Current definitions of the unconscious – in particular that of the structuralists, who aim to reduce it to the symbolic articulations of the order of language – do not allow the passageways between individual desire and the semiotic productions of every kind that intervene in social, economic, industrial, scientific, artistic structures, to be grasped. We will endeavour to show how a study of libidinal processes in all these domains is genuinely incompatible with the structuralist postulate that consists in affirming that the unconscious is ‘structured like a language’. If it was still necessary to talk about structure with regard to the unconscious – which is not self-evident, a point we will come back to – we would say instead that it is structured like a multiplicity of modes of semiotisation, of which linguistic enunciation is perhaps not the most important. It is on this condition that one can remove the shackles of the subjective, consciential and personological individuation through which the unconscious and desire have been imprisoned – considerations regarding the ‘collective unconscious’ amounting most of the time to metaphysical constructions concerning the analogical or sublimatory ‘destiny’ of the drives. The unconscious is neither individual nor collective, it is everywhere that a labour of signs bears on reality and constitutes a ‘vision’ of the world, what Roger Chambon calls an appearance [parution] of the world and which, according to him, should be distinguished from a simple representation, so as to be understood as a ‘productive perception’.1
Let’s start from a simple example, or rather, from an example that we will deliberately simplify so as to make ourselves understood: that of the interpretation of money by psychoanalysts. It’s pretty widespread, so there’s no need to go into it in detail. Let’s simply recall that in its most vulgarised version, this interpretation considers that the relation of an individual to money is a symbolic equivalent of his or her relation to faecal matter as an infant. In fact, the method consists of placing the constellation of objects of desire particular to one period of life and its corresponding mode of subjectification into correspondence with, reducing them to, those of another period. The point of view that we are proposing is completely different: we consider that in this affair there is no ‘matter’ for any translation of this kind, for any interpretation, any symbolism. Effectively, a monetary activity as such brings into play semiotic components and a pragmatics of deterritorialisation which, at the outset, are very different from those that can in any case exist either in the register of the body, or in that of the image, or that of language. So, for us there doesn’t exist any necessary passage between, for example, a ‘fixation’ on faecal matter and an attachment to money. The modes of semiotisation corresponding to the supposed ‘anal stage’ (touch, smell, a certain kind of playful provocation with regard to one’s family circle, etc.) can, under certain conditions, enter into connection with the semiotic components of monetary exchange, or those ‘iconic’ and perceptual components that are put into play by the dream, or even those that are implied by psychoanalytic interpretation and its particular type of meta-language. But it seems absurd to us to consider that such connections can be programmed on the basis of psychogenetic stages, archetypes, signifying chains or ‘mathemes of the unconscious’. Rather than considering that one is dealing here with objects, ‘stages’ and psychic agencies [instances] that would constitute the invariants of an unconscious, structured in the manner of a syntax, we propose, on the contrary, to start from particular kinds of assemblage of semiotic components, which, at a given moment, in a given situation, manifest the true structures of the unconscious, or rather what we prefer to call the machines of the unconscious. The characteristic of these living machines is to tend constantly to free themselves from preformed encodings or fixations on childhood memories. The unconscious is in action, turned towards the future, within the reach of a pragmatics operating on real situations – even when the latter can apparently only end up in neurotic reiterations or impasses. For example, when a psychoanalyst interprets a dream by applying his all-terrain equation money = shit2 he, quite happily, it seems, confuses the pragmatic components of diverse assemblages of enunciation which, in the example that we evoked, might be distinguished according to the following three ensembles:
aThe assemblage of desire corresponding to the activity of a child playing with its poo and which is inseparable from a whole family strategy, a whole world of objects and relations surrounding it.
bThe assemblage corresponding to the fact that a patient recounts a dream to a psychoanalyst (a dream in which it is a question of poo or of money), and which is inseparable from translation techniques for discursive utterances and iconic representations arising from: 1. The patient’s own interpretative grids on waking up; 2. Those interpretative grids that have been elaborated by the psychoanalytic institution.
cThe unconscious assemblage corresponding to a real handling of money, which evidently entertains specific relations with the modes of social and economic subjection of a given society. In fact, it is probably a matter here of a multiplicity of assemblages, the ‘monetary relation’ between a psychoanalyst and his patient, a mother and her child, a grocer and a child, etc., not being at all the same.
Psychoanalysts are led by their syncretism to traverse and crush the different kinds of assemblage of enunciation with which they are confronted, and to confuse the semiotic components that they put into play. They claim to remain in the field of the ‘symbolic’ and consider that in essence the reality of situations, everything that ‘makes a difference’ from the point of view of social stratifications and of the materiality of modes of expression and production, doesn’t interfere with their field. In practice, they purely and simply leave to one side the political and micropolitical3 stakes that are implied by their ‘object’, they turn away from the real complexity of contexts, the relations of force, the specific technologies of power, which, it is true, no universal interpretation could give to them! The slippage that a psychoanalytic interpretation accomplishes in passing from a child’s game to a dream or to an economic relation loses the unconscious economic dimensions that are the basis of each one of these situations. Every micropolitics of desire that sets out to take the opposite course to this confusion of planes, this generalised semiotic collapse, this ‘dictatorship of the signifier’, would, in our view, necessarily have to break with conceptions of the unconscious that attribute a [une] structure to it, a homogeneous structural consistency. We cannot repeat it enough: one never deals with the Unconscious with a capital U, but always with n formulae for unconsciouses, varying according to the nature of the semiotic components that connect individuals to one another: somatic and perceptual functions, institutions, spaces, equipment, machines, etc.
