A particular pragmatic component (to which we will return at length), the component of faciality, seems to us to play an especially important role in the micropolitics of semiotic re-deterritorialisation, above all in a rhizome, when it is inserted between a ‘becoming sexed body’ transformation and ‘becoming a social body’. In effect, in the organisation of significant redundancies of the social order, there is always a time when the dimension of the face interposes itself so as to fix the limits between what is and what ceases to be permitted. And that is not just played out through explicitly significant faciality traits (of the ‘making eyes’ kind), but also at a much more a-signifying level: one way of talking will trigger the sentiment that one is dealing with someone who ‘really is one of us’, another that one is dealing with a stranger, even someone who is strange, bizarre, or dangerous. The territorialisation of significations works on the basis of a machine that is able to put types of accent, intonation, timbre, rhythm, etc., into play, as well as stereotypical contents. A voice is always related to a face, even when this face doesn’t show itself.1 The cornerstone of this territorialisation must, in our view, be sought in the eyes-nose-mouth faceification triangle that gathers, formalises, neutralises and crushes the specific traits of other semiotic components. A certain module of faciality, with the typical intervals it tolerates, controls contents and traits of expression in their entirety. Faciality thus functions as a centre of resonance for micro-black holes that exist at the level of diverse semiotic components. As such, its politics consists in identifying and in being identified with a semiotic totalisation, the closure of which constitutes a ‘person’. This politics is fundamentally Manichean: either it is the person, for whom this face-voice is the cornerstone, or something different and, in effect, nothing. It is either completely me or nothing, As Ulysses answers: ‘it is no-one’ [personne]. The subjection of semiotics to the face is the politics of the void, of the referent, of figure-ground binarity, of responsibilisation, All the flows, all the objects, must be situated in relation to my personological totality, all the modes of subjectivation to my consciousness as ideal reification, as the impossible tangent of this politics of treatment by the void, the emptying out of all contents.
As such, faciality ‘signifies’ nothing other than a micropolitics of semiotic closure that is translated by the necessity of permanently referring contents to dominant significations. It is a redundancy of redundancy, a redundancy to the second degree, an empty, yet territorialised, redundancy. The matter of empty significations is constituted around a face. The ultimate paradigm for the face is a ‘that’s how it is!’ expressing the semiotic seizure of power which shows that, whatever else, something will be signified, once and for all. The ‘thing’ will be situated, localised in the coordinates of diverse power formations, it will be kept in hand, it will not be allowed to take flight, escape from the dominant system of signification and come to threaten the social-semiotic order in place. To be sure, such a seizure of power cannot be separated from operations of power carried out on all the other planes, socio-economic and sexual, for example. We are placing the accent here on the faciality component that makes the signifying politics of a given power formation take body, because it is generally misunderstood or treated as secondary. But it would be worth determining its points of articulation with the components of the sexed body, and in particular, the phallic component. Schematically one might say that the face functions as the other side [l’envers] of the phallus. On its deterritorialising side, capitalist power puts the phallic function to the fore, subjecting the ensemble of affects and the contents of sexed bodies to an operational a-signifying system of the social division of the sexes – phallus/not phallus – whereas on its reterritorialising side, it presents faces that ‘personalise’ this reductionist operation, which restore minuscule territorialities to desire, either to its derisory and desperate refuge in a smile, the blinking of an eye, or to micro-bastions of power, around the repressive grimace of a father, a schoolmistress or even, and especially, the faceless superego.
