By way of an exploratory hypothesis, we have been deliberately vague about the delimitation of the ensemble that is covered by the notion of collective Equipment, with the aim of drawing towards them the semiotic mechanisms that associate the power functions of the modern State and the struggle over interests between social classes with collective formations of desire that, until now, have scarcely been considered by the specialists of ‘grand’ history and ‘grand’ politics. What effectively interests us in this immanence and omnipresence of Collective equipment is less their evolving utility, their modelling or their current distribution, and more their particular function in the capitalist economy of desire. At the root of ‘modern’ processes of urbanisation, they make metastases of power proliferate, which contaminate the entire social field, well beyond the limit of the city, which traverse the old castes, the new classes, modelling sexes, ages, tastes, perceptions. How do these machines for the deterritorialisation of flows (material flows, flows of work, semiotic flows of all kinds) succeed in articulating amongst themselves the diverse components that result in the launching of a certain kind of individual or a certain kind of socius? What sort of machine or equipment produces stereotyped behaviour, relational and perceptual schemas? What sort of semiotic components interact in the production of goods, but also in the production of different kinds of subjectivity? How does Collective equipment manage to make these diverse comments ‘assimilable’ to one another? Do certain components play a particular role in bringing about their generalised submission to semiologies of language and the signifiers of the dominant powers? Can the function of Collective equipment move towards the liberating function of a collective assemblage or is it fundamentally antagonistic to this by its very nature? In our opinion, all these questions can be reduced to a more fundamental line of questioning: what is this sort of ‘optional matter’, this sort of basic political choice that ‘precedes’ every manifestation in signs, in space, in the life of a group, an institution or an equipment? Is it true that at all levels, economic, social and political, the question of a collective taking of the floor [prise de parole] or of an abandonment to the arrangements, the alienating equipments, of desire is posed?
Might the collective Equipment that take possession of individuals in their most intimate point thus have as their mission that of the expropriation of desire from its ‘original’ territories, or let us say, rather, from its territories that are not yet subjected [assujetties] by capitalist flows, that of speaking in its place, fixing new aims for it, putting it to work, adapting it to hierarchies and systems of exchange, and all of that by means of a particular semiotic technology? To go further in this direction, it is necessary for us to return to Collective equipment in the customary sense of the term, to show in detail, on the basis of concrete examples, how this option machine is produced and mobilised, behind the supposedly neutral architectural and institutional facades of this equipment. To show: by what particular techniques of semiotic predisposition, the libidinal investments of fundamental choices are made in the name of the collective, by what procedures situations that are apparently open are played out in advance; and that the real margin of choice can nonetheless subsist for people who want to escape from the system. Given a gridding of equipment, what politics of a collective assemblage is it possible to envisage? Where to begin? Obviously only the preparation of collectively elaborated monographs could allow such questions to be suitably tackled! So, in the present study we have no other ambition than to seek to appreciate what the conditions for a new analytic method could be, one whose task would not be limited in this domain to an external examination, to ‘expert’ interventions, but which would have to facilitate the collective taking in charge in determinate micropolitical domains.
Let us repeat that this exploration of the conditions for a new analytic praxis cannot be synonymous with a search for universal ‘foundations’. Whatever the theoretical renewal that it sets out might be, it accepts its limit immediately. It even vindicates as its point of departure an undecidable axiom that we could call the ‘axiom of political choice’: whatever the extent to which one segments an economic or social group, one will always be able to form a new micropolitical group, which cuts across it everywhere, on the basis of these segments. It may seem to ‘go without saying’ that the current proliferation of Collective equipment leads to an irreversible alienation in the economy of desire. Theories of destiny, of necessity, of the structural inscription of progress in the economic order, of desire in the symbolic order, etc. then become founded. But the inverse evidence could equally impose itself, that a collective assemblage function, an optional matter that is more subtle than all other semiotic, social and ‘material’ matters could undo the repressive character of the equipmental function. Certain nomadic societies have systematically refused to territorialise their power formations on Collective equipment and others have even deliberately destroyed all manifestations of such territorialisation (the armies of Ghenghis Khan, for example, weren’t satisfied just with razing to the ground the cities that they invaded: they filled up the ditches and canals, burst the dikes so as to return the ground to the state of nature after they had passed through …).1 And yet they have in their own way nonetheless contributed to what is usually called the general development of civilisation! That being the case, we will not propose them as a model, as our second and final axiom consists in refusing all references to a model or to a transcendent and universal system of categories!
