanalysis 115, 220 assemblages impeded by 55 avoids real power 43 enunciation crushed by 4–5 extinguishing effects of 173 and individualism, x and money 4–5 and signifier 237 stages of life 143–7 and structure 156 psychosis, ix–x public/private 99–100 Querrien, Anne xiv, 42 L’école mutuelle: une pédagogie trop efficace? xv Rabinow, Paul xv Racine, Jean 26 rational discourse 49, 72 282

INDEX

Recherches xiii–xv ‘Genealogy of Capital’ xiv–xv ‘Three Billion Perverts’ xiii redundancy 51, 53, 66, 69, 74, 162, 180, 183, 185, 189, 194, 223, 234, 237 and semiotisation 95–6 refrains 236–8 Reinberg, A. 218 religious machine See machines, religious repression 69, 86, 88, 101–2, 124, 144, 187 and children 144–6, 149 and collective equipment 100 and desire 60, 92, 99 miniaturisation of 83 and semiotisation 145–6 research xiii–xvi, 205 and desire 38–9 and enunciation 38–9 interdisciplinarity xiii–xiv as intervention 56 and school 43 and semiotics 37–40 See also disciplines; scholarly thinking; universities responsibilisation 181–2 revolution 63 and fascism 92 and future 234 machinic 97, 99 micro- 84 See also molecular revolution revolutionary movement: gangs prevent 90 and institution 55 rhizomes 53, 69, 72, 75, 111, 174, 185, 190, 193, 195, 197–9, 204, 214, 216, 232–3 and pragmatics 155, 165 rhizomatic analysis 80

rhythm 218, 222, 240 and archaic societies 238–9 and capitalism 236–7 See also music Robert, Françoise 151–2 Ruwet, Nicholas 116 Sade, Marquis de 72 Sadock, Jerrold 174 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness 193 Saussure, Ferdinand de 117, 139, 151, 157 schizo-analysis 194–5, 233, 239 scholarly thinking 12, 45 See also disciplines; research; universities school 41–4, 55, 57, 144 and enslavement to capitalism 150 and miniaturisation 67 and semiotics 149–50 students 84 teachers 49, 55, 65, 77–8, 80, 85, 149 See also research Schumann, Robert 238, 240 sciences, and Marxism 66–7 Searle, John 137, 157 self-management 86, 95, 102–3 semiology, and semiotics 113 semiotic components: and birds 209 and capitalism 6, 42 and creativity 118 and deterritorialisation 59 and faciality 182–4 and faciality of power 50 kinds of 129, 158, 162 and pragmatic analysis 9–10 and production of subjectivity 35 and unconscious 4 semiotics 126 and birds 209, 212

and Chomsky 9 and expression 157 and group 165 in Proust 235 and research 37–40 and school 149–50 and semiology 113 two formations of 27 semiotisation 47 and capitalism 8, 16, 99 and collective equipment 11 and dominant redundancies 95–6 and faciality 50 and machines 214 and production 63 regime change begins with 87 and repression 145–6 and subject 123 sense 189 machinic 208–9 without signification 132 sensibility, bourgeois 26–7, 30 sentiment, deterritorialisation of 27 ‘serious’ people 51 sexuality 53, 72, 91, 135, 179–80, 201, 204, 208 signification 122 archaic societies refuse 162, 165–6 and capitalism 158 dominant 8, 40, 50, 118, 124, 135, 153, 159, 170, 173, 180, 188, 190, 217 and expression 188 and faciality 179–80 sense without 132 signifier 125–6, 128 and capitalism 190–1 dictatorship of 5–9, 158, 174, 187 and psychoanalysis 237 and subjectivity 220 INDEX

283

signifying: power 166, 190 structuralism 204 substance 167 transformations 157–8, 162 simulacra 46–8 socialism 63, 65, 67 fascism supersedes 89 See also Marxism space, and time 192–3, 213, 223, 226 spectacle 126 speech, and language 190 speech acts 136–8, 154 spontaneity 102–3 Stalin, Joseph 87 state power 29, 46, 48–9, 104 and capitalism 48 and desire 65, 85, 93 and ideology 99–100 and language 134 societies without 134 and struggle 98 ubiquity of 64–5, 93 structuralism 9, 116, 204, 219–20 and signifier 237 and structure 6 and unconscious 3 structure xiii, 119 and map 156 and power 7, 9 and structuralism 6 struggle 84 class 91, 98 of desire 81 and everyday 66 and miniaturisation 97 as possibility 65, 104 and state power 98 students 84 style 136, 209 subject: and contingency 120 fabrication of 12–14 284

INDEX

and rational discourse 49 and semiotisation 123 ‘serious’ people 51 state power at heart of 93 subjectivation 47, 61, 87, 138, 186, 220 and everyday 194 and heterogeneous components 221 semiotic components centralised on 182–3 subjectivity 205 and deterritorialisation 201 production of 35 in Proust 229 and signifier 220 symbiosis 201–2 teachers 49, 55, 65, 77–8, 80, 85, 149 and faciality 80 See also school teenagers 8, 78, 130, 143–4, 146, 247 television 50–1, 84, 237 See also media territorialised assemblages 165 theory xii Thom, René 199 Thorpe, W. H. 218, 225 time: and capitalism 239 in Proust 235 and space 192–3, 213, 223, 226 Tinbergen, N. 197, 201, 214 Tosquelles, François x transversality x–xiii, 47, 59, 104, 202, 216, 235 Uexküll, Jakob von 193 Ulysses 179 unconscious: and analysis 92, 232 analytic intervention of 56 and fascism 89

and language 3, 6 and map 156, 173 and militancy 102 and pragmatics 9, 153–4, 156 rethinking of x–xii social xiv, 92 structure of 3–5 universals 61, 98, 116, 119, 136–9, 141–2, 152, 172, 226 and analysis 36 and language 135–7 and pragmatics 138, 150 universities 67–8 See also disciplines; research; scholarly thinking urbanisation xiv, xvi, 18–19, 21, 23–8, 32, 35 USSR 68, 82, 87–8, 101 value 13, 42, 188 and desire 12 Virilio, Paul 101 voice 179

Wagner 241 wasp and orchid 201–2 Weber, Max 18 Weinrich 152 Weizsaecker, Viktor von 219, 226 West, collapse of 20 Winnicot, D. W. 43 women 53 workers 57–8, 67, 171 after work 79 and bourgeoisie 63–4 and militancy 97 world: acceptance of 237 appearance of 3 and faciality 181, 183 and individual 40 writing 124, 149, 172 and archaic societies 8, 166 and syntacticised language 37 Wunderlich, Dieter 137, 174 Yanomami 188, 190

INDEX

285

286

287

288