Count the present days until today arrives (BARD)
(The message of the mystical powers that govern human destiny on earth, at least for me, was the most boring I could imagine: "NOBODY GETS RICH BY WORKING" --- in more than ten years of diligent writing, I hadn't secured a single major contract, no major publisher had felt the urge to take a chance on me and my books, and then... --- in a universe that, according to Einstein, must be eight million light-years across, a single drunken shot is enough to catapult my modest standard of living to the skies, suddenly transforming me into an obscure global celebrity, I thought, while Blanca talked on the phone the entire time, scheduling business meetings and closing million-dollar translation and publishing contracts for my books across half the globe --- And now? (I wondered) how to employ my enormous potential influence? To establish myself as a living anti-establishment legend and subvert the American way of life? By putting a lot of worms in the heads of ordinary people who already live with a migraine all day long, taking painkillers and anxiolytics every day, reading lying newspapers and bad books and having anxiety attacks, going to the movies, looking for clothing sales, working a lot and earning little, suffering, suffering, suffering? --- --- I feel my empty stomach growling, here in this hotel room, I need to get out, walk, drink, or I'll suffocate here thinking and thinking --- good coffee is at the bar on the corner and a whiskey, quick, necessary, with all those eyes fixed on me, wanting to be included in my new five-star payroll --- but this time I'll go out in plain clothes, I'm an ex-cop, I know how to lose suckers --- for an ex-cop on the CIA's radar, more than a reason to go out with a gun on my waist, now that the slight alcoholic twinge in my head from every morning had passed and I was myself again --- On the street, after four blocks of walking under the tropical sun (it was Sunday), the smell of alcohol, beer and brandy, marijuana, the dirt of bars turned upside down, in the early hours of Saturday morning; in the few natives standing in the church square, the habit of Sunday laziness and the taste for superfluous conversation, the best tranquilizer there is in life --- patiently informing myself, I arrived at a small open bar next to a fishing village waking up to a noisy radio playing prehistoric reggae; many shirtless black men with cachaça bellies climbing into wooden boats, smiling morning misery ---
ResponderExcluir--- I felt like taking some notes, capturing a vivid snapshot of the underdevelopment in these parts --- And what legs that brunette has in the miniskirt and green flip-flops! --- "I can't stand this life, it's all work early in the morning and boredom!" she suddenly yelled, seeing me sit on the beach chair while the young man brought me my beer (they didn't have any whiskey there) --- I remembered when I fought with Blanca and traveled to Italy with Natasha (my Russian lover) and we attended that lecture by Professor Fumagalli in Rome:
Excluir"These 'crowdsourcing' technologies represent the new organic composition of capital, the relationship between constant capital diffused throughout society and variable capital, also deterritorialized, dispersed throughout the sphere of reproduction, consumption, life forms, and the individual and collective imagination. The new constant capital, unlike the physical machine system typical of the Fordist factory era, is constituted, in addition to information and communication technologies, by a set of immaterial organizational systems that SURVIVE SURPLUS VALUE, persecuting workers at every moment of their lives, resulting in the living workday being lengthened and intensified to the point of starvation slavery. It is therefore no mystery that recourse to stock markets has not financed investments that directly generate employment and wages in the first and third worlds, but rather the pure and simple increase in stock market values," said Professor Fumagalli ---
ResponderExcluir--- For me, who knew the streets, that was the perfect explanation for the hell of misery and violence that we, police officers, saw growing day after day, in our city and in other cities around the world --- With the second beer (I drank the first in five minutes), I began to think about the old situation in my own life, in the days when, after leaving the force to write, I was afraid of having to return to my mamá's house, in Vigo, with empty pockets, reduced to gaining weight around the waist in front of football games on TV, forgotten about the world of letters forever --- I even remember how often that didn't even seem like such a bad option; in fact, I felt a certain nostalgia for the last times in my parents' house, before going to Barcelona --- despite the social morals in Vigo being somewhat rigid even at that time, I always found how to insinuate myself into the hearts of the beautiful young women from rich families, at school, at street parties, at sports afternoons and clubs --- I was discreet, however, I didn't give details of any of my conquests even to my best friends, who were just beginning their sexual journey at that time; no, I already liked to drink alone, hidden from the world (something unthinkable for others my age) ---