When we note the fact that semioticians (with some notable exceptions, such as Christian Metz, for cinema) have hardly bothered with setting out the specific traits of the encoding procedures and diverse modes of semiotisation with which they are confronted, we must add straightaway, in their defence, that they aren’t alone! The majority of researchers in the human and social sciences seem implicitly to accept the idea that the status of strongly syntacticised languages, with paradigmatic axes that are solidly codified by their ties to a writing machine, ought to constitute the a priori framework, the framework that is necessary for all other modes of expression, indeed for all other modes of encoding. All of contemporary semiological research seems haunted by a single preoccupation: the founding of a general semiology. However, it is not self-evident that such a science can or should be constituted! We will try to show that, on the contrary, the characteristic of modern modes of semiotisation perhaps resides in the fact of referring to the set of different scientific, technical and social systems, without ever managing to find a foundation in a system that would be proper to them. Whatever the case may be, this undertaking is marked by a doubtful a priori, it proceeds according to an unhealthy method, it is the symptom of an infantile, even a constitutional, disorder. In the domain of the natural sciences, or even in the so-called exact sciences, the vitality of research has never developed in the exclusive optic of the constitution of a, for example, general geography, a general physics, a general chemistry, even a general mathematics, etc. In fact, the ‘branches’ of scientific research have always had a tendency to go off in directions that are heterogeneous at the beginning – less like the branches of a tree and more like a rhizome. Systems for the classification of the sciences have remained the concern of philosophers (or of scientists to the extent that they set to philosophising). In the life of scientific research itself, it is always on the basis of the lengthy accumulation of work, and in a retroactive fashion, that syntheses at the most general level are accomplished, syntheses that are, in any case, provisional and always susceptible of being called into question by the facts. Hitherto it seems that it is above all as examples that semiological research has addressed itself to gestures, spatial perception, advertising, fashion, music, etc. In fact, it reduces its objects of study to the state of being an example. It doesn’t really take into account their richness, the particular traits of expression that they put into play, the collective assemblages of enunciation that they imply. It takes itself as a hegemonic theory from the outset. The least one can say is that this is how today it exports its models into domains that are little prepared to receive them. In this regard, the case of semiological research into urban space would show, to the point of caricature, the sterilising effects of such an operation.
Taking as its object gesturality in general or even Collective equipment in general, a different kind of semiotic research would have to set out the formulae for semiotisation specific to such and such a kind of equipment or particular institutional constellation. It would then be a matter of going beyond the method of exemplification by endeavouring never to reduce the specificity of the object considered. In fact, it is the epistemological prejudice regarding the supposed necessity of the generality characteristic of the object of study that would here be called into question and, as a consequence, the very status of research and of the researcher. The study of an object of desire implies not losing the singularity of its mode of enunciation en route. In these conditions, the enunciation of the study itself cannot remain independent of the modes of enunciation relative to its ‘object’. Analytically and politically neutral as it wishes itself today, research in the human sciences can only miss the collective economy of desire, in its most essential wellsprings. Only desire can read desire. We therefore cannot insist enough on the necessity of a certain transference of enunciation: the subject producing a study must be ‘meshed’, in one way or another, with the mode of enunciation of the subject concerned by the study. In the absence of a certain assemblage of enunciation between the knowing subjects and the subjects to be known, research can only become sterile, or what is worse, take its place amongst the oppressive systems of power. But the fact of renouncing the generality characteristic of the scientific object, its function of exemplification, doesn’t in the least imply abandoning every method of scientific investigation. The singularity of desire, historical mutations, the event that comes ‘from outside’, the emergence of new machinic ramifications, the springing up of what we call concrete machines, thus characterises what, following Jacques Lacan, we designate as being the status of ‘conjectural sciences’.
