War and Money is Part of the Pile of Books that I am working on
Philosophy is filled with famous breaks. The break between the young and mature Marx, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Logical Investigations, Heidegger's Kehre, Foucault's transition from archeology to genealogy. Sometimes such breaks are declared by the philosopher in question, other times they are discovered, or perhaps invented, by readers and interpreters who have no other way of making sense of a philosopher. Which means that breaks only become legible, only become visible, when enough people read them, or worry about how they fit together. I have often thought that those of us who write philosophy, or theory, should think about our own writing when we read others. I say this because I imagine that most of us do not have radical breaks, but odd intersections of continuity and discontinuity as we try to think about whatever in the world we try to think about.
I have recently read (or reread) two books by Maurizio Lazzarato, Revolutions of Capitalism: The Politics of the Event and War and Money: The Imperialism of the Dollar. The first was a reread, well a reread of the translation. I was actually surprised that I had not written a blog review of it, since it has long been on my list of books that should be translated. (That list includes Fujita's La Ciné-Capital, Garo's L'ideologie ou la pensée embarque, and pretty much everything by Macherey and Tosel.) Lazzarato is known, if he is known at all, as the author of the essay on "Immaterial Labor" in the Radical Thought in Italy collection. For many that essay, with its rough periodization and its odd attempt at identifying a sort of vanguard, represented the excesses of that particular moment of post-autonomist thought. Many people were content to dismiss Lazzarato from that point forward. Since that point Lazzarato has gone through several intellectual transformations, if I wanted to periodize them, I would say that there was the work on immaterial labor, which included a kind of workers' inquiry, of the creative industries of Paris, along with Antonella Corsani, Le Bassin de Travail Immatériel (BTI) dans le Métropole Parisienne (1996). Around the same time he completes his thesis, which is published as Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Postfordism (translated in 2019). To complete this rough periodization, I would say that the Lazzarato's works in the early two thousands are defined by a critical engagement with two different French philosophical texts, Foucault's Society must be Defended, which lead to an engagement with the question of neoliberalism, and Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies" which converge in theorizing a more diffuse and pervasive form of power. Control is more or less posited as being to neoliberal societies the way that discipline could be understood to define Fordist society.
The question of control as a more diffuse, abstract form of power, in some sense splits Lazzarato's work going forward. One of the many provocative claims of that essay is that debt functions as a form of control, this led to the publication of one of Lazzarato's most famous book's, The Making of Indebted Man, which is followed by Governing by Debt, the emphasis is on control as an economic regime, one that works not so much directly on the laboring body, as in discipline, but on the hopes' and aspirations of the working subject. The second aspect of this research on control leads Lazzarato to in some sense go beyond Deleuze by returning to what inspired him, most importantly Gabriel Tarde, but also William James.
This eclectic collection of thinkers, Tarde, James, Deleuze, Bergson, etc, are an attempt to follow through on the question of what it means for a politics to be a production of subjectivity after disciplinary societies. The answer to this question increasingly becomes that what comes after disciplinary societies continues the trajectory that Foucault had outlined, if the central thesis of disciplinary societies is that "the soul is the prison of the body" that one acts on the body by acting on perceptions, as in the famous instance of the panopticon which governs bodies by influencing minds, than control can be understood as a general noopolitics, a politics that acts on beliefs, desires, and the imagination.
As I wrote about this in The Politics of Transindividuality.
"Lazzarato’s definition of noopolitics is framed between a reading of Tarde’s Psychologie Économique and an examination of contemporary society through Deleuze’s concept of control. As such it is caught between a general ontological perspective, one that posits society, every society, as defined by the primacy of transindividual relations of imitation and invention, and a more historicized, but not necessarily historical argument, that argues that contemporary capitalism, defined by consumerism, financialization, and neoliberal restructuring of the labour process, is increasingly dependent upon the noopolitical dimension of belief. This division runs through Lazzarato’s multiple books on Tarde and contemporary capitalism. Puissance de l’invention, dedicated as it is to a critical excavation of Tarde’s work on psychological economy, takes up the latter’s perspective that Marx’s critique of political economy, a critique that focused on the exploitation of labour, needs to be situated within a larger economy, the economy of habits, imitations, and belief, which both condition the productive power of labour and provide the necessary precondition of consumption. In some sense it is a kind of inversion of Marx’s base and superstructure, rather than understand the superstructure, the realm of ideas, beliefs, and practices, as resting on a base of production, the production of things, Lazzarato argues that we have to reverse the topology, understand the base as resting on the superstructure. This is a claim that Lazzarato makes about any society, any economy. However, Lazzarato finds this also be the basis for Tarde’s surprising timeliness. What Tarde posited as a general theoretical objection to Marx and Smith, the idea that there is a diffuse network of imitation and adoption that necessarily pre-exists any division of labour, and a production of beliefs, desires, and subjectivity, that is the precondition of any production, turns out to be an idea which is increasingly realized in the contemporary economy; the three transformations that broadly go under the name of consumerism, financialization, and neoliberalism, each can be read in different ways to privilege the production of subjectivity, the dissemination of habits, beliefs, and ideas, over economic production, the production of things. Add to this the technological and political changes of the last century, all of which have only further extended the communication of habits, beliefs, and ideas that Tarde identified with the emergent technologies of print and radio, and we have the ‘revolution of capitalism’ that Lazzarato is arguing for. Thus, Tarde is presented as offering both an alternative account of social relations, a conception of the multiplicity of imitations that displaces any individualistic or dialectical account of social relations, and a philosopher whose particular untimely insights have only now found their material and social conditions.
