"Struggle, Event, Media"


Maurizio Lazzarato

Why can the
paradigm of representation not function in politics, nor
in artistic modes of expression, and here especially in
the production of works that employ moving images?

I will attempt to
answer these questions by using the paradigm that imagines
the constitution of the world from the relationship
between event and multiplicity. Representation is conversely
founded on the subject-work paradigm. In this paradigm
the images, the signs and the statements have the function
of representing the object, the world, whereas in the
paradigm of the event, images, signs and statements
contribute to allowing the world to happen. Images,
signs and statements do not represent something, but
rather create possible worlds. I would like to explain
this paradigm using two concrete examples: the dynamic
of the emergence and the constitution of post-socialist
political movements and the way television functions,
in other words, signs, images and statements in contemporary
economy.

The days of Seattle
were a political event, which – like every event – first
generated a transformation of subjectivity and its own
mode of sensibility. The motto "a different world
is possible" is symptomatic for this metamorphosis
of subjectivity and its sensibility.

The difference between this and
other political events of the recently ended century
is radical. For example, the event of Seattle no longer
refers to class struggle and the necessity of taking
power. It does not mention the subject of history, the
working class, its enemy capital, or the fatal battle
that they must engage in. It restricts itself to announcing
that "something possible has been created",
that there are new possibilities for living, and that
it is a matter of realizing them; that a possible world
has been expressed and that it must be brought to completion.
We have entered into a different intellectual atmosphere,
a different conceptual constellation.

Before Seattle, a
different world was merely virtual. Now it is actual
or possible, but it is something actual, something possible
that has to be realized. The transformation of subjectivity
must invent time-space arrangements that watch over
this re-evaluation of values, which was able to bring
forth a generation that has grown up after the fall
of the Berlin wall, in the period of major American
expansion, and in the New Economy. Twofold creation,
twofold individuation, twofold becoming. The signs,
images and statements play a strategic role in this
twofold becoming: they contribute to allowing the possible
to emerge, and they contribute to its realization. It
is at this point that the "conflict" is confronted
with the dominant values. The implementation of new
possibilities for living runs into the existing organization
of power and the established values. In the event, one
sees what is intolerable about an era and the new possibilities
for living that it contains at the same time. The mode
of the event is the problematical. The event is not
the solution to a problem, but rather opens up what
is possible. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the event reveals
the nature of being as a question or as a problem –
specifically in such a way that the sphere of the being
of the event is simultaneously that of "answering
and questioning".

The days of Seattle
involve a corporeal arrangement, a combination of bodies
(with their actions and passions) composed of individual
and collective singularities (multiplicity of individuals
and organizations – Marxists, ecologists, union activists,
Trotskyists, media activists, "witches", Black
Bloc, etc., which practice specific corporeal relations
of co-functioning); and there is an arrangement of statements,
a regime of statements formed from a multitude of statement
regimes (the statements of the Marxists are not the
same as those of the media activists, the ecologists
or the "witches", etc.). The collective statement
arrangements are not expressed solely through language,
but also through the technological expression machines
(Internet, telephone, television, etc.). Both arrangements
are constructed in terms of the current relationships
of power and desire.

The event turns away from historical
conditions, in order to create something new: a new
combination of bodies (actions and passions, which are
strung together among the demonstrators, for example)
and that which is expressed, the verbal statement as
result, as effect of the corporeal combination: a different
world is possible.

What is expressed (the meaning)
does not describe the bodies nor represent them. The
possible world exists completely, but it does not exist
outside that through which it is expressed (the slogans,
the TV reports, the Internet communications, the newspapers).

The event actualizes itself in
souls in the sense that it generates a change in sensibility
(as a non-corporeal transformation), which brings forth
a new valuation: one recognizes what is intolerable
about an era and the new possibilities for living that
it implies.

The possible world has already
been imbued with a certain reality through talking,
through communicating, but this reality must now be
completed, it must be made by making new corporeal arrangements.

