Bent Meier Sørensen

7/30/2019 Bent Meier Sørensen

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Immaterial labor and the production of subjectivity

Paper for the 2002 LOK Conference

Kolding, Denmark

Project 1.2: Organizing Difference

Bent Meier Sørensen

[email protected]

PhD-student

Dept. of Management, Politics and Philosophy

Copenhagen Business School

Denmark



1 Immaterial labor and the production of subjectivity

Abstract and context:

This paper 1 discusses the nature of immaterial labor, and the production of subjectivity(or: blocks of intensities, becomings or larval subjects, since ‘subjectivity’ still seems to point towards a representational ideology) in World Integrated Capitalism.

The ’human subject’ as representation is, especially in Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari’s Anti-Odipus2, a target for a devastating and manifold critique, summed up in

its three maladies or stratifications: the organism, signification and subjectification.

Opening this paper the notion of immaterial labor is presented, a critique of the

unsatisfactory, traditional, representational subject is presented, and a sketch of a new, post human subjectivity is outlined, in terms of production of subjectivity, which is the

production of affects and blocks of sensations (or following Gabriel Tarde: belief anddesire) and the relation between signifying regimes, a-signifying affects and the central

Deleuzian notion of ’habit’ or what Guattari calls existential refrains. The Leibnizian idea

of subjectivity as a ‘fold’ should retain the fundamental multiplicity of being.

The analysis of ‘immaterial labor’ takes places within symbol analytical and

communicative strata (here: an open office environment for small, not yet fully

established companies within the cultural sector), and the condition and outcome of suchactivity, the production of subjectivity within a ‘mass intellectuality’.

Alongside, not to be overlooked, the production of fear: he whole point of the analysis isnaturally, to see the producer-consumer as an assemblage with the to poles of every

assemblage: on the one hand the fascist pole of exploitation, where the consumer is

petrified, exhausted and hypnotized by consumption (Guattari’s striking analysis is of TV

viewing and the deterritorialisation of the Existential Refrain herein.) The criticaldiscourse on the danger is, in contemporary studies (that is apart from but linked to ahuge critical tradition), for instance Tom Frank’s compelling One Market Under Good .

And on the other hand the autonomous acts of creation within this production. Here, the

contemporary and even hyped position can be signified by the Empire-discourse,involving Negri and Hardt. Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of ‘a-signifying semiotics,’

pointing to the creative potential in any social assemblage, will provide the analysis witha possibility of mapping out the virtual path a ‘counter-actualisation’ can follow.

Organisation theory has struggled with the move from so called Fordist to post-Fordist

modes of production, where a ‘intellectual surplus’ (or ‘human’/’social’ capital) has

entered into the production processes, especially in the knowledge intensive immateriallabor. Deconstructivist approaches have suggested, that this part of the production is both

constitutive and non-representable. In more pragmatic readings, it is often lumpedtogether under the heading ‘tacit’ knowledge, which is then the target for Knowledge

Management to exploit, mine, account for or develop.

1 This paper is intended to become the third chapter of a thesis on Social Creativity, and it does to a highdegree refer to the second chapter in that thesis: ‘Production, desire and World Integrated Capitalism.’2 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1977.



The ‘connection’ between the present chapter and the following (in fact, the rest of the

chapters) is stipulated to be the figure of the bachelor , one of the ‘connectors’ in a minor literature: the ‘bachelor machine’ is defined as nothing but a production of intensities,

and explicitly, by definition, not in any contract, only, as it were, contact , and neither source of any trust, only thrust . The ‘bachelor machine’ is Kafka’s artistic machine: art is

machinic, not aesthetic, hence art is social before any aesthetic significations and thefunction of art is beyond judgement.

This should, enfin, lead to the next chapters; Chapter 4 on the social constituency, whereHobbes’ contract theory, central to theories of social order, is discussed in conjunction

with the at the moment pretty hyped discourses on trust as the fundamental regulator insociety. An alternative in terms of social consistency on an immanent plane of intensity

and transversal lines of flight is elaborated.

As it will be apparent, the more empirical part of this chapter in still developing, and will be introduced on a concrete level at the LOK conference in Kolding, DK.



