Accueil
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurizio_Lazzarato
http://lesilencequiparle.unblog.fr/2011/09/26/la-fabrique-de-lhomme-endette-essai-sur-la-condition-neoliberale-maurizio-lazzarato/
"
-Maurizio Lazzarato, Les Révolutions du capitalisme,
"Il a suffi d'un mouvement de rupture comme les Gilets jaunes, qui n'ont rien de révolutionnaire, ni même de prérévolutionnaire, pour que l'« esprit versaillais » se réveille, pour que ressurgisse l'envie de tirer sur ces « saloperies » qui menacent, ne serait que symboliquement, le pouvoir et la propriété." (p.11)
"La forme du processus révolutionnaire avait déjà changé dans les années i960, mais elle s'était heurtée à un obstacle insurmontable : l'incapacité d'inventer un modèle différent de celui qui avait ouvert, en 1917, la longue suite des révolutions du XXe siècle. Dans le modèle léniniste, la révolution avait encore la forme de la réalisation.
La classe ouvrière était le sujet qui contenait déjà les conditions de l'abolition du capitalisme et de l'installation du communisme. Le passage de la « classe en soi » à la « classe pour soi » devait être réalisé par la prise de conscience et la prise de pouvoir, organisées et dirigées par le parti qui apportait de l'extérieur ce qui manquait aux pratiques « syndicales » des ouvriers.
Or, depuis les années 1960, le processus révolutionnaire a pris la forme de l'événement : le sujet politique, au lieu d'être déjà là en puissance, est « imprévu » (les Gilets jaunes sont un exemple paradigmatique de cette imprévisibilité) ; il n'incarne pas la nécessité de l'histoire, mais seulement la contingence de l'affrontement politique." (p.12)
"Le positionnement du populisme de gauche (et sa systématisation théorique par Laclau et Mouffe) empêche de nommer l'ennemi. Ses catégories (la « caste », « ceux d'en haut » et « ceux d'en bas ») sont à un pas de la théorie du complot." (p.14)
"Si les subjectivités qui portent les luttes contre ces différentes dominations ne peuvent être réduites à l'unité du « signifiant vide » du peuple, comme le voudrait le populisme de gauche, le double problème de l'action politique commune et du pouvoir du capital reste entier." (p.16)
"La citation de Michael Lôwy placée en exergue de ce chapitre est une synthèse fidèle et efficace de la pensée de Walter Benjamin, l'un des rares marxistes à avoir pleinement saisi la rupture représentée par les guerres totales et le fascisme. La définition qu'il donne du capitalisme élargit et radicalise celle de Marx, puisque le capital est pour lui à la fois production et guerre, pouvoir de création et pouvoir de destruction : seul le « triomphe sur les classes subalternes » rend possibles les transformations du système productif, du pouvoir, du droit, de la propriété et de l'État.
Cette dynamique, nous la retrouvons au fondement du néolibéralisme, dont le « triomphe historique », dans lequel le fascisme joue encore une fois un rôle central, porte sur la « révolution mondiale ». Victoire sur des classes subalternes très différentes de celles que Benjamin avait à l'esprit- comme la plupart des marxistes européens d'alors, il avait du mal à apprécier l'importance de la lutte anticoloniale. Et pourtant, si Paris entre les deux guerres n'était plus, comme au XIXe siècle, la capitale de l'époque, elle a joué un rôle déterminant dans les révolutions à venir en tant que « capitale du tiers-monde ». Dans le croisement des migrations asiatiques, africaines et sud-américaines, s'est formée la grande majorité des dirigeants qui ont conduit les luttes de libération nationale contre le colonialisme, moteur de la révolution mondiale." (p.20)
"La différence entre mon analyse du néolibéralisme et celles de Foucault, de Luc Boltanski et Eve Chiapello ou de Pierre Dardot et Christian Laval, est radicale : ces auteurs effacent
les origines fascistes du néolibéralisme, la « révolution mondiale » des années 1960 -qui est donc loin de se limiter au 68 français-, mais aussi la contre-révolution néolibérale, cadre idéologique de la revanche du capital. Cette différence porte sur la nature du capitalisme que ces théories « pacifient » en effaçant la victoire politico-militaire qui est la condition de son déploiement. Le « triomphe » sur les classes subalternes fait partie de la nature et de la définition du capital." (p.25)
"
(pp.26-34)
-Maurizio Lazzarato, Le capital déteste tout le monde, Éditions Amsterdam, 2019, 178 pages.
