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Reviewed by:
  • Governing by Debt by Maurizio Lazzarato, and: Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity by Maurizio Lazzarato
  • Martin O’Shaughnessy
Lazzarato, Maurizio. Governing by Debt. Translated by J.D. Jordan, Semiotext(e), 2013. 280pp.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by J.D. Jordan, Semiotext(e), 2014. 280pp.

Maurizio Lazzarato is an Italian sociologist and philosopher who lives and works in France. He collaborated on collective works with important figures like Antonio Negri and Yann Moulier-Boutang in the 1990s and has been a frequent contributor to the journal Multitudes in which the same two intellectuals were also leading voices. During the same period, he was closely involved as a theorist and activist in the long and inventive struggle of the intermittents du spectacle, French cultural workers defending a social security regime that took particular account of their unstable employment and the way in which their creativity overflowed their periods of paid activity. This involvement fed into a broader reflection and theorization around mutations of labor, the rise of precariousness, neo-liberal governance and leftist mobilization that found expression in a range of texts published in the 2000s. Lazzarato came forcefully to public attention in the English-speaking world when his timely, important book on debt, La Fabrique de l’homme endetté, was translated into English in 2013 as The Making of the Indebted Man. That book came out of his broader concern with neo-liberal governance and the subjectivities associated with it, but it was tightly focused on debt. The two books to be discussed here return to that larger picture, the prime focus of Governing by Debt being neo-liberal governance and that of Signs and Machines, the production of subjectivity under capitalism. Like La Fabrique, both books are in close dialogue with Foucault and particularly his famous analysis of neo-liberalism in his Birth of Bio-politics Lectures at the Collège de France, an analysis that, in one way or another, they seek to update. Again like La Fabrique, both are also heavily influenced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and make ample use of some of the main concepts that they deploy in books like Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (e.g., codes, deterritorialization, flows and their capture, axioms, assemblages, machines). The denser and [End Page 166] more demanding of the two works, Signs and Machines, is also particularly indebted to Guattari’s discussion of signifying and a-signifying semiotics and draws heavily on theorists like Bakhtin and the filmmaker Pasolini while engaging in a sustained critique of key contemporary critical theorists like Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou and, to a lesser extent, Slavoj Žižek. Collectively, the latter are seen by Lazzarato to be part of a more general preoccupation with language, signification and the subject, at the expense of a more rounded account of capitalist subjection in its machinic and asignifying dimensions. Badiou and Rancière are also criticized for neglecting the political dimension of the economic and developing theories of politics singularly lacking in any grounded sense of how contemporary capitalism produces subjection.

Governance

Governing by Debt begins in a rather unconventional manner with a glossary that explains how Lazzarato understands certain key terms, but in fact feels more like a bullet-point summary of issues to be developed. The explanation proper starts when, in characteristically forthright terms, Lazzarato states his disagreement with both orthodox and heterodox economists. While for both groups, appropriation is secondary to production (with production and growth preceding any distribution), for Lazzarato, appropriation and distribution come first. In other words, it is the apparatuses of capture and distribution that define the conditions of production and not vice versa. It is for this reason that Lazzarato insists on the political nature of the economic: economic and labor relations are always already political; that is, power asymmetries define them from the start so that it is naïve, for instance, to think of liberating labor from capital, because labor, as we now understand it, is not defined simply by production but is fundamentally shaped by the broader system of appropriation and distribution.

For Lazzarato, there are...

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