1

Being and Event, Alain Badiou

Conditions, Alain Badiou
Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou
Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou
Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou
Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou
Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze
Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Molecular Revolution, Félix Guattari
Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Félix Guattari
The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari
Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry
After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux
Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri
Althusser's Lesson, Jacques Rancière
Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancière
Mallarmé, Jacques Rancière
Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière
The Five Senses, Michel Serres
Rome, Michel Serres
Statues, Michel Serres
Art and Fear, Paul Virilio
Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio

Ecosophy, Félix Guattari

For another world of possibilities

BIo
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Originally published as Lignes de Fuite, © Édition de If\ube, 2011

© Félix Guattari 2011

English translation © Andrew Goffey, 2016

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A catalogue record for this book is available fram the British Library.

ISBN' HB 978-1-4725-0735-8
ePDF: 978+4742-7492-0
epub 978+4742-7493-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Guattari, Félix, 1930-1992.
[Lignes de fuite. Englishl
Lines of tlight . for another world of possibilities / Felix Guattari ; translated by
Andrew Goffey. -- 1 Edition.
pages cm. - (Impacts)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4725-0735-8 (hardback)
l. Capitalism-Philosophy. 2. Political science--Philosophy. 1. Title.
HB501G738132015
330.12'2-dc23
2015015236

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Printed and bound in Great Britain
Translator's introduction ix

1 The unconscious is not structured like a

language 3
The machines of the unconscious 3
The dictatorship of the signifier 5
A non-reductive analytic pragmatics 9

2 Where Collective equipment starts and ends 11

General function of Collective equipment 11

The myth of human nature 12

3 The capitalist revolution 15

After the 'black hole' of the thirteenth century, the 'Peace of

God': a religious machine 15
The mystique of chivalry and free enterprise 17
Bourgeoisie and feudalism 19

4 Bourgeoisie and capitalist flows 23

The bourgeois machine 23

The new bourgeois 'sensibility' 26
The withering of the aristocracy 28
Bourgeois reterritorialisations 32
5 Semiotic optional rnatter 35

Semiotisation of libidinal investments 35

Rhizomatic semiotic research 37
Example of rhizomatic research: the semiotic factory of
childhood 41

6 Equipment of power and political facades 45

The institutional simulacra of instituted politics 45

The mega-network of miniaturised equipment 47
The facialities of power 49
Molar powers and molecular potentials 52
'Collective analytic' interventions and the social
unconscious 54

7 A molecular revolution 57

The third industrial revolution 57

Abstract machines 59
Bureaucratic socialism, the highest stage of capitalism 63
A new type of struggle 65
An analytico-militant labour at ail scales 68

8 The rhizome of collective assetT1blages 71

The collective assemblages of desire 71

A rhizomatic cartography 74
The macro-assemblage of audiovisual means 81

9 Micro-fascism 83

Micro-struggles 83
The politics of fascist and Stalinist equipment 87
The micro-fascisms of capitalist societies 88
Liberatory options, micro-fascist options at the molecular
level 91

vi
10 Self-management and the politics of desire 95

Methodologies of rupture 95
Singularities of desire 97
The traps of ideology 99
Prospects for self-management 101
Social transversalities 104

11 Introduction to principal themes 109

12 Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics 115

Semiotically formed matters 117

The order of things and the order of signs 118
Abstract machine or signifying abstraction 121
The assemblage of content and expression doesn't
come out of the blue 124
Four kinds of expression-content assemblage 127
Semiotic enslavement 132
Competence as instrument of power 135
Do 'pragmatic universals' exist? 137

13 Pragmatics: a micropolitics of linguistic

formations 141
Stratification, stages, and abstract machines 143
A micropolitics of desire 147
There is no language in-itself 150
The unconscious as individual or collective assemblage 152
Tracings and trees, maps and rhizomes 155
Generations and transformations 157
An analytico-militant pragmatics 170

vii
14 On faciality 179

15 The hierarchy of behaviour in man and animal 197

16 The semiotics of the grass stem 207

First series 210

Second series: the Australian finch 211
The traits of matters of expression 216

17 The !ittle phrase in Vinteuil's sonata 225

Notes 245
Index 273

viii
 ,
1 1

Félix Guattari has not been well-served by the academie machine. He was
marginalised almost from the start of his joint work with Gilles Deleuze,
who was generally seen as the brains behind Anti-Oedipus, the book that
procured for them a certain amount of renown (if not notoriety). And the
extraordinary growth in critieal scholarly commentary on their joint
writings has tended to revolve around an appreciation of Deleuze's work,
whose daim to the production of a metaphysics has all too often been
addressed with seant regard for the important role that Guattari played in
their construction of a philosophy in the years between May 1968 and
Guattari's death. 1 Of course, seeing Deleuze as a quirky metaphysician
presents sorne interesting and fascinating problems for profession al
philosophers and there is no doubting the immense subtlety and nuance of
his thinking and the scope ofhis engagement with the history of philosophy.
Yet there was always an institutional - and experiential - challenge
embodied in their double-headed writing machine that all too easily falls by
the wayside when Guatlari's role is downplayed, especially when what is
preferred is an inscription of their thinking within canonised scholarly
problematies (that Deleuze for one was always quick to repudiate).
As thinkers together of an unconscious that invested directly in the
movements of history -- schizophrenie delirium, with its 'world historical,
politieal, and raciaP content serving for them as something of a starting
point for understanding both the 'diabolic powers' knocking on the door, as
well as the compromises established with those powers by psychoanalysis
- it would be all too easy to find in their work the traces of a rather romantie
lionisation of madness that was common currency in the tumultuous
France of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, there is more to Deleuze
and Guattari's invocation of the importance of the experience of psychosis
than the judgement that they romanticise (or aestheticise) schizophrenia
would allow - and it is Guattari's work that makes this point blindingly
obvious.
From a rather early stage in his work, Guattari evinced a des ire to escape
from what he saw as the 'methodological individualism' of psyehoanalysis, its
reliance on one-on-one dialogue and its lack of engagement in the difficult,
ongoing task of treating psychosis in the institution. There was an absence of
sustained direct involvement with psychosis on the part of Freud (Schreber,
through his writings, Little Hans through his father) and only a minimal
involvement on the part of Lacan (the Papin sisters, for diagnostic purposes),
and this, for Guattari, was a problem. 3 It limited the value of the idea of the
'foredosure of the name of the father' and, on the basis of a mueh doser -
indeed daily - involvement with psychotics led to far greater emphasis being
placed by Guattari not just on institutional facts, on collectives, and the
non-autonomy of language, but also on the transindividual processes that
are put into play in and by an unconscious that is somewhat refractory to
apprehension within the enunciative space-time of'ordinary' analysis. 4 The
phony 'contractualism' of the analytic relationship, with its ostensible
exclusion of third parties and foeus on the individual, was not something
that found a very positive response amongst institutional psychotherapists,
by virtue of the broader institutional qualities of the delegation of the
treatment of madness to particular groups of people in society (to say
nothing of the concrete realities of institutional situation). And the historical
experiences of progenitors of institution al psychiatry such as Tosquelles
during the Second World War (the need to work with non-professional staff,
the use of the Saint-Alban hospital to shelter members of the Resistance, and
so on) would mean that La Borde was a propitious domain for Guattari's
own background of militancy in the student movement.
In his early writings, Guattari's conceptual displacement/relativisation
of analytic 'transference' by institutional 'transversality' is one particularly
fruitful outcome of the complex encounter between politics, therapy,
psychoanalysis and the psychiatric hospital, and it sustained a rethinking of
the unconscious in a social direction, breaking down the tacit hierarchy -
inside and outside the institution on which the 'contract' rested, and
re-instating - first with the idea of the institutional object, then with the
ide a of the desiring machine - the third party putatively excluded in one-
on-one dialogue. In addition to generating a perception of the importance
of the group, of relations between groups (as in the division of labour) and
of concrete institution al arrangements themselves (the institution as a
'modelling clay' for the treatment of psychosis), it also, more broadly, leads
to what might be called a 'de-professionalising' of access to the uneonscious,

x
accomplished through the generation of conceptual tools that reframed the
analysis of desire in directly political terms. Guattari repeatedly retums to
the view that the conceptualisation of the unconscious he was engaged in
would be an unconscious within reach of anyone!
Guattari's endeavours to taclde the role of the group in relation both to
analysis and to politics was clearly something that interested Deleuze, who
saw in the theoretical contributions of Guattari to 'institutional psychotherapy'
a set of notions that had a precise practical orientation that of'introducing
into the institution a militant political function, constituting a sort of
"monster" that is neither psychoanalysis nor hospital practice, even less group
dynamics, and which aims to be applicable everywhere, in the hospita1, the
schoo1, in militancy - a machine to pro duce and to enunciate desire'.5 That
one of the first fruits of Guattari's collaboration with Deleuze was Anti-
Oedipus, a sort of Rabelaisian high-point in the theorising that took place in
the aftermath of 1968, should not obscure the institutional experience to
which Guattari's work always sought a certain kind of fidelity. Nor, of course
should it obscure the links between the approach to writing taken by Deleuze
and Guattari and his co-author's understanding of the instititution of
philosophy. After all, Deleuze's 'conversation with Claire Pamet, Dialogues,
involves a quite explicit appraisal of the institution of philosophy and the
function that the image of thought played in codifying thinking - an appraisal
that in many respects continues the discussion of 'Intellectuals and Power'
between Foucault and Deleuze from earlier in the 1970s. And it is worth
noting here, as if in passing, that Deleuze's otherwise rather improbable
reference in this latter text to Proust for his understanding of the new role of
the intellectual is itselfheavily dependent for its understanding of the function
of the writer's 'oeuvre' on Guattari's conceptualisation of transversality.6
That Guattari's writings were not only heavily marked by but also aimed
to remain faithful ta his own experiences of working at La Borde, continuing
an analytic practice, as weIl as working tirelessly in the field of politics - is a
point that has been made succinctly by one of Guattari's colleagues at La
Borde, Jean-Claude Polack, who points out that he 'always stayed as close as
possible to his everyday experience: 7 an observation that holds true even
perhaps especially - where his writings seem most avowedly experimental.
Consistent with his work's contestation of the sufficiency of language and its
perpetuaI re-commencement from the unassignability of the expression/
content distinction, it is difficult to separate out Guattari's theory from its
'objects'. So, when Guattari returns, in a short text written in the wake of a
visit he made to a hospital on the Greek island of Leros in 1989, to the four
'imperatives' that guide his approach to 'enunciative hyper-complexity: we
would do weIl to see this as a statement of what it is that shapes Guattari's

xi
approach to his own activity of'doing theory' as such: irreversibility there's
no going back after the 'evental' encounter, singularisation the need for a
permanent readiness for the advent of any rupture of sense, heterogenesis -
the sem'ching for the specificity of the 'ontologie al' terrain on whieh
subjectivation occurs, necessitation - the way that affects, percepts, or
concepts must be incarnated in an 'existential territory'.8 In fact, this text in
whieh Guattari reflects on his lifetime of work at La Borde points us
towards a land of 'de-institutionalising' of theory accomplished, oddly,
through an acknowledgement of its much doser connection with institutions.
'Theoretical modelling, as he puts it, has an existential function .. In this
respect, it cannot be the privilege of theorists. A right to theory and to
metamodelling will one day be inscribed at the entrance to every institution
that has something to do with subjectivity:9 In sorne respects, this is a view
that directly continues both his strietures against Althusserian theory (in the
late 1960s), and, in the present text, against the Gramscian theorisation of the
organic intellectual. 'We do not think that there is any place, in effect to set up
a specific group and praxis the function of whieh would be to synthesise
Theory and Action. The very form of the division of labour between
militancy, the analysis of the unconscious and intellectual activity should
wither away, to the extent that the practiee of the ory gives up basing itself on
systems of univers aIs even if they are dialectieal and materialist and
action establishes itself in the extension of a liberatory economy of desire: lO
The reader can follow the train of thought leading Guattari to this argument
for him- or herself. But there is a more general point here, whieh is that
contrary to a fairly widespread view, whieh would hold that 'theory' and
'experience' are opposing, even antinomie terms, for Guattari they are in fact
indissociable: like his friend Deleuze, albeit in a slightly different way,
Guattari maintains the connection between theory and singularity, an
'irreversible adventure:
Guattari's 'discovery' of the dimension of transversality had for him
entailed an ongoing theoretieal and practical critique of the undue
'privileges' that might accrue to the analyst in the institution, a critique
given broader scope in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari are keen
to contest the 'underhand powers' founded on the transference - a point
noted by Foucault in his Preface to the English translation of that book. But
more important perhaps than the obvious critieal scope that the concept
permits is the way in whieh it helps to prepare for the development of the
later concept of the 'collective assemblage of enunciation' as the constructive
element that institutional analysis brought to light. Whilst in their own
presentation of this latter concept, Deleuze and Guattari use Kafl<:a as their
reference point for what they are trying to address - his novels serve as a

xii
privileged point of articulation for the concept, both in Kafka: Towards a
Minor Literature as well as A Thousand Plateaus - we would do well to note
that Guattari was already talking of'collective agents of enunciation' as early
as 1964. Conceptualising the subject as a 'collective agent of enunciation'
was, in Guattari's view then, indispensable to avoid reifying the institution
as a structure. Substituting a variable distinction between subject- and
subjugated groups for the problematic notion of structure would, he argued
enable the total (and totalising) character of the institution to be shattered,
giving way to the possibility of a praxis necessary to the generation of
analytic 'effects' (i.e. enunciating desire), through the 'subjective consistency'
of groups able to address their own transitory, finite existence. Il
There is much that might be said in turn at this point about the
connections between Guattari's consistent emphasis on the importance of
(group) practice and the concomitant critique that Deleuze and Guattari
have proposed of 'the' signifier in their writings. But contrary to the view
that sees these thinkers as apologists for the simple spontaneity of 'flows',
Guattari himself retained two key ide as throughout his work: that a
determined praxis was always necessary to open up the possibilities that the
homogeneous registers of meaning production occluded, and that linguistic,
or linguisticised conceptions of structure blocked any real analysis of the
kind required to effectively open up the possibilities 'encysted' in any
situation.
However rather than pursuing this line of argument it is perhaps more
interesting in the present context to connect the experimental approach
to practice that these explorations of transversality gave rise to with another
dimension of his work - his activities with the FGERI (Federation of
Groups for Institutional Study and Research, founded in 1965) and slightly
later CERFI (the Centre for Institutional Study, Research and Development,
in 1967). The notoriety acquired by sorne of the publications issuing from
these initiatives has been commented on elsewhere, both from more or
less negative l2 and more obviously positive 13 points of view, and Guattari's
defence in court following the publication of the 'Three Billion Perverts'
issue of the journal is particularly interesting not least for the way it shows
him trying to problematise the links between research, desire, and the
State. In any case, the numerous issues of the journal provide a written trace
of the ways in which Guattari's collective, transversal analysis of desire
was, in the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s, extending beyond the
immediate scope of the La Borde clinic and into what might now be called
'interdisciplinary' research. Interdisciplinarity is an ide a that is rather
familiar in academic circles these daysl4 - sufficiently so, perhaps that, as is
the way with familiarity, it tends, not always rightly, to breed contempt. That

xiii
such contempt is typically expressed by the well-territorialised professionals
of tradition al disciplines, with their institutional apparatus of key journals,
special conferences, accepted ways of asking questions, and so on, is not
especially surprising, and it serves here as a reminder of the difficulty of
separating out knowledge production, institutional power, and subjectivity,
a knotty set of ties which Guattari's approach to the possible 'creativity' of
the institution sought to counter. The collective research projects in which
Guattari was involved were thus in some respects rather different from
what is now held to be interdisciplinary research, not least because the kind
of interdisciplinarity at which CERFI aimed had an intensely libidinal
component, for better or for worse (Dosse, not entirely fiürly, thinks the
latter), traces of which can sometimes be found in the presentation of
material in the issues of Recherches to which these projects gave rise. But
Guattari's 'interdisciplinary' research practice with CERFI is also of interest
here because of its more or less direct bearing on the present text.
Originally titled 'Collective equipment and semiotic subjugation' and
not discovered until after Guattari's death, Lines of Flight seems to have
been written at much the same time that Guattari was working on A
Thousand Plateaus with Gilles Deleuze, a connection that the reader will be
able to confirm by di nt of the numerous passages here that are also to be
found in that text. But the text was also written as a report for the Ministère
de l'équipement, a relatively new ministry that was first created under the
government of Pompidou in 1960, out of a series of separate ministries - for
transport, for public works, and for construction. And it was with regard to
the heterogeneous matter of 'collective equipment' that the French State
provided fun ding for a CERFI research project that in addition to involving
Guattari and his other CERFIsts - François Fourquet, Lion Murard, Anne
Querrien and Liane Mozère, amongst others - also involved Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. 15 Several issues of Recherches were devoted to
presenting the findings of this project, including two issues in 1973, grouped
together under the heading the 'genealogy of capital: a title that captures
both the influence of Foucault as weIl as the (sometimes overlooked)
genealogical elements of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Engaging
specifically in the study of issues that might now be considered the province
of urbanism, town planning or urban geography, the first of the issues of
Recherches exploring this loosely conceived genealogy included two
interviews with Foucault, and whilst the discussions had are not entirely
conclusive they do point towards some of the ways in which Guattari was
extending his understanding of the social unconscious (the latter is flatly
identified, in the first of two discussions with Foucault, with 'collective
equipment as such').16 But the project on collective equipment is also

xiv
interesting here because of the way that it feeds quite directly into what will
become A Thousand Plateaus. Whilst references to 'collective equipment'
are almost entirely absent from that text, it is evident from Lines of Flight
just how much that research mattered. Here, Guattari not only picks up on
aspects of the work carried out in relation to the 'genealogy of capital' but he
also draws on Anne Querrien's research into schooling - first published as
'L'Ensaignement' and since republished as Lëcole mutuelle: une pédagogie
trop efficace? - and on Judith Belladonna's research into prostitution, which
also appeared in Recherches, and in so doing points to the close proximity
between a Foucauldian approach to subjugated knowledges and what A
Thausand Plateaus would no doubt refer to in terms of 'minoritarian
becoming'.
AIl of this, of course, is history and would probably be of Httle more than
passing interest, except for what it says, once again, about some of the
collective dimensions of the research practice in which Guattari was
engaged and what this tells us about the philosophy he was constructing
with Deleuze. Lines of Flight should, in many respects, be considered a
group project, an incipient collective assemblage of enunciation in its own
right, even if few of Guattari's collaborators in CERFI here are mentioned
by name. lt is thus advisable not to separate the theoretical challenge
presented by the concept of the collective assemblage of enunciation when
thought through the work of Kafka - rethinking the virtual presence of the
collective within the solitary writing practice of the intellectual from the
practical experimentation of which it is a part. And so one might in turn say
of Lines of Flight what Guattari says, with Deleuze, of the 'K-function' in
Kafkàs novels. 'It is pointless to ask if"K" is a subject "he" is more a general
function that proliferates by itself, or rather "K" is less a general function
assumed by an individual than the functioning afa polyvocal assemblage of
which the solitary individual is a part.'
Next to nothing has been said here about the substantive content of
Lines ofFlight. That's quite deliberate, but maybe one or two words on where
this book leads are called for, just to finish. Despite the term's absence from
A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari himself repeatedly returns to the ide a of
'collective equipment' in his later writings. This may in part be a function
of the pliability of the term 'équipement' itself, which allows it to operate as
a sort of shorthand (and not incidentally renders it difficult to translate
accurately)Y However, in a different context, the anthropologist Paul
Rabinow has helpfully indicated the historical connections between the
idea of'équipement' and the French State, and points in passing to the rather
all-encompassing reference of the term, which 'included everything that
was not a don gratuit of the soil, subsoil, or climate: at least in the 1942 'Plan

xv
d'Équipement National: 18 a breadth that Guattari certainly, if not explicitly,
picks up on. This discursive link with a broadly conceived notion of an
environment makes it unsurprising to find that it is in the context of his
grappling with the problems posed by the 'three ecologies' that Guattari
should calI once again on the ide a of 'collective equipment'. In a text on
'Ecosophic practices and the restoration of the subjective city: for example,
Guattari considers the role of urban mentalities in relation to the collective
refinalising of hum an activities. The possibility of this refinalisation taking
place is, he suggests, largely dependent on the possibility of a shift in urban
mentalities. Referring to the work of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean
world and the proliferation of city states in the sixteenth century, Guattari
argues that within the context of a nascent capitalism, this proliferation
could only be considered to hold itself together when understood as 'so
many components of a single network of collective equipment'.19 And he
goes on to note, anticipating by sorne years arguments made by geographers,
political theorists, sociologists, etc., that the situation today is one in
which that same network of'material and immaterial equipment' has woven
itself together at a mu ch greater scale. The more this network is planetarised,
the more it is 'digitalised, standardised, homogenised, uniformised', the
more it constitutes a 'hegemony of major cities or, more exactly, of subsets
of major cities connected by telematic and informatics means: Much
has been written, invoking assemblages, spaces of flows, networks and so
on since Guattari's death that is consonant with this kind of analysis, but
sorne of his lessons, particularly concerning the connections between
rhizomes, assemblages and subjectivity seem to have been filtered out along
the way. It is as mu ch in his life-long engagement with the micropolitics of
institutions and his collaborative research practices as in the better known
work with Deleuze that we can find the seeds of Guattari's prescient
conceptualisation of an integrated world capitalism. Integrated world
capitalism is at work today in the pipes, cables and circuits of global data
networks, the algae-like proliferation of property developers and global
rentiers, as weIl as our dreams and nightmares, but it finds many of the tools
Guattari elaborated for thinking practically against it, 'in favour, 1 hope, of a
time to come' here, in this book.
Andrew Goffey

xvi
PART ONE

1
1
PART ONE

1
 1 1

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 aIlow 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 pro cesses in aIl 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 rem ove 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 caIls 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. I1's pretty widespread, so there's
no need to go into it in detail. Le1'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 partieular type of
meta-language. But it seems absurd to us to consider that such connections
can be programmed on the basis of psychogenetie stages, archetypes,
signifying chains or 'mathemes of the unconscious'. Rather than considering
that one is dealing here with objects, 'stages' and psychie 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 partieular
kinds of assemblage of semiotic components, whieh, at a given moment, in a
given situation, manifest the true structures of the unconscious, or rather
what we prefer to caU 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 pragmaties
operating on real situations even when the latter can apparently only end
up in neurotie reiterations or impasses. For example, wh en a psychoanalyst
interprets a dream by applying his aU-terrain equation money = shitl he,
quite happily, it seems, confuses the pragmatie components of diverse
assemblages of enunciation whieh, in the example that we evoked, might be
distinguished according to the foUowing three ensembles:

4
 a The 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.
b The 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.
c The unconscious assemblage corresponding to a real handling
of money, which evidently entertains specifie 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 aH
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. TIley daim 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, doesnt interfere with their field. In practice, they purely
and simply leave to one side the political and micropoliticaP stakes that
are implied by their 'object: they tum away from the real complexity of
contexts, the relations of force, the specifie technologies of power, which,
it is true, no univers al interpretation could give to them! TIle 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

5
Unconscious with a capital U, but always with n formulae for unconsciouses,
varying according to the nature of the semiotic components that conne ct
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 th an today's structuralist current in French
psychoanalysis. He had taken care at a topical level to distinguish thing
representations (Sachvorstellung) - of an iconie 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 partieular power formations,
those of the normal, civilised, white, phallocratie, edueated, hierarehised,
waking world that we would globally eharacterise as capitalist, thereby
designating the ensemble of social systems funetioning on the basis of a
generalised decoding of flows.
In effeet, one of the characteristics of these capitalistic formations is
their recourse to a particular kind of semiotic machine that overcodes aIl
the other semiotic components, allowing flows, whatever they are, to be
manipulated and orientated, as mu ch 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 chaiIlS 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 schoo1, military, lega1, 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 oflanguage
and of the unconscious, at the level of the chaiIlS of genetic code and at the
level of the elementary relations ofkinship in primitive societies, at the level
of rhetoric, stylistics and poetics, at the level of the mode of functioning of

6
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. ln effect, we consider that every kind of assemblage brings
about the concatenation of semiotic chains that are fundamentally difJerent
Jrom one another and which at the outset function not as a signifying
dise ourse but as so many machines of a-signifying signs. 5 What one is
dealing with at the he art 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 possibility<' that cannot
be calculated in terms of structure, what we call a machinie 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 aIl the
modes of production and aIl 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. ln 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 eondemned 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 land 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 land 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

7
be linked to the 'new culture: to ecology, to consumer movements, etc.,
seem to think?
For us, this 'fixation' of arch aie societies on pre-signifying semiotics
is less an affair of fidelity to origins or an innate taste for spontaneous
expression th an 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 aIl 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, th an
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 le ad 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 difIerent 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: s or just simply the
ethnography of relationships in a bistro or homosexual nightclub. Residual
marginal activities, the inevitable priee 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

8
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 nationallinguistic competence, is not a natural fact, the
consequence oflinguistic univers aIs or ofa necessary symbolic structuration
of human relations. JO It can also be combatted and be defeated, and not just
in societies 'without aState: to borrow Pierre Clastres's expression, Il 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, th en 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

9
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 structurallmots 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 cC' where this is the case], at the heart of which semiotic
components of aIl 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 eut 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

10
 1
1

General
equipment
No human group, however 'primitive' one might consider it, can organise
itself, in effect, independendy of a series of types of 'collective equipment:
the first of which is to be sought in its capacity, particularised at the level of
each ethnie group or its modern equivalent, of the marking out and
expression, by me ans of diverse 'sign machines: of its co smic and social
oudine, the form of its internaI relations, of its 'foreign politics: aIl things that
we have gathered here un der the rubric of collective modes of semiotisation.
111e semiotic formation of the collective power of labour, in the context of
capitalist systems, doesn't depend solely on a central power imposed by the
constraint of relations of exploitation. It equally implies the existence of a
multitude of intermediary operations, machines for initiation and semiotic
facilitation that can capture the molecular energy of desire of hum an
individu aIs and groups. These machines, of every kind and size, converge in
the same semiotico-libidinal productive function that we will calI the general
collective equipment junction. Before being particularised in institutions and
types of collective equipment in the usual sense, this function is implanted
within the modes of semiotisation, subjectification and praxis of human
groups. It establishes a whole network of connections between:

• What we have described elsewhere under the name of molecular

desiring machines;
 (II Interpersonal molar relations (relations of sex, class, age, etc);
(II Economie relations (division of labour at the level of the process of
production, stratification of relations of production, etc.);
Formations of social and political power.

Much more th an simple elements of an ideological and political

'superstructure', 1 types of collective equipment ought to be considered as
machines that produce the conditions ofpossibility for al! capitalist economic
infrastructure. Before the exchange value-use value couple is instituted, the
collective equipment function pro duces a desire value-use value couple by
successively deterritorialising:

1 lnfra-individual values of des ire that it transforms into sexual,

family, friendship, neighbourhood, etc. use values;
2 Use values that it transforms either into capitalist exchange values
or into collective assemblage values (able to connect once again to
desire values).

TIle individual doesn't constitute the ultimate object of the 'programming'

of this sort of equipment. In effect, if it is true that one finds the individual
at one end of the chain of equipment as a whole, as its terminal 'product:
as well as at the beginning of the chain, as its basic constituent, it is also
true that things don't stop there. In our view, this image of circularity
even risks closing the capitalist processes of alienation onto identifiable
entities, a little too quickly and a little too easily, calling for the 'good sense'
of denunciations of the kind 'the relations between man and the city, man
and machine, etc. need to be rebalanced' and for a myth of a human essence
which can escape modern technologies for modelling individuals come
what may. The individual is entirely fabricated by society, in particular by its
collective equipment.
The ide a of a transcendental subject that is irreducible to processes of
semiotic contamination and subjection is a fiction. It is better to give up
expecting anything from a supposedly free, autonomous and conscious
individual subject (putting to one side a residual territory - an opaque and
reactionary ego - that serves as a support for undertakings to annihilate
every collective project), if nothing of the order of what we are calling
here the 'collective assemblage of enunciation' is put into place to resist
subjection and divert it from its goals. But scholarly thinking, as much as

12
'profane' thinking, concerned to preserve hum an values in reality, a
certain kind of value, a certain kind of society - doesn't cease taking refuge
behind the ide a that one is entitled to hope for a reprieve for, the taking
in hand of the individual human, whatever the manipulations of which it
is the object. One imputes the disordering of society and the bad uses of
science and of technique to the 'bad side' of the individual - always the
Maniehaeism of good and bad drives - whereas one expects a rectification
of the problem from his 'good side: his 'basic goodness'. Although a
carieature, this conception of the role of the individual seems to us to
correspond, more or less, not just to the practical attitude of the upholders
of bourgeois thought but equally to that of the majority of Marxist militants.
Before discussing the nature and the scope of: for example, the 'role of the
individual in history: is it not worth calling into question the very concept
of the individual? In truth, the functioning or dysfunctioning of society are
never the affair of individuals as such, they arise from complex assemblages
that cannot in the slightest be reduced to collections of individuals, to
humanist ideologies, an accumulation of individual responsibilities and
volitions. Although it has served as a justification for all social regimes,
including the most implacable fascism, although it has been denounced as
such by Marxist theorists, the humanist postulate of the ultimate reality
of the individu al, of an unalterable, autonomous, foundation cut off from
nature and inaccessible to the accidents of history of a human order, is
in fact continued by the contemporary Communist movement when it
considers itself as the repository of a universal human model, when it
misunderstands the mutations, the revolutions, of desire that work over the
social field, wh en it aims to establish - through the power of organisation
and by collective suggestion - priorities, orders of urgency, between the
'serious' and the secondary levels of action, which can only intervene as an
additional force or as suitable to reserve for 'later', or indeed which one must
turn away from because they would not be 'understood by the masses' and
would result in 'distractions' (the liberation of womens desire, or childrens
desire, homosexual desire, etc.). But the growing efficacy of technical and
scientific systems, methods of collective subjection put in place by capitalist
societies bureaucratie socialism itself being on the point of becoming the
'final stage of capitalism' - leads us to think that nothing can be subtracted
from the machinations and facilities of the collective, not even the most
intimate, the most inaccessible components of the individual: his perception,
his desire, even his consciousness are on the point of becoming 'Collective
equipment'. One is thus equipped with 'models' of perception, motricity,
intellection, imagination, memory, that differ depending on the 'post' that is
attributed to us, and as a function of the caste, class and environmental

13
appurtenance that has been affixed to us. Certainly today these setups are
'personalised' (as one says of cars!). Manuallabourers and bureaucrats are
equipped with different kinds of perception, housewives and managers
with difTerent modules of desire. But aH the basic elements come from the
same sort of factory, the same kinds of collective equipment: it is only
on the basis of their composition that one will succeed in establishing a
(functional and promotional) diversity that corresponds to the necessities
of capitalist social organisation and to the type of division of labour that
corresponds to it. (Later we will come back to the fact that the adaptive
capacity of this 'fabrication of individuals' implies a constant miniaturisation,
which we will calI a deterritorialisation, of these basic elements.)

14
 1 1
1

Fundamental political and micropolitical stakes are 'negotiated' through

this Collective equipment function in so far as it retains a preponderant
place in the formation of the collective power of capitalist labour. But
the transformation of 'polymorphous' desire into useful activity, into
deterritorialised labour and the exchange over which it presides, doesn't go
without saying. Capitalism has only been able to realise this transformation
- and thus to place the libido in its service - under particular historical
conditions.

centu ,
religious
The birth of labour that can be exploited capitalistically was doubtless
contemporaneous with the appearance of a new kind of war machine, a
new kind of religious machine and a new system of linguistic and social
segmentarity, starting in the eleventh century. Georges Duby insists on the
role pIayed by the religious machine in particular in this 'normalisation' of the
right to pillaging by armed gangs, after the political, economic and semiotic
collapse of the old territorialities and central powers inherited from the
Roman and Carolingian empires. The fixing of an external objective the
repulsion of barbarian invasions, then the expansion of Christianity - thus
contributes to the birth of a new warrior caste. 1 Instead of dispersing and
exterminating the peasantry they will be savagely exploited, they will build
castles and roads, they will relaunch a process of accumulation that will
re-create the conditions for an urban, commercial and artisanal re-equipping.
In thus succeeding in fixing the new mIes of play, the Christian religious
machine in sorne way substituted itself for the old imperial powers. But
although its power is more 'spiritual: more deterritorialised, it is no less
effective - qllite the contrary in fact! Doubtless it is here that the first great
mystery of the power takeover by capitalist flows resides.An abstract machine,
the 'Peace of God: establishes its law and stabilises social segmentarity.
In each province, 'councils summoned by prelates met together in each
district, and magnates and their warriors took part. These assemblages,
falling back on constraints of a moral and spiritual nature, aimed to curb
violence and to lay down mIes of conduct for those who bore arms: In the
prolonging of this 'Peace of God', other precepts will allow for the rest
of society to be rllied over 'it wOllld no longer be permissible to fight any
more than to han die money or to indulge in sexllal intercourse - except
within precise limits'. 2 With the progressive reappearance of a monetary
economy, it will thus result that feudal lords no longer extract the labour
power of the peasantry by me ans of corvee, but through their adaptation to
a system of deterritorialisation of exchange: 'the seigneurs did not cease to
appropriate most of the goods the peasants produced. They seized them
by other means, with an adaptability that markedly increased the velo city
of monetary circulation'.3 The mIe of antique slavery then progressively
disappears before that of modern economic exploitation. But this first
monetary deterritorialisation will not be able to find its 'realisation in the
framework of a social system centred on feudal relations that are still
too territorialised, but only in that of an economic system controlled by
the bourgeoisie (bourgeois royalty). Expropriated by money of its direct
relation to slavery, the nobility will deterritorialise itself, will have itself
emptied of ils substance by bourgeois social formations that are better
adapted to the specifie modes of semiotisation of the new capitalist
order. The emergence, not of capitalism, but of the hegemony of capitalist
flows is thus, in our opinion, inseparable from not just the temporary
respite from epidemics and large-scale barbarian invasions the ebb and
flow of nomad military machines, an internaI demographic growth, a
relative stabilisation of the feudal order, a certain economic, commercial
and monetary 'takeoff' - flows of merchants, flows of pilgrims. It is also
inseparable from the 'launching' of major operations by the Church aga in st
heresies, against the infidels, which enabled the military aristocracy to be
channelled into deterritorialised objectives: the 'Holy land', the holy shroud,
etc. The proliferation of ehurehes, cathedrals and monasteries in the twelfth
century can itself be considered a first stage of capitalist deterritorialisation.

16
It constitutes in sorne way a first 'takeoff' of Collective equipment of a new
kind, the principal mission of whieh could be broken down as fûllows: on
the one hand they have to 'produce' one of the most deterritorialised gods
in history, a god whieh, on the other han d, they have to reterritorialise onto
a segmentary social order that is 'regressive' in relation to that of classical
Antiquity, in that it continues to rely on 'archaic' systems of filiation and
ethnie organisation. Unlike the 'reasonable' gods of Greek and Roman
citizens, the new 'Asiatie' god pins his passional and universal values that
is the paradox - to the heart of barbarian aristocracies.

mystique
free enterprise
As the feeling of belonging to a City and to an Empire has been definitively
lost, a deterritorialised nomadic feeling haunts the mystique of the knight
and, once the segmentary context and feudal anarchy is stabilised around
provincial and royal powers, it indirectly prepares the path to the spirit
of adventure and the 'free enterprise' of the owners of ships, the merchants
and the capitalists of the ascendant bourgeoisie. In effect, if it is true
that everything separates feudallords and bourgeoisie, from the outset the
grand religious ideals of feudalism brought their interests together. For
example, the conduct of the Crusades is inseparable from innumerable
'secondary benefits' that both groups can draw from them: a war of pillaging,
the opening up of commercial circuits, etc. When aIl is said and done, for
whom does the Collective equipment of the Church 'work'? It is difficult, if
not impossible, to answer this question. We will corne back to the ambiguity
of the relations between Church, aristocracy and bourgeoisie later. Let
us note simply that if it is true that Collective equipment do es not simply
form 'superstructures' but pro duces the semiotic conditions of divisions
into castes and classes, th en the question of 'belonging' can no longer be
posed in the same terms.
Not only is the religious machine the 'bearer' of the social divisions that
are contemporaneous with it, but in addition it prepares the differentiations
to corne - in the sense that Newtonian theory of gravitation 'prepares'
the Einsteinian theory of relativity. That is how the abbey at Saint-Denis,
for example, was conceived by Suger as the first great form of religious
equipment for the 'bourgeois royalty'. Its function was no longer that of
the monastic Roman churches: 'the simple superstructure of a hyogeum, a
martyrium, of sorne dark, enclosed, underground place where terrified

17
pilgrims descended in single file and groped in the darkness until at last, in
the light of tapers, they perceived the martyrs' sanctified remains .. :4 It
assembles [agence J a collective semiotisation, an incarnation (through its
light, its splendour, its precious stones, the iconography of its stained glass,
its liturgy, etc.) of the relation of God to men and to royalty. Incarnation is
opposed here to the 'dualist seductions' of heresy, but also to aristocratie
anarchy, the place of the God of the bourgeoisie is on earth; the 'Peace of
God' has to guarantee work, commerce, urbanisation and the centrality of
power. The religious collective equipment of the Middle Ages will 'work' at
the development of capitalism in its own way, in so far as it will add a certain
number of quanta of deterritorialisation to the modes of semiotisation and
subj ectification of the ruling strata (the new sensibility of the aristocracy, its
code of honour, initiation rituals, etc.). Although less rational than that of
Antiquity, the human model that it puts into circulation is, in fact, more
universal, more capitalist. Straightaway this presents itself as more easily
adaptable and transposable - in limits fixed by the councils - to the
ensemble of ethnie and national components, and the limits that it imposes
on its new adherents are infinitely less constraining than those of the
'rallying' to the Roman Empire, for example. In contrast, its spiritual
demands, its subjective mutations, will in the course of time turn out to be
more and more tyrannical.
To our mind, it is from the formation of this new model that it is
advisable to 'make' the spirit of modern capitalism 'start: and not from the
later reforms of Lutheranism and Calvinism, as Max Weber proposed. 5 The
Reformation only accentuated a movement that had been launched much
earlier. From our point of view, its originality resides in the fact of having
put into place a new network of even more deterritorialised religious
equipment, the function of which was no longer to massively clear the
path for capitalist flows, but that of adapting to other networks of economic
and social equipment that were already solidly implanted, of taking a
more modest, less cumbersome place amongst them by miniaturising
the priestly apparatus and thus of accentuating the interiorisation and
individuation of religious feeling. René Grousset considered that in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Flanders was already functioning as a
'factory that expects exporters to come to it to take delivery of manufactured
products'; Hansa Teutoniea as 'a transport enterprise, a house of commerce
in which merchandise are simply warehoused and in transit'; Florence as a
manufacturer, a bank and employers federation, whilst Venice and Genoa
experimented with capitalism 'as far as the end of its programme, as far as
naval and territorial imperialism, as far as colonialism' and prefigured the
England of the nineteenth century. 6

18
 To create the conditions allowing for the formation of a new kind of
work and exchange compatible with the 'takeoff of an economy based on
the primacy of capitalist flows, the interaction of a considerable number of
deterritorialising factors was thus necessary. Let us enumerate sorne of
them, without in any way pretending to be exhaustive:

1 The collapse of the urban and state systems inherited hom the
Late Empire;
2 The emergence of a religious machine with universal,
deterritorialised objectives but which has at its disposaI a
'central' direction and an 'international' language, local and
regional Collective equipment - churches, cathedrals, monastic,
Benedictine machines, etc., finances and a significant secular
political weight;
3 The determination of a 'foreign policy' organised around
deterritorialised objectives (the Crusades);
4 The reappearance of a deterritorialised circulation of money and
the development of international commercial flows;
5 The differentiation of new social orders - fundamentally, the
nobility and the Church (we will come back later to the fact that
the Third Estate, whieh is a much later notion, is not to be put on
the same level, to the extent that it covers mu ch more
heterogeneous sociological and political realities);
6 The appearance of a new, aristocratie, style of life - suzerainty,
knighting, adelphopoiesis, courtly love, etc.?;
7 The autonomisation of Romance languages, etc.

It seems weIl established that after the collapse of the social systems
inherited from the Late Roman and Carolingian empires, the reconstitution
of a relatively coherent social fabric was contemporaneous with the
resumption of a pro cess of urbanisation and of a development of techniques
in aIl domains. The bourgeoisie and its (administrative, fiscal, corporate,
religious, commercial, etc.) collective equipment was thus weIl and truly
born at the same time as feudalism. 8 And this contemporaneity might even
lead us to formulate the hypothesis of a structural interaction between the
basic technologies of semiotic initiation of the feudal nobility and those
of the new bourgeoisie. One can put the origin of the phenomenon as

19
filf back as one wishes (for example, from the eleventh century on, when
the knighthood closed its ranks in a sacred and hereditary caste), but it will
have to be admitted that they appeared as two different but interdependent
'races: One is thus no longer in the presence of a simple opposition
here, like that which separated the 'race' of citizens from the rest of
the population in Antiquity. Citizenship is deterritorialised here, it has
absorbed something from the nomads and from the barbarian war
machines of serf technologies, and has divided into two power formations:
the ostentatious and arrogant formation of the feudal lords, and the
hardworking but ultimately triumphant formation of the bourgeoisie. 9 This
dissymmetry and interdependence between the two social stratifications
since the birth of feudalism, that is to say, the birth of 'modern times: goes
beyond the simple framework of the putting into place of a new type
of dependency of vassals and of the emergence of a social segmentarity
surmounting the old, weakening political orders; it is, above aIl, the
expression of the emergence of a new system of the economy of flows,
of a new kind of society, a new way of living, thinking, and feeling the
world. Throughout the 'black hole' of the tenth century, in the meshes of a
society in decline, a society which, in the normal course of things, would
have disappeared un der the impact of barbarian invasions, segmentary
machines of aIl kinds started, on the contrary, to proliferate and to set to
work on their own count.
Although they were more or less subjected to the powers of the nobility
and the Church, the equipment of the bourgeoisie that would come out of
this turmoil would not stop reconstituting their capital for semiotisation
and production. Like in Germany after the war, everything started again
almost from zero. Deterritorialisation must be understood in the proper
sense [i.e. literaIly]. In effect one must not forget that the economic and
urban coIlapse of the West had been almost total (to get a measure of
it, Yves Barel reminds us that in the tenth century, Rome -. which was
without a doubt the biggest Western city - can't have had any more th an
25,000 inhabitants, whilst the figure for Paris was around 5,000). The
'miracle' derives from the fact that the basic semiotic equipment - capitalised
and worked on in the 'monastery-factories' in particular - managed to
slip through the net of the disaster. One witnesses a miniaturisation, a
deterritorialisation of old semiotic and technological forms: artisans and
scribes follow the barbarian armies, merchants wander the highways at
their own risk, protected solely by the letters of safe-conduct granted to
them by the powerful, monks look after and copy manuscripts as if they
were relies, the monastic machines hang onto metal tools as if they were
treasure, and push for an improvement in agricultural techniques ...

20
 Willingly or not, the peasantry will be swept along by this semiotic
deterritorialisation, diagrammatised behind the bourgeoisie. But it seems
important to us not to put them on the same plane as the other 'classes'. They
constitute the basic fabric of society and of production.
Economically they are everything, and politically, nothing. At this
stage, the essential mutations are thus to be located in the birth of a new
kind of power, which crystallises around urban classes, around human
assemblages that are arranged in proximity to Collective equipment of a new
character. In particular, one cannot insist enough on the key position of
ecclesiastic Equipment and the highly ambiguous relations of Church
people with regard to what will mu ch later be called the Third Estate. The
religious and lordly aristocracies were certainly indissolubly linked to one
another. But from the point of view of the restarting of basic Equipment,
from the point of view of the birth of a new pro cess of urbanisation,
the monks and the mass of Church people may be considered as
participating in the same social group as the bourgeoisie. Sometimes it is
around monastic equipment that retained a minimum of cohesion
(collective organisation of labour, use of writing, maintenance of
international contacts, etc.) that certain towns were created or started to
grow again, and sometimes it is around centres of artisanry or legal
equipment. The nobility thus entered gradually into dependence on social
strata that capitalise a knowledge, a technology. The construction of its
chateaux, the preparation of its military equipment, implied a minimum of
stabilisation of professional urban corporations. The nobility and the
Church aristocracies would themselves fall into dependence on the
mercantile bourgeoisie to be able to keep their 'expenditure' - in the sense
given to this word by Georges BataillelO at an appropriate level. It is
the constitution of a network of collective equipment held by parliaments,
corporations, guilds, brotherhoods, etc. whatever the control and
exploitation the nobility may have exercised over them - that catalysed the
pro cesses of urbanisation and which started to create a new kind of power
formation distinguishing itself from the aristocratie values of 'expenditure:
This did not, incidentally, prevent a part of the bourgeoisie from depending
for its power on, or living indirectly from, its wealth. In spite of being
marked by the spirit of corporatism and its dependency with regard to
politieal and religious authorities, bourgeois initiation established itself in
connection with the ensemble of lines of deterritorialisation of the epoch,
(whether technieal, scientific, artistie, commercial, etc.), because of its
aptitude for producing models for 'training' and relatively supple and
effective pro cesses of institutionalisation that ruptured with an overly
territorialised (magieal, even sacred or charismatic) conception of the

21
filiation of power, for which it substituted a filiative system that rested
essentially on the rnuch more abstract power of capital and the real position
of individuals in relation to capitalist flows. In so doing, the bourgeoisie
acquired a secular vocation that had potentially rnuch greater universality
than the Christian churches.

22
 1 1
1 1

The
One ought to distinguish here between the apparent Power [Pouvoir] of the
nobility and the real power [puissance] of the bourgeoisie. At the molecular
level, the real power of pro cesses of deterritorialisation tends to escape
from molar Power. The tacit equilibria, the networks of interdependence,
didn't stop being worked over, caIled into question, by the deterritorialised
semiotie budding of the urban bourgeoisie. From this point of view, the
ecclesiastieal theory of'three orders' (the division of society according to a
divine plan into workers, warriors and people of prayer is an illusion: it is
the expression of an ideologieal attempt at reterritorialisation) endeavoured
to deny the growth of another deterritorialising force traversing the whole
of the social body, and whieh could not be grasped at aIl in the framework
of existing religious categorisations. In fact, it wasn't a case of homogeneous
classes that can be compared with and opposed to one another. By linking
its divisions with the prolongation of the orders and estates of the Ancien
Regime, by transposing its representation of society onto that of bourgeois
parliamentarianism, bourgeois historians and, to a certain extent, the
socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, have skirted round the issue of
the existence of social assemblages of a different nature, and avoided a
politieal problematie that is reborn today with the struggles of minorities of
aIl kinds. Before being crystallised into 'coherent' politieal and economie
groups that can be grasped on the basis of more or less univers al modes of
categorisation (whether of a religious origin or not), the socius differentiates
itself according to an unconscious sexual, ethnie, social, mieropolitieal and
mieroeconomic economy. The military, aristocratie and religious machines
of the Middle Ages cannot be placed on the same plane as the peasantry,
which was neither a dass nor an order in the Middle Ages, but society in
its entirety as a basic productive machine. And 'from the outset' it was
essentiaUy a matter of residual systems pursuing their mad trajectories and
Brownian movements according to their own laws of semiotic inertia. The
machinic cornerstone, the operator that would effectuate the conjunction
of aU the lines of deterritorialisation would be neither a caste nor a
mass and not yet a class, but a social formation with contours that are
difficult to delimit, clinging to the same urban rhizome of power functions,
technical competences, institutions, equipment, monetary flows, flows of
knowledge and merchandise ... It is the bourgeoisie that would ensure
that everything will hold together, or rather that everything will start
holding together again. Minor from the political, religious and military
point of view, powerful only in its 'machinics' and its deterritorialised
semiotics, it is the bourgeoisie that will 'hold together' the mutations of the
capitalist un cons cio us, it is on the basis of its collective assemblages and its
equipment - which are scarcely differentiated at this stage - that the new
lines of force of society would be semiotised and deployed.
Before being a class, the bourgeoisie is thus a certain kind of molecular
collective equipment. Subsequently it will put together gigantic semiotic
cyclotrons from this equipment, associated with industrial combines,
megalopolises, a world market, etc. But its 'visible' historical stages will not
stop being doubled by ruptures, the extension of systems of deterritorialisation,
followed by their taking back in hand, by reterritorialisations endeavouring
for a while to overcome the same original semiotic collapse, which will
only become more marked from one crisis to the next, constantly calling
back into question previous 'gains: The capitalist combinatory will thus
be enriched to the extent that its basic modules are deterritorialised and
miniaturised like a Lego playset or, rather, like the passage in the physico-
chemical domain from successive analyses and syntheses that first start
with molecules and atoms and then with atomic and nuclear components.
History will deploy the potentialities of deterritorialised capitalist formulae,
which will initially appear 'ready-made' at the molecular scale and in a
microscopie space. For a long time, before they make their territory, they
will be able to remain in an endemic state, like viruses that wait years for
the appearance of conditions that are favourable to their expansion. As
we have seen, this is how capitalism started to 'take' from the high Middle
Ages in Pisa, Genoa and Venice, and a fusion was even sketched out between
the urban bourgeoisie and the landowning aristocracy. In this regard, Yves
Barel has talked of 'deterritorialised city principalities'. A capitalist nobility,
supported by craft guilds and ship owners, succeeded here in taking control

24
of urban development, of the economy and of political power, in the context
of a so-called 'aristocratie republic' system. But Ids emphasise that it
was only a matter here of exceptional cases, of 'miracles' resulting from the
conspiring of very particular circumstances, that is to say, the 'accidental'
bringing into conjunction of a whole series of deterritorialising factors (the
meeting point of different worlds, opening onto the sea, a favourable
condition for picking up of commercial flows and, in the case ofVenice, its
particular situation on a lagoon as a result of pressure from the Franks, etc.).
In fact, neither the ltalian capitalist cities, nor the capitals of bourgeois
royalty, will form the crucible in which a fusion between the old aristocracies
and the ascendant bourgeois elites could be brought about. Wh ether the too
territorialised feudal segmentarity managed to impose its inertia on the new
segmentarity or inversely the latter, too deterritorialised, relied on the
former, the fact is that the urban integration of aristocratie equipment will
only have been highly relative, very partial. Even when the embourgeoisement
of fractions of the aristocracy attached directly to the functioning of the
power of the Royal state and to capitalism results locally in the constitution
of a sort of aristocratie bourgeoisie, it will still only be a matter of a relative
fusion, with a character that is, above aU, functional. This is the case, for
example, with the 'Colbert Lobby' - as Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis
Journet caU it. More th an three-quarters composed of nobility (whether
from birth or from the exercise of sorne ennobling responsibility), who,
according to these authors, nevertheless had to be brought together under a
group of financiers whose positions and functions had, sin ce the start of
the eighteenth century, 'with the discrete, effective and interested support of
the powerful, played an eminent role, whieh placed them at the centre
of the life of the State, in the surrounding monetary and economie system:
that is to say, a capitalist social formation that, despite its rupture from the
landowning aristocracy, does not for all that belong to the bourgeoisie. 1
lt is also worth being prudent with regard to the over-hasty assimilation
of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Whatever their alliances might be, it is a
matter of two lands of heterogeneous reality: the bourgeoisie results from a
conservative social stratification - which intended to retain the rights it had
gained - whereas capitalism results from a conjunction of machinic
components that tends, on the contrary, and as if in spite of itself, to destratify
the social field. This discrepancy will go on growing and it will become
partieularly visible with contemporary developments of state capitalism,
in East and West: the same rhizome of technocratie and capitalistic castes
tending to take possession of the world by negotiating its economieo-
political strategy at its he art, over the heads of the nId hourgeoisies and the
old national bureaucracies. BM 0696952
25
 In a general manner, the pro cesses of the urbanisation and equipping of
the great national capitalist entities will not result in the institutionalisation,
the codification of fixed models of power formations, as was generally the
case in the cities of Antiquity. The bourgeois town - and this is what gives it
its strength - is anything and everything. 2
Forcing things a bit we can say that it is a molar epiphenomenon,
whilst bourgeois and corporate equipment for their part represent the true
molecular pro cess of the urbanisation and rise of productive forces. 3 Whilst
the powers of the lord, the earl, the bishop, the king, etc., were quarrelling
over the military, politieal and fiscal control of towns, the capitalist molecular
revolution for its part secretly took control of the whole of the social body.
Indirectly it will take control of the nobility and the Church, by means of its
collective equipment of production and commerce, its ungraspable semiotic
machines, which it won't stop making proliferate, and which will transform
the tendencies of thinking, feelings, religion, architectures, science ... The
particularities of the ecclesiastic and noble aristocracies will only be able to
stay afloat by adapting to the relative universalism of the bourgeoisie and
only in so far as the interests of the latter willlead it to developing its semiotic
differentiation in comparison with them.

Throughout the development and conjunction of these pro cesses of

capitalistie deterritorialisation, a different conception of the human, and of
childhood in particular, starts to appear. A certain economy of traditional
aristocratie values 10st its consistency to the extent that the chivalrous
feeling of love - the idealisation of the Lady - was deterritorialised. Don
Quixote and Corneille's heroes participate in the same rearguard action,
whereas a certain childishness in Racine's characters announces the
supremacy of bourgeois sensibility. In effect, after the rise of the Lady in
the novels of chivalry and courtly romances, it is the child that cornes to the
front and centre of the stage in the eighteenth century. If the faciality of
the Lady focused the nobilitarian deterritorialisation, it seems that it is that
of the child that will, quite literally, submerge that of the bourgeoisie, and
that remains true to the present day.4 This doesn't, in any case, imply an
improvement in the fate of childhood, not even bourgeois childhood!
Things will play out in a double register:

G On the one hand, one sees a privatisation, a closing up of the family

on the child again, a growing insistence on the mother-child

26
 relation (which will be transposed onto the husband-wife relation,
and that between loyers, etc.).
e On the other hand, a reinforced semiotic gridding, a more and
more precocious, generalised control, sometimes of an unbelievable
harshness: the school of Christian Brothers having transposed the
prescriptions formulated by Ignatius Loyola for monastic discipline
for use by children (privation of wealth, of nature, of human
conversations, satisfactions of the mind, giving up one's own
freewill, one's own judgement, the condemnation of the pleasures
of the senses, which make one the same as animaIs, faithfulness to
the rules or practices of the community, etc.)5

The deterritorialisation of human work that modes of manufacturing

and industrial production will carry out corresponds not just to a
deterritorialisation of the spaces of life linked to the rural exodus,
urbanisation, etc., but also a deterritorialisation of 'sentiment' translated by
the appearance of a new kind of relationship to work - ultimately, the
disappearance of the 'love of one's trade' - and of a new kind of leader. The
man of power in capitalism will no longer be equipped with the traditional
aristocratie values. The ideal of valiance, loyalty, generosity and courtesy
transmitted through the myths of chivalry will be succeeded by that of an
efficacy and a cynicism that paradoxically is associated with a childishness
of feeling the expression of which will be manufactured 'serially' by Romance
art and literature]. Two kinds of semiotic factory could be opposed:

e That of an aristocratic formation, which starts from territorialised

basic elements (the identification of lineage and of house, 6 the
role of blood, of the earth, of the coat of arms, etc.) and ends up
with a relatively homogeneous style, as in the example of the
king's court.
e That of a capitalist formation, which begins from relatively more
deterritorialised basic modules at the outset, implying a much more
precocious 'treatment' of childhood semiotics in order to separate
them from their 'native lands', so as to bend them to abstract codes.
By carrying out differentiated 'montages', it produces men for all
occasions, more functionally adaptable than the too stiff, too
'semiotically crystallised' aristocrats could be.

111e formation of new dependencies, new hierarchies, new bureaucracies,

adapted to the evolution of capitalist relations of production, presupposes,
in our view, a double deterritorialisation of nobilitarian initiation:

27
 .. On the one hand, a diachronie deterritorialisation that is
manifested by the fading and loss of semiotie components
linked to traditional arts and values (a certain relationship to
oneself and to the world, the sense of honour, of filiation,
personal belonging, the learning of certain kinds of postures
and behaviours through horse riding, the arts of combat, good
manners, etc.).
.. On the other hand, a synchronie deterritorialisation that will
place the world of the aristocracy - the nobility 'present at the
court'? - in a semiotic (and economic) dependency with regard
to bourgeois society that is more and more marked.

aristocracy
At the end of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary ruptures between
the aristocratie powers and the bourgeoisie probably originate less in the
explicit revolutionary will of the latter than in an extension of the components
of deterritorialisation that work over the 'Atlantie world' and a conjunctural
crisis - a sort of new historie al 'black hole' of the same level of importance
as that of the tenth century, but in which the barbarian flows were, in an
inversion, replaced by that of the Napoleonie armies and the expansion of
capitalist flows ravaging aU the old territories in their passage. The grand
financial and capitalist bourgeoisie had everything to gain from a 'change in
continuity: It must be admitted that the theatre of aristocratie 'expenditure'
and the hateful, but subjugating, fascination that it exercised over people for
centuries only presented it with disadvantages. What point was there in
crushing the residues of a landed nobility that, for better or worse, continued
to 'hold' the world of the peasantry? Let's not forget that the movements
in the countryside during the French Revolution were aimed indifferently
at both the feudal nobility and the urban bourgeoisie, both of whom, albeit
by different means, hadn't stopped pressurising them. 8 Let's add to that the
fact that, as we have se en previously, the fusion between the bourgeois
aristocracy and a 'capitalist' fraction of the nobility was already largely
un der way ... Thus it is not the bourgeoisie as a class that 'made' the French
Revolution, but the capitalist components of deterritorialisation of which
it was the beat·er. Also, and perhaps principaUy, from an evental point
of view, the reterritorialising reactions of the urban masses against these
components, in partieular against the tendencies of the new ruling strata
to overturn old regulations, the old corporations, to manipulate money,
to promo te a 'liberal' economic segmentarity. Thus, by considering things

28
from the point of view of the capitalist revolution, one may consider that
numerous days of insurrection amongst the artisan and shopkeeper sans-
culottes were in sorne way 'counter-revolutionary: 'Poujadist'. Without a
well-determined political base, the bourgeoisie of the Lumières didn't stop
'jumping onto the bandwagon' in one direction or another, on the side of
the 'great Atlantic revolution', in Jacques Godechot's expression,9 or the side
of the decentralising and autonomist particularism of the Parisian sections
and the provincial federations.
The proliferation of bourgeois Equipment, in our view, then, appeared
in the meshes of the powers of the nobility and of royalty; its function was
to convert the primary surplus value that the ruling castes extracted from
the work of the peasants and artisans into capitalist labour power, to the
benefit of those castes. But in return, like a mushroom, it hastened
the rotting of its support. As the bourgeoisie implanted and stabilised its
de facto power over territorial entities constituted according to economic
norms, and not the 'logic' of filiation and alliance that presided over the
parcelling out of baronetcies, earldoms, duchies and kingdoms, this
equipment was miniaturised and polymerised in such a way as to generate
macro-equipment able to respond to the technological, economic and
political demands of modern States. 1O Thus the proliferating anarchy of
micro-equipment bears within itself a central state power (the institutional
axiomatic of which was systematised by Bonapartism: creation of major
ministries, the grandes écoles, etc.). Little by little, a double-headed network
of collective equipment - with a semiotic micro-head infiltrating itself
everywhere and the macro-head of astate with an overall hold - started to
grid the slightest no ok and cranny of the social field. The processual
character of this phenomenon ought not to mask the fact that it is from the
outset, that is to say, from weIl before the crystallisation of macro-equipment,
that the question of State power, which can be identified here with the
question of the power of the bourgeoisie, was posed.
In this regard, let us come back to the equipment relative to the semiotic
formation of the nobility. In appearance they are specifie to the nobility,
fundamentally they concern only them, and secondarily civil servants
and bourgeois artists attached to the king's court. But one can equally
consider that by taking over from the abbey at St Denis five centuries
later in subjecting an already considerably fading aristocracy to a new
'Peace of God' - this time baroque and rococo - Versailles will have been
the first collective super-Equipment of modern times, a sort of abscess
of/for fixation, a camp for regrouping and reduction, an apparatus essential
to accelerating the transfer of real powers to the profit of the Parliamentar-
ians, jurists, technocrats and bankers of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the feudal

29
nobility had been taken in charge semiotically since birth by the equipment
of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie was in sorne way the semiotic machine
for the new aristocracies since its birth. It is not a matter here just of
counsellors, scribes, poets, tutors and confessors, but also of a syntax, a
logic, a machinics, an entire new sensibility.
As long as an unconscious complicity existed between the aristocracy
and the other social strata, as long as the nobility and the higher clergy
could be considered to be castes that specialised in 'expenditure', as long as
their weaIth and their style of life, whilst abhorred by those who suffered
their effects, were accepted as being part of the 'rules of the game' and
expressed in some way a collective, 'irrational: desire, then the symbiosis
between bourgeoisie and nobility will retain its 'utility: by manifesting the
social exploitation in a system with two faces and two powers. The nobility
will constitute the alibi, the lightning rod, the diversion for growing
capitalist exploitation. But when it stopped being feIt by the mass of the
people to be a foreign body, when it lost its fascinating strangeness, its
sacred aura, th en aH that will remain is to isolate it, to park it in its specially
reserved spaces - Versailles, etc., to 'expel' it across the frontier (in a
transitory way, it is true, but the 'Restoration' would never restore to it its
eadier prerogatives). The final way in which the nobility will be of service to
the bourgeoisie is as a scapegoat; by cutting off heads, the bourgeois
revolution will attempt to make the problem take flight into the collective
imaginary: 'the heretics are to blame, the blue-bloods, the international
Jewry, the fifth column, Trotskyist spies, Beriàs clique, Lin Biao's gangs .. :
With this kind of procedure one seeks to exorcise the real nature of a crisis,
one that involves not just the 'responsibility' of the whole social body but
also mobilises its libido, by localising it, by territorialising it on a particular
constellation of faciality traits.
The ecclesiastic and noble aristocracy will thus tumble, from the moment
that its diverse modes of territorialisation by which we understand its
sumptuary equipment as much as its relation to money and to work, its
style of life, its 'etiquettes: its postures stop serving as nourishment for the
semiotic, libidinal and institutional equipment of the most deterritorialised
fractions of the bourgeoisie. However far back one goes in the political and
literary history of feudalism, it seems that one finds the originary terms of
the libidinal division of labour between the nobility and the bourgeoisie,
a division that is correlated with the double political game of the latter.
Whilst the aristocracy carries its faU haughtily, like a destiny, the bourgeoisie
slyly arranges its own inevitable triumph - if only to expel its most
unbearable faciality traits by projecting them onto the image of Lombard or
the greedy Jew. Yves Barel has pointed out from the eleventh century on, the

30
bourgeoisie alternately relied on feudal segmentarity and provincial and
royal centralising powers in a sort of complex ballet, in which earldoms,
towns and nobility are allied two against three ('If the rules of the game
stayed the same, the alliances that were made were as effective as they were
temporary and changing:). That is how the territorial establishment of
the deterritorialised machines of the bourgeoisie not only progressively
emptied the old power formations of their substance but in addition
produced a series of replacement models to ensure the continuity of their
social repressive frame.
Let us note nevertheless that long after the French Revolution, and even
as a residual territoriality, the aristocracy continued to maintain a place
amongst the new castes of notables that wasn't negligible. But paradoxically
it will be in the form of a deterritorialised archaism that it will traverse
contemporary history and will continue to play, to the present day, a very
significant role in the popular imaginary sueh as it is manipulated by
the so-called 'sensationalist' press (royal marriages, etc.). Moreover, another
part of the old aristocracy was converted into a certain number of 'modern'
economic, military and political sectors: we know that even today, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, has remained one of its privileged
poaching grounds. But there too, the key thing is not to go searehing on the
side of territorialised powers but rather on the side of libidinal conversions,
mutations of value, experiments with new kinds of bosses with which the
aristocracy has got mixed. In effect, starting from the moment that one
agrees to envisage historical phenomena not just from their large-scale
political and social angle but equally at the level of their molecular libidinal
metabolism, considering that bourgeois semiotics purely and simply
annihilated those of the aristocracy becomes less evident. No more, in any
case, than the proletariat would succeed in making those of the kulaks and
the bourgeoisie, or even those of the old 'oriental despotism' (which Stalinist
bureaucracy seems quite naturally to have 'rediscovered'!ll) decay after
'Red October'. The machines of Collective equipment, capitalist semiotic
machines can coexist perfectly weIl with the 'archaic' machines of the
aristocracy or the 'progressive' machines of the workers' movement. The
politics of modern states consists in making aIl that hold together: a certain
conception of public service, of welfare, of planning, etc., of pressure groups,
lobbies, mafias, micro-fascist systems of value such as those that animate
historical filiation - the France of Du Gueslin and Joan of Arc, the Germany
of the Teutonic order, Tsarist Russia, Zionism's promised land, etc. In this
domain of the collective economy of desire, history doesn't necessarily
proceed according to a linear progression through earlier 'stages'. It conveys
blocks of the past without any Aufhebung, it opens up the future at the same

31
time as it closes it down, it works on itself through zones of collapsing and
reterritorialisation. Everything stays in the same place, the best and the
worst, the possible and the impossible. One can saythat at one and the same
time it knocks everything over in its passage, that it transforms everything
irreversibly and that it changes nothing, that it piles stratifications up on top
of one another.

