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Abstract

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the central project of capitalism consists in the articulation of economic production with the production of subjectivity. The first part of this paper expands on how capitalism manufactures a particular mode of existence corresponding to its economic flows. Herein, it is argued that the paradigmatic figure of our neoliberal and machinic times is a self-condemning subject, attached simultaneously to the assemblages of capitalism as slave units in the cybernetic sense. The second part revolves around the question of activating a new process of subjectivation towards a new mode of existence. It is argued that the latter requires a voyage to an immanent outside and returning to the present plane of existence with new perspectives to recombine its elements differently. This spiritual voyage presupposes a suspension of the general mobilisation decreed by capital. In this context, idleness – in the form of meditative life – is offered as a micro ethico-political action that may not only allow us to acknowledge our habitually reactive selves but also give access to the outside where hitherto unknown existential refrains and configurations could be discovered.

Keywords

Capitalism Deleuze and Guattari idleness political action subjectivity

Desire is in production, just as production is in desire.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Introduction

Read (2007: 139) regards the epigraph as a ‘war cry’ that ‘could be used to sum up’ Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. ‘With this phrase’, he articulates, ‘Deleuze and Guattari reject any dualisms or hierarchies’, such as between ‘the subjective and the objective that would make the subjective an effect of the material’ (Read, 2007: 139). Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of social-production so as to emphasise that in every mode of production the ethico-political activity of subject production is immanent to the production of things which are deemed (in savagery and despotism) or calculated (in capitalism) to be valuable. What is stressed here is the univocity of the concept of production. According to Virno (1996), this refers to the ‘immediate coincidence between production and ethics, structure and superstructure . . . between material development and culture’ (p. 14). He argues that ‘if we fail to perceive the points of identity between labour practice and modes of life, we will comprehend nothing of the changes taking place in the production and misunderstand a great deal about the forms of culture’ (Virno, 1996: 14).

Capitalism is not an exception in terms of the immediate coincidence between a particular mode of object production and a particular mode of subject production (for savagery and despotism, see Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 145–154 and 192–217). At the expense of disconcerting base-superstructure orthodoxy, we need to stress that Marx was already there. For Marx, a particular mode of existence was not just a simple side-effect of a particular economic production; instead, the former was immanent and indispensable to the existence of the latter.¹ In this regard, Marx would not disagree with Deleuze and Guattari in that: ‘the central project of capitalism consists in the articulation of economic, technological, and social flows with the production of subjectivity in such a way that political economy is identical with subjective economy’ (Lazzarato, 2014: 8).

In the first part of this paper, I will discuss how capitalism as a system of commodity production manufactures a particular mode of existence corresponding to it by drawing on the concepts of ‘social subjection’ and ‘machinic enslavement’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 451–460). Here, I will also describe the paradigmatic subject-figure of our neoliberal and machinic times by referring to Foucault’s (2008) lectures on neoliberalism and critical studies on new-technologies-at-work. In particular, I will argue that the paradigmatic subject-figure of our times corresponds to a self-condemning subject, who is simultaneously enslaved to the machinic processes of capitalism as a non-human-like variable. This is a regressive subject; a subject who is in ‘existential contraction’ (Guattari, 2000: 47).

The second part of the paper will revolve around the following question: how might we think of a new process of subjectivation whereby a new way of being in the world can be actualised? I will argue, through O’Sullivan (2011, 2012), that the production of the new in relation to subjectivity involves experimentation with an immanent outside and coming back to the present plane of existence more equipped with novel perspectives to combine its elements differently. A ‘spiritual voyage’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 381) to this sort of outside requires a break with the existing reality and its accompanying significations and machinic apparatuses, that is, a rupture in habit. This presupposes, first and foremost, a suspension of the general mobilisation decreed by capital, that is, a sort of non-productivity in capitalist terms. In this context, I will offer idleness as a micro ethico-political technology of such a rupture. Here, idleness will not be understood as ‘acceptance of what happens’, laziness or monotony but as the practice of otium in the form of self-contemplation or ‘meditative life’ (Nietzsche, 1996: 171). This paper, in brief, will uphold that idleness, in the form of meditative life, may not only allow us to acknowledge our habitually reactive selves but also give access to the outside where new existential refrains and configurations could be found.