This ambiguity with respect to the transcendental and historical dimension of Tarde’s thought also bears on another, much more important, point of distinction, the relationship between noopolitics and the ‘psychological economy,’ between the political dimension of the relationship between ideas, habits, and imitations, that which is oriented towards political order and authority, and the economic dimension, that which produces value. Lazzarato at times would seem to argue that this division itself is out of date, reflecting a bygone political structure predicated on command, and a bygone economic relation, predicated on the uniform exploitation of labour. As Lazzarato argues, ‘Economic production and the production of subjectivity, labour and ethics, are indissociable.’ Within this interweaving of the political and economic there is a certain primacy of the political over the economic. Which is perhaps why Lazzarato uses one term, noopolitics for both. It is the political that takes precedence. The political is the non-economic condition of economic exploitation. Like Virno and Stiegler, Lazzarato insists on an immediate identity between economy and ethics. Moreover, this production of subjectivity is transindividual, encompassing such extra-personal dimensions as machinic, social, and technological systems, and preindividual, encompassing affects and intensities. As with Virno and Stiegler, there is ambiguity with respect to both the unity and determination of the production of subjectivity. Simondon’s objections to Marx seem oddly pertinent here. Given the multiple factors of the subjectivity, affects, language, and habits, and the multiple factors of its production from technology, to the economy and politics, to what extent does it make sense to speak of a production of subjectivity? A similar question could be raised with respect to determination. To what extent does positing subjectivity as a necessary effect and condition of the economy risk flipping a materialist analysis of subjection into a kind of subjective determination, in which subjectivity becomes itself a kind of base?"
And a few pages later...
"Lazzarato’s emphasis on the political and economic dimension of the production of subjectivity, noopolitics and nooeconomics, makes it possible for him to underscore the political aspect of certain transformations of the economy beyond the figure of debt. Financialization is not just an economic transformation, but a transformation of the production of subjectivity as well. Lazzarato argues that the various economic relations, from the wage to the stock options must be understood in terms of both their economic relation, their relation to both productivity and its measure, and in terms of their noopolitical dimension. Lazzarato offers a brief history of the manner in which productivity is measured, from wages to stock options, viewing each economic institution as much about the subjectivity it produces as the way in which it measures production. To some extent the idea of the wage as a production of subjectivity, as a particular kind of individuation, can be traced back to Marx, for whom the terrain of ‘freedom, equality, and Bentham, was in part produced by the wage, by the fiction that labour power was a commodity like any other, paid for at full price. The wage individuates and interpellates workers as individual sellers of labour power. What Lazzarato stresses is the manner in which the wage constitutes a kind of majority, the way that it functions to recognize productive activity while simultaneously exploiting it. Lazzarato’s remarks on this point draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between majority and minority. For Deleuze and Guattari the majority is less a simple statistical count, a matter of more or less, than a standard that measures deviations. As Deleuze and Guattari write,
Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language. It is obvious that ‘man’ holds the majority even if he is less numerous than mosquitos, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted.