The capitalist revolution hasn't stopped detaching new ruling classes and
new kinds ofbureaucracy from the old power formations. Starting with the
French Revolution, its institutional proliferation took on a new character
in relation to that which had engendered the bourgeoisie of the Ancien
Régime. It no longer only concerned an urban space and a codified
economic field, it no longer just concerned itself with differentiating
cities, 'conditions: revenues, habitats, benches inside churches, but also -
and more fundamentally - libidinal and semiotic mechanisms. The old
bourgeoisies controlled power over social and economic sectors that were
easy to find. The new bourgeoisies invaded everything. Man has become
universally bourgeois. The old complex - absolute distance of conditions
and imaginary symbiosis of the nobility and the people - has been
liquidated. The formaI unification of conditions ('liberté, égalité, fraternité')
is in fact accompanied by an extinguishing of the old personological and
affective values.
Coded personological relations, of the lord-valet, master.. apprentice,
kind, disappeared to the profit of a regulation of general 'human' relations,
founded in the main on abstract systems of quantification bearing on work,
on salaries, 'qualifications: profits, etc. In the last instance, the socius isn't
'anyone's' affair, but is an affair of decoded flows. The capitalist revolution
attacks aIl the old territorialities, it dislocates rural, provincial, corporate,
communities, it deterritorialises feasts and cuits, music, traditional icons, it
doesn't just 'colonise' the old aristocracies but also aU the marginal or
nomadic strata of society. But its systematic enterprise of deterritorialisation
of social groups is accompanied by a production of replacement territories
adapted to its functional requirements and to the maintenance of its power. 12
This reterritorialisation is carried out according to two modalities: by a
negotiation, a permanent compromise with the residues of territories that
had been 'surpassed: and through the 'launching' of new territories, through
the equipping of the socius with new models allowing desire to continue
to 'ding on to something: One might consider that the first task would be

32 OF
devolved onto stable (political, legal, religious, etc.) public institutions and
the second onto the proliferating network of collective Equipment. In fact,
interactions and a complex combinatory result in a constant entangling
of these two kinds of component. But schematically, one can distinguish
two domains to which the same process of deterritorialisation and
reterritorialisation applies, miniaturising and functionalising the elements
that it concerns: that of capitalist equipment and that of archaic institutions
and social stratifications. An example involving the first domain: the
bourgeois-religious proto-equipment of the Middle Ages, which had
succeeded in making the politics of the so-called Peace of God prevail, will
be internalised and universalised to result, in the eighteenth century, in the
miniaturisable equipment of the 'spirit of laws' or of Kantian morality. An
example involving the second domain: the great territorialised social entities
that were globally invested with a magico-religious character - Royal power,
the power of the Church, the nobility, the rural community, the corporations,
etc. - will be worked over 'from inside' and redeployed for other functions;
the libido will now attach as a priority - although always more or less in
resonance with the old systems to residual territories such as domestic
space, family feeling, a certain cult of childhood, the faciality traits of the
bureaucrat, the policeman, the doctor, the teacher, etc., without forgetting
those of the unconscious superego, which psychoanalysts characterise as
maternaI (one might weIl ask oneselfwhy).
But the new function of capitalist equipment will not for aIl that manage
to stabilise society by making it crystallise according to clearly delimited
entities and by imposing on it a properly coded functioning. 'Behind'
its institutional relations, assemblages, unforeseeable lin es of flight that
threaten it from inside, will not stop appearing, in a sort of inflation of
innovation or which will set off mechanisms that will, in return, block it
up in itself. Thus it will always be possible for these two domains of the
equipmental fun ct ion (that of capitalist equipment properly so-called
and that of the residual stratifications that it cuts out or of the artificial
territories that it pro duces ) to be called into question through the function
of a collective assemblage that, in a very different mode, crystallises not
persons but machinic ensembles of signs and infra-personological organs,
that effects of which concern the big molar groups and/or the microscopie
segments of the socius at the same time. This assemblage function, as
we will see later on, could either accelerate that of the equipment by
reinforcing its repressive capacity, for example 13 - or it could work against
it by pushing capitalist deterritorialisation beyond its internaI limits and
by creating the conditions for a taking charge of aIl possible equipment by
collective assemblages of revolutionary desire.

33
Table summarising the two domains of application of the equipmental function and the
process of deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation-miniaturisation of equipments and residual
stratifications
OId regime Bourgeois and bureaucratie regime

Capitalist equipment The 'Peace of God' codifies social orders
that are radically distinct from one another.
Royal power is in the position of external
arbitrator vis-à-vis the territories of the
nobility, towns, corporations, etc.
The 'spirit of laws' and conscious morals controls
a universal individual 'from the inside'. State capitalism
keeps a hold of ail the cogs of society
on the basis of a proliferating network of deterritorialised
equipment

Residual institutional El relative stability of the rural community El expropriation of old territories to the profit of
and libidinal and of feudal segmentarity economic and political segmentarity (free enterprise,
stratifications radicai-socialist republics, deviationism, gulags, etc.)
El magic-religious characteristics attached El development of the family sentiment and the cult of
to king, to trades, etc. childhood (faciality traits of the bureaucrat, the
policeman, the doctor, the teacher, the superego)
 1 1 1

Semiotisation
investments
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, weIl 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 pro duces 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 do es 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 fundamentalline
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 allievels, economic,
social and political, the question of a collective taking of the floor [prise de
parole 1 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 me ans 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 Inade 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 su ch
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 univers al '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 calI 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

36
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 des ire in the symbolic
order, etc. th en become founded. But the inverse evidence could equally
impose itself~ that a collective assemblage function, an optional matter that
is more subtle th an aU 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 an
manifestations of such territorialisation (the annies 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 aIl references to a model or to a transcendent and univers al
system of categories!

When we note the fact that semioticians (with sorne 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 confronte d, 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 an other modes of
expression, indeed for aU other modes of encoding. AlI 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

37
method, it is the symptom of an infimtile, 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
retro active fashion, that syntheses at the most generallevel 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.
ln 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

38
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 cornes 'from outside', the emergence of new machinic
ramifications, the springing up of what we caU con crete 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 leveZ of their intrinsic functioning they escape from the
redundancies that fashion the everyday. In a general fashion, we may
consider that an these components of 'natural' co ding (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 Hfe of social groups but also
onto numerous modes of semiotisation relative to the cosmos, scientific
creation, artistic creation, revolutionary action, etc.

39
 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 th an 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 stratifièd systems. This
is the pro cess 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

40
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 schoo1, 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 formaI 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 whieh
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 whieh, 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 de clare, one only every deals with limit cases, which border lines, a
hysteria equally presenting the traits of paranoia, a schizophrenie 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 terrns of

41
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 cafter' that of schoo1. 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 schoo1. 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 oflabour 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?
1s 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

42
division of castes and of classes, sexual and ethnic segregations, etc., are
preformed. That is what pro duces what Gilles Deleuze and l have attempted
to determine around the notion of a 'bureaucratie 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:

e One would consider it as being nothing more than a lay manual of

repression for the gridding and militarisation of childhood.
e 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
th an 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 schoo1, for ex ample,
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 informaI
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 animaIs and becomings-anima1,8 toys and games, on what
Fernand Déligny calls 'near space'9 so as to deterritorialise it, to 'sublimate'

43
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, bureaucratie,
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 whieh implies a 'superegoie' investment of professional roles and
hierarchieal functions. For a large part, it is this same libidinal tooling that
one comes across as the basis of the modelling of phallocratie sexual
behaviour in the couple or the polities 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.

44
 1

1 1

The institutional simulacra

instituted politics
A certain number of people are starting today to bec orne aware of a general
crisis in Collective equipment. In the aftermath of the 'events of May 68',
agitations of varying degrees of intensity and kind haven't stopped
weakening their institutional foundations. But after having in the course
of time more or less recognised the 'gravity' and the significance of the
phenomenon, the political class in its entirety has woven a fabric of
forgetting or of misrecognition around it. 'Sure, May 68 was important, but
basically it didn't change anything .. : Or it has made the event banal: it
pretends no longer to be surprised by the crises that since then haven't
stopped following on one after another, and finds it normal that one day
prisons are burning and soldiers are forming committees, and that another
day prostitutes are invading the churches or, inversely, the clergy are dying
of emotion in the corridors of brothels! It is a matter here of accidentaI
occurrences, internaI jolts that do not fundamentally call institutions into
question. Even when the most vigilant of observers start to admit that it is
perhaps a matter here of symptoms that announce a deeper crisis, they
refuse to consider that what can happen in schools, prisons, the barracks,
etc., can calI into question anything other th an the intermediate links, relays
between the power of the State and social classes. Political and university
modes of thinking, on the left as mu ch as the right, refuse to accept the idea
that something realIy important might develop from this 'Httle side' of
history. In March 1968, no-one could imagine that 'student agitation' would
end up threatening the established order and would constitute a sort of test
bank - perhaps the first of its kind - of what a socialist revolution in a
developed country might bel The only people who really had the political
measure of the collective vertigo, the only people who really envisaged a
revolutionary outcome, were neither leftist militants nor the professional
revolutionaries, but the most senior men of State, beginning with de Gaulle,
Pompidou and the leaders of the military. The origin of the blind point, of
the conceptual gap that made politicians, militants and mImerous
researchers miss the sense of such events, it seems to us, resides in the fact
that from the point of view of the molecular fi.mctioning of the socius, they
did not spot that 'visible' entities like the State, the city, the family, the
individual had the characteristics of simulacra. Unlike these latter, Collective
equipment and the collective assemblages of enunciation are never the
result of simple interactions between homogeneous domains national,
regional, family, individual sets, etc. In the first place they mesh/are plugged
into capitalist flows as deterritorialised flows that traverse and decompose
archaic territories (for example, international flows of exchanges, flows of
credit money, informatics flows, flows of scientific and technical, medical
knowledge, etc.). AlI the old facades of the State, all the venerable facialities
of traditional powers - the power of the father, the boss, the schoo1, religion,
medicine, etc. - are so decrepit that it has now become necessary to re-
equip each institutional domain with a safety territory, an artificial faciality,
that of the banker on the billboard, for example, who proposes the friendly
image of a capitalism 'entirely at your service: that of the receptionist in the
social security office ... The 'welcome' has become very important for
power! People are so lost, so maddened by the deterritorialisation of the
gears of the social, of space and time, like frightened animaIs, power feels
the need to calm them down, to put [soft] music in lifts, to make them
parade and to channel them in a continuum of spaces modelled by design
techniques.
If it happens, whether by accident or by lack of foresight, that a national
faciality of the kind that has been put in place in France with the advent of
Gaullism is not erected at the summit of the audiovisual edifice of the
Power of the State in good time, then the whole of the social imaginary will
vacillate, as in Italy for sorne time now or more recently in the United States.
In effect, what cannot be tolerated is that the fact that State power is onlya
facade bec orne too bluntly obvious, everywhere preceded and exceeded by
pressure groups, lobbies, parallel police forces, mafias, military-industrial
complexes, 'supranationals: etc. The intervention of these infra- and supra-
State machines is manifestly much better meshed with contemporary social

46
and economic realities than governments and parliaments, the formaI
'coordination' and technocratie planning that occupies the foreground.
What the political class has not yet realised is that the consistency of the
social fabric, its syntagmatic weft, no longer results from the composition of
homogeneous groups of individuals, families, classes or nations, but of
heterogeneous assemblages that are not only constituted of human persons
but also of organs, of modes of semiotisation of territories, of machines,
semiotic flows, international connections of every kind ... If 'political'
representation is thus only a screen on which what we call institutional
simulacra, which it constitutes as homogeneous but empty sets, are
projected, if it misses the heterogeneous assemblages that give real
consistency to the socius - assemblages which, let us repeat, do not result
from simple systems of interaction between human persons, but put into
play a complex metabolism of organic and perceptual functions, modes of
semiotisation and of subjectivation, machines and flows of all kinds - this
isn't the result of ideological 'errors' because, from this point of view, all the
ideologies of left and right are equivalent, but of the mode of enunciation
that it promotes. In other words, a congenital incapacity to grasp anything
other than that for which it has been put together, that is to say, icons,
personae, stereotypes without any real hold on flows of desire and economic
flows. Political life is played out at the level of collective assemblages of
desire and of the equipment of power. That these latter today occupy the
foreground to the detriment of the former ought not to mask the problematic
that they harbour, that is to say that the new technologies of social alienation
that they put to work appeal to, and to a certain extent, render possible,
radically new modes of restructuring of revolutionary struggles.

Modern collective equipment can no longer be considered to be merely

parts that are adjacent to the previous social systems. With them, one is no
longer dealing with institutional objects functioning as simulacra or as
ideological state apparatuses. On the contrary, to the extent that the old
power formations have been miniaturised and are concentrated on them,
and form the basis on which most of the deterritorialised flows that are able
to transversalise and re-stratify the diverse segments of the socius are
tooled, they from now on play a fundamental role in the delimiting, the
control, the neutralisation and the recuperation of new revolutionary

47
powers, the embryos of collective assemblages that correspond to them, and
equally in the 'redefinition' of personological simulacra of aIl kinds - the
new fashion of playing one's role as a father or a mother, or the style of the
PSU whizz-kid or UDR go-getter! .. , Thus the 'optional matter' that is
treated by the collective equipment before any social or economic
functionality may be reduced to the differentiation and articulation of old
territorialised powers into two kinds of new State powers: a molar political
power and a molecular semiotic power. Let us specify that in this last
modality State power will not just intervene on the 'small scale: at the local,
family, individual or infra-individuallevel, but also on the large scale, so
true is it that the 'grand poli tics' can enter into a dependence on a
'micropolitics' of des ire under certain circumstances. Inversely, molar State
power will be incarnated as much in major forms of equipment as in
semiotic micro-montages. In fact, we are in the presence of the same
network of equipment at every level, which ensures the control of the
deterritorialisation of capitalist flows and the reproduction of the
reterritorialising models that are related to it. It's not governments, councils,
unions or political parties that have a 'hold' on Collective equipment but a
sort of Super Equipment that is at one and the same time everywhere and
nowhere, which crosses national borders, linguistic barriers, antagonisms of
class, race and sex, the constellations of families, bodies, organs and even
mental 'faculties'.2
As a network of Collective equipment, the capitalist State has taken
charge not just of development and production that would not be
economically profitable - the equipping of infrastructure, certain primary
matters in energy, communication networks, production of flows of
knowledge, the reproduction of the flows of educational training, the
accumulation of 'knowledge capita1'3 - but it has equally taken over the
relaying of the production of values and of the 'normalising' icons of social
libido that had hitherto remained the privilege of traditional territorialities
and old religious machines. State power is no longer content to be an
internaI means of arbitration and an external means of coercion for
capitalism. It now intends to function on an equal basis in the heart of
capitalists and in that of the proletariat, in the hearts of men and women,
those of the young and of the old ... It isn't just its police, its armies, its
administrators who are on display on every street corner, interfering in
every sequence of everyday life, and who don't stop trying to kit the territory
as a whole out as a super-equipment-gulag, but it infiltrates itself everywhere
in a molecular form, in schools, the family, in the unconscious. In order to
be everywhere at once, it multiplies its one face, with its central-black-hole-
eye, which dispenses univers al guilt, or delegates to different personae the

48
concern with chanting refrains which, although apparently antagonistic, in
reality playon the same range of faciality traits. For example, through
circulars from the Ministry of Education, the molar power of the State
recommends stopping giving homework to children, whilst the molecular
power of the State at the heart of the family, which generally results from a
highly problematic compromise between the father and the mother, will
demand of teachers that they re-establish it!
In reality 'constituted' powers merely float alongside this super-machine,
like pilot fish around a wh ale, without obstructing anything essential in
its functioning. What they think are big decisions on their part generally
reduce to a taking into account of tendencies that are sketched out
elsewhere, to a registering of statistical changes and to the scaffolding,
on that basis, of predictions and plans that are inscribed within their
direction. The 'true' power of the State is not political, in the customary
sense of the term. It is not the affair of men who, 'in their heart and soul' -
according to the consecrated formula, produce a rational discourse on
society and the public good. The discourse of opinion, the Brownian
movements that give the 'lives' of ministers and the 'life' of politics in general
their apparent consistency, tend to create the illusion of a coherent political
field. In fact, each subject of enunciation, each political spokesperson, is
more or less manipulated, like a puppet by complex machines, the outlines
of which escape him or her: bureaucratie, financial, economic, military,
technical, urban territorial machines, etc. Rational human discourse no
longer constitutes anything but an element that is adjacent and sometimes
entirely marginal in relation to the diverse machinic (material, semiotic,
demographic, ecological, etc.) processes concerned. And it is no surprise
that politicians turn out to be agents - of the CIA, for example.
In every circumstance, they are never anything but the agents of one
machine or another!

To save appearances, in a system that is no longer made of anything other

than appearances, it has become primordially important that a facade of
rationality find its cornerstone in a faciality of power, if possible, that of a
he ad of State with a clenched fist but a gentle face, who knows how to keep
his subordinates, who are themselves highly important, in their place, and
who know in turn, etc. Thus the unity of the socius is reconstituted on a
mirage: the gaze of the head of State, behind which is outlined that of the
chief of police, that of the boss, the teacher, the father, the gentle superego.

49
The consistency of the socius has thus become an aftair of resonance, a knot
ofimaginary reterritorialisation on the basis of which defeated territorialities
attempt to reconstitute themselves by propping themselves up on one
another, in the same game of fiction.
In the third part of this work, as examples of these 'aberrant' components,
we will set out modes of semiotisation that operate on the basis of what we
will call faciality traits and which, although ente ring a particularly
miniaturised formation of power, carry their eftects to the broadest social
ensembles. We have eftectively come to consider that, to the extent that they
are 'treated' by the machines of Collective equipment, realities that are
apparently as ungraspable, as fleeting, as 'subjective', as facial expressions do
not simply constitute ways of 'adorning' discourse, but are fundamental
semiotic components of capitalistic systems. Everywhere and at every
moment, a faciality of power hangs over institutions and social relations
of power. We know that faciality now plays a primordial role through the
intermediary of television, in political struggles, during presidential
elections, for example, but it also participates in the labour of producing
dominant significations on many other occasions. Rather than relying on
psychosocial or psychoanalytic simplifications, the analysis of a social
situation or sorne Collective equipment, ought to grasp not 'identifications'
in general but the constellations of faciality traits, the collective tics, the
stereotypes that model a local power formation. To what point can one look
a superior in the eye or smile at him? What is the typical interval that is
tolerated in such and such a situation, as a function of the hierarchical
scales of age, sex, race, etc.? In short, there is an entire micropolitical
ethology that should be explored and experimented with here, because,
once again, Collective equipment is not just walls, offices, circulations,
transmissions of orders and information, but also and above aIl, a modelling
of attitudes, of rituals of submission that are imposed across multiple
semiotic components. The personalisation and the faceification of powers
in contemporary societies do not stop being important. Paradoxically,
as production is internationalised [deterritorialisées], it seems that we are
witnessing a particularisation (a reterritorialisation) of the relations of
production and of social relations on the nation, the region, ethnicity,
the individual, etc. This reinforcing of the individuation of enunciation
doesn't in the least signify that now it is individuals who are tending to take
control of the power of the State, the power of the business, who are giving
history, the economy, its direction ... One brandishes phrases from Mao
Tse-tung, one establishes his face so as to justify directions that are
sometimes absolutely contradictory ... One brandishes the face of a
reassuring president to try to create the 'psychological conditions' likely to

50
'cool down' overheating money markets! But every time, there are complex
social apparatuses [instances] with oudines that are very difficult to define,
which utilise a faciality of power. Sometimes it is enough to show a face
to change the dimensions of a problem (to 'make an example', to set off
a scandaI: what happened with the presentation of the desperate face of
Mme Claustre on television). In fact, what is functioning here is neither
the person nor the face as such. 4 The face belongs to a complex constellation.
It only functions in so far as it puts into play dominant systems of
redundancies, that is to say, in so far as it arises from the general equipment
function that we are talking about here and which in practice implies its
dependency with regard to a particular network of equipment and a specifie
capacity to set off miniaturised equipment on which the power of the
bourgeoisie and of capitalist bureaucrats rests. To present the faces of
starving children from Bangladesh on television has practically no efTect,
because it is a faciality that doesn't make any dent in the imaginary of
affluent, Western societies, because it doesn't interest the machinism of the
dominant power!
What is the real function of the power formations of faciality equipment
in Collective equipment? What is the meaning of this personification of
power? Can one conceive that, one day, other relations will succeed in
establishing themselves between the State, institutions, collective equipment
and users? Can one still conceive of a withering away of this personalisation,
this hierarchisation of roles and responsibilities, in the extension of the
'withering away of the State' that for Marxists pre-Stalin, the index of
socialist societies towards communism? Despite the development of
struggles arising from what we calI the molecular revolution and the
disquiet of public powers in this regard, despite the large numbers of studies
in the domains of history and sociology bearing on everyday life, the family,
school, profession al relations, etc., the majority of'serious' people persist in
considering that everything that touches on these questions of desire can
only be a matter of literature or of anarchist daydreaming, and sorne even
affirm that it is a matter of'demobilising', even 'neo-fascist' themes! And we
should also reflect more on the question of knowing if such a viewpoint
really do es 'follow the direction of history', or if it is synonymous with
a dissolution of every organised society, aU social and economic 'progress'.
To our mind, it represents the only possible escape route from the
concentration camp-like world of industrial societies, the sole point of
connection with the rhizome of another possible world. But a few local
examples of contestation, a few minoritarian practices, dont make a world!
What will 'hold together' this new world, where, in particular, will it draw
the consistency of its collective power of labour from?

51
Capitalist equipment is the locus for the intersection of two types of political
struggle: macro-political struggles that can be located at, for example, the
electoral or union level, etc., and micropolitical struggles that can be
situated at the same leve1, including that of the State, but which everywhere
exceed social stratifications, institutional and legal limits (that is how
sometimes 'insignificant' events can set off considerable upheavals, or
contribute to the blockage of political situations. For example, the Watergate
leaks or blackmail over one's private life, the tax affairs of important figures,
etc.). It is impossible to say once and for aIl that one of these types of
struggle conditions the other. In fact, they play out in different registers and
are constant1y interacting. Although they are often the result of statistical
effects relating to molecular evolution or mutation, molar politieal struggles
equally have at their disposaI their own margin of autonomy, and can in
turn influence the former. If it is true that mieroscopie 'accidents' or slow
statistical transformations, of collective sensibility, for example, can make
history topple one way or another, it is equally true that 'major' events, like
epidemies, crises, wars, invasions and revolutions, can set off or accelerate
metamorphoses at the molecular level. Molar power relations have as their
function the 'framing', the hierarchisation of the social fabrie, whereas
relations of molecular potential constitute its warp and its weft, but in the
living mode, as a function of collective assemblages with changing contours
and of praxes that rebel against sociologieal and economic invariants. Being
centred less and less round the individual, the family, the schoo1, the town,
etc., the dynamie reality, the energy and drives of the socius can be
crystallised around sometimes minuscule elements - an organic symptom
or a corporeal semiotic trait, the red cheeks of an employee who a foreman
chas a word with: for example which are required to appear in certain
circumstances as a function of certain relations of force and somehow
'independent1y' of the persons concerned.
It can be organised according to large-scale groupings putting into
play multiple economic, social, political, legal and institutional groups ... as
is the case, for example, with what today is called the 'crisis amongst the
youth', the 'crisis in the army: the 'crisis in justice' ... Rather than fixing this
reality as does the collective equipment, rather than codifying and
institutionalising the relations between molar powers and molecular
potentials, the collective assemblages implicated in these microscopie
crystals or these vast group movements do not stop calling them into

52
 question. They disorientate the systems of cause and effect, the polarisation
of objects and subjects, they undo limits, contaminate new fields, miniaturise
their efft:cts, 'work' deterritorialisation in every possible direction. Where
they manifest themselves, it quickly becomes illusory to pretend to
circumscribe a problem to a definite object or a responsible subject, an
equipment or a ministry (Monsieur Prostitution, Madame The Condition
ofWomen ... ). How could one fail to think that the emancipation struggles
of women will only find their full scope on condition that they manage
to calI into question at the same time the everyday and sexual lives of
couples, family relationships with children, the relationship to production,
to creation, etc.? The collective assemblages that are manifest in raised
consciousness and struggles cannot have one axis alone, a fixed root, on the
basis of which 'solutions' might be deduced, according to an 'arborescent'
logic. It is only at the end of a process of living institutional analysis, that
is to say, of a politically and micropolitically engaged analysis that one
can dis cern what sort of 'rhizome' they correspond to. We cannot insist
enough on this point: from the moment one cornes into contact with this
type of machinic and institutional assemblage, aIl the micropolitics
contaminate each other, that of the observed and that of the observer, that
of the judge and that of the delinquent, that of the militant and that of the
'militated' ... The stakes become political at the deepest level of libidinal
investment: either one opts for the stratification of power, one's most
intimate being included, or one agrees to follow the lines of flight of desire
and to rid oneself of pre-established equipment, dominant redundancies,
constraining significations ... To our mind, it is against this question that,
failing to recognise in it their genuine 'optional matter', every current
problematic of social change, innovation and collective experimentation
stumbles.
Envisaged from the point of view of this micropolitical analysis, the
question of Collective equipment would thus have to be distinguished from
the traditional functionalist approach, but it ought also to find its articulation
with the 'archaeological' approach. Michel Foucault has shown us to what
extent this is able to renew problems like those of the psychiatric hospital,
the prison, the school, etc. Foucault himself indicates this direction: 'one day
we should show how intra-familial relations, essentially in the parents-
children ceU, have become ''disciplined'', absorbing since the classical age
external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatrie,
psychological, which have made the family the privileged locus of emergence
for the disciplinary question of the normal and the abnormal.'5 We could thus
schematically characterise two types of approach, according to whether
they propose either:

53
 Ct to bring to light an external archaeology of power formations
whose functioning is exercised on the basis of the extrinsic systems
of redundancies of explicit codes, manifest repressive instances: for
example, the constitution of educational, medical, psychiatric
powers, which model the family, the body, the individua1, desire
'from the outside' as a function of particular micropolitical and
micro-physical technologies; or
Ct discern the emergence of these same power formations on the basis
of molecular networks of desiring machines that traverse the levels
of the body, the individual, the family, the schoo1, the army, etc, in a
much more subterranean way.

Neither of these two viewpoints can have any anteriority or priority over
the other.
Nothing is ever definitively gained on either side. If it is true that the
basic objects of the social economy of desire are no longer supposing that
they ever have been 6 territorialised groups of individuals and families, but
transpersonal multiplicities tending to escape weIl established stratifications
and contextslframes, it is equally true that these same multiplicities can
be taken up again in the play of molar apparatuses linstances] precisely
because they have been felt to be threatening by these latter and nevertheless
haven't succeeded in setting off collective assemblages that calI them into
question in a decisive way.

'Collective analytic' interventions

the social unconscious
In a more general way, it has to be admitted that, whatever the nature of the
relations of force that they manage to establish with the equipment of
power, these assemblages of desire cannot completely escape from relations
of signification and social relations, understood this time in the usual sense.
AIso, the analytic entry route at the 'intermediary' level of Collective
equipment that seems necessary and possible to us is not to be opposed to
the 'massive' political pathways, or to the very small scale analytic pathways.
It should be a matter of complementary interventions calling each other
into question. The 'political' interferes with the micro-social, the familial,
the inter-individual, and the infra-individual, whereas the 'libidinal'
interferes with the political at whatever level one takes it. And at the level of
each of these types of interference, a collective pragmatics can be put in

54
place. Thus institutional reformism without any revolutionary horizon and
revolutionary movements without any immediate praxis of everyday life
must be questioned together. It is always possible to delimit a field of
analysis and micropolitical intervention that allows the rhizome of
collective assemblages of desire to make an advance. What we criticise both
the militants of groupuscules and psychoanalysts for is that in aIl sorts of
ways they impede the putting into place of such assemblages. And they do
this in the name of their knowledge, their programme, their apparatuses,
their specialisms, their particular knack. The molecular revolution is not
hostile to political movements, whether classically contestatory or protest.
It simply makes them take flight from inside, and opens them up onto other
outsides. It isn't hostile either to relatively localised practices of institutional
analysis (in domains and with objects that doubtless don't correspond to
those of administrative nomenclatures, but which are delimited as a
function of the fields of intervention, the army, the prisons, 'madness: etc.).
Thus a certain number of groups are endeavouring today to renew an
approach to the 'school' phenomenon by considering it conjointly, on the
basis of points of view that are 'lery different from one another. For example,
its treatment of spaces - the wretched dreariness of walls, corridors, 'play'
grounds, etc.; its treatment of noise and of speech the semiotic collapse
of aIl gestural, postural, mimetic, etc., components; its micro-social,
microeconomic relations; ev en its affective misery and the confusion of
children, linked to the isolation of families, the neuroses of teachers, etc.
What then circumscribes the outline of an analytic pragmatics is the
capacity of analysing group-subjects, however embryonic they may be, to
remain closely meshed with these different components. It may be a matter
of very modest enterprises, like the intervention of those educational
psychologists in primary school teaching, who conceive their role in a very
different mode to what it was a decade ago: they refuse to test, to stay
confined in an office, and endeavour to work directly with the children and
teachers in the classroom, in order to promote the starting of collective
projects. TIlere's nothing really revolutionary about that! But the simple fact
that they break something in the collective routine sometimes succeeds in
catalysing processes of the opening of the local group eros and to set off a
chain of entirely unforeseen phenomena of disinhibition that in any case
have no common measure with what might have been the result of
individual interviews or seriaI psychotherapy, such as are dispensed in
medico-pedagogical centres in their current form.
In a very different domain, a group lilze that set up by Michel Foucault
and a certain number of militants and intellectuals around the problem of
prisons - the Groupe d'information sur les prisons (GIP) may be

55
considered as a collective analytic and militant assemblage of this kind. At
the outset, its action was limited to the distribution of questionnaires to
prison ers and to information work. Then its contacts ramified and it was in
a completely different light that possibilities for struggle appeared, resulting
in a significant calling into question of the condition of prisons, the role of
the law and of prisons, of the attitude of public opinion and militant group
with regard to 'common rights' ... Certainly it wasn't the GIP as such that
'set off' the spectacular crisis that resulted in the setting of half of all French
prisons on fire! But the political importance that the revolts of the inmates
took was certainly not without relation to its interventions. Besides, these
latter induced others, in other domains, in the same style, which quite
naturally contributed to linking together questions that had previously
been separated (those concerning immigrants, homosexuals, drug-users,
prostitutes, etc.).
To my mind, the characteristic of this new mode of action articulating
political struggle with everyday life, the slogan [mot d'ordre] to research,
the intellectual and the militant to common law, to prostitutes, etc., is a
'collective analytic' intervention into the social unconscious, even if such a
project is not made explicitly as such. The object of'militancy' doubles up: it
is on the side of the domain of intervention, but also on the side of those
intervening. It is a matter of working permanently on militant collective
enunciation, not just on the statements produced. What is important is
never to aim to guide or interpret actions. Wh en collective enunciation goes
wrong, when the group closes in on itself or takes a position of leadership,
then such groups will prefer to break up! Theil' rule of conduct is in effect
never to substitute themselves for pro cesses of the collective enunciation of
desire and for that reason, not to cut themselves off from any mode of
semiotisation that plays an important role in the economy of des ire of the
social field, whether it intervenes at the level of the individu al, the body, a
process of ideation, of perception, etc., whether it is 'intelligible' or not,
use fui or not, for 'the cause' ... In these conditions, it is not surprising that
the rhizome of semiotic components is not simply polarised according
to vectors that go from the family to the socius or, inversely, from the socius
to the family; it will be organised according to much more complicated
ensembles, branchings, maps that bypass traditional entities and
problematics. It will be able to put into play heterogeneous components
without any immediate relation with the usual system of cause and effect in
the domain in question.

56
 1

The third industrial

The breaks between professional life, lei sure and education, between
private life and public life, the valorisation of serious mindedness, even
being self-sacrificing, when it is a question of labour, seem to constitute the
very foundations of every society. Despite the evolution of the techniques
and modes of organisation of production, in 'experimental' sectors in
particular, the traditional imagery of the 'world of work: the faciality traits
of the manual labourer of the nineteenth century those of the miner
or the railworker for example - continue to serve as the basis for the
stereotypes concerning labour, such as it is conveyed in primary school,
amongst other places. If the labour is boring and repressive, it is not
fundamentally because of a mode of production founded on the exploitation
of workers, it is, above aIl, because it has to be this way, because the difficulty
and the obstacles offer an opportunity to overcome laziness and innate
bad habits. But if these clichés and allegories inherited from the first steps
in the industrial revolution continue to provide a recipe for schools and
for the mass media, the y in fact correspond less and less to the libidinal
models required by its current steps, which are sometimes characterised as
a 'third industrial revolution' and which are centred on the chemical
industry, atomic energy, automation and informatics. A coherent use of
systems of machinic enslavement (optimised and adaptable commands,
direct numerical control, self-learning systems, etc.) might permit the
accelerated replacement of systems of human enslavement bearing directIy
on the body, the limbs and organs of workers. On the contrary, the system
of production seems to reinforce the alienating constraints on work, as
if for the sake of it, even in the most modern, the most automated of
branches of production! Technical and scientific development as a whole
tends towards the liquidation of fragmented, production line work, of the
despotism of the jobsworths, and to a profound reorganisation of the
break between hourly and monthly paid work on the one hand, and that of
technicians and managers on the other. In reality the discipline and
hierarchy that were essential to the 'armies of workers' of the twentieth
century, only correspond today to the maintenance of repressive relations
of production. In fact, they run counter to the development of production
pro cesses which are led to call on not just the body, the adeptness and
the craft of workers, but also on their mind and, to a certain extent, their
libido.
The extraction of the deterritorialised schemas' required by the new
forms of the division of labour, the new organisation of society and the
generalisation of the regime of decoded flows imply a partieular treatment
of the collective power of semiotisation and of labour. 'The Chinese
communists experienced this when, in 1949, immediately after taldng
power, and having decided to reinforce the numbers of the Chine se worldng
class, they made a great many peasants come to the cities and the factories.
These peasants were so disorientated and frightened by the noise of the
machines and the agitation of the workers that it was decided that for a
certain period of time, the newcomers would have no other task th an to
move freely around the workshops so as to get used to their new working
conditions, to 'semiotise' their new environment. Collective mnemotechnies,
in whieh 'Man could never do without blood, torture, sacrifices: 2 after the
rule of 'ascetic priests: monastie discipline, after aristocratie 'etiquette: after
the confinement of manufacturing and schools, after the reign of cramming
and of 'competition animaIs' began to transfer the basic essentials of its
'memories' and a part of its logieal mechanisms into informatics machines. 3
This doesn't in the least signify that informatics will be led to seize hold of
the controls! It is even the contrary that might occur, the informatics
revolution bringing unprecedented means for clearing the field of empty
repetitions and opening up the possibility for the focusing of human labour
on decision-maldng pro cesses that by nature escape from the gridding of
informatics, which arise, that is, from the economy of desire. 4 It will thus be
less and less necessary to le am the list of subprefectures or soon even the
multiplication table: diagrammatie machines will tend more and more to
take over such operations. A new sort of indolence, a 'right to laziness: s a
'right to madness: 6 is opening up for us. As stringency can be referred to
machines, the machines of des ire will be able smoothly to take up the path
of efficacious molecular connections again. To be sure it is only a matter of

58
a point of view that is objectively possible here, because in fact the politics
of implanting repressive equipment doesn't stop thwarting and sabotaging
the collective assemblages of des ire that would allow it to be realised on a
large scale. In order to be affirme d, the new machinic memory, the new
social organisation - for which decision-making centres will be arranged in
a network and no longer subjected to one another hierarchically will thus
not be able to make do with the mass rejection of repressive equipment,
especially the miniaturised equipment like the power of the school, medical
power, the couple, the superego. It will have to take into account the
particular reproductive power ofwhich they are the bearers. It is condemned,
in sorne way, to itself pro duce modes of semiotisation and assemblages that
not only expropriate them of their current powers but which, in addition,
will continuously de-phase the incessant return of the function of capitalist
equipment.

Abstract machines
What then would happen if the hierarchies, the bureaucracies, the
phallocracies, the gerontocracies, were obliged to 'let go of the control
levers'? What would the new consistency of the social field be? To try to
advance with this question, we must return once again to the distinction
that we proposed between the function of Collective equipment and the
function of collective assemblage (machinic assemblage and assemblage of
enunciation). 1he putting into play of these functions in particular at the
level of the networks of Collective equipment has allowed us to show that
the consistency of the social field doesn't rest on any system of transcendental
invariants, any more than do es that of language or the libido. What makes a
'passage' possible from one level to another - from an economic to an
'ideological' level, for example, what guarantees what we have called social
transversality, doesn't depend on principles, categories or elements that are
delimited once and for aIl. Everything is to be remade, every time. Or, more
exactly, it falls to networks of concrete machines that manifest, in a more or
less transitory way, what we will call systems of abstract deterritorialisation
machines, to establish this consistency and this transversality in given
historical periods and conditions. The abstract machines around which
the con crete assemblages and equipment - to which we will return in the
third part of this book - crystallise are not external to social temporality,
they traverse, produce and reproduce it. They negotiate the regulation
of coefficients of deterritorialisation specifie to each semiotic component
and to each encoding component. But in passing from Equipment to

59
Assemblages, one passes from one regime of abstract machines to another.
With Equipment, abstract machines in their entirety depend on a single
command - Capital - around which an entire general staff is organised,
which grids the coordinates and values of the social field in its entirety in a
dualist fashion: the Signifier and Non-Sense, the Useful and the Useless,
Reason and Madness, the Beautiful and the Ugly, Music and Noise, etc.
With Assemblages, the abstract machines and consequently the concrete
machines that actualise them aren't organised according to systematic
computerisable 'implication trees', but in a rhizomatic fashion according
to formulae that are irreducible to the binary de composition that could
only make them lose their specifie traits to the matters of expression and
matters of encoding concerned. One cannot 'translate' the machinic traits
of a biological process into physiochemical or astrophysical traits. One
can compare them, one can make numbers, topologies, formalisations
of every kind pass into one another but not the position that it occupies
in the phylum of machinic mutations. Hierarchies of invariants always
remain external to the pro cesses themselves and it is the same with the
institutions of equipment and of the theories that are founded on them.
One has, on one side, the Law, Theory; on the other, praxis, experimentation.
But a theory-praxis functioning in the living parts of a society rupturing
with the hierarchy of pre-established values will articulate systems of
abstract machines deterritorialising onto themselves - and thus not in
any way eternally connecting to one another in an infinite rhizomatic
expansion, not so as to fix and stratify the socius but to ensure its transitory
regulation.
What makes desire work in a group, what makes a theory work, an
experiment, an art form? What makes everything topple into the clutches of
a repressive power formation at a given moment? What makes a certain
kind of abstract machine - whether the arborescent abstract machines that
refer in the last instance to Capital or the polycentric, polyvocal abstract
machines that function according to a whole entangling of open lines -
'take power' in particular circumstances? When abstract machines succeed
in escaping the regime of the capitalist economy of flows (that is to say,
when they free themselves from the institutional supervision, the equipment
of power that hierarchise, ritualise and reterritorialise them according to an
abstract and transcendent univers al order), it is because they have ceased to
be assimilable from near or far to Platonic ideas, Kantian noumena,
Hegelian or Marxist dialectical moments, Lacanian structural mathemes of
the unconscious, indeed even the modest 'states' of systems theory/ in
which forms they emerged from different theoretical horizons. On this side
of the spatio-temporal coordinates and the specifie traits of different

60
components of expression and encoding, then, they crystallise the knot ofa
problem, they guarantee the consistency of a 'state of fact' which, at the level
of concrete machines, will find itself fixe d, 'contingenced' in history and
the social field. They metabolise passageways between ditterent strata, they
model the pro cess of subjectivation without it being a question here of
a universal subjectivity - they open up or close down the possible, either
by allowing sometimes minuscule Hnes of flight of desire, to escape, or
by setting off revolutions in chain reaction, or by allowing themselves to
be taken over by systems of stratification. In the case of the collective
equipment functions and of collective assemblage functions that it is a
question of here, their role is one of problematising the political matter of
expression with which the group is confronted, what we have called its
'optional matter: and not one of staging or of representing. There are no
poHtieal universals, no 'optional matter' in general. At the heart of every
particular situation, of every disciplinary machine, of every surveillance
system, a certain type of mieropolitieal virus is at work, a certain
constellation of abstract machines is subjected to a power formation.
Although they entertain certain relations with historie al, pre-war fascism,
the different strains of micro-fascism that are at work in the United States
and the countries of the East, rieh countries and poor countries, Arab
countries and Israel, are, in the paths they follow, infinitely differentiated.
Thus no global response is possible, no 'broad antifascist front' to block
the way of this new threat: jàscism has already taken place/passed! It oozes
from the pores of capitalist societies. Consequently one must seize hold
of it where it has taken up residence, in its specifie forms, and that implies
a generalised struggle of every instance on a multitude of 'fronts'. The
polities of des ire essentially concerns these assemblages of 'particles of
possibility' that abstract machines constitute, as much at the level of a
group, an institution, or a the ory as of an art form. There is, then, no struggle
for freedom in general but the construction at every level of liberation
machines.
Why talk here of abstract machines? Because if one allows mieropolitical
problems to depend exclusively on concrete machines, that is to say, on
social institutions, equipment of all kinds, systems of interaction between
individuals, or systems of semiotic interaction, on ready-constituted theory,
on programmes, etc., one ends up reducing them so that they are nothing
more than ideologieal superstructures or apparatuses in Althusser's sense. 8
Consequently, whatever system of over-determination one cares to imagine
so as to recover a hold on the real, will be worthless. The infrastructures
whieh in the current state of the sciences are generally conceived as
necessarily being ruled by invariant laws, will always have the last word.

61
 Our 'detour' via abstract machines doesn't imply any idealist mediation.
In effect, it is not a question here of a system of ide as being related to
an instance dosed in on itself1 Abstract machines bring about a direct
passage between states of signs and states of things. With them, mental
l,
I1.
reterritorialisations pass into the background. The short-circuit that they
bring about between the deterritorialisations of material flows and the
deterritorialisations of semiotic flows - in other words, diagrammatic
pro cesses occur flush with signs and flush with the 'materiaI: Abstract
machines work the real, they fabricate it on the basis of topologies, equations,
Iii
multiple sets of references, but they also work the systems of signs so as to
III'l, place them on the same level as historical and cosmic realities and, under
li!
certain conditions, can prevent them from falling into the fixist world of
Il'
It:Il universal paradigms - what elsewhere we have called 'paradigmatic
Il' perversion: So we consider that before being an affair of material strata, of
energy, of forms or structures, the 'being' that is at the foundation of the
'existent' - at least in the social field considered from the point of view of its
economy of desire - arises primarily from this 'optional matter' such as it is
treated by the abstract machines. In other words, being is not reduced here
to anything identifiable or localisable in eternal and universal coordinates!
It is a question here solely of collective assemblages putting into play inter-
connection machines, co ding machines, semiotisation and subjectivation
machines, cutting out problematics, arranging territorialities, tranversalising
biological, ecological, economic, personological, institution al, etc. strata.
Such assemblages cannot be considered as being the subjects of a structure.
They both take part and are a part that is taken in the 'machinations' that
play out at multiple levels:

1 Abstract levels at which either:

CD New 'constructive' deterritorialisations, or
CD Reterritorialisations on the part of centralist despotic
machines such as Capital, the Signifier, etc., are brought
about.
2 Concrete levels at which either:
CD Balancing of relations of force, ritualisations, relative
naturalisations of diagrammatic pro cesses resting on the
miniaturisation of the equipment of power, on increasingly
tentacular programming and planning, or
CD Liberating tactics and strategies tending to optimise the
collective assemblage function to the detriment of the
equipment function, are brought about.

62
stage
We refuse to separate relations of production t'rom relations of semiotisation,
as the majority of theoreticians who invoke Marxism do. TIle control of the
means of production by the exploiting classes or castes, is indissociable
from the control of the collective means of semiotisation which, although
less visible, is no less fundamental. The more and more marked de-phasing
of the relations of production and productive processes therefore does not,
in our view, depend solely on an economic infrastructure. lt even only
constitutes one particular aspect of that which develops more generally
between the ensemble of social relations and the collective libidinal
economy; these latter, for their part, don't specifically arise either from a
superstructure determined 'in the last instance: according to the consecrated
expression - by the economic base. Whatever names are given to societies
founded on the exploitation of labour and of the libido, whatever the
historically discernabilised classes or bureaucratic hydra, with difficult to
determine outlines, who profit t'rom it, one is in the presence of one and the
same system of collective purpose: the reduction of useful production onto
market value and the reification of the value of desire as use and exchange
value.
Today, societies that calI themselves socialist, like those that invoke profit
and capital, are constrained to cling more and more tightly, sometimes
against the wishes of their most enlightened leaders, like Khrushchev and
Kennedy, to modes of semiotic 'subjection' that run counter to the direction
of history, and that in spite of aH their attempts at adaptation, institutional
innovation and miniaturisation of the equipment of des ire that they inje ct
into the masses. Thus, for quite sorne time already the conditions for
revolution have reached maturity without any social class appearing on the
horizon to attempt to adjust the socius to the immense deterritorialisation
that is traversing it and to redirect productive forces that on a global scale
are the object of fabulous squandering. From the point of view of the
economy of desire and semiotic integration into the dominant values,
the working classes have never fundamentally set themselves apart from
the bourgeoisie and the bureaucrats, and everything leads one to think that
they will be led to do this less and less. In fact, they tend everywhere, to
differing degrees, to collaborate actively in the enterprises of subjection of
capitalist societies.
The fundamental objective of taking political power at the level of the
State, by the 'avant -garde' of the proletariat, is considered by Marxist -Leninists

63
to be the condition sine qua non of an autonomous coming into consciousness
of itself by the working class. In fact, this objective hasn't in the slightest
avoided the contamination of the working class by bourgeois ideology. On
the contrary, it is by way of the integration of the 'avant-garde' into the rules
of the politieal and union game established by State power that it was possible
for this contamination to be extended into broad layers of the population.
The bureaucrats of the worker's movement have been in some respects the
initiators of the semiotie integration of the working class. As such, one can
legitimately consider them as Collective equipment, in the broader sense that
we have given the term here. Thus today one can only conceive of a struggle
against State bureaucracy and, in a more general way, against aIl concrete
manifestations of State power, on condition that one envisage in parallel the
dismantling of the bureaucratie structures that are paralysing the workers'
movement, popular and minority movements of every kind. State power is
everywhere and it is worth everywhere giving oneself the specific means of
flushing it out, including in the heads of the 'masses' and their leaders. But if
su ch dismantling were carried out in conditions of demoralisation and
without putting into place other kinds of assemblages of struggle, it would
bring about an immense social regression. The places where this new
problematic is emerging are thereby on the point of becoming the new hot
points of social and political struggle. TIle kind of analytie-militant struggle
that is becoming possible in a certain number of kinds of Collective
equipment, administrations, social sectors, etc., will not always be considered
marginal in relation to the major struggles in workerist citadels: Renault, the
railways, etc. And already there seems little doubt that if one day a
revolutionary surpassing becomes possible, it will notarise from these citadels
but probably from one of those sectors that appear today to be secondary in
this eyes of the militant representation and morality.
By substituting politieal 'optional matters' for globalising sociologieal
categories, one is in a better position to follow the contaminations that are
brought about between power formations of all sizes, and to grasp how
absurd it is to aim to change society, to want to construct an economic order
that no longer rests on the exploitation of one class by another, by contenting
oneself with transferring State power from the representatives of one class
to those of another and by wishing that the State then progressively lose its
usefulness as coercive force, starting to 'wither' of its own accord. State
power is not just the existence of coercive forces that are exercised at the
level of large social groupings; it is equally at work at the level of the
microscopie cogs of society. This doesn't in the least signify that it is
advisable to except everything from a simple calling into question of the
individual, or from a massive negation of the family! Thus the fact that not

64 UNES
only does centralised power have a politics concerning the conjugal couple
and the family,9 but that a micropolitics of the State functions within them
as weIl does not for aIl that signify that these institutions can be condemned
as such and be rejected out of hand! Even if it is only for a little while when
they get together, a couple can function as an assemblage of desire: that is
the time when every hope of a liberation from parental tutelage is permitted.
And even when a family seems to have been converted once and for aIl into
a phallocratie machine, despite the worst outbursts of phallocratie
authoritarianism, despite the worst fits ofjealousy, despite the micro-fascist
climate in which its members are very often shrouded, it can let minuscule
lin es of hope be reborn, fleeting tendernesses: 'lefs go on holiday, everything
will be better, things will change .. : And thinking about it, everyone knows
that given the state of chronic dependency that social formations as whole
reduce individuals, no matter what tyranny ends up seeming better th an
solitude!
State power, the exploitation of work, the alienation of desire are not
secreted solely by the grand capitalist or social-bureaucratie formations
that work over diverse social groups, the State and individuals. The two big
antagonist myths of the socialists at the st art of the century - that is to say,
that of the education of the masses and that of their Boishevik militarisation
- should be placed back to back: education controlled by State power
working towards an adaptation of the workers to the libidinal models of the
bourgeoisie, and in particular to an individuation of their enunciation; and
their 'militantisation, under all sorts of modalities unfailingly playing into
the hands of bureaucratie centralism and diverse forms of technocracy.

new struggle
A new type of struggle is trying to find its feet, less as a model than as a
demonstrable 'precedent' that another field of possibility is weIl and truly
open. The abstract machine that is in question here could announce itself
in the following way: yes it is possible to do something in all these situations
whieh, today, seem to be completely blocked, like in days past at LiplO
or today with the judicial system or prostitutes ... Yes it is possible for a
couple to 'change its way of living' or to do the same with children, when
one confronts oneself directly ... In the sector of social Equiprnent,
that devoted to childhood in particular, a whole series of oft.en confused
and contradietory microscopie confliets with regard to collective life, the
role of educationalists, psychoanalysts, teachers are played out within
establishments. Here too it would be wrong to think that it is a matter of

MOLECULAR REVOLUTION 65
struggles without any importance. Wh en one approaches such questions
with union representatives or politicians, they generally respond that such
struggles don't concern them, that they belong to the initiatives of the rank
and file. But in discussing fllrther with them, one notices that aH the
problems of physical and mental health, education, life-style, etc., have a
well-anchored reality in the dominant redundancies, the self-evident facts
generated by power, such as they are conveyed by the media: to look after
the sick, you need doctors, nurses, hospitals - who would dare daim the
contrary! To look after the mad you need psychiatrists, psychiatrie hospitals,
and also - why not - psychoanalysts; to educate children, the teaching body
of schools is needed, but also active methods; to maintain social order, a
body of policemen is needed, etc. And that all requires fllnding, equipment,
good administrators, good democratic control by elected politicians, on the
part of the childrens' parents, etc.
The optional matter here consists in the fact that no matter what 'social
problem' can be drawn towards the equipment and distanced from potential
collective assemblages. Without noticing it, one makes it the concern of
specialists, programmes, norms, budgets, supervision, etc., and one refuses
to envisage that it might be articulated with collective experiments, the life
of a neighbourhood, a taking in charge by 'users'. Now it is only in an
everyday struggle, at the level of everyday life, that relations of force can be
altered between on the one hand specialist knowledge and the political
authority of the representatives of the established order, and on the other,
this side of constituted persons and objects, the sometimes embryonie
desire, which is finding itself through a discourse that is initially inaudible
(that of children, the mad, delinquents or marginaIs, etc., for example).
Rather than accepting as destiny the excessive growth of social condensers
a sort of semiotic combine in which individuals and social relations get
machined which grid and control the four corners of the social field, can
one not imagine the passage to an active de-equipmentalising and collective
reassembling that bypasses too massive institutional structures: ministries,
bureaucratie oversight, factitious hierarchies? A multi-centred system of
social control would be enabled, having a maximal proximity with
conditions of an kinds, respecting singularities of desire and making State
power wither here and now?
In daiming to establish itself as a new science, Marxism supposed itself
to be different from all other doctrines. It sought to base the authority of its
statements and, between the lines, the authoritarianism of its practices
(and that since the establishing of the First International) - on the prestige
of other sciences. Next to it, utopias of all kinds, generous ideas, became
ridiculous and dangerous. 'One can only mislead the masses if one's

66
viewpoints on struggle are not founded on a scientific basis: Not only did
Marxism want the revolution to be backed up by the sciences, but equally
on the growth of the forces of production. Thus besides the working class,
the major motors of history have for it become the sciences and technology,
and the working classes of the nineteenth century no longer exist today
except in the heads of ideologues and retro militants! It's not a matter of
saying that the molecular revolution will be made against progress and the
well-being of the working classes. It simply seems to us that in large measure
it will happen alongside them, allowing them to evolve, even decline,
following their own paths. A certain dogmatic ideal of the sciences and a
certain ascetic, moralising ideal of workerist ideology no longer coincides
with the realities of today. Other scientific assemblages, other social
assemblages, open up other points of view. The revolution to come will not
be inscribed in the moulds of the past, it will not be synonymous with a 'step
backwards' or with the freezing of the current situation, like that which is
envisaged by the new technocratie mythology that is centred on the theme
of a return to 'zero growth'! We think, on the contrary, that it will be entirely
compatible with a tumultuous development in the sciences, of the forces of
production, artistic creations, experiments of allldnds, rupturing radically,
it must be emphasised, with the forms that they had yesterday!
Let us note, in passing, that the promotion of a difTerent myth, by Ivan
Illich,!! concerning a necessary return to human-scale tools, seems to go in
precisely the direction of the alienating miniaturisation of equipment that
we are condemning here. The ideal of socialism at the 'human scale: opposed
to the existence of mega-machines is, to our mind, a bad utopia. What is in
question according to us is not the size of the tools, machines or equipment,
but the politics of human assemblages as mu ch at the scale of microscopic
desires as of grand power formations. The more the family and the school,
for example, have been miniaturised in the course of development of the
last two centuries, the more tyrannical they have become, at the unconscious
level in particular. When, today, psychiatry starts to desert the 'walls of the
asylum' so as to become invested in equipment outside the hospital, or even
on the psychoanalyst's couch, the alienation of deviance doesn't for aIl that
les sen any: it becomes focused on new kinds of practices, personae, and
institutions, which are on the point of serving as a reference model for the
elaboration of an 'advanced technology' of power. !2 In certain circumstances,
Collective equipment on the large scale, like universities - semiotic
subjection machines for the selection, the modelling, of an elite adapted to
the semiotics of power, to the style and attitudes of future executives - have
started to function in the register of struggles of desire and have served as a
support for the emergence of collective assemblages of enunciation. During

67
the 1960s, one saw American universities become focal points of
revolutionary effervescence at the same time as they continued, more or
les s, to play their habituaI role as an equipment of normalisation. In these
conditions, it is understandable that traditional political organisations find
it impossible to appreciate the exact significance of the movements that can
develop there!

One could multiply the examples illustrating the incapacity of sociological

classifications to account for the politics of desire: let us consider, for
example, the functioning of an urban mega-machine - to borrow Lewis
Mumford's expression - like the agglomeration of New York. One may
think that it is incompatible with any liberatory assemblage of desire at aIl!
And yet, it seems to us that despite (or because of) its crowding and
subjection effects, despite the misery and violence that rules there, despite
the dismay and solitude that seems to mark every one of its inhabitants
in one way or another, even this urban continent, a gigantic semiotic
cyclotron, pro duces a certain kind of economy of desire, which is inimitable,
irreplaceable, and is felt as such by those who are attached to it as if to a
drug. What comes into play here, from the point of view of the economy of
desire, is not the conurbation, the air pollution, the absence of green spaces,
nor even - to a certain point the concentration of decision-making and
bureaucratie centres, but the way in whieh aIl these things are semiotised,
the way in which in this respect the assemblages of enunciation are tangled
and disentangled. Before knowing what a 'social project', to use the
fashionable expression, ought to be, it would be worth pinpointing what
collective life projects might be and, before equipping society, concerning
oneself with the turn that the assemblages of desire are taking. Miero-fascist
crystallisations of desire, applied to the apparently most rational, the most
harmonious, of projects, transformed the U SSR and China into continent-
wide gulags, whilst miero-revolutionary crystallisations of desire have, for
their part, started to 'change life' at a small and sometimes not so small scale,
for the inhabitants of certain dilapidated neighbourhoods in San Francisco.
Once again, this is not the level of priority and there is no order-word of the
type 'get your own house in order before you try to change society!' We
are simply affirming that change in institutions and equipment at the large-
scale caUs, at the same time, for a change in the molecular equipment and

68
micropolitics of desire. It is here and now, everywhere and at all scales, that
an analytico-militant labour is necessary so as to escape from the cogs, the
snowballing phenomena likely to accumulate micro-fascisms. But the large
repressive formations, whïch have a 'hold' on the social field and which
don't stop injecting back into it the micro-fascist drugs that they carry, must
be combatted at the same time and without delay.
One of the roles of collective assemblages at ground level (at 'grassroots:
as the Americans like to say) would consist precisely in making such
relations permanently evident. Not so as to make headlines from them or
photos, which would be consumed in a sort of contemplation-digestion the
final fun ct ion of which is an assimilation of every singularity of desire to
common values, the dominant redundancies; but rather to make them act
either in the social real or the modes of semiotisation of the unconscious.
The putting into relation will not be the result of a manipulation by power
which, in the end - on reading a magazine or newspaper will bring about
a forced association in people's heads, conditioning them mechanically to
make the 'connection'. Nor will it result from the speculative hypotheses of
researchers or the inspired intuitions of psychoanalysts; it will become an
analytico-militant programme l3 that consists in 'learning/teaching', Ids say,
semiotising collectively, the original conjunctions that have taken place in a
particular situation between sectors of very difTerent struggles. One is then
dealing with something that doesn't take place only at the level of a formaI
solidarity, but at the level of the intelligence and of the heart (there are
examples in Bellochio's film Fou à délier, about the hospital in Parma, of the
workers in a steel milllooking after mentally retarded and Downs patients;
in a completely different domain: during the imprisonment of the poet
Yann Houssin,14 on the pretext of creating soldier committees, there was the
constitution in Nimes of a network of people concerned as much with
military affairs as with poetry and regional struggle). What separates a
Corsican from a Breton or a Parisian are, apparently, socio-economic,
linguistic, even ecological characteristics, but in reality, it is micropolitical
crystallisations that are incarnated at the molecular level, like two ways to
love, to perceive the cosmos, to speak, to dance, read and write, etc. Grasped
from this angle, certain semiotic components of the 'Corsican question' can
join up with those of the Bretons or those of women's liberation, the
liberation of children, of homosexuals, etc., rather th an closing shut, as is
the case with a certain number of autonomist movements, in an opaquely
idiosyncratic and reactionary space.
There are not two successive times, one of which would consist in first
changing society and the other in [then] concerning one self with what
happens in real life. The politics of rhizomes and maps, which we will

69
oppose in the second section of this book to those of trees and tracings,
apply to the same objects and, most often, concurrently. They aim as much
at the large systems of social subjection as at the miniaturised power
formations that are at work in small groups, the family or individual. In
these conditions, there is no salvation to be expected from prioritising a
return to nature, to good feeling, tools within ann's reach, 'convivial
communities' ... Cities exist, so do armies, police forces, 'multinationals:
centralised parties, industrial complexes, electoral traditions. There is no
question of evading aIl that by waving a magic wand! But one can at least
try not to be taken prisoner by it, not to be the active accompliceof such
mechanisms, and beyond, and start to make this type of object and molar
relation, de-exist! Is it possible to hollow them out from the inside when
one cannot avoid them, and to dismantle them from the outside when the
opportunity presents itself even if it means carefully preparing such
opportunities? In a word, is it possible to undo the supposedly objective
laws of a society that daims to 'lay down the law'?