What is difficult to get people to admit today, but which seems essential to us, is that independently of their relations of subjection to the dominant languages, the dominant modes of production of signification, a taking into consideration of the semiotic components of a system is not necessarily synonymous with the point of view of a return to natural values, a fixation on the past, the cult of the archaic. Amongst these components we have cited: dance, the imitative expression of modes of somatisation, the perception of space, semiotic components at the heart of which biological codings intervene … But it would be worth adding to that ‘modern’, a-signifying or post-signifying components, putting into play batteries of deterritorialised signs like those that one is dealing with in money, the ‘writing’ of the stock exchange, musical writing, systems of scientific, computational formalism, etc. It is true that these components also, in one way or another, remain more or less tributary to signifying semiologies, but at the level of their intrinsic functioning they escape from the redundancies that fashion the everyday. In a general fashion, we may consider that all these components of ‘natural’ coding (genetic, hormonal, humoural, perceptive, postural, etc.), pre-signifying components (iconic, gestural, mimetic, etc.), or post-signifying components (digital codes, economic signs, mathematics, etc.)2 can encounter (or constitute) signifying semiologies, but only in so far as they find in them the path to their impotentiation. The fact that we are led to place the accent on semiotics that escape language must therefore not be understood in question begging terms in favour of an instaneist and spontaneist mode of communication, a return to the origin of the type proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but simply as the result of an observation, which is that in a uniquely linguistic framework, the study of semiological systems cannot but make us miss its pragmatic openings, not only onto the real life of social groups but also onto numerous modes of semiotisation relative to the cosmos, scientific creation, artistic creation, revolutionary action, etc.
In other words, in every economy of desire, understood in a very broad sense as a system of flows traversing the relations between individuals and assembling the set of possible connections between the objects and the machinisms that constitute ‘the world’ for an individual. A world which – everyone everywhere repeats – is more and more artificial, more and more alienating! But the two things do not necessarily go hand in hand. Artifice and deterritorialisation are perhaps today the two surest values of a liberating desire! And references to nature, to the evidence of faces and landscapes, are perhaps the most underhand allies of dominant systems of signification, in so far as they frame them around a lost past and on imaginary territorialisations at an impasse! In fact, the true productive relations that can exist between signs, things and the socius do not pass via the same kinds of instances as those that engender our ‘everyday significations’, those on which the enterprises of mediocritisation of power and the self-importance of its representatives are based. The signs of the body as much as the signs of science and of the arts do not attain pragmatic effectiveness other than on condition of circumventing the dominant system of redundancies in one way or another. What we would like to establish is that the way in which these sign machines, considered at the level of their work on the real, and no longer just at the level of their functions of subjective representation, effectively thwart the values of power relative to individual, family, state, territorialities, etc., and mobilise a sort of molecular semiotic energy, constituted of quanta of sub-human articulations, systems of potentialities, rather than stratified systems. This is the process that we are endeavouring to outline with the notion of diagrammatism in what follows.