Lazzarato argument that the wage constitutes a ‘majoritarian standard’ draws as much from examinations of labour outside of the wage form as it does from Deleuze and Guattari. Unstated, but important in this regard, is the work of Marxist feminists such as Silvia Federci, Mariorosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James, who argue that as much as the wage is at the base of capitalist exploitation, concealing it in the image of full compensation for work performed, it also conceals the unwaged reproductive work of childcare, cleaning, and countless other domestic tasks that have been naturalized as ‘women’s work.’ To have a wage is to have one’s work recognized as productive, as social, as something that can be contested and changed, to be unwaged is to work invisibly. Lazzarato is not explicitly concerned with invisible labour of housework, but extends this general point to encompass the intermittently employed, and everyone who is exploited without being subject to the wage. Tarde’s emphasis on the productive nature of imitation and invention, which exceed the labour process, spilling beyond the factory or firm, needs to be supplemented by a critical theory of the way in which different productive and reproductive activities are represented and measured.
For Lazzarato the wage, just as any other economic measure, such as debt or stock prices, must be understood in terms of both its economic function, its relation to exploitation, and its production of subjectivity. As Lazzarato writes,
Capital, therefore, does not simply extort an extension of labor time (the difference between paid human time and human time spent at the workplace), it initiates a process that exploits the difference between subjection and enslavement. For if subjective subjection—the social alienation inherent to a particular job or any social function (worker, unemployed, teacher, etc.)—is always assignable and measurable (the wage appropriate to one’s position, the salary appropriate to a social function), the part of machinic enslavement constituting actual production is never assignable nor quantifiable as such.
The wage addresses or interpellates an individual worker, offering an imaginary representation of their social contribution, production, as Marx argued, exploits transindividual productive capacities. While Lazzarato argues that this transindividual capacity is not quantifiable as such, following Negri’s argument regarding the unmeasurable nature of value, the two theses are not necessary corollaries of each other. It is possible to bracket the argument regarding to unquantifiable nature of value production in contemporary capitalism to simply assert that there is a division between the measure and representation of productivity presented to workers, wages fail to represent the productive nature of the necessarily transindividual relations of production and reproduction.
Social subjection and machinic enslavement become not two different epochs, or even two different mode of subjection, but two different individuations acting on the same subjects, or processes of subjection, in different ways. The one affects subjectivity and identity insofar as it is signified, represented, and conceptualized, the other at the level of gestures, affects, and actions. The division between subjection and enslavement thus extends and complicates Marx’s division between the sphere of exchange and the hidden abode of production, dividing it less between two spheres than two different elements affecting the same process, the same workers. Workers are subjectified as individual wage earners, even part of the company, but enslaved as collective bodies and transformations."
That is a long digression. However, I wanted to focus on some questions that I had about subjectivity and political economy in Lazzarato. Before I get into that, it is perhaps necessary to complete the periodization of Lazzarato's writing, after the period on control and noopolitics, Lazzarato's writing begins to return to the question of capitalism, and of the question of finance, finance no longer understood in terms of its effects on subjectivity, as in the book on debt, but finance as a structure of the world. This is developed in
Wars and Capital, co-written with Eric Alliez, and the brilliantly titled,
Capital Hates Everyone. This trajectory begins fundamentally changes the points of theoretical references, as Marx, and Lenin, take on more importance than Tarde and Bergson. Lazzarato's books take on increasingly militant dimension, which would be surprising to anyone who knew him only from the essay on immaterial labor.
The two books I have recently read, or reread, are situated at two different ends of this trajectory, Revolutions of Capitalism was originally published in 2004, and War and Money was first published in 2023. If one wanted to, one could consider these books as divided by a break. Revolutions constantly sets itself up against a kind of generic Marxism, something that is quite surprising given the very non-generic Marxisms that were being produced during Lazzarato's time in Italy and France (to name the countries which made up his intellectual milieu). As with the writing on Tarde the problem is how Marxism constructs its object, focusing on totality, identity, and contradiction rather than multiplicity, difference, and transformation. As Lazzarato writes,
"Marxist theory concentrates exclusively on exploitation. Other power relations (men/women, doctors/patients, teachers/students, etc.) and other modes of the exercise of power (domination, subjugation, enslavement) are overlooked for reasons tied to the very ontology of the category of labor. The latter has the power of dialectical totalization, as much theoretical as political, which can be criticized as Tarde did Hegel: It is necessary to "depolarize" the dialectic with the notion of multiplicity."
And on the next page
"Marxism, in focusing on a single dimension of power relations (exploitation), is thereby led to refer expressive machines to ideology. One of the objectives Foucault's work on disciplinary societies is to escape from economism and the dialectical culture of dualism and to demonstrate the poverty of explaining domination by means of ideology."