70
 1

collective assemblages
In order to legitimise its enterprise of 'tutelarising' abstract machines in
their entirety, the capitalist Law gives itself the trappings of destiny. It is
prepared for that by launching takeover bids for every system of laws, divine
laws as much as those of thermodynamics or of information theory! AU
laws, whatever they may be, faH, could fall, or ought to fall under its exclusive
control. Collective assemblages, for their part, dread the establishment of
this kind of law, founded on a hierarchy of transcendent essences, as if it
was the plague! They mean to give themselves and take back their laws as a
function of the historical contingencies and singularities that are proper to
them. To be sure they may be led to extract general laws, but always in a
transitory way. It is understood, from the outset, that the law of today should
disappear tomorrow in the face of other laws and assemblages. The legal
code has always been conceived as necessarily depending ideally on a set of
axial principles articulated according to a central arborescent system. For
their part, sociological laws are equally conceived as necessarily arising
from transcendent universals. It is not a matter here of advocating, counter
to such a method, of'taking one's desires for reality', of claiming to make the
social field fall under the rule of a univers al fantasy or an arbitrary
combinatory, but simply of noting that the movement of societies doesrit
depend on fixed constellations of ideas or on general laws of 'dialectical
progress' any more than do living species. The social field arises from the
double register of molecular mutations that are accessible to collective
praxis and to the interactions of molar groupings which block and stratify
it. So, either institutions and equipment that ding on to a system oflaws and
orders in an arborescent hierarchy, or a rhizomatic process of social
production circumventing these same institutions, this same equipment,
working at the level of collective assemblages of desire. Given a situation in
which des ire one day lays down the law, could it construct a more incoherent,
more unjust society than that which is secreted today by the morbid
rationalism of the castes and classes that intend to impose their norms and
their conceptions of order on everyone? We are constantly brought back to
this sarne line of interrogation: is the individual and collective expression of
desire compatible with effective social coordination, with the large-scale
regulation of economic life, with a respect for people?
Is not desire, as such, the bearer of a violence that is universal, the
antagonistic essence of man? If one mechanically identifies desire and the
body, if one fails to understand that the modern forms of human des ire are
deterritorialisations that traverse the socius, then one finds that it is
impossible to escape from a head-on libidinal confrontation that dassically
opposes social good will with bad animal instincts. Cut off from every
creative context, reduced to just corporeal semiotics, sexual des ire is
constrained to invest in a micro-fascist politics. Desire that is cornered -
that of de Sade, for example, but also that of Little Hans, a prisoner of
familial and psychoanalytic dogmas tumbles ineluctably towards forms of
tyranny, and if the opportunity presents itself, is ripe for investing in
repressive formations on the largest scale. But desire that is free to construct
its connections, that is free to articulate semiotics of all kinds, escapes this
infernal logic of the investment and overinvestment of power. Can it be
doubted whether desire can found a human law, participate in coherent
systems of regulation, rather than being incessantly brought before the
Law? It is enough to observe the functioning of multiplicities of desires
working fiat out - a mad love, a revolution under way - to note that efficacy
and regulation, even harmony, really do go together with them! As for
responsibility ...
But what is responsibility, what is this 'responsible before the law'? Here
one ought to go back again to what Nietzsche called the 'long story of how
responsibility originated' again! And also to what he wrote with regard to
guilt: 'the chief trick the ascetic priest permitted himselC! A taking into
consideration of collective assemblages of des ire - which constitute the
very reality of the social fabric, but which equipment functions to mutilate,
fracture permanently - would have as its corollary the extinguishing of the
institutions for reponsibilisation and the inducement of guilty feelings,
amongst which we have to count not just the visible tribunals of justice,

72
education, etc., but equaUy those that are invisible, unconscious (the
superego, inhibitions, neuroses, etc.). Whatever they may be, human
behaviour - a-social, mad, delinquent, marginal - implies nothing other
than such assemblages, which, beyond relations between persons, associate
group organs, economic processes, materials and semiotics of aU kinds.
Though not 'equipped' with transcendent Laws or representatives of the
Law, despite not being organised in the bipolar fashion of self-endosed
subjects-objects, which can easily be sized up, which can be held responsible
and made to feel guilty, such assemblages nevertheless constitute the place
where everything that remains alive in the socius takes refuge and from
where everything can start off again in the construction of another world.
We do not stop running up against the myth of the decision taken by a
boss, someone in charge, a delegate 'in his heart and sou}': the juror, for
example, who is called on to follow his 'deepest convictions' to erase from
society someone who he estimates is guilty. It is from the depths of oneself
that one daims to extract a truth in the interests of the collective, it is
interiority that daims to speak and act in the name of the community. What
an absurdity! To be sure, one day or another everyone is, by force of
circumstance, as one says, led to take themselves more or less seriously and
even, sometimes, to become a little megalomaniac with regard to their role,
to Clay it on a bit thick: to take the initiative 'in the name of Why not! But in
the name of what? The Law, one's conscience or soul? Or better still a
mission that history would have bestowed on your organisation? And why
not, very simply, 'at our own risk', this latter option not in the least implying
a choice made gratuitously, any irresponsibility, but on the contrary
demanding a constant recourse to an 'earthing' [prise de terre] - in
opposition to a reference to univers aIs fix:ed in the 'heaven of ide as' - that is
to say, a return to the territorialities of desire, in particular to those that
commit those who are in a position to make decisions 'in the name of'? And
it belongs to collective analysers to ensure the permanence of this return to
earth - not in the naturalists' sense but rather that of electricians.
It is therefore no longer just a matter of democratic control or of
psychoanalytic control but of a collective libidinal assemblage: 'OK, we
accept you speaking and acting in our name' but only to a point! To the
extent that the micropolitical assemblage that we constitute retains its
consistency of desire. If you daim to go beyond, you want to gain power
over us. And this power, as is known, will not cease to echo aIl the other
forms of power and willlead us, little by little, to the worst alienations. If
someone has to coordinate collective functions, this cannot be because of
an economy of power, but as a function of arrangements, techniques that
are as dose as possible to a collective economy of desire. It may, for example,

73
be necessary that one (or several) people are charged with deciding who
speaks in a discussion, or with dividing up work for a collective action -
without which sorne people will never be heard or will be the victims of an
implicit division of labour, reproducing old alienating segregations. But
when everyone stops finding a president on the rostrum, on television -
or no matter what leader, big or small, funny, th en there ought to be the
means within reach of making him give way.
In a collective assemblage, the individual, the self: responsibility, will
always be considered as an ettect, a result at the end of the chain. The
function of such an assemblage therefore doesn't simply consist in 'making
everyone agree' on common objectives, but in articulating the entirety of
the material, semiotic, economic and social components that pro duce a
collective desire, a group eros, capable of extricating itself from fascisising
micropolitics of every kind phallocratic, racist, capitalist, etc. Micropolitics
and des ire here are one and the same. The elaboration of a collective project
- what we will call the map of the group, in opposition to the tracings of
dominant redundancies - will endeavour to grasp the points of articulation
between the diverse components and of producing diagrammatic knots
enabling the passage from one point of deterritorialisation to another,
undoing the strata, without for aIl that precipitating the ensemble of residual
territorialities into a black hole effect. And the more the map of the
assemblage is worked over, the less the alienating effects of desire will be
in a position to Clay down the law'. Passions, madnesses, will be led, as if by
themselves, to turn away from objects such as the domination of groups, the
possession of the insignia of power, the control of the gears of production,
to be oriented towards more deterritorialised objects traversing the systems
of personological, phallocratic, narcissistic alienation. Ifs on condition that
such a micropolitical analysis attach itself to the productions of desire in
nascent state and at the level of their most immediate semiotisation that
the snowball phenomenon of micro-fascisms which we have evoked, can
be avoided and an organisation, a centrality recognised as transitorily
necessary, can become tolerable.

The cartography of collective assemblages will therefore not be reduced to

simple bipolar options of the kind: either equip with walls, institutions,
conditioned reflexes and facialities, or assemble with material flows and
flows of desire. Once it is posited, such an alternative can only explode into
a multitude of other systems of options:

74
 CD equip macro-social groupings;
CD equip micro-social and infra-individual groupings;
CD assemble macro-social groupings;
assemble micro-social and infra-individual groupings.

As an illustration of this 'complexification' of rhizomes and excusing the

slightly formaI character of this kind of exercise, we thus propose to
distinguish schematically:

1 Two domains (a simplification, of course!), as a function of the size

of the social groupings considered:
CD infra-individual and micro-social groupings,
CD macro-social groupings.
2 Two politics of desire, each concerning these two domains:
CD A politics of so-called molecular potential, a politics of social
de-stratification that we have been calling 'micropolitics of
desire' and which arises from a collective assemblage of
production and enunciation function.
CD A politics of molar power that equips, stratifies the socius and
is supported by power formations, and takes on an equipmental
function, implanting a Collective equipment network.

Size

Micro-social Macro-social

of molecular (1 ) (2)
potentials of desire Micro-assemblage of Macro-assemblage of
enunciation enunciation
Politics
of molar power (3) (4)
Micro-equipment of Macro-equipment of
power power

The table of intersections between these two domains and these two
politics leads us to examine four pragmatic options, as markers (but which,
let us stress, must not be considered as the basic elements of a systematic
politics that unfolds through successive dichotomies, through arborescent
engendering: in effect, by graduating the size of the groupings considere d,
by modulating the potentials and the powers, one would arrive at a political
map, a rhizome whose basic compositions would be infinitely richer).

75
Composition 1: micro-assemblage of
enunciation
A molecular politics of desire applied to a micro-social or infra-individual
grouping. For example: the assemblage for oneself for a small group of a
machine to 'change life' (an artistic machine, a system for the 'disordering of
the senses', the establishing of the least possibly alienating community).

Composition macro-assemblage of
enunciation
A molecular politics of desire applied to a macro-social grouping. For
example, the brief sequence of May 1968, when the whole of the social body
felt that 'something was shifting: without really knowing what, without
having got the measure of the phenomenon, the moment in which
'everything seemed possible', as repressive forces of aIl kinds that habitually
intervened by means of the government, parties, unions, groupuscules, had
not yet got a grip on themselves so as to recuperate and extinguish the
movement.

Composition 3: micro-equipment
power
A politics of molar power applied to a micro-social or infra-individual
grouping. For example: the fact of equipping a child with a repressive
superego (the suicides of children in Bavaria 'because of low grades: the
equipment of faciality: the he ad teacher, the school inspector, the social
worker ... ).

Composition macro-equipment
power
A politics of molar power applied to a macro-social grouping. For
example: the army, the police, the state education system, political parties,
unions, etc.
Now let us consider the binary relations between these elements -
also marked in terms of the same arbitrary fourfold division as our first
schema - that is to say, the way in which one politics is applied to another,
takes possession of and transforms an assemblage or equipment.

76
Composition 1 ~ 2
Micro-assemblages of desire snowball and 'trigger' major social upheavals.
For example: 'March 22nd' at Nanterre, which 'reveals', catalyses, struggles of
a new style in the University sector as a whole and in numerous other
sectors: the atelier des Beaux-Arts or the Situationist atelier at the Institut
pédagogique national, which produces posters and texts that emphasise the
style of the movement as a whole.

Composition 2 ~ 1
Collective macro-assemblages of enunciation 'trigger' molecular revolutions
within individuals, couples, families, modes of semiotisation that were
apparently definitively stratified. For example: in France after May 1968 (or
the USA in the 1960s), renowned researchers, senior civil servants, who
'drop everything' so as to adopt another way of life, altering not just their
relationship to work, money, sex, institutional systems, but equally their
relationship to time, to the body, perception, etc.

Composition 1 ~ 3
A micro-assemblage of enunciation calls into question a micro-equipment
of power. For example: a new way of being a pupil upsets the pedagogic
equipment that give teachers 'ballast'.

Composition 3 ~ 1
It was seen previously that the relations between the micro-assemblages
and micro-equipment (of molecular revolutions and small scaie fascisms)
could easily be reversed. That is why, to return to our previous examples, a
veritable war of attrition between these two kinds of micropolitical
compositions appeared in the secondary school system a number of years
ago. The molecular power of the State multiplies its attempts at recuperating
the molecular revolutions of desire, by implanting reformist micro-
equipment at the level of visible social space, and equally, at an 'invisible'
level, by the implanting of superegoic and neurotic mechanisms: inhibitions
in the face of schoolwork Cthat don't go anywhere'), which sometimes have
as their effect a veritable decomposition of the behaviour of the most aware,
the most combative, of pupils; introjection of the selection machine, which
frequently triggers phenomena of panicky fear before assessments and

COLLECTI\JrE ASSEMBLAGES 77
exams, but which result more generally in a general fading of other semiotic
components (the loss of a taste for 'something else'). The efIects of this
politics of mediocratisation - the objective of which is the fabrication of
good workers, good, submissive, well-integrated administrators evidently
does not spare those who are its agents! Hence the unbelievable rates of
absenteeism amongst teachers for depression and 'mental troubles'. Under
these conditions, the micropolitical assemblages of a certain proportion of
adolescents convert into an active, well-integrated micro-fascism. A 'ruling
elite' is thus selected by the reinforcement of systems of self-repression and
by the promotion of segregatory models that result in a contempt for those
'who are unable to foIlow' and by the targeting of the teachers, who are still
not weIl adapted to the system or who refuse to play the game of repression.
This micro-fascist 'initiation' of a non-negligible part of the collective
labour force certainly constitutes one of the most important tasks of the
Collective equipment belonging to the state education system, which in this
domain has long picked up the baton from the Church and the Army.
Another 'example' of the reversibility of the politics of revolutionary desire
and of micro-fascism as the scale of small social formations: 'life changing'
communities that faIl, sometimes from the moment that they are created,
for the charm and the iron rod of a narcissistic and phallocratie despot.

Composition 1 -';> 4
Micro-assemblages of desire revolutionise a macro-equipment of power.
For example: the Portuguese expeditionary force in Africa, eontaminated
not just by revolutionary ideas but a revolutionary style of guerrilla warfare.

Composition 4 -';> 1
Macro-equipment of power that produces and controls micro-social
assemblages of desire. For example, the formation of a commando esprit de
corps, 'Bigeard style'2: 'Our lads want it, they end up loving their leaders as
much as their mothers .. :

Composition 1 ~ 4
When things are c1ear, when stratifications are well stabilised, an interaction
of this kind between large-scale equipment and molecular assemblages of
desire is less probable. But it exists in the pores of the system, in phantasies,
without taking on an operative character. For example, in the matter of

78
molecular revolution, nothing happens, at least nothing visible, in the
Ministry of Finance - aside from a perverse modernist style finding itself:
'whatever happens, the representative of the Ministry will always have the last
word!' But in the bodies, which are even more ossified, such interactions
become very important. To get away a bit from the earlier scheme of categories,
Ids consider the particularly ambiguous example of the Magistrates' Union.
Is this the classic equipment of the union or a molecular assemblage? A
macro- or a micro-social formation. AIl of them at once, no doubt, but to
difIerent degrees depending on level and time. What gets caIled the 'crisis
in the justice system' is expressed today on the one hand by readers of Parisien
libéré demanding that magistrates be tougher, a reinforcing of repressive
equipment, and, on the other, by the development of militant attitudes and
contestatory assemblages amongst judges, lawyers, prisoners, educational
specialists, etc. But aIl these components interpenetrate: sometimes members
of this union turn out to be the most repressive, while the tradition al
Equipment is relatively 'liberal'. That is why one sometimes he ars it said today
that it is 'better' to go to prison than into a secure psychiatric unit.

Composition 2 --?o 3
A macro-assemblage of des ire undoes the micro-equipment of power or
produces new equipment. First case: in the panic of the 'events of 68',
foremen, the 'little bosses' change their style, but without moving in the
direction of a 'molecular revolution of desire: When they get back home
after work they are worse than ever Cafter aU l've had to put up with at work
today .. :). Second case: production of a new kind of micro-repressive
equipment: the militant who really loves being part of the security for the
Communist League; the playboy bureaucrat types in the PCF [Parti
Communiste Français (French Communist Party)]; even the long-haired
policeman in the neighbourhood of Huchette in Paris, or the 'Columba'
style of certain police commissioners.

Composition 3 --?o 2
It is hardly likely that the micro-equipment of power can directly engender
revolutionary macro-assemblages of enunciation. Such a composition
implies a prior de-equipping, of the 1~ 3 kind, resulting in what we have
called the 'snowball' phenomenon, of the 1~2 kind. One could repeat here
the same example of the decomposition of the old master-pupil relation,
which triggers large-scale movements.

79
Composition 2 ~ 4
A macro-assemblage of enunciation leading to large-scale equipment of
power. For example: after multiple shifts, the passage from Lenin's
communist party to the system of gulags.

Composition 4 ~ 5
Macro-equipment pro duces macro-assemblages of enunciation. But
here too it is doubtless only a matter of a relation that implies other
intermediary micro-social interactions. For example, in Latin Ameriea,
state or army unions out of which come the mass revolutionary assemblages
(which was never really the case during the first phase of the Portuguese
revolution).

Composition 3 ~ 4 and 4 ~ 3
The classic interaction between the repressive micro-equipment and the
macro-structures of power. For example the faciality of school teachers, the
'pedagogie' attitudes and enormous machine of the state education system;
psychiatric and psychoanalytie nosography and the 'heavy' equipment of
psychiatry; literary prizes; the mannerisms of taste and the instances of
central power ...
It is only as illustrations of the molar-molecular and micro-macro social
relations that we have presented these examples. Evidently a 'rhizomatic'
analyt.ic method would not proceed in this way! It would st art from concrete
situations so as to construct its own maps, to locate its tracings, its
arborescences, its potential connections, etc. As a consequence, even when
using the schematic modes of categorisation that we have just outlined, it
would never lose sight of their relative character. Let us consider, for
example, the so-called 'dual power' phenomena that appear during certain
revolutionary periods - the Soviets in Russia in 1917 and the military
power of the Bolsheviks; the grassroots committees in 1968 and the
ensemble of political, union, and state forces. Under such conditions, the
1 ~ 2 system between micro-assemblages of enunciation and revolutionary
macro-assemblages described previously, is led to enter into interaction
with the 3 ~ 4 system of micro and macro-social equipments of power.
We then have:

80
One final example: the prostitute movement (in France, but perhaps in
California above aU, where it has taken a more emphaticaUy political turn).
It puts into play an operation of power of the kind 3 -- l, of repressive
micro-equipment (brothels, pimps, the micro-fascism of clients) on
molecular assemblages of desire, and doubtless not uniquely at the level of
clients but also at the level of the prostitutes themselves, and society as a
whole beyond. 3 Besides, it st arts up a relation of the [3 -- 1J oE- 4 kind,
which associates the level of the primary subjection of desire with that of
the macro-equipment of power (collusion between the power of the police
and politicians, the mafia milieu, etc.). But one would still have to take into
account the fact that this assemblage functions as a safety valve, an outlet to
neutralise the sexuality of the déclassé, of those who do not manage to
adapt or do not have access to normative family systems. Thus one would be
led to bring to light one of the functions of the equipment of prostitution,
which consists in ensuring the reproduction of dominant moral norms:
'Look where sexuality leads, once it is exercised outside the stable
heterosexual couple .. : One can see that this kind of system of equipment
in its entirety returns to other equipment of the same kind. We have:

[(3 -- 1) oE- 4] -- 3

It is true that for a long time, anarchist polemicists had exposed the fact that
the brothel, hookers and pimps worked, on power's behalf, on this 'moral
equipping' of the nation. With the current prostitute movements, what is
relatively new is that prostitutes are no longer the object of humanitarian or
militant entreaties: the Californian movement, for example, is in constant
relation with the feminist and homosexual movements that in a certain way
it carries along with it. Thus the formalisation of our map tends to
complexify even further. We have:

[(3 -- 1) oE- 4] oE- 2

audiovisual
A new macro-assemblage of enunciation is in the pro cess of asserting itself
in the field of struggles of desire. And equaUy in the field of power. In
particular, that of the media, who thoroughly exploit the charges of
collective libido that power bears. A priori denunciations of such risks of

COILLECTI\JfE ASSEMBLAGES 81
recuperation matter little here. What counts is that measures to detect,
combat and neutralise sueh risks are taken, as and when required by the
development of the movement. Journalists in the mainstream press are
about the only people today who make the intuitive link between news
items and the libidinal investments of which they are the object. But they do
so only in the context of the machines of the press, which have no other aim
than to manipulate the audiovisual sensibility of the public at large, by
launching 'pseudo-events' around murders, kidnappings, rapes; concoeting
stories about the secret lives of public: figures in such a way that the collective
imaginary only invests in traps, and finds here a sort of outlet. 4 Nevertheless,
let us recognise that in this domain, on condition that they aren't too
'attaehed' to their hierarehies, certain journalists are sometimes mueh more
perspic:acious than profession al politic:ians and sociologists. In connection
with this irresistible growth of human interest stories in the headlines,
revolutionary groups now frequently spend their time popularising their
existence by linking their action to highly spectacular scenarios, such as
politic:al abductions, plane hijackings, etc. And in a more general fashion,
one can observe that the big subjects that preoccupy the politic:al c1ass and
mobilise the media are increasingly tributary to minuscule leaks whic:h at
the outset one might think would have no significant consequences; a
'mislaid' tax return, tape recordings that have been 'discovered' '" Thus,
beyond the controlled manipulation of power, a sort of global taking charge
of the facts of desire in the social field, although confused and contradictory,
seems to be in the process of putting itself in place through the fabulously
tentacular network of the media. And that makes one think that in this
domain the machine could just as easily st art to play against the State,
against bureaucracy and its audiovisual Machiavellianism. From this point
of view, a crisis like Watergate will have marked a spectacular turning point.
And one sees today how a handful of intellectuals in the USSR are starting
to exploit this kind of instrument in their struggle against the rnost
conspicuous forms of repression.

82
 1 1

Micro .. struggles
As we remarked previously, with regard to the events of 1968, it seems that
those who really took seriously the multiple forms of molecular revolution
were 'liberal' conservative politicians and technocrats. Unlike the classic
right, the traditionalleft reformists and archaeo-revolutionaries, they have
given up clinging to the socio-economic dogmas of the nineteenth century.
To try to face up to the social mutations that might one day submerge them,
they are endeavouring to make sorne of the questions that do not caU into
question the essential foundations of capitalist powers less weighty. But it
appears more and more clearly that, failing to unblock society by triggering
its vital forces, the principal effect of the timid reforms that they are
proposing consists in 'antagonising' the most conservative layers of the
petite-bourgeoisie. In any case, they estimate that this kind of reaction
constitutes the best justification of their politics. They feel that they are
'modern' against the right and left wings that this non-negligible part of the
electorate take their le ad from. That their points of view lead to the
systematic expropriation of old modes of habitat, work, commerce and
relations to the environment, modes that are relatively more territorialised
than the new, seems to them the inevitable cost of 'progress: To the extent
that the equipment which they favour setting up is manifestly more
oppressive than what it replaces, this is absurd! In fact, the objective of their
reformism is, above aU, to make the contemporary forms of super-alienation
'tolerable: What they are aiming at is the putting into place of new means
for the control and recuperation of the lines of flight of social desire. Sorne
of them in particular, have clearly become conscious of the necessity of
miniaturising repression, of getting it accepted 'smoothly' and, if possible,
with the active assistance of those on whom it bears, hence their new
mythology of working together with the 'users~ And it must be acknowledged
that the enterprise of recuperating the micro-revolutions that are at work
amongst a certain number of the young, women, homosexuals, soldiers,
drug- users, the rural, the mad, ecologists, Corsicans and wine makers,1 has
hitherto been accompli shed without too many difficulties!
But these techniques of'recuperation' will turn out, in the long run, to be
double-edged swords. They only 'sort things out' in appearance. Because
they have been quickly recuperated or because they seem to carry within
them the route to their own recuperation by power, a certain number of
contestatory movements, such as those of the school students or prostitutes,
have been passed over too quickly. With more or less difficulty, things end
up being taken in han d, calm is re-established, the authorities manipulate
certain leaders ... But at root that changes nothing! How many times has
one heard it said 'most of the time, students don't even know why they are
rebelling'? And it is true that they often don't know the programme of
demands of the organisations that daim to represent them. Must one for
that reason oppose their rebellions to serious revolutions? Equally, the
troublemakers are denounced on their demos as 'divisive'; but perhaps one
should ask oneself about the reasons that le ad them to express themselves
in this way. Their actions are not absurd or reactionary because organised
movements and public opinion don't understand them, nor because those
concerned themselves are often effectively incapable of formulating dearly
what it is they are aiming at (it has to be said, in their defence, that the
'education' they have received in this domain via school, the press, etc., has
hardly helped them)! When all is said and done, perhaps it is because these
struggles aim at more fundamental social objectives th an those of the
organisations that dismiss them and that through them it is in sorne way the
whole of the social body that is interrogating itself about questions that it
b.as not yet managed to comprehend: what is the law, justice, equality? To
what end does knowledge, hierarchy, the reproduction of dominant roles
and functions serve? What is the relationship between sexuality and money,
well beyond the classic prostitute-dient-pimp-copper pattern, at the heart
of the couple, or quite simply, 'when one goes shopping', when one watches
adverts on telly ... In short, what is desire, today?
One cannot properly appreciate such movements in terms of success
and failure, revolutionary purity, and recuperation. AlI sorts of equipment
and assemblages are in play here. The State 'recuperates' but, in certain cases,
lets go of things that could in turn be recuperated for the development of
the struggles of desire. Parties and unions participate in the reproduction
of dominant models, but in certain cases, their 'quantitativist' struggles
protecting salaries, maintaining hierarchies, the demand for collective

84
equipment - will be able to support the action of the minorities of desire.
The whole question is to know how the latter will succeed in hijacking the
functions of State power, the functions of recuperative equipment, to the
benefit of collective assemblage. Sociologists have, for example, brought to
light the existence of an inegalitarian development of collective equipment,
to the detriment of the most disadvantaged populations. How is such a
disparity to be appreciated from the moment that the alienating character
of this equipment is brought to light? Ought one st art to oppose the setting
up of crèches, youth clubs, etc., in immigrant neighbourhoods, for example?
An untenable position! But the question is poorly put. It is not a type of
equipment as such that must be judged, but the use that is made of it. It isn't
the walls, the fun ding for equipment and its function, but a politics of
training, of the division of labour in so far as it prohibits the development
of a collective assemblage function. AIso, before knowing what must be
demanded, it is necessary to determine who is doing the demanding! Funds,
yes; equipment, perhaps! But to do what with? To reinforce the power of
teachers, educationalists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts to
grid, control and normalise and that of other agents who maintain order?
Or the powers of local collectives? Or those of the repressive structures of
the family? Funds for 'childhood' sure, but not for model crèches! Funds so
that adults contribute to the setting up of collective assemblages relative to
the desires of children, but not for the establishment of new 'specialists: who
will only accentuate their tutelage
Today, children don't 'need' more and more specialised educationalists,
psychoanalysts or super-organisers, but space, social vacuoles where they
will at last be able to start to exist according to the singular economy of
their desire. This doesn't mean that nothing needs to be done and that it is
better to let them get on with it by themselves, on wastegrounds or in the
basements of HLM! Natural spaces as fields of spontaneous expression are
in the process of disappearing irreversibly, whether one laments the fact or
not. To open up spaces to desire now implies means that are sometimes
highly sophisticated, hence the entire, highly elaborate, technology that has
recently been created for green spaces (see for example those that have been
produced in Rennes), 'adventure playgrounds', collective games, etc. 1he
question is not one of condemning them as such, but of calling into question
the political and micropolitical role of those who are responsible for
'dealing with' them. It is perfectly easy to imagine that adults 'in the vicinity'
might intervene to help children get round the obstacles that their projects
are up against negotiation, support, if it is felt necessary in relation to the
different instances of power, intervention so as to extract material and
financial means, even the transmission of knowledge, or showing how to

85
appropriate it, always if that corresponds to the des ire of individuals and
groups. But all that implies a veritable anti-pedagogic, anti-psychiatric, anti-
sociological, anti-criminological training on the part of these adults. It
should be accepted from the outset that no-one knows anything about the
desire of children and that no specialist will seek to understand it and
recuperate it from an adaptational point of view en route. Connecting,
constructing, assembling, experimenting, in so far as one is called on to do
so, but caIled on by whom? Not by Power or Knowledge, the imperatives
of Security, of Adaptation or of symbolic Integration, nor even from the
points of view of an engagement in just causes, or under militant orders!
But simply by what is happening at the level of the assemblages of desire
and what in truth constitutes the surest vectors of 'progressive' social
transformations in aIl domains.
If it is true that at this molecular level there are no grounds for expecting
that systems of one-way causality might be established, or that by a sort of
boomerang effect, the toxins of repression might themselves st art to
decompose and contaminate in turn the major sectors of power, it
nevertheless remains the case that the 'recuperative' equipment essentially
continues to do its work, either running on empty or by serving as an outlet
for attempts to innovate (the new benevolence of the national education
system with regard to new education movements is entirely significant in
this regard). As long as no large-scale experiment in self-management, as
long as no process of expansion of creative micro-assemblages has been
brought to light, or demonstrated its credibility in a convincing fashion, the
diverse drives in this direction will equaIly run on empty and faIl over,
leaving large zones of demoralisation behind them. And it must be
acknowledged that national programmes in self-management - of the
Yugoslavian or Aigerian type have hitherto turned out to be rather
disappointing, although it is dift1cult to distinguish c1early between what it
is appropriate to impute to impasses relative to their internaI functioning
and what results from economic and political resistance relative to the
general context in which they developed. But why be surprised? Why
should social machines as complex as this be easier to get working than
material machines - the st range, heavier th an air, flying machines of the
Belle Époque? Hundreds, thousands of attempts of an kinds will perhaps
still be necessary before one succeeds in making viable self-management
systems 'take off' decisively! And it is licit to imagine between now and then
that there will be time for the curiosity of numerous amused observers
who at the moment feel unconcerned by these problems - to change into
serious anxiety when there is no longer any doubt that the future of
humanity on this planet depends on their success!

86
 fascist
Stalinist
Over the last fifty years, the only regimes to have succeeded in mobilising the
molecular energy of the masses have done so by subjection, constraint, and
in the framework of the most frighteningly oppressive structures. From this
point of view, it would be interesting to study the filiation of a certain number
of fonTIs of contemporary repressive equipment with those that were
'invented' by the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. 2 In effect, everything
leads us to think that the politics of fascist and Stalinist collective equipment
constituted a sort of test bed for the Western powers during post-Second
World War reconstruction. Quite apart from the famous autostrada, it would
be necessary to make an inventory of the institutions, corporate systems,
equipment of all kinds that was thus 'transmitted' from fascism (which in
certain cases had previously imported them from the USSR) to the
'democratic' regimes. The following hypothesis could be maintained: at the
outset, it wasn't material systems of constraint or - misleading or demagogic
- ideologies that succeeded in capturing the desiring energy of the masses,
but equipment which, although imperfect and condemned to disappear in
the short tenn, was of a new kind. The national socialist parties, inclined
towards their Duce and their Fuhrer, were a relay for the Stalinist machine
that issued from the Leninist -Boishevik party. Under conditions that were
proper to them, the fascist mass movements followed down a slope that was
in some way parallel to that which led to the degeneration of the mass
organisations of the 3rd International. While the Soviet branch developed
the role of the repressive organisation of unions for the 'young: etc., one saw
'popular' assault divisions develop into robotic SS armies - after a very
particular 'tooling up'! The emergence and filiation of these new kinds of
equipment evidently have to be studied as a function of the characteristic of
their particular terrains and their specifie modes of subjectivation, in so far
as they le ad to a different conception of the young, of the role of men and
women, the race, the body, the corporation ... and to a partial reordering of
the traditional models of family, union, sporting, military organisation, etc.
In this condition, one might th en begin to note which sorts of semiotic
components they really contributed to transforming. There is effectively
nothing more illusory than to imagine that these changes in model are
mechanically linked to changing ideas or indeed to changes in political
regime! They are in fact the result of new practices, made possible by the
emergence of new micro-equipment of semiotisation. Ideas merely register -
if we can put it like this - such transformations in the pragmatic field. This is

87
the only way to understand how so many people were able to 'function' within
fascism, despite the fact that they could be conscious of its catastrophic
character. (For example, the tradition al rightist Germany military and a
section of capital which, after having encouraged Hitler, who they thought
they could control, were overtaken byevents and constrained to follow them.)
One may ask oneself if the network of equipment that these regimes
constituted was not one of the fundamental supports allowing them to stay
in place for so many years. One would have to examine in detail, case by
case, how it succeeded in concentrating the energy of desire, which it
channelled into sorne of the most reactionary, the most archaic of attitudes,
institutions and myths one can imagine. We have already evoked what we
have called the collective black hale ejJects that capture the energies of desire
in an infernal process of deterritorialisation, trigger a mad desire for the
extermination of everything that escapes the common norm and which
even leads to a will to self-destruction, in the ultimate paroxysm of an
explosion of desire. But these absolute black holes of fascism did not vanish
with the victory of the 'Allies~ They changed form, size, and disposition.
In the most developed of capitalist countries, they have been miniaturised
and are no longer organised around a central black hole focusing the desire
of the masses, but around a multiplicity of micro-black holes that enter into
resonance with one another. Consequently, the necessity of having a central
conductor orchestrating fascism is not felt as mu ch - except in circumstances
of exceptional crisis that threaten the cohesion of the system. By contrast,
in somewhere like the Soviet Union, in which economic and social sectors
continue to experience very unequal modes of development, bureaucracy
must maintain a highly centralised despotic system, in spite of the 'liberal'
aspirations that might come to light within it, and despite presenting a
number of inconveniences, as mu ch in the internaI as on the external
planes. AIso, the persistent recourse to the politics of the Gulag rather than
to the soft drugs of the West, with their micro-equipment infiltrating the
social field as a whole and facilitating the internalisation of repression, is
doubtless the expression of a congenital weakness in such a regime, and
ultimately the bearer of major social crisis.

At the level of historical fascism, molar fascism, collective desire was

captured by an infernal machine - the network of fascist equipment:

88
party-police-army-industry-work camp-extermination camp, etc. - artie-
ulated around a central black hole: the Fuhrer's gaze. It took off massively
and manoeuvred radically round the objective interests of the masses. But
at the level of contemporary miero-fascisms that haven't yet 'snowballed:
that havent crystallised at the molar level - and will not necessarily do so -
the relationship between desire and systems of objective interests is mu ch
more ambiguous. It is not dealt with by completely stabilised Equipment; it
operates through assemblages and miero-equipment that have a certain
capacity for adaptation available to them. AlI capitalist systems have
experienced forms of psychological micro-fascism that consist in making
the balance of interests fall alternately either in a 'negative' direction from
the point of view of the libido, by turning it back against the individual -
systems of inhibition, guilt, etc., or against 'others', thus making the repressive
vector 'positive' phallocratie, persecutory, interpretative, jealous, attitudes
as a system for taking power over one's entourage. But modern, institutional,
fascism, the fascism that is equipped, has been led to seek new paths for the
appropriation of the desire of individuals and masses. Technocratie fascism
assembles, negotiates the relations between interests and desires at a small
scale, in a much more subtle way. Because of its much greater maIleability, it
succeeds in placing them in the serviee of a reactionary social order in a
much more effective fashion. Western micro-fascisms no longer have the
rigidity of national-socialism and Stalinism: in molecularising, they traverse
social barri ers even better. They are capable of innovating and even, if needs
be, of destratifying, but only to the point necessary to adapt and survive.
And today, this kind of self-regulating fascism, the methods of which do not
cease to 'improve' in countries with the most cutting edge technologies - the
USA, West Germany, France, Japan - is the envy of the repressive regimes of
the rest of the planet!
The great superiority of the miero-fascist black holes of democratic
societies thus resides in the devolution of equipment on the large scale and
in their being at work in aIl the pores of the social unconscious. Since the
end of the pro cess of selection that resulted in the elimination of the Italian
Fascist, National Socialist and Stalinist models thirty years ago, we have
witnessed the putting in place of a sort of segmentary system that stabilises
the points of turbulence of the social field. Maintaining order tends to
depend less on military and police machines than on these kinds of systems
of regulation and normalisation that are doser to the people. Putting to one
side a few wildcat strikes and a certain irreducible percentage of delinquents,
manipulated as they are by the mass media, people stick to the right path aIl
by themselves, by monitoring one another from out of the corner of their
eyes. The alternatives between good, evil, the social, the anti-social tend to

89
be less clear-cut th an they used to be. And the darkest fascism, that of the
crooked cross and the death's head, has less opportunity to take off. Certainly
it subsists everywhere a bit, but it remains relatively scattered. One might
recall the Doriotism which, after an intermediary phase around 1934, wh en
it was still reactionary and revolutionary at the same time, ended up falling
irreversibly into Nazism, and in the end, in a complete impasse. Today,
capitalist societies endeavour to find less clear-cut, apparently less
catastrophic responses. Their modes of control are more sophisticated. In
the USA, there is no Doriotism but a union system and a dividing up of
ghettos by massed gangs that precisely succeed in preventing prote st
movements and revolts from 'rising up' as far as the constitution of grand
revolutionary machines. This is how certain black, Puerto Rican or Latino
gangs have come to organise a certain popular opposition to the selling of
'hard' drugs in the neighbourhoods they control, whilst dealing in other
neighbourhoods! Their behaviour, on this point is, moreover, parallel to
that of the police force, when it redistributes drugs it has seize d, sometimes
in considerable quantities, such as happened in New York a few years ago,
when it oversees the dealers, when it gives coyer to significant leaders, or
when it imposes by force the use of substitute drugs, such as methadone, on
the pretext of detoxification. AlI the illegalities - to borrow Michel Foucault's
expression agree. And in a more general fashion, it is rather difficult to
distinguish actions that are in favour of the 'public good' from those that
tend towards the destruction of the community. The mass gangs that are
scatted throughout most of the poor neighbourhoods of big American
cities today can be considered as being at once both progressive and
fascistic, to the extent that, on the one hand they manage to establish a
minimum of self-defence, of a collective taking charge and 'organising' of
the young people that they control and, on the other hand, they do so by
employing the worst methods of violence and subjection.
The miniaturised equipment of current capitalist regimes draws its
strength from the micro-fascist politics, which it encourages at every level,
seeming to constitute the last possible of routes towards a reappropriation of
the territorialities of desire that might allow those who have recourse to them
to escape from repressive systems of encirclement. This social and political
dimension of neuroses has hitherto been, if not completely misunderstood,
at least systematically avoided by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.
Nonetheless it exists at the level of the apparently most 'apolitical' of troubles.
In this regard, the example of Little Hans, Freud's original case study in the
psychoanalysis of children,3 illustrates weIl the successive phases of such
a mechanism of encirclement. The opening onto the street, in particular
playing with his neighbours, being forbidden to him for reasons of bourgeois

90
propriety, the child withdraws into the house, th en his parents' bed and the
mother's caresses. Then it is new prohibitions, this time of a psychoanalytic
inspiration, that lead him to curl up with masochistic phantasms, to the point
that a 'diagrammatic' deterritorialisation is attained, and in such a way that
the ensemble of the repressive system is turned against the 'oppressors': Little
Hans 'then turns his neurosis into a weapon'; in turn he becomes a despot,
persecuting his family with his phobie syrnptoms. 4
We see how micro-fascisms can echo, resonate together, and prop each
other up. But in aIl other domains, as much those of psychopathology as of
everyday life, one could find this SaIne entangling of social, individual, and
biological components. On condition of course that one doesn't deliberately
avoid it! 'Before' being taken in hand by the police, the army, and the
administration, society finds its consistency, its inertia, its lines of stratification,
in this sort of self-intoxication that is constituted by the putting into circulation
of reactionary imaginary formations that willlead to down-and-outs hating
the Arabs and the 'dagos' as much as socialites condensing their bitterness at
having to be women under the conditions of the luxurious phallocracy of the
dominant classes, whatever benefits they might otherwise draw from it.
The micro-fascisms of whieh it is a question here, the phallocratie
micro-fascism, for example, do not arise, at the outset, from the antagonism
of social classes. But the positions of the workers' movement are far from
being clear on this point. And many militants today would continue to
recognise themselves in the attitude of the servant Matti when he humiliates
Mr Puntila's daughter in a gratuitous and odious fashion, after she admitted
her love for him. 5 (In theory he do es it so as to illustrate a good revolutionary
cause, but in fact it is so as to satisfy his phallocratie sadism on the cheap.)
Sexual oppression began well before the class struggle. It might even be at
the origin of the social division of labour, the constitution of the first
machines of power and the first collective war machines. Without doubt
this is what investigations into archaie societies would show if they weren't
almost always carried out just by men who, generally, do not ask themselves
this land of question and who, in any case, would have the greatest
difficulties in accepting female accounts in this domain. 6

To consider, as we are doing, that at the molecular level there is a sort of

continuum between liberatory formations of desire, modes of semiotisation

91
and the equipment that we are charaeterising as miero-fascist, doesn't in the
slightest imply that it is a good ide a to confuse the political forces that play
the game of reaction and fascism with those that are opposed to it. To
eompare bureaucratie micro- fascist secretions that paralyse the workers'
movement and the micro-fascist productions of State power doesn't in the
least imply that we are putting everything in the same bag: bosses, unions,
police officers and security services! Relations of force, 'fronts', common
actions, have their own logic, which demands to be appreciated according
to each situation. But that is not our objective here. We are simply affirming
that if the large-scale opposition between fascism and revolution is still
pertinent, at the micro-fascist level, by contrast, des ire and repression ean
only find their dividing line by way of a particular analytic labour that is
able to spot the beginnings of paranoid deviation, bureaucratie stems, etc.
The nature of the 'analysers' that would have to be put in place to fulfil such
a function matters little! It could just as easily be a matter of analytic groups
properly speaking, in different units of life, production, 'leisure time', etc., as
of systems of organisation endeavouring never to reproduce the reification
and hierarchisation of roles, functions, and persons, and that are able to
transmit information and operative statements in a completely different
mode to those that currently exist. The analysis of the 'social' unconscious
- but there is no other unconscious! - should not be 'reduced' so mu ch here
to a group or organisational activity. One can perfectly easily imagine that
it might be carried out starting from a core of two people, for example, but
on condition that no specialist claims to be the exclusive repository of good
interpretations (the current rule being that nothing valuable in the
unconscious can be admitted/heard without passing via the transference
and the silent discourse of the psychoanalyst finances permitting, it goes
without saying!). And it could equally arise, as already exists in fact, from a
solitary activity (which implies, let us note in passing, a certain number of
means, as much on a material as on a semiotic plane: how many children
have at their disposaI the minimum 'quiet little corner' so as to write poems
or play guitar? How many more don't even have any idea of this?).
The cornmon feature of aIl these analytic assemblages is that they will
never separate what happens in the socius, with its serniotic and material flows
of aIl sorts, from what happens in people's heads, in the forrn of flows of
language, images, and affects. The 'optional matter' of such analyses cannot in
any way be reduced to exclusive alternatives, to mechanical choices. It will
therefore not propose any adherence, once and for aIl, to the good orientation
of 'leftist schizo opening' or the bad orientation of 'rightist paranoid
stratification. It will remain powdery, it will deploy its intensive zones, subject
to sudden reversaIs, without any technique of interpretation, any political

92
programme, any organisational structure ever being able to guarantee once
and for all that one has adopted the correct orientation, that one has moved
into the 'correct patn, of rhizomes, self-management, and collective assemblages
of enunciation. A molecular State power - a micro-fascist, paranoid, economy
of desire, whatever one wants to caU it - can in effect always contaminate
social groups of every size; reciprocaUy, a molar political economy, a despotic
State power, can always seize ho Id of micro-social structures so as to ossify
and stratify their living parts. And it will always remain possible, even in this
case, that new assemblages, whether revolutionary or micro-fascist, can start
to proliferate from inside these ossified parts, in such a way Httle by Httle, the
ambiguity of the molecular options of desire succeeding in sorting itself out,
an apparently definitively stratified molar assemblage cornes to 'start up' again.
In a crèche, for example, or a sports club, the two types of State power can
coexist perfectly well the molecular State power that captures and models
the desire of the children or athletes, and the classic repressive State power of
the teacher in charge or the pontificating coach. The libidinal economy of
assemblages and equipments thus constantly experiences a see-saw effect
between surfaces of stratification and Hnes of flight, so as to 'change life (a bit):
And most frequently the decisive divisions take place less because of a conflict
of ideas or organisational problems than on the basis of certain faciality traits
- those of an authoritarian he ad or a seductive teacher. What is important, it
seems to us, is never to lose from view that this kind of microscopie 'optional
matter' can serve as a support for the expression and manifestation of a
possible way of getting beyond local situations. Rather than relating to
character traits, the complexes of parents, or difficulties in communicating,
they imply the calling into question of other assemblages such as the
government, the university, parent -teacher associations, etc. Whereas the role
of Collective equipment was to make all this hold together, to make molar
State power and repressive molecular powers function synchronically, that of
the collective assemblages of des ire becomes one of preventing the repressive
components from crystallising together and snowballing. This point is
fundamental, because it helps us as a consequence understand (that is to say,
to indicate to us possible lines of intervention) the fact that the politics of
capitalism forms of Collective equipment can only impose themselves at the
molar scale to the extent that State power has already positioned its pawns on
the molecular chessboard, without us being able to speak for aIl that about an
'infrastructure' of des ire that conditions an institution al superstructure. This is
because the converse is true the implanting of a molecular State power at the
heart of the subject equally depends on the fact that the large repressive
formations, the big semiotic accelerators, have succeeded in deterritorialising
individuals, organs, functions, and social groups.

93
 1 1
1

ies
A polities of self-management, accompanied byan analytic militancy (or a
militant analysis, as one wishes) can therefore only be established on condition
that instruments of semiotisation capable of dealing with sign systems without
remaining imprisoned in dominant redundancies and significations of power
are put in place. But what often disorientates militants and specialists of the
social thing is that their micropolitics of des ire and their conceptual materials
make them miss the semiotisation of the libidinal economy of the social field,
in so far as that semiotisation doesn't stop shifting its intensities around a
continuum the existence of which challenges in advance systems of options
that are crystallised in terms of a logic of totalised objects, responsibilised
persons, closed sets. If they do not 'focus' on the real in this domain, this is,
paradoxically, because the notions that they use are at once both too general
and not abstract enough.! Capitalist flows do not, in effect, work with general,
territorialised, categories (for example, men, cities, nations) but bring into
play deterritorialised functions that imply the most abstract of modes of
semiotisation in the economic, scientific, technical order, etc. Under such
conditions, thinking 'modernity' can, in our opinion, only signify a rupture
with every system of general categories, which only ever juts out over the real,
which only succeeds in carrying out a formaI inventorying of its original so-
called elements, supposedly to organise them 'logieally' but in fact so as to
stratify them in pragmatics with political repercussions that are never made
explicit. Thinking minority in the order of desire presupposes a direct meshing
with the semiotisation of a real in action, in other words, the fabrication of
new lines of reality. Equipment functions depend systematically on general
categories that tend to take a hold of collective pro cesses so as to reterritorialise
them on power formations, whereas assemblage functions, on the contrary,
endeavour to connect semiotic flows directly to the abstract machines that
are borne by the deterritorialisation of flows. The marking out of this type of
connection, through processes of diagrammatisation will enable us to better
found the opposition between the politics of equipment - in so far as it
depends on a regime of signs that function in the mode of representation,
of representatives of enunciation and of icons of power - and the politics of
collective assemblages that function on the basis of modes of semiotisation
that make signs work 'flush with' things, bodies, and flows of aIl kinds. In the
first case, one will be dealing with interactions between objects, subjects who
are distinct from one another, a causality that operates on discernabilised
strata; in the second case, one will be dealing with interactions that traverse
and undo strata, crystallise intensive multiplicities, polarise modes of
subjectivation that by rights cease to be attributable to individuated persons,
but which remain adjacent to constellations of organs, organic functions,
material flows, semiotic flows, etc.
But where do such diagrammatic assemblages currently become
manifest? Certainly not in civil society or politics, the codification of which
clings on to pre-capitalist personologicallaws. Rather it is in domains like
the sciences, industry, military and artistic machines, etc., that one can best
see them at work, to the extent that the systems of signs that they put into
play already form an intrinsic part of the material of their production. Until
now, those attempts at self-management or communitarianism that have
tried to struggle against this kind of deterritorialised machinism have
remained powerless in face of the complexity of semiotic integration at
which they arrive. It is of course obvious that invocations of a 'return to
nature: a 'return to Zen Buddhism', to the defence of the environment, to
zero growth, etc., as such, will never be enough to stop the mega-machines
that are currently sweeping everything away in their passage: nature, bodies,
minds, original forms, 'morals' ... A revolutionary resumption of machinic
processes can therefore not content itself with a critique of ideology that
articulates general notions that do not engage with the diagrammatic
pro cesses that ensure the real power of capitalist regimes.
Only the creation of other types of semiotisation machines that reorient
the economy of deterritorialised flows, undoing dominant redundancies and
the stratifications of established powers, could begin to respond to such an
objective. Lenin was amongst those who had understood the necessity of such
a creation when, becoming conscious of ineffectiveness of social-democratic,

96
economistic, humanist or anarchist discourse, he devoted his energy to the
construction of an absolutely new genre of revolutionary machine. It was
essentially over problems of organisation that he conducted his struggle
against social-democracy, the programmatic divergences seeming in some
way to have become depending on the priority of this rupture with old union
and social-democrat practices. Thus the Boishevik party fixed as its primary
task the forming of a new type of militant as the support for a specific
consciousness of the working class and the constitution of a sort of war
machine capable of tackling the existing political, economic, police, social-
democratic union practices head on. To do that it had to be in a position to
extract signs, order-words, to semiotise diagrammatically a new workerist
avant-garde and sketch out the revolutionary deterritorialisation of the
Russian peasantry, which had remained deeply rooted in Asiatic despotism.
How the Leninist machine got itself surrounded by imperialism before sinking
into Stalinism is a different question! Although it remained too territorialised
because of its implacable centralism and its party nationalism, although it got
recuperated by the Soviet State, by military and police machines, although
the type of party that it produced became a supplementary repressive
equipment the world over, the Leninist 'experiment' nonetheless resulted in
one of the most important collective assemblages of enunciation of modern
working classes. What must be remembered here are not the models that
Leninism created but the methodology of rupture that it enacted. Although
the Leninist party no longer corresponds at all with the necessities of
contemporary social struggles, although those who aim to reproduce its order-
words and organisation indefinitely are situated completely outside historical
development, the abstract machine that Leninism put in circulation, the
questions that it asked, that is to say, those concerning a new way of life, a new
morality, a new way of assembling militant practices and holding a discourse
on politics and society remain vital. In fact, the attempts at going back to
social-democratic practices have only ever resulted in the worst compromises.
Only a going beyond of this problematic will en able the impasse within which
the workers' movement finds itself to be unblocked. But there too, the question
of the miniaturisation of war machines and the constitution of multiple
'micro-undergrounds' [micro-maquis] al10wing class struggles and struggles
of desire, in their molecular aspect, to be faced with new weapons.

Singularities desire
AU existing definitions of the avant-garde, of the function of revolutionary
intellectuals, of apparatchiks, of mass militantism, are to be called into

SELF-MANAGEMENT POLITICS OF DESIRE 97

question. Let us note in particular that as interesting as they are, Gramsci's
analyses relative to the division oflabour between intellectuals and militants
do not seem to us to advance the question decisively. One may recall that
he expected the enunciation of a theory that would become the 'flesh and
blood of the proletaria1'2 from the constitution of 'collective intellectuals'.
It is evident that what we have designated with the expression collective
assemblage cannot coincide with this new race of 'organic intellectuals
of the working class'. We do not think that there is any place, in effect to
set up a specific group and praxis the function of which would be to
synthesise Theory and Action. The very form of the division of labour
between militancy, the analysis of the unconscious and intellectual
activity should wither away, to the extent that the practice of theory gives up
basing itself on systems of univers aIs even if they are dialectical and
materialist and action establishes itself in the extension of a liberatory
economy of desire. The incessant dynamic of the semiotic and pragmatic
components of collective assemblages, relative to the struggles over interest
and the investments of desire, effectively tends to make the traditional poles
of social representation (the oppositions: men-women, young-adult,
manual-intellectual; rank and file-leadership; normal-mad, heterosexual-
homosexual, etc.) lose their formaI identity.
Aiso the determination of the conditions under which the working class
will have to take control of the State, or, in a formula of Gramsci's 'make
themselves the Statl will no longer be posed in those terms at aH, as the
question of the withering away of State power will no longer be pushed
back to the end of a long historical pro cess but will be of the order of the
day at every step of every struggle. I1's the whole of the Marxist -Leninist-
Maoist casuistry of principal and secondary contradictions that must be
called into question here. To consider, for example, that the contradictions
between men and women, children and adults, are secondary in relation to
class contradictions in a capitalist regime corresponds neither to history
nor to current concrete situations. Attempts at hierarchising contradictions
at a doctrinal level always imply a micropolitics of the subjection of the
struggles of desire to the 'serious matter' of class struggle, that is to say, in
the last instance, to the party leadership. One can admit that during major
social struggles, the working class has a determining role to play, but that
doesn't in the slightest imply that workers' organisations can lay down
the law on women's movements, the movements of the young, artistic,
intellectual, regionalist currents, sexual minorities, etc.
This loss of identities, of roles and of specialisms within 'collective
assemblages of enunciations' ought not, therefore, entail the dissolving of
the singular characteristics of each pragmatic 'region', quite the contrary.

98
Without differentiating distinct races of militants, intellectuals, artists, etc.,
it will become possible that the same person can legitimately pass from one
type of activity to another and radically change system of reference without
that creating mental or social difficulties for him. It is, in effect, dear that
every attempt at homogenising pragmatic fields, at smoothing over the
singularities of desire relative to each type of semiotic component, always
goes in the direction of an accumulation of repression (something that can
be spotted today wh en considering the affinities that exist, above aIl at the
level of institutional practices, between power formations such as the
leadership of centralised parties, those of groupuscules, of psychoanalytic
societies, literary cliques, academic pressure groups, etc.). Diagrammatic
assemblages already exist everywhere in capitalist societies: they constitute
the very motor of their semiotic potential. But every effort is made
to channel their creativity into the dominant territorialities of the
system. Thus deterritorialising diagrammatism is ceaselessly recuperated,
reterritorialised, hierarchised, impotentiated. Paradoxically, capitalist and
bureaucratie socialist societies cannot do without semiotic procedures for
the capture of libido, which, moreover, they find intrinsically threatening.
Collective equipment is thus the seat of a complex metabolism for the
capitalisation, but at the same time, neutralisation, of diagrammatic
assemblages. It thereby forms the junction between the old civil society and
the machinic revolution.

Whilst endeavouring not to escape the context of Marxist orthodoxy - but

one would have to look at this more closely Louis Althusser has attempted
to determine the specificity of those machines of collective semiotisation
that he has called Ideological State Apparatuses. 3 It may be recalled that
he distinguishes between a component of State power, which, he says,
'functions through violence' in the functioning of repressive powers, and an
ideological component which functions softly, in some way. Also, in order
to arrive at a systematic gridding of the social field in every domain
(religion, education, the family, law, politics, unions, information, culture,
etc.), these Apparatuses are led to efIectuate subtle combinations of violence
and ideological 'deception'. The fact that Louis Althusser detaches apparatus
that arise from the private domain from what he calls the 'Repressive State
Apparatuses' seems to be of the greatest interest, but we part company from
him when he characterises the former as being fundamentaIly'ideological'.
The problematic that we have ourselves sought to outline, with collective

99
assemblages of enunciation, diagrammatic machines and Collective
equipment functions, has, on the contrary, led us to consider the existence
of a continuity between the blatant forms of public repression and the
innumerable 'private' modes of internalisation of repression.
The State is everywhere and before being incarnated in repressive
instruments, it functions in the libido. We really do mean libido, because the
movement of ideas, in this domain above aIl, cannot be separated from the
metabolism of the social unconscious. So we cannot follow Louis Althusser
when he localises Ideological State Apparatuses at the level of ideological
superstructures, thus repeating the old nineteenth century metaphors about
the 'edifice' of causalities. According to us, the economic base does not
constitute an infrastructure that necessarily imposes itself on the libido
and on ideas. Everything can become infrastructure! Under certain
conditions, legal-political doctrines, machines for injecting ideas, religious
representations, etc., can play a determining role. Under other conditions,
they float outside any social reality. And it isn't even enough then to say that
they are 'ideological' and depend on an economic base. That would still be
to accord them too much respect. At the limit, they no longer depend on
anything! TIley no longer exist except as empty redundancy. Louis Althusser
has made ideology too general a category, encompassing and confusing
radically heterogeneous semiotic categories. In identifying it, following the
classical tradition, with logos, he wanted to underline that it could not
constitute a productive force. And on this point we can only part company
from him. In fact, it is an entire conception of language and of production
that is in question here.
An analytic approach to social libido would require that one not restrict
oneself solely to the visible parts of equipment such as schools, prisons,
stages, etc. In effect, a fundamental element of their functioning derives
from their aptitude for capturing not just interests, but also individual and
collective desires. If one restricts oneself to their manifest discourse (legal,
regulatory, etc.) one misses an essential element of the iceberg of repression
in capitalist regimes. To make do with analysing the ideological character of
these discourses risks making us lose not just its implicit dimensions -
something Freudians have tried to locate with their opposition between
manifest utterances and latent contents - but more fundamentally, the
metabolism of the coding components and the non-linguistic semiotic
components of assemblages of enunciation that correspond to them.
Ideology is a trap in two ways: at the level of its content, it gives consistency
to empty redundancies, and, at the level of its very existence, it endeavours
to give credence to the idea that it itself plays a major role. Thus everyone
pretends to believe that the future of society depends on the fact that

100
leaders, parties, newspapers, etc., convey such and such a doctrine, whilst in
reality today theoretical points of view - social projects - only have an
insignificant part to play in the real decision -making pro cesses of the
capitalist world. Only pragmatic assemblages that are directly engaged
with reality on the basis of their own diagrammatic machine will be able to
bring effective responses to contemporary social problems, without there
being mu ch to expect from the group and leaders who claim to have
something to teach the masses.
People have been taught to clap in time vote, opinion poIl,
demonstration, etc. - in front of the overly brightly lit scenes of ideology,
with their characters and their Manichean options: left or right, socialism
or barbarity, fascism or revolution? But the projectors of real history are
shifting now, irreversibly, it seems, towards an entirely different problematic:
left and right, inextricably mixed up, socialism and barbarity, fascism and
revolution. That is to say, at the same time both the Chilean national
stadium, at the molar level, and the 'politics of the public square' at the
molecular level, to use Paul Virilio's felicitous expression, that is, a
micropolitics of generalised gridding. 4 Repressive institutions have a hold
on us everywhere, they mobilise us at every moment in our lives - even
dreams, parapraxes, lapsus have to be accountable, under the regime of
psychoanalytic surveillance that is starting to be put in place in a certain
number of institutions!
The ensemble of conceptions that are relative to the high points of
struggle in periods of upswing and downswing, aIl systems of strategie
choices of the type 'we need more time to allow the power of the Soviets in
the USSR to be consolidated' or tactical calculations of the kind 'Elections
first, then our demands' tend to lose their signification. A molecular
revolution, leaning up against molar revolution, so as to divert capitalist
societies from their catastrophic ends, to seize control of the economy of
deterritorialised flows that they have succeeded in putting at their service,
could only be permanent and be established on every front at the same
time. Not only will it 'capitalise' aIl the vectors of deterritorialisation, it will
Clay it on' to the extent that it will devote itself to undoing bourgeois
reterritorialisations, amongst the ranks of which should be counted aIl
today's retro nostalgia!

Numerous indices of this kind of revolutionary renewal can be noted, but is

this really the direction which history is taking? During 'social crises' of the

101
kind that marked the USA at the end of the Vietnam war, for example, or
Portugal during the collapse of the regime of Salazar, attempts at self-
management and communitarian projects of aIl kinds appeared, then got
bogged down in their internaI difficulties and general indifference. In
France, self-management has become a bit fashionable with the business of
the LI P cooperative, that is to say, precisely in relation to a company that is
implacably surrounded by capitalism, the power of the State and the unions,
and who as a result had no chance of surviving. But, it will be said, these
kinds of intersections are found more or less everywhere! And every
attempt of this kind will always end up being taken in hand or liquidated.
Practically everything that was set in motion in May 1968 has been
recuperated. But an immense fissure between repressive equipment and the
collective energy of des ire has revealed a new problematic, and set into
circulation new abstract machines and has opened up new prospects for
innovative militancy which little by little are transforming the general
conditions for social struggles.
Whatever the case may be, it seems to us that one of the major obstacles
to a self-management orientation gaining ground on the political chessboard
in a decisive fashion, is that for the most part its defenders and promoters
only think of it as something that must be limited to the sphere of economic
and material problems. Thus in the eyes of opinion they are as people
seeldng above aIl to sort their own issues out, as a function of their own
concerns, as a function of their own desires, and not so mu ch as a function
of those of the rest of society. We come up against the myth of spontaneity
here: seen from the outside, this is interpreted as a politics of 'everyone for
themselves: To free the thought of self-management from spontaneism is
thus not only an affair of ideology but a fundamental problem of orientation
concerning crucial theoretical questions a certain definition of the
unconscious - as weIl as very practical questions of everyday life and
militant organisation. Self-management can be neither anti-management
nor a 'democratic' adjustment of planning, as currently conceived by the left.
Before being economic, it should concern the very texture of the socius,
through the promotion of a new type of relationship between things, signs
and collective modes of subjectivation. In itself, the idea of a 'mode!' for self-
management is thus contradictory. Self-management can only result from a
continuous pro cess of collective experimentation which, whilst always
taking things further in the detail of life and respect for the singularities of
desire, will nonetheless be capable, little by little, of 'rationally' ensuring
essential tasks of coordination at the broadest sociallevels.
Let us put it bluntly: it doesn't seem very honest to us to promise self-
management today for electoral tomorrows, without starting to put it into

102
practice everywhere that it is already possible. It must be put to work
straightaway, in the party, in the union, in private life! The collective
neuroses that become manifest with investment in bureaucracy, the magical
recourse to leaders, to stars, champions ... are not just a fact of class enemies.
They are perpetuated in us and around us. And one cannot pretend to deal
with them elsewhere if one does attack the points where they most paralyse
us, that is to say, at the blind spots of our own micro-fascisms. Self-
management cannot be a synonym for a generalised autonomism, for a
closing up onto territorialities that are jealous of one another - the family,
the community, the party, race: on the contrary, it is about deterritorialising,
connecting old stratifications, opening up to the prospect of a planetary
management that isn't centralised, that isn't about planning, whieh
multiplies decision-making centres and frees the libidinal energies that
have, hitherto been prisoners of racial, national, phallocratic, etc.
investments. Thus as we have tried to show, it cannot be separated from the
putting into place of analytic-political assemblages that only have distant
relations with what a certain number of 'non -authoritarian: Rogerian,
psycho-sociologists have classified in terms of'analysers'. It is not, in effect,
a matter of proposing a new recipe for the 'running' of small groups, but of
envisaging the conditions for a mieropolitics of desire, itself indissociable
from a 'large-scale' politics concerning the ensemble of class struggles. 5 To
have done with the dialogue of the deaf that opposes 'centralists' who caU
themselves democratic, from 'spontaneists' who are scarcely more so, it is at
a practicallevel that militants of self- management will have to take charge
of the intersections of power formations and machines of des ire with which
they are confronted. But under current conditions of capitalist alienation,
whieh spares no-one, it is difficult to imagine such analytie-militant groups
falling from the sky!
They will not be made to proliferate overnight, by making the right
resolutions, by opting for the right programme! And even in revolutionary
or pre-revolutionary conditions, which are in principle favourable to the
establishment of systems of 'dual power: one cannot expect that they will
start to germinate by themselves in the soil of popular spontaneity! They
can only be born from properly experimental embryos, from sometimes
entirely microscopie collective assemblages that are capable of combining
working problematics of economie management, everyday life, and desire.
In order to be produced, such assemblages will, on condition that they have
managed to engage with reality, will have no need of being put in print or
'propagandised'. In effect, once a new form of struggle or organisation 6
succeeds in resolving a problem, one notices that it is transmitted at the
speed of audiovisual. Once again, it is not a question here of putting a model

103
into circulation! The growth and expansion of'social innovations': can only
be accomplished along the lines - a rhizome of creative experimentation.
What continues to be rewarding in the work of Célestin Freinet, for
example/ is less his 'methods' or the movement that invokes them
(sometimes in quite a dogmatic fashion), than the fact that they contribute
to the catalysing of other efforts, in other contexts - in the urban context
with institution al pedagogy, for exampleB - or that it announces the idea of
a mu ch more radical calling into question of the existence of school as
such. 9

One can never say about a particular situation of oppression that it offers
no possibility for struggle; inversely, one can never daim that a society
or a social group, as such, is definitively protected against the growth of
a new form of fascism. Molecular semiotisation works over molar
stratifications and, inversely, these latter attempt to render molecular
assemblages impotent. Macroscopic or microscopic territorialities, massive
deterritorialisations or minuscule lines of flight, paranoid local or large-
scale fascist reterritorialisations do not cease penetrating each other
according to a general principle of transversality, in su ch a way that, for
example, micro-fascist conjunctions of power can spring up aIl over
the place, as we see in France, Germany, and Italy today, without the
modification of legal rights, constitution al guarantees, or consolidated
gains. In these countries until now micro-fascist conjunctions seem not to
have to crystallise at the molar level. But nothing ensures that it will always
be like this! We haven't forgotten the dedarations of the generals in Chile,
on the eve of the coup, who affirmed that their army was the most
democratic in the world! What took place then, not just in their heads, but
above aIl in the heads of those who 'believed in' them?
Were we not already in the presence of a fascist seizure of power, at the
level of a phenomenon of collective belief? Michel Foucault has clearly
shown that one cannot consider the political power of the State simply to be
the result of a hierarchy of coercive organisms. He has brought out what he
has called the ramified anatomy of disciplinary power: 'discipline may be
identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of
power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a "physics" or an
"anatomy" of power, a technologY:lO 1he whole question is one of knowing
un der what conditions this technology can be neutralised and this anatomy

104
defeated/undone! It is thus not a matter for us of opposing two types of
origin, a genealogical origin of major social formations, and a micro-
physical emergence of the socius on the basis of desiring machines. What is
in question here is, rather, the liquidation of every idea of origin and that
having taken into account the practical impossibility that active agents of
enunciation - and not 'objective' and external observers - generally find in
determining the number and intensity of the semiotic components which,
at a given moment, in a given situation, are likely to intervene in the
transformation of a social formation. Our intention is not at an to promote
a metaphysics of indeterminacy here, but to criticise political ideas that
think social causality in static terms - even when they daim to be dialectical
or to be inspired by thermodynamic concepts. 11 With their 'engines of
history', their 'weak links and strong links', their 'transmission mechanisms'
it seems that a certain number of Marxists really are fixated on what we
could calI the 'ste am engine complex'! Rather th an dinging too simplistic
models of causality between clearly distinguished objects and as a function
of energy parameters that are distinct from one another, they would do weIl
to take inspiration from more recent 'models: those of interaction in
contemporary physics, for example. 12 Inspiration has to be understood here
in the poetic sense or that of walkers who need a change of scenery.
Evidently it is not a matter of proposing new tracings, or the compulsive
search for a 'scientificity' of concepts in these domains - something that
seems to arise more from obsessional neurosis than from a theoretical
analysis connected with social realities.

