[ox-en] Maurizio Lazzarato, "Struggle, Event, Media"
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- Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 09:11:18 +0100
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*Title* Maurizio Lazzarato, "Struggle, Event, Media"
*Date* Monday March 08, @02:42AM
*Author* hydrarchist
*Topic* Culture <http://info.interactivist.net/search.pl?topic=22>
from the /problems-of-representation/ dept.
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/08/1253213
*"Struggle, Event, Media"
Maurizio Lazzarato *
Why can the paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor in
artistic modes of expression, and here especially in the production of
works that employ moving images?
I will attempt to answer these questions by using the paradigm that
imagines the constitution of the world from the relationship between
event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely founded on the
subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm the images, the signs and the
statements have the function of representing the object, the world,
whereas in the paradigm of the event, images, signs and statements
contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images, signs and statements
do not represent something, but rather create possible worlds. I would
like to explain this paradigm using two concrete examples: the dynamic
of the emergence and the constitution of post-socialist political
movements and the way television functions, in other words, signs,
images and statements in contemporary economy.
The days of Seattle were a political event, which – like every event –
first generated a transformation of subjectivity and its own mode of
sensibility. The motto "a different world is possible" is symptomatic
for this metamorphosis of subjectivity and its sensibility.
The difference between this and other political events of the recently
ended century is radical. For example, the event of Seattle no longer
refers to class struggle and the necessity of taking power. It does not
mention the subject of history, the working class, its enemy capital, or
the fatal battle that they must engage in. It restricts itself to
announcing that "something possible has been created", that there are
new possibilities for living, and that it is a matter of realizing them;
that a possible world has been expressed and that it must be brought to
completion. We have entered into a different intellectual atmosphere, a
different conceptual constellation.
Before Seattle, a different world was merely virtual. Now it is actual
or possible, but it is something actual, something possible that has to
be realized. The transformation of subjectivity must invent time-space
arrangements that watch over this re-evaluation of values, which was
able to bring forth a generation that has grown up after the fall of the
Berlin wall, in the period of major American expansion, and in the New
Economy. Twofold creation, twofold individuation, twofold becoming. The
signs, images and statements play a strategic role in this twofold
becoming: they contribute to allowing the possible to emerge, and they
contribute to its realization. It is at this point that the "conflict"
is confronted with the dominant values. The implementation of new
possibilities for living runs into the existing organization of power
and the established values. In the event, one sees what is intolerable
about an era and the new possibilities for living that it contains at
the same time. The mode of the event is the problematical. The event is
not the solution to a problem, but rather opens up what is possible. For
Mikhail Bakhtin, the event reveals the nature of being as a question or
as a problem – specifically in such a way that the sphere of the being
of the event is simultaneously that of "answering and questioning".
The days of Seattle involve a corporeal arrangement, a combination of
bodies (with their actions and passions) composed of individual and
collective singularities (multiplicity of individuals and organizations
– Marxists, ecologists, union activists, Trotskyists, media activists,
"witches", Black Bloc, etc., which practice specific corporeal relations
of co-functioning); and there is an arrangement of statements, a regime
of statements formed from a multitude of statement regimes (the
statements of the Marxists are not the same as those of the media
activists, the ecologists or the "witches", etc.). The collective
statement arrangements are not expressed solely through language, but
also through the technological expression machines (Internet, telephone,
television, etc.). Both arrangements are constructed in terms of the
current relationships of power and desire.
The event turns away from historical conditions, in order to create
something new: a new combination of bodies (actions and passions, which
are strung together among the demonstrators, for example) and that which
is expressed, the verbal statement as result, as effect of the corporeal
combination: a different world is possible.
What is expressed (the meaning) does not describe the bodies nor
represent them. The possible world exists completely, but it does not
exist outside that through which it is expressed (the slogans, the TV
reports, the Internet communications, the newspapers).
The event actualizes itself in souls in the sense that it generates a
change in sensibility (as a non-corporeal transformation), which brings
forth a new valuation: one recognizes what is intolerable about an era
and the new possibilities for living that it implies.
