Once more I’m going to check out something short, ‘Subjectless Action’ by Félix Guattari, a psychoanalysis and semiotics conference presentation that took place in 1974. Now, you don’t need to know a whole lot about his work, or the works of Gilles Deleuze or Michel Foucault, to name a few, to figure out what this presentation was all about. You can find it in one of the compilations of Guattari’s works, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics’, in case you are interested.
In case you don’t get it, like I don’t know how, knowing the title of his presentation that I just gave you, it’s indeed about how action can be subjectless. If you can handle that, if the subject, you, first and foremost, is your starting point for everything, well, I guess it’s better that you stop reading now. It’s only likely that you’ll get angry and, well, that’s not very productive. You might end up smashing things, like someone who isn’t in control of oneself, so let’s just leave it there. Move along, find something else instead.
But if you get it, and if you can handle it, stick around. It’ll be fun. I guarantee that, even though I haven’t even read this yet, as I’m writing it as I’m reading it. I don’t always do that, but, yeah, every now and then. It’s quite refreshing really, because you anticipate things which may not crop up and it’s so, so cool when they do crop up.
Right, Guattari starts, or started, his presentation by noting something that Finns would approve. He (135) points out that pronouns aren’t even needed: we could just replace all of them, in all their forms, whatever, with ‘it’. In Finnish, this is regularly done. There’s just ‘se’, which used to be ‘proper’ only for things, like inanimate objects, but it’s more common than not to use for just about anything, or anyone. Me, you, that person walking the dog and the dog, they are all ‘se’, which is the same as ‘it’.
What Guattari (135) finds particularly interesting about ‘it’ is that ‘it’ is not a subject, nor represent one. ‘It’ is just ‘it’, singularly ‘it’. Okay, we can substitute ‘it’ with a name, like, let’s say Charlie, and it works the same way, singularly, in the sense that ‘it’ is not possible to specify what ‘it’ is, yet you just know what ‘it’ is, as he, sorry, ‘it’ and Deleuze (264) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. He (135) is, of course, a bit more verbose than that, what I just pointed out:
“‘It’ represents the potential articulation of those linked elements of expression whose contents are the least formalized, and therefore the most susceptible of being rearranged to produce the maximum of occurrences.”
So, in connection to the point they (264) make in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, a name or just ‘it’ can be just about anything, to whom it may concern. Like Charlie who? Do I know Charlie? Do you know Charlie? And even if we know Charlie, we know a different Charlie. Or, rather, it’s the same Charlie, that ‘it’, but that Charlie, that ‘it’, appears to us the way it does. I might like Charlie, you might not, or the other way around, for whatever reason. ‘It’ has that singular quality to it. Anyway, he (135) continues:
“‘It’ does not represent a subject; it diagrammatizes an agency. It does not over-encode utterances, or transcend them as do the various modalities of the subject of the utterance; it prevents their falling under the tyranny of semiological constellations whose only function is to evoke the presence of a transcendent uttering process[.]”
This is exactly why I, sorry, ‘it’, likes the expression, sorry, ‘it’, ‘it is what it is’, because ‘it’ is such a good way to put it, in that situation. You acknowledge that ‘it’ is just the way ‘it’ is, without trying to put any labels on it. What does that expression, ‘it is what it is’, mean? Ah, but see, that is the point exactly and I keep using ‘it’. The thing is that ‘it’ could be anything, as I already pointed out, and as he (135) goes on to specify:
“[I]t is the a-signifying semiological matrix of utterances – the subject par excellence of the utterances – in so far as these succeed in freeing themselves from the sway of the dominant personal and sexual significations and entering into conjunction with machinic agencies of utterance.”
How is ‘it’ a-signifying? Well, because it could be anything. When you utter ‘it’, ‘it is what it is’, without any need to clarify it. We could give ‘it’ labels, but ‘it’ would still be ‘it’, with or without the labels, just as Charlie is Charlie, to me, to you, to anyone, without us having to start explaining what Charlie looks like, what Charlie sounds like, etc.