"Today; the weakness of capitalism lies in the production of subjectivity. As a consequence, systemic crisis and the crisis in the production of subjectivity are strictly interlinked. It is impossible to separate economic, political, and social processes from the processes of subjectivation occurring within them.
With neoliberal deterritorialization, no new production of subjectivity takes place." (p.8 )
"On the other hand, neoliberalism has destroyed previous social relations and their forms of subjectivation (worker, communist, or social-democrat subjectivation or national subjectivity, bourgeois subjectivity, etc.). Nor does neoliberalism's promotion of the entrepreneur-with which Foucault associates the subjective mobilization management requires in all forms of economic activity--offer any kind of solution to the problem. Quite the contrary. Capital has always required a territory beyond the market and the corporation and a subjectivity that is not that of the entrepreneur; for although the entrepreneur, the business, and the market make up the economy, they also break up society.
Hence the long-standing recourse to pre-capitalist territories and values, to long-established morals and religions, and to the formidable modern subjectivations of nationalism, racism, and fascism which aim to maintain the social ties capitalism continually undermines. Today, the ubiquity of entrepreneurial subjectivation, manifest in the drive to transform every individual into a business, has resulted in a number of paradoxes. The autonomy, initiative, and subjective commitment demanded of each of us constitute new norms of employability and, therefore, strictly speaking, a heteronomy. At the same time, the injunction imposed on the individual to act, take the initiative, and undertake risks has led to widespread depression, a maladie du siecle, the refusal to accept homogenization, and, finally, the impoverishment of existence brought on by the individual "success" of the entrepreneurial model." (p.8 )
"The unions and political parties on the "left" provide no solutions to these problems because they too have no alternative subjectivities on offer. The people, the working class, labor, producers, and employment no longer have a hold on subjectivity, no longer function as vectors of subjectivation. Today's critical theories similarly fail to account for the relationship between capitalism and processes of subjectivation. Cognitive capitalism, the information society, and cultural capitalism (Rifkin) capture the relationship but do so all too reductively. On the one hand, knowledge, information, and culture are far from sufficient to cover the multiplicity of economies that constitutes "production." On the other hand, their subjective avatars (cognitive workers, "manipulators of symbols," etc.) fall shon of the multiple modes of subjection and political subjectivation that contribute to the "production of subjectivity." Their claim to found a hegemonic paradigm for production and the production of subjectivity is belied by the fact that the fate of the class struggle, as the crisis has shown, is not being played out in the domains of knowledge, information, or culture." (p.11)
"Social subjection equips us with a subjectivity, assigning us an identity, a sex, a body, a profession, a nationality, and so on. In response to the needs of the social division of labor, it in this way manufactures individuated subjects, their consciousness, representations, and behavior. But the production of the individuated subject is coupled with a completely different process and a completely different hold on subjectivity that proceeds through desubjectivation. Machinic enslavement dismantles the individuated subject, consciousness, and representations, acting on both the pre-individual and supraindividual levels." (p.12 )
"Now, capitalism reveals a twofold cynicism: the "humanist" cynicism of assigning us individuality and pre-established roles (worker, consumer, unemployed, man/woman, artist, etc.) in which individuals are necessarily alienated; and the "dehumanizing" cynicism of including us in an assemblage that no longer distinguishes between human and non-human, subject and object, or words and things.
Throughout this book, we will examine the difference and complementarity between apparatuses of"social subjection" and those of "machinic enslavement," for it is at their point of intersection that the production of subjectivity occurs. We will trace a cartography of the modalities of subjection and enslavement, those with which we will have to break in order to begin a process of subjectivation independent and autonomous of capitalism's hold on subjectivity, its modalities of production and forms of life.
It is therefore essential to understand that the subjectivity and subjectivations capitalism produces are meant for the "machine." Not primarily for the "technical machine" but for the "social machine," for the "megamachine," as Lewis Mumford calls it, which includes the technical machine as one of its products.