ResponderExcluir--- in my teenage bedroom, I thought like a bloodhound, devising a thousand and one strategies to overcome initial opposition and class barriers (we were lower-middle class); I lost count of how many maidens I swayed to my precocious power of seduction, surgically breaking down edges of pride and exclusivity in the barrels of social prejudice --- alcohol often made me persistent there where everyone saw no chance of success; so, I never stopped following my favorites, even when they showed a preference for someone else --- "Just crawl a little further" I thought at that time, and I would lie in bed thinking about how to unmask my rivals, because I considered everything in life a lazy game of appearances --- I remember when I lit my first cigarette, lying in the bedroom (my parents had traveled), and applied that instantaneous power of abstraction that nicotine provides for a few minutes in an order of totally petty and cunning social calculations, but which earned me the prettiest girl in the neighborhood for almost a week, until her parents banned our meetings ---
-- Then my father died and I took the exam to join the Barcelona police force so I wouldn't starve, so --- WAIT! --- my phone --- "Hello?" --- it was Natasha (my Russian lover in Barcelona): "We really need to talk, you and I, Bard. I'm pregnant, I'm very afraid of television. You and the CIA," she said, as I stared at the fishing suburbs in front of me, not quite believing what I was hearing; I had a psychedelic sensation of being back in the neocolonial-style room I'd rented in downtown Barcelona just to write my books in solitude, yet still looking at that brunette in a miniskirt and long, shiny ebony legs, the same one from a moment ago; now, she was in the middle of the crowd, near the beach --- suddenly, she turned for no apparent reason and stared at me for a long time from a distance, me sitting there on the sand by the bar; around her, all the faces seemed like a single social wound, and showed indifference to my Don Juan-esque abstraction of a gringo flirting with a horny mulatta --- ''HELLO? HELLO?! HELLO???!!!!!! BARD!!!!!! Are you listening YO?'', Natasha roared on the other end of the line, extremely nervous ---
ResponderExcluir--- "What's this all about now, Natasha?! Isn't it a bit too much of a coincidence? Just because I got rich and famous overnight?! What do you need? Tell me, it's money, right? How much?" I retorted, not exactly furious; all I wanted from her at that moment was to hear a less son-of-a-bitch wavelength; for all the good times we'd had together recently, despite Blanca, you know? --- "I'm pregnant, son of a bitch, grand son of a bitch. And I'm here, nearby, in the city of Salvador, I arrived today. I didn't have a plane there. I want you to come here, to be with me now! This is your son too, you fucking drunk!" and she hung up on me ---
ResponderExcluir
ResponderExcluir---I immediately received the address and room number of the hotel via WhatsApp, in a city I'd never set foot in before. It's true that I'd started that day longing for long adventures, a new and abundant life, as busy as Morell's, now that I'd stolen some of his shine and fame; something like the constant renewal of exotic situations that would allow me to constantly nourish my predilection for the Mysterious and the Unexpected, enhancing life's inner and outer beauty, while an army of bad thoughts continued to swirl around in my head (inevitable in a police officer or ex-cop, of course) --- that feeling, by the way, matched my personal, alcoholic brand of Zen ---
ResponderExcluir--- finally, the minutes passed, maybe a whole hour, without me doing anything but drinking compulsively and staring at the beach: the fishing boats already in the distance; the long-legged brunette gone. I no longer cared what I was thinking, probably nothing. Ah, the empty head, the best companion to a cold beer! --- however, there was a moment when I heard a voice with a strong, unidentified accent shout in Portuguese, five meters behind my beach chair: "EEEEEEIA, Mr. Bard, could I have your attention for a moment?!" --- he was a white, Caucasian, beardless man, about two meters tall, corpulent and ridiculously dressed in a suit and tie, sunglasses, and Italian shoes, kind of a cheap imitation of an American businessman --- I remember not being able to contain my laughter, watching him struggle through the soft sand in that suffocating outfit)
Post script
ResponderExcluirfirst chapter of an unpublished book by Maurizio Lazzarato, provisionally entitled The Existential and the Discursive, to be published soon in France.