Reflexive consciousness must be considered to be one assemblage of enunciation amongst others, and even as a particular kind of semiotic equipment put together on the basis of a capitalist abstract machine. The idea of a pure a priori form for all formalisms, of a machine of pure empty redundancy, does not, in effect, arise from a universal mode of subjectification, but from a whole ensemble of systems of representation, social structures and productive machines, founded on an economy of decoded flows. Subjective consciential individuation can only be adjacent to the material, semiotic and social flows that participate ‘intrinsically’ in the capitalist ‘mode of production’. ‘After’ the components of faciality and phallic binarisation, those of conscientialisation thus constitute the third fundamental kind of element of the machinic montage of signifying power formations. The face, the phallus, consciousness of the self, turn around the same abstract machine for the reterritorialisation of decoded flows, which has as its function the fabrication, with the means that are available, of a feeling of appropriation, a power-over demarcating itself from a power-against. Therefore one cannot say that there is a consciousness of faciality, or a consciousness of the phallus. The three modalities of the same separating power that these three instances are bearers of – the typical intervals of faciality, the intentional objectification of consciousness, phallic dichotomies – do not operate on the basis, let us repeat, of universal mechanisms. If one finds them to be similar everywhere, it is because they have been standardised by power formations with a hegemonic mission. But with these powers overturned or avoided, they could equally be differentiated or follow different paths. One is not dealing here with functions like that of Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, conceived as a general matrix for the entrance of the subject into the ‘symbolic order’. There is no faciality ‘in general’ or entry into the order of faciality ‘in general’. The particular facialities with which we are dealing are linked to power formations that are themselves inseparable from the ensemble of interactions in the social field. They are particular montages of faciality that will give to the latter a more or less great importance depending on the development of the relations of force present or on the nature of the micropolitical options taken by the assemblages of enunciation concerned. The world and its faciality thus do not stop entertaining singular relations with each other. A face always inhabits a landscape as its cornerstone, to close it up on itself. Throughout the day, I pass incessantly from one faciality to another. And the faciality that dominates me at a given moment isn’t necessarily ‘mine’. Perhaps it is that of an other – and not necessarily that of another human, but equally that of an animal, a vegetable, a constellation of objects, a familiar space, an institution, the ‘a priori’ faciality of a doctor, a crazy person, a police officer, etc., for example. The same faciality could equally change its demeanour depending on whether it is oriented to a politics of the arborescent hierarchisation of semiotic components or towards their arrangement on a rhizomatic map that respects the singularity traits of each of the matters of expression, avoiding the micro-black holes of anxiety and guilt that they threaten to generate.
The responsibilisation of enunciation, which occurs through the individuation of an addresser and an addressee as ‘respondents’ in the discourse that they are having (although in reality it is the discourse that has them) is inseparable from the power formations that effectuate it. A child who goes from one game to another incessantly, or a ‘pervert’ from one sex to another, will be considered as out of field, out of play, and will become dependent on the social formations charged with helping them. One can ascribe the fact that they don’t feel responsible for their actions, don’t identify once and for all with a role or a function, don’t capitalise the ensemble of their semiotic productions on the basis of one and the same consciousness of self, to a defect or to immaturity. But one can also consider their attitude as the consequence of an implicit refusal – perhaps in a provisional way – of the coordinates of the dominant powers.
Signifying power draws its strength from its being in the position to ‘totalise’, to identify, to responsibilise the person, by mobilising libido and focusing it on making the ensemble of micro-black holes borne by the diverse semiotic components that converge on his or her life and its expression resonate. All these components are disciplined, uniformised, translateabilised, hierarchised; everything that they manifest will have to seem as if it emanated from a central point of subjectivation. As the first function of signifying conscientialisation is, furthermore, to mask the fact that there is nothing ineluctable in the triggering and linking of the operations that converge in processes of semiotic subjection, these operations will have to appear to go without saying and to participate in the order of the world. Consciousness of self and the feeling of belonging to a ‘mother tongue’ are one and the same, despite us moving incessantly from one mode of subjectivation to another, from one idiolect to another. At any moment, the politics of the dominant real, which is that of consciousness, will lead to it carrying out operations that take in hand the semiotic components that would try to regain their freedom of action. It will repel certain faciality traits, it will change the arrangement of certain others, it will impose its refrains, its icons, so as to neutralise the points of turbulence of desire. In a certain epoch, for example, it distanced or transfigured certain animal facialities of childhood, to the profit of that of the mother or the fairy, Rumpelstiltskin and Prince Charming, the father and the king, etc. But today, after the rout of territorialised assemblages and the capitalist hegemony of decoded flows, it falls to the mass media to produce ersatz ritual and totemic facialities that no ‘natural’ group is in a position to secrete through its own means. Consequently it is no longer a territory, an ethnic group but the entirety of sonorous and visual space that finds itself saturated by the standardised models of an essentially functional faciality. Let us note that this utilisation of certain facial prototypes by capitalist societies doesn’t imply that faciality can be reduced to a system of reifying icons, the support of alienating identifications. The manipulation of the imaginary by the media doesn’t just have a ‘sedative’ function, to calm and keep the drives of productive agents in place.