The production of subjectivity in capitalism

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that the investment of capital into subjectivity is a twofold power relation. In other words, the production of value and wealth in capitalism operates at the intersection of two heterogeneous but complementary power regimes (i.e. dispositif), namely ‘social subjection’ and ‘machinic enslavement’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 451–460). In this part, I will briefly explain what these power regimes mean and how they function before speculating on the paradigmatic subject-figure of our times.

Social subjection might be thought of a subjectivation process directed towards producing ‘individuated subjects with identities’ (Wark, 2017: 78) by acting on their consciousness. This process consists in assigning us a specific ‘profession, pre-determined and future roles, and so on in response to the needs of the social division of labour’ (Lazzarato, 2015: 183, also Bueno, 2020: 82–85). It often starts in the family (even before we were born, à la Lacan) and operates in our entire lives through ‘signifying semiologies’ (Guattari, 1996, 2010, also Genosko, 2011, 2012; Hietanen and Andéhn, 2018) such as narratives, discourses, instructions, lectures, myths and stories which are activated and diffused largely through the medium of human language. They create a system of representation, meaning and interpretation, which overall produce a rationality through which one comes to construct oneself as ‘I’ and orient her/his actions accordingly.

The individuated subject of our neoliberal times corresponds to Foucault’s (2008) ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (Da Costa and Saraiva, 2012; Jones and Murtola, 2012; Tedmanson et al., 2012). In his 1978–1979 lectures, Foucault discerns one of the characteristic tendencies of neoliberal ‘governmentality’ as ‘the extension of the rationality of the market . . . to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic’ (Foucault, 2008: 323). Neoliberal reason, which was formulated and promoted originally by the Chicago School, ‘redefines the social sphere as a form of economic domain and [thus] elides any difference between the economy and the social’ (Lemke, 2001: 197). This corresponds to the ‘reorganisation of social relations around a notion of enterprise’ (McNay, 2009: 55), where enterprise indicates ‘cost-benefit calculus, financial concerns, productivity, efficiency, and expedience’ (Hamann, 2009: 41).

‘The generalisation of the enterprise form through the whole of society’ (Flew, 2012: 56) does not only concern the privatisation and commodification of public institutions and common wealth. It encompasses, above all, the subjectivity. As Lemke (2001) states, ‘the area covered by the economy embraces the entirety of human action’ (p. 198). Indeed, neoliberal reason attributes a new meaning to the anthropology of humankind: the subject is no longer a creature of barter, truck and exchange (as in liberalism of Smith, Hume, Ferguson) but of ‘interest, investment, and competition’ (Read, 2009: 29). By inventing and diffusing a particular mode of life or, in Foucault’s (2008) terms, by creating a ‘conduct of conduct’, neoliberalism forges a ‘social milieu’ in which the subjects come to define themselves as autonomous entrepreneurs, relating to their own being as a form of human capital (see the notion of human capital in Becker, 1964). In this model, one is encouraged to compete not only with others but also with oneself. One is motivated to work on himself. One needs to measure, invest in, and calibrate oneself according to the calculations of cost and benefit, supply and demand and profit-making. After all, one need to take responsibility for one’s actions in the most prudent fashion as she/he is the ‘boss’ of her/himself.

The neoliberal project of producing self-enterprise has eventually hit the brick wall (Berardi, 2015, 2016; Fleming, 2017a, 2017b; Lazzarato, 2014, 2015). Its promises of material and immaterial wealth in return for hard-work, competitiveness, self-investment, risk-taking and ‘radical responsibilisation’ (Fleming, 2017a: 691) have largely proved empty. The project of transforming every individual into a boss, business, shareholder has resulted in ‘a growing economic insecurity, low productivity, diminished autonomy and worrying levels of personal debt’ (Fleming, 2017a: 691). Today, ‘frustration, resentment, and fear make the “passions” of the neoliberal relation to the self’ (Lazzarato, 2015: 186). At the same time, it must be added, in neoliberalism one has been produced to feel guilty and take full responsibility for her/his fate. Lazzarato’s striking insight needs to be put here (also Fisher, 2014):

[T]he ‘enemy’ becomes indistinguishable from a part of the self. ‘Complaints’ are turned against oneself . . . Hence the guilt, bad conscience, loneliness, and resentment. [Self-enterprise] coincides with his full and complete alienation. Neurosis is the pathology of a bygone capitalism; the ‘malady’ of the twenty-first century manifests itself in ‘depression’. (Lazzarato, 2015: 187)