Social Subjection ~ Neoliberal Subjectivation
ExcluirCapitalism recognizes two modes of production, treatment, and exploitation of subjectivity: social subjection and machinic servitude. Social subjection, by providing us with subjectivity, by assigning us an identity, a sex, a profession, a nationality, etc., produces and distributes roles and places. It constitutes a significant and representative trap from which no one escapes. Social subjection produces an "individualized subject" whose paradigmatic form, in neoliberal capitalism, is that of the "entrepreneur of the self." All functions, all places that subjection distributes, must be assumed as functions and places that we choose and in which we will fulfill ourselves by investing, like any good entrepreneur, the entirety of our lives. In all domains, whether production, education, consumption, or communication, we are invited to behave as "entrepreneurs" who assume all the risks and costs of their activity. Micro-enterprises, self-entrepreneurs, and human capital celebrate the marriage between economic and political individualism. (p. 168)
Machinic Servitude as Desubjectification (Objectification?)
ExcluirIn machinic servitude, the individual is no longer instituted as a subject (human capital or self-entrepreneur). Instead, they are considered a cog, a cog, a component of the "company" assemblage, the "financial system" assemblage, the media assemblage, the "welfare state" assemblage, and their "collective equipment of subjectivation" (school, hospital, museum, theater, television, internet, etc.). The individual "functions" and is subjected to assemblage in the same way as the parts of technical machines, organizational procedures, sign systems, etc. (p. 168)
2: Servitude is a concept used in cybernetics (a Greek word meaning "piloting" or "governing") and automation. (p. 168)
Mediation in Machinic Servitude
ExcluirSubjection creates a subject in relation to an external object (machine, communication device, currency, public service, etc.) that they use and with which they act. In subjection, the individuated subject works or communicates with another individuated subject through a machine—an object that functions as a "means" or mediation of their action or use. The "subject-object" logic, which constitutes the mode of functioning of the social subject, is a "human, all too human" logic. (p. 168)
Machinic servitude does not differentiate between human and non-human (hybrids)
ExcluirMachinic servitude is not hampered by distinctions between objects and subjects, between words and things, between "nature" and "culture." In machinic servitude, the individuated subject is not opposed to machines; it is adjacent to them. Together, they constitute a "human-machine" apparatus where humans and machines are merely recurring and reversible components of the process of production, communication, consumption, etc. In machinic servitude, the ontological chasm between the human and the non-human, between subjects and objects, between words and things, is constantly bridged by techniques, procedures, and protocols that mobilize asignifying semiotics (diagrams, plans, equations, graphs, schemes, etc.). For ergonomics, in human-machine systems, where “several human and non-human elements interact (...) the components of all work can be expressed in terms of information
But here the "notion of information loses its anthropocentric aspect." In ergonomics, we no longer speak of "signal-organism-response," nor do we use the model of communication theories in which exchanges occur between distinct subjects—individuated individuals—which allows for "convenient, if limited, analogies: sender-receiver." We speak and use the concepts of "inputs" and "outputs," which no longer have anything anthropomorphic about them. "Human-machine systems" (plural) cannot be considered a simple accumulation of "human-machine" jobs (singular), since they differ in nature from the subject (human)/object (machine) "dyad." (p. 169)
ExcluirTo put it no longer in terms of ergonomics, but with the philosophical concepts of Félix Guattari, servitude does not, strictly speaking, involve either subjects or objects, but rather “ontologically ambiguous” entities, hybrids, “objectities/subjectities,” that is, “two-faced object-subject” entities. “Objects,” machines, protocols, diagrams, graphs, and schemes can constitute vectors of “proto-subjectification” or foci of “proto-enunciation.” The “for oneself” and the “for others,” normally considered exclusive attributes of human subjectivity, also adhere to “things.” “Subjects,” in contrast, crystallize habits, physical, and intellectual routines that can possess the consistency of “objects.” (p. 169)
ExcluirIn servitude, the individual not only “plays a part with the agency,” but is also torn to pieces by it: the components of his or her subjectivity (intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, memory, physical strength) are no longer unified in the “I,” they no longer have the individuated subject as their referent. Intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, memory, and physical strength now constitute components that no longer find their synthesis in the person, but in the agency or in the process (company, media, public service, school, etc.). (p. 169)
ExcluirServitude ~ Modeling and Modulation
ExcluirServitude acts neither through repression nor ideology. It proceeds through techniques of modeling and modulation, which connect to the "very energies of human life and activity." It takes hold of human beings "from within" and "from without" by equipping them with certain modes of perception and sensitivity, as well as unconscious representations. The formatting exercised by machinic servitude intervenes in the "basic functioning of perceptive, sensitive, affective, cognitive, and linguistic behaviors" (p. 170).
