Félix Guattari’s Desiring Machines

Lacan himself ends up missing the opportunity to relate his notion of the objet petit a to Marxist ideas about production, reproduction and consumption in political economy, and therefore scotomises the possible forms of “social enunciation” that could act as vehicles for political agency precisely during periods of technological revolution. Industrial capitalism, once set in motion, generates deterritorialised subjects, and through the very process of constant de-skilling and re-skilling, engenders new, in principle universal, machinic forms of subjectivity. Lacan had discovered the mechanism, but had not yet unfolded its historical conditions and political implications. Guattari suggests that the entire direction of social institutions has been radically transformed as a result of the capitalist expropriation of the results of the industrial revolution.