What are the conditions for a political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity constitutes the most fundamental of capitalist concerns ? What are the instruments specific to the production of subjectivity such that its industrial and serial production by the State and the corporation might be thwarted ? What model and what modalities of organization must be constructed for a subjectivation process that joins micro- and macropolitics ?" (pp.12-14)
"Structuralism may be dead, but language, which founds the structuralist paradigm, is still alive and well in these theories. To grasp the limits of the new "logocentrism,'' we will have to take a step backwards, returning to the critiques of structuralism and linguistics advanced in the 1960s and 70s by Guattari, Deleuze, and Foucault. In different ways, their critiques demoted language from the central role it was made to play in politics and subjectivation processes following the "linguistic turn" in analytic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. They set forth a new semiotic theory and a new theory of enunciation better able to register how signs function in these processes and in the economy. In particular, we will return to Guattari's semiotic theory. 'While affirming that each subjectivation process implies the operations of mixed, signifying, symbolic, and asignifying semiotics, Guattari considers the latter, as they operate in the economy ; science, art, and machines, the specificity of capitalism. What role and function do different signifying, symbolic, and asignifying semiotics have in running and controlling capitalist deterritorialization and reterritorialization ? And what is their relationship with the subjectivation process ?
Guattari and Foucault do not stop at deposing the "imperialism" of language over other modes of expression and other formations of subjectivity. 'While emphasizing the strategic importance of different semiotics for steering and controlling capitalist flows and subjectivity production, they argue that in order to bring together the conditions for rupture and subjective reconversion, we must move beyond both language and semiotics." (pp.17)
" "a radical divorce" (Guattari) between pragmatic linguistics and existential pragmatics, between the semiotic logic that produces meaning and the pragmatics that produces existence and political rupture.
In the act of enunciation (in the same way as in every act of creation), a power of self-positioning, self-production, and a capacity to secrete one's own referent emerges, a power which has little to do with Saussurean "speech," the Lacanian "signifier," or the performatives and speech acts of analytic philosophy.
A force of self-affectation, self-affirmation, and self-positioning doubles power and knowledge relations, defying the powers and knowledge in place. It provides the conditions for rupture as well as for processes of political subjectivation-indeed, for processes of subjectivation tout court. The rules governing the production of the self are those "optional" and processual ones invented by constructing "sensible territories" and by a singularization of subjectivity (Guattari), by creating the alterity of "an other life" and "an other world"
(Foucault). Hence the recourse, not to cognitive, linguistic, and informational methods and paradigms, but to political, ethical-aesthetic approaches and paradigms-the "aesthetic paradigm" of Guattari and the "aesthetics of existence" of Foucault." (p.18)
"The analysis of the Soviet Revolution, which returns like a refrain in Deleuze and Guattari's work, offers certain, even if only formal, insights which help to understand the limits of the current political situation. In their work, the modes of subjectivity production are translated into politics. Under capitalism, processes of political subjectivation must both enter and break from economic, social, and political flows. The two operations are indispensable: start from the hold machinic enslavements and social subjections maintain over subjectivity and produce a rupture, which is always at the same time an invention and constitution of the sel£9 "Revolution" erupts from history, that is, from economic, political, and social conditions while it simultaneously leaves these causes and conditions behind by creating new possibilities. It derives and, paradoxically, does not derive from history.
Viewed through the lens of post-May '68 struggles rather than as a historical reconstruction, the "Leninist rupture" is characterized by the coexistence of different orders: the order of causes and the order of desire (the existential, non-discursive dimension), the order of "preconscious investments'' governed by causes and aims and the order of "unconscious revolutionary investments" which have as their cause a rupture in causality, the condition for opening new possibilitiess.
Such an opening, "prepared by the subterranean work of causes, aims, and interests," only becomes real through something of another order, by "a desire without aim or cause."