That said, Guattari ain’t a numpty. He (135) is well aware of how people tend to think otherwise. For most people, it’s all me, me and me, that ‘I’, instead of ‘it’. He (135) specifies this by noting that the ‘I’, what he also refers to as the utterer, comes to recognize itself in the utterance, as the ‘I’ as the utterer utters the ‘I’. This is also what he and Deleuze (130) refer to as the doubled subject in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:
“A strange invention: as if in one form the doubled subject were the cause of the statements of which, in its other form, it itself is a part.”
In his presentation, he (135) explains this in a bit more detail:
“This operation begins with a split in the ‘it’, the pretended discovery that ‘it’ contains a hidden cogito, a thinking I-ego.”
In other words, there’s always that ‘it’, as this singularity or multiplicity, as this one that is always also many, without giving ‘it’ any labels, but, for whatever reason, perhaps thanks to René Descartes, given that this is explained in reference to cogito, we have this tendency, this arrogance, to start from ourselves, which is the ‘I’ or, here, the ‘I-ego’. What follows from that is then exactly what he and Deleuze (130) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, as expressed by him (135) in his presentation:
“The elements of expression are taken over by an uttering subject. An empty redundancy, a second-degree redundancy appears alongside all the redundancies of expression.”
This is the doubled subject, in the sense that the subject does not need to be doubled but it is, which explains the empty redundancy. So, instead of saying ‘it is what it is’, we say ‘I am …’, as he (135) goes on to point out, in a rather verbose manner:
“The phonic expression no longer evokes a gestural, postural, ritual, sexual, etc. expression. It has first to turn back upon itself, cut itself off from the collective desiring production, and become arranged on separate, hierarchized semiological strata.”
He (135) then links this to what’s known as double articulation. This is also something that he and Deleuze deal with in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, not only in reference to language and semiotics, but also to geology and biology. In that book they (142) state that:
“[D]ouble articulation … formalizes traits of expression and traits of content, each in its own right, turning matters into physically or semiotically formed substances and functions into forms of expression or content.”
So, in summary, here we have matter turned into substance or, rather, formed matter and functions get formalized. Okay, it’s a bit more complex than that, but I don’t want to get tangled up on that. I’ve written about that a number of times already, so it’s not worth explaining in more detail here. Anyway, so, Guattari (135) connects all this to the issue with the doubled subject:
“The splitting of the I-ego is the point of origin of systems of reciprocal articulation – double articulation – between redundancies of content and redundancies of signifying expression.”
Okay, so, there’s the content and the expression that undergo certain formalization, if you will. Oh, and it’s definitely a certain formalization, not formalization in general, as it could all turn out otherwise, formalized in some other way. He (135-136) continues:
“The material and semiotic fluxes are made to fit a mental world constituted by being filled with mental representations that have been rendered powerless.”
The problem with this formalization is that the physical content becomes subordinate to the semiotic expression that is, in itself, powerless, because it is doomed to go around in circles. How so? Well, the thing about signifiers is that rely on other signifiers, in a redundant fashion, so that you always need other signifiers to explain a signifier, as he and Deleuze (112) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:
“All signs are signs of signs. The question is not yet what a given sign signifies but to which other signs it refers, or which signs add themselves to it to form a network without beginning or end[.]”
Or in simpler terms used by them (112):
“[E]very sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum.”
Now, as signs only ever refer to other signs, the whole idea of semiotic sign becomes pointless and reduced to signifier, as explained by them (112):
“That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign’s relation to a state of things it designates, or to an entity it signifies, but only the formal relation of sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain.”
So, what we are left with is just signification, as they (112) go on to add:
“The limitlessness of signifiance replaces the sign.”
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that physical content somehow doesn’t exist, no, no, that’d be absurd. It is there and it is needed, even for this to work. They (112) are pretty clear about this:
“[The] network … projects its shadow onto an amorphous atmospheric continuum. It is this amorphous continuum that for the moment plays the role of the ‘signified,’ but it continually glides beneath the signifier, for which it serves only as a medium or wall: the specific forms of all contents dissolve in it.”