More fundamentally, its intervention arises from a specific diagrammatic function of the capitalist mode of subjectivation. It is a matter of putting an operator of enunciation in place that is able to concentrate and miniaturise the semiotic components implied by the principal power formations. It neutralises the n animal, vegetable and cosmic eyes of the rhizomatic possible (such as they might subsist in residual territorial assemblages) so as to neutralise them. By emptying the world of the polyvocity of its contents, it installs behind each gaze an empty point, a black hole, from which a central signification will irradiate all local significations, such that nothing will be able to exist outside the mundanity of the human, nothing will be able to escape from the signifying contamination that constitutes an empty humanity as centre of the world, perpetually referring to systems of redundancy and self-enclosed hierarchies. Systems of formal equivalence that pilot and keep in hand every component, every production, every innovation in any domain whatsoever. In these conditions, no mystery point can escape from the imperialist gaze of the signifier any longer: all landscapes will be obscured by a basic faciality, which, although not necessarily being as spectacular as that of Big Brother or Idi Amin, will be no less omnipresent. Even in the extreme case of abstract painting, one will see such faciality crystallise: one will say to oneself, for example ‘Well now, here’s a painting that must be from Dewasne’s era, from the time of Denise René’s gallery …’ and straightaway one will be interpellated by a certain faciality of this era, emanating from the very texture of the canvas: ‘Is it really you who I knew back then, you who are claiming to “place” me, can you even be sure of having stayed the same, to intend to judge me, to assess in this way …’ When, on the beach at Balbec, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time gives up his first idea, which consisted in emptying all the maritime landscapes of any human presence, so as to devote himself to the passionate study of young girls ‘in bloom’2, one must not think that he is returning to a human faciality after a long period of renunciation.
In fact, at no moment have the faciality systems of the dominant classes at the heart of which the Proustian semiotisation is deployed been escaped from. Here it simply changes heading: a politics of faciality-landscapeity that is too fixed, too classically literary, too romantic, too symbolist, is abandoned for another that is more virulent, that endeavours to grasp movements of desire and temporary ruptures in their ‘nascent state’3 amongst characters who are in other ways bound to the codes of society people. The procedure here, which, on the basis of the evocation of a singular trait, consists of triggering a process of semiotic germination that transforms the habitual coordinates of literary space, could be compared to the experience of drugs. Starting with a noise, a word, a movement, it too liberates a whole series of intensities of desire in the domain of perception and internal sensations that profoundly reorganise the ‘hierarchies’ presiding over the organisation of the everyday world.4
How does faciality succeed in functioning as a sort of key, a lock, for semiotic components as a whole? It seems that in primitive societies, it is far from playing such an important role. In effect, on the one hand it is detached by means of masks and circulates in the group without ever installing itself as universal faciality and, on the other hand, its functioning is inseparable from that of the body, with its tattoos and postures, the dancing that plays between all sorts of people and the productive and ritual activities that are at work, each appearing on its own count and according to its own rhythms. Let us try to study a bit more closely the binarisation mechanism that allows capitalist faciality to function as a diagrammatic operator of signifying semiologies. At the ‘outset’, in the context of the territorialised assemblages of a primitive, mad, infantile, or poetic enunciation, the world of contents is never homogeneous, the support polygon of signification has its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere. It encompasses the entire universe. To recentre the multiplicity of points of signifiance, faciality has to relate them to overcoding invariants which it will make itself the centre of. There is therefore a double movement:
•On the one hand, the constitution of a deterritorialised face-landscape that is concentrated around a black hole as central point, of arborescence and closure, and the abstract displacement of this black hole that deploys a semiotic wall unifying the set of semiotic coordinates.
•On the other hand, the universalisation of paradigms, the accentuated arborification of their systems of organisation resulting notably in all the abstract machines being conjugated on the basis of a sort of mono-subjectivism, which finds it religious expression in monotheism (correlative to a degeneration of systems of animal abstract machines).
The black hole of faciality is in some way diffused across the totality of the semiotic screen that empty, reflexive consciousness constitutes, whilst recentring the set of significative facialities. To the extent that it contaminates all modes of semiotisation, the black hole shifts, invades the universe, and turns towards no matter what intensive point, so as to overcode it. All the points of closure, all the arborescent potentialities are conjugated, enter into resonance, and try to prohibit the rhizomatic impulses of the diverse singular traits that the semiotic components are bearers of by absorbing them in a central black hole.
The constitution of a central machine of redundancies thus rests on the double phenomenon of the unification of subjective resonances and the setting into arborescence of all the local redundancies and their paradigmatic axes. Certainly the machine of consciential subjectivation, which presents itself as universal, is in fact the concrete manifestation of a particular system of power: white power, male power, adult power, heterosexual power, etc. The semiotic screen that it deploys in order to dissolve the territorial limits of an ethnic grouping – from the Indian shabono to the bar on the corner, or any other modality of the support polygon of signification – and its capacity to make all the paradigmatic systems resonate together around a central point of subjectivation, constitute the two fundamental elements of the individuated assemblages of enunciation that produce signifying substances of expression that overcode all the other matters of expression. At this ‘step’ with faciality, rhizomatic possibility has been systematically destroyed or overcoded, to the profit of an arborescent possibility. The entire order of the possible must inscribe itself on this substance of the signifier.