On this question of the relation of the unconscious to language, Freud had been more prudent than today’s structuralist current in French psychoanalysis. He had taken care at a topical level to distinguish thing representations (Sachvorstellung) – of an iconic order, as one might say today, from word representations (Wortvorstellung) – of a linguistic order. But he nonetheless affirmed the supremacy of the word over the image, the unconscious primary process never managing to free itself entirely from thing representations (treating words as things in dreams or in schizophrenia, for example), and the preconscious-unconscious system alone being capable of bringing these two kinds of representations into connection.4 To be sure there is no doubt that such supremacy can exist, but only in certain cases, only in the context of particular power formations, those of the normal, civilised, white, phallocratic, educated, hierarchised, waking world that we would globally characterise as capitalist, thereby designating the ensemble of social systems functioning on the basis of a generalised decoding of flows.
In effect, one of the characteristics of these capitalistic formations is their recourse to a particular kind of semiotic machine that overcodes all the other semiotic components, allowing flows, whatever they are, to be manipulated and orientated, as much at the level of production as at the level of social field or the individual. The deterritorialised chains put into play by these machines do not signify as such (in the case of the syntagmatic chains of language, the machines of scientific, technological, economic, etc. signs, for example, we will even call them a-signifying), but they entertain particular relations with signifying contents. They hierarchise them, order them on the basis of a unique semiotic grid that fundamentally functions as a machine of subjection at the service of power formations (the school, military, legal, machine, etc.), and secondarily as a significant mode of expression. The paradox is that it is precisely these a-signifying chains put into play by capitalist formations that structuralists characterise as signifying. They wish to make of them a sort of universal constituent of structures. According to them, everywhere there is structure, one should find this kind of signifying material: this is how one finds oneself dealing with the same systems of articulation at the level of language and of the unconscious, at the level of the chains of genetic code and at the level of the elementary relations of kinship in primitive societies, at the level of rhetoric, stylistics and poetics, at the level of the mode of functioning of consumer society and at the level of the mode of cinema, even of the discourse of the sciences, etc. For our part, it seems to us entirely necessary and urgent to disaggregate this agglomeration, which is presented to us today under the category of the signifier or of the symbolic and which, for numerous researchers, seems to have become a basic notion, an obvious starting point. In effect, we consider that every kind of assemblage brings about the concatenation of semiotic chains that are fundamentally different from one another and which at the outset function not as a signifying discourse but as so many machines of a-signifying signs.5 What one is dealing with at the heart of productive processes and social groups are always semiotic procedures, regimes of signs for which it is absurd to want to propose master keys. One never encounters the ‘signifier’ in general: ‘on the ground’ one is always confronted with semiotic compositions mixing genres, mixtures, constellations, that are open to a possibility6 that cannot be calculated in terms of structure, what we call a machinic creativity. By bringing about the loss of the polyvocity of components of expression in a sort of semiotic collapse, the imperialism of the signifier reduces all the modes of production and all social formations to the semiotics of power. Thus our problem is not solely one of doctrine but is also practical: the signifier is [not] just an error made by linguists and structuralist psychoanalysts, it is also something that lives in everyday existence, that subjects us to the conviction that somewhere there exists a universal referent, that the world, society, the individual and the laws that rule over them are structured according to a necessary order, that they have a profound meaning. In fact, the signifier is a fundamental procedure for the dissimulation of the real functioning of power formations.
Following the linguists and semioticians, icons, diagrams or no matter what other means of so-called pre-verbal, gestural, imitative, corporeal, etc., expression, are considered as necessarily being dependent on a signifying language. They are ‘lacking’ something. It is as if they were condemned to waiting for the signifying chains of language to come and take charge of them so as to check, interpret, mark off the authorised paths/voices, the forbidden directions/meanings, the tolerated distances. And yet anthropology and history furnish us with many testimonies to the functioning of societies that have done without this kind of semiotic subjection! Their system of expression was no less rich for it, quite the contrary: it seems that the mode of interaction that they realised between speech and other modes of (ritual, gestural, musical, mythical, economic, etc.) semiotisation corresponded much better to a collective expression of desire and to a certain kind of social homeostasis. Is it a matter of stages that have been surpassed or of a micropolitical choice that is always current, as the diverse currents that can be linked to the ‘new culture’, to ecology, to consumer movements, etc., seem to think?