Domination of Multitudes of Power and Desire Quanta Beyond Economic Exploitation
"Through a continuous enrichment of its semiotic components, capital takes control, beyond wage labor and its monetized goods, of multitudes of power and desire quanta that once remained encysted in the local, domestic, libidinal economy" (Guattari). (p. 170)
Double Capitalist Cynicism ("Humanization and Dehumanization")
ExcluirCapitalism exercises a double cynicism: a "humanist" cynicism that assigns us individuality and pre-established roles (worker, consumer, unemployed, man/woman, artist, etc.) in which individuals must alienate themselves; and a "dehumanizing" cynicism that includes us in an assemblage that no longer distinguishes between human and non-human, subject and object, words and things. In servitude, we no longer act, nor even make use of anything, if by action and use we understand the functions of the subject. Rather, we constitute simple inputs and outputs, inputs or outputs of the functioning of economic, social, and communicational processes, governed or piloted by servitude. (p. 170)
The Economic Functioning of Capitalism
ExcluirIn Deleuze and Guattari's revival and renewal of the Marxist concept of "production," subjection and servitude determine, together and through their differences, the "economic" functioning of capitalism. Capital, when purchasing labor power, remunerates a form of subjection: a period of presence in a job, in a role, a being at one's disposal (as in the case of the unemployed, or the "available brain time" of the television viewer). But, in reality, what capital buys is not only the time of the labor force's presence in a company, in an institution, in a social role, or even the available time of the unemployed or the television viewer. What it purchases primarily is the right to exploit a "complex" assemblage that brings into play "means of transportation, urban models, media, leisure industries, ways of perceiving and feeling, all semiotics." Servitude thus releases productive powers incommensurable with those of employment and human labor. (p. 171)
Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in Marx. Time and machinic surplus value in D&G.
ExcluirIn the law of value of Capital, Marx also has an "anthropomorphic" and "anthropocentric" view of production, since surplus value is human, as is labor time. Only the worker's labor produces surplus value, while machines do nothing but transmit their value, which, in turn, results from the human labor time required for their manufacture. Deleuze and Guattari, sensitive to the extraordinary growth of constant capital (machinery), introduce the concept of machinic surplus value and machinic time. These times are times of servitude where we no longer distinguish between subject and object, human and non-human, natural and artificial. These machinic temporalities constitute the essential factors of capitalist production. Unlike human time and surplus value, machinic times and surplus value have the property of being neither quantifiable nor determinable. (p. 171)
9: “The real control of machine time, of the servitude of human organs to productive arrangements, cannot be validly measured based on a general equivalent. One can measure a time of presence, a time of alienation, a duration of incarceration within a factory or a prison: one cannot measure their consequences on an individual. One can quantify the visible work of a physicist in a laboratory, but not the productive value of the formulas he develops.” Félix Guattari, La Révolution Moléculaire, Ed. Recherche, coll. Encres, Paris, 1977, p. 74 (p. 171)
ExcluirWithin the company, the employee must act and recognize himself as a producer subject to the machines that are external to him and which he uses. But it is never the employee (individualized subjectivity), nor a simple cooperation of employees (inter-subjectivity) that produces. The productivity of capital depends, on the one hand, on the agency of organs (brain, hands, muscles, etc.) and human faculties (memory, perception, cognition, etc.); and, on the other, on the “intellectual” and physical performances of machines, organizational protocols, software, or even sign systems, the power of science, etc. (p. 172)
Capital exploits the difference between subjection and servitude
ExcluirCapital, therefore, does not extort a simple increase in labor time (the difference between paid human time and human time spent in a workplace), but installs a process that exploits the difference between subjection and servitude: for if subjective subjection, the social alienation inherent in a workplace or in any social function (worker, unemployed, teacher, mother, etc.), is always assignable and calculable (a salary that corresponds to a job, an income that corresponds to a social function), the part of machine-based servitude that enters into human activity is never assignable or quantifiable as such. (p. 172)
Production as a Composition of Social Subjection and Machinic Servitude
ExcluirIn machinic servitude, there is no proportionality between individual labor and production. Production is not the sum of individual employment times, nor even the sum of individual labor times, if we consider that labor must be distinguished from employment, since the former overflows the latter. Production and productivity only partially depend on employment and even labor; they arise, first and foremost, from agency, that is, from the mobilization of the powers of the mechanism, communication, science, and the social, as Marx had already anticipated in the Grundrisse. Thus, just as it was necessary for us to distinguish employment from labor, it is now necessary to separate human labor and employment from production. (p. 172)