Social subjection is a compelling power regime acting on the production of subjectivity, which corresponds to a regressive/negative subjectivity in our neoliberal times. It is not easy to escape from this web of representation which embodies various pillars and temporalities of life. Nevertheless, it is still ‘human, all too human’ inasmuch as it relies on inter-subjective relations that operate principally through signifying semiologies. Deleuze and Guattari speak of an entirely different capture of subjectivity within capitalism, machinic enslavement, imposed on individuated subjects through asignifying (e.g. representational, operational and diagrammatic) semiologies such as signs, mathematical equations, indices, diagrams, scientific formulas, computer languages and protocols (Guattari, 1996, 2010; also Bueno, 2020: 82–85; Genosko, 2011, 2012; Hietanen and Andéhn, 2018). If social subjection is a subjectivation process directed towards producing individuated subjects, machinic enslavement might be regarded as a desubjectivation process, transforming and making use of individuated subjects as ‘constituent pieces of a machine they compose . . . with other things (animals, tools)’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 457). This requires a bit of explanation.

For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is a social relation but a machinic one.² It is conceptualised as a – mega – social-machine, that is, a network of overlapping assemblages (e.g. business, media, state) in which human and nonhuman entities are irreversibly enmeshed in constituting human-nonhuman systems. The operation of these systems rests on the converge of living and dead forces, that is of human organs (e.g. eyes, hands, muscles) and faculties (e.g. cognition, affection, sense-making) and an assembly of nonhuman entities (henceforth technical-machinery) such as hardware, tools, objects, protocols, devices and software. In fully developed capitalism, according to Deleuze and Guattari, technical-machinery can no longer be considered secondary inasmuch as it has an agency; its diagrammatic functioning acts on things – including human beings.³ It ‘divides up the self [e.g. intelligence, affects, sensations, cognition, memory] and attaches bits of it here and there to machinic processes as less-than-human agent’ (Wark, 2017: 79). In machinic enslavement, we are torn to human variables, contiguous with the technical-machinery. Deleuze (1992: 5) produces the concept of ‘dividual’ to define the deterritorialization of the individual in machinic enslavement, that is, its decomposition into fragments and flows in the interconnected series of machinic assemblages that govern our lives.

Deleuze and Guattari’s insights into machinic enslavement, the idea of the mutation of individual into dividual has become more and more relevant with the rise of new digital technologies (e.g. algorithms, learning machines, artificial intelligence, internet of things). The critical literature on new-technologies-at-work is largely informed by Thrift’s (2005) early concept of ‘technological unconsciousness’. In Knowing Capitalism, Thrift (2005: 213) refers to the emerging technologies within the field of logistics and suggests that knowledge provided by these technologies (e.g. GPS) amounts to ‘technological unconsciousness’ in a sense that ‘bodies with their environments’ bend to ‘a specific set of addresses without the benefit of any cognitive input, a pre-personal substrate of guaranteed correlations’. With rapid technological developments, Thrift’s preliminary insight has evolved into an argument that new technologies operate in a way that increasingly side-steps human cognition, perception and well-timed reaction. That is, it is now increasingly machines that calculates, makes decisions and takes actions in different terrains of life, including our work lives (Amoore and Piotukh, 2016; Hayles, 2017; Lazzarato, 2015; Martin, 2009; Parisi, 2015; Seyfert and Roberge, 2016).

But if it is true that there is a tendency towards this sort of machine-machine ecology, what is/will be the function of social subjection? How do Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that social subjection and machinic enslavement constitute ‘two coexisting poles’ (p. 459)?⁴ According to Lazzarato (2014), workers are indeed ‘enslaved to the automatization of procedures, machines, and the division of labour, functioning as the “inputs” and “outputs” of the production process’ (p. 38). However, he elucidates, ‘when a breakdown, an accident, or a malfunction occurs, the subject-function, consciousness, and representation must be mobilised in order to “recover” from the incident, explain it, and mitigate its effects with a view to returning the automatic functions’ (Lazzarato, 2014: 39). This insight is reflected as a pattern in my ethnographic research on financial services, characterised by the use of advanced technologies at work,⁵ for example:

When the machines are live, everything is automatic. Trading is 100% automatic. They work 5 days 24 hours. We don’t have a concept of trader but order management system. . . But errors occur. You have to be on-line. I mean because almost nothing is manual these processes may have a mind of their own. When a bug appears, I receive an error message and I have to fix the problem. This is my job, really. (Senior finance officer in a hedge fund, UK)

In summary, we are simultaneously subject to twofold relation of power in capitalism. First, social subjection acts upon our consciousness, that is, the construction of our ego (i.e. subjectivation). What characterises ‘social subjection is the process of individualization’ (Bueno, 2020: 83). In the age of neoliberalism, it aims at transforming every human being into a self-enterprise identifying her/himself as her/his own boss, that is, neoliberal homo economicus in Foucauldian parlance. The failure of ‘neoliberal dreams’ has resulted in a regressive/negative subject, endowed with a strong sense of guilt. At the same time, secondly, we are enslaved to the machinic processes of capitalism. In the manner that a technological system enslaves variables such as temperature, pressure, speed in order to ensure the smooth operation of the whole, the machinic assemblages of business, communication, market, media, public services and so forth enslave humankind to ensure the smooth operation of capital. In this context, the concept of machinic enslavement refers to the desubjectivation of individuated subject, that is, its mutation into ‘slave units in the cybernetic sense’ (Wark, 2017: 79). With the rise of the advanced digital technologies, side-stepping human representation, the subject has increasingly become automatically-responsive, whose enterprise-function is mobilised when the system stumbles or breaks down.

A speculation on ‘what is to be done?’: Idleness as a micro ethico-political action

The devil makes work for idle hands.

A Proverb

Today, the ‘end of history’ seems to define the ethos of humanity at large. In the age of ‘capitalist realism’, Fisher (2009) refers to Jameson (2003), ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (p. 2). ‘The futurity of future’ is cancelled as we have come to believe that ‘the future will be pretty much like the present only more so’ (Eagleton, 2002: para 2, also Fisher, 2014). We must resist the prevailing capitalist catechism [investissement] and keep the question of ‘what is to be done’ alive – the theorists insist. Yet, if one of the greatest ‘achievements’ of capitalism lies in ‘the capitalisation of subjective power’ (Guattari, 2000: 47), that is, the capture of human sensibility, imagination and desire, is there even any hope?

My answer is affirmative. As noted, firstly, the neoliberal project of transforming every individual into a business is increasingly in crisis. This is a subjective crisis in Guattarian parlance, revealing itself, for Berardi (2015), in the astonishing rise of mental health problems.⁶ Secondly, with the Covid-19 pandemic, it now seems inevitable that we will experience a deep economic recession (Davies, 2020; Elliott, 2020), which will deepen the subjective crisis when the public starts to foot the bill for bailouts. Therefore, I agree with Davies (2020) that the impact of the pandemic on economies ‘might better be understood as the sort of world-making event that allows for new economic and intellectual beginnings’ (para 12, also Žižek, 2020).

If so, how might we think of a new process of subjectivation whereby a new way of being in the world can be actualised? O’Sullivan (2011, also 2012: 59–87) offers two central theses on the new in relation to subjectivity. Firstly, he writes, ‘the new does not arrive from some other place (transcendence), but is produced from the very matter of the world. . . After all, where else can the new come from?’ (O’Sullivan, 2011: 97). This means that the new involves a recombination of already existing elements in and of the world. Yet, is this sort of recombination enough to produce something new? In the second thesis, he elucidates, ‘what else is needed [is] a certain depth. . . Put simply, the new involves accessing something outside the present plane of existence’ (O’Sullivan, 2011: 97–98). Accordingly, the production of new – subjectivity – involves experimentation with this sort of immanent outside and returning to the present plane of existence more equipped with novel perspectives to combine its elements differently.