105
PARTTWO

1
 1 1
1 1

Previously, we recalled the different modes of interaction that exist between

the molar and the molecular levels. But because we didn't go into sufficient
depth regarding the nature of the semiotie drivers of these interactions -
the function of abstract machines in partieular - our description remained
essentially on a synchronie and spatial plane. It would thus be necessary
also to envisage the existence of diachronie interactions that un do the
mechanistic systems of causality on which reasoning in terms of
evolutionary stages is founded. But how can the way that what cornes 'after'
determines what cornes 'before' be conceptualised? Every traditional mode
of thinking is opposed to the ide a that an effect can go against the grain of
time! AIso, such interactions can only be conceived on condition that they
be envisaged at a level we will characterise as 'machinic' - without specifying
its material and/or semiotie nature - in which they fun ct ion outside of
human spatio-temporal coordinates. Such is precisely the role that we
intend to make abstract machines and the machinie plane of consistency
onto whieh they 'fasten' themselves play. Neither transcendent Platonie
ideas nor Aristotelian forms in proximity with an amorphous matter, these
abstract machines make and unmake stratifications of aIl kinds. They
therefore do not function as a system of coding that would be fixed onto
existing stratifications from the outside; they 'hold' them from the 'inside'.
In the context of a general movement of deterritorialisation, they
constitute a sort of 'optional matter' whose crystals of possibility catalyse
the connections, the destratifications, and the reterritorialisations that work
the living world as much as the inanimate world. In sum, they mark the fact
that deterritorialisation 'precedes' the existence of strata and territories.
AIso, they cannot be 'realised' in a logical space, but only through contingent
machinic manifestations. With abstract machines it is never simply a
question of a simple combinatory, but of the assemblage of intensive
components that are irreducible to a formaI description. So, without
implying the recourse to any sort of background world, their necessity
follows from a reversaI of perspective leading to the pro cesses of coding
and of 'instruction' independently of a deixis and an anthropocentric
logic, and it has as a consequence the reshuffling of the 'hierarchical'
relations between the singular and the universal. The singularity of a matter
that is semiologically unformeà can daim universality. And inversely, the
universality of a coding procedure or a signifying redundancy can fall into
particularism. Neither universal, nor singular, the sign-partides that
constitute the abstract machines charge up singularities, not with the power
of universality but with a certain potential for traversing the universe of
stratifications. Thus marked in their own colours these singularities and the
stratifications that they bring about become available for the work of a
semiological assemblage. Correlatively, every utterance or instance of
power that daims universality finds itself weighed down with a facticity or
a historicity that lends them to a possible pragmatic reassembling.
But just as they have tried to annex semiotics, linguists today intend to
control the development of a possible pragmatics. As a form of content,
pragmatics is bracketed off or, when it is acknowledged, its political tenor is
neutralised. What the structuralists did for the signified a massive
operation of neutralisation - is repeated at another level by generative
linguistics and the linguistics of enunciation. Certainly there is now a
certain acknowledgement of semantic contents and pragmatic contents, but
always on condition that they are distanced from the collective assemblages
of enunciation on which they depend. Now, in our opinion, the essential
object of a pragmatics ought to be the study of micropolitical formations
relative to these assemblages and their impact on discourse and language.
In whatever way one considers it, contemporary linguistics continues to
model pragmatic and semantic fields on the syntagmatic field. Even wh en it
daims to know nothing of language itself - as with the distributionalists or
with Chomsky - it remains imprisoned in a certain type of discourse on the
basis of which it daims to deduce aIl the other possibilities of semiotic
competence. Hence the imperious necessity which it finds for itself of
affirming, as an intangible preliminary, that the types of langue and
competence that it studies - normal, masculine, heterosexual, adult, and
most frequently, white and capitalist, language are essentially based on
systems of universals. The abstraction of models here simply masks the
historically contingent character of the powers in play. But the reproach
that one may level at these theories is not that they are too abstract but on

110
the contrary that they aren't abstract enough and do not account for the
kind of singular - and not universal - abstract machines that are put into
play by languages, in the context of particular relations of production. We
consider that any ide a of a linguistic universal, at the level of the form of
expression (guaranteeing the autonomy of the grammatical) or at the level
of the form of content, has the role of dodging pragmatics in its power
functions and of cutting it off from the social and historical field. Here we
will oppose something that is not a model, which we will call 'rhizome' (or
'lattice'), to the model of the syntagmatic tree. It will be defined by the
following characteristics:

Contrary to Chomskyan trees, which begin at the point Sand

proceed through dichotomy, rhizomes can connect any point
whatsoever to any other.
• Each trait of the rhizome do es not necessarily refer to a linguistic
trait. Semiotic chains of all kinds are connected here to the most
diverse modes of co ding, biological chains, political chains,
economic, etc., putting into play not just every regime of signs but
also everything that has a non -sign status.
The relations that exist between the levels of segmentarity within
each semiotic stratum, are to be differentiated from interstratic
relations, and operate on the basis of the lines of flight of
deterritorialisation.
• Pragmatics will give up any idea of deep structure; the pragmatic
unconscious, unlike the psychoanalytic unconscious, is not a
representational unconscious, crystallised into codified complexes
and distributed according to a genetic axis; it is to be constructed
like a map.

The map, as the final characteristic of the rhizome, can be taken apart,
connected, reversed and can be modified constantly. There can be tree
structures within a rhizome. Inversely, the branch of a tree can start to bud in
a rhizomatic form.
Pragmatics is divided into two series of components:

1 Interpretative transformational components (that can equally be

called generative), which imply the primacy of semiologies of
signification over non-interpretative semiotics.
They are themselves divided into two general types of
transformation:

111
 • analogie transformations arising from iconic semiologies, for
example;
• signifying transformations, arising from linguistie semiologies.
Two types of'seizing power over contents' through reterritorialisation
and subjectivation correspond to them, which depend either on
territorialised assemblages of enunciation or on an individuation of
enunciation.
2 Non-interpretative transformational components whieh can
overturn the power of the preceding two transformations.
One can divide them into two general types of transformation
paraUel to the interpretative transformations:
• symbolic transformations arising from intensive semioties (on
the perceptive, gestural or mimetie level, etc.);
• diagrammatic transformations arising from a-signifying
semioties, whieh operate through a deterritorialisation that
bears jointly on the formalism of content and on that of
expression, and through the putting into play of abstract
machines manifested by a system of signs-particles.
Remarks:

1 We are not employing the expressions 'generative component' and

'transformational component' in the same sense as the
Chomskyans. For them, the generative capacity of a system
functions like a Iogico-mathematicai axiomatic, whereas we
consider that the generative constraints (of a language or a diaiect)
are always intrinsically linked to the genealogy of a power
formation. It is the same with the notion of transformation. The
Chomskyans conceptualise it in a way that is identicai to that of
algebraic or geometricai transformations (it will be recalled that the
transformations of an equation change its form whilst maintaining
the 'deep' economy of the relations present). We are taiking here in
a sense that couid be connected to the sense in which in the history
of theories of evolution, transformism (or mutationism) was
opposed to fixism. But perhaps there is only a tiny bit of derision
and provocation in our 'abusive' use of the Chomskyan categories,
because in fact they have served as a guide a contrario.
2 Contrary to the historicai decision of the International Association
of Semiotics, we propose, with the same arbitrariness, to main tain
(and even to reinforce) a distinction between:

112 UNES OF FUGHT

 Semiology, as a trans-linguistic discipline which examines
systems of signs in relationship with the laws of language
(Barthes's point of view); and
fil Semiotics, as a discipline that aims to study systems of signs
following a method that doesn't depend on linguistics (Peirce's
point ofview).

113
 1 ,
1 1 1

The problems posed by pragmatics are in the process of acquiring a central

place in the preoccupations of contemporary linguistics. With linguistic
structuralism, contents were tributary to signifying chains that could always
be described in terms of chains of binary oppositions. Information theory
had established itself in sorne way at the heart of the machine of linguistic
expression. It seemed to go without saying that its purpose was the
transmission of information, the rest being mere noise and redundancy.
With language having no other content than information, it was not a
question for linguistics of interpenetration with the social field and its
political problems. The object of linguistics, the 'objective' object that was
supposed to constitute it as a science, was this atom of information Ca sort of
quantitative unit of form), whereas the problems of communication were
relegated to a question that remained rather marginal, that of enunciation.
Imitating scientific objectivity, linguistics thus believed it could keep its
distance from any difficult social problematic. Psychoanalysis had proceeded
in the same way, but by relying not on information theory, but on biology,
linguistics and, recently, even logic and mathematics.
Chomskyan linguistics wanted straightaway to distinguish itself from
structural linguistics, which it reproached for not taking into account the
creative characteristic of language. In its first version, it considered that the
phonological machine could only intervene in the final formulation of
utterances, at a so-called surface level. On the basis of a syntactic deep
structure, its first linguistic model was supposed to generate and transform
utterances without losing any nuance, any semantic ambiguity. But along the
way the 'semantic question' has only deepened the mystery of the operations
that are supposed to be accomplished at the 'deep' level. For orthodox
Chomskyans, a mathematical machine - a syntactic topology is relied on
to produce semantic compositions, whilst for the 'generative semantics'
current, this same task is entrusted to a partic:ular logic, a so-called 'natural
logic:' that articulates abstract 'semantic atoms' ('atomic predicates') and the
'postulates of meaning' that link them together. 1 Seeking to free itself from
the narrow formalism of structuralism and Chomskyanism, a linguistics of
enunciation is today endeavouring to find its own path. Its explicit object
is the consideration of the pragmatic components of communication.
Unfortunately, it still seems to go without saying, for the linguistics of
enunciation, that one can only take these components into consideration in
so far as they have an impact on the structures of language as such, that is to
say, in so far as they have already been syntacticised and semanticised.
And once again the question of the status of the micropolitical fields of
power that the research of the phonological and generativist currents had
evacuated makes its appearance. One has the impression that once more the
wastebasket of linguistics - to borrow an expression from ChomskyZ - has
merely been shifted. With the binary reduction of the structuralists, semantics
was the wastebasket. With the topologism of the 'generative semanticists:
semantic contents were apparently taken in hand, but they are studied
without the social assemblages of their enunciation ever being worried about;
thus the political wastebasket is pushed back towards a pragmatics with
undefinable limits. With the linguistics of enunciation, one finally turns to
pragmatics, but it is constituted in a restrictive way. It is treated as a signifying
content. In the same way as semantic fields, pragmatic fields are flattened,
structuralised. They remain dependent on syntactic and phonological
machines. To be sure these are more complex than those of Martinet's
structuralism, and they have to be inserted at one point or another in the
branching of the deep structures or surface structures of the generativist
kind, without the idea that they might have their own system of staging, their
own micropolitical fields of enunciation, ever being accepted.
Linguists seem to accept as self-evident that semantic fields and
pragmatic fields can be binarised in a similar way to machines of expression
that convey 'digitalise d' information. One might say that they are wary of
content and context and that they only agree to take them into consideration
on condition of having the guarantee that they can control them on the basis
of a rigorous formalisation relying on a system of univers aIs, which protects
them from historical and social contingencies. For ex ample, Nicholas Ruwet
considers that the creativity of language can only be exercised in the
framework of an axiomatics. He refuses the open perspective of Hjelmslev,

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that it might begin at the more molecular level of the concatenation of
figures of expression and figures of content (we will try to define the first as
being a-signifying diagrammatic, and the second as a-signifying semantic).
Certainly this author doesn't completely exclu de the existence of this ldnd of
work within language, but he relegates it to a marginal position that seems
to echo, on a linguistic plane, that which the mad, children and poets
experience on the social plane. 3 Under these conditions, how can one still
hope to preserve the creative dimension of language?
How is one to understand that deviants, group-subjects, can invent
words, break a syntax, change significations, pro duce new connotations,
action words, political order words, engender revolutions as much in society
as in language?

With Hjelmslev, the project of a radical axiomatisation of linguistics at least

presented the advantage of not specifying the irreversible opposition of
content and expression. 'The very terms plane, expression, and content have
been chosen according to current usage, and are entirely arbitrary. By virtue
of their functional definition, it is impossible to maintain that it is legitimate
to caU one of these magnitudes "expression" and the other "content': and not
the other way round: they are only defined through their solidarity with one
another, and neither can be defined more precisely. Taken separately, they
can only be defined through opposition and in a relative fashion, as the
functives of a single function that opposes them to one another: 4 Of course
it is regrettable that in fact this axiomatised opposition of expression and
content coincides with that made by Saussure between signifier and signified,
and as a consequence, the ensemble of semiotics are made to depend on
linguistics again. 5
Whatever the case may be, at the most essential level of what the
glossematicians caU the 'semiotic function: the form of expression and
the form of content are articulated so as to constitute a 'solidarity' that
radically relativises this classic opposition between content and expression. 6
This latter finally only reasserts its rights at the level of substances (the
meaning of content and the meaning of expression). Correlatively, one can
therefore only talk of form to the extent that it is manifest, functionalised in
substances. Now, what we are trying to show is that non-linguistic semiotic
metabolisms work these substances 'before' the constitution of a machine for
'making significations: without it being possible to establish a relation of
priority or hierarchy with regard to them in relation to the latter (metabolism,

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symbolic, diagrammatic, etc.). It is by semiotising diverse basic 'matters' that
this solidarity of farms - which we will caU here an abstract machine -
constitutes substances of expression and content. What differentiates
substance from matters is precisely their being semiotically formed. The
distinction that Hjelmslev establishes between the system and the pro cess
of its syntagmatisation do es not imply that this latter remain a prisoner of
autonomous forms of the Platonic ide a type. No form can exist for itself
outside of processes of formation. These pro cesses do not necessarily refer to
univers al codes, closed in on themselves; in certain cases, they remain
inseparable from characteristics proper to the base materials that they put
into play, what Metz, with regard to cinema, has called the pertinent traits of
matters of expression. 7 The whole question is one of seeking to determine
what gives a creative fünction to a semiotic component and what takes it
away. Languages, as such, have no privilege for semiotic creativity; they
even function, most often, as encodings of normalisation. Inversely, non-
linguistic semiotics can perfectly easily be creative and even break the lead
weight of conformity of dominant linguistic significations. The operation
of semiological overcoding of semiotic pro cesses in the 'free state: which
reduces them to the status of linguistic component, or to a dependency of
language, consists in isolating the traits that are useful to power formations
for every one of them, and of neutralising, repressing, and 'structuralising'
the others, by means of the signifying linguistic machine.
We will therefore not take up the distinction maintained by Hjelmslev
between sign and symbol again. What we will designate with the expression
'sign machine' will coyer both Hjelmslev's sign and symbol systems
(Prolegomena p.142).As a consequence, we will not endeavour to determine
what characterises the productions of signification and symbolic or iconic
productions at the level of figures of expression, but at the pragmatic level of
assemblages of enunciation relative to these sign machines. Thus pragmatics
will in a way move into the first rank of components responsible for semiotic
micropolitics.

In our terminology, we will say that by semiologising itself in a language,

the abstract machine, or if you wish, the machine extracted from the base of
semiotic components, the sign machine in what makes it most machinic
(that is to say, deterritorialised), brings about a reterritorialisation of these

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components by their regrouping into two homogeneous planes, that of
expression and that of content. In fact, these two planes are not homogeneous
at an: they only give the illusion of being sa through the double articulation,
the polarisation, the structuralisation of the constitutive elements that they
set up, in relation to one another. Once they have been homogenised,
planified, these 'base' components could be caIled semiological, and no
longer semiotic. This semiological super-substance, which has been put in
place behind the variety of serniotic substances, this dualist signifying
substance, or this super-sense, is only in a position to 'take in hand' the
intensive multiplicities put into play by the different semiotic vectors on
condition that it grids and hierarchises them by this system of double
overcoding - overcoding of power at the level of content and logieo-
axiomatie overcoding at the syntagrnatie level. The ideal of order, of the
general formalisation of aIl modes of expression, of the delimitation and
control of intensive flows of semiological substances, is an ideal that is
never completely reached because in reality, as we will see later on, language
leaks aIl over the place. This ideal is that of exhaustive diehotomous analysis,
the binary reduction, the radical 'digitalisation' of aIl semiotic praxis, the
model for which was elaborated by information theory, and it continues ta
function (in the company of behaviourism and Pavlovianism, with whieh
in any case it has certain affinities) as a veritable repressive war machine in
the field of the sciences of language and the hum an sciences.
It is considered, coldly, 'scientifically: that reductive binary analysis could
by rights be applied to no matter what kind of social fact. And if sorne or
other artifice seems ta give success in this, then one is persuaded that the
essential point in question has been grasped, one can be satisfied, stop and
move on to something else! In this direction, and by pushing things ta the
extreme, one might th en start to consider that because every event can be
expressed in terms of the probability of its occurrence, no matter what
structure itself results from an originally accidentaI deducting [prélèvement],
or is commanded by a universallogical imperative, the 'goal' of which is the
constitution of a local nucleus of diminishing entropy in the probabilistic
system that is the starting point. The ulliversais that are supposed to weigh
over history and its power struggles are thus at the join between two
operations, which consist in 1) probabilising events along a diachronie axis;
and 2) structuralising events along a synchronie axis. But the true goal of this
entire operation consists in making socio-machinie assemblages, which in
the last instance constitute the sole effective producers of rupture and of
innovation in the semiotic domains that interest us here, disappear under the
table. Chance and structure are the worst enemies of freedom. Both proceed
from the same conservative ideal of a general axiomatic of the sciences,

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imported from mathematics starting at the end of the nineteenth century,
the same philosophical tradition of the transcendental subject as knowing
subject, opaque to the contingencies ofhistory, and which is prolonged today
in the ossified and pernickety dise ourse of epistemology. Every time it is the
same magic trick: by means of the defence of a transcendent order founded
on the supposedly universal character of the signifying articulations of
certain utterances - the cogito, mathematics, the 'discourse' of science - one
seeks to support a certain land of stratification of powers that guarantees the
status, the material comfort and the imaginary security of its scribes.
There are thus two possible attitudes, two possible politics, with regard to
form: a formalist position which sets out from transcendent, univers al forms
eut off from history, which come to be 'incarnated' in semiological substances;
and a position which sets out from power formations and assemblages of
enunciation, which extracts semiotic components and abstract machines on
the basis of machinic processes such as are offered up by history. Sometimes,
more or less accidentaI conjunctions between 'natura!' codings and sign
machines get the upper hand in a given period, but in fact, these conjunctions
are inseparable from the assemblages, which in any case constitute the
nucleus of their enunciation. Not, as one might be tempted to say, their re-
enunciation. In effect, there is no meta-language here.
The collective assemblage speaks 'flush' with states of things and states of
fact.There is not, on the one hand, a subject that speaks in the void, and on the
other, an object that would be spoken in 'the full'. Ihe void and the full are
'machined' by the same deterritorialisation effect. Connections are only
possible at the points where 'natura!' things and the linguistic things are
deterritorialised and make possible the connection of their deterritorialisatioIl.
Thus, assemblages are not offered up to chance or to an axiomatic of universals:
they arise from a general 'law' of deterritorialisation: it is the most
deterritorialised assemblage which has the potential for resolving the impasse
in earlier systems of enunciation and the stratifications of the machinic
assemblages that correspond to them. But this 'law' doesn't in the least imply a
pre-established order, a necessary harmony. Just a machinic diachrony without
any dialectical guarantee. If we believe it necessary to insist on this second
point of view - that of abstract machines and not transcendent forms - it is
because it seems to us to be the sole possible way out of the impenitent and
disempowering dualism in which linguists, and following them, semioticians
and structuralists, are imprisoned. But it is not an ideological optional matter.
In effect, these two points of view coexist and interact with one another
incessantly. From the side of intensive multiplicities, machinic lines of flight
tend to deterritorialise semiotic processes, to open them up, to connect them
to other matters of expression, whilst stratified codings, on the side of the

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order of'things: of the dominant worldlinesses tend to syntacticise them and
to eut them off from any meshing with the intensive real. On the first side,
desire, which is in a perpetuaily nascent state, foilows its own line with respect
to semiological stratifications; on the other side, it st arts to turn round and
round in power structures, in this 'silent order' which, Michel Foucault teils us,
subjects us to a grid that is prior to linguistic, perceptual and practical grids, to
the extent that it neutralises them by doubling them. 8

abstraction
Exiting from the ghetto of linguistics, from the ghetto of significations,
depends on whether abstract machines function with signification or
independently of it, in what we cail a diagrammatic effect (at the level of
'pre-'signifying symbolic semiotic components, we will not yet talk about an
abstract machine but only of a machinic index). When they are liberated
from dualist signifying substance, which they avoid or get around, abstract
machines do not arise from a particular stratum, constituted - as it happens
- from the articulation of a plane of expression with a plane of content, to
manifest themselves. With the diagrammatic effect they are organised on the
basis of a single plane: the machinic plane of consistency or plane of machinic
immanence. 9
Ail the points of deterritorialisation, ail the machinic surplus values, are
inscribed on this plane. They constitute in sorne way a sort of machine of
abstract machines (and of machinic indices), the place for the potentialisation
of ail potential machinic assemblages. Abstract machines cease to be slotted
into (or encasted in), segmentarised in the strata. On the contrary, now the
strata depend on it, in so far as they knot the points of deterritorialisation of
their material and semiotic components together with the machinic-semiotic
surplus values of the plane of consistency. The strata are thus doubled, haunted
by a field of possible on the horizon: that of the upsurge of new machinic
assemblages. At this level, the distinction between semiotic machines and
their referents ceases to be pertinent, and it is that which motivates our use of
the expression 'abstract machine'. Machines here are no longer either material
or semiotic. They are machines of pure potentiality. Not empty potentiality,
because they do not start out from nothing, but from the points of
potentialisation of machinic assemblages, considered at a given point of the
machinic phylum, in a given historical context. Machines are abstract in that
they extract the points of connection between lines of destratification. They

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establish the univocity of possible connections, where the strata seemed to
have to maintain separations eternally. With abstract machines and their
plane of consistency, ruptures between the strata are brought to light and a
passage for the most deterritorialised energy is made possible.
But this univocity of abstract machines remains fundamentaUy metastable.
They are, we repeat, nothing, as such, they have no mass, no energy of their
own, no memory. They are nothing but the infinitesimal, super-deterritorialised
indication of a possible crystallisation between states of things and states of
signs. One might compare them to the partides of contemporary physics,
which are 'virtualised' by theory and retain their identity for an infinitesimal
period of time, an identity which in any case it is not necessary to prove on an
experimental plane, as long as the theoretico-experimental complex can
continue to function by presupposing their existence. It is this metaphor that
leads us to speak, with regard to the diagrammatic effect, of a putting to work
of sign-particles: the abstract machine is 'charged' either with signification or
with existence, depending on whether it is fixed and disempowered in a
semiological substance or it is inscribed on the machinic plane of consistency
by the process of diagrammatisation. In the first case it serves as a point to
which lin es of potential destratification ding, which it reterritorialises by
folding them back on themselves, by putting them into bi-univocal
correspondence, by overcoding or axiomatising them. For the lin es of flight it
then becomes a vanishing point [un point de fuite], in the pictorial sense this
time, a point of closure for representation, which totalises a virtual point of
view, that puts an end to aU the leaking of des ire, a sort of drain for a whole
series of contents that are constituted as a dependency of an empty container.
Whereas in the second case, the pro cesses of semiotisation will traverse aIl the
strata, will avoid the knots of redundancy that are the effects of signification,
the personological poles, the fixation on faciality traits, etc. Whatever its mode
of existence and the semiotic compositions which it enters the heart of might
be, the abstract machine will no longer be linked to fixed and universal
coordinates, but to a becoming with multiple potentialities. When such a
diagrammatic effect does not manage to constitute itself, the system collapses
and one gets recuperated by dualist substance. The 'mentalisation' of signifying
contents consists in reifying a real, in paradigmaticising signifieds and
syntagmaticising an expression, according to an economy of semiotic
normativisation and subjection. As Hjelmslev has demonstrated so weIl, the
diverse modes of semiological formalisation depend on the fundamental
break between expression and content in signification. After a first step in
which the two breaks between expression and content and form and substance
are 'contracted' at the heart of the machine of semiotic disempowerment that
the famous signifier-signified-referent triangle constitutes, the second step is

122
to award honours to the production of signification, proclaiming its superiority
over aU other semiotic productions, to the extent that it alone would be able to
be defined as a semiology of communication. But a communication of what
between who, if not disempowered informational residues between fictive
poles of subjectivation, radically eut off from intensive multiplicities?
The subject is thus not a simple effect of a signifier, as the celebrated
Lacanian formula 'the signifier represents the subject for another signifier'
proclaims; it results from the ensemble of processes that converge on
the disempowering of modes of semiotisation. 'The individuated and
consciential subjectivation of enunciation corresponds to the particular
assemblages of a series of disempowering breaks:

at the level of sign machines between the signifier and the

signified;
Ct at the level of discourse, between the signified and the referent;
Ct at the very level of the process of subjectivation, by the establishment
of a redundancy of redundancies, of a formalisation of formalisms
constitutive of one's presence to self, of the splitting of the self, by the
threat of the loss of identity in the double, by the opposition between
the subject and the other and, beyond - and always recentred on the
same system of empty resonance - by aIl the systems of bipolar
values (masculine-feminine around the phallus, singular-plural
around the whole object, true-false, good-evil, etc).

When the energy of desiring intensities is captured by the infernal machine of

the semiological triangle (signifier-signified-referent), the abstract machines,
connected in a closed circuit as if in a sort of cyclotron, lose their open
machinic function so as to become signifying abstractions. Instead of being
organised according to machinic indices, lines of power (machinic surplus
values) or machinic assemblages, intensive multiplicities are structured
according to spatio-temporal coordinates, substances of expressions and
inter-subjective positions for which these abstractions will be the cornerstone.
Thus, signifying abstraction, the abstract machine, machinic indices and
assemblages - to which we will return in what foUows - do not crystallise
'spontaneously' but only because of particular assemblages of enunciation.
Abstraction partially crystaUises with the territorialised assemblage of
enunciation, but above aU and most fuUywith the individuation of enunciation.
It implies the erection of a transcendentalised subject, of a transcendentalised
object, of a transcendentalised other and of a transcendentalised signifier. AU
the flows are thus stratifie d, dualised, grasped in systems of echoes.

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The semiologisation of an abstract machine, its fixation as an abstraction,
implies an autonomisation and a disempowering of deterritorialisation: an
empty deterritorialisation, turning around on itself, is constituted with the
process of consciential subjectivation. This empty system of redundancies of
the consciential machine corresponds to this system of the double
articulation of signifying chains: a machine for emptying out intensities, a
machine to produce the void, lack and the break of representation.
Abstraction simulates a passageway between sign machines and real
intensities; this semiotic simulation of real articulations implies that aIl the
effective connections between the sign machine and the referent have been
eut off, emptied out, such that relations of denotation appear arbitrary and
relations of signification unmotivated. But it is a matter of a forced
arbitrariness and a forced motivation, an active politics of the break and of
the autonomisation of the plane of the signifier. The void must be continuously
remade, isolation must be reproduced, the risk that the leaking of desire
might re-establish a direct connection between machinic expression, the
formalism of content and the traits of expression of the matters constitutive
of the referent must be combatted incessantly.1O The task of emptying out
and avoiding desire falls to this machine of empty redundancy, this
consciential machine. Consciential subjectivation is essentiaIly linked to a
certain kind of organisation of society, a system of law and of signification
which imposes a space of representation that is separated from the world of
affects and of real assemblages. AIl encoding must pass through the central
programming machine. And for that to happen, every intensity must be
constrained to renounce the connections that would be established outside
of the 'coherence' of dominant significations and coordinates. Far from being
a given in itself, the signifier therefore has to be incessantly reproduced by
the consciential machine and signifying simulation, incessantly prevented
from transforming itself into a diagrammatic becoming that would set off
direct interactions between the sign machines, affects and field of 'materiaf
intensities. Speech and writing are not impotent as such, but also because of
a repressive syntagmatisation and paradigmatisation that overcode them.
But this disempowering is constantly demolished by the fact that - at the
level of the 'deep' articulations of its figures of expression - the deterritorialised
machine of expression tends to escape this repression, as if of its own accord.

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The homogenisation of the processes of formalisation that arise from content
with those that arise trom expression, do not drop out of the skyl It results
from a unification brought about by the ensemble of power formations. In
'depth' there is neither unity of form nor duality of substance, but a
multiplicity of intensities of machinisms with no distinction between
expression and content, form and substance.
At the level of social stratifications, exchanges will only be tolerated if
they are duly overcoded - that is the regime of relative deterritorialisation.
In these conditions, abstraction should no longer be considered a 'cooled
down' abstract machine but rather as an active system for the neutralisation
of machinic assemblages and the extinction of machinic indices. And it
always goes hand in glove with a power formation. The abstractions of
religion, for example, or those that found personological, ethnic, national
identity, etc., create a sentiment of belonging, of participation in a common
reference territoriality.All paths lead to the transcendent point of significance
to which the diverse religious, moral, political, economic, cosmic value
systems are linked. This knot of redundancy, which marks the optimum
tolerable of processes of deterritorialisation, has as its function 'doubling'
and putting an end to the threat of their overflowing. Thus it fixes an
objective, point of view, to the lines of flight opened up by the machinic
indices and assemblages; the first will have constantly to remain on this side
of an abstract horizon, whereas the second will have constantly to return to
the universal contents for which they will become the apparent foundations.
With the abstract machines thus fixed like butterflies to the sky of abstract
ide as, the energy of desire can be put in the service of a world order that will
for its part be completely terrestrial!
It is not a question of bringing des ire to the side of the con crete and of
excluding it from the side of the abstract. Only an investment of desire in the
power formations that produce abstract representations can explain the
alienating potential of the latter. 'flle paradox of these transcendental
pseudo-mediations which only end up in the void and powerlessness, whilst
the true operators are within reach, in the practical assemblages that can, at
every moment, restitute power to the signs of the earth and confer an
unbelievable superpower on the sign-particle machines of the collective
assemblages of enunciation (on theoretico-experimental complexes, on
music, etc.). From the point of view of a pragmatics (semiotic or not), one
should be led to consider the contingent character of the components of the
semiotic triangle, which we are presented with as being grounded on
univers ais, but for which none is independent of particular power
formations: on the side of the signifier, scientific and economic assemblages
of diagrammatic power; on the side of the signifie d, assemblages of power in

125
politics, schools, etc.; on the side of semiotics of the referent, systems of the
enslavement of modes of perceptual or audiovisual coding, etc. ll (One only
perceives objects of consumption, for example, to the extent that one has
access to them through monetary semiotics - 'buying power', advertising,
etc.; if one passes by them without seeing them, one merely dreams about
them.)
For Hjelmslev, the substance-form couple was primary in relation to the
expression-content couple, whilst from our point of view, it is the possible
articulation of these two couples and of the matters of expression of
the 'referent' by an assemblage of enunciation, that one must start from. The
foundation of expression is not to be sought in a transcendental formalisation,
but in the constitution of a machine of expression, the modes of subjectivation
of which could be symbolic, analogical, signifying, a-signifying, to difTerent
degrees, as a function of the assemblage of semiotic components putting
more or less deterritorialised, discretised, digitalised, syntacticised batteries
of signs to work. In fact, Hjelmslev did not completely free himself up from
a linguisticocentric point of view; he only retained the case of expression-
content complementarity of the recto-verso type, that is to say, the case of
total reversibility between a form of expression and form of content. But the
rule of a generalised formalism of this kind could only be established on
condition that real operations have been effectuated prior to the convertibility
of the value systems concerned. It will be a matter, in the first instance, of
State power as the locus for a general convertibility of macro-systems of
economic and symbolic values, but also of the tentacular rhizome of power
formations and of Collective equipments linked to social groups of aIl sizes
which miniaturise and deepen this convertibility to attain a systematic
control of aU singular systems of values of desire. The industry of the
spectacle, for example, supported by the mass media, will organise loci for
the convertibility of aIl imaginary representations; whilst the family and the
school charge themselves with the semantic translatability and the signifying
sectioning of every expression by the child.
What passes from expression to content and inversely are relatively
deterritorialised forms, forms for which deterritorialisation has been
standardise d, eut off from its potential dynamism. The convertibility of
systems is always synonymous with impotentialisation and power:
impotentialisation of desire by the stratifying power of signifying semiotic
formations that succeed in localising, 'identifying: formalising it, in a system
of empty redundancy. Let us consider the case of a complete reversion
between a signifier and a signified during the learning of a foreign language:
the fact that a denoted object can serve to indicate an unknown word implies
that an element of the referent, or of representation, passes into a signifying

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position, whilst the chain of phonematic or graphematic expression passes
into a signified position. What is happening? Is there the transmission of a
form? Of information? Is it not rather the putting into place of a new
component of perceptual encoding, in which the sign-percept thing will be
the correspondent of the thing said or murmured? What is in question here
is therefore not a simple linguistic technology of the translateability of a
form but an assemblage of enunciation that may or may not render possible
such and such a micropolitics of discourse. 12 A child can very easily manage
to machine words and things without cutting them off from desiring
intensities. Little Hans, for example, will avoid formalising a paradigm
around the penis - he will speak instead of the function, of the 'wee-wee
maker' (wiwimacher), which he will find at work a bit everywhere. But once
the power of the adult, the family, the school, is established at the heart of its
mode of semiotisation, everything changes: the energy of desire will have to
be invested in the syntacticisation of utterances, the identification of objects,
classes, coordinates of aH sorts: the child must at aH costs give up his or her
question-machines and accept the fixed order of things, that is to say that
neither women nor trains have wee-wee makers. Thus the dichotomising
formations of the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement, of
the addressor and addressee, of the inanimate and the living object, of the
masculine and the feminine, etc. will be fixed and stabilised, although for
the child innumerable passageways between these stratifications exist.

assemblage
The individuation of the process of enunciation and the semiotic
discernibilisation of another from oneself are correlative to the taking off of
a plane of content that is transcendent in relation to the 'natural' territorialities
of des ire and in relation to the plane of immanence of machinic intensities.
The splitting of enunciation is inseparable from the splitting of signification.
The subject of enunciation, the Other, the Law and the plane of content
always correspond to the setting out of the object of power. Content
crystallises a world, not a universal world, but a worldliness that is marked by
contingent fields of force. Here would be the place to clearly distinguish the
different modes of structuring of formalisms as a function of the fact that
they do or don't imply the existence of an autonomised plane of expression
radically separating the object expressed from the machine of expression. In
effect, the formalisation traits of different 'matters' of expression, in

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Hjelmslev's sense, are not necessarily structured in such a way that they are
translateable. When they are, it is because they have been treated in an
appropriate way. But it would also be worth distinguishing between diverse
modes of translateabilisation, depending on whether they have a scientific
proposition or a common-sense utterance as their object, whether they are
effectuated by an aesthetic machine or by a revolutionary social machine, etc.
It would be illusory to think, for example, that the structure given to musical
forms in the baroque era contains the axiomatic of the development of
romantic music 'in potentiaI: To be sure there are constants, logical
correspondences, but the passage from one era to another is not made up of
that alone. Many other factors are to be attributed to the social, historical and
technical field, etc.
No formaI structure presides over the different semiotic strata, except in
the minds of theorists of art or epistemologists. Even in the case in which a
style, a theory, even an axiomatics, succeeds in imposing itself, like a dogma,
and seems to mark its era with its imprint, real changes, in fact, always result
from the tangling together of components that everywhere exceed the domain
in question. AIso, once the structural couple substance of the signifier/
substance of the signified finds itself threatened by the irruption of an internaI
line of flight - a diagrammatic component - aIl the traits of the matters of
expression tend to reassert their rights and return to their intrinsic mode of
formalisation (which is manifest with the semiotic compositions of the dream
or of anxiety). Thus, relativising the tradition al signifier-signified opposition,
as we propose to do, doesn't necessarily imply giving up on applying the
content-expression opposition to other kinds of structural assemblage. As
Oswald Ducrot suggests, the identification of semantic realitywith signification
isn't completely self-evident, to the extent that the pragmatic dimensions of
content exceed signification in its customary sense. 13
In these conditions there is perhaps something to be gained by reserving
the use of the notions of semantic content and semantic field for the
particular case of interpretative analogical components, by taking up the
outline of a classification of semiotic components that we proposed earlier.
One would then have:

El Analogical generative components, the semantic contents of which

would entertain relations of'envelopment' with the referents that
they interpret, and would generate fields of in te rp re tan ce. Their mode
of enunciation would arise from territorialised collective assemblages
(the classic or transitivist example of childhood 'before'language).
El Generative semiologicallinguistic components the interpretation of
which operates on the basis of a syntagmatic 'studding' of the plane

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 Semiotic Functions of content Articulations of Assemblages of
components content and expression enunciation

Generative Interpretative Analogical Semantic Fields of interpretance Subject, collective and

territorialised

Semiological Signifying Plane of significance (double Subjective, individuated,

linguistic articulation) egoic

Transformational non- Symbolic intensive Performative Lines of flight and of A-subjective performative
Interpretative and indexial destratification

Diagrammatic Of sense a-signifying Plane of consistency A-subjective machinic

 of content (the plane ofsignificance). The referent here being
distanced from the signifying representation, the mode of
enunciation would arise from individuated subjective assemblages
that are relatively more deterritorialised th an the preceding case
(function of the ego).
ct Intensive and a-subjective symbolic transformational components,
the contents of which index referents and enunciative coordinates
(machinic indices, line of flight and performative function). They
desubjectivise, 'machinise' enunciation, deterritorialise
personological strategies, without for aIl that catalysing the
diagrammatic pro cesses of deterritorialisation of sign machines.
1hey would operate by the reassemblage of semiotic components
without creating any new ones properly speaking (for example:
mystical or aesthetic desubjectivation). One will speak here of a
collective assemblage of enunciation even in the case in which a
single individual is expressing him or her self here, because he or
she will be considered as a non-totalisable intensive multiplicity.
ct A-subjective diagrammatic transformational components, the
a-signifying contents of which not only deterritorialise the
assemblages of enunciation but equally the machines of expression,
semantic formalisms but would also enter into a direct connection
with the modes of encoding proper to different stratifications of
the referent (which implies a common 'reference' at the most
deterritorialised level: that of the machinic plane of consistency).
One will speak here of a machinic assemblage of enunciation.
One will note that the collective assemblages such as we have envisaged them
in the first part of this work exceed the diverse cases in our table: they can be
territorialised and arise from a predominantly analogical component
(primitive societies, groups of adolescents, etc., for example); they can
participate in intensive symbolic components (the experience of drugs, for
example); they can be adjacent to a machinic enunciation (the chorus in
relation to the orchestra in a modern opera, for example); or they can remain
dependent on an individuated economy of enunciation (the sliding of group-
subjects towards subjugated groups). In a more general fashion the terms of
the fourfold division that we are proposing must not be considered as if they
were the nuclear elements of a semiotic 'machinics: In effect, each one of
them puts into play a particular diagrammatic function so as to attain its
point of effectiveness (even when it is a matter of a point of signifying
impotentiation), and to one degree or another, they develop an indiciary
semantic and signifying function. Everything is a matter of assemblage here,

130
of accent, of the dominant tone, in a word, of semiotic micropolitics. One is
therefore only ever dealing with mixtures associating these different kinds of
component. A poetic assemblage of enunciation, for example, will result in
symbolic concatenations and modes of subjectivation associating difterent
regimes of signs, about which one could say that they are at one and the same
time semiologically formed - although partially a-grammaticaP4 - and a-
signifying, although bearing pre-coded semantic contents.
Let us also note, with regard to this table, that it seems to us that the
linguistic categories of Benveniste, of interpretance and significance, which
for this author correspond to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes
respectively, can be transposed here to a semiotic level, but on condition that
they are disjoined from one another. Interpretance here becomes a component
that can be autonomised:

Applied in isolation to an intensive symbolic component, starting

from that component it generates an analogical semiotics (without
any intersection between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes,
but with the development of fields of semantic interpretance and
territorialised assemblages of enunciation).
Applied to a diagrammatic component (a sign machine of
linguistic origin, for example), it transforms that component
(or retransforms it) into a signifying semiology, taking on the
significance function itself, through the intersection of
paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, correlative to a pro cess of
subjectivation (or of re-subjectivation).

The degree of grammaticality proposed by Chomsky would therefore be a

function of the degree of dependency and counter-dependency established
in the framework of a signifying linguistic assemblage between, on the one
hand, the 'latent' semantic contents of the analogical and performative
components of the symbolic components implicated in it, and, on the other
hand, the 'potential' diagrammatic components of the a-signifying machine
that is put into play here. The a-significance of an utterance could therefore
result from two types of transformation: it either succeeds in avoiding the
despotism of signifying formalisms at a morphematic lev el, and is enriched
by new indiciary 'charges' the polysemie or homonymie proliferation that
opens it up in different directions, for example (this is the case with the
passage from a semiotic assemblage dominated by a signifying mode of
generation to a symbolic transformation); or, at the 'glossematic' level of its
figures of expression (phonemes, graphemes ... ), it manages to insert itself
in a semiotic assemblage dominated by a diagrammatic transformation, the

131
content of which escapes any system of analogical representation or
signifying overcoding. Consequently, the diagrammatic utterance will
participate directly in a machinic assemblage, by ceasing to put into play
semiologically formed substances, but [rather] the pertinent traits of a
matter of expression constitutive of'scientifically formed: musically formed,
etc., a-signifying chains. 15
For us, these distinctions should lead us to lift the ambiguities that, for
example, result from Charles Sanders Peirce's amalgamation, under the term
icon, of 'images' and 'icons of relation', the images arising from semantic and
indiciary contents and the icons of relation from diagrammatic contents -
or even from oppositions between lexical signification and grammatical
signification, these latter equally arising from the diagrammatic components
proper to language. The diagrammatic sense that we propose here could
equally be brought into proximity with the operatory sense that Klauss
opposes to eidetic sense. 16 For this author, operatory sense puts assemblages
of signs into play that represent sequences of phonemes or semantic
configurations, whereas eidetic sense remains prisoner of the triangle of
signification, sign-concept-object represented. But in our opinion he still
over-valorises eidetic sense, which he makes into a sort of secret reference
for operatory sense. That is why, when he quite rightly considers that
concatenations of symbols in abstract calculations are operations endowed
with a certain kind of sense, he adds that it is a matter of a sense that is 'less
rich' in possibilities as regards the possible handling of objects that they
represent. We consider, on the contrary, that the sense without signification
that is produced by a diagrammatic economy of signs is capable of thwarting
the impasses proper to semiologies of signification, in so far as it introduces
a supplementary coefficient of deterritorialisation into semiotic assemblages,
enabling [these] semiotic machines to simulate, to 'double: to effectuate the
relational and structural knots relative to material and social flows, precisely
at the points which an anthropocentric vision is blind to.

The fascination that Chomskyan formalisation has exercised over the last
fifteen years doubtless derives from the topological constructions that are
associated with it: one manipulates its trees and symbols, one discernabilises
ambiguities. Chomsky's first approach certainly immediately touched
on something of the abstract machine that functions in language. But
the succession of models proposed and the attempt by psychologists,
semanticists and logicians to recuperate the model have tempered the very

132
abrupt character of this abstract machinism. What is perhaps best in
Chomsky's work are his very first intuitions. 17 Certainly today the supporters
of generative semantics can easily contest his opposition between deep and
surface structures and re-establish a continuity between syntax and
semantics. In sum, they restore the reasonableness of Chomsky; but they can
only do so to the extent that they continue to agree never to leave the
framework of signifying semiologies. In fact, by trying to carry along the
orthodox Chomskyans with them, into a linguistics that is further than ever
from a pragmatic micropolitics, they really only get bogged down themselves.
perhaps one should deepen the initial intuitions of Chomsky, by considering
that his first models of abstract machines were not yet abstract enough, that
they still remained too reliant on the signifying articulations of language
and the grammaticality that he sought to grasp, far from having to be
alienated in a 'semantic logic' should, on the contrary, be understood as one
of the modalities of the abstract power that is put into play by the most
decoded of capitalist flows (that is to say, a-semantic and a-signifying
diagrammatic flows). 18 What is grammaticality? To what does this categorical
symbol that dominates aH phrases, this sign S19 and this first axiom of the
generative structure of Chomsky's syntagmatic trees, which forces aIl
derivations to go back to a unique point of origin, correspond? Must it be
considered simply as the generative kernel of the first grammatical
significations, or rather as one of the most fundamental markers of the a-
signifying pragmatics inherent in a certain kind of society? Without doubt
it participates in both dimensions. S is a mixed marker: in the first place it is
a marker of power, and secondarily it is a syntactic marker. Forming
grammatically correct phrases is the prelude for a 'normal' individual for all
submission to sociallaws. No-one can ignore the principle of grammaticality,
any more than they can the law, or they belong in special institutions set up
for sub-humans, children, deviants, the mad and maladjusted; the individual
is [referred to] sub-systems of grammaticalisation; one is interpreted,
translateabilised, adapted.
The putting into circulation of normativised agents of production
happens above an by the semiotic enslavement of every individu al as a
speaker-listener capable of adopting the linguistic behaviour that is
compatible with the modes of competence that he or she is assigned by
virtue of his or her particular position in society and production. The axiom
S, the signifying first principle of language - the production of phrases that
correspond to the norms of grammaticality - seems to us to arise first and
foremost from a fundamental micropolitical principle of capitalist societies.
1hese societies are constituted in such a way that by rights no-one can
escape from the despotism of decoded flows: flow of abstract labour, as the

133
essence of exchange values; flow of monetary signs, as the substance of
expression of capital; flow of linguistic signs syntagmaticised and
paradigmaticised in such a way as to correspond to normalised modes of
inter-hum an communication. Certainly the threat of a power takeover by
decoded flows doesn't begin with capitalism; it already existed in the most
'primitive' of societies. (One should distinguish here between what Pierre
Clastres caUs societies with and societies without aState, which don't have
the same defensive attitude towards the accumulation of power in aState
apparatus.)2° As we tried to show in the first chapter of this study, primitive
and ancient societies are already traversed by capitalist flows, which they
attempt to ward off; one has to wait until the 'accident' of the Middle Ages
in the West, and the Renaissance to see the appearance of societies that
reaUy do lose control of the decoded flows, in a sort of generalised -
economic, political, religious, aesthetic, scientific baroque, pro cesses that
willlead to capitalist societies.
The semiotic enslavement of flows of desire which capitalist societies
carry out does not tolerate the autonomy of any intrinsic encoding, and no
desiring machine can escape being overcoded by the signifying machine of
the State. The signifying power of the national language and State power
tend to coincide. The molecular segments of expressions are substituted for
the old segmentary structures of the socius, so as to constitute the plane of
content that conveys at the same time the imperatives of both moral and
civillaws. It is by the lifting up of this plane that the intensities of desire take
off from their old territorialities and receive the polarity of subject and
object. They are mediatised, gridded and become social need, demand,
necessity and submission. They only exist to the extent that, on the one
hand, their expression enters into redundancy with the principles of State
organisation as the locus for the recentering and capitalisation of power,
and on the other, they fold in on themselves, are translateabilised, that is
to say that when aU is said and done, they give up their character as an
a-subjective nom ad flow without object.
The State machine of semiotic enslavement in fact constitutes the
fundamental tool enabling the dominant classes to ensure their power of
the agents and means of production. Everything apparently begins with the
dichotomies engendered on the basis of the axiom S, which organises
phrases that can be divided into nominal and verbal syntagms, which seem
to correspond to one of the fundamental requirements of the human
condition, although in fact it is only a particular semiological transformation,
the signifying transformation, which forces discourse to bend to the activity
of predication. But capitalist power cannot content itself with the semiotic
assemblage of intensities in the infinitive mode alone. 21 Intensive infinitives

134
must be modulated, they must place themselves in the service of a predicative
pragmatics and a deictic strategy that is compatible with the dominant
system of significations (coding of hierarchical position, permutation of
roles, division of sexes, etc.). Intensities will have to do their bit for the norms
of the dominant system, and the more abstract and interiorised normative
encoding is, the more effective it will be. In particular, what we call the
'becoming-sexed-body' will be negotiated in its relation with the 'becoming-
social-body' by the regime of pronominality and gender, which will
axiomatise the subjective positions of female alienation. 22 But it is equally in
its slightest details that the composition of political and micropolitical
powers will be indexed by language. This abstract economy of power and its
implications for the modes of generation of the transformation of syntactic,
lexical, morpho-phonological and prosodie components of language thus
seems to us to be inseparable from the intersection of pragmatic fields of
enunciation, from what Ducrot designates as the 'polemical value' (in the
etymological sense) of language. Simply taking this into account ought to
reduce any idea of founding the autonomy of language on a system of
universals to nothing.

as
Generative linguistics presents competence to us as a sort of neutral
instrument in the service of the creative production of discourse. One gains
access to the sky of linguistic univers aIs outside of any social or historical
contingency. And for every thing that remains obscure, one falls back on the
miracles of heredity! But there is no grammaticality in itself, no competence
in itself. Competence and performance are always relative.
Any crystallisation of a competence as a norm, as a framing of diverse
con crete performances, is always synonymous with the establishing of a
position of power. There is no general competence, it is always linked to a
particular - political, social, economic, religious, aesthetic, etc. terrain. That
doesn't signify that it doesn't put into play abstract means - abstract machines
- which spring up like mutations of the machinic phylum of the hum an
'branch: But they do not depend on grammars based on structural universals
(for a long time capitalist political economy has wanted to present itself as
the general grammar of aH possible economy!) There is no performance, that
of a child at school, for example, other than in relation to the kind of
competence that is fixed in the framework of educational micropolitics, of a
given society in a given era. In a general fashion, every competence will
involve political relations between nations, regions, political classes, castes,

135
ethnie groups, etc. Theories of the universality of competence rest on the in
itself simple idea that the individual's capacity for linguistie production
exceeds his or her effective discursive production - his or her performances;
in other words, that si he has at his or her disposaI a machine of expression
that puts into play abstract schema, and that this machine is much more than
the simple totalisation of the series of utterances it is capable of producing.
No doubt! But the relations between this 'competence machine' and the
productions that it performs can be inverted. The machine itself is produced
by its production. How could it be any different? Where else could it come
from? From an innate linguistie faculty? Competence and performance
interact constantly. At a given moment, competence - the machinic virtuality
of expression - holds the keys to the deterritorialisation of stratified and
stereotypical utterances; at another moment, a particular semiotie production
deterritorialises an overly rigid syntax. A competence that is territorialised
on a given social space - a group, an ethnicity, a trade, etc. - can be relegated
to the rank of a sub-competence, the effect of which will be to devalorise the
different kinds of performance whieh are associated with it,23 then, as a
function of the modification of relations of force that are present, or of a
transformation of the local micropolities of desire, this same competence
can 'take power' in a bigger social space and become a regional, national or
imperial competence ... A style imposes itself, a patois becomes an
aristocratie way of speaking, a technicallanguage contaminates vernacular
languages, a minor literature takes on a univers al importance ... Let's be
clear that the processes of politieal agitation do not just concern the diffusion
of morphemes but put into play aU the drivers of language.
There is universality of speech acts and as language is inseparable from
these acts, there is no universality of language. Every sequence of linguistie
expression is associated with a network of semiotie chains of an sorts
(perceptual, mimetie, gestural, imagistie, etc.). Every signifying utterance
thus crystallises a mute dance of intensities that plays out on social and
individuated bodies at the same time. From language to glossolalia, aIl the
transitions are possible. There are no linguistie universals. The examples of
universals proposed by the Chomskyans, such as the existence of the
morpho-phonological organisation of double articulation on the plane of
expression, for example, are machinic characteristies, which concern the
conditions of possibility of language and whieh are as extrinsie to it as the
range of phonie articulations on the basis of whieh a phonological semiotics
might be established. These supposed univers ais are only the specifie traits
of a partieular substance of expression, what Christian Metz caIls the
'pertinent traits of matters of expression' on the basis of whieh semioticaIly
formed substances are constituted. Heredity is often brought to the fore to

136
explain the speed with which language is learned. But Ids consider the fact
that in a milieu that is 'impregnated' with musical semiotics, a four- year-old
can attain genuine musical competence: is one going to account for this on
the basis of a hereditary 'montage' of the capacity to read and of the highly
specialised capacity with one's hands we know is needed, for each musical
instrument? The idea is absurd!
The hypothesis concerning univers aIs at the level of content is even more
fragile. The organisation of contents, the constitution of a homogeneous field
of representation, always corresponds to the crystallisation of a power
formation. Neither can any category, any mode of categorisation be considered
as such as being universal and as being programmed by a hereditary code. It
is always a social field, a micropolitical field that overcodes the cutting out of
contents. Hereditary programming can only playon strata that are extrinsic
to language and, besides, nothing allows one to consider that it is itself linked
to a system of univers aIs (unless one considers, for example, genes as such a
system, but that would imply once again a misunderstanding of the role
played by the other physico-chemical strata). What good is invoking
universals if their existence in fact depends on contingent relations between
heterogeneous strata? TIle stability that in fact obtains for the genetic code
has nothing univers al about it, any more than does the structure of matter. Its
stratification, the fact that it is reverted to, that one finds it everywhere doesn't
imply the erecting of a transcendent formalism, but the putting into play of
mutational abstract machines.

In recent years, a certain number of authors, such as John Searle, Wunderlich,

etc., have endeavoured to broaden the Chomskyan point of view, which never
gets out of the system of language to turn towards the study of performance
and 'speech acts'. Foregrounding what, after Habermas,he calls 'communicative
competence' (or even 'idiosyncratic performatory competencè), Herbert E.
Brekle 24 is led to oppose this to a 'systemic competence' of the Chomskyan
kind. The latter rests on abstract structures which, after the fixing of rules of
formation and transformation, are closed onto phonetic chains, whilst the
former are linked, according to dynamic selj~regulating relations to a whole
set of communicative competence factors that, according to the author, must
be articulated at three levels: that of a 'linguistic faculty: that of language as
a system, that of speech ('idiosyncratic performatory competence'), with
different kinds of problems of syntax, semantics and pragmatics arising at
each of these levels. Such a project does at least have the advantage of freeing

137
the relations between competence and performance from the tradition al
oppositions of langue and parole, and expression and content. One would
thus be dealing with a particular compositions of semiotic dimensions at
different levels, the elucidation of which should be pushed to its limit: the
description of real acts of speech in an their concrete dimensions (this wou Id,
in our opinion, probably lead to an unavoidable rupture with the Chomskyan
technology of dichotomous trees, that is to say, with the intervention of a
pseudo-mathematisation of language). Unfortunately in its current state, the
pragmatics to which he refers and which should be the hinge between syntax
and semantics at different levels is still conceived of as resting on univers ais.
Whilst the existence of these universals already seemed to us to derive from
a misunderstanding at the level of syntax and semantics, the daim to inject
them into pragmatics seems to us this time, frankly, to be aberrant. Herbert E.
Brekle is thus, at the level of a supposed 'univers al faculty of language: led to
adopt Habermas's point of view regarding a 'univers al pragmatics' that would
have to account for the general structure of al! discursive situations and for
the constitution of the possible speech acts. According to Habermas, one
would have to oppose a particular dass of speech acts to these pragmatic
universals, which they wouldn't belong to but which would, on the contrary,
serve to 'represent actions or behaviour institutionalised in a certain culture
or regulated by social norms'.
The examples of the universals of 'general structures of discourse' that
are proposed are:

• personal pronouns, with a performative and deictic function: l, you,

he ... ;
• vocative forms and honorifics;
• spatio-temporal deictics, demonstratives, etc.;
• performatives, such as: to assert, to ask, to order, to promise ... ;
intention al or modal expressions such as believing, knowing,
necessarily.

Ille examples of speech acts not belonging to pragmatic univers aIs:

phrases introduced by verbs such as to greet, to congratulate, to

thank, to baptise, to curse, to name, to condemn, to acquit ...

What a curious conception of universality! How is asserting or knowing

more univers al th an greeting, naming or condemning? And what place is
reserved for non-individuated modes of subjectivation, the transitivism of
childhood, the upheavals undergone or organised by dominant coordinates

138
in madness and creation? Furthering the only part of this proj ect that seems
of interest to us, that of the idiosyncratic performatory competence, should
le ad its promoters to give up fragile categories such as 'linguistic faculty'
transmitted to them by Saussure, and free themselves up for once and for an
from this obsession with 'universals' that has been reactivated by Chomsky.
It is not just a matter for linguistics of giving psycho-linguistic and socio-
linguistic problematics their due in the analysis of the pragmatic dimensions
of 'linguistic behaviour', but also of accepting the coming into force of the
problematics of the micropolitics of desire.

139
 1 l1li
l1li

If the autonomy of a linguistic competence cannot, any more than can the
pragmatics of its performances, be based on universals, perhaps one might
consider that it corresponds to a certain transitory crystallisation of astate
of language in relation to which individual performances will have to
determine themselves?
How, then, is one to account for the nature of the constraints that
ensure this stabilisation, constraints that phonologists have attributed to a
structure that is intrinsic to language and generativists to hereditarily
encoded universals?
What is the crystallisation of a linguistic power formation? One can
understand nothing of this question if one represents power as just being a
social superstructure. Power is not just micropolitical power, it is also the
power of the superego, the famous power over oneself, which makes one shake
with fear, which engenders somatisations, neuroses, suicides, etc. The stability
of a 'state oflanguage' certainly always corresponds to an equilibrium between
these powers; these latter of course, are not arranged in relation to each other
in no matter what way - it is not a question of an amorphous matter. Thus one
can only account for the stabilisation of a 'stratum of competence' on condition
that one render homogeneous domains that are as different as those of:

El the entirety of semiotisation activities (going from internaI

perceptions to modes of communication arising from the
mass media);
 • micropoliticallevels (arising trom the formation of bodies without
organs);
machinic indices and abstract machines (arising from the machinic
phylum and the plane of consistency);
which result in the putting into correspondenc:e within each
stratum of diverse systems of segmentarity and deterritorialising
lines of flight.

