#lazzarato

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“The essence of the “current crisis” lies in the incapacity of capitalist forces to articulate the discursive and existential dimensions, in the impossibility of assembling ensembles of actualized economic, social, and technological flows and the virtual and incorporeal dimension of subjectivity production, existential territories, and universes of value. If the production of subjectivity is not part of a social field, a “product”, a politics, a language, and so forth, we are faced, as is the case today, with a pathology of subjectivity (racist, xenophobic, individualist, confined to one’s own interests, etc.). The watchwords concerning employment, full-employment, wages, labor, the defense of the welfare state, and so on, which ought to be connected to subjectivity, do not lead to subjectivation processes, for they do not open onto new worlds, do not constitute optional matter for modern-day subjectivity.”

Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (2010), 217

This is why I’m concerned about the possibility of a Trump win: not just the direct effects in the US, and to us in the rest of the world (given its economic and military influence), but because it will have been caused by the inability of the ‘left’ - or more broadly, the centre - to articulate an alternative subjectivity to what Trump offers: the authoritarian reaction to ‘globalisation’ and social and economic liberalism, the simplification of class and economic relations into populist elite-bashing and immigrant-scapegoating, the growing distrust of an educated establishment and media. This is a matter of both language and economics, or ‘discursive’ and ‘existential’, of signs and machines: the subjectivity of post-industrial dread, those whiteboy blues that are being channelled into incipient fascism. The particular awfulness of Trump may be unique to America, to its speech logic and racial divides, but the basic problems are common across the developed world - as is the lack of an apparent solution, a persuasive left narrative to effectively shape political discourse away from violence and hatred*. That’s the really scary part.   

(Obviously, I’m really hoping Clinton wins this week: even though the polls have tightened a lot, here are some reasons why Trump is different from Brexit; here are some thoughts about the deeper social malaise behind this fascist candidate; these are just some thoughts I’ve been having about Trump and his specific use of language, or political speech, vis-a-vis ‘truth’)

“The organic link between language, speech genres, and speech acts “cannot become lexical, grammatically stable, and fixed in identical and reproducible forms, i.e., cannot itself become a sign or a constant element of a sign, cannot become grammaticalised.”

Linguistics appears obsessed by the desire to reduce the indeterminacy, risk, and instability created by the event-capacity of enunciation to a fixed grammatical or syntactic structure, to norms of enunciation, to the invariants of official language.”

Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, ‘“Scum” and the Critique of Performativity’

I just finished reading this chapter of Signs and Machines, which I think says in a (more philosophically dense) way what Eimear McBride says here, that “Grammatical sentence structure sets a false linear construction on the experience of life”. Speech contains linguistic and non-linguistic aspects, and cannot be reduced to either: it also has a body and a context, a moment and an event. Lazzarato is quoting the theorist Bakhtin, but in order to connect him to Guattari and to Foucault on the role of language in political discourse.

In the chapter he takes as its starting point the use by Nicolas Sarkozy prior to the 2005 French Presidential Election of the word racaille, or “scum”, to describe youth of the banlieues or deprived suburbs of Paris: the deployment of socially and racially charged language by a conservative, authoritarian politician in a time of tension (riots that occurred after the deaths of two teenagers). Specifically, (and as a critique of Judith Butler’s writings)

“Out hypothesis is the following: discursive machines are something other than language [...] since they imply a multiplicity of signifying and asignifying semiotics, technologies, functions, and so on, that do not operate according to performative logic but in a completely different register. They intervene in the social as part of a strategy of governing conduct that functions as the event-generating dynamic of an “action upon an action”.”

I also just read yesterday this rather bizarre opinion piece in an Irish newspaper which tries to shoehorn Trump into criticism of small left-wing political parties, with the sentence: “Like Trump, what the far Left here stand for is a dictatorship of the articulate.” Which... what - Trump, articulate? As far as I can see it’s meant to be a criticism of populist sloganeering (don’t presume to use words like ‘democracy’ outside of their orthodox non-meaning) but I think it makes more sense if understood in the light of the above: articulate not by measure of grammatical syntax, or lexical conformity, but by the ability to articulate - join - both linguistic and non-linguistic elements of political speech.

Maurizio Lazzarato,’Pasoloni and Neo-Capitalism’s Semiotics of Immanence’, Signs and Machines, p. 136.

I really like this idea - especially that phrase “continuum without any solution of continuity” - because I think this kind of immanence is key to the Zen perception of the world, or the unfolding of subjectivity into the “sounds of the valley streams”.