The possible world has already been imbued with a certain reality
through talking, through communicating, but this reality must now be
completed, it must be made by making new corporeal arrangements.
The event constitutes the relationship between the two types of
arrangements; it is the event that distributes the subjectivities and
objectivities that will overthrow the configurations of bodies and signs.
Everyone came with their own corporeal machine and their own expression
machine and returned home with the necessity of newly defining these in
relation to that which was done and said. The forms of political
organization (of the co-functioning of the bodies) and the statement
forms (the theories and statements about capitalism, the subjects, forms
of exploitation, etc.) are to be weighed and related to the event. Even
the Trotskyists are compelled to ask: What happened? What is happening?
What will happen? And to report what they do at the event (the
organization) and what they say (the discourse they conduct).
At this point we see that the order of verbal statements is what is
problematic. All are compelled to open themselves to the event, i.e. to
open themselves up to the area of questions and answers. Those who hold
answers prepared in advance (and there are many of those), miss the
event. That is the political drama that we lived after 1968, missing the
event, because the questions already had their predetermined answers
(Maoism, Leninism, Trotskyism).
The event insists, which means it continues to have an impact, to
produce effects: the discussions about what capitalism is and about what
a revolutionary subject is today, are making good progress all over the
world in light of the event.
Language, signs, and images do not represent something, but rather
contribute to making it happen. Images, languages and signs are
constitutive of reality and not of its representation.
Let us turn now to the question of how signs, images and statements are
used by corporations in contemporary capitalism.
The corporation does not generate the object (the commodity), but rather
the world in which the object exists. Nor does it generate the subject
(worker and consumer), but rather the world in which the subject exists.
In contemporary capitalism, we must first distinguish the enterprise
from the factory. Two years ago a large French multinational corporation
announced that it would part from eleven production sites. This
separation between enterprise and factory is a borderline case, but one
that is becoming increasingly frequent in contemporary capitalism.
In the majority of cases, these two functions are mutually integrated;
we presume, however, that their separation is symbolic of a more
profound transformation of capitalist production. What will this
multinational corporation retain? What does it understand as
"enterprise"? All the functions, all the services and all the employees
that allow it to create a world: marketing, service, design,
communication, etc.
The enterprise generates a service or a product. In its logic, the
service or the product exists, just like consumers and producers, for
its world, the world of the enterprise; the latter must be internalized
in the souls and bodies of the workers and consumers. In contemporary
capitalism, the enterprise does not exist outside the producers and
consumers that give it expression. Its world, its objectivity and its
reality mix with the relationships that the enterprise, the workers and
the consumers have with one another.
* Communication / Consumption * Let us start with consumption, because
the relationship between supply and demand has been reversed: the
customers are the pivotal point of the enterprise strategy. In reality,
this definition from political economics does not even touch the
problem: the sensational rise, the strategic role played in contemporary
capitalism by the expression machine (of opinion, communication,
marketing and thus the signs, images and statements).
Consumption is not reduced to the act of buying and carrying out a
service or a product, as political economics and its criticism teach,
but instead means, first of all, belonging to a world or a universe.
Which world is this? It is enough to turn on the television or the
radio, go for a walk in a city, buy a weekly or daily newspaper, to know
that this world is constructed through a statement arrangement, through
a sign regime, the expression of which is called advertising, and what
is expressed (the meaning) is a prompt, a command, representing per se a
valuation, a judgment, a view of the world, of themselves and others.
What is expressed (the meaning) is not an ideological valuation, but
rather an incentive (it gives signs), a prompt to assume a form of
living, i.e. a way of dressing, having a body, eating, communicating,
residing, moving, having a gender, speaking, etc. Television is a stream
of advertising that is regularly interrupted by films, entertainment
programs and news programs. According to the way Jean-Luc Godard depicts
it, if you take out all the pages of a newspaper that contain
advertising, it is reduced to the editorial by the editor-in-chief. And
radio is just as much a stream of advertising and programs, in which it
is increasingly difficult to distinguish where one begins and the other
ends. Unfortunately, we must agree with Deleuze in his conviction that
the enterprise has a soul, that marketing has become its strategic
center, and that advertising specialists are "creative".