The coming into being of immaterial labor

In the last chapter the concept of machinic production was established in a (for that

matter purely analytical) framework of different dia- and synchronic machines: the

Primitive, the Imperial, the Capitalist, and, finally, the machine of World Integrated

Capitalism. It was sketched how organised work relates to this development, from theitinerant via the industrial worker to the post-Fordist social worker of immaterial labor.The relation between the machinic assemblages of desire and their stratifications was

raised, that is, how molecular desiring production was met by apparatuses of capture and

social control. Schizoanalysis was suggested as a possible nomadic, non-essentialist andrelational war machine capable of analysing the possibilities and dangers of World

Integrated Capitalism (WIC) on the one hand, and the machinic production of subjectivityon the other. What Foucault names bio-power is this rise of the productive multiplicity,

here under extreme conditions: In Deleuze and Guattari, and especially in Guattari’s later

work, the question of the innovative and productive power of what Negri and Hardt termsthe Multitude is formulated as a matter of producing subjectivity. This production of

subjectivity within immaterial labor is hence the necessary next theme to be explored.This is then a matter of the adequate uses of the three productive synthesis, those which

enhance the body’s capabilities and enlarge its connections: transverse connections,

inclusive disjunctions, and polyvocal conjunctions.3

We saw in earlier that the move from sovereignty in precapitalism to the govermentalityof capitalism and the perpetual immanent integration of all surplus value of life in WIC is

further reinforced by a constant dedifferentiation of the social institutions: they come toresemble each other as their borders wither, and foster, rather than a society based on

discipline and punish, a range of societies of control , an absolute smoothing of spaces

and decoding of flows. As World Integrated (or more to the point: integrating)Capitalism, spreads its sphere of domination, the distinction between the smooth space of

‘free action’ and the striated space of the ‘Work-model’ disappear, in a way relevant toour analysis: all activities are open for valorisation as well as for auto-valorisation.

Surplus value, which pertained to the core of the definition of the Work-model (no

surplus, no labor), is in WIC no longer localisable, and the production merges with theconsumption: there might not be any labor without surplus value, but surplus value does

arise without any work is done. The consumer turns into a producer that produces‘attention’

4: on the internet, in front of the screen, the newspaper, the spectacle of the

real. While not ceasing to function in its striated mode on level of the State – the State

never really disappeared - a limitless, World Integrated Capitalism appears on the border of this mode, superseding it via the free circulation of capital that on its side creates a

new smooth space, which totally reshapes the idea of work.

When the user becomes the employee (and vice versa), capitalism is not limited toquantity (as in the double abstract machine of economy and physics discussed above) but

operates by

3 Theses syntheses are developed in great detail throughout Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.4 Michael Goldhabers book on the attention economy might still have a valid point apart from its hype,

even given the fact that it was written prior to the (first) collapse of the New Economy.



a complex qualitative process bringing into play modes of transportation, urban

models, the media, the entertainment industries, ways of perceiving and feeling – every semiotic system.

5

This production-consumption process as a machinic assemblage is what must be taken as

the point of departure for the present study, rather than an ‘organisation’, its

‘environment’ and the ‘consumers’ of its ‘products’. To a certain extent, the advent of World Integrated Capitalism equals the advent of what Hardt & Negri’s Empire coined as

postmodern capitalism, or simply Empire, where the distinction between an outside(exchange value) and an inside (use value) of production is no longer valid.

6The

movement towards a society of control implies a full investment of social relations intothe relations of production. The difference between Empire and the productive Multitude

where affects, intensities and subjectivities are produced without capture from the State

or capital, appears, in Hardt and Negri, to parallel the emblem of the Austro-HungarianEmpire: an eagle with two heads, only should the two heads not look outward, but look at

each other in an attacking gesture.