The event constitutes the relationship
between the two types of arrangements; it is the event
that distributes the subjectivities and objectivities
that will overthrow the configurations of bodies and
signs.

Everyone came with
their own corporeal machine and their own expression
machine and returned home with the necessity of newly
defining these in relation to that which was done and
said. The forms of political organization (of the co-functioning
of the bodies) and the statement forms (the theories
and statements about capitalism, the subjects, forms
of exploitation, etc.) are to be weighed and related
to the event. Even the Trotskyists are compelled to
ask: What happened? What is happening? What will happen?
And to report what they do at the event (the organization)
and what they say (the discourse they conduct).

At this point we see that the
order of verbal statements is what is problematic. All
are compelled to open themselves to the event, i.e.
to open themselves up to the area of questions and answers.
Those who hold answers prepared in advance (and there
are many of those), miss the event. That is the political
drama that we lived after 1968, missing the event, because
the questions already had their predetermined answers
(Maoism, Leninism, Trotskyism).

The event insists, which means
it continues to have an impact, to produce effects:
the discussions about what capitalism is and about what
a revolutionary subject is today, are making good progress
all over the world in light of the event.

Language, signs, and images do
not represent something, but rather contribute to making
it happen. Images, languages and signs are constitutive
of reality and not of its representation.

Let us turn now to
the question of how signs, images and statements are
used by corporations in contemporary capitalism.

The corporation does not generate
the object (the commodity), but rather the world in
which the object exists. Nor does it generate the subject
(worker and consumer), but rather the world in which
the subject exists.

In contemporary capitalism, we
must first distinguish the enterprise from the factory.
Two years ago a large French multinational corporation
announced that it would part from eleven production
sites. This separation between enterprise and factory
is a borderline case, but one that is becoming increasingly
frequent in contemporary capitalism.

In the majority
of cases, these two functions are mutually integrated;
we presume, however, that their separation is symbolic
of a more profound transformation of capitalist production.
What will this multinational corporation retain? What
does it understand as "enterprise"? All the
functions, all the services and all the employees that
allow it to create a world: marketing, service, design,
communication, etc.

The enterprise generates
a service or a product. In its logic, the service or
the product exists, just like consumers and producers,
for its world, the world of the enterprise; the latter
must be internalized in the souls and bodies of the
workers and consumers. In contemporary capitalism, the
enterprise does not exist outside the producers and
consumers that give it expression. Its world, its objectivity
and its reality mix with the relationships that the
enterprise, the workers and the consumers have with
one another.
 

Communication
/ Consumption
Let us start with
consumption, because the relationship between supply
and demand has been reversed: the customers are the
pivotal point of the enterprise strategy. In reality,
this definition from political economics does not even
touch the problem: the sensational rise, the strategic
role played in contemporary capitalism by the expression
machine (of opinion, communication, marketing and thus
the signs, images and statements).

Consumption is not reduced to
the act of buying and carrying out a service or a product,
as political economics and its criticism teach, but
instead means, first of all, belonging to a world or
a universe.

Which world is this? It is enough
to turn on the television or the radio, go for a walk
in a city, buy a weekly or daily newspaper, to know
that this world is constructed through a statement arrangement,
through a sign regime, the expression of which is called
advertising, and what is expressed (the meaning) is
a prompt, a command, representing per se a valuation,
a judgment, a view of the world, of themselves and others.
What is expressed (the meaning) is not an ideological
valuation, but rather an incentive (it gives signs),
a prompt to assume a form of living, i.e. a way of dressing,
having a body, eating, communicating, residing, moving,
having a gender, speaking, etc. Television is a stream
of advertising that is regularly interrupted by films,
entertainment programs and news programs. According
to the way Jean-Luc Godard depicts it, if you take out
all the pages of a newspaper that contain advertising,
it is reduced to the editorial by the editor-in-chief.
And radio is just as much a stream of advertising and
programs, in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish
where one begins and the other ends. Unfortunately,
we must agree with Deleuze in his conviction that the
enterprise has a soul, that marketing has become its
strategic center, and that advertising specialists are
"creative".

