2/25/16Lazzarato Lecture, end of Ch3 and conclusion

Debt as both ‘social subjection’ and ‘machinic subjugation’

So, most of what we have been talking about in terms of debt over the past few classes has been the intersection between debt and morality, the ways in which as subjets, we are made, through the processes of memory, subjection, and consciousness, into individuals who will pay our debts. Let’s just be reminded of those elements…

All of this preceeding analysis is what Lazzarato calls ‘social subjection’, but Lazzarato says, there is another element besides this social subjection that completes the process, what he calls, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “machinic subjection”

For, as Marx reminds us: “As a matter of course, the creditor possesses, besides moral guarantees, also the guarantee of legal compulsion and still other more or less real guarantees” (qtd 146); in other words, L writes, “Morality, the promise, and one’s word, are mostly insufficient to guarantee debt repayment. To have a real ‘hold’ on subjectivity, there must also be legal and police machines” (146). These two – social subjection and machinic subjugation operate as two necessary halves of the creation and maintenance of the creditor-debtor relationship.

Molarity vs. Molecularity: “In mechanics, molar properties are those of a mass of matter, as opposed to its parts -- atoms or molecules. For Deleuze and Guattari, molarity is the site of coded wholes. It is a productive process: a making-the-same. Its attractor state is that of stable equilibrium. It is the mode of being, rather than becoming.The principle revolutionary objective of their writing is to break down molar aggregates in favor of molecularity, and the "microphysics of desire." They call for becoming rather than being, for becoming-other rather than being the same. For them, becoming-other is thoroughly political.”

Okay, but so what is machinic subjugation? It is this kind of ‘pre-individual’ level at which the debt relationship operates, a level that “does not involve consciousness, re[resentation, or the subject” (147). “Social subjection functions according to norms, rules, and law, but subjugation inversely involbes only protocols, techniques, procedures, instructions, and asignifying semiotics requiring reaction rather than action. Subjection implies and demands a certain self-relation, it brings into play techniques of the self. Machinic subjugation on the other hand, dismantles the self, the subject, and the individual” (150).

He gives the example of the ATM --- in which you are a number, following a series of repetitive reactions, entering the ‘correct’ information into a machine, operating as a machine. There is nothing subjective, individual, or even human about this. The operations of consciousness and subjectivity are not at play here: “there is no subject who acts here”; rather there is a “dividual” that functions” (148). What does this concept of the dividual mean?

“The individual makes ‘use’ of money, the dividual is adjacent to the credit-machine,he does not act, does not use, he functions according to the programs that use him as one of its component parts… he functions correctly according to the received instructions. And the same is true for all the machines that we encounter every day” (149)

Why do we need to explain both sides of this construction of the debtor, as both individual and dividual?

This analysis leads us to see that the agent of power here is precisely not, as some of you have been writing in your reading responses, per say, the government. Remember, part of L’s argument is that the government too is beholden to financial interests --- credit rating agencies, international finance agencies like the IMF and the World Bank, currency markets, international trade alliances like NAFTA and the WTO, individual lobbyist organizations, the foreign and domestic banks that finance its debt; it is even, as we saw in 2008, obliged to ‘bail out banks’. So while the government does have some power in this drama of debt and credit, this role is limited. In fact, L clearly says that the government has a role in the ‘social subjection’ side only; “the government has a hold on behavior, that is, on the conduct, the actions of individuated subjects, but not on the machinic functioning of dividuals. Debt/money clearly represents a technique for governing behavior, but it also and above all functions as a subjugation governing dividuals through machinic recurrence and feedback.” (150)

Okay, so at one and the same time, the creditor-debtor relation creates us as individuals and destroys our individuality and humanity by requiring that we all the time act as machines – a pretty apparent contradiction, no? So L is describing neoliberalism as a system that is fraught with contradictions. Here are a few more: In the neoliberal world “science simultaneously produces nuclear power capable of destroying several earth-sized plaets; its civil uses pollute the ecosustem… Industry multiplies the production of consumer goods while at the same time multiplying water, air, and soil pollusion and degrading the climate. Agrigultural production posions us at the same time it provides us with food; cognitive capitalism destroys the ‘public’ education system at every level [at the same time it has made information more available now than at any other point in history]; cultural capitalism produces historically unprecedented conformism [even as we are told more now than ever before that we must ‘be individuals, be unique, be free’]” (152)

The most important one, however, for L is that “Those who put the nation at risk today are those responsible for law, order, rationality, and democracy itself” (156)

It should not be a surprise then, that L argues that neoliberalism and the creditor-debtor relation lead to a kind of anti-democracy. You all should have answered that question last class… what were your answers?

“For forty years of neoliberal policies have undermined already weak preprsentative instittions and the crisis has strengthened all the political systems the [Ancient] Greeks considered opposed to democracy. Choices and deicsions concerning whole people has been made by an oligarchy, a plutocracy, and an aristocracty.

Oligarchy – rule by the few

Plutocracy – rule by the wealthyAristocracy – rule by the upper class (which is here social as well as financial)

Corruption, hypocrisy, and distrust, L argues, are not accidentally related to a society founded on the creditor-debtor relationship, but rather its necessary outcome. (159)

Conclusion

There are two aspects of L’s proposal of what must be done: “ This not only means annulling debts or calling for default, even if that too would be quite useful, but leaving behind debt morality and the discourse in which it holds us hostage. We have lost a lot of time, and lost a lot period by trying to clear our debts. In doing so, we are already guilty! We must recapture this second innocence, rid ourselves of guilt, of everything owned, of all bad conscience, and not repay a cent. We must fight for the cancellation of debt, for debt, one will recall, is not an economic proble, but an apparatus of power designed not only to impoverish us, but to bring about catastrophe” (164).