The enterprise exploits to its own advantage the dynamic of the event
and the process of constituting difference and repetition by distorting
them and making them dependent on the logic of enhanced value.
For the enterprise the "event" means advertising (or communication or
marketing). We will analyze this particular aspect of enterprise
strategy in relation to the constitution of the consumers, its
customers. Enterprises now invest up to 40% of their turnover in
marketing, advertising, styling, design, etc. These investments in the
expression machine can far surpass investments in "labor".
Advertising – like every "event" – first distributes modes of perception
in order to prompt ways of living; it actualizes modes of affecting and
being affected in souls, in order to realize them in bodies. With
advertising and marketing, the enterprise effects incorporeal
transformations (the slogans of advertising), which are stated through
bodies and only through bodies. The incorporeal transformations first
produce a change in sensibility (or that is what they would like to
produce), a change in our way of making value judgments.
The incorporeal transformations have no referents, because they are
auto-referential. There are no antecedent needs, no natural necessities
that would satisfy production. The incorporeal transformations pose the
valuations and their object at the same time that they produce them.
Advertising represents the spiritual dimension of the "event", which the
enterprise and the advertising agencies invent using images, signs and
statements, and which must be realized in bodies. The material dimension
of the event, its realization, is completed when the ways of living,
ways of eating, of having a body, dressing, residing, etc. are
incarnated in bodies: one lives materially among the goods and services
that one buys, in the houses, among the furniture, with the objects and
services that one has seized as "possible", in the flows of information
and communication, in which we have submerged ourselves. We go to bed,
we rush to do this and that, while that which is "expressed" continues
to circulate (it "insists") in the hertz waves, in the telematic
networks, and in the newspapers. It doubles the world and our existence
as "something possible", which is, in fact, already a command, an
authoritarian slogan expressing itself through seduction.
In which form does marketing produce actualization in the soul? Which
type of subjectivation is mobilized by advertising?
The design of an advertisement, the concatenation and rhythm of the
images, the soundtrack are organized like a kind of "ritornello" or a
"whirlwind". There are advertisements that reverberate in us like a
musical theme or a refrain. You have probably already been surprised to
find yourself whistling a musical theme from advertising (it certainly
happens to me, at least). The Leibnizian distinction between
actualization in souls and realization in bodies is very important,
because these two processes do not coincide and can result in completely
unpredictable effects on the subjectivity of the monads. The television
networks recognize no national borders, no differences in class, status
or income. Their images are received in non-Western countries or by the
poorest classes of the Western population, who have little or no buying
power.
The incorporeal transformations work well on the souls of the television
viewers (of these countries, as well as on the souls of the poor in rich
countries) by creating a new sensibility, because something possible
certainly exists, even if not outside the medium of its expression (the
television images). For what is possible, in this sense, it is enough to
be expressed through a sign in order to have a certain reality, as
Deleuze demonstrated to us.
However, the realization in bodies, the possibility of buying and living
with one's body among the services and goods that are expressed by the
signs as possible worlds, does not always follow (and not at all for the
majority of the world population), occasioning expectations,
frustrations and rejection.
In conjunction with the observation of this phenomenon in Brazil, Suely
Rolnik speaks of two subjective figures, which represent two extremes,
in which the variations of the soul and the body are articulated, that
are produced by the logic just described: the glamour of "luxury
subjectivity" and the misery of "trash subjectivity".
The West is horrified by the new "Islamic" subjectivities. But it has
created this "monster" itself and specifically with the help of its most
"peaceful", most seductive techniques. What we are facing here are not
remnants of traditional societies in need of modernization, but in fact
cyborgs that conjoin the "oldest" with the "most modern".