Anticipation of Machinic Surplus Value in the Grundrisse and in Marx's Unpublished Chapter
Excluir10: While the theory of value in Marx's first book of Capital is still an additive theory (the arithmetic sum of labor) of value, and surplus value is still conceived as a "human surplus value," in the Grundrisse and in the unpublished chapter of Capital, Marx describes machinic servitude without, however, elaborating a theory of "machinic" value that corresponds to it. Guattari notes that the Marxist conception of human surplus value corresponds to the accounting practice of capitalism, but certainly not to its actual functioning. This accounting is nowadays taken up again to legitimize the pension counter-reform, since its financing is calculated based on individual employment and wages. Only subjection is taken into account, while servitude counts for nothing. "Cosmic trickery," said Gilles Deleuze. (p. 172)
Regarding the Welfare State and Unemployment Insurance, They Fail to Consider Machinic Servitude
ExcluirThe social "equipment" of the Welfare State that manages unemployment insurance forces the unemployed to act and recognize themselves as "users" of the insurance, that is, as human capital responsible for their employability. But, at the same time, they are forced to function as a simple adjustment variable in the labor market, as a flexible component adaptable to the "automatisms" of job supply and demand. On the one hand, the "pastoral" mechanisms of control and encouragement, focusing in detail on the training, projects, skills, and behaviors of the unemployed, force them to establish themselves as subjects, while, on the other hand, the market considers them as de-individualized components participating in the automatism of its self-regulation.
Now, if unemployment insurance is the measure of what it costs to make the unemployed available (the measure of subjection), what the unemployed produce with their mobility and flexibility in the job market, what they produce as a consumer or as they contribute to making the machine of the unemployment insurance service relationship run (the information they provide, despite themselves, the subjective and objective index they represent, despite themselves, makes the unemployed one of the feed-backs of this “social machine”), is neither determinable nor calculable. (p. 173)
ExcluirFinancial System
ExcluirIn the financial system, the individual is a subject (human capital) in yet another way. As an "investor/debtor," it can be considered the very model of subjectivation: the promise to pay off the debt one has incurred implies the fabrication of a memory and the affects (such as guilt, responsibility, loyalty, trust, etc.) necessary to guarantee the fulfillment of one's promise. But when credit enters the financial machine, it becomes something else entirely, a simple input to the financial agency. The credit/debt incorporated into the agency effectively loses all reference to the subject who contracted the debt. The credit/debt is literally torn to shreds (in the same way that the agency tears the subject to shreds) by the financial machine, as the subprime crisis demonstrated. It is no longer about this or that investment, this or that debt: the financial agency has transformed it into currency that acts as "capital," into money that generates money, which does not limit itself to commanding labor, but above all commands an agency, a complex social process. (p. 173-4)
Machine Servitude and Labor
ExcluirIn servitude, on the other hand, labor seems to explode in two directions: that of an "intensive" overwork that no longer even involves labor, but rather a generalized "machine servitude," "to the point of providing surplus value independently of any labor (the child, the retiree, the unemployed, the television viewer, etc.), and that of an extensive labor that has become precarious and fluctuating." In this situation, users (of unemployment insurance, television, public and private services, etc.), like all consumers, tend to become "employees." In "consumer labor," we have an example of a productivity that no longer involves the "physical-social definition of labor." (p. 174)
14: “Consumer participation in production is extremely heterogeneous... We have been able to show that each of these activities can be qualified as work in the economic, sociological, and ergonomic sense of the term. They produce value for the firm... Like a wage earner, the consumer's activity is strongly prescribed and regulated. It is often carried out under constraints of time, productivity, and results, through specific instruments.” Marie-Anne Dujarier, Le travail du consommateur, Editions la Découverte, Paris, 2008, p. 230–231. (p. 174–5)
ExcluirCapital as a semiotic operator, semiotics (signifier of subjection and a-signifier of servitude) as a condition of production
ExcluirCapital is a "semiotic operator." What does Guattari's statement mean? At first glance, it amounts to saying that semiotics are conditions of production (p. 175).
