In a recently published book, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, the Sociologist Maurizzio Lazzarato considers the question of what genuine creativity and innovation would look like in late capitalist societies. When creativity and innovation are the celebrated values of advertisers and marketers and are so crucial to the production of profit in the late capitalist economy, the question arises: are other, more disruptive forms of creativity possible?
Leaning heavily on the work of Felix Guattari, Lazzarato suggests that the principal terrain on which capitalism operates today is at the level of the production of subjectivities. Where the early stages of capitalism, famously described in Marx’s political economic writings, were concerned with the production of objects, today’s political economy is a kind of subjective economy. Through capitalism, we are assigned an individual identity – an identity, a sex, a profession, a nationality and so on. We become entrepreneurs of the self, of our own human capital. At the same time, however, we are subject to less humanising processes, which produce us as component parts in a machinic assemblage. At this level we exist not as individuals but as ‘dividuals’ – as data, bits of intelligence, quanta of affect.
For the humanists amongst us, the dehumanising impulse that reduces human beings to non-human parts of the social machine will be the worrying one. But Lazzarato’s account of contemporary capitalism rejects the notion that there could be a kind of authentic or fully human individuality that lies outside the scene and that might serve as our point of freedom. The argument being made here thus departs in important respects from those made by critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, or more popularly, by Naomi Klein. There is here no authentic individuality, defined by a capacity for critical thinking or, in Klein’s case, a commitment to an emancipatory collective politics.
Yet I do not see Lazzarato’s argument as representing a bleaker position than we would find in these thinkers. In the spirit of the thinkers who he acknowledges as his intellectual influences – Michel Foucault, Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze – Lazzarato makes it clear that the production of subjectivity under capitalism provides both the limits and conditions of our freedom today. To say that we are produced by processes that are at once humanising and de-humanising is not to suggest that no ruptures are possible. Indeed, the task is to find ways, within the conditions that produce us, to ‘produce a new discourse, new knowledge, a new politics’ (Lazzarato 2014, p. 18). In order to do this it is necessary to experiment with new ways of speaking, acting, thinking and being, which may not be immediately recognisable, precisely because they are novel. As Lazzarato (2014, p. 18) rather dramatically puts it, ‘one must traverse an unnameable point, a point of absolute non-narrative, non-culture and non-knowledge’. Perhaps it is in the new forms of individuality, but also through the bits of language and circulations of affect that experiments such as this journal bring into being, that new forms of political subjectivity might become possible.
