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textid=172&lang=en
Date: 08-March-2014

Economy and the Production of

Subjectivity
The binding of affective powers in
contemporary capitalism
Maurizio Lazzarato
This text is the English translation of a preprint from Maurizio
Lazzarato's new book Videophilosophie, which will be published in the
summer of 2001 by b-books in Berlin

Marx saw the key to the solution of the puzzle of work and wares in
the relationship of time to subjectivity - in a sort of crystallization
of time.
Cinema, video, and digital technologies suggest a different
crystallization of time: a new type of machine that, in contrast to
mechanical and thermodynamic machines, does not crystallize time
in general, but the duration of perception, sensitivity, and thought.
Bergson understands crystallization of time to mean a
process of creation and accumulation of powers. For him, duration
is a specific power. But what power is in question here? It is
neither a kinetic nor a potential power. Bergson fits into the
materialistic tradition, according to which power is closely
connected to emotion. He adds an important determination to the
qualification of affective power: affective power can only be
comprehended in relation to time, to duration. In this way, he
reveals a relationship between affective power, subjectivity, and
time/duration.
The activity implied by image technologies directly affects the
specific power that one calls the feeling of effort or

attentiveness. Time-crystallization machines have a direct

influence on the process of the production of subjectivity, since
they join forces with the emotions, perception, memory, language,
and thought.
The attentiveness that Bergson speaks of is not individual,
psychological attentiveness, but the power that feels and acts by
producing the images and various conditions of consciousness.
To be more precise: before images and sounds are produced,
the time-crystallization machines produce duration. Only the
possibility of its reproduction allows the production of images and
sounds. The time-crystallization machines are the motors of the
synthesis, the contraction, and the creation of affective power. A
new type of powerful, non-organic energy forms the material
they work with.
In order to analyze how the affective powers and the
production of subjectivity are at the center of the process of adding
value to capital, I shall combine the analysis of capitalism
developed by Deleuze and Guattari with an analysis of the
information economy.
A whole series of categories that served to form a critique of
political economy has to be abandoned or reformulated. That is
particularly the case with the category of work, which has to be
compared, without any nostalgia, with the activities and affective
powers roused, produced and consumed through the new
technological arrangements. The concept of living work was at
the heart of the critique of work. Critical Marxism interpreted it as
an expression of the worker's subjectivity, thus making possible a
thoroughgoing renewal of the critique of political economy.
However, this concept remained directly connected with the
qualification of subjectivity as proletarian subjectivity. The Marxist
concept of a global subjectivity as a characteristic that defines
capitalism was thus not able to leave this framework.
The concept of the production of subjectivity as developed
in French post-structuralist philosophy - with significant differences
- allows a radical break with the Marxist definition of living work
( and can, at the same time, regain its original intuition from a
different perspective): the subjectivity that is put to work is
simply any subjectivity at all when it can no longer be called

exclusively proletarian. In postmodern capitalism, the Benjaminian

distinction between work and perception - or the distinction
between work and affect that emerged in the '70s - has been made
superfluous by the definition of generic activity that, from the
production point of view, produces added value independently of
any form of work (children, pensioners, unemployed, TV viewers).
This produces enormous problems inasmuch as it is not just a
matter of combining work and subjectivity, work and language, or
work and affects. The arrangements and conditions of the
production of added value and of subjectivity must be completely
redefined in a world in which there is no longer any distinction
between man-nature, society-nature, industry-nature ... (and) ... no
spheres or cycles that are relatively independent of one another
(Deleuze/Guattari). This redefinition requires the reconstruction of
the concept of activity, of the affective powers, of free action,
which was perverted and mysticized equally by both capitalism and
the labor movement. Neither point of view has ever freed itself
from the theoretical and political subordination of the concept of
power to the concept of work.
We are obliged to abandon most of the categories of the
critique of the political economy, but we shall not abandon the
Marxist methodology: that is, the necessity of discovering the
genetic, creative, differential element that Marx defined as living
work within the categories of political economy. Most terms
concerned with language, communication, and information hide
and mysticize the conditions of the production of subjectivity and
the affective powers that constitute it. In fact, language and
communication tend to include subjectivities, virtualities and
affective powers in the faculties of the soul; but once they are so
defined, the ontological and political novelty is found there as
intersubjectivity, as the relationship with the Other.
In this regard, one should treat Habermas, Shannon, and
most linguists in a similar way to that in which Marx treated the
classical economists. Language, communication, and information
are, under the new conditions of capitalistic accumulation, the
forms in which the affective powers are spatialized. Within
language, communication, information, it is impossible to
define the genetic, plastic element that alone can explain their
constitution and development. But what are they related to, if the

socius were reduced to the facts of language and these latter, in

their turn, to series of signifiers able to be expressed binarily,
'digitally'? (Felix Guattari).
In Mille Plateaux, Deleuze/Guattari not only
the production of value is no longer based on
component in work; they also provide us with
necessary to express the relationship between the
subjectivity and time-crystallization machines,
categories of utility value and exchange value.