From a semiotic perspective, machinic servitude and social subjection imply distinct sign regimes. Social subjection mobilizes signifying semiotics, especially language, which addresses consciousness and representations with the aim of constituting an individuated subject (human capital), while machinic servitude operates based on asignifying semiotics (stock market indexes, currency, equations, diagrams, computer language, etc.) that bypass consciousness and representations and do not have the subject as their referent. (p. 175)
15: “Our opposition between despotic signifying semiologies and asignifying semiologies remains very schematic. In reality, there are only mixed semiotics that participate in both to varying degrees. A signifying semiology is always frequented by a sign machine and, conversely, a sign machine is always in the process of being recovered by a signifying semiology. But it is certainly useful to discern the relations of polarity defined by these components.” (Félix Guattari, La révolution molecularire, Paris, Ed. Recherches, 1977, p. 346 (p. 175)
ExcluirSigns and semiotics can function according to these two logics, at once heterogeneous and complementary: producing operations, initiating actions, functioning, constituting the input and output components of a social or technological machine, as in the case of machinic servitude; producing meaning, significations, interpretations, discourses, and representations through language, as in the case of social subjection. Asignifying semiotics act alongside things. They place an organ, a system of perception, an activity, etc., directly in connection with a machine, with processes, with signs, without going through the representation of a subject. They play an entirely specific role in capitalism, since, "essentially, capitalism relies on asignifying machines." (p. 175)
ExcluirCritique of the Privilege of Language in the Ideas of Cognitive and Cultural Capitalism
Excluir16: Theories that make the "primacy of language" the key to the semiotic functioning of our society run the risk of overlooking the real functioning of capitalism. Capital operates from a multiplicity of semiotics, not only from signifying and linguistic semiotics, as theories of "cognitive" or cultural capitalism assume. (p. 175)
A-Signifying Semiotics
ExcluirStock market indexes, unemployment insurance statistics, the functions and diagrams of science, and the languages of computing do not construct discourses or create narratives (discourses and narratives are produced alongside them); they function by executing a program and increasing the power of "productive" agency. A-Signifying semiotics remain more or less dependent on signifying semiologies, but at the level of their intrinsic functioning, they escape language and dominant social meanings. If the European Central Bank increases its discount rate by 1%, tens of thousands of "projects" will disappear like smoke due to a lack of credit. If real estate prices collapse, as in the case of subprime mortgages in the United States, thousands of families will no longer be able to pay their debts. If Social Security accounts show a deficit, measures to reduce "social spending" will be determined. (p. 175)
The flows of asignifying signs act directly on material flows, beyond the separation between production and representation inherent in signifying semiotics, and function independently of whether they mean anything to anyone. (p. 175)
ExcluirSigns, rather than redirecting to other signs, act directly on reality, in the sense that the signs of a computerized language activate a technical machine like a computer, monetary signs activate the economic machine, and the signs of a mathematical equation are used in the construction of a bridge or a building. (p. 176)
The automatism on which capitalism relies aims to depoliticize power relations
ExcluirCapitalism is a system that always seeks to rely on automatic systems of evaluation, measurement, and regulation. For this reason, it is important for it to control the asignifying semiotic devices (economic, accounting, stock market writing, etc.) with which it aims to depoliticize power relations. The power of asignifying semiotics lies, on the one hand, in the fact that they are "automatic" modes of evaluation and measurement, and, on the other, in their ability to establish communication and "formal" equivalence between heterogeneous domains of asymmetric power and power, organizing their integration and refocusing on economic accumulation. (p. 176)