Revolutionary possibility can always be identified by the impossibility it makes real, and by the fact that a process erupts secreting other systems of reference at the very place where the world was once closed. As in all creation (whether artistic, scientific, or social), the suspension of the ordinary course of things first of all affects subjectivity and its forms of expression by creating the conditions for new subjectivation. This process must be problematized." (pp.19-20)
-Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and machines. Capitalism and the production of subjectivity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2014, 279 pages.
http://lesilencequiparle.unblog.fr/2011/09/26/la-fabrique-de-lhomme-endette-essai-sur-la-condition-neoliberale-maurizio-lazzarato/
"
-Maurizio Lazzarato, Les Révolutions du capitalisme,
"Il a suffi d'un mouvement de rupture comme les Gilets jaunes, qui n'ont rien de révolutionnaire, ni même de prérévolutionnaire, pour que l'« esprit versaillais » se réveille, pour que ressurgisse l'envie de tirer sur ces « saloperies » qui menacent, ne serait que symboliquement, le pouvoir et la propriété." (p.11)
"La forme du processus révolutionnaire avait déjà changé dans les années i960, mais elle s'était heurtée à un obstacle insurmontable : l'incapacité d'inventer un modèle différent de celui qui avait ouvert, en 1917, la longue suite des révolutions du XXe siècle. Dans le modèle léniniste, la révolution avait encore la forme de la réalisation.
La classe ouvrière était le sujet qui contenait déjà les conditions de l'abolition du capitalisme et de l'installation du communisme. Le passage de la « classe en soi » à la « classe pour soi » devait être réalisé par la prise de conscience et la prise de pouvoir, organisées et dirigées par le parti qui apportait de l'extérieur ce qui manquait aux pratiques « syndicales » des ouvriers.
Or, depuis les années 1960, le processus révolutionnaire a pris la forme de l'événement : le sujet politique, au lieu d'être déjà là en puissance, est « imprévu » (les Gilets jaunes sont un exemple paradigmatique de cette imprévisibilité) ; il n'incarne pas la nécessité de l'histoire, mais seulement la contingence de l'affrontement politique." (p.12)
"Le positionnement du populisme de gauche (et sa systématisation théorique par Laclau et Mouffe) empêche de nommer l'ennemi. Ses catégories (la « caste », « ceux d'en haut » et « ceux d'en bas ») sont à un pas de la théorie du complot." (p.14)
"Si les subjectivités qui portent les luttes contre ces différentes dominations ne peuvent être réduites à l'unité du « signifiant vide » du peuple, comme le voudrait le populisme de gauche, le double problème de l'action politique commune et du pouvoir du capital reste entier." (p.16)
"La citation de Michael Lôwy placée en exergue de ce chapitre est une synthèse fidèle et efficace de la pensée de Walter Benjamin, l'un des rares marxistes à avoir pleinement saisi la rupture représentée par les guerres totales et le fascisme. La définition qu'il donne du capitalisme élargit et radicalise celle de Marx, puisque le capital est pour lui à la fois production et guerre, pouvoir de création et pouvoir de destruction : seul le « triomphe sur les classes subalternes » rend possibles les transformations du système productif, du pouvoir, du droit, de la propriété et de l'État.
Cette dynamique, nous la retrouvons au fondement du néolibéralisme, dont le « triomphe historique », dans lequel le fascisme joue encore une fois un rôle central, porte sur la « révolution mondiale ». Victoire sur des classes subalternes très différentes de celles que Benjamin avait à l'esprit- comme la plupart des marxistes européens d'alors, il avait du mal à apprécier l'importance de la lutte anticoloniale. Et pourtant, si Paris entre les deux guerres n'était plus, comme au XIXe siècle, la capitale de l'époque, elle a joué un rôle déterminant dans les révolutions à venir en tant que « capitale du tiers-monde ». Dans le croisement des migrations asiatiques, africaines et sud-américaines, s'est formée la grande majorité des dirigeants qui ont conduit les luttes de libération nationale contre le colonialisme, moteur de la révolution mondiale." (p.20)
"La différence entre mon analyse du néolibéralisme et celles de Foucault, de Luc Boltanski et Eve Chiapello ou de Pierre Dardot et Christian Laval, est radicale : ces auteurs effacent
les origines fascistes du néolibéralisme, la « révolution mondiale » des années 1960 -qui est donc loin de se limiter au 68 français-, mais aussi la contre-révolution néolibérale, cadre idéologique de la revanche du capital. Cette différence porte sur la nature du capitalisme que ces théories « pacifient » en effaçant la victoire politico-militaire qui est la condition de son déploiement. Le « triomphe » sur les classes subalternes fait partie de la nature et de la définition du capital." (p.25)
"
(pp.26-34)
-Maurizio Lazzarato, Le capital déteste tout le monde, Éditions Amsterdam, 2019, 178 pages.
