A politics of self-management, accompanied by an analytic militancy (or a militant analysis, as one wishes) can therefore only be established on condition that instruments of semiotisation capable of dealing with sign systems without remaining imprisoned in dominant redundancies and significations of power are put in place. But what often disorientates militants and specialists of the social thing is that their micropolitics of desire and their conceptual materials make them miss the semiotisation of the libidinal economy of the social field, in so far as that semiotisation doesn’t stop shifting its intensities around a continuum the existence of which challenges in advance systems of options that are crystallised in terms of a logic of totalised objects, responsibilised persons, closed sets. If they do not ‘focus’ on the real in this domain, this is, paradoxically, because the notions that they use are at once both too general and not abstract enough.1 Capitalist flows do not, in effect, work with general, territorialised, categories (for example, men, cities, nations) but bring into play deterritorialised functions that imply the most abstract of modes of semiotisation in the economic, scientific, technical order, etc. Under such conditions, thinking ‘modernity’ can, in our opinion, only signify a rupture with every system of general categories, which only ever juts out over the real, which only succeeds in carrying out a formal inventorying of its original so-called elements, supposedly to organise them ‘logically’ but in fact so as to stratify them in pragmatics with political repercussions that are never made explicit. Thinking minority in the order of desire presupposes a direct meshing with the semiotisation of a real in action, in other words, the fabrication of new lines of reality. Equipment functions depend systematically on general categories that tend to take a hold of collective processes so as to reterritorialise them on power formations, whereas assemblage functions, on the contrary, endeavour to connect semiotic flows directly to the abstract machines that are borne by the deterritorialisation of flows. The marking out of this type of connection, through processes of diagrammatisation will enable us to better found the opposition between the politics of equipment – in so far as it depends on a regime of signs that function in the mode of representation, of representatives of enunciation and of icons of power – and the politics of collective assemblages that function on the basis of modes of semiotisation that make signs work ‘flush with’ things, bodies, and flows of all kinds. In the first case, one will be dealing with interactions between objects, subjects who are distinct from one another, a causality that operates on discernabilised strata; in the second case, one will be dealing with interactions that traverse and undo strata, crystallise intensive multiplicities, polarise modes of subjectivation that by rights cease to be attributable to individuated persons, but which remain adjacent to constellations of organs, organic functions, material flows, semiotic flows, etc.
But where do such diagrammatic assemblages currently become manifest? Certainly not in civil society or politics, the codification of which clings on to pre-capitalist personological laws. Rather it is in domains like the sciences, industry, military and artistic machines, etc., that one can best see them at work, to the extent that the systems of signs that they put into play already form an intrinsic part of the material of their production. Until now, those attempts at self-management or communitarianism that have tried to struggle against this kind of deterritorialised machinism have remained powerless in face of the complexity of semiotic integration at which they arrive. It is of course obvious that invocations of a ‘return to nature’, a ‘return to Zen Buddhism’, to the defence of the environment, to zero growth, etc., as such, will never be enough to stop the mega-machines that are currently sweeping everything away in their passage: nature, bodies, minds, original forms, ‘morals’ … A revolutionary resumption of machinic processes can therefore not content itself with a critique of ideology that articulates general notions that do not engage with the diagrammatic processes that ensure the real power of capitalist regimes.