The enterprise exploits
to its own advantage the dynamic of the event and the
process of constituting difference and repetition by
distorting them and making them dependent on the logic
of enhanced value.

For the enterprise the "event"
means advertising (or communication or marketing). We
will analyze this particular aspect of enterprise strategy
in relation to the constitution of the consumers, its
customers. Enterprises now invest up to 40% of their
turnover in marketing, advertising, styling, design,
etc. These investments in the expression machine can
far surpass investments in "labor".

Advertising – like
every "event" – first distributes modes of
perception in order to prompt ways of living; it actualizes
modes of affecting and being affected in souls, in order
to realize them in bodies. With advertising and marketing,
the enterprise effects incorporeal transformations (the
slogans of advertising), which are stated through bodies
and only through bodies. The incorporeal transformations
first produce a change in sensibility (or that is what
they would like to produce), a change in our way of
making value judgments.

The incorporeal transformations
have no referents, because they are auto-referential.
There are no antecedent needs, no natural necessities
that would satisfy production. The incorporeal transformations
pose the valuations and their object at the same time
that they produce them. Advertising represents the spiritual
dimension of the "event", which the enterprise
and the advertising agencies invent using images, signs
and statements, and which must be realized in bodies.
The material dimension of the event, its realization,
is completed when the ways of living, ways of eating,
of having a body, dressing, residing, etc. are incarnated
in bodies: one lives materially among the goods and
services that one buys, in the houses, among the furniture,
with the objects and services that one has seized as
"possible", in the flows of information and
communication, in which we have submerged ourselves.
We go to bed, we rush to do this and that, while that
which is "expressed" continues to circulate
(it "insists") in the hertz waves, in the
telematic networks, and in the newspapers. It doubles
the world and our existence as "something possible",
which is, in fact, already a command, an authoritarian
slogan expressing itself through seduction.

In which form does marketing
produce actualization in the soul? Which type of subjectivation
is mobilized by advertising?

The design of an advertisement,
the concatenation and rhythm of the images, the soundtrack
are organized like a kind of "ritornello"
or a "whirlwind". There are advertisements
that reverberate in us like a musical theme or a refrain.
You have probably already been surprised to find yourself
whistling a musical theme from advertising (it certainly
happens to me, at least). The Leibnizian distinction
between actualization in souls and realization in bodies
is very important, because these two processes do not
coincide and can result in completely unpredictable
effects on the subjectivity of the monads.
The television networks
recognize no national borders, no differences in class,
status or income. Their images are received in non-Western
countries or by the poorest classes of the Western population,
who have little or no buying power.

The incorporeal transformations
work well on the souls of the television viewers (of
these countries, as well as on the souls of the poor
in rich countries) by creating a new sensibility, because
something possible certainly exists, even if not outside
the medium of its expression (the television images).
For what is possible, in this sense, it is enough to
be expressed through a sign in order to have a certain
reality, as Deleuze demonstrated to us.

However, the realization in bodies,
the possibility of buying and living with one's body
among the services and goods that are expressed by the
signs as possible worlds, does not always follow (and
not at all for the majority of the world population),
occasioning expectations, frustrations and rejection.

In conjunction with the observation
of this phenomenon in Brazil, Suely Rolnik speaks of
two subjective figures, which represent two extremes,
in which the variations of the soul and the body are
articulated, that are produced by the logic just described:
the glamour of "luxury subjectivity" and the
misery of "trash subjectivity".

The West is horrified by the
new "Islamic" subjectivities. But it has created
this "monster" itself and specifically with
the help of its most "peaceful", most seductive
techniques. What we are facing here are not remnants
of traditional societies in need of modernization, but
in fact cyborgs that conjoin the "oldest"
with the "most modern".