The sphere of domination and the sphere of production no longer have a fixed space, afact that creates the need of another definition of labor as ‘abstract labor’7, an activity

taking place everywhere. This abstract labor is characterised by

The cooperating set of brains and hands, minds and bodies; it is both the non-

belonging and the creative social diffusion of living labor; it is the desire and the

striving of the multitude of mobile and flexible workers; and at the same time it isintellectual energy and linguistic and communicative construction of the multitude

of intellectual and affective laborers.8

This preliminary definition of immaterial labor (of which we must take autonomous labor and autonomous production to be integral terms) points to the most crucial threshold

maintained in Fordism, and transgressed in late capitalism: the urgency of boundary

maintenance. This is now (being) superseded by a reintroduction of the question of territoriality, a territoriality which is established neither in relation to the earth nor to the

despot. It is established immanent to its own creation, which is why the focus shiftstowards the refrain and its deterritorialising force.

In organisational theory the advent of immaterial labor not just as a dominant form, but

also as a form to be found in practically all domains of production, has been dealt with

largely as a question of knowledge as capital and a new organisation of productionfollowing from this insight.

9It is not, though, as yet a big area in terms of research, but a

rough sketch can be outlined. The basic tenet – in the most critical approaches, which it isthe aim to narrow a survey down to – knowledge is recognised as a real amount of capital

partaking in production. To analyse knowledge as capital takes into consideration thefact, that knowledge has left its industrialist position as external to production. While

5 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1988, p.492.6 Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri: Empire, 2000, p.209.7 It has to be worked out which exact relationships the concepts of abstract, immaterial and living labor has

here as compared to their source in the writing of Marx.8 Empire, p.209.9 Cf. for instance Solheim: Knowledge As Capital – an Organisational Challenge, 2001.



being external, knowledge should still be produced, and the production of knowledge and

its ‘transfer’ to the individual was during industrialism seen as the task for theeducational system. In Foucault’s disciplinary and striated society, knowledge-production

was confined both in time and space, a specific span of years in the life of each individualshould be spent in specific buildings and areas, where education in specific curricula took

place.Shoshana Zuboff came out in 1986 with an analysis of work and high technology that

describes this development within industry: In the age of the smart machine. The futureof work and power.

10Even if the analysis seems somewhat theoretically limited, it

deservedly became highly influential, not least because of its precise conception of post-industrial work: Zuboff distinguishes between two effects this development, an

automatisation and an informatisation. The automatization is well known as the takeover

by machines from the ‘hands’ of the worker to the domain of the machine. Theinformatization on the other hand, has a reciprocal character, as (also) industrial (as well,

naturally, of work in the tertiary sector) becomes infused with information, figures,graphs and text, which replaces the work on the hands, or more precisely, in the cognitive

and communicative capabilities of the multitude of the workers, in short, in their handlingand production of knowledge and communicational relationships, the latter via the production of affects and sociality. So alongside that knowledge and its reproduction has

entered into the centre of production, so has the social production. While thereproduction of labor capital did not concern production during industrialism, it is now in

the very core of capitalist production.

This has (had) huge consequences for educational practise and the continuousdevelopment of knowledge within the organisation, and, as it will be clear, even greater

in society at large. Within the organisation in turn, it leads to an intensification of the

responsibility delegated towards each member or unit within the organisation, with agrowing emphasis on self-management, both of the literal management of the self and of

the management of the labor processes and on continuous education and learning. Whilethese are some of the consequences within the still Taylorist

11organisation, the notion of

within (and without, and, on a more abstract level, size) is problematised. In the true

Fordist consumer society, the connection between production and the market isunidirectional and it remains a subsequent problem for ‘marketing’ to in fact sell the

product. In a growing area of the post-Fordist industry, however, the customer is able tospecify, in varying degree, the layout and functionality of the product, say the motor

power and indoor design of a car.

10

Shoshana Zuboff: In the Age of the Smart Machinethe Future of Work and Power 1, 1988.11 The two different concepts Taylorism and Fordism often seem to get mixed up. As they are used here,

Taylorism refers to the regimes within the organisation that were developed in accordance with Taylor’s

principles of Scientific Management. Fordism, on the other hand, refers to how the relation between the production process and the consumer is established, whether or not and to which degree the consumer has a

direct relation to the production process. It turns out, of course, that the principles of ScientificManagement does anything but solve the problems related to a post-Fordist consumer society, which

probably is one of the reasons for the frequent confusion of the concepts.