For us, this ‘fixation’ of archaic societies on pre-signifying semiotics is less an affair of fidelity to origins or an innate taste for spontaneous expression than the consequence of a defensive attitude participating in a whole series of apparatuses against the emergence of a certain kind of power which, from chiefdom to the State, requires all modes of the social division of labour to be executed to the profit of castes and exploiting classes. From this point of view, the absence of writing in ‘primitive societies’ should be related less to a lack, to a deficiency, an under-development, than to an unconscious collective resistance to a certain kind of deterritorialised machinism (this is how, in modern African states today, vernacular languages sometimes serve as a refuge for the expression of a mode of life that is literally ‘encircled’ by the growth of the equipment of capitalism).7 But the survival of modes of semiotisation that manage to escape, even only partially, from the ‘dictatorship’ of the scriptural signifier, is posed in our societies too, by childhood, madness, creation … And even at the heart of the most ‘policed’ sectors, an analysis of collective formations of desire would lead to new light being shed on a multitude of ‘compensatory’ practices and spaces, the constitution of secret or shameful zones as much as of ‘breathing spaces’, according to Koestler’s expression, for taking a step back, if only for a few moments, from the different forms of social neurosis which sum up systems of domestic life, hierarchical relations, bureaucracy, organised leisure time … The privileged objects of such an analysis could just as easily be the functioning of gangs of teenagers in the basements of HLM [Habitation à Loyer Modéré (rent-controlled housing)] as the ‘discrete charm’ of bourgeois orgies, ‘ballets roses’,8 or just simply the ethnography of relationships in a bistro or homosexual nightclub. Residual marginal activities, the inevitable price to be paid for any social organisation, it will be said! But activities which do not in any way justify the taming of drives, a signifying gridding of sexuality! It is a fact that the institution of current diverse modes of economic and social subjection would rapidly become impossible if it wasn’t staged through this ‘dictatorship’ of dominant significations and checks, which imposes its norms at the root of all semiotisation, which roots the sense of prohibition at the heart of the mind and body, which triggers machines of culpabilisation that are so powerful that they end up mobilising the bulk of the libidinal energy of the individual. A certain kind of language and certain individuated and culpabilising modes of semiotisation thus appear as being entirely necessary to stabilise the social field of capitalism. They imply in particular the power takeover by a national vehicular language of the dominant laws and system of values and reduce dialects, special languages, infantile, ‘pathological’ modes of expression to a marginal status or quite simply annihilate them. Certainly it is a matter here of factual givens, which can hardly be contested but which structuralists tend to turn into givens by right. A micropolitical analysis of the semiotic components put into play in concrete situations would lead us to show that this ‘structuralisation’ of diverse semiotic components – that is to say, the fact of being constantly ordered to comply, to have to be accountable, to be translated/brought before9 the tribunal of syntaxes, semantics and pragmatics of dominant power formations, themselves translatisable into a national linguistic competence, is not a natural fact, the consequence of linguistic universals or of a necessary symbolic structuration of human relations.10 It can also be combatted and be defeated, and not just in societies ‘without a State’, to borrow Pierre Clastres’s expression,11 not just in archaic, pathological or marginal situations …
Look at what it is in current linguistic and semiotic theories that ‘authorises’ reductive signifying interpretations, whether they arise from linguistics, psychoanalysis or everyday life. Linguistics and semiotics have for a long time lived by following the model of phonological analysis. Following the Chomskyan current, the accent has been placed on syntactic, then semantic models and more recently attempts at theorising enunciation have surfaced. In our opinion, this trajectory will only attain its fullest scope when a veritable pragmatic analysis allowing the micropolitics of desire in the social field to be explored can be constituted. But that will only be possible to the extent that in the domains of linguistics and semiotics, structuralist prejudices, which, let us note, have sometimes become very close to those of psychoanalysis, have been sufficiently cleared away.
In the second part of this research, we will propose a classification of semiotic components that will endeavour to respect their differences of nature; we will try to sketch out the major lines of the approach that might be taken by a non-reductive pragmatic analysis. We think that to the extent that they put into play a very extensive range of encoding and semiotic components, collective equipment will be able to constitute a privileged point of application for this pragmatic approach to the economy of desires in the social field. At its beginnings, psychoanalysis was only able to develop on the basis of the study of monographs. It should be the same for this new kind of analysis of the unconscious, the objects of which should be approached from angles and using methods, concepts and assemblages of enunciation, that are radically different not just from those of the psychoanalysis of the ‘consulting room’ but also from those of university sociology. It is no longer a question here of starting from ‘complexes’, from universal structural knots or simple parameters that are constitutive of complex fields, like those that Kurt Lewin proposed, for example, in constituting his psycho-sociology, or more recently the Palo Alto group around Gregory Bateson, when he tried to treat intra-family communications in terms of information theory.12 To the extent that it fastens onto complex institutional objects such as Collective equipment [Guattari sometimes capitalises the ‘E’ in this expression – Equipement collectif – we have capitalised the ‘C’ where this is the case], at the heart of which semiotic components of all kinds interact (economic, political, administrative, and legal, arising from the State; economic, urban, technological, scientific, arising from diverse levels of public and private institutions; somatic, perceptual, affective, imaginary, arising from individual and infra-individual levels, organs, functions, behaviours, etc.), an analytic pragmatics would never be led to cut itself off from the specific modes of collective enunciation of each one of the constellations realised by its components, and it would tend to constitute itself as an ‘analyser’, an analytic group-subject.13