Each pragmatic sequence involves a composition of powers at aIl levels

and of every kind; its effectiveness depends on the dominant mode of
semiotisation that it puts to work, due in particular to wh ether or not a
diagrammatic semiotics liberates the functioning of certain abstract machines
(financial, scientific, artistic, etc.). Thus we are led to define a micropolitical
pragmatics as an activity of the assemblage of modes of semiotisation that
everywhere exceed linguistic personology - towards corporeal intensities on
the infra side, and towards the socius on the supra side. From this point of
view, one would have to stop considering pragmatics as on the outskirts
of syntax and semantics. Semiological (linguistic) pragmatics only represents
a particular case of a more general semiotic pragmatics. The crystallisation of
a signifying power, that we would put on the side of generative pragmatics
(linguistic semiology), corresponds to a stratification of the libido, it coiling
up into a system of redundancy of expression and redundancy of contents,
the articulation of which has the effect of disempowering utterances of
enclosing them either in the [worldliness] of an instituted power, or in an
idiosyncratic system arising from madness or creation, for example. But
before being stabilised as a language or a dialect, this kind of micropolitical
competence is first experienced as a collective performance: every degree of
fluidity is thus possible in the passage from an individual performance, even
one that is marginal or delirious, to the completely sclerotic encoding of the
dictionary or academic grammar kind. Besides naturalising the foundations
of language, the brutal opposition of competence and performance squeezes
[in English in the original] collective assemblages of enunciation - that is to
say the groups that, in linguistic matters, are genuinely creative - to the profit
of an alternative between an individuated or a universal subjectivity. One can
approve the position of psycholinguists such as T.G. Bever, who consider that
judgements of grammaticality are 'forms of behavior like any other'! without
for aIl that falling into the trap oflinguistic 'psychologisation: That a signifying
grammaticalisation might take power over semiotic ensembles relative to
capitalistic social fields, thus contributing to their stratification, doesn't in the
slightest imply that such ensembles can only be based on the universals that
are supposed to rule over them.ln fact, one is in the presence of the same type

142
of universalisation procedure with a retro active effect used by aU power
formations that wanted to give themselves the apparent legitimacy of divine
right, and in particular those that sought to 'justify' the expansionism of
capitalist exchangism. From the fact that one can always 'structuralise'
monetary, linguistic, musical, etc. performances, that one can always
discursivise them, binarise them, one considers that they have always been
there, or even that their elements carried within themselves the seeds of the
generation of the form of Capital, the Signifier, Music ... But the process of
power and the machinic mutations that have fixed and stabilised this form,
furnished and delimited its creative potentialities, the metastable equilibria of
its assemblages of enunciation and its group-subjects are, for their part,
absolutely undecomposable, irreducible to a range of discrete and in principle
discursive elements. If - as we will try to show later on - the abstract machines
that are in question here can always be complexified, they can never, by
contrast, be decomposed without losing their mutational specificity. And
theyaren't [acquired] in little pieces, through learning or conditioning. They
latch on to a process ready-made, they co-opt themselves in an assemblage
that they can transform from top to bottom.

stages, abstract
machines
Abstract machines thus have nothing to do with the supposed 'stages' that it
is claimed punctuate the 'development' of the child. The passage from one
age in life to another doesn't depend on the developmental programmes
constructed by psychologists or psychoanalysts. It is linked to original
reassemblages of different modes of encoding and semiotisation the nature
and linking together of which cannot be determined a priori. The 'stages' in
question have nothing automatic about them; as an individuated organic
totality, the child only constitutes an intersection between the multiple
material, socio-economic, semiotic, sets that traverse it.
The intrusion of the biological components of puberty in the life of an
adolescent, for example, is inseparable from the micro-social context within
which they appear; they trigger a series of machinic indices that have been
put together elsewhere, they liberate a new abstract machine that will be
manifested in the most varied of registers: the reorganisation of perceptual
codes, turning in on oneself and/or poetic, cosmic, social externalisation,
opposition to paternal values, etc. But in reality this triggering is not
unilateral, other 'external' semiotic components can likewise accelerate,

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inhibit or reorient the effects of the biological semiotic effects of puberty.
Under the se conditions, where do the interactions between the biological
and the social start and finish? Certainly not with the delimitation of an
individual, considered as an organic totality or a sub-set of a family group!
Little by little, aIl the machines of the socius are called into question by such
phenomena, and reciprocally, biology in its entirety, at its most molecular
level, is concerned with the interactions of the social field! On the plane of
the individual, one thus ought not to separate the manifestations of puberty,
considered in their organic, family, educational, context, from the upheavals
which, on a broader social plane, calI back into question the collective
economy of desire. How can one fail to recognise that society in its entirety
is constantly traversed, in its most intimate fibres, by these phenomena of
biological change, which tirelessly sweeps childhood and adolescence away,
generation after generation? It is true that the flights of desire of which they
are the bearers are kept systematically in hand by the codes of the family, the
school, medicine, sport, the army, and aIl the regulations and laws that are
supposed to order the 'normal' behaviour of the individual. But it nevertheless
happens that they managed to make collective machines of desire crystallise
at the largest of scales (from neighbourhood gangs to Woodstock or
May 68, etc.). And what were only scattered machinic indices, the quickly
disempowered outlines of cleterritorialisation, then become abstract
machines able to catalyse new semiotic assemblages of desire.
Let's return to the relative positions and functions of machinic indices,
abstract machines, and semiotic assemblages on the basis of sorne different
examples. In the first place, let us consider the embryonic writing that is
manifested in the clrawings of children, until the age of three or four. One can
only talk about an index of writing here. Nothing is played out, nothing is
crystallised, everything is possible still. But taken in charge by the educational
machine, this index undergoes a profound reorganisation. Drawing loses its
polyvocity. There is a disjunction between, on the one hand, drawing, which
is impoverished and imitative, and, on the other, a writing that is directed
entirely towards adult expression and is tyrannised by a concern for
conformity with the dominant norms. How does the assemblage of semiotics
in the school thus manage to take power over the child's intensities of desire?
Previously we have evoked the insufficiency of explanations that are content
to consider the repressive action of equipments of power over the machinic
indices 'of' the child. What one must try to grasp is why, in one case, this
repression achieves its goal, and in another, it misses it. Once again, it seems
to us to be impossible to avoid the intermediary instance constituted by
abstract machines. If the crystallisation of an abstract machine tied to
repression fails, the assemblage of power will lack its effect, subjects will

144
become maladjusted, retarde d, disturbed, psychotic etc., all things that
supporters of the established order will blame on a deficit, although it would
be easy to see that under non-repressive conditions, these same children
incessantly enrich their 'pre-school' semiotic creativity. The passage to the
stage of'working normally' in class, the acquisition of an average competence
in matters of reading, writing and arithmetic, etc., thus do not depend on the
mechanical triggering of sensori-motor schemas internalised in the course
of various 'stages' in the development oflanguage. The stages in question here
are not of a psychogenetic but of a repressive-genetic order. Instead of
considering a 'latency period' which is as if destined, with the 'waning of
the Oedipus complex' to punctuate the child's life, it would doubtless be
more advisable to study concrete social constellations and their particular
technologies of semiotic subjection, in so far as they le ad to the child's
surrounding by the family and education at a decisive moment of his
'entering the world' (one might talk here of a 'school-barracks' complex, to
borrow Fernand Oury's expression).
Abstract machines, which the supposed 'psychogenetic' stages put into
play, cannot be assimilated to general schema at the level of perception,
memory, logical integration, the structure of behaviour. In fact, they
crystallise heteroclite components, they mix up 'regressive fixations' and
archaic modes of territorialisation with ultra-deterritorialised semiotic
components. A child who wets the bed, for example, cornes up against an
abstract formula - a body without organs in which, in the same repressive
formulation, a postural semiotics directed towards a turning in on oneself is
associated with an affective semiotics directed towards a dependency on
one's family, and sado-masochistic educational and therapeutic machines,
running from special beds to behavioural techniques so-called for the
'reinforcing of the right reactions' or the tyrannical interpretations of the
psychoanalytic apparatus. But the abstract machine of 'wetting the bed'
nonetheless retains the singularity of its mute dances, which will always
remain more or less irreducible to the discursive-repressive analyses of
therapists of every stripe! The possible good will of the child nevertheless
always risks being found to be at fault. Even ifhe plays the game of repression,
even if he invests it explicitly, the dimension of singularity of his system of
abstract machines will allow him to escape from it partially.
In any case, repression doesn't seek to completely submerge the child as
an organic totality, but to graft itself onto the elements that are constitutive of
his modes of semiotisation. Thus there isn't purely and simply an application
of the repressive ensemble to the ensemble of desiring machines, but
processes of mediatisation by way of the abstract machines traversing the
socius and the individual. When, as a secondary symptom, the bed-wetter

145
manifests an inability to do division at schoo1, for example, that doesn't
signify the existence of a deficit of logical competence on the contrary,
one notices that he is very frequently capable of dealing with very
difficult abstract problems - but only that he has organised for himself a
repressive jouissance in the ffamework of the rhizome 'school-teacher-
parent-notational system-repressive fi:lciality traits-prohibitions bearing on
masturbation: etc. His refusaI of a certain kind of logical discursivity
manifests his desire to globalise the assemblage in question. He thus furnishes
a sort of extra-corporeal erogenous zone for himself~ territorialised on a
particular stopping point: the division question thus becomes a machine
point, the index of a potentialline of flight. Under other circumstances, the
same child could just as easily become mute or start to ejaculate on reading
the statement of a problem ... In fact, the machines of family and education al
power can only find their efficacy to the extent that they manage to ding on
to such bio-psycho-social zones, which do not inevitably take the form of
labelled symptoms. The adaptive and recuperative therapy that consists in
enlarging, in normalising, the semiotic conjunctions called into question by,
for example, a child who territorialises a zone of stuttering, seeks to convert
his libido to a relatively more deterritorialised zone: an anxiety linked to
competitiveness at schoo1, without for aIl that completely paralysing him.
Thus, by way of abstract machines, the libido doesn't cease circulating
between instances of social repression and those of individual semiotisation.
But there is nothing automatic about this circulation, nothing necessary. It
must always bring together two conditions to be possible: 1) 'individual'
desire must crystallise its indices, its machinic points, on an abstract
machine; 2) it must be possible for certain elements of the repressive socius
to be connectable to this abstract machine. With an abstract machine, the
possibility of a different assemblage of the world unfolds emptily. On leaving
childhood, for example, an adolescent will see, as if in a flash, aIl the richness
and threat that is harboured by the new system of enunciation in which he
is engaged and which he both takes part in and is taken up by. EquaIly, the
abstract machine constitutes a fundamentally metastable instance between
the intensities of desire and the dominant semiological stratifications.
However, unlike the machinic indices, which only anticipate their
crystallisation, abstract machines subsist in the virtual state, even wh en they
do not consolidate their pathways to manifestation. Whilst indices can be
scattered at any moment and allow the forceful returning of old stratifications
to establish itself, abstract machines will, under aIl circumstances and
everywhere, continue to threaten them with a possible revolution. This is
how a capitalist abstract machine has haunted every social system from the
moment that a despotic State power succeeded in taking off from the archaic

146
territorialities of the Neolithic (Urstaat). It is by a sort of immediate semiotic
contamination that the most deterritorialised abstract machinisms are
transmitted from one system to another. But whilst there is a potential
transmission of abstract machines from the adult world 'to' the world of
childhood, from the civilized world 'to' the barbarian, on the side of
childhood 'without' adults, savages 'without' the civilized, there are only
indices - of writing and the capitalist economy, for example. At this level,
nothing has been played out definitively; everything depends on the
constitution of collective assemblages of enunciation; a new assemblage can
close up around a closed system of semiologisation - a dualist signifier-
signified substance, or it can set off diagrammatic chain reactions, machinic
flights/leaks of desire that will cross the 'wall of significations' and bring
about direct connections between the points of deterritorialisation of sign
machines and those of material and social ensembles. One might say that
the abstract machine 'materialises' a triple possibility:

either its own dissolution and a return to the 'anarchy' of machinic

indices;
or a relatively deterritorialised stratification in the form of
abstraction by the putting into play of a significative semiology;
or an active destratification, by the diagrammatising effect and
putting into circulation of a-signifying particle-signs.

An abstract machine thus do es not belong to one amongst a number of

stages; it can participate in several stages at once, in one modality or another:
at the level of indices, where it represents the potential for a machinic
integration at a 'higher' degree, which will or won't be recuperated by a
stratum; and at the level of the strata, where it represents the potential for a
destratifying diagrammatisation. Pure quanta ofpotential deterritorialisation,
the abstract machines are everywhere and nowhere, before and after the
crystallisation of the oppositions of machine and structure, representation
and referent, object and subject. Thus the abstract machines make the threat
of a reifying totalisation weigh on multiplicities as much as they do the
possibility of a deterritorialising multiplication of stratifications that they
open up. Independently of the appearance of an autonomous semiotic
machine that distributes signs, things and representations over the separated
planes of content and expression, their existence prohibits us from reducing
them to a logico-mathematical system or to a priori forms. Their existence

147
after the stratification of signifying semiologies, on the other hand, prohibits
us from considering them as simple structural invariants of stratification or
transcendent al abstractions. Although the strata are nothing, for them, but
the provisional residues of pro cesses of deterritorialisation, being nothing
in themselves from the substantial point of view, in order to become manifest
they are constrained permanently to stratify and destratify themselves. But
for aIl that they are not restricted to a disempowering face- to-face of the
form-matter kind. There is thus a fundamental dissymmetry between
the closed formalism of the strata that are 'established' in existence, and
the active, open formalisation that is piloted by the abstract machines at the
level of machinic indices and diagrammatic effects that mark the at once
both creative and irreversible character of pro cesses of deterritorialisation.
Under these conditions, a homeostatic equilibria of strata will never be
guaranteed: they are threatened from the 'outside' by the work of interstratic
deterritorialisation of the abstract machines, which can result in the
reshuffling, assemblages and creation of new strata, and from the 'inside' by
the metabolism of lin es of flight criss-crossing them everywhere.
Before the manifestation of the possible in semiotic structures or social
material stratifications, the possible doesn't exist as a purely logical matter;
it doesn't start out from nothing, either. It is organised in the form of quanta
of freedom, in a sort of system of valences, the différentiation and complexity
of which gives nothing away to the chains of organic chemistry or genetic
codes. 2 It puts into play matters of expression that are differentiated as a
function of their degree of deterritorialisation. The plane of consistency,
which deploys the infinite set of machinic potentialities, constitutes a sort of
sensory plate for the locating, selection and articulation of points of active
deterritorialisation within the strata. There is no possibility in general, but
only by starting from a process of deterritorialisation which must not be
confused with a global and undifferentiated nihilation. Thus there exists a
sort of matter of deterritorialisation, a matter of the possible, which constitutes
the essence of politics, but a trans-human, trans-sexual, trans-cosmic politics.
The pro cess of deterritorialisation always leaves remains, either in the form of
spatio-temporal, energised, substantialised - stratification, or in the form
of the residual possibilities of the line of flight and of the generation of new
connections. Deterritorialisation never stops when under way, that is how it
differs from a nothingness that one represents as closed in on itself,
maintaining disempowering mirror relations with the stratified real. The
system of abstract machines thus constitutes an active limit, a productive
limit beyond the most deterritorialised limits, and on this side of a nothingness
as the terminal point of aIl process. Abstract machines are thus not a scientific
affair, nor an affair of culture, ideology, or education, but an affair of the

148
politics of desire before subjects and objects have been specified. It is not a
question here of a freedom linked intrinsically to the human condition, of a
freedom of the 'for itself' in a radical opposition with an 'in itself' that is
stratified and thereby with no connection with anything other than its own
impotence. In passing from one assemblage to another, one receives or one
loses a certain quantum of deterritorialising connection; deterritorialisation
cannot be assimilated to a necessary causality, it can be vectored either along
the lines of a stratification or along the lines of an open 'possibilisation:
Let's come back once again to the supposed 'latency' period which,
according to the Freudians, marks the 'development' of the child. It would be
manifested between six and eight years by a 'childhood amnesià that results
from a repression bearing on the whole Oedipal and pre-Oedipal past of the
child. But, Freud tells us, aIl memory is not, for aIl that, abolished: 'vague,
incomprehensible memories'3 remain an the same. Incomprehensible for
who? For the civilized, normal, white adult! In fact it is not a matter of
memories here but of the entirety of the modes of semiotisation of the child,
of its sensations, its feelings, its sexual impulses, which receive a formidable
snuffing out. Why would one find the existence of a mechanism for the
intrinsic repression of the development of the drives of the child - which will
subsequently be linked to the universal antagonism between Eros and
Thanatos - if not so as to mask the entrance on stage of repressive social
assemblages? Why does the semiotic politics of the child invert itself, why does
it take the side of repression? Why do the factors of deterritorialisation, which
unbalance the earlier territorialities instead of opening the process up to a
greater semiotic creativity, vectorise the child to the abstractions of the
dominant system?
As soon as one attempts to give up the schematic responses of
psychogenetic determinism, the questions change completely and are
enriched. In the context of the repressive powers of the family and school of
a given society, as a function of what particularity do es a child resist or
succumb to the 'temptation' of an investment in repression? In the case of
the 'latency period: on the very con crete terrain of existing systems, what
sort of educational abstract machine connects to the abstract machines of
the child? In what ways do the semiotics put into action by nurseries
continue the [extinguishing] actions of the 'education al' interventions of
the parents? (We know now that it is from the nursery on that the division
between work and 'play' time is put in place.) In what way do es learning a
writing that is detached from any living use, at school, sterilise the ulterior
possibilities of a creative diagrammatism? How do the semiotics of
educational space and time (division between school days and holidays,
division between the space of the class and the space of the teacher, the

149
space of the playground, the street, etc.), how do the semiotics of discipline
(sitting in rows and ranking, grades, emulation, punishments, etc.) succeed
in crushing the 'pre-school' semiotics of the child, sometimes definitively?
And how do they outline the semiotic conditionings of the factory, the
office and the barracks? As we have tried to show previously, the compulsory
schooling machine doesn't have as its primary goal the transmission of
information, of knowledge, a 'culture: but the top to bottom transformation
of the semiotic coordinates of the child. In these conditions one can
consider that the real fllnction of the 'latency period' is a modern equivalent
of the initiation camps in primitive societies, which fabricate complete
'persons', that is, adult males who me et the essential norms of the group.4
But here, instead of lasting fifteen days, the initiation camp lasts fifteen
years, and its objective is to enslave individuals to capitalist systems of
production, right down to the least useful fibre in their bodies. Childhood
amnesia, correlated to the latency period, thus marks the extinction of
semiotics that are not sllbjected to the signifying semiologies of the
dominant powers. And if the neurotics, like 'pre-Oedipal' children, escape
its net, this is precisely because, for one reason or another, the systems of
encirclement by these powers have failed to get a hold over them.
Consequently, childhood intensities continue to work away and to upset
them, to turn them against 'normal' values and significations. The role of
memory - either the natural memory of the adult who recalls his childhood
nostalgically or the artificial memory of psychoanalytic anamnesis -
consists in doubling up the first erasing of these intensities and in
recognising childhood according to a set of norms.

is
To have a grasp of reality, the assemblages of discourse are required, in
whatever way it might be, to free themselves from the constraints of language,
considered as a system closed up on itself. And it is the classic break between
langue and parole that a pragmatics will, at a minimum, have to calI into
question. But although the linguistics of enunciation has already oriented
itself in this direction, no micropolitical analysis of these assemblages, at the
level of their collective or individual unconscious effects will become possible
if it doesn't calI into question more fundamentally the concepts that delimit
the different disciplines arising from what are usually called the human
sciences. To succeed in constituting itself, a pragmatics of the unconscious will
thus not only have to free itself from the dominant ideologies and universals
of psychology, sociology, and psychoanalysis, but equally from a certain

150
conception of the unity and autonomy of language, considered as plane of
expression as weIl as a social entity that is to say, in short, from the key
'conquests' of linguistics since Saussure. For our part we consider that there is
no language in itsell What is specifie about the phenomenon of language is
precisely that it never refers to itself~ that it always remains open to an the
other modes of semiotisation. Whenever it closes up round a language, a
dialect, a patois, a specialised language, a delusion, this always results from a
certain kind of political or micropolitical operation. There is nothing less
logical, less mathematical, than a language. Its 'structure' results from the
petrification of a sort of rag-bag, whose elements come from borrowings,
amalgamations, agglutinations, misunderstandings - a sort of underhand
humour that presides over its generalisations. It is the same with linguistic
laws as it is with anthropologicallaws, those bearing on incest, for example:
seen from the distance of the grammarian or the ethnologist, they seem to
have a certain coherence, but as soon as one gets a little closer, everything gets
tangled up and one notices that it is a matter of systems of arrangements that
ean be pulled in numerous directions or turned around in all sorts of ways.
'The relativity of the relations between concrete semiotie performances
and a structurallinguistic competence, or between languages themselves, is
thus imposed not just on the synchronie but also the diachronie plane. The
unity of a language is inseparable from the constitution of a power formation.
One never finds clear frontiers on the map of dialects, only borderlands or
zones of transition. There is no mother tongue, but phenomena of semiotic
power takeover by a group, an ethnie group or a nation. Language stabilises
around a parish, a bishoprie, a capital. It evolves by flows along river valleys
or train tracks; it spreads like patches of oiLS
But the fluidity of the competence-performance relation makes it
something on this side of dialect. One may consider that every individual
passes constantly from language to language. He successively speaks as 'father
to son', as a teacher or as a boss; to his lover, he speaks an infantilised language;
while sleeping he is plunged into an oneiric discourse, then abruptly returns
to a professional language when the phone rings. Each time a whole set of
semantic, syntactie, phonological and prosodic dimensions are put into play
- not to mention the poetie, stylistic, rhetorieal and micropolitical dimensions
of discourse. Studying linguistic change, Françoise Robert notes that linguistic
mutations are manifested by 'graduaI modifications, not of the phenomena
themselves ... but of their frequency, their establishment in language'.6 And it
is true that one does not observe the sudden ruptures that are implied by the
clear-eut distinction between synchrony and diachrony (a point OIl which
Chomsky did not distinguish himself from Saussure, who only intended to
take into account innovations at the moment when 'the collective welcome

151
thern'ï). Thus the autonomy of a pragmatic micropolitics is unfounded if the
break between the exercise of individual speech and the coding of language
in the socius is maintained. For Chomsky, as Françoise Robert also remarks,
the reference to an ideal locutor-auditor, who belongs to a completely
homogenous linguistic community, in fact results in investing the separation
between competence and performance with a normative function. And, in
the last resort, this norm is reduced to that of the linguist himself. 8 In our
opinion then, the apparent unity of a language doesn't depend on the
constitution of a structural competence. According to Weinrich's formula,
language is an 'essentially heterogeneous reality:9 In the final analysis, its
homogeneity can only result from phenomena of a political order,
independent of the structural decompositions that can otherwise be carried
out on it. And what characterises a political event is its being the bearer of a
historical singularity that is undecomposable or that an analysis will
necessarily decentre in other dimensions, other registers. Things happen in
the same way as in the chemical analysis of a biological phenomenon, or in
the economic analysis of a social phenomenon: there is no more a chemical
structure of a biological fact, or a chemical competence with regard to a
biological performance, than there is a capitalist or socialist structural
competence with regard to economic or monetary performances. There are
no biological or economic universals. And yet at each one of these levels,
abstract machines are differentiated, manifested, and stratified at different
crossroads-points of the machinic phylum, without depending on any
transcendental formalism, any heredity, any linguistic essence, any economic
fate. Our hypothesis, of a mutational phylum of abstract machines, should
allow two kinds of obstacle in the domain of pragmatics to be avoided:

1> a pure and simple pinning of linguistic machines onto social

structures, as in the linguistic dogmatism of Marr, or as in certain
contemporary psycho-linguistic currents;
1> a structuralist or generative formalisation, which cuts the
production of utterances off from the collective assemblages of
enunciation.

The differential relations between what we will calI the tracings of

performance and the maps of competence do not play just at the level of

152
diverse kinds of segmented encoding. We consider that the relative structure
of 'competence' in one domain in relation to another in fact depends on
whether or not it puts into play a segmentarity that is finer, more machinic,
more molecular, more deterritorialised than the more molar segmentarity
of the second, which thus finds itself taking a 'performative' position. A
hierarchical relationship of double segmentarity is thus established, which
fixes the possibilities for semiotic innovation within a strict margin.
Only the appearance of a deterritorialising line of flight (the diagrammatic
use of signs with a linguistic origin in aesthetic or scientific domains,
etc.) can overthrow such an equilibrium. We have seen that at the level of
past-ified, spatialised or semiologically substance-ified strata, equilibria,
relations of force, can only manifest themselves on the basis of a relative
deterritorialisation, the placing into correspondence of at least two systems
of segmentarity (for example, the molecular segmentarity of the figures
of expression of the second articulation), whilst at the level of machinic
mutations, the strata are undone or reorganised by diagrammatie pro cesses
that put into play a deterritorialisation that is quantified by systems of
abstract machines. But the lines of diagrammatic deterritorialisation do
not definitively transcend segmentary stratifications. Mad vectors of
possibilities, whieh cannot be realised in the existing context, as well as
veritable machinic mutations, can result from their interactions with
stratified systems. 10
As we have seen, not only are abstract machines not outside history,
'before' my spatial, temporal and substantial coordinates - deictic
performances, one might say - but they do not result in the unification of
diverse modes of semiotisation. 11 Abstract and singular machines, they make
history by undoing dominant realities and signification; they constitute the
umbilicus, the point of emergence and creationism of the machinic phylum.
Thus there cannot be an abstract set of the abstract machines. No logieal
category can subsume machinic consistency (hence the difference that we
have already signalled between logical and machinic consistency). Being
undecomposable on an intensional plane, one cannot insert abstract
machines in an extensional class. 12 Given that there is no abstract machine
hanging over history, no 'subject' of history, and that machinie multiplicities
traverse the different strata both on a diachronie and on a synchronie plane,
one cannot say that the general movement of their line of deterritorialisation
manifests a univers al and homogeneous tendency, because it is interrupted
at every level by strata of reterritorialisation, onto which microscopie
buds of deterritorialisation are grafted once again. In these conditions, a
pragmatie approach to the unconscious would have to escape from two
kinds of pitfall:

153
 1 An analysis that is centred exclusively on a verbal material and
tends to a 'significantisation' of behaviours and affects by means of
a systematic gridding of semantic contents and enunciative
strategies (politics of transference), based on a meta-syntactic
interpretative grid.
2 A return to the analysis of personological strategies, as is the case
with Anglo-Saxon family therapies, and a return to lived
experience, to corporeal abreaction, etc.

Before its engagement in the detail of utterance production and modes of

semiotisation, the abstract machine has to determine the micropolitical lin es
creating the ensemble of assemblages of enunciation and power formations
at the most abstract level. In other words, in each case and in each situation, it
has to construct a map of the unconscious - with its strata, its lines of
deterritorialisation, its black holes - open to opportunities for experimentation
(and that in opposition with the infinite tracing of Oedipal triangulations,
which merely make ail previous impasses, ail modes of signifying subjection,
resonate together). In effect, we consider that the pragmatic articulation of
encoding strata closed in on themselves always leave open the possibility of a
passage from one stratum to another, byway of the abstract machines traversing
different modes of territorialisation, The different kinds of consistency -
biological, ethological, semiological, sociological, etc. - therefore do not depend
on structural or generative super-stratum; they are worked from the 'inside' by
a network of machinic connections. Machinic consistency is not totalising but
deterritorialising. It guarantees the always possible conjunction of the most
different of systems of stratification, and it is in this respect that it is in sorne way
the basic element out of which a pragmatic can constitute itself.
After having relied on psychoanalysis, linguistics, semiology, will the
normative gridding of the human sciences shift to a new field of combat,
that of pragmatics? The latter is defined by Herbert E. Brekle as the 'condition
for the production of speech acts'. And straightaway it is associated with
communication: pragmatics is the communicative dimension of language.
Communication being inseparable here from the bipolar speaker-listener
axis, pragmatics thus finds its fate is linked to the existence of the stratum of
individuated subjectivity and the individuallsocius opposition. A different
condition for the possible extraction of the autonomy of pragmatics will
thus consist in specifying, positively this time, its specific modes of
semiotisation, its particular way of freeing itself from the semiological
modes of 'structuralisation' of the languages of power. Here the collective
character of machinic enunciation is opposed to the individuation of
signifying enunciation, and the politics of sense to that of signification. Such

154
a pragmatics thus presents two faces: one that links it to the stratum of
subjectivation and alienates it in communication, and one that links it to
collective assemblages capable of producing utterances that mesh directly
with machinic pro cesses. The always possible bogging down of modes of
semiotisation would thus form an intrinsic part of pragmatic components.
And the pragmatics of enunciative linguistics, in which language is closed in
on itself in a function of disempowerment, would thus be just a particular
case of a more general (diagrammatic) pragmatics, open to the ensemble of
non -linguistic modes of encoding and semiotisation. In sum, the autonomy
of pragmatics will be founded on the essential impossibility of guaranteeing
its own autonomy. And rather th an seeking to give itself a pseudo-scientific
status, it will define itself as an activity of micropolitical assemblage.

Tracing and trees, maps

rhizomes
What might the characteristics of a generative and transformational
pragmatics be? In the first place, its modes of engendering would not be
trees, but rhizomes (or trellises). A priori there would be no reason for a
pragmatic chain to begin at point S so as then to be derived by successive
dichotomies; any point whatever of the rhizome can be connected to any
other point. Besides, no trait will necessarily refer to a linguistic trait. A
linguistic chain can be connected here to the chain of a non-linguistic
semiology, or to an assemblage that is social, biological, etc. Segmentary
stratifications will be correlated here with deterritorialising lines of flight. A
rhizome cannot, therefore, be formalised on the basis of a logical or
mathematical meta-language. It will not be indebted to any structuralist or
generative model. As a pro cess of machinic diagrammatisation, it cannot be
reduced to a system of representation, and it implies the putting into play of
a collective assemblage of enunciation. The preparation of the pragmatic
rhizome arising from such and such an assemblage will not have as its goal
the description of a state of fact, the re-balancing of inter-subjective
relations, or the exploration of the mysteries of an unconscious hidden
away in the shadowy corners of memory. On the contrary, it will be turned
entirely towards an experimentation flush with the real. It will not decipher
an always already constituted unconscious, closed in on itself, it will
construct the unconscious. It will contribute to the connection of fields, the
unblocking of stratifie d, empty or cancerous bodies without organs, and to
their maximal opening onto the machinic plane of consistency. It will be led

155
to put into play diverse semiotics and modes of co ding, of a biological,
sensory, perceptual order, on the order of a thinking with images, categorical
thought, semiotics of gesture and word, political and social fields, formalised
writings, arts, music, refrains ... Unlike psychoanalysis, which always seeks
to reduce each utterance and each libidinal production to an overcoding
structure, a schizo-analytic pragmatics will have as its objective, the
pinpointing of their repetitive elements in what we will caU systems of
tracings, which can be articulated with a map of the unconscious.
The map is opposed to structure here; the map is open, it can be connected
in each of its dimensions, it can be tOrIl up, it can be adapted to every kind
of setup. A pragmatic map can be put to work by an isolated individual or by
a group, one can draw it on a wall, one can conceive it as a work of art, one
can conduct it like a political action or as a meditation. What matters is to
determine how, given a kind of performance, a particular assemblage of
enunciation, a redundant tracing, does or doesn't modify the unconscious
map of a local pragmatic competence. l3 These maps of competence do not
depend in an absolute fashion on a broader competence. Just as there is no
univers al competence, there is no univers al cartography: such and such a
map, which serves as a marker for one collective performance (that of an
anti-psychiatric community or a groupuscule, for example), could be valid
as a performance for such and sueh other social group (psychiatry in France
as a whole, or the ensemble of political movements, for example).
One rediscovers the subjeet-group/subjugated group alternative here,
which must never be taken as an absolute opposition. The relations of
alienation between fields of competence always imply a certain margin,
which it falls to pragmatics to localise and utilise. In other words, in no matter
what situation, a diagrammatic politics is always possible. Pragmatics refuses
any ide a of fatalism, whatever name one gives it: divine, historical, economic,
structural, hereditary or syntagmatic. By taking into account the entirety of
his semiotic productions, studying the unconscious in the case of Little Hans
would have consisted in establishing which land of tree or rhizome his libido
would have been led to invest. How, at such and such a moment, the branch
of the neighbours was cut off, following what manoeuvrings the Oedipal tree
contracted, what role Professor Freud's branch and its deterritorialising
activity played, why the libido was constrained to take refuge in the
semiotisation of a becoming-horse, etc. In this way, phobia would no longer
be considered a psychopathological result but as the libidinal pragmatics of a
child who was not able to find any other micropolitical solution to escape
from familial and psychoanalytic transformations. Pragmatics would thus
imply, in the first place, an active refusaI of every conception of the
unconscious as a genetic stage, as structural destiny. For a group, it would

156
necessitate a permanent searching for investments of desire able to thwart
the reifications of bureaucracy, leadership, etc. 'Working' the map of the
group would consist in carrying out a reshuffiing and transformation of the
body without organs of the group - that is to say, the locus of investment of
desire 'anterior' to any specification, any organisation centred on an object -
necessitated by a micropolitics compatible with these investments. One
cannot just give such a pragmatics its part to do: it can only challenge the
hegemonic vocation of linguistics, psychoanalysis, social psychology, the
entirety of the human, social, le gal, economic sciences.

Generations and transformations

What is the nature of the relations between the two kinds of components -
generative and transformational of pragmatics, the existence of which we
have simply evoked? As we have said, pragmatics has, hitherto, been considered
as a do main that can only be adjacent to linguistics. This was true for Austin
and Searle, and it is still true for Ducrot, despite the fact that he calls into
question communication as the essential characteristic of language, and
despite the richness of his analysis of presupposition, which opens linguistics
up to a veritable new micropolitical field. 14 We have se en that whilst the
pragmatics that we are envisaging is essentially aimed at the ensemble of non-
linguistic semiotics fields, it nevertheless entertains a particular relationship
with linguistic semiologies, this domain being defined as that of generative
pragmatics. Pragmatics would thus be divided into two components - and not
two regions, as these components will constantly recompose themselves: a
generative pragmatics corresponding to the modes of 'linguisticisation' of
semiotics and a non-linguistic, non-signifying, transformational pragmatics.
The question was already posed at the level of the independence of
'analogical' semiotics. Should one accept their fundamental dependence
on linguistic semiology, like the majority of semioticians, accept their
fundamental dependence on linguistic semiology? Or should they be
considered as autonomous modes of semiotisation, able, under certain
conditions, to pass into the control of a signifying transformation? Should one
not, on the contrary, consider that what could be called the 'axiom of structure'
(which has, since Saussure, consisted in separating language from acts of
language and expression), is just a particular case, resulting from a contingent
semiotic conjunction? Does the normal, terminal, regime of symbolic
semiotics depend on the linguistic machine of expression? On the contrary,
we previously indicated that we consider that there is nothing ineluctable,
nothing universal, about signifying transformations, and that they are linked

157
to a certain kind of regime of individuation, enunciation and inter-subjective
communication. These signifying transformations derive their power from
their reliance on a certain kind of a-signifying machine of expression (double
articulation machine, which can be described in terms of syntagmatic
trees or more abstract formalisations), whieh organises and stabilises the
entirety of semiotic compositions as a plane of content and plane of
expression. The strength of the machine for signifying disempowerment
resides in its capacity to crush, to neutralise aIl contents. The function of the
signifying transformation is to generate, to structuralise semiotic productions
of aIl kinds. By means of which systems of institutional constraints is what
Herbert E. Brekle designates as 'communicative competence' determined?
These are the questions to which a generate pragmatics must respond.
Let us return now to the relations between the different semiotic
components, which we presented in the table on p. 129, and let us examine
in particular the fact that non-interpretative (symbolic, diagrammatic)
transformation al components are able to break the hegemony of interpretive
(analogical and signifying) generative components.

1. Intensive symbolic transformations

The anthropological study of phenomena of acculturation shows us that the
putting into place of a signifying transformation never goes without saying.
Primitive societies can even actively oppose it. It is in this way that certain
mythographic systems have long been able to resist the exclusive domination
of a semiology in which the expression -content relation is structured according
to syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. In the domain of myth, kinship
relations, political anthropology, etc., symbolic semiologies cannot be
automaticaIly reduced to the dichotomous relations of a signifying economy.
There is a big danger here of a hasty 'structuralisation' of ethnographie data,
consisting in interpreting kinship relations in terms of a generalised
exchangism, for example. Ihe installing of invariant15 significations doesn't go
without saying. In symbolic semiotics, the planes of content are linked to one
another, slide around in relation to each other, without being organised on the
structured plane of the signified. It is only with the accomplishment of the
hegemony of capitalism, in the nineteenth century, that the 'absolute stability
of signifieds, under the proliferation of relations of designation [... ] so as to be
able to found the comparison of forms'16 imposed itself definitively. A certain
kind of dictatorship of the signifier thus seems linked to a certain historical
context and, as a consequence, cannot be considered either as immutable or as
univers al. This signifying power can be neutralised, even overthrown by

158
transformations. This is what happens in contemporary African societies, for
example, where a fixation on tribal modes of solidarity, or sudden returns to
animist practices, serve as a counter-weight to the expansion of semiologies of
the Western kind. Equally, at an individuallevel, with the 'taking power' by an
oneiric semiology, of perceptual semiotics, linguistic semiologies, etc., under
the effect of sleep, drugs, amorous exaltation, etc.

2. Diagrammatic transformations
Another general type of pragmatic transformation can bring about a
semiotic freeing up of the disempowering signifier-signified couple:
diagrammatic transformation. Two kinds of semiotic system, the distinction
between which had nevertheless been outlined by CS. Peirce, have generally
been confused un der the category of icon: 17

a Images, in which the sign functions through analogy, by evoking

the object denoted (in the case of a semiotic functioning on the
basis of spatial elements, these generally put into play at least two
dimensions) .
b Diagrams, which fun ct ion in such a way that the elements of the
form of content are transferred onto the plane of the form of
expression by means of what we will caIl a sign-particle system that
simulates the process denoted, and that generally according to a
linear mode of coding. 18 Peirce defined diagrams as being 'ieons of
relation~ The diagrammatic sign doesn't imitate objects, but
artieulates properties, functions. 19 Content is deterritorialised by its
mode of formalisation. Symbolic semantie and semiologieal
signifying redundancies are emptied of their substance (a
polyphonie and harmonie formalisation in music, mathematics in
physies, axiomatics in mathematics).2°

Thus diagrammatism does not objectify a world, the representation of

whieh it would stabilise, but assembles a new type of reality. It ruptures
with the organisation of dominant significations. Diagrammatic semiotic
processes in fact constitute components that are indispensable to the
machinie assemblages of human societies. For example, it is impossible to
conceive the assemblages of a scientific experiment without the putting to
work of such a process (in the form of plans, topological, mathematical,
axiomatie, informatics descriptions, etc.). TIlat such sign machines can
function directly within material and social machines, with the mediation
of pro cesses of significant subjectivation, is something that has become

159
daily more evident; but the decisive step that it seems to us to be necessary
to take, in order to found a pragmatic politics, is to see that the common
essence of semiotic and material machines results from the same kind of
abstract machine. Positivist realism has led to the crushing of the creative
dimension of diagrammatism, reducing it to the general category of
analogy; first, diagrammatism is recuperated as a sub-product of the ieon,
then, second, the icon is recuperated under the category of analogy, itself
considered as a sub-product of signification. But - and we can't insist on
this enough - the relation of signification (signifier-signified), is only a
partieular case of the mechanism of semiotic machines, whieh function by
prolonging one another. In this regard, Bettin and Casetti have pointed out
how reductive the commentary on Peirce's writings has been, because,
unlike their habituaI presentation, his categories are never closed in on
themselves, and there is no irreversible break between the systems of signs
and their object. An iconie sign can always be the sign of another system,
and the systems of objects themselves already function as a sign machine in
a society's knowledge, inserting themselves into what he caIls, the
'progressive chain of interpretative definitions'. And the establishment of a
stabilised system of significations in efh~ct indeed seems to us always to be
correlated with the placing under guard of symbolic semiologies in their
diversity. As Lotman writes 'the greater the distance between structures
made equivalent to each other in the process of recoding, the greater the
disparity in their nature, the rieher will be the content of the very act of
switching from one system to the other'Y

3D Analogie and signifying generation

Analogy only constitutes the first level of this operation of levelling and
translateabilisation of semiotic chains of aIl kinds (doubtless one ought to be
led to consider 'degrees of analogism'). Analogy and signifiance constitute two
modes of the same polities of the reterritorialisation and subjectivation of
contents. But whilst analogy organises them into relatively informaI fields,
articulated through relatively territorialised assemblages of enunciation,
significance, with its doubly articulated chains, grids them in paradigmatic
and syntagmatic coordinates that are much more strietly articulated with
individuated assemblages of enunciation directly subjected to capitalist social
systems. Analogie formalisation is less rigorous, less deterritorialised, than
that of signifiance: it brings into view strata of expression that retain their own
consistency, producing what we have caIled 'fields of interpretance: One
symbol interprets another, whieh itself interprets a third, and so OIl, without

160 UNES OF FUGHT

the process hitting a terminating signifie d, the sense of which would be
blocked in, for example, a dictionary, and without the chain being liable to
respect a grarnrnaticality that fixes rigorous rules of syntagmatie concatenation.
The work of signifying generation on content brings an addition al degree of
deterritorialisation into play: it isn't based on analogie motivations any longer,
but on the 'arbitrariness' of a machine of a-signifying signs,22 which
phonologises, graphematises, morphologises, lexicalises, syntacticises,
rhetorieises them. Certainly, analogie transformations are not specifie to one
particular land of assemblage of enunciation; they can equally be applied to
diagrarnmatic semiotics. But in this case, the sarne signs are treated in terms
of two generative and transformational semiotie polities: on the one hand,
they function as symbols in an analogie mode, and on the other, as figures
of expression in a diagrammatic mode. This mixed system corresponds
precisely to the signifying mode of representation, which puts an a-signifying
machine at the service of signifiance. Empty signs, without any semantic
content, the phonie or graphie image of the word 'table: for exarnple, are seen
as a table. 23 Thus, by territorialising artificial analogons, diagrammatisation
closes up on a world of quasi-objects. But, unlike the world of syrnbolic
representations, this world is 'worked' from the inside by syntax and logie, on
which the formalisation of significations and dominant propositions rests. On
the one hand, it invites us to insert ourselves into a reality that 'goes without
saying: a reality of the everyday, and on the other, it draws us, as if in spite of
ourselves, into the circle of its pragmatie implications, and its signifying chains
alienates us in an immense social and technical machine, that of Charlie
Chaplin in Modern Times. Ali libido is thus captured, functionalised,
subjectivised as a function of the demands of the economy of capitalist flows.
The generative components of analogy and signifiance are thus not to be
placed on the same plane as the transformational components of symbolism
and diagrammatism, and the distinction, now traditional, between 'analog'
and 'digital' semiotics 24 seems to us not to need to be maintained. We find
ourselves in the presence of two general kinds of component:

Symbolic and diagrammatic transformations, whieh constitute

semiotie domains that are distinct from one another, and the
difference of whieh even gets accentuated to the extent that the
pro cess of deterritorialisation that marks the evolution of the
second develops.
Analogie and signifying 'generations: whieh do not constitute
distinct semiotic domains, but both participate in the sarne
reterritorialisation and subjectivation function. The constraints that
these components impose on the two previous components, when

PRAGMATICS 161
 they are applied to them, have as their goal making them
compatible with the values and coordinates of a particular vision of
the world. They generate a world by making the possibility of the
appearance of different worlds degenerate; thus we could caU them
degenerative components, in opposition to the pragmatic
(symbolic and diagrammatic) transformations which, each in their
own way, overthrows the dominant system of redundancies,
reordering the vision of a world.

Like the semiotic components that they put into play, pragmatic assemblages
of enunciation cannot be reduced to the composition of standard elements,
universal subjective positions of the kind theorised by Lacan, for example
(discourses of the master, the hysteric, knowledge, the analyst). And the
classification that we have set out in the table on page 129 is entirely relative!
Thus, in fact, territorialised assemblages of enunciation only correspond to
a dominance of analogical transformations of interpretance, and can
equally put into play symbolic, diagrammatic and signifying semiotics
(example: the discourse of primitive societies, in so far as it 'refuses' the
reductive effects of signifying generation, bases itself on symbolic
techniques relatively non-interpretative, but this refusaI implies by contrast
the existence of a threatening signifying economy). The individuation of
enunciation, whilst being specific to the dominance of signifying
transformations, equally puts into play deterritorialised and overcoded
symbolic transformations (of the figure-ground kind) and a diagrammatic

Table summarising the formation of semiotic fields

on the basis of transformational and generative
components
Transformations Generations Semiological fields

A. Symbolic (e.g. .li AC Interpretative semiology

dreams) (e.g. magic)

'>J - analogical -7 AD Signifying semiology (e.g.

(interpretance) psychoanalysis)

.li - signifying -7 BC Interpretative logography

(signifiance) (e.g. geomancy, tarot)

B. Diagrammatic '>J BD Doubly articulated

(e.g. systems of languages
graphemes)

162
redundancy organising symbolic formations according to a plane of content
(consciential transformation). Ulis second degree formalisation thus has as
consequence the production of a new kind of eftect, that one could call the
effect of lack. Each content is doubled by a lack, it is 'lacking' the formalism
that overcodes it. The unity oflinguistic semiology thus becomes the formaI
signifying unity that Hjelmslev brought to light between the form of
expression and the form of content. The fundamentally metastable character
of this effect of lack produced through consciential transformation has as
its corollary a sort of vertigo of unbearable, maddeningly anguishing,
deterritorialisation. It must be filled without delay; and it entails the
intervention of a certain number of reterritorialising pragmatic components:
a transformation of faciality; transformation of the double, transformation
of the couple, transformation of paranoid knowledge, etc. The mad vector
of consciential transformation that this absolute deterritorialisation
represents is thus conjured away through artificial reterritorialisations,
which it is worth differentiating from the territorialised assemblages of
enunciation evoked earlier. Now, there is no methodological necessity that
forces us to consider that the semiotic components, on the basis of which
we started our description, have real priority. A 'rhizomatic' analysis could
just as weIl be carried out on the basis ofless classically semiotic components,
such as those that are knotted together around the black holes of anxiety,
faciality, power formations, etc.
It is the same with the machinic assemblages of enunciation that are
characteristic of the domain of diagrammatic pragmatic transformations.
They remain haunted by subjects of enunciation. But the representation of a
locutor-auditor as fictive pole of the production of utterances becoming
increasingly abstract with them, the fact that 'it continues to speak' through the
mouths of individuals takes on an increasingly relative scope. The utterance is
produced and understood through a complex assemblage of individuals,
organs, material and social machines, mathematical and scientific semiotic
machines, etc., which constitute the veritable nucleus of enunciation. That
being the case, this kind of assemblage cannot be separated in practice from
the artificial reterritorialisations of enunciation that are correlative to it and
which are always manifested within mixed semantics. It is in reaction to
the vertiginous deterritorialisation of the subject that is implied, either
through consciential transformation, or by a desubjectifying diagrammatic
transformation, that a system of collective 'reassurance' artificially reproduces
a territorialisation of enunciation. Thus, after the collapse of systems of
territorialised,familial communities, the illusion of a return to the territorialised
assemblages of primitive societies could even be maintained (the illusion of a
'return to naturè, of a return to originary significations). Thus an artificial

163
conjugal nuclear family will be recreated or, faced with the internationalisation
of production and of the market, one will witness a massive return to questions
of nationality, of regional particularisms, racisms, etc.

Three limit cases of collective

assemblages of enunciation
Without losing from view the arbitrary character of the systematic
classifications that we are proposing, let us now examine certain limit
assemblages, such as they can be determined on the basis of the distribution
of their components - this time of a different, ternary order. We will insist
once again on the fact that a monographie approach - a 'rhizomatic' analysis
- of real situations, would therefore not start from the simple to go to the
complex, but, on the contrary, would begin from the complex so as to
envisage the 'elementary' components only to the extent that such an
undertaking would allow it to explore more precisely certain singular traits
of these components, leading to an even greater complexification of the
assemblages of enunciation, and permitting a rieher, more open, creative
experimentation to be envisaged. The triadic system that we are proposing
here can therefore not be assimilated to a method like that of cs. Peirce, for
example. The association of five, seven or n components might, in principle,
have been preferable for him. Nevertheless, it should allow us to examine
the limit cases, whieh anthropologists, historians or economists would
doubtless make into typical cases, structural archetypes.

Assemblages of Machinic Semiotic

enunciation instances components

Composition a Territorialised Index Symbolic

Composition b Individuated Abstract machine Signifying

(abstraction)

Composition c Collective Machinic A-signifying

assemblage

Numerous symbolic semioties - those of childhood, of the mad, of primitive

societies - are inseparable from the existence of stratified territorialities.

164
Thus they do not depend, in the first place, on a substance of expression that
would traverse and unify its different modes of semiotisation. They constitute
a system of articulation of modes of encoding and formalisation in the
raising up of a universal substance of expression. For example, in the
territorialised assemblage of certain primitive societies, one will find an
activity of mythographic formation developing on the basis of traits of
matters of expression that do not enter into correspondence, that are not
translateabilisable with those of gestural, perceptual, economic and other
semiotics. That does not signify that these diverse modes of semiotisation are
without relation to each other. But what brings about this relation is precisely
the kind of territorialisation of the group, its internaI topology, its translations
into itself and outside its territory. Here, the territorialised assemblage of the
group occupies the place that will become that of signifying substance in the
system of despotic individualisation of enunciation.
Primitive societies refuse, by warding off, the bringing to light of a
signifying substance; their politics is that of a group enactment of semiotic
conjunctions. Already it is a matter here of a sort of pragmatic rhizome, but
a rhizome that seeks to contain, to dominate deterritorialising flights. The
systems of indices precisely mark on this rhizome the inscription of such a
threat, of such a refusaI to faU into signifying abstraction or into
deterritorialised machinic assemblages. One index would, for example, be
the fact that the death of a cow first caUs for a recourse to the practices of
geomancy, then, to the extent that the right results have been obtained from
this procedure, the recourse to a ritual sacrifice, th en to a trial for witchcraft,
a marabout etc., without a synthesis being effectuated at any moment
between these different undertakings, without a paradigm stabilising their
general signification being extracted.
The group assembles the semiotics, it doesn't interpret, it experiments.
This real passage operates by respecting the particular traits of each matter
of expression. Besides, and here is an essential difference with the rhizomes
that depend on a deterritorialised machinic phylum, these territorialised
assemblages do not hierarchise planes. Machinic deterritorialisations exist
(for example: an embryonic writing) but they will be treated on the same
plane as the territorialised assemblages. It is as if these societies entertained
an active misunderstanding of the powers of deterritorialisation contained
in certain indices. TIüs land of assemblage thus doesn't exclude either the
signifier, or diagrammatism, it simply refuses the power takeover by an
overcoding instance or a deterritorialisation machine. A religious machine
can be the bearer of universalising abstractions, but it will be prevented
from escaping its territory, its totem, for example. It doesn't aspire to a
general translateability of kind of capitalist religions. It equally avoids

165
symbolism faIling into the equivalent of signifying translateability that
iconism constitutes for it. The differential coefficients of deterritorialisation
are not extracted from their territory, their original matter.
These societies lead an active struggle against the erection of a signifying
object on high, whether in the form of a capitalisation of power, at the level
of the chiefs, or in the form of a concentration of systems of semiotic
enslavement in technical machines or writing machines. In other words,
they endeavour to ensure that aIl systems of deterritorialisation remain or
return to the state of indices, qualitative indices that will be neither quantified
nor systematised. It is only during the 'passage' to societies dominated by
signifying semiologies or a-signifying semiotics that such a quantification,
such an accumulation of effects of deterritorialisation can be put to work.
Here deterritorialisations still remain directIy plugged into the intensities of
desire, the body, the group, the territory.

Composition b corresponds to a pro cess of evolution of the old territories

that are traversed by machinic systems that hoIlow them out everywhere.
Indices link together, accumulate. In the societies of the Pueblos, as with the
Hopi Indians (whose 'theocratisrrl, according to Levi-Strauss, evokes, in an
unrefined form, Aztec civilisations), one begins to interpret indices in
relation to one another; it is the reign of 'dwelling on the past: of bad
conscience, of guilt. 2S Abstract machines capitalise the indices and sketch
out the constitution of machinic assemblages. In such conditions, these
societies become vulnerable to contamination by abstract capitalist
machines. But it is with societies that autonomise a despotic State machine
that this signifying power will truly acquire its autonomy. How will the
escalating deterritorialisations and systems of defence against capitalist
flows be effectuated, what will they ding on to? What ceased to be possible
in a territory will become so again in a system of semiological substance.
The characteristics of this substance are disempowerment and dualism.
What is retained by this substance are no longer intensities as such, but
their differential character. Precisely the ensemble of these differential
relations constitutes signifying substance. 1his signifying disempowerment
is correlated with conscientalisation, the emergence of myths of the double,
the totalisation of intensive effects on the person, the dualism of phallic
power and already, in an embryonic fashion, systems of enslavement by
semiotics of faciality and conjugality. Once it has crystallised, this substance
contaminates aIl the old matters of expression. It constitutes a sort of sky

166
that looms over intensities, pinning them down like butterflies, reducing
them to the state of neutralised indices.
It deploys a formaI subjectivity that is substituted for deterritorialised
assemblages. Unlike these latter, this subjectivity has no need of being
enacted, as it haunts each intensive system as difterential value; it functions
as a capital of difJerences; it is the matrix of aIl the capitalisations of power,
whether they concern the State, matrimonial or economic exchanges, and, in
general, aIl the systems for the capitalisation of decoded flows that we have
characterised as capitalist. The semiological substance of individuated (or
individuating) assemblages of enunciation is dualist in that it deploys a
surface of representation that is constantly divided into two sub-systems: a
substance of expression and a substance of content. The ensemble of intensive
eftects is formalised, secretly kept in hand by the formalisation of expression.
Inversely, the diagrammatic machines that are put into play by them are kept
in hand by the organisation, the finalisation, of the significations of content.
This process of the bi ,. univocalisation of aIl intensities has as its coroIlary a
linearisation, a flattening, of the old systems of territorialised rhizomes.
AIl the material intensities that contribute to the formalisation of
expression must be put into order. It is no longer appropriate to speak by
singing and dancing. What counts now is solely the assemblage of difterential
characteristics of the system as a whole, in so far as it contributes to the
functioning of new deterritorialised powers. Under these conditions, the
prosodic components that arise from song, from mimi cry, from gestures,
posture, etc., from 'primitive' speech can do nothing other th an degenerate.
One passes from one element to another according to a syntactic order and no
longer the apparent disorder of territorialised assemblages. One compares,
one measures, the coefficients of deterritorialisation of each fulfilling of form.
The strata will have to submit themselves and to be hierarchised in this
passage, there will not be any more contour, just a linear passage, constituting
the most economic means of effectuating such a comparison and
hierarchisation. In the absence of such a neutralisation, the possibility of the
irruption of a system of intensity would subsist. But signifying substance is
hegemonic, it cannot take such a risk.
In fact, it remains in a metastable state, because in order to be able to
semiotise the structuring and hierarchisation of power formations on
which it rests, it must have recourse to a putter to work of diagrammatic
machines, the effects of which also risk making themselves felt on the side
of content by the triggering of new machinic assemblages. How, under
these conditions, is one to keep such a sign machine in hand? At every
moment, and for everything, it will be necessary only to retain from it
what can be fixed in a system of abstraction and a formaI syntax. For

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example, the appearance, in the history of music, of a polyphonie, then a
harmonie, writing component, which threatened to make music explode in
a kind of generalised baroque, was warded off for a long time by religious
power, whieh endeavoured to retain only those traits of musical expression
that were mathematisable.
Thus a sort of univers al syntax of musical writing was established,
inseparable from the power formations weighing on musicians (teaching,
patronage, etc.). It was only when other, more deterritorialised components,
come on the scene and call into question the musical compromise called,
paradoxieally, 'baroque: that the continuous process of fragmentation that
the evolution of modern music represents, will be sketched out. But this
semiotic deterritorialisation of music is inseparable from those that have
worked over the representations of the world in the religious, philosophical
and scientific domains. And there too one will discover systems of
reterritorialisation to check the proliferation of abstract machines and
translateabilise them into a general conception of the world. Abstraction
functions here as a locus for rebounding, a stopping point for semiotic
systems susceptible of being organised into a machinic rhizome. The
abstract machine corresponds here to the Hjelmslevian intuition regarding
form, according to which it is, in some way, the same abstract machine that
is manifested in the substance of expression and the substance of content.
One might say that it is the same dualising substance that secretes
abstraction and contains intensities in reductive systems of dichotomous
trees. But the transcendent formalism, which results from what we have
called a paradigmatic perversion, is nonetheless under threat from a double
danger: on the si de of content, the explosion, the flourishing, of intensive
multiplicities; on the side of expression, the implacable diagrammatism of
sign machines.

The figure-ground, form-matter oppositions of territorialised assemblages,

and the dualism of the signifying substance of individuated assemblages,
cease to be pertinent here. In appearance, one is returning here to a polyvocal
expression of the kind of territorialised assemblages. But one is not dealing
here with welliocalised assemblages of persons, techniques, myths, etc., with
the enactment of bodies, organs and territories on the basis of a system of
signifying subjection, but with a machinic assemblage, a non-human
machine, at the heart of which the overcodings of despotic abstraction no
longer lay down the law in the same way. What now looms over this semiotic

168
system is no longer a territorialised assemblage or a formaI subjectivity, but
the plane of consistency of the ensemble of possible machinic assemblages.
The machinic assemblage of enunciation re-articulates machinic indices at
an intensive level, and no longer solely at a differentiallevel. In addition it
vectorises systems of stratification by polarising territorialised systems
towards deterritorialised systems. One has thus left the register of the
autonomy of territorialised assemblages or of the comparative dualism of
intensities of signifying substance in individuated assemblages. The machinic
rhizome is vectored and vectorising.A general vectorisation of destratification
pro cesses is substituted for global hierarchies.
One is not for aIl that in the presence of an autonomised machinic
substance: machinic components are not stratified: as they are enacted, they
constitute a phylum that implies not just their actual state and the historical
and logical links that have led there, but also their diagrammatic
potentialities. The virtual, the theoretical and the experimental to come thus
form a part of the machinic phylum.26 We will therefore not reintroduce a
dualism between material and semiotic deterritorialisation at this level,
because one is always in the presence of a multiplicity of matters of
expression and semiotic systems corresponding to a diversity of particular
modes of deterritorialisation. There is thus no place for grouping [together],
for example, energetic, physic-chemical, biological, etc., intensities on the
one hand, and aesthetic, revolutionary, scientific, etc., intensities on the
other. The multiplicity of systems of intensity is conjugated, 'rhizomatises'
over itself: the machinic assemblage brings about conjunctions between
'scientifically formed: 'aesthetically formed' matters, without giving them
any privilege, in so far as they issue from an autonomised sign machine. No
system has any priority over any other as of right; material components are
not necessarily more territorialised than semiotic components. What is
important here is not a particular differential index, nor a range of differential
indices, it is the assemblage of quanta of deterritorialisation enacted. Certain
intensive systems have quantum superpower in relation to others.
A mathematical sign machine can temporarily become superpowered in
relation to the system of deterritorialisation in play in physics, for example,
in conjunction with theoretical and experimental components. Inversely an
intensive effecf7 can become superpowered in relation to an entire sector of
theoretical physics. Indices and abstract machines continue to exist in
machinic assemblages but instead of the indices turning round and round in
a territorialised assemblage, enacted by hum an collectivities in a given
territory, or the abstract machines remaining tightly fixed to a dualising
substance, they now only function in so far as they are bearers of certain
quanta of deterritorialisation. This point is primordial, because, we repeat,

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there is no hierarchy between indices, abstract machines and machinic
assemblages. For example, the 'feelings', the private life, of a scientific
researcher, the fact that he faIls in love or goes mad, can introduce a
deterritorialising charge of the greatest in the machinic assemblage that
constitutes his research. An erotic index, a libidinal charge, will perhaps be
able to unblock systems of abstract machines and systems of experimental
assemblages, or even throw them out of gear completely. Inversely, an abstract
machine might fertilise a system of indices: it is perhaps the fact that an
abstract machine, of a theoretical or experimental order, has been introduced
into his system that makes our researcher 'decide' to faH in love or go mad.
Passions, aH passions, not just those of artists and scientific experts, whatever
they may be, whatever they put into play, should cease being separated from
oeuvres so that they can be related to the recipes relative to the interpersonal
strategies that obsess psychoanalysis. Machinic assemblages are bearers of
indices as much as abstract machines are. One may even consider that in a
sense, there are only machinic assemblages, whether virtual or manifest, and
that territorialised assemblages and abstract machines are already potentially
machinic assemblages.
We have only considered here limit situations that translate the fact that:

1 territorialised machinic assemblages at level a mark a fear and a

warding off of deterritorialisation at level b;
2 those of level b mark, in another form, a refusaI and repression of
the diagrammatic effects at level c, by way of the systems of abstract
machines;
3 the machinic assemblages of level c mark, on the one hand, a return
to territorialised indices and, on the other hand, a beyond of the
abstract machines of level b, in that they bring a deterritorialising
charge to the indices that allows them to pass through the 'wall of
the signifier:

'Do it' could be the order-word for a pragmatic micropolitics. Not only can
the Chomskyan axiom of grammaticality (S) no longer be accepted as going
without saying, but it becomes the object of a sort of militant opposition. One
refuses to consider that semiotic assemblages of all kinds have necessarily to
organise themselves into phrases that are compatible with the system of
dominant significations. A pragmatic order-word will therefore not seek to
interpret, to reorganise significations, to compose with them; it will postulate

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that beyond their systems of redundancy, it is always possible to transform a
semiotic assemblage. There is a primary political decision here, a primary
axiom of pragmatics: the refusaI to legitimate the signifying power manifested
by the 'evidence' of dominant 'grammaticalities'. The appreciation of a 'degree
of grammaticality' then becomes a political matter. Rather than agreeing to
remain prisoner of the redundancy of signifying tracings, one will endeavour
to fabricate a new map of competence, new a-signifying diagrammatic
coordinates. This is what the Leninists did during their rupture with the
social-democrats, when they decided, with a certain arbitrariness, that on the
basis of the constitution of a party of a new kind a split would be created
between the proletarian avant-garde and the masses, the effect of which
would be to radically transform their passive attitude, their tendency to
spontaneity, and their 'economist' tendency. The fact that his 'Leninist
transformation' later toppled over into the field of redundancy of Stalinist
bureaucracy shows that in this domain, the systems of maps and tracings can
always be inverted, that no structural foundation, no theoreticallegitimation
can definitively guarantee the maintenance of a revolutionary 'competence'.
Whatever the case may be, the Leninists made a new matter of expression rise
up from the social field, a new map of the political unconscious, in relation to
which aIl productions of utterances, including those of bourgeois movements,
would be constrained to determine themselves. Another transformation of
the unconscious map of the revolutionary movement had been produced by
the Marxists of the First International, who literally 'invented' a new kind of
working class, anticipating the sociological transformations that industrial
societies were to experience (in effect, the class on which the communist
movement of Marx's era rested was essentially composed of artisans and
journeymen: it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that it really
began to be proletarianised). A micropolitical pragmatics will never accept
systems of redundancy, which seem to be the most stuck in an 'impasse, as a
fait accompli; it will endeavour to make pro cesses of diagrammatisation
emerge, 'analysers: collective assemblages of enunciation that will depose
individuated modes of subjectivation and will form the basis on which
previous micropolitical relations will be registered and reshuffled. But, once
again, it cannot be a matter here simply of organisational, programmatic or
theoretical instruments, but fundamentally of mutations in social pragmatics.
The task of a revolutionary pragmatics will thus consist in bringing
about connections between transformation al systems able to annul the
effects of signifying generation. One is thus in the presence of two
micropolitical orientations concerning semiotic systems as a whole.
Diagrammatic transformations are thus able to carry their effects into no
matter what semiotic register: whether it is a matter of symbolic semiologies

171
(with mimetic or transitivist efIects, for example), signifying semiologies
(with systems of expression based on a limited range of dis crete elements:
phonemes, graphemes, distinctive features, etc.), or even natural modes of
encoding. ln each situation the pragmatic objective will consist in setting
out the nature of the crystallisations of power that operate around a
dominant transformational component: the map of black holes, semiotie
branches and lines of flight (in Asiatic empires, the establishment of a
despotie signifying writing, for example, or the emergence of a systematie
signifying delirium in paranoia). Overthrow by a new diagrammatie
component will reduce the effects of signifiance and individuation and le ad
to enunciation being nothing more than one element amongst others in
machinie assemblages (the emancipation of a writing machine from its
signifying function in poetie, musieal, mathematical work, etc.). Pragmatie
transformations will assemble their composition synchronically as a
function of diverse political strategies; but they will equally organise their
mutations diachronieally on a machinic rhizome. Although evolution goes
globaUy in the direction of a growing deterritorialisation, punctuated by
always more brutal reterritorialisation on artificial stratifications, one really
cannot set out generallaws concerning them. And that is how it should bel
Pragmatic assemblages are machinic; they do not depend on universal
laws properly speaking; they are subject to historical mutation. Thus one can
speak of a 'romantie complex: of a 'Popular Front complex: a 'Resistance
complex: a 'positivist complex: aU of which have maintained their effects
beyond their original historicallocalisation, without it being possible to give
them the universal character that psychoanalysts accord to the Oedipus
complex, or Maoists to the 'revisionist' complex. Pragmatic markers are not
univers aIs, they can always be called into question. Let us consider, for
example, the fact that the most territorialised segmentarities have a
'tendency' to take control of more molar segmentarities. This is, in effect, a
kind of law. But it only remains valid in the context of a given period, to the
point when a revolutionary situation, overturning the maps of competence,
reveals the existence of another machinism that was in the subterranean
process of gnawing away at an earlier equilibrium. Differentiating coefficients
of deterritorialisation ought nonetheless to allow political sequences to be
vectorised - a 'line' of schizophrenisation versus a paranoid 'line' for example
-- in the struggle against bureaucratie transformations. But one will never be
able to deduce from this, as sorne have believed they could consider so doing
on the basis of Anti-Oedipus, that it is a matter here of a new Manichean
alternative.lt will only ever be a matter of a provisional orientation. Different
kinds of entrance points must always be possible in a pragmatic system: that
of performances of tracings or that of the competence of maps. In the first

172
case, one will accept the repetitive character of deadlocked libidinal
investments, one will even rely on them, so as to guarantee the minimal
deterritorialisation of a body without organs on the basis of which other
transformational operations will be possible (example: the positive aspects
of regionalist struggles). In the other case, one will rely directly on a line of
flight able to make the strata explode and bring about new semiotic
branchings. Schematically speaking, and to borrow a difterent terminology,
one can say of the generative pragmatics that it will con cern itself specifically
with empty and cancerous bodies without organs, whilst the transformational
pragmatics will concern itself with full bodies without organs connected to
the plane of consistency. But what brings these two points of entry together
is that the simple fact of introducing a mode of semiotisation that concerns
them in particular, the simple fact of memorising potentialities, of noting
tracings and drawing up maps already sketches out diagrammatic effects:
the simple fact of deciding to write down one's dreams, for example, rather
th an passively interpreting them, the simple fact of sketching or miming
them, could transform the map of the unconscious. One of the formidable
traps of psychoanalysis is that it has managed to rely on the minimal
transformation that the simple fact ofhaving a discourse outside the habituaI
conditions of enunciation represents: the entire 'mission' of psychoanalysis
having hitherto consisted in 'extinguishing' the diagrammatic effects of this
transformation through the technique of the transference, and in pushing
the discourse of the patient back into new grids of signifying redundancy.
A pragmatics of collective assemblages of enunciation will therefore
oscillate constantly between these two kinds of semiotic micropolitics,
elaborating from them a sort of technology for the calling into question of
dominant significations. Under these conditions, discourse itself could
become a war machine, with the constant risk of the re-establishing of a
system of signifying redundancy.
Let us note that in effect, from the point of view of a transformational
pragmatics, there is no fundamental difference between a war machine and
diagrammatie linguistic machine, for the reason that at the level of the
plane of consistency one cannot distinguish between the abstract machines
that are manifested by a semiologieal substance of expression, and those
that are manifested by the intensive traits of a more 'material' diagrammatic
machine. Both are a part of the same land of rhizome. Let us add that
appreciating the effects of redundancy produced by a pragmatic
transformation is not an unimportant objective; it is not, in effect, a matter
of proposing a politics of novelty for novelty's sake a mimetie conversion
to madness on the pretext of playing of a schizophrenie line against a
paranoid line, for example! Pragmatie map-tracing assemblages intervene