Perhaps we will be reproached with wanting to put semiotics everywhere and of no longer being in a position to delimit our object precisely. But provisionally, we prefer to run this risk rather than the risk that would consist of missing the essential dimensions of the functioning of this domain of Collective equipment, from the point of view of the economy of desire in the social field, and thus of explicitly legitimating their alienating function. Applied to this particular domain, the kind of pragmatic approach whose foundations we would like to sketch out here, should even, in our view, make the necessity of a reorganisation of the field of semiology evident and urgent. From the moment that one is confronted with the diversity of components of coding and of semiotisation effectively put into play by a Collective equipment, one is led to ask oneself about the nature of the system that presides over their concatenation and over the passageways that lead from one to the other. And it is no longer just on speculative grounds but also on a practical terrain that questions concerning the systems of ‘causality’, which under certain conditions places one of them in the dominant position in relation to the others, permanently rest. Are there infrastructural determinations or a particular practice that might permit the semiotic toolings that are carried out by the school, prisons, the prefecture, the banks, etc., to be oriented in a de-alienating direction? In numerous disciplines, one senses the necessity of escaping from the simple categorial oppositions that have led traditional medical semiology, for example, to make a symptom depend either on the body or on the ‘mind’, that is to say, either on objective biological sciences, or interpretative, symbolic systems, etc. In effect, these dichotomies of ‘good sense’ always in the end result in making arbitrary groupings, or even in putting everything in the same boat: behind the diversity of modes of encoding, the same principle of formal organisation, in which an all-powerful generative formula is supposed to ‘inhabit’ the biological as its soul, or inversely, to make the mind function according to a mechanics the models for which have been copied from external scientific schema (which are, in any case, often outmoded!) The objects of study having thus been delimited and stratified, it is no surprise that research imprisons itself in spatialised and ahistorical frameworks. Every time that one brings about this kind of dichotomous reduction, one loses the unity of functioning, the fundamental movement of the creative virtualities of the object studied. Psychiatry has arranged its own impotence by dissecting symptoms and syndromes in such a way as to make them enter into tableaux that are closed in on themselves – something which, it is true, gives well-informed practitioners the opportunity to exercise their ‘authority’ over their novice colleagues, by constantly overturning the categories of the school [in question]. In fact, they declare, one only every deals with limit cases, which border lines, a hysteria equally presenting the traits of paranoia, a schizophrenic tableau not being incompatible with depressive syndromes, etc. In a more general fashion, one may consider ‘simple’ and ‘logical’ alternatives almost inevitably operate by strong-arming reality.
One cannot, for example, say that the disciplinary economy of the school is solely in the service of the learning of language, writing, calculus, the transmission of knowledge that is ‘useful’ for the child, or utilisable by society, all things that could in the last analysis be described in terms of information theory. One cannot say either that it is solely a dressage of attitudes based on competition, mutual surveillance, etc., or a learning of the rituals of submission to dominant values. One cannot dissociate the discernible Collective equipment (with its walls, its urban situation, etc.) from the social fields of force in which it bathes, from the State power on which it depends, or from its interactions with families and diverse other modes of sociality with contours that are more difficult to discern, such as the classes of age, professional, cultural, sporting, etc. interests. It is important not to let oneself get caught up here in the logic of genetic chains or that of containers of the macro-social/micro-social kind, or even that of difference of levels between infrastructures and superstructures.
No genetic or structural programming drives the modelling of the child; the action of the family, for example, doesn’t come ‘after’ that of school. As Anne Querrien has remarked, one is in the presence of a veritable system of interaction: the school playing an important role in the modelling of the family as such, dictating to adults the behaviour they will have to adopt in order to become ‘good parents of pupils’, and family authority not ceasing to be exercised, in all sorts of ways, over the teaching personnel and the mode of functioning of the school. The interaction between school and State doesn’t depend on a one-way fit either: the State controls the school by means of the Ministry for Education, its inspectors, its missives, etc., but inversely it is itself largely ‘infiltrated’ by the teaching body. It is enough here to evoke the importance of the role of the teaching body in the so-called ‘radical socialist’ period of the Third Republic, and its still current power, via organisations such as the Ligue d’enseignement, the Freemasons, etc. Can one nonetheless maintain that because school is only supposed to deal with words and attitudes it thus only arises from ideological superstructures, from ideological state apparatuses depending ‘in the last instance’ on economic infrastructures? But doesn’t the semiotic tooling of labour power which it carries out constitute a fundamental cog, not just in the relations of production of capitalist societies, but also in their productive forces as such?