Only the creation of other types of semiotisation machines that reorient the economy of deterritorialised flows, undoing dominant redundancies and the stratifications of established powers, could begin to respond to such an objective. Lenin was amongst those who had understood the necessity of such a creation when, becoming conscious of ineffectiveness of social-democratic, economistic, humanist or anarchist discourse, he devoted his energy to the construction of an absolutely new genre of revolutionary machine. It was essentially over problems of organisation that he conducted his struggle against social-democracy, the programmatic divergences seeming in some way to have become depending on the priority of this rupture with old union and social-democrat practices. Thus the Bolshevik party fixed as its primary task the forming of a new type of militant as the support for a specific consciousness of the working class and the constitution of a sort of war machine capable of tackling the existing political, economic, police, social-democratic union practices head on. To do that it had to be in a position to extract signs, order-words, to semiotise diagrammatically a new workerist avant-garde and sketch out the revolutionary deterritorialisation of the Russian peasantry, which had remained deeply rooted in Asiatic despotism. How the Leninist machine got itself surrounded by imperialism before sinking into Stalinism is a different question! Although it remained too territorialised because of its implacable centralism and its party nationalism, although it got recuperated by the Soviet State, by military and police machines, although the type of party that it produced became a supplementary repressive equipment the world over, the Leninist ‘experiment’ nonetheless resulted in one of the most important collective assemblages of enunciation of modern working classes. What must be remembered here are not the models that Leninism created but the methodology of rupture that it enacted. Although the Leninist party no longer corresponds at all with the necessities of contemporary social struggles, although those who aim to reproduce its order-words and organisation indefinitely are situated completely outside historical development, the abstract machine that Leninism put in circulation, the questions that it asked, that is to say, those concerning a new way of life, a new morality, a new way of assembling militant practices and holding a discourse on politics and society remain vital. In fact, the attempts at going back to social-democratic practices have only ever resulted in the worst compromises. Only a going beyond of this problematic will enable the impasse within which the workers’ movement finds itself to be unblocked. But there too, the question of the miniaturisation of war machines and the constitution of multiple ‘micro-undergrounds’ [micro-maquis] allowing class struggles and struggles of desire, in their molecular aspect, to be faced with new weapons.
All existing definitions of the avant-garde, of the function of revolutionary intellectuals, of apparatchiks, of mass militantism, are to be called into question. Let us note in particular that as interesting as they are, Gramsci’s analyses relative to the division of labour between intellectuals and militants do not seem to us to advance the question decisively. One may recall that he expected the enunciation of a theory that would become the ‘flesh and blood of the proletariat’2 from the constitution of ‘collective intellectuals’. It is evident that what we have designated with the expression collective assemblage cannot coincide with this new race of ‘organic intellectuals of the working class’. We do not think that there is any place, in effect to set up a specific group and praxis the function of which would be to synthesise Theory and Action. The very form of the division of labour between militancy, the analysis of the unconscious and intellectual activity should wither away, to the extent that the practice of theory gives up basing itself on systems of universals – even if they are dialectical and materialist – and action establishes itself in the extension of a liberatory economy of desire. The incessant dynamic of the semiotic and pragmatic components of collective assemblages, relative to the struggles over interest and the investments of desire, effectively tends to make the traditional poles of social representation (the oppositions: men-women, young-adult, manual-intellectual; rank and file-leadership; normal-mad, heterosexual-homosexual, etc.) lose their formal identity.
Also the determination of the conditions under which the working class will have to take control of the State, or, in a formula of Gramsci’s ‘make themselves the State’ will no longer be posed in those terms at all, as the question of the withering away of State power will no longer be pushed back to the end of a long historical process but will be of the order of the day at every step of every struggle. It’s the whole of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist casuistry of principal and secondary contradictions that must be called into question here. To consider, for example, that the contradictions between men and women, children and adults, are secondary in relation to class contradictions in a capitalist regime corresponds neither to history nor to current concrete situations. Attempts at hierarchising contradictions at a doctrinal level always imply a micropolitics of the subjection of the struggles of desire to the ‘serious matter’ of class struggle, that is to say, in the last instance, to the party leadership. One can admit that during major social struggles, the working class has a determining role to play, but that doesn’t in the slightest imply that workers’ organisations can lay down the law on women’s movements, the movements of the young, artistic, intellectual, regionalist currents, sexual minorities, etc.
This loss of identities, of roles and of specialisms within ‘collective assemblages of enunciations’ ought not, therefore, entail the dissolving of the singular characteristics of each pragmatic ‘region’, quite the contrary. Without differentiating distinct races of militants, intellectuals, artists, etc., it will become possible that the same person can legitimately pass from one type of activity to another and radically change system of reference without that creating mental or social difficulties for him. It is, in effect, clear that every attempt at homogenising pragmatic fields, at smoothing over the singularities of desire relative to each type of semiotic component, always goes in the direction of an accumulation of repression (something that can be spotted today when considering the affinities that exist, above all at the level of institutional practices, between power formations such as the leadership of centralised parties, those of groupuscules, of psychoanalytic societies, literary cliques, academic pressure groups, etc.). Diagrammatic assemblages already exist everywhere in capitalist societies: they constitute the very motor of their semiotic potential. But every effort is made to channel their creativity into the dominant territorialities of the system. Thus deterritorialising diagrammatism is ceaselessly recuperated, reterritorialised, hierarchised, impotentiated. Paradoxically, capitalist and bureaucratic socialist societies cannot do without semiotic procedures for the capture of libido, which, moreover, they find intrinsically threatening. Collective equipment is thus the seat of a complex metabolism for the capitalisation, but at the same time, neutralisation, of diagrammatic assemblages. It thereby forms the junction between the old civil society and the machinic revolution.