"Today; the weakness of capitalism lies in the production of subjectivity. As a consequence, systemic crisis and the crisis in the production of subjectivity are strictly interlinked. It is impossible to separate economic, political, and social processes from the processes of subjectivation occurring within them.
With neoliberal deterritorialization, no new production of subjectivity takes place." (p.8 )
"On the other hand, neoliberalism has destroyed previous social relations and their forms of subjectivation (worker, communist, or social-democrat subjectivation or national subjectivity, bourgeois subjectivity, etc.). Nor does neoliberalism's promotion of the entrepreneur-with which Foucault associates the subjective mobilization management requires in all forms of economic activity--offer any kind of solution to the problem. Quite the contrary. Capital has always required a territory beyond the market and the corporation and a subjectivity that is not that of the entrepreneur; for although the entrepreneur, the business, and the market make up the economy, they also break up society.
Hence the long-standing recourse to pre-capitalist territories and values, to long-established morals and religions, and to the formidable modern subjectivations of nationalism, racism, and fascism which aim to maintain the social ties capitalism continually undermines. Today, the ubiquity of entrepreneurial subjectivation, manifest in the drive to transform every individual into a business, has resulted in a number of paradoxes. The autonomy, initiative, and subjective commitment demanded of each of us constitute new norms of employability and, therefore, strictly speaking, a heteronomy. At the same time, the injunction imposed on the individual to act, take the initiative, and undertake risks has led to widespread depression, a maladie du siecle, the refusal to accept homogenization, and, finally, the impoverishment of existence brought on by the individual "success" of the entrepreneurial model." (p.8 )
"The unions and political parties on the "left" provide no solutions to these problems because they too have no alternative subjectivities on offer. The people, the working class, labor, producers, and employment no longer have a hold on subjectivity, no longer function as vectors of subjectivation. Today's critical theories similarly fail to account for the relationship between capitalism and processes of subjectivation. Cognitive capitalism, the information society, and cultural capitalism (Rifkin) capture the relationship but do so all too reductively. On the one hand, knowledge, information, and culture are far from sufficient to cover the multiplicity of economies that constitutes "production." On the other hand, their subjective avatars (cognitive workers, "manipulators of symbols," etc.) fall shon of the multiple modes of subjection and political subjectivation that contribute to the "production of subjectivity." Their claim to found a hegemonic paradigm for production and the production of subjectivity is belied by the fact that the fate of the class struggle, as the crisis has shown, is not being played out in the domains of knowledge, information, or culture." (p.11)
"Social subjection equips us with a subjectivity, assigning us an identity, a sex, a body, a profession, a nationality, and so on. In response to the needs of the social division of labor, it in this way manufactures individuated subjects, their consciousness, representations, and behavior. But the production of the individuated subject is coupled with a completely different process and a completely different hold on subjectivity that proceeds through desubjectivation. Machinic enslavement dismantles the individuated subject, consciousness, and representations, acting on both the pre-individual and supraindividual levels." (p.12 )
"Now, capitalism reveals a twofold cynicism: the "humanist" cynicism of assigning us individuality and pre-established roles (worker, consumer, unemployed, man/woman, artist, etc.) in which individuals are necessarily alienated; and the "dehumanizing" cynicism of including us in an assemblage that no longer distinguishes between human and non-human, subject and object, or words and things.
Throughout this book, we will examine the difference and complementarity between apparatuses of"social subjection" and those of "machinic enslavement," for it is at their point of intersection that the production of subjectivity occurs. We will trace a cartography of the modalities of subjection and enslavement, those with which we will have to break in order to begin a process of subjectivation independent and autonomous of capitalism's hold on subjectivity, its modalities of production and forms of life.
It is therefore essential to understand that the subjectivity and subjectivations capitalism produces are meant for the "machine." Not primarily for the "technical machine" but for the "social machine," for the "megamachine," as Lewis Mumford calls it, which includes the technical machine as one of its products.