In continental philosophy, this outside has a name.⁷ It is the temporal realm of virtual or pure-past in Bergson (1991), truth in Foucault (1995) (or Foucauldian truth) and incorporeal Universes in Guattari (1995, 2000). This paper cannot do justice to all these concepts. Yet, it might speculate on what traverses them as a common theme. Here, the outside implies a realm where one can experience difference-in-kind. It does not involve identification or imitation of something already existing because it is characterised by unactualised potentiality. It is not to do with knowledge as such, particularly with ‘scientific’ knowledge, as it does not understand ‘evidence’, ‘proof’ or ‘fact’. It is ‘non-dimensioned, non-coordinated, trans-sensible and infinite’ (Guattari, 2000: 75). It is a realm of ‘absolute non-narrative, non-culture, and non-knowledge’ (Lazzarato, 2014: 18). More concretely, it is a realm where one can encounter with hitherto unknown ‘universes of reference’, experiment with new ‘existential refrains and configurations’, which can then act, in the world we are living, as catalytic focal points for ‘the resingularisation of existence’ (Guattari, 1995, 2000).

The outside is not immediately accessible or apparent to the human body-mind configuration in its typical state. To access and communicate with this sort of outside, there must be a break with already existing reality and its accompanying significations, narratives, refrains, values, norms, semiotic chains and enslaving machinic apparatuses. There must be, in a word, a rupture in habit, be it formed consciously or impulsively. This presupposes, first and foremost, a suspension of the general mobilisation decreed by capital. Workers’ strikes, struggles, revolts and riots do not only operate as technologies of such a rupture but they also expose what the heterogeneous elements of the outside might be. They are the moments of, paradoxically, non-movement, suspending all dominant references and coordinates with unforeseeable consequences: ‘I am no longer as I was before. I am . . . carried beyond my familiar existential Territories’ (Guattari, 1995: 93).

In this context, I think of idleness as a micro ethico-political technology of such a rupture, a technology of Foucauldian self-care (see also Munro, 2014; Randall and Munro, 2010), potentially opening up the aforementioned outside. Nietzsche (1996) argues that idleness, against hasty mobilisation, is a ‘noble thing’, ‘really the beginning of all vices’ and ‘located in the closest vicinity to all virtues’ (p. 171). In a similar vein, Kierkegaard (1946) holds that what is evil is not idleness but those who dictate that idleness as evil. ‘Idleness . . . is a truly divine life’ (Kierkegaard, 1946: 23). He adds that ‘every human being who lacks a sense of idleness proves that his [or her] consciousness has not yet been elevated to the level of the humane’ (Kierkegaard, 1946: 24). Does not idleness mean laziness? Nietzsche (1996) mockingly answers, ‘you don’t think . . . I am talking about you, do you, you lazybones?’ (p. 171).⁸ By idleness, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, therefore, do not understand acceptance of what happens, a sort of emptiness or monotony. They rather see it as an ethico-political action on one self. In Nietzsche, idleness refers to the practice of otium in the form of self-contemplation or what he (Nietzsche, 1996: 171) calls ‘meditative life’ or ‘prolonged reflection’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 259). In fact, this reflects the connotation of the term in Elizabethan English, that is, wandering in the mind. Kierkegaard (1946) implies something similar when he considers ‘the restless activity’ (vis-à-vis an examined life) a barrier before ‘the world of the spirit’ (p. 24).

In contemporary capitalism, we have increasingly become more like inputs, absorbing all stimuli imposed by two regimes of power (i.e. social subjection and machinic enslavement), and outputs, emitting some sort of response often unreflectively. In order to open a gap between stimulus and response (à la Bergson, 1991), we should resist reckless mobilisation, enjoy ‘a vita contemplative (e.g. taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 260), and attempt to cultivate a genuine understanding of our reactive selves. This ‘self-positioning’ (Foucault, 2000) may culminate in ‘a kind of super-productivity arising from a specifically non-productive (in capitalist terms) state’ (O’Sullivan, 2011: 99). Idleness, that is to say, may enable us to recognise and grasp not only our habitual responses and reactions, whose aggregation ultimately constitutes who we are and how we act, but also new existential terrains on another vector, in which the aspects of a different mode of being could be found.

As a way of conclusion, we must note, firstly, that idleness, like any technology of rupture, is only a first step towards producing a new subjectivity. New habits, refrains, practices, organisations, and so forth should follow from any rupture so as to combine the elements of the actual world in a different way. Secondly, the production of a new subjectivity is after all always an experiment. We cannot know beforehand whether the outside is emancipating or supressing, producing joy or sadness. This experiment, however, is the very test of life (Foucault, 2000).

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Emrah Karakilic

Notes

Author biography

Emrah Karakilic holds a PhD in sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London. He works as a senior research fellow in the RSB Lab at Nottingham Trent University.

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