Signs and Machines - 9781584351306

"Capital is a semiotic operator": this assertion by Félix Guattari is atthe heart of Maurizio Lazzarato's Signs and Machines, which asks us to leavebehind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for anew theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in theproduction of subjectivity.

Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified,Signs and Machines shows how signs act as "sign-operators" that enterdirectly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, pricedifferentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic"motors" that make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassingrepresentation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semioticenslavements.

Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics withthe political theories of Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and JudithButler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzaratoasks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when theproduction of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism?What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivityundertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process ofsubjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement?In addressing these questions, Signs and Machines takes on a task that is todaymore urgent than ever.