Whilst endeavouring not to escape the context of Marxist orthodoxy – but one would have to look at this more closely – Louis Althusser has attempted to determine the specificity of those machines of collective semiotisation that he has called Ideological State Apparatuses.3 It may be recalled that he distinguishes between a component of State power, which, he says, ‘functions through violence’ in the functioning of repressive powers, and an ideological component which functions softly, in some way. Also, in order to arrive at a systematic gridding of the social field in every domain (religion, education, the family, law, politics, unions, information, culture, etc.), these Apparatuses are led to effectuate subtle combinations of violence and ideological ‘deception’. The fact that Louis Althusser detaches apparatus that arise from the private domain from what he calls the ‘Repressive State Apparatuses’ seems to be of the greatest interest, but we part company from him when he characterises the former as being fundamentally ‘ideological’. The problematic that we have ourselves sought to outline, with collective assemblages of enunciation, diagrammatic machines and Collective equipment functions, has, on the contrary, led us to consider the existence of a continuity between the blatant forms of public repression and the innumerable ‘private’ modes of internalisation of repression.
The State is everywhere and before being incarnated in repressive instruments, it functions in the libido. We really do mean libido, because the movement of ideas, in this domain above all, cannot be separated from the metabolism of the social unconscious. So we cannot follow Louis Althusser when he localises Ideological State Apparatuses at the level of ideological superstructures, thus repeating the old nineteenth century metaphors about the ‘edifice’ of causalities. According to us, the economic base does not constitute an infrastructure that necessarily imposes itself on the libido and on ideas. Everything can become infrastructure! Under certain conditions, legal-political doctrines, machines for injecting ideas, religious representations, etc., can play a determining role. Under other conditions, they float outside any social reality. And it isn’t even enough then to say that they are ‘ideological’ and depend on an economic base. That would still be to accord them too much respect. At the limit, they no longer depend on anything! They no longer exist except as empty redundancy. Louis Althusser has made ideology too general a category, encompassing and confusing radically heterogeneous semiotic categories. In identifying it, following the classical tradition, with logos, he wanted to underline that it could not constitute a productive force. And on this point we can only part company from him. In fact, it is an entire conception of language and of production that is in question here.
An analytic approach to social libido would require that one not restrict oneself solely to the visible parts of equipment such as schools, prisons, stages, etc. In effect, a fundamental element of their functioning derives from their aptitude for capturing not just interests, but also individual and collective desires. If one restricts oneself to their manifest discourse (legal, regulatory, etc.) one misses an essential element of the iceberg of repression in capitalist regimes. To make do with analysing the ideological character of these discourses risks making us lose not just its implicit dimensions – something Freudians have tried to locate with their opposition between manifest utterances and latent contents – but more fundamentally, the metabolism of the coding components and the non-linguistic semiotic components of assemblages of enunciation that correspond to them. Ideology is a trap in two ways: at the level of its content, it gives consistency to empty redundancies, and, at the level of its very existence, it endeavours to give credence to the idea that it itself plays a major role. Thus everyone pretends to believe that the future of society depends on the fact that leaders, parties, newspapers, etc., convey such and such a doctrine, whilst in reality today theoretical points of view – social projects – only have an insignificant part to play in the real decision-making processes of the capitalist world. Only pragmatic assemblages that are directly engaged with reality on the basis of their own diagrammatic machine will be able to bring effective responses to contemporary social problems, without there being much to expect from the group and leaders who claim to have something to teach the masses.
People have been taught to clap in time – vote, opinion poll, demonstration, etc. – in front of the overly brightly lit scenes of ideology, with their characters and their Manichean options: left or right, socialism or barbarity, fascism or revolution? But the projectors of real history are shifting now, irreversibly, it seems, towards an entirely different problematic: left and right, inextricably mixed up, socialism and barbarity, fascism and revolution. That is to say, at the same time both the Chilean national stadium, at the molar level, and the ‘politics of the public square’ at the molecular level, to use Paul Virilio’s felicitous expression, that is, a micropolitics of generalised gridding.4 Repressive institutions have a hold on us everywhere, they mobilise us at every moment in our lives – even dreams, parapraxes, lapsus have to be accountable, under the regime of psychoanalytic surveillance that is starting to be put in place in a certain number of institutions!