The intensive matter of expression will no longer be able to organise itself freely in a rhizome. There are no longer n eyes in the sky or in vegetable and animal becomings, but a central eye radiating all the spatial, rhythmic, moral, etc., coordinates of the world. Thus a universal landscape is constituted on the basis of a universal face. The politics of the centring of faciality on the person, as is carried out by capitalist enunciation, uses the axis of symmetry of the triangle of faciality: eyes-nose-mouth, to which the first inter-subjective relations of the newborn baby cling, as psychologists have shown.5 It is this centralising machine of perceptual and behavioural deterritorialisation that allows the black points of subjectivation proper to each semiotic component, the diverse alienation strategies linked to them, and the diverse formations of power, to be framed. A surface for reference in general will thus be cleared by this sort of laser beam of semiotic deterritorialisation emitted by the central black hole of subjectivation, which neutralises all the rough edges of matters of expression, constituting a sort of circular white screen, multiplying the blind face-to-face double of the primary triangle of reification constituted by the ego, the other, and the object. The world, the human, and the intimate, never arise from a formal ontology or from the phenomenology of a ‘buried eideticity’, to borrow Gérard Granel’s expression.6 They are produced by concrete machines, by assemblages of semiotisation that can be historically dated and are localised in the social field. There is therefore no reason, in our opinion, to follow the Lacanians, when they make faciality a universal psychic instance which is triggered by the ‘mirror phase’ and behind which a ‘big Other’ would appear, as the matrix of all serial relations between the self and the other.7 It is on the basis of the singular traits of faciality that a micropolitics of desire and a social macro-politics of subjection to capitalist flows can be elaborated. To give up thinking of the subject, the object, and the other as the elementary givens of metaphysics or of the ‘mathemes of the unconscious’ does not necessarily imply a return to ‘primitive’ – magical, animist, participationist – conceptions of subjectivity. On the contrary, it is a matter of making a whole series of semiotic, economic, and political givens of the contemporary world enter into processes of enunciation, subjectivation, and conscientialisation, as essential components.
The ‘objectification’, ‘subjectivisation’, and ‘otherification’ of enunciation are never given once and for all. They result from particular micropolitics in particular contexts. Their stakes concern the eyes of desire, everything in the cosmos, the socius and ‘interiority’ that can look at us, everything that means ‘it is looking at us!’ [nous regarde, also ‘concerns us’]. In the capitalist regime, all the points of flight, all the lines of desire, all the openings, the possible connections, are focused on a central point of signifiance that makes the ensemble of black holes of anxiety echo each other. All the stratifications, the segregations and inhibitions prop each other up in a politics of the generalised disempowerment of desire, of the break between productions of utterances and the singular lines of the components of expression, of the sabotaging of creative assemblages of enunciation and of the promoting of castrated subjects, empty and guilty consciences … The four-eye machine of the psychologists, for example, is recuperated as Collective equipment: from birth, a faciality machine is implanted in the subjectivity of the child, as the support for a certain modelling of reality, alterity and interiority based on an arborescent hierarchy of powers. But it is not [in]conceivable that another politics of faciality might appear in other micropolitical contexts.8 Whilst in primitive societies, the articulation of the subject with the cosmos and the living world is brought about on the basis of territorialised assemblages of enunciation corresponding to a collective territory of social, religious, sexual, playful, etc., activity, the ideal capitalistic subjectivity imposes a systematic deterritorialisation on the supports of expression – only to reterritorialise them on functional ersatz, such as the nuclear family, social status, etc. The multiform designs of the monotheistic god of deterritorialisation no longer converge on an ethnic group, an elect people, even his own son on the cross, or an empty point of consciousness. They converge on a sort of blank third eye which haunts the gaze of the white man of rich countries, which will extinguish all the creative powers of desire in knotting together the investments of power.9
In the continuum of movements of the face, the binarising faciality machine only retains passages to the limit, the exceeding of tolerated typical screen types. For example:
•Beyond a certain limit too broad a smile becomes a mad grimace or insolent mockery.
•Submissiveness that is too affected becomes shifty.
•A pout that goes beyond the norm becomes a mark of contempt.
•Too old, too wrinkled, a face is frightening.
•Skin that is too dark will call foreigners to mind and will be fixed on a deviant accent.
•Additionally, one’s sex must be clearly asserted in one’s face, otherwise it will be felt to be a threat to phallocratic power.
•Etc.
In this way a universal normality is instituted that hierarchises and co-adjusts the diverse normative local activities of power formations. The signifying coordinates of a ‘normal’ world are deployed and regulated on the basis of a central faciality. Become ‘human’ as a function of a ‘normal’ faciality, the world is subjectivated on the basis of a concrete machine that coordinates the ensemble of abstract machines through a social syntax that presents its laws as arising from universal reason alone, as strictly associated with the order of things and moral good sense. There is no longer a simple warding off of rhizomatic possibility, as was the case with the territorialised assemblages of enunciation, but arborescencing, finalisation, ‘causalisation’, gridding, limiting and anticipation of everything that claims to escape from the dictatorship of signifying substance. Everything that threatens dominant faciality arises from repression.
