Little Machines

MF: Imagine if you could invent something like that – where you’d just endlessly distract yourself; at any point in the world and at any time in the world you can be reached by the imperatives of capitalism ... Imagine an object like that! What would it look like?

Student #10: A phone?1

X: Where do you place the proletarian, then?

... In a world in which there has emerged, in a way that actually does exist, that is a presence in the world, not the thought of science, but science objectified in some way, I mean these things entirely forged by science, ... gadgets and things, which at the moment occupy the same space as us - in a world in which this emergence has taken place, can know-how at the level of manual labor carry enough weight to be a subversive factor? This is how, for me, the question arises.

What do you do with all I tell you? You record it on a little machine, and afterward, you give parties which you hand out invitations to - that's a Lacan tape for you.2


It is clear, even if one admits that Marx will disappear for now, that he will reappear one day.3

Footnotes

  1. Fisher, Mark, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. by Matt Colquhoun (Repeater, 2020) p 134 ↩

  2. Lacan, Jacques, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, trans. by Russell Grigg, 1st edition (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007) p 149 ↩

  3. Foucault, Michel, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Pbk. [ed.] (Routledge, 1990) p 45 ↩