The ensemble of conceptions that are relative to the high points of struggle in periods of upswing and downswing, all systems of strategic choices of the type ‘we need more time to allow the power of the Soviets in the USSR to be consolidated’ or tactical calculations of the kind ‘Elections first, then our demands’ tend to lose their signification. A molecular revolution, leaning up against molar revolution, so as to divert capitalist societies from their catastrophic ends, to seize control of the economy of deterritorialised flows that they have succeeded in putting at their service, could only be permanent and be established on every front at the same time. Not only will it ‘capitalise’ all the vectors of deterritorialisation, it will ‘lay it on’ to the extent that it will devote itself to undoing bourgeois reterritorialisations, amongst the ranks of which should be counted all today’s retro nostalgia!
Numerous indices of this kind of revolutionary renewal can be noted, but is this really the direction which history is taking? During ‘social crises’ of the kind that marked the USA at the end of the Vietnam war, for example, or Portugal during the collapse of the regime of Salazar, attempts at self-management and communitarian projects of all kinds appeared, then got bogged down in their internal difficulties and general indifference. In France, self-management has become a bit fashionable with the business of the LIP cooperative, that is to say, precisely in relation to a company that is implacably surrounded by capitalism, the power of the State and the unions, and who as a result had no chance of surviving. But, it will be said, these kinds of intersections are found more or less everywhere! And every attempt of this kind will always end up being taken in hand or liquidated. Practically everything that was set in motion in May 1968 has been recuperated. But an immense fissure between repressive equipment and the collective energy of desire has revealed a new problematic, and set into circulation new abstract machines and has opened up new prospects for innovative militancy which little by little are transforming the general conditions for social struggles.
Whatever the case may be, it seems to us that one of the major obstacles to a self-management orientation gaining ground on the political chessboard in a decisive fashion, is that for the most part its defenders and promoters only think of it as something that must be limited to the sphere of economic and material problems. Thus in the eyes of opinion they are as people seeking above all to sort their own issues out, as a function of their own concerns, as a function of their own desires, and not so much as a function of those of the rest of society. We come up against the myth of spontaneity here: seen from the outside, this is interpreted as a politics of ‘everyone for themselves’. To free the thought of self-management from spontaneism is thus not only an affair of ideology but a fundamental problem of orientation concerning crucial theoretical questions – a certain definition of the unconscious – as well as very practical questions of everyday life and militant organisation. Self-management can be neither anti-management nor a ‘democratic’ adjustment of planning, as currently conceived by the left. Before being economic, it should concern the very texture of the socius, through the promotion of a new type of relationship between things, signs and collective modes of subjectivation. In itself, the idea of a ‘model’ for self-management is thus contradictory. Self-management can only result from a continuous process of collective experimentation which, whilst always taking things further in the detail of life and respect for the singularities of desire, will nonetheless be capable, little by little, of ‘rationally’ ensuring essential tasks of coordination at the broadest social levels.
Let us put it bluntly: it doesn’t seem very honest to us to promise self-management today for electoral tomorrows, without starting to put it into practice everywhere that it is already possible. It must be put to work straightaway, in the party, in the union, in private life! The collective neuroses that become manifest with investment in bureaucracy, the magical recourse to leaders, to stars, champions … are not just a fact of class enemies. They are perpetuated in us and around us. And one cannot pretend to deal with them elsewhere if one does attack the points where they most paralyse us, that is to say, at the blind spots of our own micro-fascisms. Self-management cannot be a synonym for a generalised autonomism, for a closing up onto territorialities that are jealous of one another – the family, the community, the party, race: on the contrary, it is about deterritorialising, connecting old stratifications, opening up to the prospect of a planetary management that isn’t centralised, that isn’t about planning, which multiplies decision-making centres and frees the libidinal energies that have, hitherto been prisoners of racial, national, phallocratic, etc. investments. Thus as we have tried to show, it cannot be separated from the putting into place of analytic-political assemblages that only have distant relations with what a certain number of ‘non-authoritarian’, Rogerian, psycho-sociologists have classified in terms of ‘analysers’. It is not, in effect, a matter of proposing a new recipe for the ‘running’ of small groups, but of envisaging the conditions for a micropolitics of desire, itself indissociable from a ‘large-scale’ politics concerning the ensemble of class struggles.5 To have done with the dialogue of the deaf that opposes ‘centralists’ who call themselves democratic, from ‘spontaneists’ who are scarcely more so, it is at a practical level that militants of self-management will have to take charge of the intersections of power formations and machines of desire with which they are confronted. But under current conditions of capitalist alienation, which spares no-one, it is difficult to imagine such analytic-militant groups falling from the sky!