As a contrast here is a passage from War and Money:
"Capital is an expression of an absolutely contradictory double dynamic: on the one hand, it tends continuously to globalize, to expand its production and its financialization throughout the world market. It is an uprooting force that seems to attack even borders, the boundaries of states. On the other hand, it cannot carry out this globalization because in order to hold its own in the world market, to guarantee internal peace and an external shock force for itself, it must be anchored to a state, to a currency that can only be national and to a legitimate monopoly of force that can only have one nationality. By definition, there is no world state that can accompany the worldwide becoming of capital."
I am more interested in the odd commonalities between these texts, texts which on the surface seem to be written in very different theoretical registers, the first in a kind of post-structural critique of Marxism and the second in a return to the concept of imperialism, a concept absent from the theoretical perspectives of post-structuralism (and even many contemporary Marxists, hence the importance of Lenin.) In order to grasp these commonalities, it is necessary to say something about the positive dimension of Revolutions of Capitalism (Honestly, its critique of an almost straw man version of Dialectical Materialism is the least interesting part) What is interesting is what Lazzarato wants to put in its place, in place of the mode of production, he wants to think the production of worlds. As he writes, "Capitalism is not a mode of production it is a production of worlds (“mo(n)des”) (That passage is from my notes on the original French edition of the book, hence the untranslatable play on the words) As Lazzarato goes onto state,
"Consumption cannot be reduced to purchasing and "destroying" a service or product, as political economy and its critiques have claimed, but rather it means belonging to a world, joining a universe. What kind of world? All one has to do is turn on the radio and television, stroll through the city, or buy a newspaper or magazine to know that the world is constituted by an assemblage of statements, by sign regimes whose expression is called advertising and that constitute an invitation and a command that is at the same time an evaluation, a judgment, a belief about the world, about oneself, and others. What is expressed is not an ideological evaluation, but an incitement, an invitation to adopt a form of life, that is, to adopt a certain way of dressing, a way of presenting one's body, a way of eating, a way of communication, a way of living, a way of moving about, a way of expressing a gender, a way of speaking, and so on."
And compare that to this passage from War and Money:
"The economic, political, and subjective transformative power of consumption is a terrain on which class struggle is played out and, as such, it is surely one of the causes of the impending civil war. Using Marxian categories, we will now analyze the clash that threatens to destroy what remains of the social democracy of consumption, the last bastion in defense of institutional democracy and its process of centralization.
The power of consumption runs through individuals, splitting them according to the division in the condition of the worker already discussed by Marx. On the one hand, it makes each individual both abstract and universal, equal to every other individual to whom advertising promises the satisfaction of every desire, and manifesting a power that is bound to limitless consumption, always saying yes. On the other hand, real (not just imaginary) access to goods is neither universal nor egalitarian because it depends on the proletarian condition of the individual, in this case trapped in concreteness, in singularity. The consumption of the young insurgent of the French banlieus, of the precarious worker in underpaid jobs, of the woman providing free domestic work, of the racialized servile labourer, or the minimum wage earner must first pass through exploitation, submission to welfare, or the power of a bank (credit or microcredit)."
My point is not just that consumption is mentioned in both texts, but that consumption functions as a production of subjectivity. It is not just an economic activity, a way of acquiring the necessary goods for survival, but is itself productive of a whole way of living and thinking. As Lazzarato goes onto write, "In the pantheon of the gods of capital, the consumer occupies a prominent place. As a model of subjectification, they are surely more effective than the entrepreneur who still suffers, in spite of everything, from the Calvinist (protestant) ethic of performance, toil, and self sacrifice."
The focus on consumption is fundamentally different in each text, in the former, Revolutions, it is situated in terms of multiple forms of identification, class, but also race, and gender, and its primary function is to actualize one set of virtual possibilities, creating one world out of many possible worlds, while in War and Money it is split divided between an imagined universality, and actual divisions, particularity and hierarchy. The same commodities are available to everyone, but not anyone can afford them. Moreover, the focus in the second book is less about the way in which consumption only realize one restricted world, than on the way in which the isolation and individualization of consumption leaves us helpless in the face of imperialism. If the second seems more restrictedly economic than the first, it is worth indicating that Lazzarato argues that the production of subjectivity of consumption, of money, is situated in a larger production of subjectivity through war. As Lazzarato writes, "We must not look for great anthropological change in the figure of the entrepreneur but in the subjugation that combines fascism, racism, sexism, and the further leap forward it takes with war."
Obviously much has changed between the two books, and in some sense Lazzarto's focus on the power of finance, the dollar, and war, reflects the historical sequence between the early two thousands to the twenty twenties, but much has stayed the same, as both books try to think together the intersection of the mode of production and production of subjectivity.
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