In 1968, a long-hair faciality shook the world. For a time, one might have had the impression that utterances were ‘walking on their hands’. Unthinkable propositions surged in all domains and the old self-evidence was emptied of its sense in the space of a few hours. The possibility of a new order appeared on the horizon. One no longer saw the same thing, one no longer loved in the same way, a different relationship to work, a different relationship to the environment, began to appear and a different childhood, a different homosexuality, etc., too. In ‘normal times’, that is to say at the current time, a feeling of everydayness is imposed on every perception of the world – even if one is living in a time of great suffering. And this everydayness is constantly modulated by the faces that come and go and manifest, in their indifference, that ‘nothing is happening’, that everything is normal. Average faciality functions like a normality indicator. One of the motives for the fascination for the ‘retro’10 occurs through the transitory disturbance of this sort of register of the everyday: ‘Well well, they found it perfectly normal to ride horses in the traffic; well, well, there were Germans, rickshaws, wooden heels …’ Above all else this normality is read on faces, on the gazes of the era, but also on objects, on the old wooden radio sets, in so far as they are bearers of the same faces and the same gaze. Thus everything that is played out on the body, in its posture, and so on, is recentred on the face: all faciality traits themselves are recentred on the black hole in which all signification production originates. Thus the normal landscapeity, the normal faciality, which contaminates the whole world, is itself dominated by an empty signification, a signification in itself, a general substance of expression from which no matter of expression can escape. A relatively deterritorialised system of values is thus projected over all contents and becomes immanent to every mode of semiotisation. When the Yanomami shaman ‘absorbed’ a paradigm, the risk that this might return to the sky or be blocked in a threatening animality always subsisted. Now, there is absolutely no chance that this sort of escape might occur. Regional paradigms are entirely tributary to the system of signifying arborescence deployed on the basis of a black hole of subjectivation.
Territorialised assemblages of enunciation put into play a break between an inside and an outside, which separated a reassuring from a threatening possibility (only for a part of this outside to invest the inside and, inversely, for a reassuring inside to install itself outside the territory and organise its own circuits). Hence the break no longer passes between an inside and an outside, but is internal to signifying chains. The signifying break is potentially everywhere. It aims to impose its game of dominant significations everywhere. At every moment, a prototypical human face can surge up anywhere: the face of Christ in the clouds, at the heart of anxiety or in no matter what enunciation from a given era, or the face of ‘our President’ on television. An immanent faciality inhabits the world. Properly speaking there is no longer any facial alterity, as might exist in territorial assemblages which carry a specific faciality for each ethnic group, in such a way that others find themselves turned away immediately, towards the foreign, to animal becomings. An opposing value, one inhabiting the entirety of spatio-temporal coordinates, is substituted for this territorialised opposition by capitalist powers, one that opposes normal, universal faciality and dangerous, deviant faciality. No-one should ignore the law borne by the dominant faciality, all faces are in the position of being judged, of being assessed in relationship to a norm or deprecated and possibly taken control of, looked after, assisted, re-adapted or imprisoned by society.11
With all redundancies having been centralised and articulated in a universal system of signification, it falls to the power formations that are in a position to manifest the summit faciality to decide as to whether or not there is any signification, if it can pass or not. If the empty eye of power can say no, then it will be urgently necessary to mobilise the resources of all the syntagmatics and paradigmatics so as to fill, to recuperate, the lateral hole that has become manifest and which would otherwise risk emitting mutant flows on its own count, threatening the equilibrium between the complementary facialities that populate the social unconscious. Sense occurs through acquiescence to the faciality of power and circulates to infinity on the edge of the black hole of its single eye, or else it destroys itself in anxiety and is swallowed up by it. Sense or non-sense: it’s all or nothing. Such is the fundamental binary break, after which one can no longer pick oneself up again. Either it’s one of us or it isn’t – it corresponds to something or nothing – it can be said or it can’t be said – it stands up or it collapses – it’s French or it’s foreign and therefore hostile – it’s part of the family or people we don’t know. ‘Before’ faciality, there still subsisted polyvocal possibilities of approximation; ‘after’, there is the law of all or nothing. Endless discussions. Half-lies and half-truths are proscribed. The signifying break imposes its exclusive truth, its all-or-nothing truth on the basis of the feed-back system of faciality. An utterance only acquires its weight of signification, its truth value, to the extent that it latches onto the field that arises from the central oscillograph of faciality. If it deviates too much, it falls into non-sense, and a whole machinery of rectification is set to work.