Especially the services of the tertiary sector, services, are affected of this passage to what

is here termed World Integrated Capitalism: the symbolic-analytical work processes inthis sector undergo profound structural changes, as the production and the consumption

processes converge and the whole of the social is being invested in production. Thedecisive raw material of the production is not found as pre-given entities, that is material

substances, data or images, even when these entities partake in the production. Rather,subjectivity in itself becomes the raw material of production and the product of production, in the conflating production-consumption process, that is eradicating the

distinction completely. In the passage to World Integrated Capitalism, Guattari focuses(as does Negri and Hardt) on this production of subjectivity, a new subjectivity which

eventually becomes expressed in this new configuration of labor in its immaterial form.

An immaterial, high technology production which within itself has created ‘autonomouslabor’, insofar as these forms of production simultaneously are animated by subjectivity

and communication.12

This eradication of the distinction between producer and consumer can be approachedfrom two perspectives simultaneously: on the one hand from the perspective of the

capitalist miraculation of production, where production is disregarded as such, and itappears to the consumer that capital itself produced the product, a somewhat‘traditionalist’ account of the production cycle in WIC. However, it is possible to argue

that in WIC and especially in the area of immaterial labor, this miraculation is less likelyto be effective, insofar as it is the production itself which is expanding and integrating

with consumption. Production is not concealed under consumption, rather is consumption

becoming an integral part of the production process, and vice versa.

This establishment pertains, as Maurizio Lazzarato points out, to a new cycle of

production, especially within productions with a cultural content (excluding, in fact, very

few commodities and services). The communication with the customer activates both a productive cooperation as well as a social relationship.

13The commodity transforms its

consumer by producing a social relationship consisting of innovation, production, andconsumption. The consumer, in the act of consumption, is transformed, and the

ideological and cultural environment of the consumer is enlarged and recreated.14

This

development especially concerns small and medium-sized enterprises, often as small asone person (or, as a matter of working hours,

15less than one) when engaged in multiple

networks of production(-consumption). It is in these networks of communication that, inBakhtin’s sense, a new social creativity is at stake. When the traditional cycle of

production is deconstructed, a new is set up where, to use Bakhtin’s model again, author-

reproduction-reception trilogy seems more suitable. The author is the ‘original’ producer,the enterprise, but since we are dealing with the production of affects, a whole range of

virtual series, this originality is yet to be expressed in the unfolding of the specific space-

time of the event. The reproduction is the communicative phase of exchange andinnovation, and the reception becomes the consumer/communicator. The valorisation

12 Cf. Empire, p.277.13 Cf.Maurizio Lazzarato: Immaterial Labor, 1996, p.138ff.14 Immaterial Labor, p.137.15 Later I shall sketch the critical relation between time and the production of subjectivity under capitalism,where Lazzarato deploys a more creative interpretation than Jameson’s rather pessimistic one, cf.

Myklebust, p.248.



becomes the production of communication itself,16

which is why it is meaningful to speak

of the production of subjectivity as what is in fact created in immaterial labor in WIC.The audience has left the position of being the mere undifferentiated receivers of goods,

in both being the already designed receiver of the product and also the field of socialcommunication that integrates the product in its larger context, without which there

would be no product.Lazzarato, alongside Bakhtin, maintains the radical autonomy of the productive synergies

of the whole process, and this autonomy establishes the paradoxical and new situation:Immanent to the capitalist production is a not yet decided potential for novelty, of which

actualisation, naturally, much have to be said.

However, the paradox might as well be understood as a prejudice. The ‘traditional’ view(of for instance the Frankfurter school) runs approximately as follows: it is first assumed

that there is an ‘outside’, which the subsumption has not yet deterritorialised, and since real desire is presumed to be outside capital, novelty or creativity must always work from

the outside (culture), where it finds its always already autonomous territory, secured by,

again somewhat paradoxically, the State (classical sovereignty). If, however, thedistinction between economy and culture, production and reproduction, capital and desire

is a construction which has now come to its close, the paradox and its transcendental premises loses its validity. The situation must be understood in terms of immanence: the

production of difference is integral to the all productionprocesses on a single plane of

ontological consistency.