173
essentially at the level of the traits of matters of expression. In the last resort
they are what determine the regime of coefficients of deterritorialisation,
the rhythms of induction, the viscosity, the boomerang effects and so on,
that are compatible with the fabrication of a body without organs (the
injections of 'caution' so as not to bodge a body without organs). Tracking
them thus doesn't depend here on theoretical analyses but on a composition
of systems of intensities. ln sum, the redundancy of traits of the matter of
expression relaya generative tree, a new rhizome can conne ct itself up and
- this is perhaps the most general case - a microscopie element of a tree,
a radicle, will outline the production of a new land of local competence,
whilst overcoded in a generative tree, one of the different semiotie
components (perceptual, sensory, from thinking in image, speech, the
socius, writing) will in any case crack. An intensive trait starts to work on its
own count, a hallucinatory perception, synaesthesia, a perverse mutation, a
play of images, detach themselves and in a single blow, the hegemony of the
signifier is caIled into question. 28 Generative trees, constructed according to
the Chomskyan syntagmatie model, and which Jim McCawley, Jerrold
Sadock, Dieter Wunderlich, etc., are trying to adapt for linguistie
pragmatics,29 could thus open up and bud in aIl directions. A performative
utterance, a promise, an order, can change the import of a situation -- whieh
is nothing to do with its signification - as a function of the appearance of a
new transformation. It is obvious that a sermon does not have the same
impact when it is given in the content of a transformation of conjugal,
police or religious 'power'. Saying '1 swear' before a judge or in a
psychodramatie scene doesn't have the same function, doesn't involve the
same ldnd of persona, nor the same ldnd of intersubjectivity.
The question, then,is not only one ofknowing if a pragmatie transformation
intervenes at different levels semantic, syntactie, phonologie al, prosodie, etc.
- but of studying how it intervenes on a mieropolitieal plane. And in the
instance that its impact is not seen, this is because the analysis has been taken
to its terminal point! This attitude is exactly the inverse of linguists who seek
to minimise the role of pragmatic components and only agree to take them
into account when they can no longer avoid them. Here one is no longer
interrogating syntax and semantics so as to detect whether they harbour
pragmatic elements: one interrogates the pragmatic semiotic compositions of
assemblages of enunciation so as to detect the paralysing effects of signifying
redundancies. Wh en Bukharin takes the oath, from the point of view of the
militant persona that he intended to remain faithful to until his death, this
ambiguity can already be sensed in the official accounts. There is every reason
to think that a syntactic, phonological, analysis of his dis course would allow
the effects of the transformation 'Moscow Trial' on his oral expression to be

174
brought out, and the international suc cess that this formula has experienced.
(Evidently it would be absurd to consider that such transformations of power,
linked to schoo1, to the tribunal, the party, the family, can be typified once and
for aH, in so far as they modify the signification of a performative, for example,
or to seek to extract 'universals' from them.)
GeneraHy acts of citizenship are considered to be the crowning point of a
series that begins with a commitment to family values. Thus modes of mental
organisation are staged, going from the most primitive of levels, like that of
oral fixation, to the most ethereal oflevels of sublimation. But in reality, things
are not like that: every'stage' can play a role at any time, and any one can come
back on the system at a given point and blow it up. Let us repeat: no genetic
finality, no general competence in a dominant adult language, will ever
constitute a totalising reference for a particular performance. The objective of
generative pragmatics is to determine in what way there is a coincidence
between maps and what disjunctions might be utilised, what the scope of a
power takeover by the signifier in a given system is, what the nature of the
power formations that are plugged into the signifier S that organises and
overcodes a corpus of utterances and propositions is. A repressive proposition,
for example, doesn't function in the same way when it is assembled in a molar
military enunciation or in a molecular micro-fascist enunciation. Particular
dialects, even idiolects, correspond to each situational rhizome. And in the
case in which these are traversed by a language system, by a general
grammaticality, it will always be a matter of a dominant overcoding instance
functioning like Francophony in relation to the vernacular languages of the
old French colonies, relayed today by new power formations. 30

175
PART THREE

1
 1 1

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 mu ch
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 dangerc '.lS. 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 stereotypie al 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, AlI the flows,
aIl the objects, must be situated in relation to my personological totality, aU
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 aIl 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 Ütce 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
aIl. 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 aU 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

180
the capitalist 'mode of production'. 'After' the components of ÜlCiality 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 filciality, 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 the se powers overturned or avoided, they cou Id equally be
differentiated'1r 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 dose it up on itself. Throughout
the day, 1 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. 1he 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

181
has them) is inseparable from the power formations that effectuate iL A
child who goes trom 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 aH with a role or a function, dont 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 refusaI - 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. AIl these eomponents are disciplined, uniformised,
translateabilised, hierarehised; everything that they manifest will have to
seem as if it emanated from a central point of subjectivation. As the first
funetion of signifying eonscientialisation is, furthermore, to mask the
faet that there is nothing ineluetable in the triggering and linking of
the operations that converge in pro cesses 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 idioleet to another. At any
moment, the polities of the dominant real, whieh is that of consciousness,
will le ad to it carrying out operations that take in hand the semiotie
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 ieons, 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
fair y, Rumpelstiltskin and Prince Channing, the father and the king, etc.
But today, after the rout of territorialised assemblages and the capitalist
hegemony of deeoded flows, it falls to the mass media to produce ersatz
ritual and totemic facialities that no 'natura!' group is in a position to secrete
through its own means. Consequently it is no longer a territory, an ethnie
group but the entirety of sonorous and visual space that finds itself saturated
by the standardised models of an essentiaIly 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 ieons, the support
of alienating identifications. The manipulation of the imaginary by the

182
media doesn't just have a 'sedative' function, to calm and keep the drives of
productive agents in place.
More fundamentaIly, its intervention arises from a specifie diagrammatic
function of the capitalist mode of subjectivation.lt is a matter of putting an
operator of enunciation in place that is able to concentrate and miniaturise
the semiotic components impliec":. 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 alliocai 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 formaI equivalence
that pilot and keep in hand every component, every production, every
innovation in any domain whatsoever. ln these conditions, no mystery
point can escape from the imperialist gaze of the signifier any longer:
aIl 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 1 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 rime gives up his first idea, which consisted in emptying an 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 roman tic, 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

183
transforms the habituaI 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 internaI sensations that profoundly reorganise the 'hierarchies'
presiding over the organisation of the everyday world. 4
How does faciality succeed in ftUlctioning as a sort of key, a lock, for
semiotic components as a whole? It seems that in primitive societies, it is far
t'rom 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 an 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 sorne 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 ho le shifts, invades the universe, and
turns towards no matter what intensive point, so as to overcode it. All the
points of closure, an the arborescent potentialities are conjugated, enter into

184
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 reduüdancies and their paradigmatic
axes. Certainly the machine of consciential subjectivation, which presents
itself as univers al, 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 territoriallimits
of an ethnie grouping - trom the lndian shabono to the bar on the corner,
or any other modality of the support polygon of signification - and its
capacity to make aH 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 aH the other matters of expression.
At this 'step' with faciality, rhizomatic possibility has been systematicaHy
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 aH the spatial, rhythmic,
moral, etc., coordinates of the world. Thus a univers al 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 ding, as psychologists
have shown. 5 It is this centralising machine of perceptual and behavioural
deterritorialisation that aHows 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 aU 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 formaI 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

185
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 aIl seriaI 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' do es 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 pro cesses of enunciation,
subjectivation, and conscientialisation, as essential components.
The 'objectification', 'subjectivisation', and 'otherification' of enunciation
are never given once and for aIl. 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
me ans 'it is looking at us!' [nous regarde, also 'concerns us']. In the capitalist
regime, aIl the points of flight, aIl the lin es of desire, aIl 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. AlI 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
monotheistie god of deterritorialisation no longer converge on an ethnie
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 whieh haunts the

186
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 aff(:~cted becomes shifty.
A pout that go es 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 fi.xed
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 phallocratie 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 univers al 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 daims 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 aIl 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 sayat 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

187
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'JO occurs through the transitory
disturbance of this sort of register of the everyday: 'WeIl weIl, they found it
perfectly normal to ride horses in the traffic; weIl, weIl, there were Germans,
rickshaws, wooden heels .. : Above aIl 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: aIl ülCiality traits themselves are recentred on the
black ho le in which aIl 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 whieh no matter of expression can escape.
A relatively deterritorialised system of values is th us projected over aIl
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 internaI 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 he art 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 whieh earry a specifie faciality for eaeh ethnie 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, aIl faces are in the position ofbeing

188
judged, of being assessed in relationship to a nonn or deprecated and
possibly taken control ot looked after, assiste d, re-adapted or imprisoned
by society. Il
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 aU
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: ifs 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 ifs foreign and therefore hostile - it's part of the family or
people we dont know. 'Before' faciality, there still subsisted polyvocal
possibilities of approximation; cafter: 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 jèed-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 aU the possibilities to come but also reacts, in a kind
of retro active way, on 'past possibility'. Nothing else was possible in the

189
past than what submitted to signifying recording. Signifying possibility,
arborescent possibility thus imposes itself definitively, to the detriment of
aH rhizomatic possibilisation.
One is dealing here with the driving force itself of the signifying
binarisation of aU 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, rais es 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 th an 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
dis course, 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 th an in the
statistical checking of the performance of a memory for judgement. What is
above aU 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

190
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 pro cess 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 caH 'refrain machines'). This process results - or should result, from
the ide al point ofview - in no matter what expressive production submitting
to a reduction, a translateabilisation in terrns 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 sorne 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 sorne 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 th an 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 necessaryI3). And it is beginning to be capable of formulating
original mathematical problems.
It is therefore not in sorne 'essence of human thought' that the limit to
the semiotic capacities of the machine will be found, but rather in the nature

191
of the informatic language that presides over its current functioning and
which results in current 'processing' missing the phenomena of rupture,
destratification and desire - aIl 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 calI 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 mutation al 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, faIl 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 aIl
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 an times,
petrified for aIl eternity? The categories of time and space, generally known
as a priori and univers al 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 pro cesses, would be led, if needs
be, to deploy time and causality 'in reverse' (this is already what happens in

192 UNES OF FUGHT

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 hum an 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. 'InternaI' 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 individu al or a group - are
inseparable from the 'external' deterritorialisations that work over the
environment and history. Because this 'external' rhizome cannot be eut off
from the internaI 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' ethnie grouping, etc.
Nothing is played out in advance, no vectoring between in si de and outside,
before and after, molar and molecular, supra and infra, can be calculated
once and for aIl. Thus, if, for example, it is true that the machination of a
gaze can appear 'on the ground of the destruction of the eyes whieh look at
me' (to paraphrase Sartre in Being and Nothingness 16 ), inversely, sightless
eyes, a for-other eut 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 SOLI D matter that surrounds
us' and whieh are as much excavators clearing out what is before them, as
'flying machines', birds capable of going through the windows of the
lands cape (AND THE EARTH AND THE SKY NIGHT AND DAY
WILL COME IN)Y
The reterritorialisations - refrains, eyes, faces, landscapes - that coyer 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 partieular arrangements, whieh are proper
to each type of assemblage, each of which itself escapes from any taxonomie
systematisation. Not aIl components of an assemblage of enunciation have
the same importance and the weight of one in relation to another can vary

ON FACIALITY 193
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 sorne 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 internaI 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 aIl kinds, they can also move as mu ch 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, 'ding'
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 trom them so as to make them function in a

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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-analytie cartography cannot content
itself with the synchronie 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 diachronie marking out of the generation and
transformation of assemblages. But the two analytie series will eonstantly
interseet, the same series of questions effectively traversing them both:
why does an assemblage dose 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 dosed
circuits (of the train-work-bed kind) that reconstitute self-endosed
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 co ding, for ex ample - 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.).

195
 1

It seems that inter-assemblage relations are organised into aggregates

that are aIl the more complex and aIl the more capable of adaptation
and creativity for the existence of intra-assemblage relations that
make deterritorialised components, specialised in transformations, in
diagrammatic phase transitions appear and not simply transcodings
without any assemblage modification, that is to say, in the passage from
one form to another, from one assemblage to another, through the
decomposition of stratified form-substance relations. It is aIl this rhizomatic
creativity that is systematically lacking, or lacking in the systems of
information processing, signifying structuralisms, axiomatics that operate
through 'arborescent' deductions. But before coming back to what seems
to us to be their common characteristic, that is, a method of binary
reduction of the specific characteristics of their components, let us examine
- on the basis of examples taken from the domain of ethology diverse
modes of intra- and inter-assemblage organisation. This choice of examples
will be oriented as a function of two kinds of preoccupation:

1 The concern to relativise the notion of a hierarchy of instinctive

behaviours based on a hierarchy of nerve centres, such as has been
developed following the work of N. Tinbergen.
2 The desire to group several suggestive markers concerning the
assemblage of faciality and refrain components in the phylum of
deterritorialised semiotics, and to demonstrate their position of
transition between systems of reterritorialisation and diagrammatic
 pro cesses that pro duce new spatio-temporal, ecological, social
coordinates, etc.

In effect, it seems to us that a 'rhizomatic' conception of inter-assemblage

relations (and not an arborescent one like that proposed by Tinbergen,
with his celebrated schema 1), should authorise an innovative opening up of
the behavioural programming of the animal world as much as, if the case
arises, a 'determinist' closure of that of the human world. Now, what it seems
must be remembered with faciality and refrain components, is that they
play in the hum an and animal registers precisely without having a rigid
opposition between the innate and the acquired stuck onto them, without
projecting a fictitious freedom onto the human or a strict determinism onto
the animal. In our opinion, in the course of the 'ethological misunderstanding'
a mechanistic coupling between inhibiting factors for a components and
innate triggering mechanisms rules.
AH conceptions that resuIt in arborescent descriptions of chains of
behaviour rest on this basic binary operation - one that is, in addition, very
close to that of the ideology secreted by information theory. In wanting
to specify too positively the nature of 'what inhibits' or of 'what triggers:
one ends up postulating a purposiveness, a teleological signification, or
the existence of a soul to or for these chains. In effect, as they have been
arbitrarily mechanised at the outset, one ends up being obliged to clamp on
to them transcendent structures so as to make them function. It is always
the same politics of worlds beyond or of'objects on high', which only results
in the reconstitution of linear causalities and in the pro cess loses the points
of singularity borne by abstract machinisms. Now one is perhaps dealing
here with something similar to the action of catalysts in the domain of
chemistry, the intervention of which is not linked to the chemical reactions
proper to them but to the kind of molecular connections that they facilitate.
What counts, in these 'crystallisations' of behaviour, is perhaps less the
nature of such and such a - hormonal, perceptual, ecological, etc. -
component, than the spatial apparatuses that determine the strategies and
tactics, the linking rhythms that do or dont succeed in being stabilised and
triggered on the basis of 'automatic' codings, and the existence of certain
deterritorialised (diagrammatic) components that establishes bridges,
semiotic, transcoding exchangers, between these spaces and rhythms. This
'machinics', this biologico-behavioural engineering could engender chains
of the 'stigmergic' kind (each sequence being articulated to the next without
any 'knowledge' that would preside over the whole of a conscious project
being implied), or chains that imply a semiotisation on the spot, a
questioning regarding the 'sense' of an intentional arc, or even black hole

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effects, that is to say, the fact that a semiotic or 'natural' coding component
turns around on itself emptily, issues in nothing, and no longer echoes
anything except other systems of inhibition. Perhaps nothing is played out
between inhibition and 'triggering' in an absolutely mechanical, 'bi -univocal'
way; perhaps a rhizomatic opening always remains possible, if only at the
microscopic scale, and it is always on the basis of minuscule creative lines
of flight that evolution finally finds its adaptive path?
Perhaps inhibiting black hole and rhizomatic connection should not be
opposed, anyway. In effect, it is possible that it is precisely only from such a
black hole that these minuscule lin es of flight that will deterritorialise a
stratified system can emerge. Perhaps it is inevitable that to be in a position
to be triggered, certain innovative pro cesses have previously to be engaged
in blockages, black holes, that can only end up outside of any 'constructive
dialectics' - in 'catastrophes: in the sense given to this term by René Thom. 2
(Examples: invasions, epidemics, the Hundred Years War, etc. on the eve of
the great revolutions of capitalism.) And the 'equipment' of faciality and
refrain perhaps have as their function precisely one of regulating new
'rhythms of catastrophe' and the unprecedented metabolisms for exiting the
black holes of absolute deterritorialisation. Whatever the case may be, one
cornes across stases of inhibition associated with the triggering of crossroad-
behaviours, which turn out additionally to be genetically programmed,
everywhere in the animal kingdom. They can appear in the form of a pause,
of blocked time - a sort of'time for comprehending: to use Jacques Lacan's
expression - or the time of the palaver, of the festival or the sacrifice. A
'spectacular' example: the courting ritual of the peacock who holds the hen
at a distance for a period of time through captivation: she pecks at an
imaginary food at the focal point determined by the slightly tilted concavity
of his black hole tail. What can be happening in that period of time?
Although the existence of orgasm amongst animaIs is sometimes denied,
isn't that what it is a matter of here? An orgasm at a distance that attaches
itself to the couple relation by means of an image and which probably
triggers the hormonal components necessary to the sequences of events
that follow. Biochemical causality, the survival strategies of the species, the
ruses and improvisations of des ire overlap each other incessantly in the
same rhizome. One can only find one's way here on condition that one
determines one's point of view, the kind of assemblage of enunciation one
is seeking to account for here, at the outset. Whilst selective pressure brings
to the fore and automates certain pro cesses, it repels others, which as a
consequence can only subsist in a trace state. This doesn't in the slightest
prohibit the existence of marginal assemblages which are trying to 'find
themselves: seeking their own rules. And equally nor do es it prohibit the

199
deployment of a whole economy of desire marked by the same freedom as
that which characterises humans face-to-face, with the consciousness of
finitude and death.
It would be absurd to separate human desire radically from that of the
animal, as certain structuralist psychoanalysts do, on the pretext of
the privileged support of language and the Law. The ritualistic fascination
of animal desire depends just as much on semiotic constraints that are
adorned by ostentatious expenditure and gratuitous games. But will we find
the same kind of individuated assemblage of enunciation or the same
function of signifying subjectivation with the animal? Will we find the same
sort of human politics of the abolition of desire, of black holes or aphanisis
(to borrow Ernest Jones's expression) amongst birds, for example? One
frequently sees sudden reversaIs of behaviour amongst them (during fitful
nuptial displays, in aggressive attitudes, rituals of submission, simulated
grooming, etc.). It is as if behavioural sequences detached themselves in
indivisible pieces, that have to be taken or left in their entirety, because of
the 'too' territorialised character of their assemblage. In truth, one will find
this same mode of semiotisation en bloc amongst humans when someone,
who has been interrupted accidentaIly whilst reciting something, has to
'st art aIl over again' - but the blocs are less delimited, more open, as if they
were chipped. It seems that this difference is particularly accentuated with
regard to human assemblages of desire, which seem to be mu ch more
closely fitted to a certain kind of black hole impasse th an with animaIs, one
that can go as far as 'apathy' or even neurotie disturbances. Without even
going as far as the 'pathological' excesses of myaesthenia, or neuroses,
with their cortege of inhibitions, vertigo, somatisation, inhibition - the
infinite looking backwards of the obsessive, the semiotie impasse of the
phobie ... - it is obvious that in the capitalist social field, human desire
usually ceases to be a productive pause, a 'time for comprehending' and that
its black hole micropolitics, at least on the scale of the individual condition,
is weIl and truly stuck in a desperate contemplation of its futility.3 It is only
on a much bigger scale that this heap of empty consciousnesses might
succeed in launching super-deterritorialised modes of semiotisation, such
as speech, writing, religious or scientific symbolism, that can create the
conditions for a reversaI of the situation. But in the last resort it is only on
the scale of revolutionary - or perhaps one ought instead to say 'trans-
revolutionary' - collective assemblages that this excess of consciential
deterritorialisation, this detachment of every thing, this de-short-circuiting
of the real and of desire, can produce a new reality and a new desire. What
separates the Umwelt of the animal from that of the human is thus perhaps
the fact that for the latter, the diverse black holes carried by components of

200
semiotisation resonate together more easily, because of the starting up of
super-deterritorialised semiotic machines, which thus facilitate a general
translateabilisation of aIl components - at the cost of unbearable anxiety,
solitude, and guilt. Thus a central subjectivity, a grand, tascinating hollow
whose focal point - unlike the peacock's tail - is everywhere at once, like a
laser beam of deterritorialisation, taking control of~ hierachising, 'managing'4
aIl inter-assemblage relations, aIl residual territorialities, so as to extinguish
and recuperate aIl possibilities in their nascent state. The animal world, with
less difficulty, doubtless, avoided black hole effects and arranges them in a
non-rhizomatic, arborescent way. (From this point of view, Tinbergen's
hierarchy might be considered an anthropocentric projection.) Certainly,
starting from this kind of central machine of consciential subjectivation,
human semiotisation seems to have multiplied its powers of intervention
infinitely and to have created exception al possibilities for hum an survival,
through a sort of headlong flight outside the 'usual' evolutionary contexts.
But it can just as easily be reduced to totalitarian systems of aIl kind, which
(if nothing prevents them) tend to make the fate of industrial societies
more closely approximate that of ant societies - production for production's
sake, generalised gulags, etc.
We know that in general in the animal world, collective assemblages of
territorialisation bring into play marking 'techniques' that are very different
from one another markers of smeH, with excrement or special secretions,
distancing, through 'territorial song', intimidating sexual displays, etc.
Considered separately, these diverse intra-assemblage components seem
only to arise from innate codings, functioning in the same way as reflexes or
taxes. Anticipating an example to which we will return at length, it thus
seems that the function of the highly coloured plumage of zebra finches
studied by K. Immelman 5 can be reduced to the inhibition of relations of
proximity and to the ordering of the distribution of individuals in a given
space. (In the case of the white birds of the same species, one effectively sees
a coHapse of this critical distance and a strengthening of groups.) But let us
now examine a certain number of 'methods' for the deterritorialisation of
inter-assemblage relations that allow us to glimpse the 'play' that is possible,
the opening, the lines of flight, on which selective pressure will 'bd (without,
we repeat, any idea of progress being associated with this evolution, which
can just as easily lead to a totalitarian specialisation of roles, of the sexes, of
species ... ).
Let's return to an example of symbiosis made popular by Remy Chauvin,
one which has been established between certain species of wasp and
orchid. 6 We know that in simulating a sexual act with the olfactory and
morphologicallure constituted by the orchid's rostellum, pollen is freed up

201
and attaches to the wasp, which then transports it to other plants, thereby
ensuring the reproduction of this species. The set of systems of transcoding
that allows this back and forth between the plant and the animalldngdoms
seems completely closed to any individual experimentation, any learning,
any innovation. Selective pressure has retained encounters which were
perhaps originally only accidentaI and improvised, sequences that it has
succeeded in systematising, in controlling, on the basis of an abstract
machinism closed on itself, stratified in the genome of the species, which
ontogeny will only need to decipher and trace out mechanically. But one
would be wrong, to our mind, to reduce such inter-assemblage systems
to a simple 'commonality' of a certain quantity of information carried
by the genes of each species respectively. How, then, is one to apprehend
the passages between the innate and the acquired, the acquired and the
experimental, between biological encoding, ecological adaptation and
collective semiotisation? In fact, as we will try to demonstrate on the
basis of the following examples, even (and perhaps above aIl) when inter-
assemblage relations make such 'mechanised' encoding components
intervene, they give a bit of 'play' to the intra -assemblage relations, they
favour the appearance of new dimensions in the environment, the y
trigger pro cesses of specialisation, of the 'contraction' of certain systems
of coding or semiotisation, they create the conditions for an acceleration
of deterritorialising innovations. In short, they open up new possibilities.
Doubtless there is nothing to be gained by reducing the symbiosis between
the wasp and the orchid to a simple linldng together of two heterogeneous
worlds. This encounter is certainly productive of what we have called
elsewhere a 'surplus value of code: that is to say, a result that exceeds
the simple totalisation of the codings in questions (the sexual goal of the
orchid plus the feeding goal of the wasp). Ihe new symbiotic assemblage
functions as a mutant wasp-orchid species, evolving on its own count,
redistributing genetic and semiotic components taken from both original
species (morphological, physiological, ethological, ecological components,
semiotisation of visual, olfactory, sexuallures, etc.), according to its own
norms. A new evolutionary line of flight is thus created on the bio-ecological
rhizome, which, moreover, finds itself hidden, gridded, by the genetic codes
that limit the affection to species and phylogenetically circumscribed
species.
Onlya constructive one is tempted to say'constructivist' micropolitics
of assemblages of desire and social assemblages, which sets out to
discernabilise the deterritorialising components 'of passage' between
assemblages or the components that are 'predisposed' to such a transversality
function, in whatever domain that may be, of thwarting the too solid

202
oppositions between the innate and the acquired, the biochemical and the
'adaptive', the individu al and the social, the economic and the cultural, etc.
To be sure, a destratifying transversality of this kind between behavioural
assemblages is always found, to one degree or another, at every level of the
animal phylum, but it is evidently easier to locate it in the most 'evolved'
animaIs. Let us consider, for example, three types of social assemblage
amongst baboons and vervets, which principally put sexual components
and territorialisation components in the dominant position:

a An assemblage that particularly concerns the hierarchical relations

internaI to a group, fixing the place and the rights of dominant and
marginal males, fernales and the young: ethologists underline the
fact that the internaI disputes that the functioning of this
assemblage is likely to entail must be distinguished from external
territorial disputes. As Eibl-Eibesfeldt, from whom we take this
example, writes 7 'disputes of a hierarchical order are not linked to
territorial possession, rivaIs of different hierarchical ranks unite in
a common action against foreign aggressors:
b An assemblage for the collective defence of the territory: certain
male baboons act as sentries on the periphery of their group,
turning their backs on them, whilst quite conspicuously displaying
their highly coloured sexual organs (sometimes, when an intruder
approaches, their penises become erect and rhythmically
animated). But it has been observed that this collective assemblage
only functions in relation to neighbouring fighters of the same
species.
c An individuated flight assemblage: in the case in which predators
appear 'each baboon is free again and flees as discretely as
possible'.

The collective semiotisation of the defence of the territory is th us connected

to 'originally' intra-assemblage sexual components and to 'originally' inter-
assemblage faciality-corporeality components (the decisive role played
by the fact of looking into another's eyes as a trigger for aggression or
submission, amongst monkeys). Other 'formulae' for other animal species
demonstrate an inversion of this sex -aggression vector, in which simulated
aggression becomes a component in seduction rituals. Whatever the case
may be, one can already admit, against the good sense of those who only
tolerate strict classifications, that the penis isn't just related to a stratum of
the organism or a reproductive function, nor is the hostile grimace solely
related to a certain state of social tension and a communication function.

203
Both function as components of passage between particular assemblages -
the sexual organ, in reality the image of the sexual organ, only intervenes
at the level of individuated assemblages, as a sort of'survival discriminator:
The sexual organ and faciality ought not to be considered as part objects,
in the Kleinian sense or as objects a little in the Lacanian sense, but
as operators, as concrete machines for the collective and individual
semiotisation of a certain exterior. They have become bridges or tunnels of
deterritorialisation that articulate the assemblages of internaI hierarchy,
assemblages of collective defence (the external demarcation of a territory,
the limit or border beyond which collective semiotisation ceases, and there
is a black hole etfect) and diverse individuated assemblages like those of
flight.
1mprinting by the image of a congener (or accidentaI imprinting by an
intrusive faciality) during a sensitive period can only be dissociated from
and opposed to the diverse modes of learning that accompany it in the
context of experimental protocols that disorganise the entangling of
behavioural components. 8 A study that endeavoured Ilot to crush the
rhizome of socio-biological assemblages of animaIs would, in our opinion,
make it possible to talk about 'imprinting choices' that coexist with 'genetic
choices: 'learning choices' and 'experimental choices'. Happily, though,
ethologists have not fallen into the [trap] of most ethnologists, who divide
up their 'terrain' into dearly separated parts (kinship relations, analysis of
myths, politics, economics, etc.). And whatever the psychoanalytic
temptations of sorne of them in the domain of imprinting in particular,
which they often compare to the 'childhood fixations' of Freudian
psychogenesis, the idea of a signifying structuralism that would have to
account for aIl behaviour still hasn't made an appearance. (However, one can
easily imagine an 'interpretation' of so-called 'forced copulation' amongst
chimpanzees in terms of more or less repressed homosexual drives.) But in
this do main the facts have not yet been submerged by theories, and complex
behaviours such as submission rituals and courtship displays must be
inscribed on the rhizome of innateness, imprinting, learning and individual
initiatives. War and sex here still participate too heavily in a common
economy of desire to be able to be separated into antagonistic drives. 9
Is it really su ch a paradox to aim to inscribe components that arise from
do mains that are apparently as heterogeneous as those of:

(II the individual, with its biological rhythms, its refIexes, its
conditioning, its improvisation, its dysfunctioning;
(II the group, with its rituals, its collective movements, its ecological
regulations, its modes of initiation and learning;

204
 e the species, with its genetic mutations and adaptations, its
demarcation techniques, JO its symbolic options, etc.

on the same 'rhizome of choices'? Is affirming that a finality, an abstract

machinism, a 'thought: if you wish, presides over the evolution of each
branch of the animal phylum really such a paradox? Not a thought that is
assembled individually, of course, but an n-dimensional thought in which
everything thinks at the same time, individuals as well as groups, the
'chemical' as well as the 'chromosome: and the biosphere. Despite much
methodological reluctance their conflict in the living rhizome of animal
behaviour actually leads a certain number of primatologists to sorne 'painful
reappraisals'. To account for the facts observed, they have thus been led to
hypothesise the existence of 'altruistic behaviour' amongst primates, a
collective behaviour, which 'implies a sacrifice in which the individu al
"renounces" its own opportunities to benefit in favour of those of a parent'.ll
In other words, the molecular phylum of genes that moves across
individuals, species, and milieus, is substituted for molar causalities, which
imply individuals and clearly delimited functions.
Freedom is not just freedom of the mind but also the rhizomatic play
that can appear at the level of any of the components of an assemblage.
There is a 'grace' for the nervous system or the digestive system, the existence
of which is clearly perceived a contrario with tics and stomach aches! A
semiotisation that has the task of generic regulation or that is automated by
harmonious learning is evidently worth more th an a perpetuaI questioning
or a cascade of blockages that gnaws away at an intentional arc. 'Machinic
freedom' begins at the moment that things which are boring or without
interest can be accomplished as if 'by themselves' and where one can focus
one's capacities for life and for semiotisation on what moves, what creates,
what changes the world and humans, that is to say, on individual or
collective choices of desire, without falling into a generalised and blind
automatism. The opposition between a pure individuated signifying
subjectivity and a collective biologico-economic destiny that consciousness
class consciousness, for example would have to take charge of from the
outside, is not tenable: just like the opposition between freedom and
innateness, it plays the game of power formations, which use it in order to
select creative assemblages. Neither the absolute deterritorialisation of pure
consciousness of self, nor the automatism of an ant society, freedom consists
in playing and thwarting the quanta of deterritorialisation - refrains,
faciality, etc. borne by the ensemble of components of an assemblage,
whether they are material or desiring, individual or group, public or private.
And the fact that the obsessive cautiousness of researchers, who above aIl

205
else are concerned about falling into paradoxes that le ad them to confuse
'mind' and 'matter', only drags along with it old dogmatic conflicts, ought
not to mask the entirely actual political stakes of themes that they refuse to
caU into question and which we have previously evoked with regard to the
false dilemmas between centralism and spontaneity, superstructure and
infrastructure, public life and home life, conscious thought for the other
and private unconscious. Because no struggle for freedom can be conceived
today that does not engage the socius and the private realm at the same
time, the 'mental' and the body, the economic and unexchangeable desire,
the unconscious and deliberate programming ...

206
 1 1

For a certain number of species of birds (passerines, palmipeds, waders),

the presentation of a blade of grass (or of straw or moss) to the female
by the male during courtship rituals, as a tribute seems to play a specific role
in the linking of behavioural sequences. For example: the male zebra finch
first sings and dances so as to attract the attention of the female, he perches
on a branch and whilst balancing on it, brandishes a blade of grass in his
beak. Then he imitates the characteristic position of the young of this
species seeking food, tipping his head to one side, seeming to offer the blade
of grass but without letting go of it. 1 This use of the grass stem index,
whieh seems to entail no improvisation is especially interesting to us to the
extent that it could be related to the functioning of human faciality traits
such as those described by ethologists with regard to 'flirting behaviour' and
'welcoming behaviour'. It is a matter of rapid imitations, the encoding of
whieh is probably hereditary and the details of whieh can only be detected
by slow-motion filming. In particular they include imperceptible phases of
eyebrow raising and widening of the eyes, which last no more than two- to
three-tenths of a second. 2 The birds' grass stem ritual evidently doesnt put
the same components of expression into play as flirtation and welcoming
rituals amongst humans, and we should perhaps talk of silhouetting traits
instead of faciality traits. The difference matters, because unlike what has
happened with humans, there has not been any deterritorialisation of a face,
that is to say, a surface of inscription, in relation to the snout of the animal
in the case ofbirds, on whieh gestural, postural, sonorous traits of expression
as a whole would reverberate, be concentrated, articulated and hierarchised,
by way of the anatomie freeing up of the lips, the particular development
of facial muscles, correlative to that of the phonatory apparatus. The
'comparison must not be made here to the detriment of the analysis of the
specifie traits of each assemblage. It would be relatively easy to interpret the
bird's grass stem and the faciality traits of the human on the basis of the
same psychoanalytic algorithms: phallus, unary trait, bar of castration
(without mentioning part and transitional objects, which are now a bit out
of fashion!).
It is by 'examining' the differences, that is to say, by really doing analysis
(contrary to what psychoanalysts daim to do with their stereotypical
interpretations) that one will perhaps succeed in making the existence
of abstract machinisms that are not common since unlike 'complexes'
they cannot belong to anyone - appear, which participate in the same
deterritorialising processes, the same adaptive headlong flight, the same
kinds of semiotic solutions '" By starting from sorne phylogenetic
landmarks, we will therefore try to grasp the 'machinic sense'3 of the
functional evolution of this grass stem ritual. Ethologists explain to us that
it is a matter of an archaic 'residue' that is related to nesting behaviour. This
does not implythat it might be reduced to a simple function of representation,
stimulus, or reflex trigger. Rather than talking of signs here we would like to
talk of a concrete machine (a machinic index or diagrammatic operator)
that participates in machinic assemblages without necessarily referring
to the hierarchised systems of the reflex arc, to a signifying structure or
even to a manifest assemblage of enunciation. What has to be accounted
for here is thus not the application of a universal topics that would have
to 'localise' contingent singularities, but a 'machinics' which brings into
play components that are very different from one another (hereditary,
acquired, improvised ... ) and which has crystallised in a mode that is
irreducible to any general formula. Perhaps it will be objected that we are
displacing the problem of 'univers ais', by ourselves postulating a universal
deterritorialisation instead of an order of rational progress. But the
difference resides in the fact that this deterritorialisation doesn't have any
order 'in general' and doesn't participate in a progress that is inscribed in
the order of things. 4 1he semiotics of the grass stem results from the
'refining' of a deterritorialisation, a territorialised nesting behaviour.
We will see that this local deterritorialisation has as its 'consequence'
a change in the abstract formula that articulates the semiotisation of
territory and that of sexuality. But this mutation doesn't as sueh involve
any 'political' progress for the species or a liberation of individual desire.
Abstraction and dialectical determination always remain coupled with
semiotic unevenness, arehaisms, stratifications that result from interactions
between phylogeny and ontogeny, ecological and historical 'Accidents' that
specify them, without irreversibly attaching them to a context or to an
evolution that is fixed once and for aU.

208
 This is the case, in particular, with what we might calI the 'abstract
machine' moving-towards-more-sociability. For certain number of species,
the fact that it seems to involve the deterritorialisation of a series of
components - as the following examples will suggest for finches - doesn't
automatically imply that they are linked to an idea of'progress: Not that it
might be necessary to give up on estimating the progress of inter-assemblage
transformations, with aIl the risks that involves. But it doesn't entail any
univocal relation with one formula rather th an another. If it exists, it is at
the overall level of a rhizomatic process. It is political, not normative: in
other words, it doesn't arise from transcendental characteristics (example:
individual freedom, which is manifestly lac king amongst ants), but it must
be evaluated as a function of the rhizomatic expansion of assemblages, their
lin es of flight, their lines of creation, the elegance of their solutions - to talk
in the way mathematicians do and since we are not concerned to avoid
the accusation that we are irresponsible idealists, why not also add that it
must be evaluated as the function of a grace and a beauty to which it isn't
just human eyes that are sensible?
The semiotics of the grass stem amongst birds, like that of faciality
amongst humans, doesn't just have a function of representing, triggering or
inhibiting. With other less 'spectacular' components of the rhizome of
assemblages (investments that are hormonal - which we will come back to
with regard to the refrain - emotional, perceptual and also 'political' at the
level of the territory and the species), it works directly at the production of
a style of life, at the semiotisation of a world. To try to illustrate the non-
representational, a-signifying, diagrammatic character of this particular
kind of semiotic component, we will now review two series of examples: the
first taken from sorne very different species ofbirds, the second from among
the variants of a very old species of chaffinch. However superficial our
inventory may be, it should alIow us to set out sorne hypotheses concerning
the 'machinic sense' of this semiotics of the grass stem, which is to say that
the deterritorialisation of the nesting behaviour into a symbolic ritual seems
to be correlated with two other series of deterritorialisations, concerning:

• the mode of semiotisation of territory amongst the most 'evolved'

species, which tends to open up to a development of gregariousness
and an intensification of sociallife;
• the specifie refrain function, which also tends to become less
'territorial' and to place itself at the service of more intimist
assemblages, like those of courtship rituals, or even to give rise to
solitary improvisations for 'the pleasure of il'. On the one hand, then,
the opening up to the socius, and on the other, to the individual.

SEMIOTICS OF THE GRASS STEM 209

In the mating season, the male grebe - a species of palmiped living in small
groups, which nonetheless have a very strict conception of territorial defence
- c:onstructs a floating nest with the collaboration of a female. Throughout
this activity, the courtship ceremony is punctuated by face- to-face
intimidation, simulated grooming and the offering of bits of vegetation. The
fact that this last form of behaviour is not 'yet' ritualised could be brought
into relation with the relatively poorly developed sociability of this species. 5
One finds a giving ritual that is already much more complicated amongst
grey herons, a wader that lives in small colonies (although certain herons
can boast up to one hundred nests) and coexists with sparrows as welI
as falcons and kites, without any problem. A spot for a nest having been
chosen - already constructed or not once a female has started to take an
interest in the cries, the bobbing, the inclining of the neck, the ruffling of the
male's feathers, the latter stops his attempts at seduction so as to invite his
partner to effectively participate in making the nest. To do this he holds out
branches that she will place on the nest as it is being constructed: but any
kind of sudden gesture or clumsiness can calI everything into question and
bring them to blows. 6 One thus remains closer to reality than symbol here,
and the conjugal assemblage (let us note in passing, so as to illustrate our
previous remarks on this subject) has not yet been completely set on 'genetic
rails': conjunctural tactics, improvisations on the fly can be associated here
with innate codings and genetically conditioned learning.
These last two examples seem already to indicate to us certain
correlations between, on the one hand:

CP assemblages that open up the Umwelt of the male to the female

(courtship ritual);
assemblages that demarcate a territory for a couple and furnish a
protected space for their young;

And on the other hand:

the territorialisation of the machinic indices of the grass stem

offering; and
CP a certain 'disposition' towards gregariousness.

With the Troglodytidae, the wren family, which constitutes one of the least
sociable of the sparrows (although when it is very cold a dozen of them will
gather together to keep warm), the activity of demarcating a territory brings

210
into play what Paul Geroudet calls a 'music box refrain.', that is to say a highly
formulaic chant, aimed as a constant warning to possible intruders. After
having taken possession of his territory, the male builds up to a dozen nests.
When a fernale arrives in the vicinity, he lowers the intensity of his song,
which is then reduced to a mere trill. 'He goes to a high point in front of
one of his nests, sings and putts himself up, lets his outspread wings hang
and shakes his outstretched tail, then returns to his nest, and sings whilst
looking out from it, leaves and returns several times in a row. The invitation
is dear: if the female consents, she answers with a little cry, bobbing jerkily
several times, and finishes by inspecting the nest.'7 It was necessary to cite
Paul Geroudet's description here in its entirety to shows the richness of the
semiotic interactions of this courtship assemblage, which, it will have been
noticed, doesn't include a grass stem component. We haven't 'yet' arrived at
the mimicking of the building of a nest, but only at the presentation of a nest
that has already been built. The courtship and territorialisation assemblages
remain autonomous of one another. But what it seems we must retain from
this example is the role of the passage component of the refrain, and this for
two reasons. In effect, we see here that it participates in two successive
functions and in so doing perhaps 'announces' a supplementary degree of
deterritorialisation that leads to a more pronounced autonomisation of the
vocal semiotic and to its more individuated subjective internalisation.

series:
In a general fashion the chaffinch is considered to occupy a special place in
the finch family. They bring together species that are relatively the most
'territorial' in this family. Unlike other finches - canaries, bullfinches, etc. -
chaffinches only live in groups for a part of the year: during mating the
territorialisation component becomes autonomous and dominates the
sociability component. Curiously, it seems that the male chaffinch defends
his territory aU the more ferociously for abandoning himself to limitless
gregariousness outside of this assemblage of sexual territorialisation. The
Australian finches studied by K. lmmelman and M.F. Hall allow the
evolution of the grass stem ritual to be followed across vestigial behaviours
that are fixed amongst a whole range of species and constitute in sorne way
a series of 'living fossils':

• Males of the genus Bathilda and Aejintha cannot court females

without actually having a piece of straw in their beak. But by
contrast they only mimic the construction of the nest.

211
 ct Same scenario for the genus Neochmia, but the male uses a material
that is different to what he will use when building the nest. The
semiotisation of the grass stem has therefore become autonomous.
The male of the genus Aidemosyne only uses a grass stem in the
initial phases of the courtship.
ct With the genus Lonchura it is only prior to deciding to court that a
grass stem is sometimes carried.
ct The male of the germs Emblema only pecks at grass stems but
doesn't use them.
Courtship with grass stems only occasionally appears amongst the
genus Poephila, especially young males.

What particularly interests us about the evolution of Australian finches is

that parallel to a deterritorialisation that makes the grass stem more and
more symbolic, even ending up in its disappearance, one witnesses the
emergence of a new kind of refrain. Thus the phylogenetic articulation of
the visual semiotics of the grass stem with the sonorous semiotisation of
the courtship refrain is indicated. In this regard, Eibl-Eibesfeldt writes that
'[ c] arting nesting material for nest building evolved into the male courtship
actions using grass stems. This was again secondarily reduced in sorne
species and became rudimentary, while at the same time the song, which
originally served the function of staking out territories, also underwent a
change in function. These animaIs are gregarious and hardly territorial.
Instead of courting with grass stems, these males sing softly while sitting
next to the females: s
In the previous chapter we insisted on the fact that the 'matters of
expression' put to work by the assemblages did not simply play the role of
something that 'fills' semiotic forms or the 'channel' of transmission, in the
information theoretical sense. They participate actively, according to aH
sorts of modalities, in modelling, in catalyses, 'choices of rhythms',
stratifications, Hnes of flight ... They are 'inhabited' by abstract machines
that 'opt for' one connection rather than another. In short, when we talk
about the components of an assemblage, what is in play is not just forms
and quantities of information or différentiations, but also irreducible
material traits such as the 'viscosity' of a transmission channel, the rhythms,
inertia, the black holes that are proper to a biological, social, or machinic
stratum, etc. As soon as one tries to take the point of view of machinic
assemblages, of formative assemblages, the brute opposition form-
amorphous matter has to be abandoned to the profit of a deterritorialisation
that works forms as well as matter, deterritorialising forms and deforming

212
matters. Certainly one can always account for the quantity of movement
and the translation of forms on the basis of 'purifie d' spatio-temporal
coordinates. But taking into consideration the intensity, the mutations, of
regimes of deterritorialisation implies the intervention of other 'existential'
coordinates, which one might call the coordinates of substance. What
characterises cornponents of passage like faciality and refrains is that they
work within both norm and deterritorialisation: that is how the y allow for
the passage from one assemblage to another. They do not belong to space
and time 'in general: they efTectuate particular spaces and times. Let's go
back to our last ex amples concerning bird silhouetting traits and refrains:
because of the 'material' characteristics that are proper to them, one can see
that these cornponents, which nevertheless sornetirnes have the same sort
of function - in courtship rituals, for exarnple - do not entertain the same
ltind of relationship with the deterritorialisation that traverses thern both.
Silhouetting traits are, in sorne way, 'carried off' by a phylogenetic
deterritorialisation that bears on nesting behaviours and grass stem rituals,
and they subsequently tend to efface themselves to the profit of an indexical
semiotisation which is integrated into other semiotic components (dance,
posture, etc.). In sum, the effect of deterritorialisation is to dissolve them as
an autonomous assemblage, an assemblage that was, at the outset, rather
plastic, 'sticlting' to the territorialities of the species that it concerned, thus
putting into play highly heterogeneous (morphological, iconic, rnirnetic,
postural, etc.) components, highly varied 'tools' and procedures (grass
stems, twigs, mosses, fish, etc.).9 The situation is very difTerent with the
birdsong component. It is also 'originally' territorial but the more it is
deterritorialised, the more refined, specialised and autonomous it becomes.
It ends up playing a very particular role in pro cesses of evolutionary
selection, as it can be considered that amongst certain sparrows, for example,
the consequence of the existence of different 'dialects' has been an
'ethological isolation' of different populations and the division of certain
species. 1O Besides articulating intra-species refrains - centred on the
territory or on courtship, the 'catalytic' behavioural function of birdsong
can also return in a much less specifie system of warning cries. When birds
of prey hover over them, for example, finches will ernit cries that resembles
those of other species of bird, trait for trait, who will, if they are in the are a
will not fail to make use of the information.
The triggering of these relatively undifferentiated cries is highly
progressive and it seems 'conceived' in such a way as not to allow the bird of
prey to establish binaural comparisons helping it to locate the birds emitting
the cries. The latter's territorial song or courtship song, which are different
for each species, because of the sharp variations of frequency that they put

213
into play, are by contrast, easy to localise. The singing of the finches can thus
play in two registers: one of alarm and territorial scrambling or of
specification and localisation. But it also aUows for combinations that make
of it a sort of a-signifying language. But the song components can also enter
much more elaborate rhizomatic combinations, which tend to function as a
sort of signifying behaviourallanguage. We have seen that in passing from
territorial to courting behaviour, the wren could inflect its refrain -. a
lowering of intensity, reduction to a trill this change of direction
constituting a signaUing and triggering system at the heart of the same
component. We have also seen - in the phylogenetic order, this time - the
refrain being substituted for the grass stem system amongst Australian
finches. It thus seems that the most deterritorialised component - here that
of the song tends to impose itself at the heart of the rhizome of assemblages.
Tinbergen's description of the courtship behaviour of the albatross, the
highly complex scenario of which is as if 'crowned' by a song component,
seems to confirm this. II Or equally that of Lorenz, for grey geese, where one
also finds this same sort of'victory cry' at the conclusion of their courtship
ritual, marking the neutralisation of aggressive assemblages and the
establishment of a 'defence community' at the level of the couple. 12
The ritualisation of a behavioural assemblage is not synonymous
with automation. A semiotisation can become machinic without for aU that
being mechanical. And aU sorts of approximations, variants, lines of flight,
black holes, always remain possible. We have evoked the [examens rates] of
the wrens and the domestic scenes of storks but gratuitous acts such as the
imitation of the song of the buzzard by the blue tit 13 or the incredible
chattering of the excited starling caricaturing - in the absence of a real
talent for mimicry - the blackbird, the oriole, and even farmyard animaIs. 14
Without mentioning the weU-known exhibitionism of the nightingale,
which leads to it taking the risk of exposing itself 5 or 6 metres from the
ground so as to be sure its extraordinary vocal performance has the
maximum impact. 15
But nor is this ritualisation synonymous with a release of or a break with
more 'determinist' components, even in the case in which super-
deterritorialised components like that of birdsong are brought to the fore
(and for humans, that of speech and religious rituals). Let us borrow a few
more examples from ethology to illustrate this dependency, or rather this
system of rhizomatic interrelations between components. Let's come back
to our first example, the zebra finch, who, it will be recaUed, combined a
'grass stem' component and a 'return to childhood' component in its
courtship ritual. To assemble its territory, it also uses two other semiotic
components, to keep other males at a distance: one that is visual - highly

214
coloured plumage,16 and one that is sonorous - a stereotyped refrain. Young
zebra finches acquire this refrain by learning with their congeners. But if
one amongst them is raised in a family of white-rumped munia (known in
aviculture as the striated finch), it willlearn the song of its foster fatherY
Let us note that this learning is carried out during what is called a 'sensitive'
period, long before the young bird is in a position to sing effectively. One
must therefore distinguish between a purely auditory phase of semiotisation
(through imprinting) and a phase of active phonie semiotisation.
Additionally, 'behind' these two components biological components of an
entirely different kind appear, as is shown by the fact that a female zebra
finch, who doesn't 'normally' have a territorial song, acquires one when
given male sexual hormones. Obviously, she only reproduces the song of
the species with which she has been imprinted during the thirty-five day
'sensitive period' of her lite. 18
That a component lilœ the refrain is more deterritorialised th an the
others doesn't in the least imply that it has taken its distance from more
'determinist' components like those of learning, imprinting, or endocrine
transformations. And perhaps one is justified in expecting that the more a
component is deterritorialised, the more closely it 'meshes' with more
molecular components of behaviour and life itself. There is no doubt, for
example, that for man, linguistic semiotics, in parallel with their magic
conjuration function and of social subjection, have assembled a
'omnipotence' over his behaviour, his environment and numerous living
species, of a new kind for him. And the supplementary degrees of
deterritorialisation that the successive phases of deterritorialisation that the
taking off of a 'mecanosphere' from the biological, linguistic and social
order represent have taken on such an importance that without them, the
survival of man would be inconceivable. (On a biological plane in particular,
industrial man only 'maintains himself' by his capacity to discernabilise,
semiotise, to artificially diagrammatise the pathological agents that threaten
him.) But how are things at the relatively elementary level we placed
ourselves at, with a semiotic component like that of refrains amongst birds?
We cannot insist enough on the fact that even in such a do main the relations
that are established between biological and semiotic components do not
function in one direction only. One can better understand the complexity
of this kind of relation by examining a graph such as that proposed by
R. Hinde 19 to describe the interactions between different factors that
intervene in the reproductive cycle of the canary, which put into play:

physical components such as the length of the day and the degree
oflight;

215
 El biological and morphological component, production of
hormones, growth of the gonads, development of the brood
patch and oviduct;
El perceptual components, iconic stimuli emitted by the image of the
male and his changes of posture;
El behavioural assemblages that are individuated such as egg laying,
and social, such as courtship, nesting, etc.

In four points, the author thus makes explicit the 'principles' that regulate
incontestably rhizomatic relations:

1 The causes and consequences of sexual behaviour are strictly

linked to those of nest construction and one cannot consider them
separately.
2 External stimuli (the male, the nest) create endocrine modifications
the effects of which are added to these factors.
3 Hormone production is governed by diverse checks.
4 Hormones have multiple effects.

The distinctions that we have been led to establish within behavioural

rhizomes, between assemblages of semiotisation and semiotic or coding
components, are entirely relative and do not imply any priority of one
over another, no a priori hierarchy. Certain assemblages can be stratifie d,
automated and ranked as components in another assemblage, whilst certain
components can st art to 'bud' and to pro duce new assemblages. In addition,
certain hyper-stratifications can entail zones of semiotic collapse, black
holes which, in turn, will generate super-deterritorialised lines of flight
(example: the explosion of'Eternal Russia'between 1905 and 1917).
The connections between assemblages and the components of a rhizome
thus do not necessarily respect the existence of layers that would be staged
in a pre-established order - the order of deterritorialisations between
the 'physical: 'chemical: 'biological' and 'semiotic' ... There are certain
'transversals' that thus connect the 'more social' to the 'more biological' or to
the 'more ecological' in the animal order. But isn't this rhizomatic
organisation 'double d' by a less visible hierarchy which, this time, no longer
concerns the assemblages and components, but the very texture of these
latter, what (following glossematicians) we have called the traits of matters

216 OF
of expression and of coding? In this regard, one might consider that social
faciality, which we have classified amongst Collective micro-equipment and
to which it pertains to manifest the demarcations of power between the
'acceptable' and the 'licit' and which is charged with globally memorising
the 'graphs' of binary choice borne by the dominant significations,20 in fact
rests on the innate faciality traits that ethologists are currently studying.21 In
another order of ideas, one might consider that the two kinds of memory
that have been brought to light by psycho-physiologists - short-term
memory, which capitalises information for a period of a few tenths of a
second, and long-term memory - are entirely tributary to sensory memory,
which retains information for two-tenths to three-tenths of a second. But to
what extent do es this molecular memory not also depend on the more
molar memories, which seem to rely on them? The scientistic refusaI to
admit that the most deterritorialised of existents, such as faciality, refrains,
ideational pro cesses, abstract machines, are also just as real, just as closely
'meshed' with reality as the visibly material processes results in an a priori
privileging of systems of linear causality and dualisms that go from the
chemical towards life, from matter towards min d, etc. If they have any reality
at aH, one certainly cannot doubt that faciality and refrain components
have something to do with the brain. One could even 'localise' them in an
approximate way, along with other, globaHy visual and tactile memory
components, in the left anterior part of the temporal lobe, in 'opposition' to
the discursive memory components that intervene in language, 'localised' in
the right-hand side of this same lobe. 22 But, on the other hand, the inverse
hypothesis, that faciality components, musical components can also
intervene in the body, modify the brain, transform metabolisms would
appear rather unscientific. And yet it is probably in this direction that
ethological research willlead when it has finished with its infantile disorders
(taxinomism, reflexologism, behaviourism, vitalism, etc.). We always come
back to this same question: what makes assemblages and their heterogeneous
components hold together? A transcendent hierarchy of spatio-temporal
forms, a propping of physico-chemical effects, or the contingent montage
of certain components which 'take on' specialised transcoding and
deterritorialising functions (which we have been calling 'components of
passage' or 'diagrammatic components')?
In the background to the problem of the refrain, another problem, that
of the synchronisation of biological rhythms is posed, which before
resulting in a new science - chronobiology has given rise to innumerable
metaphysical developments. One of the founders of graphology, for
example, Ludwig Klages, had been led to oppose a vital rhythm to more
cultural cadences. He considered that the human alone was able to assemble

GRASS 217
elementary rhythms in free spatial and temporal cadences. 'Life: he wrote, ois
expressed in rhythm: Mind, by contrast, forces the rhythmic impulse of lite
to bend to its law, by means of metric cadence:23 But rather seeking to
'attach' trans- rhythmicity to mind and to culture, chronobiology endeavours,
on the contrary, to derive it from a rhythmic composition with a molecular
base. Thus it currently considers that circadian rhythms 24 result from a
generalised coupling of what A. Reinberg calls a population of molecular
oscillators, with an inhibiting effect. 25 It is interesting to find here the same
method of research into 'molecular packs' as we have signalled with regards
to memory.
This 'logic of packs' certainly ought to help us escape from formaI
categories such as Life, Mind, Matter, but will it for all that allow us to
progress with a problem such as that posed by Klages with regard to the
articulation between vital rhythms and more complex 'cadences'? The fact
that heterogeneous systems are 'traversed' by the same kind of molecular
element infra -biological molecular rhythms, for example - indicates to us
that between them there exist systems of articulation 'from the inside: as it
were, but it doesn't succeed in enlightening us on what makes qualitative
differences crystallise at a molar level, or on what characterises the
functioning of what we have called components of passage. To illustrate this
kind of difficulty, one last example from the ethology of birds. In the course
of his study of the ch affin ch refrain, W.H. Thorpe has been led to distinguish
two types of rhythmic and melodic level in its internaI organisation: one
which concerns a certain 'finish' in its structure, which allows the song to be
differentiated into three strophes, and to be articulated according to a given
order (true song).26 But as we will see, this distinction is far from intersecting
with that of Klages, between elementary vital rhythms and socialised
cadences! In effect, the basic material here is already highly elaborated on
the 'musical' plane and it is, in addition, impossible to clearly distinguish
between what would arise from hereditary programming and what
would arise from social programming. Raised in isolation, young finches
spontaneously discover the number and length of the basic syllables, but
they also have available to them a sort of 'recipe' for learning or, more
precisely, as Thorpe emphasises, selecting the melodies that they have to
imitate. (If one gives them several different song recordings during their
sensitive period, they will retain 'those which, by the quality of tone and the
form of the strophes, resemble the typical song of their species'.) Let us also
signal that one part is also left for improvisation and competition, since, as
WH. Thorpe remarks, the details of the final phrase, with their fioritura, are
apparently not learned, but 'worked' with other members of the group
('worked out by competitive singing'). The diagrammatism of codings is

218
manifested here by this constant entangling of heredity, learning,
experimentation, and improvisation. And by means of this example, one
may notice that what 'passes' from one domain to the other, are not just the
basic materials or universal schema, but highly differentiated forms, sorts of
singular keys for opening and closing a territory or a species, whïch we have
proposed calling abstract machines.
It shows us that the stage of an analytic, quantitative and statistical study
of basic elements of rhythm or faciality, for example - ought necessarily
to be followed by a more qualitative stage, of the specification of assemblages
and, correlatively, of the definition of machinic 'procedures' resulting in
changes of farm and mutations of structure. Having brought to light the
back and for th of packs of molecules and signs that link together a set of
chemical, biological, ecological, technical, economic components on the
same machinic phylum, it remains for molecular analysis to determine the
paths by me ans of which a living and social thing selects, assembles, and
normatises the circuits and rhythms of these packs. But if it is true that
the essence of the living being 'sticks' at one and the same time to 'matter'
and to the 'semiotic', it will th en necessarily be from the first moment -
of the homogenisation of intensive molecular fields - that the question
of the 'reconstitution' of spatio-temporal localisations, totalisations and
stratifications will be posed. If the 'molecular machine' does not wish to
crush and reduce aIl the material and semiotic rough edges in an
undifferentiated continuum (the Cartesian res extensa 27 ) parallei to the
rhizomatic connections of flows and the generalised intersection of
assemblages, it will have in effect to bring to light the kind of interaction
that ensures that 'there will be' assemblage. We rediscover here a problem
that is similar to the one that we evoked in the second part of this book,
wh en we were led to relativise the distinction between 'generations' and
'transformations' in the semiotic domain, because in the last analysis it is
indeed a question of the same micropolitical 'optional matter' it is a question
of. One might even consider that the semiotic relation transformation/
generation is only a particular case of the molecular/molar relation that is
established at the level of the ensemble of what we have called 'machinic
propositions'. Interactions between the molar and the molecular are
constant but they result from assemblages that in certain cases majorise the
'power' of visible passage components to the molar state and, in other cases,
'invisible' molecular pro cesses.
Whatever the structuralist efforts to overcome the ancient separation
between the psychic and the somatic might be (from Goldstein's 'structure
of the organism', Merleau -Ponty's 'structure of behaviour' to Lacan's
'symbolic structure' ... ), and to articulate what von Weizsaecker called the

219
'ontic' and the 'pathic' in life, might be, they have been given 'weight' by the
epistemological models of classical physics. 28 They have considered that
maintaining and even accentuating an opposition between, on the one
hand the laws of matter and on the other, those of life, the mind and the
socius, goes without saying. As material assemblages, assemblages of
biological encoding, assemblages of enunciation, propositional assemblages,
etc., constitute phenomenally distinct worlds, they have refused to venture
into what for them would only have been a return to an outdated
metaphysics, that is to say, the exploration of the 'machinics' that crosses
through aIl these 'regions' of experience. Every system of enclosure, of the
looping back onto themselves of physico-chemicallaws and causalities in
parallel prohibits any genuine opening up of the organism, the socius or the
signifier onto reality. To our mind that is where the fundamental impotence
of structuralist theories and their political responsibility resides: they accept
much too easily the stratifications that they come up against in the order of
components of material, biological, and social encodings. There is no
escaping the primacy of a subjectivisation and an assemblage of enunciation
that is based on a transcendental cogito with them.
But once the principle of an exception al existential status has been
accorded to this kind of subjectivity, it is subsequently not surprising that no
inter-component diagrammatic connection can be established without
being haunted by it in one way or another. The Subject, Form, Structure,
the Signifier relay each other in contemporary thought, so as to resist an
inanimate matter which has, in any case, become imaginary in relation to
effective scientific research. By means of the celebrated formula 'a signifier
represents the subject for another signifier: the hegemony of the Lacanian
signifier tends to make subjectivity proliferate universally. But not no matter
what subjectivity, only that of individuated enunciation, of signifying
centring, of power over the self - the myth of mastery by symbolic castration,
the subjectivity, in fact, which serves as a relay for capitalist power formations
and their tentacular network of collective equipments. Now, the subject,
we repeat, is evidently not something that exists solely where there are
autonomous individuals, conscious language, a responsible discursivity ...
Precisely, it will be objected, psychoanalysis has clearly seen that the subject
did not coincide with consciousness or with the exercise of responsible
discursivity. But to make unconscious subjectivity, which it is additionally
claimed is being liberated, essentially depend on speech and the field of
language, really do es mutilate it. 29 There is subjectivity in the group -
whether territorialised or not, there is subjectivity in the economy, at the
stock exchange, for example, in politics, in factories. There are also
subjectivation functions that are deployed in living matter and in machines,

220
with or without human hands, with or without a cogito. And of course, it is
not a matter each time of the same subject, who would miraculously make
messages, decisions and laws pass from one component to another. A little
subject in my head, like a minuscule manager on the top floor of a building!
Processes of subjectivation correspond to complex assemblages, knots of
deterritorialisation that associate heterogeneous components - and thus
never a pure and univers al signifying substance opposed to a no less pure
and univers al matter of content. The seriaI production and massive exporting
of the white, conscious, adult, male subject, master of himself and of the
universe, has always had as its correlate the chasing away of intensive
multiplicities which essentially escape any centring, any arborescence. But
once one has decided to abandon the model of the cogito or its derivatives
as the implicit reference of assemblages of semiotisation, it becomes possible
to dis cern the real play of the machinic indices, lines of deterritorialisation,
abstract machine, the infinite diversity of modes of subjectivation, reflexivity,
and discursivity.30 It ceases to be surprising that molecular packs and
populations 'daim' to machine a creative order at their own level.
We must constantly guard against our conceptual instruments starting
to function as simple blades that binarise objects and 'arborise' problems.
Let us insist once again on the fact that the 'molar' must not be opposed here
to the 'molecular' as the bigger and more passive would be opposed to the
smaller and more active. There is a passive molar faciality - that of the
imago and psychoanalytic identification - and an active molar faciality -
that of schizo-analytic faciality traits. There is a 'mechanical' molecular
faciality that of ethology - and a molecular faciality that transmutes the
coordinates of perception and desire - as described by Proust, for example,
with the ten faces of Albertine, which get successively doser to the narrator,
at the moment of their first kiss. But one can also pass from one component
to another so as to safeguard an assemblage - further on we will examine
the to and fro of Swann from a refrain to a faciality, for example. Besides,
there are direct interactions, on 'this side' of closed assemblages and
substantialised components, at the level of matters of expression. Thus
whilst one can have the impression of remaining 'in place: of being
established with a signification, a solid system of redundancies, one can be
torn between warring components.
This is what is shown by the results of English researchers into the
interferences between auditory and faciality components in spoken
language, which they have brought to light by modifying a message read on
someone's lips in relation to what is given to be heard. 31 ln effect, encoding
components and semiotic components do not properly belong to one of
these levels of analysis. Under certain conditions, as a function of certain

221
machinic formulae (abstract machines), certain amongst them can play an
essential role in assemblages. Passage components, arising from refrains or
facialities, can, for example, trigger new passional assemblages, make new
components proliferate, block others, make black holes resonate and
focalise their effects ... The same components, under other circumstances,
will fall bacl( to the rank of intra-assemblage, subjugated, stratified
components. In the same way as natural, territorialised assemblages or
artificial technical assemblages, assemblages of semiotisation, assemblages
of subjectivation, assemblages of conscientialisation, assemblages of
'alterisation' and so on, result from machinic montages that are localised
over the ensemble of phyla of (senüotic and material) deterritorialisation,
and territorialised on the rhizome of stratifications on the plane of
consistency of abstract machines having to make this diachrony of
stratifications and this synchrony of deterritorialisations 'hold together:
Thus one cannot pose the problem of the subject, or the Other, or
consciousness, in general. This kind of assemblage will produce a black hole
effect, the effect of a territorialised collective or individu al subject, of
subjection, etc. The cogito as empty consciential subjectivation corresponds
to a black hole assemblage, a correlative semiotic laying bare of the growth
of capitalist flows, whilst the subject of the Freudo-Lacanian unconscious
marks a supplementary degree of semiotic deterritorialisation monemes
progressively giving way to phonemes, graphemes and 'mathemes'. But
other politics, other societies, other montages will assemble other
subjectivations, other more social or more molecular semiotisations, or
both at once, more ethological or more revolutionary, etc.
As has been seen, a flux of hormones can 'trigger' an unexpected
competence in the matter of refrains, a flux of D NA can transform
a memorisation pro cess, or enlarge circadian rhythms. Intersections,
marriages, that are apparently the most unexpected, the most 'against
nature: always seem possible, but on condition that they are compatible
with a set of machinic propositions, the montage of which, without being
properly speaking univers al, as it is 'dated' (because it marks irreversible
choices on the phylum of deterritorialisations), nonetheless imposes on
them a sort of 'reality threshold'.32 One corollary of the contingency of
abstract machines is that no type of molecular population, no universal
rhythm, no energy equation, can account once and for aIl for the infinite
variety of what one might caU 'assemblage convertors'. Certain amongst
them will seem of an elementary simplicity like the 'magnetic effects' of
rhythms that E. von Hoist describes, the effect of which is to impose one
rhythm on others,33 others of a great complexity like the human brain,
which not only selects schemas and rhythms so as to 'paradigmatise' them

222
on deterritorialised mental representations and on systems for inducing
'passages to the ad but additionally make them susceptible of ente ring into
a combinatory of unlimited richness. Is this to say that the scale of
complexity of these convertors is parallel to that of phylogenetic evolution?
Not at aIl. In fact we know that at apparently the least difIerentiated, the
least 'evolved' level, extremely sophisticated systems of interactions of
heterogeneous 34 components can exist, whereas inversely, at the most
difIerentiated, the most 'evolved' level, mechanisms of a wretched poverty
can appear - fascist gregariousness, for example. The elementary, the binary,
feedback, black hole-abolition are not the property of one evolutionary
stage. The elaboration of complex codings can borrow many other paths
than those of individuated, conscious enunciation. Why not admit that a
genetic knowledge exists? Why not admit that a machinic consciousness
exists - for example in the case of the enslavement of the driver to his
machine? Grass stems, refrains, faces for birds and for our passions but for
our intelligence too - are instruments of knowledge, pragmatic operators,
in the same way that spoken or written words, figures, graphs, plans,
equations or informatic memories can be in a factory. Once one wants to
grasp them outside of the dominant redundancies, the signification of the
world, the sense of des ire, demand that one broaden the range of the
semiotics we resort to. A thousand machinic propositions constantly work
over every individual, over and underneath his speaking head. 35 If we place
the accent on faciality and the refrain in the components of the passage of
human des ire it is because one of their principal specificities is in sorne way
to take other components 'against the grain' by short-circuiting their
rhizomatic connections, by recentring them on black hole effects, by making
the latter echo one another.
In as much as a certain abstract perception of time and space and, as a
consequence, of work and the socius, rest on the establishing of these two
components, essential components of capitalist subjectivation depend on
the prior emptying of intensities of desire (the values of desire) of their
substances and the prior reduction and gridding of rough edges of the
world as a function of dominant redundancies and norms (the use-value-
exchange value couple). We have tried to show elsewhere how, in order to
explore the desiring coordinates of a new type of bureaucratic capitalism,
an author like Kafka was led to becomings-animal, musical, perceptual
deterritorialisations, etc. On the basis of the numerous pages of prodigious
analytic work that Proust's oeuvre constitutes, we now propose to examine
the impact of certain capitalist mutations at the start of the twentieth
century on an amorous passion, that of Charles Swann for Odette de Crécy.