The incorporeal transformations
happen first and faster than the corporeal transformations.
Three quarters of humanity are excluded from the latter,
but they have easy access to the former (first and foremost
through television). Contemporary capitalism does not
arrive first with the factories: these follow later,
if at all. It first arrives with words, signs and images.
And specifically these technologies precede not only
the factories today, but also the war machine.

The event is an encounter
and it is even a twofold one: one time it meets the
soul, the other the body. This twofold encounter can
make space for a twofold shift, because it is only one
opening of possibilities in the modality of the "problematical".
Advertising is only one possible world, a fold sheltering
virtualities. Unfolding what is enveloped in it, unfolding
the fold, can bring forth completely heterogeneous effects,
because on the one hand they encounter monads, which
are all autonomous, independent and virtual singularities.
On the other – as we have seen in neo-monadological
ontology – a different possible world is always virtually
present. The bifurcation of divergent series haunts
contemporary capitalism. Incompatible worlds unfold
in the same world. For this reason, the capitalist process
of appropriation is never closed in itself, but is instead
always uncertain, unpredictable, open. "To exist
means to differ", and this differentiation is newly
uncertain, unpredictable and risky each time.

Capitalism attempts
to control this bifurcation, which is virtually always
possible through variations and continuous modulation:
neither the production of a subject nor the production
of an object, but rather subjects and objects in continuous
variation guided by the technologies of modulation,
which are in turn continuously varied.

Control is expressed
in Western countries not only through modulating brains,
but also through forming bodies (in prisons, schools
and hospitals) and through life management ("workfare").
We would be doing our capitalist societies a favor,
if we think that everything happens through the continuous
variation of subjects and objects, through modulating
brains and by means of the occupation of memory and
attention by signs, images and statements. The control
society integrates the "old" disciplinary
dispositive. In non-Western societies, where disciplinary
institutions and "workfare" are weaker and
less developed, control immediately means the logic
of war, even in times of "peace" (see Brazil,
still).

The paradigmatic
body of Western control societies is no longer represented
by the imprisoned body of the worker, the lunatic, the
ill person, but rather by the obese (full of the worlds
of the enterprise) or anorectic (rejection of this world)
body, which see the bodies of humanity scourged by hunger,
violence and thirst on television. The paradigmatic
body of our societies is no longer the mute body molded
by discipline, but rather it is the bodies and souls
marked by the signs, words and images (company logos)
that are inscribed in us – similar to the procedure,
through which the machine in Kafka's "Penal Colony"
inscribes its commands into the skin of the condemned.

In the 70s Pasolini very precisely
described how television had changed the soul and the
body of the Italians, how it was the main instrument
of an anthropological transformation that first and
especially affected youth. He used practically the same
concept as Tarde to describe the modalities of an effect
of television at a distance: the impact of television
is due to example rather than discipline, to imitation
rather than coercion. It is the steering of behavior,
the influence on possible activities. His film trilogy
about bodies was rejected, because it did not take up
this transformation. It still spoke of the body before
the modulation of brains and, with regard to certain
aspects, even before disciplinary societies.

These incorporeal transformations
that come into our heads again and again like ritornelli,
which are circulating all over the world at the moment,
penetrating into every household, and which represent
the real weapon for the conquest, the occupation, the
seizure of brains and bodies – they are simply incomprehensible
to Marxist theory and to economic theories. We face
a change of paradigms here, which we cannot grasp starting
from labor, from practice. On the contrary, it could
well be that the latter supplies a false image of what
production means today, because the process we have
just described is the precondition for every organization
of labor (or non-labor).

Images, signs and
statements are thus possibilities, possible worlds,
which affect souls (brains) and must be realized in
bodies. Images, signs and statements intervene in both
the incorporeal and the corporeal transformations. Their
effect is that of the creation and realization of what
is possible, not of representation. They contribute
to the metamorphoses of subjectivity, not to their representation. "