Exploitation and stratification, on the other side, machinic enslavement of diverse kinds,

do not vanish away, but, essentially, capitalist command becomes parasitic to productionas well as reproduction. As was developed in the former chapter, the seemingly vanishing

sovereign State of the western societies is a signal of this process, as had these agencies

unknowingly made themselves superfluous in the societies of control. The authors of

Empire suggest that the constituency of the State is being deterritorialised by the creativeconstitution of being (vis a vis, it must be assumed, its deterritorialisation by worldintegrated capitalism), by way of the aforementioned convergence or conflation. On the

molecular level, the constituent forces of the assemblage (or the Multitude) is prior to its

capture, in which sense resistance becomes prior to power, since as desire is active, and

power is re-active. In the societies of control, as was also developed in the end of theformer chapter, the intermediary between the molecular constituency, that is, the

production of a-signifying intensities and pre-personal subjectivities and their capture or stratification, becomes increasingly shorter: there seems to be an instant capture at play,

that does not allow for the intensive field to proliferate, a constituent betrayal of desire.

This is the final conjunction in the well known three phase history of industrialism, which

then can be recaptured in the following way. The professional worker in earlyindustrialism reterritorialised a field of autonomy via the realisation of the unions; later,the mass worker performed a reterritorialisation via an even greater, but equally fragile

and time bound union, the Welfare State. Finally, the worker of WIC is a social, or

communicative worker, an expression of the Marxian mass intellectuality, whose

autonomous field is immanent to control, encompassing the whole field of production and

16 Immaterial Labor, p.144.



reproduction. This immanence and autonomy might be termed the multitude, or biopower

from below.17

It is, correspondingly, impossible to give a general account of whether thistype of analysis is progressive or reactionary. It could appear as a ‘reaction’ against the

decoding and deterritorialisation of the flows of commodities and money, pointing out yetmore severe exploitation and breakdowns of autonomy and social creativity. It might also

be understood as a radical innovative, ‘revolutionary movement’, expanding the speed of the market still further, to, in Nietzsche’s words, accelerate the process. The truth aboutthis matter, Deleuze and Guattari asserts, is that ‘we haven’t seen anything yet.’

18That is,

the capitalist axiomatic is always behind its schizophrenic limit, or, resistance is always prior to power.

2 The production of subjectivity is a deterritorialisation of the‘subject’: a note on affects

It is important to bear in mind that despite ‘individuality’ (especially in the 80’es and

early 90’es) has played a crucial role in producing a (in some senses superficial) feeling

of coherence in a perceived fragmented social environment, at the end of the daysubjectivity is a peripheral appendix to the desiring machines, proving Wittgenstein’s

words, that the subject is not part of the world but its boundary (here even thefunctionalism of Niklas Luhmann agrees). Mainly because of the rise in marketing and

control demands, an ideology in general known as consumerism, the subject hasdiscoursively (machinic: by means of language and technology) been placed at the

‘centre’ of the social as production.

In classical critique, the empty signifier of the subject was necessarily maintained to hide

the fact that it with severe progression became increasingly boring to be this subject, thatis, identify with it and seeking satisfaction by letting oneself be represented in its

discourse, no matter which alternative one compares this experience to. The subject in

this configuration is interpellated19 or perhaps miraculated by what Jameson terms ascommodity fetishism. Ideologically what is concealed is the fact that subjectivity has no

identity in the first place, that it is ‘a spare part adjecent to the machine’ and remains‘forever decentered, defined by the states through which it passes.’

20In the present text, it

is not a matter of ‘getting rid’ of the subject in its character of subjectivation (in line withthe late Foucault), but reversing the primacy of subjectivation over the creative

production of subjectivity or affects. It is already in play in the first volume of Capitalism

and Schizophrenia. The focus is not on identity, the relation to an interior, the boudoir of the Biedermeier culture expressed in the tedious postmodern lifestyle question: who am

I? The unproductive nature of this perspective was already pointed out in Adorno’sreading of Kierkegaard’s interior , where the inside of bourgeois life in all its concealment

was constructed as containing that safe knowledge about life which seemed totally