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 1
1 1 1

Developing principally from the extension of animal ethology, hum an

ethology has so far devoted itself above all to the study of the most visible,
the most territorialised components of human behaviour. 1 But an inversion
of this relationship of dependency is not inconceivable and every hope is
permitted when an ethologist such as W.H. Thorpe happens to dedare that
characteristics of human behaviour as fundamental as articulated language,
the handling of number concepts, the use of symbols, of artistic appreciation
and creation are not in the slightest absent from the animal world. 2 nIe
prodigious expansion of biology in recent de cades has mainly concerned
its chemical and cellular foundations, but we are perhaps on the eve of a
turnaround in the situation, which would lead to it bringing the study of
behaviour and of the most complex modes of sociability to the fore, as its
current joining up with ethology, socio-ecology, socio-biology, etc. testify.
Such a reorientation would in fact put it in the position of being a 'pilot
science' in relation to the human sciences as a whole, thus expropriating
linguistics of this role, which structuralists claimed for it. Mechanistic
approaches to hum an behaviour based, for example, on stimulus-response
couplings, or rash psychogenetic explanations, ought to give way to in
vivo studies, monographie descriptions that really do set out to enrich the
information that we have rather than reducing it through simplification.
And it must be acknowledged that considerable catching up in the
observation, inventorying and classification of basic data ofhuman ethology
(in the domain of the most deterritorialised components of behaviour in
particular) is needed. It is a long way from having at its disposaI the stock
of knowledge that the great naturalists bequeathed to modern biological
sciences at the end of the Middle Ages. With what the psychology and
psychoanalysis has represented of 'universals' one almost has to start from
the beginning aIl over again with the question of feeling and thinking.
Therefore it is without much in the way of epistemological qualms that
we will for our part address Proust - a specialist, if ever there was one, of
the most deterritorialised mental objects - so as to begin to reflect on the
articulation and the overlapping of faciality and refrain components in
the matter of human passions. Before becoming an aff::ür of words and
ideas, the writings of novelists and poets is perhaps first concerned with the
singular position of the assemblage of enunciation to which they belong,
because of the exceptionally marked deterritorialisation of one or several of
its historie al, economic, sexual, or sensual components. We are brought
back implacably to the poverty of the real means for analysis put at our
disposaI by the hum an sciences in their current state.
Just one example to illustrate the accumulated delay in the collection of
essentiai facts: it will soon be fifty years since von Weizsaecker recommended
the systematic study of 'perceptual overlap: sensoriai hyperaesthesia,
synaesthesia, synopsia, etc. But to our knowledge, aside from sorne
neurological and physico-pathological research on intoxication by
hallucinogens - which are, moreover, extremely dry it is best today to rely
on the 'research' of Henri Michaux or of the American Beat Generation
writers to have at one's disposaI even a minimum of information on these
questions, which it is nonetheless essentiai to explore in order to broaden
our horizon with regard to the diversity of modes of subjectivation and
semiotisation. As an indication, but very briefly, schematically and relying on
Sherrington's old classification, for lack of anything better, one couid 'situate'
two authors like Kaflza and Proust in relation to the particular position of
certain of their 'mutant' perceptuai components. A whole labour of distortion,
enlargement, displacement, overlap, etc., of sensory coordinates, seems in
effect to bear more specifically on:

proprioceptive components in Kaflza, such as posture, balance,

muscle tone, blood pressure, etc., entailing the expansion and
contraction of space and time (taking into account his highly
singular way of'drugging' himself through fatigue and anorexia);
• exterioceptive (taste, heat, pain, light, digestion, taste and
sound receptors) and secondarily interioceptive (respiratory,
in particuIar), components in Proust. 3

Swann did not 'construct' his love for Odette de Crécy on the basis of intra-
psychic entities that arise from generai psychology or psychoanalysis. It is

226
his entire existence, in its most spiritual, but also its most social, and even
most material of aspects that he 'bet', in one of those escalations that
gamblers in a casino call a 'rising: 4 and which will make him cry, at the
height of distress, Tm getting neurotic' (1,345).
Two non-linguistic components (which are a-signifying in various
ways) will play a role in the foreground of this passional assemblage: a short
sequence of music of the time 'Vinteuil's little phrase' - and the portrait of
a woman reproduced from a Botticelli fresco. Due to a deterritorialising
matter of expression, the first will function as a component of passage
opening up new connections, transforming the coordinates of Swann's
everyday world. The second will tend, inversely, to push the passional
assemblage back, to reterritorialise it onto icons and affective territories
that are closed in on themselves. An aesthete's love, might one object? A
mechanism of sublimation? We will try to show, on the contrary, that by
reassembling itself on the face of a woman, before being 'humanised: this
love of Swann's really did arise at the outset from a non-human sexuality.
Its object was neither a parental complex, nor a pre-genital part object, but
a machinic musical formula that was revolutionary for its time. Music here
is not a sublimatory'last resort: a derivative symbolic pathway for the libido,
or the mannerism of an aesthete, but the instrument of production of a
different reality, a machine catalysing new semiotic components and giving
their deterritorialising capacities their greatest potential, trigger at the same
time nervous tensions for the ego, neurotic rituals that will themselves play
into the hands of certain sociological 'inertias'.
Without explicitly developing a the ory of incorporeals or abstract
machines, Proust insists incessantly on the fact that the 'musical effect' and
that of works of art more generally arises not from the imaginary but from
reality: 'this music seemed to me something truer than all known books. At
moments l thought that this was due to the fact that, what we feel about life
not being felt in the form of ide as, its literary, that is to say intellectual
expression describes it, explains it, analyses it, but does not recompose
it as does music, in which the sounds seem to follow the very movement of
our being, to reproduce that extreme inner point of our sensations which
is the part that gives us that peculiar exhilaration which we experience
from time to time and which, when we say, "What a fine day! What
glorious sunshine!" we do not in the least communicate to others, in
whom the same sun and the same weather evoke quite different vibrations'
(III, 381). The whole of the 'search' will collide with this unclassifiable type
of reality. Sometimes, Proust will assimilate it to a material entity, and he
will compare the oeuvre of a musician such as Vinteuil with the work of a
Lavoisier or an Ampère (1,382). At other times he leans towards a realism

227
of ideas: '... Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another
world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadow, unknown, impenetrable to
the human mind, but none the less perfectly distinct from one another,
unequal among themselves in value and significance' (I, 379-80). But at
certain moments he will be tempted to analyse the matter of expression of
'Vinteuil's little phrase' in terms that will evoke what twenty years later will
be the distinctive oppositions of the phonologists of the Prague Circle:
'he had observed that it was to the closeness of the intervals between the
five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition of two of them
that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness: But, as
if he were aware of the 'reductionist' abuses to which the structuralist
interpretations to come will give rise, he pulls himself together straightaway
and adds that 'in reality he kllew that he was basing this conclusion not
upon the phrase itself, but merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for
his mind's convenience) for the mysterious entity of which he had become
aware' (1, 380).
Without really relying on one theory instead of another, Proust circles
around the same difficulty: he cannot accept the evanescent character, the
vague waves of sensations that assail him. The inaugural event of his oeuvre,
it will be recalled, was this carriage ride in Combray, during the course of
which he succeeded in going aIl the way to 'the core of my impression
for the first time (it was a matter of making this 'something analogous to a
pretty phrase' that the relative shifts of the bells at Martinville and Vieuxvicq
harboured pass into language) (1, 197). He can affirm at least one thing of
this reality in the nascent state, which is that it do es not arise uniquely from
a discursive analysis such as human language supports. On the contrary,
it is even to this reality that one must address oneself in order to enrich
language, to make it fertile and engender a new discursivity that is directly
plugged into what we will, for our part, caU the economy of desire. Far from
allowing fantasy to reign, as one might have believed, the suppression of
human words, he writes, still with regard to 'Vinteuil's little phrase' had
eliminated it: '[N]ever was spoken language so inexorably de termine d,
never had it known questions so pertinent, such irrefutable replies' (I, 382).
And years after the writing of Swanns Love, Proust will return, in The
Prisoner, to this question, which it seemed to him had never stopped
pursuing him: 'For those phrases, historians of music could no doubt find
affinities and pedigrees in the works of other great composers, but only for
secondary reasons, external resemblances, analogies ingeniously discovered
by reasoning rather th an felt as the result of a direct impression. The
impression conveyed by Vinteuil's phrases was different from any other, as
though, in spite of the conclusions to which science seems to point, the

228
individual did exist' (III, 257). A science of the individual, this is what
Proust's thinking stumbles on, influenced as he probably was by the
scientistic thinking of matter, which in any case was more dominant in
philos op hic al and literary milieus than in the scientific milieus in question.
Whatever the case may be, his religion is fixed, at least on one point: one
cannot consider human subjectivity as something that is undifferentiated
and empty, which would get filled up and animated from the outside. 5
His entire analysis leads him to the grasping of trans-subjective and trans-
objective abstract machinisms, which he gives us a rigorous and, it goes
without saying, supremely elegant description of. 'Even when he was not
thinking of the little phrase, it existed latent in his mind on the same footing
as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of
light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions
wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned' (1, 380-1), sometimes
leading us to the borders of what we have been calling collective assemblages
of enunciation, as he sometimes has this same little phrase speak in ste ad in
the third person.
And is it not equally a collective assemblage of enunciation that is
constituted before our eyes when 'Vinteuil's little phrase' starts to speak in
the third person, imposing its refrain on the angles of the subjective triangle
on the basis of which In Search then deploys the intensive multiplicities
of the loves of Swann, the narrator, and Proust himself, pen in hand, and
beyond that, of the process of the open work on our own desire? (1,379-80)
Nothing predisposed Swann to fall madly in love with a girl like
Odette. A regular in princely salons, it was a principle of his to balance
out his liaisons with high society by courting servant girls with 'healthy,
abundant, rosy flesh' (1,209) so as to guard against attachments that were
too exclusive. That at the time of their encounter Odette may have been a
demi-mondaine something he was not aware of or rather unconsciously
refused to know - thus did not constitute an obstacle a priori to him having
an 'adventure' with her: what distanced him from her was her kind of
physical beauty, which, literally, didn't 'get to' him: 'her profile was too sharp,
her skin too delicate, her cheek-bones were too prominent, her features too
tightly drawn, to be attractive to him. Her eyes were beautiful, but so large
they seemed to droop beneath their own weight, strained the rest of her face
and always made her appear unwell or in a bad mood' (1, 213). As Odette
will admit to the narrator much later on, it was she who was passionately in
love with him first. And every pretext to visit him or attract him to her
would be okay for her. And that for a long time without any result! Her first
success with Swann would be to get him to accept an invitation to visit
Mme Verdurin, her protector and only true support in the 'world'. Salons at

229
that time seemed to function a bit like 'initiation camps' for the diverse
tribes that constituted the ruling classes, and Swann visited Mme Verdurin's
salon a little like an ethnologist might have visited an unknown clan,
because the people who frequented it were very much below his level. But it
would nevertheless be this slightly vulgar and sometimes clearly ridiculous
bourgeois salon that would be the 'semiotic convertor' and even the infernal
machine that would turn his existence upside down. 6
This labour of conversion will bear on two points: Odette's face and
Vinteuil's little musical phrase. Can the priority of one of these points over
the other be detected? Certainly the refrain appeared before the fact, and
one might even consider that the new type of amorous assemblage that
crystallises in Swann fixated on it at the outset, from the first time that
he heard Vinteuil's music. But, Proust explains to us, for Swann this love
for a musical phrase - one year before the encounter with Odette - is only
the outline of a 'possibility of a sort of rejuvenation' (1, 229), an outline
or machinic index that will only find itself starting to be realised with the
passion for Odette. 7 Ought one instead to seek this priority in the pro cesses
of deterritorialisation? It is true that from this point of view we will have a
tendency to privilege the refrain component over the faciality component.
In effect it seems, at least for Swann - and obviously it isn't a matter
of turning him into a general 'case' that it is the refrain that works
the ensemble of assemblages and which, in particular, hollows out and
decomposes the faciality component. But there is no essential necessity of
any sort presiding over su ch a dependency, and it cannot be a question of
mechanically indexing each refrain to a deterritorialisation function and
each faciality to a reterritorialisation function - in any case the refrain will
play a very important role here in the later stratification of assemblages.
Odette's faciality also experiences its own lines of deterritorialisation. In the
gestation period of Swann's passion, we will th us see Odette's face undergo
a slow process of transformation: an ideal Odette will settle, become
autonomous and even end up expropriating the Odette of real encounters,
so as to 'set itself up' in solitary reverie. 8
Manifestly, Swann is caught unawares by the machinic mutation of
which Vinteuil's little phrase is the bearer. Although he is not unaware of
the profound upheavals that European music was then experiencing, not
being a musician himself, he does not really live them from the 'inside'. His
situation is very different with regard to the iconic components, as he one of
the most listened to art critics in the salons that he frequents and he follows
the development of nascent modern art attentively. A new face could
therefore not dis concert him for long; he even adopted a rather particular
procedure so as to 'fix' it or to give it a supplementary attractiveness, which

230
consists in associating it with a canvas that he knows particularly well.
Proust explains to us that this is his way of warding off his regret at having
'confined his attention to the social side oflife' (I, 223/268 citation modified).
By making the frivolous world enter into art it thus seems to him that he
exorcises it. But one might think that this procedure also has as its goal to
prote ct him from transports of passion that would effectively lead him out
of his world, and not just as an ethnologist of the Verdurin salon or by
chasing after housemaids. By 'aestheticising' his encounters, he recuperates
and neutralises aIl the semiotic rough edges, aIl the machinic indices, aIl the
lines of flight and charges of desire of an iconic order. That is what he tries
to do with Odette de Crécy, who will become Zipporah, the daughter
of Jethro, who he extracts from a portrait in the fresco of the Sistine
Chapel consecrated by Botticelli to illustrating the seven episodes of Moses'
youth. On this occasion, Swann even works out a sort of private ritual: he
contemplates a reproduction of Jethro's daughter, which he has placed on
his study table, imagining that it is a photograph of Odette (1,243), he utters
a sort of magic formula: 'Florentine painting', and he thereby succeeds,
Proust tells us, in 'introduc[ing] the image of Odette into a world of dreams
and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering' (1, 245).
But instead of his passion being exorcised by this ritual, channelled by the
to and fro between the time of dreams and the time of reality, on the
contrary it only took on a body. Like the bas-relief in Jensen's Gradiva,9
the face-icon of Odette-Zipporah will live and develop on its own account,
detach itself from the rails that were supposed to control its trajectory,
and disorganise the whole system of existing assemblages. The oscillation
between on the one hand the reterritorialisations on the face of the real
Odette, on her reproduction-icon in the study, on the quiet Httle evenings
at the Verdurins and, on the other hand, the deterritorialisations of desire
towards another possibility, a different music, a different class relation, a
different style of life which would, for example, detach Swann from his role
as Jew-fetish for the racist upper aristocracy, will not succeed in finding
a point of equilibrium. With the motivating force of jealousy, it will, on
the contrary, keep on accelerating and the sentimental ambivalence that
was knowingly entertained at the beginning of the relationship will on the
contrary collapse into a passional black hole that will lead Swann to the
edge of madness.
But what is the nature of this image transference? Is it a matter, on
Swann's part, of a regressive identification with a maternaI figure? The
consequence of the absence of a symbolicaHy paternal pole that would
prohibit him from 'assuming' his castration appropriately? It is enough to
raise one's little finger to trigger psychoanalytic delusion! After aH, wasn't

231
this Zipporah given to Moses by her father Jethro the priest, as security for
his return to the God of Abraham? And was not the fresco in the Sistine
Chapel conceived as a counterpoint between the life of Jesus and the life of
Moses? There can be no doubt: Swann is fixated on an equivalent of the bad
mother/whore because he is searching for and lacking his original father,
who would alone have been able to impose the law and re-establish order. 1s
it not, in e:ffect, foUowing his marri age to Odette, that is to say, a procedure
for sublimating his incestuous passion, that he will, on the occasion of the
Dreyfus Affair succeed in assuming his condition as a Jew? What good is
there in wondering any more about the singularity of this face, the matter of
expression of this musical phrase, the assemblage of this salon, the
circumstances of this political conversion ... With a little authority and
mu ch bluffing, one could always make aU these details fit into the framework
of basic interpretations. What's the use of doubting these explanations,
which are good for everything, which no longer seem to be a problem
for anyone? It is not a matter for us of claiming to improve them, or of
substituting one grid for another, one that would this time guarantee that
every time one would find the right 'solution'. It is the very principle of
interpretation that we intend to caU into question. It seems essential to us to
affirm that the analysis of the unconscious consists in foUowing, at one's
own risk, aU the Hnes of the rhizome that an assemblage constitutes,
whatever it may be the matters of expression of their components, the
black hole effects that they trigger. And to do so without prejudice, whatever
the implications, indeed the chain reactions, that such a pro cess can entail,
might be. We are not saying, in the case of Swann, for example, that
identification is nothing. But we only consider it as one particular procedure
functioning in the context of particular assemblages and on the basis of
particular components and matter. ID Considered in isolation, they present
no interest, they give rise to no interpretation a priori, and do not refer to
any universal imago. Does such and such precise component of iconic
identification play a diagrammatic role, the role of a passage component?
Where, when, how, and in what context? What sort of component will take
over from its intervention? That is our problem.
'Yinteuil's little phrase' marks out the successive assemblages that
constitute Swanns love. As an a-signifying machinic index, it announces
that love, a year before the encounter with Odette; as an essential component
in triggering the love it will, over the course of time, degenerate into an
'indicator' of Swann's entering the Yerdurin territory; it will end up being
his swan song, on the day that he returns, death in his soul, through idleness,
to the salon of Madame de Saint -Euverte. And long after the disappearance
of Swann, the narrator will continue to wonder about the nature of its

232
power: 'when his vision of the universe is modifie d, purified, becomes more
adapted to his memory of his inner homeland, it is only natural that this
should be expressed by a musician in a general alteration of sonorities,
as of colours by a painter' (III, 259). But would it not instead be the world
itself and this 'unknown homeland' that the artist is 'citizen' oL that find
themselves transformed by works of art? The stakes of this choice are
decisive. In effect, depending on whether one makes artistic mutations the
result of changes in the world or of intra-psychic agencies, or one admits
that they can participate fully in their transformation, one willlean either
towards a globalising analytic interpretation, closed in on itself, or towards
a 'rhizomatic' and constructivist vision of these changes. On the one hand,
one provides oneself ready-constituted structures waiting to be 'filled in', on
the other, one accepts the idea that without recourse to any transcendent
instance, assemblages secrete and un do the systems that totalise 8.nd stratify
them. Example of a schizo-analytic problem: should one consider the
Verdurin salon as being nothing but an empty frame to which characters
and problems are attached? Is it not instead an active molar assemblage, a
sort of semiotic cyclotron, which accelerates or neutralises the interaction
of the molecular faciality and refrain components in the different phases of
Swann's love? On the other hand, what in particular in the composition
of the Saint-Euverte salon allows it, as we will see, to un do the encystment
of these two components, which had led to their launching into orbit
around a black ho le effect. For its part, along what sort of trajectory will the
Verdurin salon develop to be led to play an important role in the Dreyfus
Affair? Is there a link between characters such as Diaghilev, Nijinksy, the
political ascendency of the radical bourgeoisie, the exacerbation of racism
in the army and the aristocracy, etc., and the secret garden of Swann's
desires? In any event, a psychoanalyst would end up not being able to make
head nor tail of it!
What sort of abstract machinic mutations work the heterogeneous Hnes
of the pre-First World War rhizome that the Proustian analysis explores? It is
true that sometimes the analysis is tempted to have recourse to linear
mechanistic interpretations and that it also experiences certain difficulties in
elucidating the articulations between art and society, but the effective
approach of ln Search ofLost Time nonetheless continues its incessant to and
fro between the molar and molecular levels. To our mind it even tends
implicitly to privilege the fact that in a period of crisis, it is the most
deterritorialised components (here Vinteuil's little phrase or, in Combray,
the morcel of Aunt Leonie's madeleine) that 'pilot' the transformations of the
most territorialised assemblages. The most fragile, the most immaterial,
the most artificial, thus do not necessarily depend on external determinations

233
or psychological mechanisms. One can even, to the contrary, conceive that
the y might play an essential role in the 'passage: the semiotic diagrammatism,
between the weightiest, the most redundant of formations - faces that span
childhood, powers that relay and echo one another, racist, sexist, 'fixations:
etc., and in the transformation and creation of assemblages that change life,
disconcert the sexes and make one's perception of the world mutate.
We must now undertake a series of detours so as to try to broaden
our understanding of the functioning of Vinteuil's little phrase. The first
will bring us back once again to the question of the diagrammatic passage
between matters of expression in their most material aspect and option al
matters, in their most political aspect. What is the nature of what happens in
a musical phrase, a passional movement, a social problem, etc.? Is it a matter
of a style, a form, a structure, or rather, as we think, of a crystal of a code, a
semiotic diastase, a contingent abstract machine? But one can readily sense
that our expressions remain too imprisoned in the general coordinates of
time, space, and substance. In certain circumstances, things and signs take the
same turn, the same twist; a refusaI on their part to navigate the diagrammatic
course leads to an impasse, either because of a black ho le effect - a sort of
semiotic collapsus - or because of a super-stratification effect. Caught up in
a sort of vertiginous desire for abolition, the assemblage, in a totalising-
totalitarian mode, selects the only dimensions of the possible that square with
the dominant stratifications and redundancies.
As we know, social revolutions, aesthetic revolutions, do not just
overturn ideas and what is given to be seen and heard, they also work on
bodies, the most subterranean of organic metabolisms, perceptions of the
world, formulations of intersubjectivity and even a certain presentiment
of the future. We have seen that in Swann's case the abstract machine
that crosses aIl these registers first manifests itself in the form of a little
musical phrase. But for someone else it could have 'chosen' to crystallise in
a mathematical formula, a face, or something found on the shelves of a
junkshop! Why did Swann hear this little phrase? Why did he not block his
ears and understanding and align his judgement with that of most of his
contemporaries, who found this kind of musical innovation unhealthy?
'That's not how one makes music ... That's not how mathematics is done: ll
The a-signifying event-phrase is the bearer of no message, no
discernabilisable information. It crashes into the assemblages of
semiotisation and subjectivation that 'constitute' Swann. Having recovered
from the confusion of this first encounter, their respective essential
components are contaminated by the phrase. But in order for this kind of
abstraction mutation to be able to gain ground, was it not necessary for the
ground to lend itself to it? The concrete musical machine reveals, manifests

234
and makes operative an abstract machine of transversality. Proust's concrete
literary machine itself relays this machinic revolution. Something that is
essential to our era and which goes well beyond a style or fashion is thus
transmitted from one assemblage to another, from a narrative assemblage
of content to an assemblage of expression, one assemblage of enunciation
to another ... 'flle paradox is that by only retaining the significations that it
conveys, Proust's oeuvre appears instead as conservative, reactionary, even.
But considered as such, the Proustian literary machine is, without contest,
innovative, even revolutionary. And essentially that may be because of its
extraordinary power of semiotic magnification, which shows us certain of
the most deterritorialised aspects of des ire, certain of its most troubling and
virulent transversal dimensions, and that with an unprecedented 'fine-
grain: an unprecedented acuity.
It is revolutionary, then, in the sense that one says that the telescope of
the Palomar Observatory will have played a decisive role in the technico-
semiotic apparatus that turned modern astronomy upside down. And
rather than aspiring to read and re-read, interpret and judge an oeuvre
like Proust's by borrowing Freud's or Marx's glass es (or those of the leader
of no matter what literary school), it would on the contrary perhaps be
opportune to benefit from this sort of discovery's capacity to magnify and
illuminate lines of transversality so as to detect the vagueness and fudging
of a certain number of essential questions regarding the micropolitics
of desire in the oeuvres of these official revolutionaries, which serve those
who invoke them as a justification to have them blocking History. We
have endeavoured to show elsewhere that the abstract machinism which
targeted Kafka and which he aimed at was that of a bureaucracy in its
most modern of forms - whether it is a matter of that which works at the
summits of the grand apparatuses of power, or that which makes a
functionary one rung from the bottom of the ladder stiff-necked when he
summons his subordinate. The concern of Proust, as everyone knows, is
time. The time of childhood, doubtless, the archaic and reactionary time
of the genealogies dear to the Duke of Guermantes, but also perhaps and
above aIl, the capitalist time that doesn't stop gnawing away at every other
mode of temporalisation. A second detour into this aspect must now be
undertaken, so as to better determine the machinic sense, the secret
potential ofVinteuil's little phrase.
Time is not inflicted on the human as something that comes from
the outside. One doesn't deal with time in general and the hum an in
general. Just as space is faceified according to dominant norms and social
rituals, so time 'beats' in concrete assemblages of semiotisation (collective
or individual; territorialised or deterritorialised; machinic or stratified). A

235
child humming to himself at night because he is scared of the dark seeks to
take control of events that deterritorialise too quickly for his liking and start
to proliferate in the direction of the cosmos and the imaginary. Every
individuaI, every group, every nation thus 'equips' itself with a basic range
of incantatory refrains. Trades and corporations in Ancient Greece, for
example, possessed a sort of sonorous stamp, a short melodic formula
called a 'nome'Y It was used to affirm their identity vis-à-vis the outside, to
demarcate them spatially and socially and, one might imagine, as a means
of securing internaI cohesion; each member of the group knowing how to
participate in the same sonorous shifter, with the refrain acquiring the
function of the collective and a-signifying subject of enunciation. But
everything we know about the oldest of societies shows us that unlike
capitalist societies, they did not separate out the different components of
song, dance, speech, rituaI, production, etc. (For example, in African 'tonal'
languages, a word changes meaning depending on whether certain of its
phonemes are produced with a high or low pitch.) In fact, these societies
refused a division of labour and a specialisation of isolated components
that was too marked. They trust the effecting of diagrammatic passages
between assemblages - at least those that had a marked collective
importance - to heterogeneous assemblages that associated the ritual and
the productive, the sexual and the ludic, the political, etc. Diagrammatism
here thus doesn't necessarily imply recourse to an autonomous signifying
machine and to hierarchised power formations that keep it under their
yoke so as to profit from capitalising aIl the 'benefits' of the social-semiotic
division of labour. Let us note in addition that because of the primordial
importance that their scriptural component in particular takes over
other components of expression, the capitalist automation of signifying
languages will be the correlate of a simplification, even a degeneration
in certain cases, of the former. Thus the break in the West between speech,
song, mimicry, dance, etc., has as its consequence a certain abandoning of
prosodic traditions and a binarisation and territorialisation of musical
rhythms, a purification of lines and timbres that can also be considered an
impoverishment.
This simplification of capitalist refrains, their reduction to a simple
binary or ternary rhythm, at the limit, far from reducing their importance,
will on the contrary lead to them taking an essential place amongst the
components of semiotic subjection. Instead ofbeing assembled on the basis
of territorialised systems such as the tribes, clan or guild, subjectivation will
be internalised and individuated on the deterritorialised territories that the
ego, the role, the person, love, the feeling of'belonging to' constitute. Under
these conditions, initiation to the semiotics of social time no longer arises

236
from collective ceremonies but from co ding processes centred on the
individual, which tend to accord a great part to television and dises. Thus,
today, instead of the lullabies and nursery rhymes, it is a televisual teddy
bear who - calibrated by the latest marketing methods induces dreams
amongst our children, whilst neuroleptic ditties are prescribed to our young
people or young girls lacking love ... These ditties, these rhythms, these
theme tunes invade aIl our modes of semiotising time; they constitute the
spirit of the times, which leads to us feeling 'lilœ everyone else' and to accept
'the way the world is ...'
When Pierre Clastres evokes the solitary chant of an Indian facing night,
he describes it as a sort of attempt 'to escape the subjection of man by the
general network of signs',13 as a sort of aggression against words as means
of communication. According to him, speaking is always about 'putting
the Other into plaY: But this kind of escaping from social redundancies,
this 'detaching' of the other from dominant refrains and facialities, has
doubtless become more difficult, even exceptional, in our societies, which
live under a general regime of inter-subjective pulp, mixing these cosmic
universes and investments of des ire into the most derisory, limited,
utilitarian everydayness. Can we even imagine a type of sociallife, like that
of the Amazonian Indians, that would never exclude a solitary face-to-face
with the night and the finitude of the human condition, whatever its
intensity? Structuralist psychoanalysts did not consider it necessary to
found the Subject and the Other on an exclusive relation with the linguistic
signifier in vain! In effect it really is down this path that the evolution of
'developed' societies is going!
Capitalist refrains, like faciality traits, should be classified as part of
Collective micro-equipment such as was defined previously. The former
work over and grid our most intimate temporalisations, whilst the latter
model our relation to the landscape and to the living world. Moreover, they
cannot be separated. A face is always associated with a refrain; a significative
redundancy is always associated with a face, the timbre of a voice ... '1 love
you, don't leave me, you are my world, my mother, my father, my race, the
linchpin of my organs, my drug, 1 can do nothing without you ... What you
really are, in fact - man, woman, object, social status - matters little. What
counts is that you allow me to function in this society, that you neutralise in
advance every temptation, every component of passage that would risk me
going off the rails of the dominant system. Nothing can happen that doesn't
pass via you .. : How is this contradiction to be grasped? It's always the same
old song, the same miserable secret and yet the notes through which it
cornes to us always sound new, are always ready to open us up to new hopes.
Since the Baroque era, Western music has aimed at becoming a univers al

237
model, occasionaIly c:ondescending to absorb themes from 'folk' music.
Musics are no longer linked to the territories and seductions of the exotic.
Henceforth there is just music. The musics that will be played in the
courts and capitals of Europe will impose their law, certain types of
scales, their rhythms, their conception of harmony and polyphony, their
writing pro cesses, their instruments ... Seen from the 'outside' this pure -
deterritorialised - musie seems richer, more open, more creative than
others. But how are things exactly at the level of individual or collective
assemblages of'consumption'? On the contrary, aren't the capitalist refrains
of current consumption, those which go round inside our heads in the
morning on the metro, impoverished, to the extent that they shrink onto a
solitary individual and their production is 'mass-mediatised'?
One could caIl the 'binarist illusion' everything that leads us to estimate
that our relationship to life, to time, to thought, to the arts is superior to those
of ancient or archaic societies, simply on the basis that it is machinicaIly
'armed: that is to say, that it puts into play innumerable instrumental and
semiotic relays. Kafka, whose heroes are frequently thought to come up
against their own solitude in a sort of unbearable whistling, and who himself
suffered cruelly from the slightest noise, has described the emptiness of the
sonorous answer to our relation to time ('ls it in fact singing at aU? Although
we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people
did sing; this is mentioned in legends and sorne songs have actually survived,
which, it is true, no-one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what
singing is, and Josephine's art does not really correspond to it. So is it
singing at aU? Is it not perhaps just piping?'14). The collapse of territorialised
refrains thus threatens to make us fall into a black hole of whistling. A binary
tune if ever!
AIl of Western music might be considered the result of a sort of immense
fugue, constructed on the basis of this one and only empty note. In any case,
wasn't filling in the black ho le of his madness through more and more
fleeting, more and more deterritorialised childhood refrains, being in a
headlong flight through incessant melodic, harmonie, polyphonic and
instrumental creations, the fate of Robert Schumann, who embodied one
of the most decisive turns in the music of our time, even to the point of his
final collapse?lS When today musicologists transcribe so-called 'primitive'
musies using Western notation, they don't fully consider to what extent
they are missing the singularity of their object. Secret relations may exist
between those musics and certain incantatory rituals, certain prosodic
systems linked to 'magic' phrases. 16 A specialist who, for example, establishes
a survey of the complex rhythms that characterise certain of these musics
will translate a rupture in rhythm as syncopation or the offbeat. For him,

238
the foundations, the universal reference, is isorhythmics. But perhaps the
primitives really didn't fi.ll1ction on the basis of the same abstract machine
of rhythm! Perhaps the norm for them is a syncopated time! And perhaps
their life is assembled according to rhythms of great amplitude, which we
have lost any capacity to discern, haunted as we are by our own uniformly
isorhythmic refrains. We could without doubt situate this problem in a
relatively better way by referring to the times of our childhood, to the
incessant ruptures of temporalisation that characterised it and which we
harbour a nostalgia for '" With schoo1, military service and 'entering'
capitalist life through big corridors oozing bleach, our rhythms and refrains
have been purified, disinfected. And an attentive study of these phenomena
would certainly result in a certain synchrony between the growth of what
we are calling the binarist illusion and the process of public hygiene being
brought out!
We are not advocating here a return to the primitivism of childhood,
madness or of archaic societies. What we are seeking to determine, from a
schizo-analytic point of view, are not regressions, childhood fixations, but
the functioning of childhood blocks, refrains, faciality traits in the adult
world, such as it is organised in capitalist systems. In fact, everything is
infantile in our societies, except perhaps the reality of childhood itselfl
Modes of subjectivation cling on to residual objects or semiotic ersatz
in the measure that 'original' territorialities lilze those of the extended
family, rural communities, castes, guilds, etc., have been swept away by
deterritorialised flows. (A whole play of elective affinities or even of direct
filiation between the Lady of courtly love, the puerility of romantic feeling,
the Nazi fascination with Aryan blood and the ideal of social status that
rules in developed societies could thus perhaps be brought to light.) The
capitalist deterritorialisation of assemblages has brought about profound
modifications in the modes of semiotising time. Thus new refrains and new
musics, whose matters of expression have been selected in su ch a way as to
lend themselves to what one might calI the reinforcing of the politics of
extremes, have been put in place. The new assemblages of temporalisation
effectively go in three directions at once:

1 Towards a hyper-territorialised subjectivation, in the domain of

the domestic economy in particular, by opening up a practically
unlimited path to power operations bearing on the control of the
rhythms of the body, of the most imperceptible of movements of
spouse and children - 'what's up with you, you are out of sorts,
what are your secret thoughts, what makes your jouissance (or
your refusaI of jouissance) .. : .

239
 2 Towards a diagrammatism that is always more 'profitable' for
the system, through the development of new technologies for
the chronographic enslavement of individuals. The setting of
labour power into refrains no longer depends on initiation in
guilds but on the internalisation of blocs of code, blocs of
standard profession al becoming - everywhere the same kind
of executive, supervisor, bureaucrat, technician, specialised
worker l7 - demarcating milieus, castes, deterritorialised power
formations.
3 Towards a rhizomatic opening, deterritorialising the traditional
(biological and archaic) rhythms and creating conditions that allow
an entirely renewed relation to the cosmos and to des ire to be
envisaged.

The deterritorialisation of its writing, its executation and its listening have
led Western music to detach its rhythms and tunes from their 'native lands:
And, from this point of view, it seems one need not maintain that there is a
difference between serious and popular music. Both tend to fiIl what we
have calle d, roughly, the same lack of territorialised sonorous response. They
are musics of expectation, of response, stop gap musics that only refer the
subject to an exacerbated individuation, that tend to disconnect him from
the socius or, at least they only integrate him into a purified deterritorialised
socius. The expressive richness of chamber musics, of symphonic musics or
of opera should leave one under no illusion in this regard. From the point of
view of assemblages of consumption, they bring into play subjective ersatz
that are similar on aIl points to elevator music. Even mass musics that
require a certain participation from users - from a country dance to the
spectacle of a mega-show participate, each in its own way, in this technology
of the folding up of the self. Baroque rationalism tried to substitute a logic
territoriality for the old regions and liturgies. But its incessant expansion
led to its own negation and, at the limit, its abolition. From this point of view
one can consider that the Schumannian lied will have marked a final
desperate point of resistance. After him, a certain 'natural' relation between
song and feelings will never again be possible, other than by'laying it on' a
bit or taking an infinite detour through the artifices, the contortions, even, of
symbolism or neo-classicism. In Schumann, the childhood block always
remains 'at the limit': an intensely expressive melodic reterritorialisation, it
constantly threatens to shatter and dissolve as a basic element in highly
elaborate harmonic and polyphonie constructions. Schumann himself was
doubtless too gifted, and also too caught up in a deterritorialising madness,
to accept that his refrains might remain passive prisoners of any kind of

240 FliGHT
frame - as was the case for Chopin, for example, who never exits from a
certain melodic outline linked to a nostalgia for childhood and a lament for
the lost homeland. 18
With the birth of the new French school, in particular with the music of
Gabriel Fauré, we will find this same 'restraint' over the lied and chamber
music, but in a very sophisticated form. Then it was a matter of forming a
united front against the provocations of Wagner, which consisted in dissolving
the very principle of dassic refrains, which would consequently tend not to
arise from this logic of basic elements, but to work as an intensive bloc of
becoming on the basis of a fragmented melodic system - the Wagnerian
arioso.
Certainly it will still be very much a question of childhood and of a
nostalgia for the past in French music, but in a different, less 'basal' way,
more at the level of the form of content th an of the form of expression. 19
Whatever the case may be, deterritorialising tonnent will have quickly
circumvented the French phenomenon: in the name of a new axiomatics,
the Viennese will definitively shake up the credibility not just of the
dassical codes but also of every fixed form of code (induding the return to
old codes such as the pentatonic sc ales dear to the French), the Russians will
liberate rhythms and sonorities, so as to pro duce assemblages that really
had never been heard before,20 in the expectation that aIl the noises of the
world would finally find their citizenship in the context of the generalised
music towards which an contemporary developments are, in our opinion,
leading.
Stravinsky, Russian ballets ... here we are again in the salon of Mme
Verdurin, who Proust will make the accredited representative of Russian
artists in Paris, in The Prisoner, their all-powerful 'Fairy Godmother' (III,
238). What we would like to pinpoint more precisely now is the nature of
the relation that we sense between the role played by Vinteuil's Httle phrase
in Swanns Way and the new revolution in the art of music. The hypothesis
that forms our starting point, to wit, that the same abstract machinism
passes through individual passions, social problems, questions of art, etc.,
would have hardly any interest if we contented ourselves with drawing from
it the idea that we are only dealing with a simple transfer of form or a
transcoding. Abstract machines do not just exist on the si de of forms and
molecular codes, but also on the side of matters of expression and molecular
productions. And by taking our analysis in the direction of the latter, we will
perhaps be in a better position to approach the reaHty of these diagrammatic
passages. Let us return once again to the fact that Swann's passion was first
dedared for the Httle phrase, before bearing on Odette. From the first
moments of this encounter, he had the intuition that she would perhaps

241
have the greatest consequences for his life. 2I How did that happen? Not as
the result of reasoning or of an evocation of the past, but rather as a
consequence of the discovery of a new relation to music, and more generally,
a new mode of semiotisation of sonorous matter, which he made at that
time. During this first hearing, in effect, Vinteuil's little phrase was Ilot given
as already constituted - ready made22 - as might have been the case if it was
a matter of a theme that announced variations or which was destined for
fugato treatment. Swann, Proust tells us, at first only dealt with the material
qualities of the sounds secreted by the instruments. And he adds: 'and it
had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the
violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he had suddenly
become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning ta surge upward in
plashing waves of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like
the deep tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the
moonlight' (I, 227). It is thus only at the end of this preliminary phase of
semiotisation that he willlearn to 'catch' something a bit more consistent,
without for aH that yet being in a position to distinguish whether what he
had arrested here was a melodic phrase or simply a new sort of harmony.
Let us note that the extreme difficulty that Swann had in freeing his first
impressions of the music from a whole synaesthesic complex associating
the lapping of liquids, the fragrance of roses, and arabesques, to sensations
of br~adth or tenuity, stability or caprice (1, 228) will not be ascribed by
Proust solely to his dilettantish nature. 'Perhaps it was owing to his ignorance
of music that he had received so confused an impression, one of those that
are nonetheless the only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent,
entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this
order, vanishing in an instant is, so to speak, sine materia' (I, 227 -8). For our
part it is nonetheless of matter that we would like to speak in this regard.
But of the matter of the form of expression, and that with the concern not
ta stick to the simplistic idea that in this domain matter is only an affair of
instrumentation and sound waves. The abstract matter of Vinteuil's phrase
doesn't have the same consistency, the same machinic characteristics as
those of the music Swann was accustomed to. That is what disorientates and
unsettles him and which, perhaps contributes ta his being carried off to a
different fate. It doesn't constitute a strongly crystallised semiotic block. It
offers itself, in sorne way, to the listening subject's initiative. Or rather, it
grafts onto the assemblage that it constitutes the new lzind of machinism of
which it is the bearer. And without a doubt this effect of open semiotisation
- in reference here to what will much later be called an 'open work' - should
not be assimilated to a simple 'projective technique' like that used by
psychologists, for example, with the ink blots of the Rorschach test to

242
capture a subject's imaginary. Fundamentally, what interests Proust is not
the result but the creative machinism that is put into playon this occasion.
To be sure, Swann will end up stabilising a representation of the musical
phrase by grasping 'its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its
expressive value' (I, 228).

243
[TN] = Translator's Note

Translator's Introduction
Or, indeed, for Deleuze's humour, since his affirmation is aeeompanied by
a specifie attention to what it is that philosophers do. See his letter to
Jean-Clet Martin in Two Regimes ofMadness.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Anti-Oedipus translated by Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (London: Athlone, 1984) p. 88.
3 And it remained so throughout his life, as his comments in De Leros à la
Borde, whieh is referred to later, show.
4 This is an issue that has been explored at length in the work of Jean-Claude
Polack. See for example his Épreuves de la folie. Travail psychanalytique et
processus psychotiques (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Éditions érès, 2006).
5 Gilles Deleuze 'Trois problèmes de groupe' preface to Félix Guattari
Psychanalyse et transversalité (Paris: La Découverte, 2003) p. x.
6 The revised edition of his book Proust and Signs, published in 1970, is
strongly marked by his encounter with Guattari.
7 Jean-Claude Polack 'Analysis between Psycho and Sehizo' in Éric Alliez and
Andrew Goffey The Guattari Effect (London: Continuum, 2011) p. 61.
8 Félix Guattari De Leros à la Borde (Paris: Lignes, 2012).
9 Guattari ibid p. 82.
10 See the present volume p. 98.
11 Félix Guattari 'La psychothérapie institutionelle' in Psychanalyse et
transversalité p. 47.
12 See for example Francois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari:
Intersecting Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and Julian
Bourg From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French
Thought (Montreal: MeGill University Press, 2007).
13 See the extensive discussion in Gary Genosko 'Busted: Félix Guattari and
the Grande Encyclopedie des Homosexualites' in Rhizomes 11112 (Fa1l2005/
Spring 2006). Online at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/genosko.html
[accessed 17 March 2015].
14 For an up ta date discussion see for example Andrew Barry and Georgina
Born (eds) Interdisciplinarity. Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural
Sciences (London: Routledge, 2015).
15 Some of the links have been documented by Liane Mozère in her article
'Foucault et le CERFI: instantanés et actualités' in Le Portique 13-14
(2004). Available online at http://leportique.revues.org/642 [accessed
17 March 2015]. Mozère suggests in particular that Foucault acted as a
'guarantor' for this research project, the third CERFI project to have been
funded by the State.
16 See Michel Foucault, in discussion with Francois Fourquet and Félix
Guattari 'Premieres discussions, premiers balbutiements: la ville est-elle
une force productive ou d'anti-production' in Dits et Écrits 1: 1954-75
(Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001) p. 1316.
17 Ihe term has no direct equivalent in English, translating variously as
'facilities', 'equipment: 'supplies', 'kit' or 'gear'. Here l've followed the
anthropologist Paul Rabinow in his book French Modern: Norms and
Fonns of the Social Environment, who simply leaves the term untranslated.
It's worth painting out here also that Guattari sometimes renders the term
in the plural, sometimes in the singular. In a doubtless failed attempt at
elegance l've exploited the property that the mass noun has of referring to
things that can't be counted as a way of conveying something both of the
term's extension and its multiplicity. Where doing that proved tao ugly,
l've adopted the convention of talking about a 'form' of collective
equipment.
18 Paul Rabinow French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995) p. 2.
19 Félix Guattari 'Pratiques écosophiques et restauration de la cité subjective'
in Qu'est-ce que lëcosophie (Abbaye d'ardenne: Lignes/Imec, 2013)
pp. 36-7.

1 unconscious is
a language
1 Roger Chambon Le Monde comme représentation et réalité Paris: J. Vrin,
1952, pp. 165-71.
2 It will be objected that our example is too simple and that analysts today
are much more subtle! But on doser inspection one would see that
they still have recourse to the same types of universalising procedure;
ifs just that instead of talldng about father, mother, faeces, and
complexes, they talk about the symbolic functioIl, the imaginary, the
Moebius strip, etc.

246
3 ln this text the correct orthography for 'micropolitics' and related terms is
not dear. Guattari sometimes has 'micropolitiques' and sometimes
'micro-politiques'. In the absence of an obvious rationale for this difference,
we have followed the general convention for Deleuze and Guattari's
wode
4 Sigmund Freud 'Metapsychology' translated by James Strachey Standard
Edition volume 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74).
5 In the sense that Hjelmslev talks about the 'figure of expression'. Cf. Louis
Hjelmslev Prolegomena to a Theory of Language translated by Francis J.
Whitfield (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963).
6 The French noun 'possible' - as in 'un autre monde des possibles' has been
translated throughout as 'possibility' [IN].
7 Thinking along the same lines, let us note that argots - the special
languages used by vagrants and thieves to protect themselves from their
external milieu - are a relatively recent creation. One finds no mention of
them before the fifteenth century, that is to say, at the moment wh en urban
and modern capitalist powers were busily expanding. Cf. Auguste Vitu Le
Jargon du XVe siècle, Paris: Charpentier, 1884, and Lazare Sainean Les
Sources de l'argot ancien, Paris: Champion, 1912.
8 'Ballets roses' is a name given to a 1959 scandaI in which male members of
the establishment had 'ballets' (striptease, posing nude, etc.) performed to
them by teenage girls. There were rumours also of, amongst other things,
sado-masochist orgies. Nowadays a 'ballet rose' tends to refer to criminal
activities involving rape [IN].
9 Io be 'traduit devant un tribunal' means to be brought to a tribunal. But
'traduit' also means 'translate' [IN].
10 Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss The Elementary Structures ofKinship (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969).
11 Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley
(New York: Zone, 1989).
12 Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin-Bavelas, and Don Jackson Pragmatics of
Human Communication - A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies,
and Paradoxes (NewYork:WW Norton, 1967).
13 In the sense defined in Psychanalyse et tranversalité Paris: Maspero, 1972.

2 Collective equipment starts

and ends
1 Which would, in Louis Althusser's view, arise from 'Ideological State
Apparatuses'.

247
3 capitalist revolution
1 Georges Duby The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and
Peasants j1-om the Seventh to the Twelfth Century translated by Howard B.
Clarke (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1974).
2 Ibid p. 163.
3 Ibid p. 213 [translated slightly modified].
4 Georges Duby The Age of Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980-1420 translated
by Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1983) p. 102.
5 Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism translated by
Stephen Kalberg (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001).
6 René Grousset, preface to Régine Pernoud Les villes marchandes aux XIVe
et XVe siècles, impérialisme et capitalisme au Moyen-âge (Paris: La Table
Ronde, 1948).
7 René Nelli L'Érotique des troubadours (Toulouse: Privat, 1963) and 'De
l'amitié à l'amour ou de l'affrèrement par le sang à l'épreuve des corps' Les
Cahiers du Sud 3471958.
8 Cf. Jean Gimpel The Mediaeval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the
Middle Ages (New York: HoIt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976) and Yves Barel
Une approche systémique de la ville (Grenoble: Institut de recherché
économique et de planification May 1974).
9 This system of complernentarity between a caste system and a growing
class (the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) will, in sorne way, 'find' itself
inverted in the dependent situation that bourgeois capitalists find
thernselves today with regard to union and state bureaucracies. Bourgeois
power today only holds up thanks to the gridding of the working class by
bureaucratie castes. As for the interdependence of the bureaucracies of the
State capitalism of the USSR and American imperialism, it is now almost
entirely institutionalised!
10 Georges Bataille The Accursed Share translated by Robert Hurley (New
York: Zone, 1988).

4 and capitalist
1 Daniel Dessert and Jean-Louis Jourent Le Lobby Colvert - Un royaume ou
une affaire de famille? (Paris: Armand Colin, 1975).
2 Fernand Braudel shows that the proliferation of'model' cities is such, in
the sixteenth century, that a typology can only be established on condition
that one use a combinatory that brings into play heterogeneous factors

248
 which - aside from questions about size and rank of city - would refer to
collective equipment functions, in the very broad sense in which we are
considering them here. So, sticking just with the cities of Spain, one might
say that Granada and Madrid are bureaucratie cities, Toledo, Burgos, and
Seville mercantile cities, but Seville is equally bureaucratie, rentier, and
artisanal; Cordova and Segovia industrial and capitalist cities; Cuenca,
industrial but also artisanal; Salamanca and Jerez, agricultural cities;
Guadalajara, a clerieal city; others are more military, 'sheep-farming: rustic,
maritime, cities of studying, etc. Finally, the only way of making these cities
'hold together' in the same capitalist grouping, so that they don't fragment
into a multitude of autonomous and antagonistie cities, is to consider them
as arising from the same rhizome of Collective Equipment. Cf. Fernand
Braudel The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Phillip II translated by Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972).
3 It is worth distinguishing here the aspect of the deterritorialisation of
machines and equipments, in so far as they engender new forms of
production and circulation, and the aspect of institutional, regulatory, and
imaginary reterritorialisation, which attempts to put a brake on this
movement through the system of corporations and guilds, etc.
4 Philippe Ariès Centuries of Childhood. A Social History of Family Life,
translated by Robert Baldick (New York: Basic, 1962).
5 Anne Querrien, unpublished.
6 Jean-Louis Flandrin Familles: Parenté, maison, sexualité dans l'ancienne
société Paris: Hachette, 1975.
7 According to Albert Soboul, 'the courtiers living at Versailles as part of the
King's entourage, represented about 4,000 families'. See Albert Soboul A
Short History of the French Revolution translated by Geoffrey Symcox
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
8 Paul Bois Paysans de l'Ouest (Paris: Flammarion, 1971).
9 Jacques Godechot La grande nation: l'expansion révolutionnaire de la
France dans le monde de 1789 à 1799 (Paris: Aubier, 1956).
10 Stock market equipment, for example, started to come into existence in the
modern form of product exchange and securities market from the end of
the sixteenth century; but it is only at the start of the seventeenth century
that they will acquire a gigantic size sometimes, between 5,000 and 6,000
people gathering every day in the stock market at Amsterdam to follow the
priee of the East lndia Company.
11 Karl Wittfogel Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
12 Cf. the 'great enclosure' [of unreason] described by Michel Foucault in The
History of Madness translated by Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2009).

249
13 There is a case here for distinguishing fascist movements from reactionary
institutions. For example: the appearance of a Puritan movement,
separating from the Anglican institution, and which gives rise to the
formation, by the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower, of a sort of fascist
community in New England - a new promised land that was to be built
against the people of demons, that is to say, against the Indians.

5 Semiotic optional matter

1 Maurice Percheron Ghengis Khan (Paris: Seuil, 1962) p. 126.
2 It goes without saying that this classification is only proposed as a rough
guide, because in fact, the majority of these components straddle different
categories: perception and posture also pertain to a pre-signifying register;
mimicry from a register of natural coding, etc.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
translated by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986).
4 Cited by Anne Querrien:
Does the school observe a sufficient general silence?
Is the teacher sufficiently silent, making himself obeyed through
gesture?
Does reading occur in hushed tones?
Is the furniture in order and is the maxim 'One place for one thing
and each thing in its place' evident?
Are the lighting and ventilation sufficient?
Do the pupils have enough room?
Is the attitude of the pupils acceptable?
Do the pupils have their hands behind their backs when moving,
and do they walk in step?
Are the pupils satisfied?
Do the pupils have clean hands and face?
• Are notices about punishments clearly evident and utilised?
Does the teacher permit himself to threaten to strike pupils?
Does the teacher exercise permanent surveillance of aIl pupils?
Are movements simultaneous?
Is the head monitor respected?
• Are the monitors weIl chosen?

250
 El Does the teacher dismiss poor monitors?
Do the monitors feel that they are sufficiently responsible? What
are their exact responsibilities?
El How are the pupils divided up?
El How frequently do es the teacher carry out a new ranldng of pupils?
Do the pupils understand what they read?
El Is there sufficient emulation?
El Are the registers kept properly?
Are prayers given exactly?
El Are songs sung correctly?
El Are pupils overseen by a monitor when they go out?
El Are the parents of absent children sent notes?
Anne Querrien TEnsaignement' Recherches 23 1976
5 Cf. in Kafka, the very lengthy expositions concerning arguments of an
administrative or litigious character, which sometimes take on the quality
of a 'bureaucratie epic'; for example, the different modes of'acquittal' in
The Trial: real acquittal, apparent acquittal, unlimited deferral ... See also
the accounts given of the Moscow show trials, implacable machines
resulting not just in the checking of every utterance with a diabolical and
fascinating meticulousness, but also the acceptance of a logic of
enunciation in whieh the key points about responsibility are based on the
declarations of the accuse d, whieh as a consequence sometimes result in
impasses similar to the 'liar paradox'. For example: in his final declaration,
Karl Radek, reacting to Vyshinky's insults, says ... '1 have to recognise my
guilt in the name of the general usefulness this truth must bring. And
when 1 hear it said that quite simply those on the accused's bench are spies
and bandits, 1 have to take a stand against this assertion, not from the
point of view of my own defence, from the moment that 1 recognise that 1
have betrayed justice ... If you are only dealing with simple common law
criminals, informers, how can you be sure that what we have said is the
rock solid truth?' Le Procès du Centre antisoviétique trotskyste (Moscow,
1937) p. 565.
6 Cf. René Scherer and Guy Hocquenghem 'Co-ire: album systématique de
l'enfance' Recherches 22,1976.
7 For example, the corner of a blanket, whieh will service as an object that is
intermediary between a partial erogenous zone - the mouth, for example
and the outside world, to which the child is attached exclusively. D.W
Winnicott Transitional abjects and Transitional Phenomena (London:
Tavistock,1953).

251
8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.
9 Fernand Deligny Cahiers de l'immuable 1 and 2, Recherches 8 1975 and 20
1975; Nous et l'Innocent (Paris: Maspero, 1975).

6 and political
facades
PSU - Parti Socialiste Unifié - French socialist party formed in 1967,
UDR - Union pour la défense de la République (the name adopted by the
Gaullist party in France after the events of May 1968) [TN].
2 The courts of royalty doubtless marked a transitory step in the putting in
place of this Collective super-equipment. Still marked by the old
formations of ostentatious expenditure, they nonetheless announced the
deterritorialisation of traditional social formations and the erection of a
new type of'personalisation' of central power. One could here in this
regard make a baroque eros and a bureaucratie eros into an extension of
one another.
3 Alain Cotta Théorie générale du Capital, de la croissance et des fluctuations
(Paris: Dunod, 1966).
4 The notion of the person [personne: also 'no-one'] should be related here
to its primary etymological meaning (of Etruscan origin), that of a
theatrical mask; but now it is a matter of a theatre that covers the social
field in its entirety.
5 Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish translated by Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin, 1977) pp. 215-16.
6 Following from the work of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins
on the economy of the most 'primitive' of societies, Claude Meillassoux has
elaborated the notion of a 'domestic mode of production'. He opposes the
existence of relations of social 'adhesion: that are first manifested at the
level of the participation in activities of collective production, to the
obsessions of structuralists and functionalists who try to base the
consistency of these societies on relations of filiation that rest on
universals of the exchange of women, incest prohibition type: 'for the
domestic community to reproduce itself, in effect, relations of filiation
must be in conformity with the relations of dependency and anteriority
established in production: relations of reproduction must became relations
of production: This domestic mode of production is not, for aIl that,
conceptualised as a genetic stage of humanity: it plays a fundamental role
in the imperialist exploitation of its periphery, of archaic agricultural
sectors and, at the heart of its system of reproduction, of domestic, female,
labour. Claude Meillassoux Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris: Maspero,
1975).

252
1 molecular revolution
1 Which we williater describe as a 'diagrammatic function'.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche On the Genealogy of MoraIs translated by Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969) p. 6l.
3 Memory, as Francis Yates shows us, has long depended on highly
territorialised 'memory' machines (the architectural rhetoric machines
derived from the Ad Herennium of Antiquity), or the highly sophisticated
machines like those of Lulle (where concepts are represented by letters of
the alphabet which turn around an axis, and figures by concentric circles
on which the letters referring to concepts are found and which, when these
wheels are rotated allow combinations of concepts to be obtained). See
Francis Yates The Art ofMemory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1966).
4 Criticising the abusive export of the language of informatics outside its
own domain, Cornelius Castoriadis asks himself whether the concept of
order that biology and anthropology need is necessarily identical to that of
physics (Castoriadis Science moderne et Interrogation philosophique
Encyclopaedia Universalis Organum, 1975). In effect, and unlike the order
of physico-chemical strata, 'human' orders seem to be inseparable from
collective assemblages and formations of power, that is to say, from modes
of semiotisation that expose, arrange, and guarantee them ...
independently of any transcendental guarantee.
5 Paul Lafargue The Right to Be Lazy (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2012).
6 Jean-Claude Polack and Danielle Sabourin La Borde ou le droit à la folie
(Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1976).
7 Ludwig von Bertalanffy General System Theory (New York: Basic, 1965).
8 See Chapter 10, 'The Traps of ldeology'.
9 In numerous domains, it is the category of the family or household that
constitutes the institution al object of reference. For example, national
accounts continue to talk of a 'household budget' with regard to single
people! On the genealogy of familialist intimacy see Lionel Murard and
Patrick Zylberman 'Le Petit travailleur infatigable' Recherches 25,1976.
10 Factory in Besançon that was the foeus of a series of industrial upheavals
as weIl as an experiment in worker management in the 1970s [TN].
11 Ivan Illich Yools for Conviviality (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
12 See 'Histoire de la psychiatrie de secteur' Recherches 17, 1975 and Robert
Castel Le Psychanalysme (Paris, Maspero, republished Paris 10/18, 1975).
13 The term 'programme' is not employed here in the sense that one speaks,
for example, of the 'Common programme of the Left' but in the sense that
sado-masochists talk about a programme, that is to say as means for

253
 marldng out an experiment that everywhere exceeds their own
'predictions', hence the mystery and the fascination, the impression of
something that has 'never been seen' despite the ritualised charac:ter
of programmed phases. In contemporary music, one talks equally of
'programmed music' when a significant part of the music is left up to the
performers and the score gives nothing more th an broad indications,
general directions.
14 Tristan Cabral (Yann Houssin) Ouvrez le feu (Paris: Plasma, 1975).

8 rhizome of collective assemblages

1 Nietzsche On The Genealogy of Marals p. 61, 140.
2 After Marcel Bigeard, a well-known General in the French Army [TN].
3 Prostitution seems al ways to retain something of the religious basis of its
ancient origins.
4 Cf. in this regard the excellent work ofJean-Marie Geng Information,
Mystification (Paris: EPI, 1973), and Traité des censures (Paris: EPI, 1976).

9 Micro-fascism
1 And perhaps tomorrow of old people and school children. Cf. Mathusalem,
le journal qui na pas froid aux vieux 1 March 1976 (BP 202,75866, Paris
Dedex 18); and for a new approach to childhood, the books of Christiane
Rochefort Encore heureux qu'on va vers lëté Paris, Grasset, 1975 and Les
Enfants d'abord (Paris: Grasset, 1976).
2 On national-Bolshevism in Germany: Jean-Pierre Faye Langages
totalitaires (Paris: Hermann, 1972) and Théorie du récit (Paris: Hermann,
1972).
3 Sigmund Freud 'Analysis of a phobia in a five- year-old boy' translated by
James Strachey in Standard Edition volume 10 (London: Hogarth Press,
1953-74).
4 Cf. the outIine of a map of the neurotic rhizome of Little Hans in Félix
Guattari L'Inconscient machinique (Paris: Recherches, 1979).
5 Bertolt Brecht Mr Puntila and his Man Matti.
6 See the extraordinary 'reportage' by Elena Valero, a Brazilian who was
held captive for years by Yanomami Indians. Although carefully edited
by missionaries, her account reconstitutes the continuing climate of
bullying in which lndian women live. Ettoro Biocca Yanoama (Paris:
Plon, 1968).