establish that
the human
the elements
production of
beyond the

Labor is only productive (in the economic sense) to the extent

to which it is able to integrate and discipline desire and the
affective powers. Capitalism has always achieved this appropriation
through divisions: between factory and society, between proletarian
subjectivity and other forms of subjectivity, between productive
and unproductive work, between time for working and time for
living, between manual work and brainwork. Only under these
conditions is the productive relationship between subjectivity,
body, and timea relationship produced by capitalismseen as the
power of capital and labor.
The big transformation heralded by the conflicts of 1968
consists in the fact that the relationship between desire, affective
powers, and time no longer has to take the detour via labor to
produce wealth. The information economy shows us how
capitalism, even in its most advanced forms, organizes the
relationship between affects, desires, and time without recourse to
the discipline of the factory, and appropriates the affects and
desires of each and every individual in an open space (without
distinguishing between productive and unproductive, or between
proletarian or other subjectivities) in order to prepare them for
the production of profit.
The analysis of advanced capitalism developed by Felix
Guattari in the seventies allows us to understand the increasingly
important role that the affective posers and the time-crystallization
machines will play in the organization of the economy. In his
analysis, Guattari focuses on two complementary aspects which
have since been confirmed. Firstly, contemporary capitalism does
not confine itself to exploiting labor; it exploits the whole of society.
The concepts of capitalistic business and of jobs can no longer be
separated from the entirety of the social fabric, which itself is

produced and reproduced under the direct control of capital. The

concept of capitalistic business must be extended to include
collective institutions, state institutions, media apparatuses, jobs,
and the majority of unpaid activities. It could be said that the
housewife has a job at the school, the consumer in the
supermarket, and TV viewers in front of their screens. (Guattari)
Capitalism no longer restricts itself to exploiting work-time;
it also exploits living-time. To use one of Foucault's concepts:
contemporary capitalism defines itself as a bio-power and as
bio-politics. Putting life at the center of the production of added
value implies? and this is the second aspect of Guattari's analysis the central position held in the production of value by the affective
powers that make up life.
The organization of the production of value thus does not only
include the economically determinable values, but also the
mental and affective values, the faculties of the soul, as well as
the impersonal affects that are at the basis of the production of
subjectivity.
The capitalistic machinery grafts itself onto this basic
functioning of perceptive, sensitive, affective, cognitive, and
linguistic behaviors, as individuals are just as 'equipped' with
modes of perception or of normalization of desire as factories,
schools, territories. (Guattari)
Capitalism not only manufactures the flows of primary
material, the flows of energy, the flows of human labor, but also the
flows of knowledge, semiotic flows, which reproduce affects,
sensations, attitudes, and collective behavior patterns. The
mechanisms involved in the production of subjectivity thus
increasingly tend to correspond to the processes of the production
of wealth.
According to Guattari, capitalism defines itself by a process of
deterritorialization of the real, which can only be controlled and
integrated by the a-significant semiotic machines and the flow of
signs, themselves deterritorialized. On an economic level,
capitalism does not produce discourse, but attempts to control the
a-significant semiotic machines. Here, Guattari refers primarily to
money, the organization of its circulation, and the a-significant
grids of the stock market. The deterritorialized flows of subjectivity

are thus controlled and integrated by the deterritorialized flows of

money.
Contemporary capitalism is defined by a continued
enrichment through semiotic components and a-significant semiotic
machines of appropriation that are no longer restricted to money
and its derivatives. Putting the socius and the affective powers to
work requires a specific machinery. This is where Guattari sees the
increase in what we have called time-crystallization machines (TV,
cinema, the electronic networks), which effect a semiotic work
process that directly affects subjectivity.
Capital today manifests itself - beyond hard cash and paper
money, credit, shares, title deeds, etc. - in semiotic operations and
every kind of manipulation of power by using information
technology and the media. (Guattari)
Turning life into value requires machines that are in a position
to integrate the affective powers and the non-organic energy of
which they are made up. With the time- crystallization machines,
mechanical integration is no longer limited to locations of
production, but also develops in all other social and institutional
spaces: the media, networks, collective institutions, etc. Our whole
work is meant to show how, by using these new machines,
capitalism can gain control, beyond labor and monetarized goods,
of a multitude of power 'quanta' that would otherwise remain
encapsulated in local, domestic or libidinal economies.
What is new about Guattari's analysis is that collective
institutions (among which are the media and digital networks) are,
for him, no longer ideological apparatuses of the state as
proposed by Althusser. For Guattari, they are not mechanisms for
the reproduction of ideology, but for the reproduction of the means
and relationships of production. The developments of the last
twenty years confirm his analysis and radicalize it so far as to state
that the information economy today has made these institutions
into mechanisms for the direct creation of economic wealth.
Through the information economy, they themselves have become
the most dynamic, and quantitatively most important, part of postFordist accumulation.
Taking Guattari's concepts as a basis, it is possible to put
forward another very important qualification of the time-

crystallization machines, one that is closely connected with the

critique of their function of ideological representation. The timecrystallization
machines
do
not
only
function
through
representations, but also, and above all, through affects. To use
a Bergsonian distinction: these machines, through the work of
production, of conservation, and of accumulation of duration, graft
themselves on to the affective feelings and the representative
feelings in equal measure. These machines function on a double
level of a-significant semiotics (of durations, of intensities, of
affects) and significant semiotics (of representations, of ideas, of
emotions). This distinction is of great importance if one is not to
reduce time-crystallization machines to mechanisms of ideological
production, and to understand how they participate in the
accumulation of energy of a new type, as Bergson puts it.
Through this double affective level, the time-crystallization
machines directly involve desire and the affective powers in the
information economy.
While the significant machines and semiotics involve the
person, that is, the easily manipulable subjective representations
(ideas and emotions), the a-significant machines and semiotics
arrange infra-personal, infra-social elements according to a
molecular economy of desire that is very much more difficult to put
at the heart of stratified social relationships. By thus putting
perceptive functions, affects and unconscious behavior patterns to
work, capitalism takes possession of a capacity for work and desire
that easily exceeds those of the working class in the sociological
sense. (Guattari)

Translator: Tim Jones