17 Still the sense of these two concepts, presently given their connotation via the Empire discourse, is

contingent on empirical validation.18 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.240.19 Since Deleuze rejects ideology as such, interpellation in Laclau’s sense cannot in fact be inscribed as amotor in this production.20 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.20.



destroyed in industrialism.21

In this text the focus is on produced subjectivity and

produced order, always in relation to an absolute Outside which keeps entering intorelations with larger relations of forces. The traditional subject is not the central issue for

Deleuze and Guattari: it is justified to say that their project is a oriented towards theobject rather than the subject

22and that is how the subject to be treated, as an object, a

special one, a ‘partial object’ as Guattari says, but nevertheless an object.While the subject is grafted into the plane of organisation, where al molar aggregates are

found, subjectivity is composed by blocks of intensities on the plane of consistency.Subjectivity is less a matter of being as it is a matter of becoming . The subject as a form

is in effect a stratification of the assemblage, and the

problem is therefore one of knowing how the individual would be able to transcendhis form and his syntactical link with a world, in order to attain to the universal

communication of events.23

Which is the image of thought that the production of subjectivity is to overthrow, or, at

least, to revitalise? It is the ‘I’ – hence the violent attack on psychoanalysis in Anti-

Oedipus. It is via psychoanalysis that desire becomes representational, becomes a theatre,rather than what it, according to Deleuze and Guattari is, a factory.

24Psychoanalysis also

partakes in a process of subjectification, and it is this subject and its desire (in the form of neurosis) which schizzoanalysis sets out to circumvent; there are whole regimes of

signifying semiological components (dispositifs) that stratifies the group subject. But one

can always replace any pronoun with ‘it’: ‘‘It’ does not represent a subject; itdiagrammatizes agency’ as Guattari says in Molecular Revolutions.

25In other words, the

reversal that the critique of Oedipus sets out to accomplish is both an analysis of how psychoanalysis produces distorted, constrained subjectivities (and does so in compliance

with capitalism) and a proposal of a theory of another construction of subjectivity

altogether. It is this construction that Guattari takes further in Chaosmosis and other of

his later writings. He defines subjectivity asThe ensemble of conditions which render possible the emergence of individual

and/or collective instances of self-referential existential Territories, adjacent, or in adelimiting relation, to an alterity that is itself subjective.

26

It is a definition that echoes Deleuze, when he asserts that the struggle for subjectivity

manifests itself through the right to ‘difference, variation and metamorphosis’, to use the

Foucauldian slogan. We are, in other words, exactly as far from the needs of theindustrial corporation as we are from the modern notion of the identity of the subject. The

21 Cf. Jameson’s discussion of Adorno’s point in Fredric Jameson: Late Marxism. Adorno, or, the

Persistence of the Dialectic, 1990, p.203.22 Cf Ian Buchanan: Deleuzism. A Metacommentary, 2000.23 Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense, 1990, p.178, quoted in Daniel Smith’s ‘Introduction’ to Gilles

Deleuze: Essays Critical and Clinical , 1997.24 Fundamentally this is the two things that Deleuze-Guattari point out as shortcomings with regard to

psychoanalysis: that it does not understanding the nature of delirium, the fact that delirium invests thewhole social field, and, secondly, that it does not understand the nature of desire, because the unconscious

is seen as a stage, not a factory. Cf. Chaosophy, p.99.25 Félix Guattari: Molecular Revolution. Psychiatry and Politics, 1984, p.135.26 Félix Guattari: Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, 1995, p.9.



subject belongs, as said, to the plane of molar organisation, and at the limit between this

organisation, and the molecular multiplicity of desire is where desiring-production takes place. The task here, the task of schizoanalysis as such, is to insert itself in this liminal

intersection in order to deterritorialise this already factitious and subjugated territory.27

On the other hand, it is the function of Oedipus to displace this border, thereby turning

the becoming schizophrenic into a neurotic being.In this sense we can talk of partial objects, larval subjects or, below, affects to designate

the production of subjectivity. The partial object is detotalised, deterritorialised, anddistanced from and individuated corporeity,

28in which sense it is pre-individual, and

remains pre-individual, as it doesn’t refer back to a full body of which it is a ‘part’: it isin a constitutive position of becoming, able to open itself up to molecular desiring

machines, influencing – still in a very real way – history.