In other words, signification results in this grid of signifiers that only ever refer to one another, which is why they (112) refer to it also as a network. This network then gets projected on the world, by which they hint at what Louis Hjelmslev (36) states in his ‘Prolegomena’:
“[A]n open net casts its shadow down on an undivided surface.”
The thing is, however, that the physical content cannot ever become the signified, which explains why they (112, 167, 170) refer to the physical content acting only as “a medium or wall”, a surface on to which the signifiers attach themselves to, but without ever actually changing the physical content. Another way of explaining this is to point out that a signifier never refers to a signified, only to other signifiers, because the contents for those expressions are abstracted, as they (112) point out.
To make more sense of that, we need to know what Ferdinand de Saussure had to say about this. So, as explained by him (66) in ‘Course in General Linguistics’ a signifier is a sound-image and a signified is a concept. In his (66) view, it’s all in your head anyway, both the signifiers and the signifieds:
“The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image.”
He is very, very adamant about this, so he (66) goes on to make sure that you get it:
“The latter is not the material sound, a purely is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our sense. The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it ‘material,’ it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract.”
As you can see yourself, both are, in fact, abstract. Sure, you do need the material world, and even he acknowledges that here, but what matters is that in signification it’s all abstract. It is we who refer to whatever it is that we are referring to as … because we’ve abstract the world that way, not because it is inherently that way. That’s the point Hjelmslev makes when he (36) states in his ‘Prolegomena’ that undivided surface gets divided, “just as an open net casts its shadow down”.
This is, of course, not all there is to language, nor to semiotics, which is what Deleuze and Guattari (112) want their readers to understand. In Peircean terms, the problem for them (112) is that we’ve ended up thinking only terms of symbols and forgot about indexes and icons. This is also what Guattari (136) indicates in his conference presentation.
He (135-136) is also troubled by the way in which signification is utilized. It’s inherently powerless, as acknowledged by him (136), or impotent, as he and Deleuze (112) put it in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, because it’s all about signifiers referring to other signifiers, so what’s the problem? Well, this lack of power, or impotence, is, paradoxically, what makes it powerful. They (113) summarize this by stating that:
“Nothing is ever over and done with in a regime of this kind.”
In other words, if you think you’re done, like once and for all, like having paid your debt, nah, nah-ah, you’re not, the debt is infinite, as they (113) point out. That’s because the chain of signification is both infinite and circular, as noted by them (113), hence my earlier remark about how signification is about going in circles. Okay, okay, but if that’s the case, if it is just powerless and impotent, how on earth does it make it powerful? Well, according to them (114), and I agree, some of the signifiers are given or, rather, promoted to the status of signified, even though they are just signifiers, by which they, and I, mean that some signifiers are granted a special status, as somehow more valuable than other signifiers. In their (117) terminology, these signifiers are supreme signifiers or despotic signifiers. Now, of course, what matters then is that we turn our attention to who gets to define which signifiers are granted such special status, as they (114) point out.
They (114) refer to these people as priests, likely in homage to Friedrich Nietzsche, and as bureaucrats. They are the ones who take it up to themselves to tell others what’s what. To avoid getting more tangled up on that, let’s just refer to them as the powers that be, or as “the dominant order”, as done by Guattari (136) in his conference presentation.
What also bothers Guattari (136) about this regime is that semiotics is reduced to semiology. Everything is, supposedly, explainable in linguistic terms, either in speech or writing, which devalues other semiotic modes, as he (136) points out. In simpler terms, he doesn’t like the way language is thought to represent the world, when it is, in fact, imposed on it.