The incorporeal transformations happen first and faster than the
corporeal transformations. Three quarters of humanity are excluded from
the latter, but they have easy access to the former (first and foremost
through television). Contemporary capitalism does not arrive first with
the factories: these follow later, if at all. It first arrives with
words, signs and images. And specifically these technologies precede not
only the factories today, but also the war machine.
The event is an encounter and it is even a twofold one: one time it
meets the soul, the other the body. This twofold encounter can make
space for a twofold shift, because it is only one opening of
possibilities in the modality of the "problematical". Advertising is
only one possible world, a fold sheltering virtualities. Unfolding what
is enveloped in it, unfolding the fold, can bring forth completely
heterogeneous effects, because on the one hand they encounter monads,
which are all autonomous, independent and virtual singularities. On the
other – as we have seen in neo-monadological ontology – a different
possible world is always virtually present. The bifurcation of divergent
series haunts contemporary capitalism. Incompatible worlds unfold in the
same world. For this reason, the capitalist process of appropriation is
never closed in itself, but is instead always uncertain, unpredictable,
open. "To exist means to differ", and this differentiation is newly
uncertain, unpredictable and risky each time.
Capitalism attempts to control this bifurcation, which is virtually
always possible through variations and continuous modulation: neither
the production of a subject nor the production of an object, but rather
subjects and objects in continuous variation guided by the technologies
of modulation, which are in turn continuously varied.
Control is expressed in Western countries not only through modulating
brains, but also through forming bodies (in prisons, schools and
hospitals) and through life management ("workfare"). We would be doing
our capitalist societies a favor, if we think that everything happens
through the continuous variation of subjects and objects, through
modulating brains and by means of the occupation of memory and attention
by signs, images and statements. The control society integrates the
"old" disciplinary dispositive. In non-Western societies, where
disciplinary institutions and "workfare" are weaker and less developed,
control immediately means the logic of war, even in times of "peace"
(see Brazil, still).
The paradigmatic body of Western control societies is no longer
represented by the imprisoned body of the worker, the lunatic, the ill
person, but rather by the obese (full of the worlds of the enterprise)
or anorectic (rejection of this world) body, which see the bodies of
humanity scourged by hunger, violence and thirst on television. The
paradigmatic body of our societies is no longer the mute body molded by
discipline, but rather it is the bodies and souls marked by the signs,
words and images (company logos) that are inscribed in us – similar to
the procedure, through which the machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony"
inscribes its commands into the skin of the condemned.
In the 70s Pasolini very precisely described how television had changed
the soul and the body of the Italians, how it was the main instrument of
an anthropological transformation that first and especially affected
youth. He used practically the same concept as Tarde to describe the
modalities of an effect of television at a distance: the impact of
television is due to example rather than discipline, to imitation rather
than coercion. It is the steering of behavior, the influence on possible
activities. His film trilogy about bodies was rejected, because it did
not take up this transformation. It still spoke of the body before the
modulation of brains and, with regard to certain aspects, even before
disciplinary societies.
These incorporeal transformations that come into our heads again and
again like ritornelli, which are circulating all over the world at the
moment, penetrating into every household, and which represent the real
weapon for the conquest, the occupation, the seizure of brains and
bodies – they are simply incomprehensible to Marxist theory and to
economic theories. We face a change of paradigms here, which we cannot
grasp starting from labor, from practice. On the contrary, it could well
be that the latter supplies a false image of what production means
today, because the process we have just described is the precondition
for every organization of labor (or non-labor).
Images, signs and statements are thus possibilities, possible worlds,
which affect souls (brains) and must be realized in bodies. Images,
signs and statements intervene in both the incorporeal and the corporeal
transformations. Their effect is that of the creation and realization of
what is possible, not of representation. They contribute to the
metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their representation. "
Maurizio Lazzarato, "Struggle, Event, Media"
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<http://info.interactivist.net/>, Maurizio Lazzarato, "Struggle, Event,
Media" <http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/08/1253213>
on 2004-03-11 02:12:26
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