254
10 Self-management and the politics
of desire
In the second part of this book we will come back to Chomsky's thinldng,
which to our mind precisely misses a certain level of abstraction in the
func:tioning of language.
2 Antonio Gramsci Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011).
3 Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
4 Paul Virilio Elnsécurité du térritoire (Paris: Stock, 1976) A recent example: the
government decision that creates departmental committees that make the
placing of children in psychological medical establishments and sheltered
accommodation under the direct control of the director for economic and
social action, academy inspectors and local dignitaries. Psychiatrists and
psychologists will be required to apply the decisions of these committees.
After the age of 16, they will be able to transfer certain children, those they
judge to be 'bad.ward: directly into psychiatrie hospitals, the wards of which
today are very often, as is known, half empty. Let us be clear that these
prominent people are found in the committees with oversight for these same
establishments and psychiatrie hospitals. Everything is connected!
5 Having myself initiated the themes of 'institutional analysis' and of
analysers sorne fifteen years ago, 1 was led to make the following correction
in the 1974 re-edition of a collection of articles Psychanalyse et
transversalité, published by Maspero: 'it was starting in 1961, during the
meetings of the GTPSI (Groupe de travail de psychologie et de thérapie
institutionelle [Worldng group in institutional psychology and therapy])
that 1 proposed situating institutional therapy as a particular case of what 1
have called ((institution al analysis': At that time this ide a had few echoes. It
was outside the psychiatrie milieus, in the groups of FGERI (Federation
des groups d'études et de recherches institutionelles [Federation of groups
for institutional study and research)) in partieular that it was taken up. The
leaders of the institutional psychotherapy current hardly envisaged more
than a slight extension of analysis in the domains of psychiatry and
possibly pedagogy. To my mind, such an extension could only le ad to an
impasse, if it didn't aim at the social and political field in its entirety. One
of the essential points of the political application of this institutional
analysis in particular seemed to me ta be the phenomenon of the
bureaucratisation of militant organisations, whieh ought to be a matter for
((group analysers': These themes caught on, analysers, institutional analysis,
and transversality have been made to fit every occasion somewhat;
perhaps one should see in this an indication that despite their approximate
character they harboured a somewhat lively problematic. Far be it for me

255
 to defend any kind of orthodoxy with regard to the origin of these
concepts! At this time the GTPSI's work of elaboration was collective;
ideas were bursting out everywhere without belonging to anyone.
Unfortunately, the dimate has changed, and if 1 have been led to make
these clarifications, it is because it seemed to me that they have escaped a
certain number of people who are interested in this current of thinking
today. To fill the hole in their memories or their lack of training, and in
order to be precise, 1 therefore recall that nothing was said of or written
about 'institutional analysis' and 'analysers' before the different versions
that 1 have given of my report on 'Transversality'. Published in 1964 in the
first issue of the Revue de psychothérapie institutionelle.
6 Or, in other domains, a new mathematical machine or a new technical
procedure.
7 Célestin Freinet Pour lëcole du people (Paris: Maspero, 1969) and Élise
Freinet Naissance d'une pédagogie populaire (Paris: Maspero, 1969).
8 Fernand Oury and Jacques Pain Chronique de lëcole caserne (Paris:
Maspero, 1972); Fernand Oury and Aida Vasquez De la class coopérative à
la pédagogie institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1970); Fernand Oury and Aida
Vasquez Vers une pédagogie institutionelle (Paris: Maspero, 1967).
9 A fascinating article that appeared in Liberation in September 1975 on
parallel education networks, entitled 'Living without school' and in the
journal Parallèle April-June 1976, published by the Groupe
d'expérimentation sociale (Reid, Hall, 4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris),
and an article by Liane Mozère 'Projet d'hôtel d'enfants:
10 Foucault Discipline and Punish p. 215.
11 See also the very surprising Lacano- Maoist metaphysies of Guy Lardreau
and Christian Jambet LAnge (Paris: Grasset, 1976), whieh endeavours to
distinguish a 'discourse of the rebel' from the Lacanian universals of
enunciation, i.e. the four fundamental discourses: those of the Master, the
University, the Hysterie, and the Analyst. Cf. Jacques Lacan On Feminine
Sexuality. The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73 translated by Bruce
Pink (New York: WW Norton, 1998) 'Thus the speech of the Master must be
purified of the simulacra that cIutter it, not so as to bend to it but so as to
tear it away from them' (p. 73). At the risk of adding to their weariness
('Do we have to keep on saying incessantly that the signifier is not
'linguistic' in the sense that it would be opposed to we don't know what
'libido', thought in terms of intensity? Do we have to reaffirm the truism
that the opposition of the energetic to signifying law is a pre-critieal
blunder that since Lacan has been impossible?') we will continue to worry,
along with sorne other pre-Lacanian asses, about the practical politieal
and analytic - consequences of the reduction of all systems of intensity, al!
energeties to the single register, so-called, of the 'signifier' (whether
linguistie or not).

256
12 Four types of interaction allow physicists to 'pas s' from matter to energy:
gravitational interactions of the 'weight' type; electromagnetic interactions
of the 'light' and 'matter' type; weak and strong interactions of the 'nuclear
energy' type. Another subject for meditation could be the mode of
articulation between quantum mechanics, at the microscopie scale, and
statistical mechanics, at the macroscopic scale, or even the princip les of
relativity, which consist in never separating time and space measurements
from the movement of the instruments that accomplish them, that is to
say, from their 'observer: or, if one wishes, their assemblage of enunciation.
But unlike the relativist 'observers', whose own movements and referential
coordinates are 'homogenised' on the basis of the same principle of
mathematical invariance, collective assemblages of des ire never entirely
give up the singularity of what physicists calI the line of their 'gauge space'.
Cf. Banesh Hoffmann The Strange History of the Quantum (New York:
Dover,1959).

12 Pragmatics, the runt of linguistics

1 See Language 27, September 1972 p. 72 on 'generative semantics'.
2 Bar-Hillel also talks about it as a 'wastebasket'. See 'Out of the Pragmatic
Wastebasket' Linguistic Enquiry 2/3 p. 71.
3 'But first note that the utilisation of these unexploited possibilities, for
creative ends, remains very unusual, even in poetry. One could indeed
quote the "Jabberwocky" of Lewis Carroll, Finnegans Wake or certain texts
by Michaux; but the least that one could say is that this type of creativity
has only extremely distant connections with the creativity which operates
in the ordinary use of language: Nicolas Ruwet Introduction to Generative
Grammar translated by Norval H. Smith (Amsterdam: North Holland
Publishing, 1973) p. 30.
4 René Lindekens Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage (Paris:
Hatier, 1975) p. 85.
5 Hjelmslev defines language as a 'semiotic into which all other semiotics
may be translated both all other languages, and all other conceivable
semiotic structures' Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du langage
p.109.
6 As René Lindekens writes '... the semiotic relation of absolute
interdependence, which characterises the link between the planes of
expression and content - from which the denotative power of sign
systems issues - and which Hjelmslev calls a relation of solidarity,
must be considered as contracted exclusively by two forms, from one
plane of the sign to the other: Hjelmslev. Prolégomènes à une théorie du
langage.

NOTES 257
7 Cf. Christian Metz Film Language translated by Bertrand Augst (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1974) and Language and Cinema translated by
Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Walter de Gruyter, 1974).
8 Michel Foucault The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human
Sciences translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970).
9 The notion of'machinic consistency' is proposed here in opposition to that
of'axiomatic consistency' in mathematics.
10 This implies that one foIlow Greimas wh en he proposes to stop
considering the extra-linguistic world as an absolute referent and to treat it
as a set of more or less implicit semiotic systems. A.J. Greimas On Meaning
(Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
11 Roland Barthes den ounces the claim that denotation founds the "first
meaning": 'denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so; under
this illusion, it is ultimately no more than the last of the connotations (the
one which seems both to establish and to close the reading), the superior
myth by which the text pretends to return to the nature of language, to
language as nature: doesn't a sentence, whatever meaning it releases,
subsequent to its utterance, it would seem, appear to be telling us
something simple, literaI, primitive: something true, in relation to which
aIl the rest (which cornes afterwards, on top) is literature?' Roland Barthes
S/Z translated by Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil BlackwelI, 1990) p. 9.
12 Paul Ricoeur thus opposes the possibility of translating the meaning of
one instance of discourse to the impossibility of translating the signified of
a system of signs: 'this logical function of meaning, carried by a phrase in
its entirety, cannot be confused with the signified of any of the signs put to
work in the phrase. In effect, the signified of the sign is solidary with the
system of a given language; for this reason, it cannot be transposed from
one language to another; on the contrary, the meaning of the phrase,
which it would be better to calI the "intended" than the signified, is a global
thought content which one can propose to say differently within the same
language, or to translate it into another language; the signifie d, then, is
untranslatable, the "intended" is eminently translatable' Paul Ricoeur 'Signe
et sens' Emyclopaedia Universalis 1975.
13 Oswald Ducrot, preface to John Searle Les Actes de langage. Un essai de
philosophie de langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972) p. 25.
14 In the terminology of Charles E. BazelI, here we should speak instead of
non-grammatical utterances. BazeIl believes it necessary to establish a
distinction between a-grammatical utterances and non-grammatical
utterances. The first, of the 'he seems sleeping' type, are susceptible of
rearrangement, of being translated back into 'normal' utterances: 'he seems
to be asleep: for example. However, because the second, of the 'colourless
green ideas sleep furiously' type aren't 'missing' anything, because they
cannot be related to any crystallisation of a signifie d, and do not

258
 correspond to anything recognisable, avoid any possible correction, as if by
themselves. But this distinction seems entirely relative to us: there are
effectively many repressive intermediaries between the correction of
grammar by a teacher and the incorrigible segregation of the text of the
mad by psychiatry. Cf. Langage 34 June 1974.
15 Louis Hjelmslev La Stratification du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1971) p. 58.
16 Herbert E. Brekle Sémantique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) pp. 54-60.
17 One could make the same remark with regard to Freud's first models.
18 Sebastian K. Saumjan opposes a system of abstract objects based on the
operation of application (AGM: applicational generative model) to
Chomsky's system of linear concatenation, but his formalisation seems not
to lead him to having to account for the modelling of language on the
basis of the facts of power. See Langage 33 March 1974 p. 22,54, on
Hjelmslev's influence.
19 Abbreviation for 'sentence:
20 Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley
(New York: Zone, 1989).
21 The first verbal expressions of the child are past participles, for the past
('left: 'fell') and infinitives for the future. Then periphrasis develops CI am
going to go') and inflections only come in the last place. Cf. Elizabeth
Traugott 'Le changement linguistique et sa relation à l'acquisition de la
langue maternelle' Langages 321973 p. 47.
22 Cf. Robin Lakoff Language and Womans Place (New York: Harper and
Row, 1973).
23 Cf. the study by Joey L. Dillard Black English, Negro Non-Standard English,
and Mexican (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).
24 Brekle Sémantique pp. 94-104, and also W. C. Watt, who is equally oriented
towards an 'abstract performative gram mal" having to account for the
functioning of what he calls 'mental grammar' in its relations to
perception, memory, etc.

13 Pragmatics: a micropolitics of
linguistic formations
Thomas Bever 'TIle Cognitive Basis for Linguistic Structures' in T.R. Hayes
(ed.) Cognition and the Development of Language (New York: Wiley, 1979)
vol. 279 p. 203.
2 Giving up the simplifications that tended to reduce genetic encodings and
evolution to a capitalisation of information and a statistical selection in
which the most complex elements entertained an 'arborescent' dependency

259
 with regard to the most elementary elements, certain theories now
envisage the transfers of genetic information can be produced through
viruses and in such a way that evolution can 'go back' from a more evolved
species to a species that is less evolved or generative or the more evolved.
'If such passages of information were revealed as having been very
important, certain geneticists declare that we would be led to substitute
reticular schema (with communication across branches after their
differentiation) to the bush- or tree-like schema that serve to represent
evolution' Yves Christensen 'Le rôle des virus dans l'évolution' La Recherche
54, March 1975 p. 27l.
3 Sigmund Freud 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' translated by
James Strachey. Standard Edition volume 7 (London: Hogarth, 1953).
4 Pierre Clastres Chronique des Indiens Guayaki (Paris: Plon, 1972) and
Society against the State, Jacques Lizot Le Cercle des feux. Faits et dits des
Indiens Yanomami (Paris: Seuil, 1976).
5 Nathan Lindquist declares that linguistic innovations can attack important
centres 'like paratroopers' and then radiate across neighbouring
countryside. Cited in Bertil Malmberg New Trends in Linguistics translated
by Edward Carners (Stockholm: Lund, 1964) p. 65.
6 Languages 32 December 1973 p. 88.
7 Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics translated by Wade
Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
8 And one doesn't get the impression that the linguist is ready to be rid of it
any time soon, as when, for example, this same Françoise Robert,
frightened by her own audacity with regard to the ideas she proposes in
relation to a 'community grammar', is disturbed that such a conception
might le ad to a representation of competence that would threaten to
destroy the sacrosanct concept of langue. Malmberg New Trends p. 60.
9 Langage 32 December 1973 p. 90.
10 The distinction proposed by Julia Kristeva, within the pro cess of
signifance, between the level of a semiotic chora and a symbolic level,
besides perpetuating and universalising the signifying, also has the
disadvantage of closing up diagrammatic transformation on itself, making
it a sort of deep structure, an arche-writing, once again. With Julia
Kristeva, the innateness of univers ais leaves the symbolic so as to emigrate
into the semiotic. In these conditions, pragmatics risks getting bogged
down on an interminable textual practice like psychoanalysis risks
wandering between a symbolic phenotext and a semiotic genotext which
despite being freed from the personological polarities of communication,
nevertheless remains prisoner of the hypothesis of an 'unconscious
signifying' subjectivity. Julia Kristeva La Révolution du langage poetique
(Paris: Seuil, 1974).

260
11 Regarding a possible tripart division of deixis, into time, space and socius,
see Langage 32 December 1973 p. 45.
12 They thus escape both sense and signification at the same time, in so far as
the first, as Brekle proposes, would be assimilated to the intensional
content of a concept attached to a signifier, and the second to its
extensional aspect. Brekle Sémantique (Paris: Armand Colin, 1974) p. 44.
But from a 'machinic' (and not a logical) point of view, sense would mark
the establishment of a diagrammatic connection that is independent of
any representational or signification al system.
13 In the same way as a group, an institution, or a much bigger social
grouping, an isolated individual can be constitutive of such an assemblage,
which is never reduced to being just a totalisation of individuals, but
which engages other, 'non-human' flows (non-human sexuality, economic
flows, material flows, etc.).
14 John L. Austin How To Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1962), John Searle Les Actes de langage. Un essai de philosophie de
langage (Paris: Hermann, 1972), Oswald Ducrot Dire et ne pas dire (Paris:
Hermann, 1972).
15 Information theorists define signification as 'an invariant in the reversible
operations of translation' (B.A. Uspenskij quoted by Juri Lotman The
Structure of the Artistic Text translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures, 1977) p. 34.
16 Alain Rey 'Langage et temporalités' in Langages 32 December 1973.
Jean-Claude Chevalier for his part writes that 'the language of general
grammar and repression; for the bourgeoisie, the predicative schema and
its meta-language (and the pre-eminence of syntax is indeed an ideological
decision); for the people, technical words and vocabularies and a spoken
language abandoned to an indifferent freedom' 'Idéologie grammaticale et
changement linguistique' Langages 32 December 1973.
17 Charles Sanders Peirce Col!ected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce edited by
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press,
1965).
18 François Jacob considers that the linearity of a mode of encoding allows
much more rigorous control of the linking of encoded sequences. Francois
Jacob 'Le modèle linguistique en biologie' Critique 322 March 1974 p. 202.
19 Without exposing the specificity of the diagrammatic sign, Bettini and
Casetti define its contour weIl. See Filippo Bettini and Francesco Casetti
'La sémiologie des moyens de communication audio-visuels et le problème
de l'analogie' in Dominique Noguez (ed.) Cinema: Théorie, Lectures (Paris:
Klincksieck, 1973) p. 92.
20 Peirce classified algorithms amongst kons of relation, etc.

NOTES 261
21 Lotman The Structure of the Artistic Text p. 36. Content, for Lotman, is
synonymous with the signified.
22 In Hjelmslev's terminology: figures or glossemes of expression.
23 TIle development of a semiotics of synaesthesias would, on this point, be
fundamental: how can sounds be seen, col ours heard, words somatised ...
A propos of'intersensorial transpositions', Merleau-Ponty wrote 'the senses
translate each other without any need of an interpreter, and are mutually
comprehensible without the intervention of any idea' Maurice Merleau-
Ponty The Phenomenology of Perception translated Colin Smith (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 235 [The French text misquotes
Merleau-Ponty - having'sons' (sounds) instead of'sens' (senses).].
24 Semiotics operating by batteries of dis crete signs, cutting up information
into successive dichotomies baptised 'digits:
25 See the different semiotisations of jealousy and vengeance amongst the
Crow and Hopi Indians, noted by Lowie and signalled by Levi-Strauss in
his preface to Solei Hopi. Don C. Talayesva Solei Hopi (Paris: Plon, 1959)
[French language translation of Sun Chief The Autobiography of a Hopi
Indian.].
26 One could distinguish between level a) human enactment, level b) abstract
signification, level c) machinic enactment.
27 'effect' in the sense in that in physics one talks of a 'Compton effect:
28 As in this 'page of writing' by Jacques Prevert, in which the 'lyre-bird's'
flying off into the sky liberates not only the semiotics repressed by school
(singing, dancing, ... ) but also an the other modes of encoding and
stratification: 'and the windows become sand again, the ink becomes water
again, the desks become trees again, chalk becomes a cliff, the pen-holder
becomes a bird: Jacques Prevert Paroles (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
29 Langages 26 June 1972.
30 Cf. also the way in which the imposition of the 'language of the Republic'
on 'wild France' acquired the character of a colonial campaign, such as it
was inaugurated by the Jacobin method of the Revolution. One finds the
same slogans here as marked their furrows across the colonial empire: 'of
routes and schoolmasters: Michel de Certeau, with Dominique Julia and
Jacques Revel Une politique de la langue. La Révolution française et les
patois. (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

14 faciality
1 Cf. the myths of the man without a face, etc., and the fact that when a
psychotic los es the ability to recognise his own face, the entirety of
signification is modified.

262
2 'A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur' literally'In the shadow of young girls
in flower' is the title of part of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, translated by
Montcrieff and Kilmartin as 'Within a Budding Grove' [TN l.
3 '... I had al ways striven, when I stood before the sea, to exp el from my field
of vision, as weIl as the bathers in the foreground and the yachts with their
too dazzling sails that were like seaside costumes, everything that
prevented me from persuading myself that I was contemplating the
immemorial ocean which had already been pursuing the same mysterious
life before the human race .. .' Marcel Proust In Search ofLost Time v.1
translated by Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1981) p. 963.
4 Cf. in this regard Henri Mic:haux's film on drugs, despite its very poor
production quality.
5 Cf. René Spitz's description of the functioning in a newbom baby of a
'Gestalt-sign constituted by the eyes, forehead, and nose in movement:
From the second month, the baby foIlows the eyes of the moving face of
the adult, and during breastfeeding, it fixes its eyes continually on the
mother's face. It smiles at a face (or a mask) but only on condition that
it is seen he ad on. René Spitz De la naissance à la parole (Paris: PUF,
1968). See also Otto Isakower 'Contribution à la psychopathologie des
phénomènes associés à l'endormissement' Nouvelle Revue de la
psychoanalyse 5, 1972, and Bertram D. Lewin 'Le sommeil, la bouche,
et l'écran du rêve' ibid.
6 'In any case, that is to say whether we like it or not, whether we lmow it or
not, we are in the process of unifying the Earth and the peoples that it
bears under the infinite production of reason in its "purity" and of
consciousness in its "propriety'" writes Gerard Granel a propos of Husserl's
phenomenology ('Husserl' article EnGyclopaedia Universalis volume 8). The
whole question here is one of knowing if it is just a matter of taking note
of the ravages of the capitalist crusade to unify modes of subjectivation or,
indeed, of putting one self at its service in the name of a metaphysics of
being in the pure state and the univers al truth, which one intends to tum
into 'a question, a place of combat and of decision'.
7 Jacques Lacan 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience' in Écrits. A Selection translated by
Bruce Fink (New York: WW Norton, 2004).
8 Other registers, that of refrains, for example, or constellations of sonorous
and rhythmic traits occupying temporality - Vinteuil's 'Httle phrase' for
example - which impose a break between the world of speech and the
world of song, would equally be called into question by a such a
reorientation of semiotic assemblages.
9 Ethnologists ought not to content themselves with preaching against
ethnocentrism, they ought also to devote themselves to making possible

263
 the existence of a counter-ethnography that would give to the 'primitives'
the means of developing their point of view on the Whites, who they very
generally consider to be sad, inhuman, cadaverous.
10 The 'retro' phenomenon does not itself result from a passing fashion. It has
always existed, at least in the context of societies that are engaged in a
pro cess of the acceleration of history, that is to say, of the acceleration of
processes of deterritorialisation (the Romans, for example, were fascinated
by the traces of the Greek and Egyptian past).
11 See for example how the judges in court cases where the defendant
has been caught red-handed literally judge them according to 'how they
look'. Christian Hennion Chronique des flagrants délits (Paris: Stock,
1976).
12 Frances A. Yates The Art ofMemory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1966).
13 Cf. the article by Maurice Arvong in Le Monde 1 September 1976.
14 La Recherche 66, April 1976.
15 Jakob von Uexküll Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin: Springer,
1909/21).
16 Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness translated by Hazel E. Barnes
(London: Methuen, 1957) p. 258.
17 Jean-Luc Parant Les Yeux MMDVI Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1976:
'... the work that is the great builders of EMPTY holes that are the eyes
WITHOUT WHICH THEY NOT THE EYES WOULD NOT BE
ABLE EITHER TO FLY OR SEE AND THE EYES HAVE DUG
HOLES IN ALL THE WALLS SIGHT HAS UNBLOCKED
EVERYTHING like the pioneers OF EMPTY space who have beaten a
path to life by hollowing out the night and the consistency THAT
GRIPPED US LIKE A SKIN to the point of finding the EMPTY day
and this void THIS VOID without which THE EYES we could neither
FLY move or see and the eyes are submerged entirely in space and only
ever return to the surface covered with their hard and creased membrane
EYELIDS:
18 Marcel Proust In Search ofLost Time p. 227, 375, 570.
19 In the framework of quantum physics, 'quantum tunnelling' allows the
passage of a physical system from one 'authorised state' to another
'authorised state' via a succession of'prohibited' intermediary states to be
described. See La Recherche 58, July-August 1975.
20 Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology. The Biology of Behaviour translated
by Erich Klinghammer (New York: HoIt, Rhinehart, and Winston,
1970).

264 NOTES
15 The hierarchy of behaviour in man
and animal
1 Nikolas Tinbergen The Study of Instinct (London: Oxford University Press,
1951).
2 René Thom Structural Stability and Morphogenesis translated by D.H.
Fowler.
3 From this point of view, we cannot foIlow Michel Foucault wh en in The
History of Sexuality v.1 he considers that there is a specifie repression of
desire correlative to the evolution of capitalism. It is true that he doesn't
talk about desire, but about sexuality, and that the target being aimed at
having thereby been first reduced, it seems clear that in effect there must,
aIl things considere d, always be 'as mu ch sexuality' in one epoch as
another. But when sexuality-desire is subsequently broadened to the
discourses and power formations that relate to it, it becomes less evident
that there might not be a recuperative repression, which is miniaturised
and interiorised more and more, that is specifie to the methods of
capitalist subjection.
4 In English in the original [TN].
5 Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 143.
6 Remy Chauvin Entretiens sur la sexualité (Paris: Plon, 1965). Cf. the
references assembled by Eibl-Eibesfeldt ibid pp. 158-9.
7 Eibl-Eibesfeldt ibid p. 323 and 450.
8 'An entire study of animal behaviour (one could say as much of human
behaviour) involves in the first place the determination of norms for the
species under consideration, living in its natural milieu, or in conditions
that reproduce them as faithfuIly as possible ... whereas in the wild rabbits
live in a society and manifest complex sexual customs, caged rab bits are
limited to vegetative activity. There is no possible comparison between
the behaviour of a rat free in the wild and a white rat living in the confines
of a small cage. Man has selected the gentlest individuals, the least
'rodent-like' and created a being whose psychic level, compared to that of
the wild rat, is that of a mongoloid idiot [sic] in relation to a normal
human. When one thinks that the immense body of work accomplished
by American zoopsychogists, with the aid of mazes and other tests, is
based exclusively on the reactions of this idiotie white rat of the Winston
or any other race, one is taken aback, to say the least .. : Pierre-Paul
Grasse 'Zoologie' Encyclopédie de la Pléiade v.1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)
p.25l.
9 The first 'quantitative' studies by primatologists (Washburn, DeVore)
started out from the hypothesis of a direct relation between the strictness

265
 of hierarchical domination amongst apes and the degree of adaptation to
life in the savannah, and have had to be reoriented. What has been given
primacy is no longer simply the quantity of social relation (delousing, etc.),
but the quality of their diverse assemblages and their order of appearance.
For example, the graph of links of the four assemblages of two baboons
(one dominant, one dominated): 1) combat; 2) presentation of posteriors;
3) the mounting of a sexual character; 4) social delousing. See Hans
Kummer 'Le comportement social des singes' La Recherche 75, December
1976, pp. 10-12.
10 In this regard we will la ter turn to the use, for example amongst birds, of
specifie refrains for the sexual 'closure' of a species (Eibl-Eibesfeldt
Ethology p. 24,104) and to the more fundamental relations that exist
between the semiotisations of rhythm and of territory.
11 Kummer 'Le comportement social des singes'.

16 semiotics of the grass stem

1 Jurgen Nicolai Vogelhaltung und Vogelpflege. Das Vivarium (Stuttgart:
Franckh-Kosmos Verlag, 1965). Quoted by Eibl-Eibesfeldt.
2 Filmed at the rate of 48 frames a second and decomposed image by image,
these expressions are also found in the Solomon Islands, Papua New
Guinea, France, Japan, Africa, amongst Indians of the Orinoco-Amazon
region, etc. Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology pp. 436-42.
3 Which is opposed here to symbolic interpretation.
4 With regard to criticism of mechanically 'progressive' phylogeny, we can
only repeat here what François Dagognet has said and transpose it from
the botanic taxonomies of zoology: '... Simplicity do es not stand as an
index of primitiveness or ancestrality. In effect, it can be excluded that the
flower was initially polycarpic and multi-petalled (cycadeoidea theory), as
the oldest records of the Early Cretaceous (the Bennettitales) tend to
suggest. Similarly, Monocotyledons would also be derived from
dicotyledons and not the other way around, as an additive theory of
evolution would have it, with regular movements from one to two. It is true
that certain palaeobotanists are happy to admit dense and ramified lines,
on the basis of a single complex, but this is another way of refuting the
concept of a rectilinear and progressive movement. And these remarks
show weIl enough the traps of a phylogeny understood too much in terms of
a transition from the simple to the complex, although the abundance of
spiral forms l... ] may translate an earlier situation' Encyclopaedia
Universalis vol. 15 p. 764.
5 Paul Géroudet Les Palmipèdes (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1959)
pp. 20-40.

266
6 Paul Géroudet Les Échasseurs (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1967)
pp. 31-40.
7 Paul Géroudet Les Passereaux (Neuchatel: Delachaux et Niestlé, nd) vol. 2
pp. 89-94.
8 Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 193.
9 In proximate forms, one finds a courtship ritual that makes a reference to
'nesting' even amongst fish. For example, the male decorates its spawning
are a with [twigs] in such a manner as to pro duce a star effect that will
attract females. Example given by Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 126.
10 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who also recalls the work of 1. Nicolai concerning the
coevolution of Wydahbirds and the birds that they parasite (different
species of Bengali finch, waxbills, etc.) on the basis of the fact that they
imitate their hos1's song: 'it is highly probable that the traditionallinks of
the wydahs with their host-species, which are maintained by the imitation
of the latter's song, has led to the evolution of different races from this
group' Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 162 and 194.
11 Eibl- Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 130 and 136.
12 This ritual is composed of several assemblages:
Dancing: with their necks pushed back, the partners alternate in turning
beaks, head to one side, in such a manner that the beak touches the
shoulder pushed upwards;

ct clashing of beaks, which 'imitates' the search for food by the

young;
banging of beaks, which evokes a threat;
crying towards the sky, which evokes instead an appeasement;
smoothing of shoulder feathers of the partner (always punctuated
bya banging of the beak).

And at the end of each sequence, the order of which is not very strict, the
two birds both bend towards the ground and emit 'two sonorous syllables'
so as to seal a sort of'nesting contract:
13 Paul Géroudet Les Passereaux vol. 2 p. 10.
14 Ibid vol. 3 p. 10.
15 An entire field of animal play ought equally to be explored. Eibl-Eibesfeldt,
for example, describes an extraordinary game of croquet between two
Galapagos finches, pushing a small mealworm back and forth through a
crack in a branch, into which they had probably previously inserted il.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 252.
16 K. lmmelman has demonstrated that zebra finches with highly colourful
plumage, main tain a certain distance from one another, whereas the

267
 alI-white birds of the same species sit more closely to one another. Cited in
EibI-Eibesfeidt p. 143.
17 Even at this Ievei of biologicai fascination that imprinting constitutes,
there will continue to exist sorts of degrees of freedom or optionai
matters, as tends to be indicated by the fact that zebra finches who have
been raised by f(:~rnale society finches will court society finches when
adult if they are given the choice. If on the contrary they are forced to
cohabit with a conspecific female they will appear to become 'normal'
again: they court and breed with thern as if there had been no imprinting.
In short, the effects of imprinting seem to be imposed on the order of
desire.
18 Research of K. Immelman, cited by Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 241.
19 Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt pp. 51-2.
20 It is to be noted that mathematical techniques of data analysis have for
some years had recourse to rnethods of transcription that appeal precisely
to elementary faciality traits. Thus in Chernoff's method, parameters are
represented by the mouth, the nose, etc, and one compares physiognomies
so as to compare the objects studied. See Edwin Diday and Ludovic Lebart
'L'analyse des donnees' in La Recherche 74, January 1977.
21 According to them, aIl, or a part, of the behaviours of negation, approval,
welcoming, flirting, arrogance, intimidation, triumph, submission,
rage etc, arise from c:odings that are transmitted through heredity.
Cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 440 et seq.
22 Let us emphasise that it isn't 'centres' that neurosurgeons localise, but only
resection points that have as a consequence the disorganisation of the
components in question. Everything leads us to think in effect that each
real act of memorisation - in particular when it concerns long-term
memory - puts into play the electrical potentials of a whole population of
neurons, which cannot be 'loc:alised' but whieh is 'selected' in the brain as a
whole. Wilder Penfield and Brenda Milner 'Memory deficit produced by
bilateral lesions in the hippocampal zone' Archive of Neurology and
Psychiatry 1958. E. Roy John Mechanisms of Memory (New York: Academie
Press, 1967).
23 There is rhythm in the beating wings of migrating birds, in the trotting of
wild horses, in undulating gliding of fish; but it is also as impossible for
animaIs to trot, fly, or swim, in metre as it is for humans to breathe in time
with a metronome. Ludwig Klages Expression du caractère dans lëcriture
(Neuchatel: Delachaux-Niestlé, 1947) p. 41.
24 A rhythm of a period of 24 hours, playing a role that turns out to be more
significant the more it is studied, as much at the levels of cellular biology,
pharmacology, the physiology of tissues, organs, and functions, as of
ethology. The majority of rhythms of a greater periodicity - like that of

268
 migrations - result from a composition based on circadian rhythms, and
thus, in the final analysis, from these molecular rhythms.
25 Alain Reinberg 'La chronobiology. Une nouvelle étape de l'étude des
rhythm es biologiques' Sciences vol. 1, 1970; 'Rhythmes biologiques'
Encyclopedia Universalis vol. 14 p. 568; Julian de Ajuriaguerra Cycles
biologiques et psychiatrie (Geneva: Editions Georg et Cie, 1968).
26 William H. Thorpe Learning and Instinct in Animals (London: Methuen,
1969) pp. 421-6.
27 'By a "body" 1 understand whatever has a definite shape and position, and
can occupy a region of space in such a way as to keep every other body out
of it' René Descartes Meditations 2nd Meditation.
28 Von Weizsacker, for example, writes 'In the case of physic:s, the law resides
in the action of forces, in the case of organic: movement, it cornes from
form'Viktor von Weizsacker Le Cycle de la structure translated by Michel
Foucault and Daniel Rocher (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1958).
29 And also, indirectly, specialists of psychoanalytic 'pass' words.
30 An example of a non-signifying and non-individuated system of
'reflexivity' carrying out highly complex discursive work: the duplication
of the double helix systems of DNA that correspond at the molecular level
with the duplication of chromosomes.
31 Cf. 'L'oeil écoute. BABA + GAGA - DADA: Review of the work of Harry
McGurk and John MacDonald 'Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices' from
Nature 26 December 1976, in Le Monde 26 January 1977.
32 For example, why is it that life 'got going' on the basis of carbon and not
silicon?
33 For example, Hoist has established that the rhythms of the pectoral fins of
fish are always dominant in relation to the rhythms of the dorsal and
caudal fins. Cited in Eibl-Eibesfeldt p. 41.
34 A humorous example of an animal warding off of a 'politics of black holes'
through the putting into play of highly sophisticated semiotic interactions:
that of [male] insects which, in order to delay the fatal moment, at least
whilst copulating, under threat of being eaten by their female mate during
intercourse, offer them little alimentary gifts. Those of the species Hilaria
even push the stunt as far as offering them an unconsumable object of
sorne sort, wrapped in a cocoon that is particularly difficult to take apart
... Noted in Eibl-Eibesfeldt Ethology p. 127.
35 Kenneth W. Braly has shown, for example, that immediate 'natura!'
perception of complex forms was influenced considerably by learning on
the basis of an unconscious perceptual memory. Kenneth W Braly"The
Influence of Past Experience in Visual Perception' cited in Robert Frances
La Perception de la musique (Paris: Vrin, 1972) p. 52.

NOTES 269
17 Uttle phrase in Vinteuil's sonata
1 For example, faciality traits trigger attention behaviour amongst the young,
reactions to the 'baby' schema (Lorenz, Spindler ... ) or the effects of
suggestion like those exploited by Milgram with his torture experiments,
graduated, simulated, and ordered by a hierarchical authority. Cf. Eibl-
EibesfeIdt Ethology p. 446 and 448.
2 Thorpe Learning and Instinct in Animais p. 469.
3 '[L Jike that ClIp of te a, all those sensations of light, the bright clamour, the
boisterous colours that Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he
composed, paraded before my imagination, insistently but too rapidly for
me to be able to apprehend it, something that l might compare to the
perfumed silkiness of a geranium. But whereas in memory this vagueness
may be, if not fathomed, at any rate identified, thanks to a pinpointing of
circumstances which explain why a certain taste has been able to recall to
us luminous sensations, the vague sensations given by Vinteuil (like that of
the steeple of Martinville), one would have to find, for the geranium scent
of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the
unknown, colourful festival (of which his works seemed to be the
disconnected fragments, the scarlet-flashing splinters), the mode by which
he "heard" the universe and projected it far beyond himself' (III, 382).
4 Proust himself was a passionate gambIer and at several points in his life
lost large sums of money playing baccarat.
S The field opened up by music cannot be restricted to seven notes on a
keyboard, but to an incommensurable keyboard that is still almost entirely
unknown ... The great artists discover new universes and show us 'what
richness, what variety lies hidden unknown to us, in that vast, unfathomed
and forbidding night of our soul which we take to be an impenetrable void'
(I,380).
6 Proust gives a remarkable description of the worldly salons as collective
assemblages of enunciation, in Cities of the Plain in particular: 'salons
cannot be portrayed in a static immobility which has been conventionaIly
employed up to this point for the study of characters, though these too
must be carried along as it were in a quasi-historical momentum' (II, 769».
7 'The abundance of impressions which he had been receiving for sorne time
past, even though they had come to him rather through the channel of his
appreciation of music, had enriched his appetite for painting as weIl' (I,
244). But this new lease of life for painting will be short lived; it too will
subside in the black hole pro cess of semiotic collapse that will characterise
his passion for Odette.
8 Each one of Odette's visits 'revived the sense of disappointment which he
felt at the sight of a face whose details he had somewhat forgotten in the

270
 interval, not remembering it as either so expressive or, in spite of her
youth, so faded; he used to regret, while she was talking to him, that her
really considerable beauty was not of the ldnd which he spontaneously
admired' (l, 215).
9 Sigmund Freud 'Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva in Standard
Edition volume 9 (London, Hogarth, 1959).
10 A differential analysis would perhaps be led to show that photographs do
not have the same function for Proust as for Kafka (for Proust, the
photograph is related to the portrait, whilst in Kafka, the portrait is related
to the photograph).
11 The same objection was made against partisans of a mathematician such
as Henri-Leon Lebesgue.
12 Cf. 'Histoire de la musique' Encyclopédie de la Pleiade volume 1 p. 1168.
13 Pierre Clastres Society Against the State translated by Robert Hurley (New
York: Zone, 1989) p. 107 et seq.
14 Franz Kafka 'Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse-Folk' in Complete Short
Stories (London: Penguin, 1983) p. 361. From this point of view, let us also
note that for John Cage, a politics of sound should not be an obstacle to
silence, and that silence should not obscure sound. He envisages a sort of
'recuperation' of nothingness, as the following extract from one of his
interviews with Daniel Charles shows:

JC: Nothingness is nothing but a word.

DC: Like silence it must suppress itself ...
JC: And one thereby cornes back to what is, that is to say, to sounds.
DC: But don't you lose something?
JC: What?
DC: Silence, nothingness ...
JC: Look, l'm losing nothing! It isn't a question of losing anything in
aIl that, but of gaining.
DC: Coming back to sound is thus to return to sounds 'accompanied'
by nothingness, this side of al! structure.
JOHN CAGE Pour les oiseaux (Paris: Belfond, 1976) p. 32

See also the comparison that John Cage establishes between going beyond
what is called music and what is called politics: 'politics is the same thing.
And 1 can even talk about "non-politics" the way that with regard to my
work, one spoke of "non-music": Ibid. p. 54.
15 Cf. the fine homage by the musician Jacques Besse 'Robert Schumann was
sectioned' in La Grande Pâque (Paris: Belfond, 1969).

271
16 In certain African musics, a phrase can be drummed without being
articulated verbally.
17 In fact, this new deterritorialised relation between labour power and
power formations doesn't just concern leading economic sectors, it also
has an effect on older sectors, on the public function; it also traverses the
milieus of the unions, politics, universities, the judiciary, etc.
18 Other creators, such as Berlioz, will also use their own inadequacies so as
not to cross a certain threshold of deterritorialisation.
19 One need only think of Debussy's Children's Corner, La Boîte à joujoux,
the role of childhood in Pel/eas and Melisande, or of rEnfant et les
sortilèges by Ravel. But what specifies the position of childhood in these
works, to our mind, is that it no longer functions as a basic refrain, as a
generative bloc, as a bloc of becoming; at the end point of a generative
process of a different nature, it no longer appears as anything other than a
redundant theme. In any case, Claude Debussy very frequently only
characterised the content of his works after the fact by giving them
expressive titles (for example, the symphonie poem La Mer).
20 Cf. Pierre Boulez's analysis of rhythmic cells in Sacré du printemps: Relèves
d'apprenti (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
21 '... when he returned home he felt the need of it: he was like a man into
whose life a woman he has seen for a moment passing by has brought the
image of a new beauty which deepens his sensibility, although he do es not
even know her name or whether he will ever see her again. Indeed this
passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann
the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation .. : (1, 229).
22 In English in the original [TN].

272 NOTES
1

a-signification 6,39,130 chimpanzees 204

and assemblages 7
and birds 209,214
and faciality 179
in Proust 232, 234
abstraction 124-5
See a/sa machines, abstract
adolescence 8,78,130,247
stages of life 143-7
alienation 40, 47, 57, 65, 67, 73-4,
103, 135, 156
tolerability of 83
Althusser, Louis xii, 99-100
analogy 160-1
analysis:
conditions for a new method
of36
and faciality 50
institutional xii, 43, 53, 55
micropolitical9, 53,55,74
militant 56,69,95,98, 103
poverty of means for 226
pragmatic 9-10,54-5
in Proust 233
rhizomatic 80, 163
schizo- 194-5,233,239
and unconscious 92, 232
and universals 36
See also pragmatics
animaIs 198-205
altruistic behaviour 205
baboons 203
birds 207-16, 218
birdsong 213-15
courtship 210-12
and humans 193,200
and orgasm 199
wasp and orchid 201-2
See also ethology
anxiety 86,128,146,163,181,186,
188-9,201
archaeology 53-4
archaic societies 91, 158, 162
and capitalism 134, 186, 236
and expression 7-9
and faciality 184
and music 238
refuse signification 162,
165-6
and rhythm 238-9
and school 150
and territorialisation 37
and writing 8, 166
aristocracy See nobility
artifice 40
assemblages 52
and a-signification 7
and desire 54-5
and deterritorialisation 120
and equipment 33,36-7,
59-60,96
and expression 61
heterogeneous 47
inter- 194-5,197-8,201-3,
209
and machines 62, 119, 132
manifestation of 96
and micropolitics 53
possibility of 36
 revolutionary 200
territorialised 165
and unconscious 4
See also collective assemblages;
desire; enunciation
Barel, Yves 20, 24, 30
baroque 168
Barthes, Roland 113
Bataille, Georges 21
Bateson, Gregory 10
beat poets 226
Belladonna, Judith xv
Bellochio, Marco, Fou à délier 69
belonging 17
Benveniste, Émile 131
Bettin 160
Bever, T. G. 142
bi-univocalisation 122,167,199
binarisation 119,181,184,187,190,
192,197-8,236
binarist illusion 238-9
See also dualism
black holes 44, 48, 74, 88-9, 154,
163,179,181-5,188-9,
193-4,198-201,204,212,
216,222
and capitalism 186
body 179-80, 184, 188
bourgeoisie 19-22
and collective equipment 19,21,
24,29
invade everything 32
and nobility 23-6, 28-31
sensibility of 26-7,30
and workers 63-4
Braudel, Fernand xvi
Brekle, Herbert E. 137-8,154,
158
Bukharin, Nikolai 174
capitalism:
and archaic societies 134, 186,
236
274
and black holes 186
and bourgeoisie 25
and childhood 239
and collective equipment 11-12,
17-18,26,33,50
and deterritorialisation 16,
18-20,32-3,95
deterritorialises everything
32,48
everything organised around 60
and faciality 180-2
and family 42
and fascism 61,88,90
historie al development of 15-19,
24,26,28-9
integrated world capitalism xvi
and Kafka 223
and language 8-9
as only economy 135
refrains of 236-8
and rhythm 236-7
school as enslavement to 150
and semiotic components 6,42
and semiotisation 8, 99
and signification 158
and signifier 190-1
and workers 63
at your service 46
Casetti, Francesco 160
causality 41, 56, 86,105,109,149,
192,198-9,217
and machines 192
CERFI (Centre for Institutional
Study, Research and
Development) xiii-xv
Chambon, Roger 3
chance 119
change 68
Chaplin, Charlie, Modern Times 161
Chauvin, Rémy 201
childhood/children 4, 53,126-7
bed wetting of 145
and bourgeois sensibility 26-7
and capitalism 239
 in Chopin 241
and desire 85-6
drawings of 144
and enslavement 150
as escape from signifier 8
and faciality 182, 186
and freedom 92
modelling of 42
in Proust 235-6
and repression 144-6,149
and school 42-4
in Schumann 240
stages of life 143-7
worked from inside 33
See also Freud, Little Hans
Chomsky, Noam 9,110-12,115-16,
131-3,137-9,151-2,
170,174
early intuitions of 133
Chopin 241
Christ 188
Christianity 15-16
churches 16-17, 19-22
citizenship 175
Clastres, Pierre 9, 134,237
collective assemblages 71-4
cartography of 74-81
identity loss in 98
See also assemblages; desire;
enunciation
collective equipment xiv-xvi, 35-8,
40,42-3,47-8
and bourgeoisie 19,21,24,29
and capitalism 11-12, l7 -18,
26,33,50
crisis in 45
and desire 13-14,67,93
and deterritorialisation 46
and enunciation 67
and fabrication of individuals
12-14,33
and faciality 50-1, 186,237
function of 11-12, 34
and hum ans Il
and machinic revolution 99
and micropolitics 52-3
and possession of individuals
35-6
and pragmatic analysis 9-10
and repression 100
See also equipment
communication 115-16, 123,
134,154
competence:
communicative 137,158
in general175
and performance 135-9, 141-2,
151-2,175
computers 191
conscientialisation 123-4, 163,
180-2,186,194,
200-1,222
and power 185
and signifying power 166
contingency 116
and subject 120
couples 44, 53,193
and state power 65
cynicism 27
Deleuze, Gilles ix, xii, xiv, 43
Anti-Oedipus ix, xi-xii, xiv, 172
Dialogues xi
and institution of philosophy xi
'Intellectuals and Power' xi
Kafka: Towards a Minor
Literature xiii
A Thousand Plateaus xiii-xv
Déligny, Fernand 43
democratic regimes, and fascism
87-91
desire:
alienation of 37
and archaic societies 7
and assemblages 54-5
and children 85-6
collective assemblages of 33,47,
59,72,93
275
 and collective equipment 13-14,
67,93
control of 126, 144, 182, 186
and deterritorialisation 32
economy of 40, 54, 56, 58, 62-3,
68, 73, 98, 228
energy of 125, 127
and escape from signifier 8-9
and everyday 237
expropriation of 36
extinguished by white male
gaze 187
human and animal 200
and language 3
and law72
leakiness of 124,147
lines of flight of 53, 61
and micropolitics 74,202
micropolitics of 5,9,48,69,75,
95,103,136,139,147,
186,235
politics of 61, 68, 75-6,149
and power 81
in Proust 235
and repression 60, 92, 99
and research 38-9
and 'serious' people 51
and state power 65, 85, 93
struggle of 81, 97
and value 12
See also machines, desiring
Dessert, Daniel 25
destiny 37, 66, 71,156,205
deterritorialisation 14,48,53,109
and abstract machines 62, 121
and archaic societies 166
and artifice 40
and assemblages 120
and birds 211-16
and bourgeoisie 24-6
and capitalism 16, 18-20,32-3,
48,95
and collective equipment 46
and desire 72
276
and fascism 88
and labour 58
and music 240
of nobility 27-8
and politics 148
as possibilisation 149
and semiotic components 59
of sentiment 27
and subjectivity 201
diagrammatism 40, 58, 62, 74,
91,96,99-101,121-2,
124,128,131-2,147,
149,153,155-6,159-61,
173,195,197,209,218,
236
diagrammatic transformation
159,171
diagrams 159
disciplines (academic) xiv, 41, 150
interdisciplinarity xiii-xiv
See also research; scholarly
thinking
dis course 135,138,190
rational 49, 72
dominant:
redundancies 51,53,66,69,74,
95-6,162,223,234
significations 8, 40, 50, 118,
124,135,153,159,
170,173,180,188,
190,217
Don Quixote (Cervantes) 26
Dosse, François, xiv
drawing 144
See a/so painting
drugs 88,90
dualism 120, 166,217
See also binarisation
Duby, Georges 15
Ducrot, Oswald 128, 135, 157
ecologyxvi
education See school
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus 203,212
enslavement: experimentation 66, 103-4, 154-5,
audiovisual126 165,202,219
chronographic 240 exploitation 11,15-16,21, 29-30,
machinic 57,223 57,63-5
by school 150 expression 185
semiotic 44,133-4,166 and archaic societies 7, 186
enunciation 186 and assemblages 61
assemblages of 4-5,9-10,39, and capitalism 8-9, 186
68,123,126-7,131,154, and collective equipment Il
162-4,167,169,174, and content 117, 119, 122,
186,220 125-8,138,142,167-8
collective assemblages of xii-xiii, foundation of 126
xv,12,38,46,67,97-100, and order 119
110,125,130,142,147, and school 44
155,173,229 and semiotics 157
individuation of 50 and signification 188
linguistics of 116 and syntacticised language 37
militant 56
psychoanlaysis crushes 4-5 faciality 93,146,163,179-94,
and rational discourse 49 197-9,203,213,223
and research 38-9 and archaic societies 184
and responsibilisation 181 and bourgeoisie 30
splitting of 127 and capitalism 180-2
environment xvi and children 182,186
equipment xv, 53, 65-6, 83 and collective equipment 50-l,
and assemblages 33,36-7, 186,237
59-60,96 decay of 46
and fascism 87-8,90 and enslavement 166
See also collective equipment and ethnology 207
equivalence 183 and institution 46, 50
escape 69, 72,133,188,237 and labour 57
ethnology: and normalisation 187-9
and ethology 204 and politics 181
and faciality 207 and polyvocity 189
ethology 208, 214, 218, 225 and power 49-51,180-1,187,
and ethnology 204 189
everyday 9, 53, 56, 91,102,161,184, and Proust 183,221,226,230-2
187-8,194 saturated by standardised models
and desire 237 of 182
and struggle 66 and semiotic components
and subjectivation 194 182-4
evolution 192, 205, 208 and signification 179-80
expenditure 21, 28, 30 and teachers 80
experience xi-xii white male gaze 187

277
 worked from inside 33 Grane!, Gérard 185
and world 181, 183 group x-xi
family 48-9, 53 and semiotics 165
and capitalist production 42 Grousset, René 18
and miniaturisation 67 Guattari, Félix ix-xvi
and normality 53 Anti-Oedipus ix, xi-xii, xiv, 172
and state power 65 eariy work of x
fascism 74, 223 foci ofxi
and capitalism 61, 88 Kafka: Towards a Minor
and democratic regimes 87-91 Uterature xiii
micro- 68,78,89-91,104 Unes ofPlight xiv-xvi
as possibility 104 marginalisation of ix
and revolution 92 A Thousand Plateaus xiii-xv
Fauré, Gabriel 241 'TInee Billion Perverts' xiii
feeling 33 guilt 48, 72-3, 89,166,168,181,
passions 170 186,201
feudalism 17, 19-20,30
FGERI (Federation of Groups for Habermas, Jürgen 137-8
Institutional Study and Hall, M. F. 211
Research) xiii heredity 136-7,207,218-19
finitude 237 heterogeneous:
Foucault, Michel xiv, 44, 53, 90, assemblages 47, 236
104,121 components 56,217,221, 223
'Intellectuals and Power' xi Hinde, R. 215
and prisons 55-6 history 153
Fourquet, François xiv Hitler, Adolf 87-8
freedom 205-6 Hjelmslev, Louis 116-18, 122, 126,
Freinet, Célestin 104 128,163,168
Freud, Sigmund x, 6 Holst, E. von 222
Little Hans x, 72, 90-1,127,156 Houssin, Yann 69
future 192 humans:
and revolution 234 and animaIs 193,200,225
and bourgeoisie 32
gangs 8, 15,90,144 and collective equipment Il
revoit prevented by 90 and machines 191
Gaulle, Charles de 46
gaze, white male 187 ideology, and state power 99-100
Genghis Khan 37 Ignatius of Loyola 27
Géroudet, Paul 211 Illich, Ivan 67
God, Peace of 16, 18,29,33-4 images 159
Godechot, Jacques 29 Immelman, K. 201, 211
grammaticality 133, 135, 142, l70-1 individual:
and pragmatics 171 enslaved by school 150
Gramsci, Antonio xii, 98 fabrication of 12-14, 33

278
 infra- 10, 12,48, 54, 75-6 division of xii, 85
and political 54 and faciality 57
possession of 35-6, 223 Lacan, Jacques x, 39, 162, 199,219
in Proust 229 mirror stage 181,186
and psychoanalysis, x language xi
'serious' people 51 and capitalism 8-9
and state power 50 creativity of 116-17
and world 40 infinitives 134
See a/sa personalisation; subject and information 115
industrial revolution, third 57 in itself 150-2
infantilisation 239 leakiness of 119
information the ory 10,42, 71, and normalisation 118
115,119,191-2,197-8, and politics 136
212 and power 141
infra-: in Proust 228
individual10, 12,48,54,75-6 and speech 190
personological33,142 and state power 134
institution x-xvi and unconscious 3, 6
and crisis 45 and universals 135-7
and faciality 46, 50 See aiso dis course;
institutional analysis xii, 43, enunciation; expression;
53,55 grammaticality;
reform without revolution 55 polyvocity; semiotics;
integrated world capitalism xvi speech acts; writing
intellectuals, and militancy 97-8 law 70-3
interdisciplinarity xiii-xiv and desire 72
disciplines xiv, 41, 150 leaders 10 1, 103
interpretance 131,160 politicians 66
interpretation 232 Lenin 96-7
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 166
Jones, Ernest 200 Lewin, Kurt 10
Journet, Jean-Louis 25 life, origins of 192
lines of flight 33,53,61,93, 104,
Kafka, Franz xii-xiii, xv, 235, 238 111,120,122,125,129,
and capitalism 223 142,148,155,172,194,
and Proust 226 199,201,209,212,214,
Kennedy, John F. 63 216,230
Khrushchev, Nikita 63 control of 83
Klages, Ludwig 217-18 linguistics 110
Koestler, Arthur 8 and Chomsky 9
of enunciation 116
La Borde, x-xiii generative 135
labour: object of 115
and deterritorialisation 58 and pragmatics 157

279
 and structure xiii
See also grammaticality;
pragmatics
literature, minor 136
Lorenz, Konrad 214
Lotman, Yuri 160
love 19,26
machines:
abstract 59-62, 96-7,109-12,
120-5,143-9,152-4,
170
and assemblages 62,119,132,
170
and bourgeoisie 30
and causality 192
coexistence of 31
concrete 39, 59-61,185,187,194,
204,208
definition of 121
desiring Il,54,58
and humans 191
machinic sense 208-9
mega- 67-8,96
and rational dis course 49
religious 15-17,19,23,165
revolutionary 97, 99
and semiotisation 214
and subjectivity 35
and unconscious 4
war 15,20,91,97,119,173
madness, as escape from signifier 8
Manichaeism 13, lOI, 172, 179
Mao Tse-tung 50
map, and unconscious 156, 173
Marxism 105,171
and sciences 66-7
See also socialism
masses, energy of 87
May 1968 45,76-7,79,102,187
McCawley, Jim 174
media 57,66,81-2,89,126,182-3,
238
television 50-1,84,237
280 iNDEX
memory 149-50, 190,217
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 219
metamodelling xii
Metz, Christian 37, 118, 136
Michaux, Henri 226
micropolitical:
analysis 9, 53, 55, 74
ethology 50
group 36
struggle 52
micropolitics 52-3,61,65,98,101,
110,116,118,127,131,
133,137,152
and desire 74, 202
of desire 5,9,48,69,75,95,103,
136,139,147,186,235
and pragmatics 155
militancy 56, 102
and intellectuals 97-8
and workers 97
See also analysis, militant
miniaturisation 14,18,20,24,33,
44,53,67,83,126
and faciality of power 50-l,
183
and fascism 88, 90
and revolutionary powers 47
and struggle 97
minor literature 136
minorities 23
modelling xii, 37,42,50,87,93,
102-3,132,182,212,
237
modernity 95
molecular revolution 51,55,67,77,
79,83,101
and capitalist development 26
See also revolution
money:
and capitalist development 16
and psychoanalysis 4-5
Mozère, Liane xiv
Mumford, Lewis 68
Murard, Lion xiv
music 137,218
and archaic societies 238
baroque 168
as calming design 46
and deterritorialisation 240
in Proust 227-8,230-5,241-2
See also rhythm
Mussolini, Benito 87
mutations 83
nature 40
disappearance of 85
return to 70, 96, 163
Nietzsche, Friedrich 72
Nimier, Jacques 192
nobility 16, 19-21
and bourgeoisie 23-6, 28-31
deterritorialisation of 27-8
norms/normalisation 89, 133-4,
138,144
and faciality 187-9
and family 53
and language 118
and universities 68
order, ideal of 119
origins 105
Oury, Fernand 145
packs 218
painting 183
See also drawing
Parent, Jean-Luc 193
Parnet, Claire, Dialogues xi
passions 170
feeling 33
Peace of God 16,18,29,33-4
peasantry 24, 28, 58
Peirce, C. S. lB, 132, 159-60, 164
perception:
appearance of world 3
and collective equipment 13-14
performance, and competence
135-9,141-2,151-2,175
personalisation 50-l, 180
infra- 33, 142
plane of consistency 109, 121-2,
129-30,142,148,155,169,
173,222
Polack, Jean-Claude xi
politicians 66
leaders 101, 103
politics:
of archaic societies 165
and deterritorialisation 148
and faciality 181
and language 136
polyvocity 7, 60,144,168,183,189
and faciality 189
Pompidou, Georges 46
possible 148,185,190
>"possibilisation 149
power 6
and bourgeoisie 23
calming designs of 46
and competence 135
and conscientialisation 185
constituted 49
and desire 81
disciplinary 104
and faciality 49-51,180-1,187,
189
and language 141
molar and molecular 48-9,
52,93
psychoanalysis avoids 43
signifying 166
and structure 7, 9
See also state power
pragmatics 9-10,54-5, llO-lI,
115-16,125,138,152
definition of 142,154-5
generative 157-8,173,175
and grammaticality 171
and linguistics 157
and micropolitics 155
revolutionary 171
and rhizomes 155,165
281
 and unconscious 9, 153-4, 156
and universals 138,150
primitive societies See archaic
societies
prisons 55-6
production 57-8
and semiotisation 63
prostitution 81
Proust, Marcel xi, 194,226-35,
241-3
analysis in 233
and capitalism 223
extraordinary semiotic
magnification in 235
and faciality 183, 221, 226,
230-2
In Search ofLost Time 183,229
and Kafka 226
music in 227-8,230-5,241-2
The Prisoner 228
Swann's Love 228
psychiatry:
impotence of 41
outside the hospital 67
psychoanalysis 115,220
assemblages impeded by 55
avoids real power 43
enunciation crushed by 4-5
extinguishing effects of 173
and individualism, x
and money 4-5
and signifier 237
stages of life 143-7
and structure 156
psychosis, ix-x
public/private 99-100
Querrien, Anne xiv, 42
Lécole mutuelle: une pédagogie
trop efficace? xv
Rabinow, Paul xv
Racine, Jean 26
rational discourse 49, 72
282
Recherches xiii-xv
'Genealogy of Capital'
xiv-xv
'Three Billion Perverts' xiii
redundancy 51, 53, 66, 69, 74,162,
180,183,185,189,194,
223,234,237
and semiotisation 95-6
refrains 236-8
Reinberg, A. 218
religious machine See machines,
religious
repression 69,86,88,101-2,124,
144,187
and children 144-6,149
and collective equipment 100
and desire 60,92, 99
miniaturisation of 83
and semiotisation 145-6
research xiii-xvi, 205
and desire 38-9
and enunciation 38-9
interdisciplinarity xiii-xiv
as intervention 56
and school 43
and semiotics 37-40
See also disciplines; scholarly
thinking; universities
responsibilisation 181-2
revolution 63
and fascism 92
and future 234
machinic 97, 99
micro- 84
See also molecular revolution
revolutionary movement:
gangs prevent 90
and institution 55
rhizomes 53,69,72,75,111,174,
185,190,193,195,
197-9,204,214,216,
232-3
and pragmatics 155,165
rhizomatic analysis 80
rhythm 218, 222, 240 and Chomsky 9
and archaic societies 238-9 and expression 157
and capitalism 236-7 and group 165
See also music in Proust 235
Robert, Françoise 151-2 and research 37-40
Ruwet, Nicholas 116 and school149-50
and semiology 113
Sade, Marquis de 72 two formations of 27
Sadock, Jerrold 174 semiotisation 47
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and and capitalism 8, 16,99
Nothingness 193 and collective equipment Il
Saussure, Ferdinand de 117, 139, and dominant redundancies
151,157 95-6
schizo-analysis 194-5,233,239 and faciality 50
scholarly thinking 12,45 and machines 214
See also disciplines; research; and production 63
universities regime change begins with 87
schooI41-4,55,57,144 and repression 145-6
and enslavement to capitalism and subject 123
150 sense 189
and miniaturisation 67 machinic 208-9
and semiotics 149-50 without signification 132
students 84 sensibility, bourgeois 26-7, 30
teachers 49, 55, 65, 77-8, 80, 85, sentiment, deterritorialisation
149 of27
See also research 'serious' people 51
Schumann, Robert 238, 240 sexuality 53, 72, 91, 135, 179-80,
sciences, and Marxism 66-7 201, 204, 208
Searle, John 137, 157 signification 122
self-management 86, 95, 102-3 archaic societies refuse 162,
semiology, and semiotics 113 165-6
semiotic components: and capitalism 158
and birds 209 dominant 8,40,50, 118, 124,
and capitalism 6, 42 135,153,159,170,173,
and creativity 118 180,188,190,217
and deterritorialisation 59 and expression 188
and faciality 182-4 and faciality 179-80
and faciality of power 50 sense without 132
kinds of 129,158,162 signifier 125-6, 128
and pragmatic analysis 9-10 and capitalism 190-1
and production of subjectivity 35 dictatorship of 5-9, 158, 174,
and unconscious 4 187
semiotics 126 and psychoanalysis 237
and birds 209, 212 and subjectivity 220

283
signifying:
power 166, 190
structuralism 204
substance 167
transformations 157-8, 162
simulacra 46-8
socialism 63,65,67
fascism supersedes 89
See also Marxism
space, and time 192-3,213,
223,226
spectacle 126
speech, and language 190
speech acts 136-8, 154
spontaneity 102-3
Stalin, Joseph 87
state power 29,46,48-9, 104
and capitalism 48
and desire 65, 85, 93
and ideology 99-100
and language 134
societies without 134
and struggle 98
ubiquity of 64-5,93
structuralism 9, 116,204,219-20
and signifier 237
and structure 6
and unconscious 3
structure xiii, 119
and map 156
and power 7,9
and structuralism 6
struggle 84
class 91,98
of desire 81
and everyday 66
and miniaturisation 97
as possibility 65, 104
and state power 98
students 84
style 136, 209
subject:
and contingency 120
fabrication of 12-14
284
and rational discourse 49
and semiotisation 123
'serious' people 51
state power at heart of 93
subjectivation 47, 61, 87,138,186,
220
and everyday 194
and heterogeneous components
221
semiotic components centralised
on 182-3
subjectivity 205
and deterritorialisation 201
production of 35
in Proust 229
and signifier 220
symbiosis 201-2
teachers 49, 55, 65, 77-8, 80, 85,149
and faciality 80
See also school
teenagers 8, 78, 130, 143-4,
146,247
television 50-1, 84, 237
See also media
territorialised assemblages 165
theOl-Y xii
Thom, René 199
Thorpe, W H. 218, 225
time:
and capitalism 239
in Proust 235
and space 192-3,213,223,226
Tinbergen, N. 197,201,214
Tosquelles, François x
transversality x-xiii, 47, 59,104,202,
216,235
Uexküll, Jakob von 193
Ulysses 179
unconscious:
and analysis 92, 232
analytic intervention of 56
and fascism 89
 and language 3, 6
and map 156, 173
and militancy 102
and pragmatics 9,153-4,156
rethinking of x-xii
social xiv, 92
structure of 3-5
univers aIs 61,98,116,119,136-9,
141-2,152,172,226
and analysis 36
and language 135-7
and pragmatics 138, 150
universities 67-8
See also disciplines; research;
scholarly thinking
urbanisation xiv, xvi, 18-19,21,
23-8,32,35
USSR 68, 82, 87-8, 101
value 13,42,188
and desire 12
Virilio, Paul 101
voice 179
Wagner 241
wasp and orchid 201-2
Weber, Max 18
Weinrich 152
Weizsaecker, Viktor von 219,226
West, collapse of 20
Winnicot, D. W. 43
women 53
workers 57-8,67,171
after work 79
and bourgeoisie 63-4
and militancy 97
world:
acceptance of 237
appearance of 3
and faciality 181, 183
and individual 40
writing 124, 149, 172
and archaic societies 8, 166
and syntacticised language 37
Wunderlich, Dieter 137,174
Yanomami 188, 190
285