But why is this a problem then? Well, the simple or simplified answer to that is that it’s bad for me, for you, and for everybody, both individually and collectively. It’s bad in two ways. Firstly, it’s bad because of that infinite postponement and circularity. Secondly, it’s bad because you subject yourself and others to this. This is all super bad because everyone has to constantly lie to themselves, to deceive themselves. He (137) comments on the Cartesian cogito, which we might also call the ‘I’, the doubled subject, noting that it fools us to think that we are the starting point, that consciousness is simply given and then it’s all obvious to us, as these subjects and objects. He (137) adds to this that this is indeed super bad because that’s just something that we’ve made up to and once you realize that, yeah, let’s just say it’s not pretty:
“The process of making conscious carries desire to such a pitch of excess, … of detachment from all reference-points, that it no longer has anything to hang on to, and has to improvise whatever expedients it can to avoid being destroyed in its own nothingness.”
So, yeah, like I put it, in this regime, people constantly lie to themselves and deceive themselves, because that’s what they have to do. Okay, the lesson of all this is that you don’t have to do that, but I’m saying that here in case you feel like you are suddenly falling apart, having realized that the way you think is based on lying to yourself and deceiving yourself, and other around you think this way as well. That’s the feel-good part of this essay. You won’t fall apart. You’ll be fine.
Guattari (137-139) goes on to explain this in his usual jargon, which is fine, I dig it, but it’s a bit of a tangent here, so I won’t do it. I’ll leave this discussion of deterritorialization and reterritorialization for another day. Instead, I’ll jump to the point where he (139) further comments on how this affects the ‘I’, the doubled subject, noting that the regime typically works with recourse to some higher power that, supposedly, makes it all work, as you might have guessed already. The signifiers that have been given a special status as supreme signifiers or despotic signifiers are presented to us, by the powers that be, as somehow inherently valuable, you know, like natural or god given. One way to look at that is, of course, to think that, well, ain’t that great. If something is inherently valuable, then that’s worth striving for and it’s all good. Another way to look at that is to think otherwise, to think that’s not good at all, and not because that’s not the case, because nothing is inherently valuable, but because someone else is presenting it to you as inherently valuable, because someone else is lying to you, because someone else is deceiving you, and because if you believe that someone else, you liable to make that even more believable, which means that you also end up lying to others and deceiving them.
Now, as I pointed out earlier, Guattari ain’t a numpty, so, no, he (139) doesn’t really think that it’s enough these days that some priests say that something is valuable, because some god, supposedly says so. He (139) reckons that it’d be rather quaint if that were the case. Instead, the problem is that this has become much more microscopic, by which he (139) means that it has become much more individual or individuated. Now people do this themselves, all day, every day, with or without the priests or the bureaucrats, because they themselves are part and parcel of that dominant social order, as he and Deleuze (130) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’.
I think Guattari (141) ends up summarizing this quite well, after he’s done with more of what I won’t cover here:
“A flux of empty subjectivity streams out to the detriment of any real freedom of action[.] … It remains a freedom meaning nothing, the freedom of the empty subject, the freedom of impotence.”
Now, to be positive, and to give credit to Descartes, as also done by Guattari (137), the empty subject is indeed free, because it is empty, because there is no inherent meaning to anything. The problem is, however, that people don’t know what to do with that freedom and before they figure out what to do it, that freedom is taken away from them, as he (141) goes on to add:
“This emptiness is not left to chance, but carefully put in place on the ladder of power relationships: everyone is bound to be bored, to feel meaningless and powerless, but everyone must get on with life in their prescribed place.”
Indeed, it’s all boring, meaningless and pointless, but life goes on and we lapse into thinking that it can be exciting, meaningful and there’s a point to it all if we value this and/or that signifier, because we are constantly told that you need to do that. In his (141) words:
“The flux of empty subjectivity produced by the capitalist signifying machine crystallizes at fixed points around which nomadic bits of desire must circulate.”
I’m changing the order here a bit, as he covers this, but a bit later than I had anticipated it. Later on, he (142) refers to this as “[t]he expression/content machine of money/merchandise relationship” that is central to capitalism, by which he means that money gets you things, which you think you need.
