https://transversal.at/transversal/1106/lazzarato/en

"The technological machine is only one instance of machinism. There are also technical, aesthetic, economic, social, etc. machines.

One can be ‘enslaved’ or ‘subjected’ to a machine (whether it be technical, social, communicational, etc.) We are enslaved to a machine when we are a cog in the wheels, one of the constituent parts enabling the machine to function. We are subjected to the machine when, constituted as its users, we are defined purely by the actions that use of the machine demands. Subjection operates at the molar level of the individual (its social dimension, the roles, functions, representations and affections). Enslavement on the other hand operates at the molecular (or pre-individual or infrasocial) level (affects, sensations, desires, those relationships not yet individuated or assigned to a subject). I will try to illustrate the features that characterize these devices of enslavement and subjection, by examining how they function in the television “machine”.

 
Subject constitution through communication and language

“Who would still dare to claim true ownership of his anger nowadays, when so many take it upon themselves to tell him how he feels – indeed, they know better than he himself does?!”[1]
Robert Musil

 
The capitalist system, through the operation of social subjection, creates and allocates roles and functions; it provides us with a subjectivity and assigns to us a specific process of individuation (via categories such as identity, sex, profession, nationality, etc.). On the one hand, subjection causes us to individuate; it constitutes us as subjects, determined by the specific demands of power. On the other, it attaches each individual to an identity which is a “known quantity”, fixed and immutable.

How does television produce subjection? What role do language and communication play in this process?

The subject-function in communication and language is in no way natural: on the contrary, it has to be constructed and imposed. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the subject is neither a precondition of language nor is it the cause of a statement. Deleuze argues that we as subjects are not what generate the statements in each of us; they are produced by something entirely different, by “multiplicities, masses and packs, peoples and tribes: all collective arrangements which are within us and for which we are vehicles, without knowing precisely what those arrangements are.” These are what make us speak, and they are the true drivers of our statements. There is no subject, only collective arrangements of enunciation which produce statements. “The statement is always collective, even when it appears to be expressed by a unique, solitary individual such as the artist.”[2]

From these collective arrangements, from the multiplicity of roles which constitute us and for which we are vehicles, the televisual machine extracts a subject which apprehends and indeed feels itself to be the absolute and individual cause and origin of its expressions, its words and its affects. Television functions through the use of a small number of established, codified statements, statements of the dominant reality; it also uses a series of prefabricated modes of expression. It then claims to transform these statements and expressions into the statements and expressions of individual subjects themselves. How does it go about doing this?

Television succeeds in presenting statements that conform to the dominant reality of capitalism as though they were the statements of individuals, by constructing a machine that interprets their words and their expression; it also puts in place a machine of subjectivation that operates by creating a double of the subject. It encourages you to speak as the subject of enunciation (sujet d’énonciation), as though you were the cause and the origin of statements. At the same time, as the subject of the statement (sujet d’énoncé), you are spoken by this same machine of communication. If you are interviewed on television (whether in a literary discussion programme or a chat show or even on reality TV, where you talk about your experiences), you are set up as a subject of enunciation (“You the viewer or you the esteemed guest, who are making television”). You are then subjected to a machine of interpretation with several constituent parts. First of all, you become dominated by a non-discursive machine designed to interpret, select and standardize – and this is before you have even begun to speak'.

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