2.1 Desire and the production of subjectivity

Guattari’s definition is beyond the individual and the person, dealing with pre-verbal

intensities, the above mentioned partial objects, which are a-signifying blocks of intensities. Thus understood, these intensities are desiring production, following, Brian

Massumi’s definition of desire:

Desire is the production of singular states of intensity by the repulsion-attraction of limitative bodies without organs (governed by deterministic whole attractors) and

nonlimitative bodies without organs (governed by chance-ridden fractalattractors.)

29

Subjectivity is the becoming of these singular states of intensities in their movement from

the virtual to the actual (from the nonlimitative to the limitative). Notably these

intensities considered as differences are superior to mere variations or ‘differenciations’:

the variations of the actual are just the remnants of the differences of the virtual or intensive fields, as Deleuze makes clear in Difference & Repetition.30

This enables us tospeculate that WIC is not as such characterised by a lack of difference, even if the

differenciations pertaining to present day society seems redundant. Buy this is rather a

question of dominant significations, of machinic agencies that hide and destroy differences in order to control.

Intensities or affects, on the contrary, are nonsignifying and pre-individual (and, of

course, even more pre-personal), they cannot be disciplined, controlled or counted. Hencethey escape the Royal Sciences, among which the primary and most distinguished are the

life sciences. Intensities must, in their character of events, be followed , as they areunformed matter of deterritorialised flux.

31Affects are not emotions, and the analysis will

not exceed psychologisms if emotions should set the agenda. The upsurge of signifyingregimes producing quests for ‘emotional intelligence’ within the organisation is nothing but another index of signifying regimes and machinic subjectivation.

27 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.102.28 Chaosophy, p.104-5.29 Brian Massumi: A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1992, p.xx.30 Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition, 1994.31 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 1986 , p.13.



Later I will discuss the notion of trust as a mode of order of the social. In relation to

affect and directly working to limit its autonomy and indetermination, trust can be seen asthe generalised apparatus of capture, or a social machine which codes affects. If we for

the time being equals confidence with trust, still bearing in mind that confidence seems to be a deterioration of trust, a preliminary hypothesis regarding trust society in a Deleuzian

framework is highly critical. In his contribution to the Deleuze Reader , ‘The autonomy of Affect’, Brian Massumi performs a catchy analysis of what made it possible for anincipient figure like Ronald Reagan to rule for two periods in the White House. He

suggests that this was due to a strategy of ‘projecting and air of confidence’. By this ismeant deploying an apparatus of capture that inhibits affect , that overcodes affects as

affection: ’Confidence is the emotional translation of affects as capturable life potential.’

The virtual, where a capture has not yet been carried out, is played out on a plane of

consistency, constructed by the abstract machines. They are genuinely abstract, in thatthey don’t exist outside the concrete assemblage in which they operate and they don’t

operate via forms and substances, even if they are affectuated in forms and substances.32

Abstract machines operate in the assemblage via another logic than the strata: they

effectuate the metamorphosis of the assemblage from point of view of the molecular andthe intense. The abstract machine simultaneously constitute a plane of consistency that isopposed to the plane of organisation on which ‘the subject’, ‘the organisation’ and other

molar segmentarities are played out.

The plane of consistency is the name this surface has in A Thousand Plateaus, where italso approximates the ‘machinic phylum’.

33This plane consists of haecceities,

singularities, speed and slowness, temperature, potential, in short: intensive differences or differences of intensity. That is a tautology and rightly so: an intensity is in itself a

difference, it differs by the force of its intensity.34

The plane of consistency relates to the

given diversity by way of actualisation, by which actualisation the intensive stage is‘covered over.’

35That is why Deleuze can maintain that the diversity is the given, but

‘difference is that by which the given is given.’ Diversity is given for experience, and itturns out that in actual experience the intensities are subordinated the extensities

(qualities).

Prior, then to the I and the self, we have the individual (or the dividual), having the same

relation to this field of intensive order of implication as the I and the self have to theextensive and qualitative order of explication.