That could be, for example, beauty and it can be achieved by using money on this and/or that beauty product. That’ll make you happy, until you realize that you need to use more money on it, or that you also need to spend more money on some other beauty product, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum, because, as you might have guessed it, the chain of signification is infinite and circular. That’s also how capitalism works.
He (141-142) further elaborates this by stating that instead of thinking everything in terms of machines, like he and Deleuze do in ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, or assemblages and abstract machines, as they do in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, people are empty, yet crave fulfilment that nonetheless won’t ever satisfy them:
“Abstract machinism has faded into the background when confronted with the powerless world of representation and a subjectivation that can only, ever, lack reality. By ‘lacking’ it, I do not mean just not having it; but lacking in an active sense, in the sense that it is continually filled with a lack.”
He and Deleuze (154) also mention this in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Their translator, Brian Massumi (532), indicates that this Lacanian conception of desire as lack leaves us in a situation in which we lack enjoyment, and thus seek it, but the only thing we ever get to enjoy is that lack. It’s only fitting that he (532) exemplifies this with orgasm: people are willing to do a lot to have sex and then climax, only to want to do it again, and again, and again. Now, if you’ve ever had sex, or, rather an orgasm, you should be able to get the point.
He (141) gets to the bottom of this, by going back to the pronouns, how ‘it’ gets personified, giving primacy to the first person, over the second person and the third person, while also privileging the sexed over the non-sexed and one of the sexes over the other sex. His (141) point really is that we privilege ourselves over others and those like ourselves over others and tend to impose this over others, which can seen in something like personal pronouns.
It’s been pointed out already, at the very beginning of this essay, but it’s worth reiterating that he (141) really, really digs ‘it’, because it is a singularity or a multiplicity. To use the translator’s (135) example, there’s the ‘it’ in something like ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is true’ that functions this way. I think Guattari would have loved Finnish in this regard, not because it also has ‘it’, as already discussed, but because you don’t even need ‘it’ for something like ‘it is raining’ or ‘it is true’, because you can say ‘sataa’ or ‘totta’ and people understand that you are referring to this subjectless action, to what he (141) also refers to as “a complex abstract machine which can appear independent of any subjective tendency”.
This may seem unncessarily abstract, but he’s got you covered. So, let’s not get tangled up on the specifics, like what’s a signifier anyway, and let’s think in concrete, practical terms. He (143) summarizes this, the gist of it, by stating that:
“[W]e are all subjects – not necessarily the subjects of the signifier, but at least subject to Knowledge, Power, Money.”
So, it’s all equal, right? Well, no, absolutely not, as he (143) goes on to add:
“But the shares in this kind of subjectivity are in fact radically different, depending on whether one is a child, a member of a primitive society, a woman, poor, mad and so on.”
So, on paper, we are all equal, or so they, the powers that be, keep saying to us, but, in reality, that’s not really the case, as he (142-143) points out just a bit earlier:
“Qualitatively, everyone should in theory be equal before the flux of this subjectivity. But quantitatively, each will receive a share commensurate with the place he or she occupies where the various formations of power intersect.”
Yeah, so, yes, but also no. This is also more or less the end of his presentation and my essay. What did I learn from this? Well, not much that I didn’t already know. That said, it was still interesting because this is was a conference presentation that held years before the publication of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. You’d think it would be more like how he and Deleuze explain things in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, yet it isn’t. Plus, what I like the most about it is that something as simple as focusing ‘it’ can help you understand what they mean by machines or assemblages. When you get that, that it is what it is, that all makes way, way more sense.
References
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1972] 1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Guattari, F. [1974] (1984). In F. Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (R. Sheed, Trans.) (pp. 135–143). Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin Books.
- Hjelmslev, L. ([1943] 1953). Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (F. J. Whitfield). Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press.
- de Saussure, F. ([1916] 1959). Course in General Linguistics (C. Bally and A. Sechehaye, Eds., W. Baskin, Trans.). New York, NY: Philosophical Library.