They will not be made to proliferate overnight, by making the right resolutions, by opting for the right programme! And even in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary conditions, which are in principle favourable to the establishment of systems of ‘dual power’, one cannot expect that they will start to germinate by themselves in the soil of popular spontaneity! They can only be born from properly experimental embryos, from sometimes entirely microscopic collective assemblages that are capable of combining working problematics of economic management, everyday life, and desire. In order to be produced, such assemblages will, on condition that they have managed to engage with reality, will have no need of being put in print or ‘propagandised’. In effect, once a new form of struggle or organisation6 succeeds in resolving a problem, one notices that it is transmitted at the speed of audiovisual. Once again, it is not a question here of putting a model into circulation! The growth and expansion of ‘social innovations’: can only be accomplished along the lines – a rhizome – of creative experimentation. What continues to be rewarding in the work of Célestin Freinet, for example,7 is less his ‘methods’ or the movement that invokes them (sometimes in quite a dogmatic fashion), than the fact that they contribute to the catalysing of other efforts, in other contexts – in the urban context with institutional pedagogy, for example8 – or that it announces the idea of a much more radical calling into question of the existence of school as such.9
One can never say about a particular situation of oppression that it offers no possibility for struggle; inversely, one can never claim that a society or a social group, as such, is definitively protected against the growth of a new form of fascism. Molecular semiotisation works over molar stratifications and, inversely, these latter attempt to render molecular assemblages impotent. Macroscopic or microscopic territorialities, massive deterritorialisations or minuscule lines of flight, paranoid local or large-scale fascist reterritorialisations do not cease penetrating each other according to a general principle of transversality, in such a way that, for example, micro-fascist conjunctions of power can spring up all over the place, as we see in France, Germany, and Italy today, without the modification of legal rights, constitutional guarantees, or consolidated gains. In these countries until now micro-fascist conjunctions seem not to have to crystallise at the molar level. But nothing ensures that it will always be like this! We haven’t forgotten the declarations of the generals in Chile, on the eve of the coup, who affirmed that their army was the most democratic in the world! What took place then, not just in their heads, but above all in the heads of those who ‘believed in’ them?
Were we not already in the presence of a fascist seizure of power, at the level of a phenomenon of collective belief? Michel Foucault has clearly shown that one cannot consider the political power of the State simply to be the result of a hierarchy of coercive organisms. He has brought out what he has called the ramified anatomy of disciplinary power: ‘discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a “physics” or an “anatomy” of power, a technology.’10 The whole question is one of knowing under what conditions this technology can be neutralised and this anatomy defeated/undone! It is thus not a matter for us of opposing two types of origin, a genealogical origin of major social formations, and a micro-physical emergence of the socius on the basis of desiring machines. What is in question here is, rather, the liquidation of every idea of origin and that having taken into account the practical impossibility that active agents of enunciation – and not ‘objective’ and external observers – generally find in determining the number and intensity of the semiotic components which, at a given moment, in a given situation, are likely to intervene in the transformation of a social formation. Our intention is not at all to promote a metaphysics of indeterminacy here, but to criticise political ideas that think social causality in static terms – even when they claim to be dialectical or to be inspired by thermodynamic concepts.11 With their ‘engines of history’, their ‘weak links and strong links’, their ‘transmission mechanisms’ it seems that a certain number of Marxists really are fixated on what we could call the ‘steam engine complex’! Rather than clinging too simplistic models of causality between clearly distinguished objects and as a function of energy parameters that are distinct from one another, they would do well to take inspiration from more recent ‘models’, those of interaction in contemporary physics, for example.12 Inspiration has to be understood here in the poetic sense or that of walkers who need a change of scenery. Evidently it is not a matter of proposing new tracings, or the compulsive search for a ‘scientificity’ of concepts in these domains – something that seems to arise more from obsessional neurosis than from a theoretical analysis connected with social realities.