Power in Desubjectification
ExcluirThe desubjectification brought about by machinic servitude could be used to escape the murderous collective subjections of capitalist modernity and the individual subjections that always confine us to the self, the person, the family, etc. Using desubjectification to produce something other than paranoid individualism, and to escape the false alternative of being condemned to function as one cog among others in a social machinery or of becoming an individual subject, a human capital. (p. 176-7)
It is against this possibility that subjection works, ensuring the reterritorialization and recomposition of the subjective components "liberated" by machinic servitude upon the individuated "subject," thus burdening it with guilt, fear, and responsibility. Social subjection and its signifying semiotics must produce the social values, meanings, and individual and collective identifications necessary for the roles and functions of social production. (p. 177)
Critique of Approaches That Only Consider Subjection (Rancière and Badiou)
ExcluirTheories that limit themselves to considering "social subjection" and completely neglect machinic servitude (Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, for example) subject capitalism to such mutilations that it is doubtful whether they can account for the processes of subjectivation that operate within it. While they allow us to grasp the divisions between those who monopolize power and knowledge and those who suffer them at the macro-political level, and allow us to intersect these divisions with those of race, gender, age, etc., they ignore the nature and functions of machinic servitude. However, if we consider capitalism solely from the perspective of subjection, we lose sight of the specificity of the modalities of machinic servitude. If we do not take servitudes into account, we run the risk of confusing, in the manner of Rancière and Badiou, Greek democracy with capitalism, the work of artisans and slaves with that of “workers,” and Marx with Plato. (p. 177)
Indirect Relationship (Wage-Earning) of Social Subordination to Real Production
ExcluirFrom an economic perspective, subordination distributes wages and income that are only indirectly related to "real production." Subordination divides the population between those who have a job and those who do not, between those who have social rights and those who do not, between "active" and "inactive," and this on a basis that does not respond to any economic need, since each person's contribution to "production" is neither assignable nor measurable. (p. 177)
Hard and binary segmentarity of subjection vs. multiple and flexible in servitude
ExcluirSubjection operates based on binary segmentarities (employment/unemployment, producer/consumer, men/women, artist/non-artist, productive/non-productive, etc.), while servitude, passing through subjections and their dualisms, operates based on a flexible segmentarity. In machinic servitude, the divisions of employment/unemployment, insurance/assistance, productive/non-productive no longer exist, because from the perspective of "real production," from the perspective of agency or process, everyone "works," everyone is "productive" in different ways. (p. 177)
19: "In a certain way, the housewife occupies a workplace in her home, the child in school, the consumer in the supermarket, the spectator in front of their screen." From the perspective of machine servitude, children “work in front of the television; they work in daycare with toys designed to improve their productive performance. In a sense, this work can be compared to that of apprentices in vocational school.” (Félix Guattari, La Révolution molecularire, Paris, Ed. Recherches, 1980, p. 80). (pp. 177–8)
Expansion of the Workplace in Contemporary Capitalism
ExcluirIn contemporary capitalism, the wage earner only partially encompasses the multiplicity of "jobs" performed, and even more partially the multiplicity of "productive" arrangements. The notion of workplace should be extended to most non-wage activities, and that of enterprise to the collective facilities of the welfare state, the media, etc. "It would be completely arbitrary to consider the wage earner of an enterprise today independently of the multiple systems of differentiated wages, assistance, and social costs that affect, closely or remotely, the reproduction of the workforce, which bypass the monetary circuit of the enterprise and are controlled by the multiple institutions and facilities of power." (p. 178)