Is not the first of primary matters, before coal, steel and electricity, this semiotic matter that is produced through academic and university equipment? It isn’t just the competence of workers, of technicians and executive, in the matter of reading orders, deciphering plans, the articulation of complex operations that depends on it, but also the adaptation to the discipline of the workshop and the office, acceptance of hierarchies – an acceptance that is as ‘active’ as possible. It is in the family-nursery-school complex that the basic semiotic components of capitalist labour power are manufactured and that the essential schemas of the division of labour, the division of castes and of classes, sexual and ethnic segregations, etc., are preformed. That is what produces what Gilles Deleuze and I have attempted to determine around the notion of a ‘bureaucratic eros’,3 this ascetic jouissance that capitalist societies seem to have inherited from the old monastic machines, as the ‘credo’ elaborated by the Société pour l’amélioration de l’instruction élémentaire as a ‘guide for the use of inspectors’ in 1817 tends to show us.4 Two kinds of readings can be proposed of such a document:
•One would consider it as being nothing more than a lay manual of repression for the gridding and militarisation of childhood.
•The other would additionally try to bring out a curious bureaucratic religion from it, imprinted with a sort of administrative poetry.
Literary research will perhaps one day be led to make a compilation of this kind of production and to show its articulation with major literature. Rather than misrecognising the micro-fascist seductions that it harbours, we should on the contrary try to clarify what it might bring to its ‘users’, what sort of inadmissible pleasure they can take from it.5 A jouissance centred on the master, as the Lacanians might say! But on which master and in what conditions? In whatever domain one might come to apply it, psychoanalytic abstraction can only lead to the avoidance of the real fields of power. An exploration of the libidinal functioning of the school, for example, ought on the contrary to envisage the nature of the entirety of investments that operate there, beginning with those that exist between the children themselves. Here, one is perhaps effectively in the presence of an informal ersatz of what is institutionalised in primitive societies, at the level of the rites of passage that mark the entrance of children into a range of different classes of age.
Additionally, an institutional analysis of the libido of the school would have everything to gain from an appeal to ethnologists rather than to pedagogues, for it is true that it is archaic societies that have the most to teach us about the modes of crystallisation of the socius preserving the libidinal components of the school, this time concerning the very particular sexual activity that develops there between adults and children: a mysterious crossroads of ‘adult’ semiotics of seduction, authority, suggestion, and the ‘world of children’.6 One might then try to extract a specific matrix function from this kind of Collective equipment, which consists in capturing the sexual energy of children – an energy that at the outset is territorialised on the body and on what Winnicot has called ‘transitional objects’7 or on animals and becomings-animal,8 toys and games, on what Fernand Déligny calls ‘near space’9 so as to deterritorialise it, to ‘sublimate’ it, as psychoanalysts would say. In fact, it is so as to impotentiate it, to make it fall into power’s zones of collapse – what, in the third part of this work, we will designate with the term ‘black hole’, and finally to place it in the service of capitalist systems of semiotic enslavement (family, bureaucratic, industrial, cultural, systems, etc.). A non-reductive analysis of school would show us that when all is said and done, the ‘matter’ that is tooled behind its walls is doubtless less an affair of teaching, of information or of power than a libidinal matter that is constitutive of the collective power of labour, and which implies a ‘superegoic’ investment of professional roles and hierarchical functions. For a large part, it is this same libidinal tooling that one comes across as the basis of the modelling of phallocratic sexual behaviour in the couple or the politics of repressive introjection with regard to the sexed body. In the machinery of the School, everything converges on this generalised subjection: systems of relations as much as the organisation of space – which Michel Foucault has described as a miniaturisation of the ‘panoptic machine’ – the system of timetables, the rhythms of work, the constraints imposed on the exercise of speech, the control of movement in space, and even – very often – the pure and simple forbidding of components of corporeal, musical, plastic expression, etc. Nor should one forget the absence of any system of funding, which has as its consequence the maintenance of children and teaching personnel in an attitude of passive dependence with regard to the administration and to the family.