36The I and the self, which are universals

dispersed by the signifying regimes, must be replaced by the (non-personological)individual, its intense individuating process and its pre-individual singularities. To re-

singularise is to let the I and the self remain abstractions in the face of the event and be

re-produced via the intense singularities of the event, rather than treating the event as

32 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.511.33 Its other names includes metaphysical plane in The Logic of Sense, Body without Organs in Anti-

Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and plane of immanence in Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: What

Is Philosophy?, 1994. In Difference and Repetition the virtual-actual configuration is developed further with a intensive plane or state between them.34 Difference and Repetition, p.222.35 Difference and Repetition, p.223.36 Difference and Repetition, p.258.



‘what happens to me’, and in that sense letting no self be produced by the event, the

heaecceity, the singular thisness of what happens to me.

The process of actualisation is then delimited by the order word: A single philosophicalterm (essence, meaning, order-word) can summarise all three dimensions as they in their

multiplicity are one. The problem with the order-word is, that it ‘restrict us to the lowest

level of our virtuality.’37 Language must not be analysed as consisting of constants, sinceits essence is change and continuous variation.

38The abstract machine behind every

order-word is in constant variation and in fact new in any actual occurrence. D&Greinstate content, what Massumi calls ‘vertical content’ into language, but not in the

relation of the signifier/signified, rather to be a produced state of alienation from thevirtual, or the overcoding of the intense quanta with qualities and organisation: in a sense,

the ‘wo-man without qualities’ is what we want to follow here.

The production, it can be concluded, of affects or intensities is the engine of the production of subjectivity, confidence, trust and, we might add, contract, is the capture

and overcoding of affects, exclusive disjunctive synthesis that breaks the consistency of

affect. Affects that serves as the creative potential of becoming at all, the difference behind every actualisation and any ‘autonomy’.

When it comes to the re-singularisation of subjectivity or the establishment of anexistential territory, we are not talking about massive bundles of affects, in overflowing

or Dionysian configurations. Rather it is ‘hyper-complex refrains, catalysing the

emergence of incorporeal Universes such as those of music or mathematics, andcrystallising the most deterritorialised existential Territories.’

39This catalysis is the way

be which consistency, what Guattari calls ‘auto-enriching,’ is reappropriated in aheterogeneous manner. This calls for a transversal schizo analysis, which both draw on

the linguistic signifier, but also on the other side of the assemblage, its machinic order,

where ‘non-semiotically formed matter’ is expressed, expanding the analysis to the non-

human, technological, image- and sound production, all assembled together bytransversal connectors that serve as ‘refrains’ of Existential Territories.

If, however, we follow the neo-liberal call for a reconstruction of the individual,40

as it isseen in for instance Peter Drucker’s writings, we will obtain nothing more than

confirming the immense social and technical machines that produces individuals in their

normal, neurotic form, a form they share with us, a production which is not for the sakeof the same individuals, but for the sake of reproducing and repeating status quo. That is,

clearly, not fascism, but neither is it, clearly, resistance nor creativity. What must bereinvigorated is the possibility for experimentation beyond judgement, letting the

individuation process pass through enough zones of imperceptibility as to separate

destiny and necessity41

and to re-singularise the ‘di-vidual’ as a true multiplicity.

37 A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, p.40.38 Such a conception makes relative the distinction between stasis and movement: stasis is just a relative

lower degree of difference39 Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, p.16.40 Cf. for instance Frank’s devastating critique of the new individualism in ‘extreme capitalism’ in Thomas

Frank: One Market Under God. Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, 2000.41 Cf. The Logic of Sense, p.169.



2.2 Case material

What remains, then, is to adapt this notion of subjectivity production in the case of Louiz .

This will be introduced via a discussion of the indoor design and architecture of the openoffice environment, and presented at the forthcoming conference.

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Jameson, Fredric (1990): Late Marxism. Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio (1996): Immaterial Labor. In Virilio, Paul and Hardt, Michael: Radical Thought in Italy Minneapolis: University of Minnisota Press.

Massumi, Brian (1992): A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge,

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Solheim (2001): Knowledge As Capital – an Organisational Challenge.

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the Future of Work and Power 1. New York: Basic Books.

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