What are the conditions for a political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity constitutes the most fundamental of capitalist concerns ? What are the instruments specific to the production of subjectivity such that its industrial and serial production by the State and the corporation might be thwarted ? What model and what modalities of organization must be constructed for a subjectivation process that joins micro- and macropolitics ?" (pp.12-14)
"Structuralism may be dead, but language, which founds the structuralist paradigm, is still alive and well in these theories. To grasp the limits of the new "logocentrism,'' we will have to take a step backwards, returning to the critiques of structuralism and linguistics advanced in the 1960s and 70s by Guattari, Deleuze, and Foucault. In different ways, their critiques demoted language from the central role it was made to play in politics and subjectivation processes following the "linguistic turn" in analytic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. They set forth a new semiotic theory and a new theory of enunciation better able to register how signs function in these processes and in the economy. In particular, we will return to Guattari's semiotic theory. 'While affirming that each subjectivation process implies the operations of mixed, signifying, symbolic, and asignifying semiotics, Guattari considers the latter, as they operate in the economy ; science, art, and machines, the specificity of capitalism. What role and function do different signifying, symbolic, and asignifying semiotics have in running and controlling capitalist deterritorialization and reterritorialization ? And what is their relationship with the subjectivation process ?
Guattari and Foucault do not stop at deposing the "imperialism" of language over other modes of expression and other formations of subjectivity. 'While emphasizing the strategic importance of different semiotics for steering and controlling capitalist flows and subjectivity production, they argue that in order to bring together the conditions for rupture and subjective reconversion, we must move beyond both language and semiotics." (pp.17)
" "a radical divorce" (Guattari) between pragmatic linguistics and existential pragmatics, between the semiotic logic that produces meaning and the pragmatics that produces existence and political rupture.
In the act of enunciation (in the same way as in every act of creation), a power of self-positioning, self-production, and a capacity to secrete one's own referent emerges, a power which has little to do with Saussurean "speech," the Lacanian "signifier," or the performatives and speech acts of analytic philosophy.
A force of self-affectation, self-affirmation, and self-positioning doubles power and knowledge relations, defying the powers and knowledge in place. It provides the conditions for rupture as well as for processes of political subjectivation-indeed, for processes of subjectivation tout court. The rules governing the production of the self are those "optional" and processual ones invented by constructing "sensible territories" and by a singularization of subjectivity (Guattari), by creating the alterity of "an other life" and "an other world"
(Foucault). Hence the recourse, not to cognitive, linguistic, and informational methods and paradigms, but to political, ethical-aesthetic approaches and paradigms-the "aesthetic paradigm" of Guattari and the "aesthetics of existence" of Foucault." (p.18)
"The analysis of the Soviet Revolution, which returns like a refrain in Deleuze and Guattari's work, offers certain, even if only formal, insights which help to understand the limits of the current political situation. In their work, the modes of subjectivity production are translated into politics. Under capitalism, processes of political subjectivation must both enter and break from economic, social, and political flows. The two operations are indispensable: start from the hold machinic enslavements and social subjections maintain over subjectivity and produce a rupture, which is always at the same time an invention and constitution of the sel£9 "Revolution" erupts from history, that is, from economic, political, and social conditions while it simultaneously leaves these causes and conditions behind by creating new possibilities. It derives and, paradoxically, does not derive from history.
Viewed through the lens of post-May '68 struggles rather than as a historical reconstruction, the "Leninist rupture" is characterized by the coexistence of different orders: the order of causes and the order of desire (the existential, non-discursive dimension), the order of "preconscious investments'' governed by causes and aims and the order of "unconscious revolutionary investments" which have as their cause a rupture in causality, the condition for opening new possibilitiess.
Such an opening, "prepared by the subterranean work of causes, aims, and interests," only becomes real through something of another order, by "a desire without aim or cause."
Revolutionary possibility can always be identified by the impossibility it makes real, and by the fact that a process erupts secreting other systems of reference at the very place where the world was once closed. As in all creation (whether artistic, scientific, or social), the suspension of the ordinary course of things first of all affects subjectivity and its forms of expression by creating the conditions for new subjectivation. This process must be problematized." (pp.19-20)
-Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and machines. Capitalism and the production of subjectivity, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2014, 279 pages.