To function as the binary indicator of dominant values, faciality must: 1) be detached from the rest of the semiotic components; it must serve as a surface of reference onto which passages to the limit that occur elsewhere will be related, transposed, arranged, calibrated; 2) be neutralised, so as not to interfere with the components that it has to represent, coordinate, and hierarchise. In effect, if faciality set to work on its own count, as an autonomous matter of expression, everything would be lost. A ‘primitive’ polyvocity reappears, like one ‘finds’ with the grimaces, the mannerisms, of the schizophrenic, or with the ‘autistic’ child. The system of break, translateabilisation and hierarchisation that is instituted by the signifying faciality machine thus secretes a sort of political optional matter that invades not just all the possibilities to come but also reacts, in a kind of retroactive way, on ‘past possibility’. Nothing else was possible in the past than what submitted to signifying recording. Signifying possibility, arborescent possibility thus imposes itself definitively, to the detriment of all rhizomatic possibilisation.
One is dealing here with the driving force itself of the signifying binarisation of all utterances. One can always reduce semiotic production to the moralising significations of faciality. Signifying power shakes its head and there is signification, or it says no, raises its eyebrows: there is non-sense and the set of paradigmatic equivalences has to recoil into its own system of gridding so as to find a solution to the problem posed. Thus no semiotic manifestation can escape this organised face-language machine, which is like a cyclotron around an immanent black hole making everything that happens resonate at the level of singular faces and institutional facialities. To each type of institution, each type of machine (military, religious, educational, etc.) there corresponds a dominant faciality. To consider that speech has no other function than to convey messages is, properly speaking, delusional. A language doesn’t speak on its own. It only speaks if it succeeds in assembling its propositions in the field constituted by the ensemble of power formations such as it is mediated by faciality. A discourse is always caught in a face that ‘manages’ its utterances and propositions, giving them a weight, ballasting them in relation to the dominant significations, or emptying them of their sense.
Here we should return to the studies that have been made into the history of memory to show the evolution of modes of territorialisation of discourse, in particular before memory machines relayed mnemotechnic scenarios arranged in a reference space.12 The later deterritorialisation of iconic supports doubtless shifted the learning of memory onto dichotomous systems of judgement. ‘Modern’ techniques of examination through questionnaires consist less in the reciting of complex lists than in the statistical checking of the performance of a memory for judgement. What is above all else demanded of a candidate is not to be mistaken by the overall appreciation, the profile of a question, whether it rings true, whether it ‘passes’. In fact, what exams aim to select, in the last analysis, are candidates for power, more or less in conformity with the demands of the dominant system, and it is on the basis of a sort of pragmatic syntax that all the spatio-temporal and behavioural coordinates relating to other semiotic syntaxes, beginning with common grammar, find themselves centred around a faciality of power. When the Yanomami shaman missed a Hekua, which departed for its rock or into the sky, the syntax of the ritual was interrupted. With this system of universal syntax, with the infinite cross-checking of the informational gridding of the capitalist machinic assemblages, no escape of this nature is possible any longer. The signifier refers only to itself: according to Saussure’s intuition, it has become a substance that one finds everywhere and nowhere, but it is the very substance of the capitalist mode of semiotisation.
The capitalist faciality machine doesn’t operate solely by global breaks, massive dichotomies, or the bipolarisation of contents that it constitutes. Its reductive binarising action bears equally on the texture of the matters of expression that are associated with it, and which it contributes to transforming into signifying substance. The hegemonic power takeover of linguistic systems founded on systems of distinctive oppositions articulated on the basis of a finite range of glossemes of expression is, in fact, the result of a long process of crushing diverse intensive systems of expression. Because of the structuring – in large measure, a-signifying – of their phonological, syntactic lexical organisation that has developed, the primacy of linearised and relatively autonomous signifying chains over the world of signified contents implies a whole prior work of semiotic subjection by power formations, and by capitalist faciality machines in particular (later on, we will, in addition, evoke the primordial role that is played in this regard by what we call ‘refrain machines’). This process results – or should result, from the ideal point of view – in no matter what expressive production submitting to a reduction, a translateabilisation in terms of quantities of information, that is to say, in the last analysis, a structured succession of automatised binary choices that can be treated exhaustively by a computer.
It is certainly not a question here of claiming to keep some sort of ‘pure thought’ at a distance from the ‘ravages’ brought about by what gets called the information revolution in every domain. A humanist conception of science wrongly hangs onto the idea that some ultimate and radical division of labour between the scientist and machine reduces the possible field of intervention of informatics to the treatment of data previously elaborated by humans. Machinic semiotisation today is no less essential than that of humans. The computer, which has hitherto remained the concern of specialist technicians and developed out of a rather impoverished mathematics, is effectively on the point of being integrated into a complex of enunciation in which it will become impossible to ‘separate out’ human intervention and machinic creativity. It can now tackle certain mathematical problems that had been unsolvable through a lack of the quantitative means of semiotisation (the solution to the centuries-old four colour problem required 1,200 hours computing time to carry out the ten million calculations necessary13). And it is beginning to be capable of formulating original mathematical problems.
It is therefore not in some ‘essence of human thought’ that the limit to the semiotic capacities of the machine will be found, but rather in the nature of the informatic language that presides over its current functioning and which results in current ‘processing’ missing the phenomena of rupture, destratification and desire – all the deterritorialisations that can only escape from the reductions of signifying binarity. It is a preoccupation of this order that leads certain biochemists today to call into question current theories concerning the origins of life, to the extent that their descriptions of evolution, which only measure situations on the basis of global parameters arising from thermodynamics or information theory, leave out essential elements of the mutational processes. Thus Jacques Nimier argues that ‘if the purely chemical evolution of a prebiotic soup is described, one cannot see where the fundamental biological categories of replication and information transfer will be introduced. If prebiotic systems are represented by means of the language of information, one cannot see a new property such as that of motricity will be made to arise on the basis of a purely mathematical treatment. More precisely, it cannot be excluded that properties can be made to appear which, at first sight, fall outside the conceptual field of the initial description, but on condition that they are explicitly looked for. So, we need an instrument that might help us see the unsuspected, because the intermediary states of organisation of matter could very easily have obeyed logics that are entirely different from the current logic of the living being.’14
In our view it will even be necessary, one day, to have done with the idea that the future can only be ‘calculated’ on the basis of the ‘tendencies’ of the past, or that the more differentiated necessarily has to depend on the less differentiated, or that productive-expressive assemblages have to be divided into superstructures that rest and depend on infrastructures. The ensemble of mechanist, finalist, idealist, dialectical, etc., conceptions of matter and history binarise the possible incessantly, close off the future through all sorts of procedures. Might they not instead seek to deploy the potentialities of the present and face up to the idea that the ‘new’ can surge up from the heart of the past? What else, in effect, are the sciences, the arts, the attempts at ‘changing life’ today doing, in their cutting edge research, if not discovering – projecting, inventing, in fact – a future, an unforeseen possibility, at the heart of the stratifications that seemed closed in on themselves for all times, petrified for all eternity? The categories of time and space, generally known as a priori and universal givens, despite the efforts of relativity, are the basic instruments that lead the capitalist mode of thought to polarise, to binarise, to ‘determinise’ its logical, scientific and political approaches. A ‘machinics’ rupturing with this mode of thinking would begin by refusing the dichotomy between semiotic and material processes, would be led, if needs be, to deploy time and causality ‘in reverse’ (this is already what happens in theoretical physics, with theories of quarks, partons or Boscovitch’s puncta), and in a more general fashion only to consider the deterritorialisations of space and time in relation to the assemblages that effectuate them. In the case of human and animal worlds, it would be a matter of de-objectifying the assemblages of semiotisation, by articulating the components that von Uexküll still divided up into Umwelt and Innerwelt, on the same rhizome.15
We repeat: faciality and refrain components do not fabricate space and time ‘in general’, but this time, this space lived in such and such an assemblage, in such and such an ecological, ethological, economic, social, political context. ‘Internal’ deterritorialisations – those that open up the eye to an internal-external world or those that put the sexual economy (once it is actively connected to other components), in a position to change the perceived world and the projects of an individual or a group – are inseparable from the ‘external’ deterritorialisations that work over the environment and history. Because this ‘external’ rhizome cannot be cut off from the internal rhizome, a desired partner could be simultaneously (or successively) a stake of power, a redundant faciality (identification), the support for certain diagrammatic faciality traits which will, by contrast, reorganise the assemblage as a whole from top to bottom, the quasi-unavoidable imposition of reterritorialising refrains that reincarnate a ‘New’ self, a ‘new’ conjugality, a ‘new family’, a ‘new’ ethnic grouping, etc. Nothing is played out in advance, no vectoring between inside and outside, before and after, molar and molecular, supra and infra, can be calculated once and for all. Thus, if, for example, it is true that the machination of a gaze can appear ‘on the ground of the destruction of the eyes which look at me’ (to paraphrase Sartre in Being and Nothingness16), inversely, sightless eyes, a for-other cut off from any human Gestalt, can install itself right in the middle of the world, crack it and take possession of the reigning modes of subjectivation. This is the universe that Jean-Luc Parent explores when he describes eyes ‘on the surface of the solid SOLID matter that surrounds us’ and which are as much excavators clearing out what is before them, as ‘flying machines’, birds capable of going through the windows of the landscape (AND THE EARTH AND THE SKY NIGHT AND DAY WILL COME IN).17
The reterritorialisations – refrains, eyes, faces, landscapes – that cover up the phenomena of resonance of black holes borne by semiotic components, cannot be classified or labelled as a function of general categories. They are only organised in the context of particular arrangements, which are proper to each type of assemblage, each of which itself escapes from any taxonomic systematisation. Not all components of an assemblage of enunciation have the same importance and the weight of one in relation to another can vary from one situation to the next. Certain components are organised amongst themselves so as to form constellations that will reappear in a cyclical mode (for example: sleep, wakefulness, meals, etc.). Thus they are centred and hierarchised around a point of arborescence, which in some way programs the regularity of this return of the same assemblages and the consistency of an everyday mode and a mode of subjectivation that for better or for worse is always recentred on the same self. Other components behave as ‘trouble-makers’ or rather as ‘reality-troublers’, and set themselves up at the limit of the tree of signifying implications, outline rhizomes, eluding the resonance phenomena of black holes, making certain refrains, certain faciality traits work for their own sake so as to undo the globalising redundancies of face, landscape, everydayness, and engage the energy of desire so as to make assemblages tip over, to subvert their customary functioning and connect them to one another in unforeseen constellations. For example: the ‘little phrase’ in Vinteuil’s sonata, for months a sort of linchpin for Swann’s love for Odette, but which, one day, opens itself up, reveals previously (literally) unheard of potentialities and makes this love drift towards other assemblages.18
The work of schizo-analysis will consist in particular in making the mutational components, which carry semiotic rough edges, deterritorialising point-signs that allow them to ‘pass through’ the stratifications of assemblages, a little like the ‘quantum tunnelling’ described by physicists,19 discernible. As a consequence it will thus not content itself with examining from the outside the relativity of the different points of view present, or – as the ethologists say, the ‘parallel and contradictory’ universes that coexist in the world, but will intervene actively so as to facilitate the internal mutations of assemblages and the passages from one assemblage to another. In other words, it will work flush with the trees and rhizomes that constitute assemblages of enunciation. Refrains, those crystals of time, facialities, those catalysers of space, belong at one and the same time to the trees and the rhizomes constituted by intra- and inter-assemblage relations. As concrete machines, junctions, loci for the effectuation of optional matters of all kinds, they can also move as much in the direction of conservative stratifications as in the direction of creative lines of flight. An individuated, signifying, consciential mode of subjectivation, could, for example, ‘cling’ to an animal faciality or to an obsessive contraction of time, which psychoanalysts would place in the category of phantasm or repetition compulsion. Consciousness and reason will, in sum, take the route of animality and neurosis. An oneiric or psychotic mode of subjectivation will turn out to be capable of dissolving familial and alienating facialities, of detaching certain traits from them so as to make them function in a creative, diagrammatic way – the big, life-changing decisions that one makes whilst dreaming, the grand inventions of visionary lunatics that transform the world …
Under these conditions, a schizo-analytic cartography cannot content itself with the synchronic analysis of the components that constitute an assemblage at a given moment and polarise it towards such and such a behaviour, such and such an arborescent politics or rhizomatic connection. It will also have to initiate the diachronic marking out of the generation and transformation of assemblages. But the two analytic series will constantly intersect, the same series of questions effectively traversing them both: why does an assemblage close up and what components of semiotisation function so as to make it ‘loop’ back on itself, what black hole effects, adjacent to diverse components, resonate together or, by contrast, are resorbed and convert their metabolism into a non-arborescent line of flight; what components of non-semiotic encoding work to rupture homeostatic, intra-assemblage equilibria; at the inter-assemblage level are there closed circuits (of the train-work-bed kind) that reconstitute self-enclosed pragmatic stratifications; or, on the contrary, are there any links between assemblages that sketch out rhizomatic openings? It is only by taking into account inter-assemblage transformations that one will, to our mind, be able to make the true factors of rupture and mutation that work assemblages at the molecular scale and catalyse the ‘phase transitions’ or ‘percolations effects’ (to borrow the language of physicists) discernible, and thus be able to intervene.20 Furthermore, it is also only at this diachronic level that systems of articulation between natural encoding components and semiotic components that are very different from one another will be seen (those that come about by chemical or genetic coding, for example – linked to a reproduction assemblage, evolving through ‘selective pressure’, through ethological ‘imprinting’, programmed learning at certain ‘critical periods’, collective semiotisation, individuated and autonomous semiotisation, etc.).