As Maurizio Lazzarato observes, contemporary subjection has two radically different but complementary dimensions: subjectivation and machinic enslavement. On the one hand, through a range of processes, we are constituted as individualised subjects with named roles, positions and rewards such as man, woman, boss, worker, creditor and debtor. On the other, we are torn apart and inserted as cogs into larger machineries which may involve technical machines but, given their necessary imbrication in a social context, are never simply reducible to them. In the past, machinic enslavement was above all associated with the factory: workers were ‘hands’ attached to machines or production lines and inserted into the factory’s broader productive apparatus. Now, in the age of data and the digital, machinic enslavement is no longer contained by factory walls. Our information, affects, attention and labour are ripped apart and reassembled as elements of multiple larger machineries on a continuous basis. Machinic enslavement, Lazzarato comments acerbically, is everywhere except in critical theory which is too drawn to language and the subject to engage with the machinic and the non-linguistic forms of semiosis (the data, the graph, the code) at its core (Lazzarato 2014: 13). And what of cinema, that most machinic and semiotically diverse of cultural forms? Is it able to engage with machinic enslavement in a way that critical theory generally fails to do or does it simply put its own machineries and semiotic diversity to work to monetise our attention while narratively re-centring the bounded individual?

These are questions that I will explore as the chapter proceeds, in the process both radicalising my probing of the crisis of the individual subject and seeking to move beyond it. I begin by looking at two broadly social realist films which engage frontally with the crisis but where the machinic is effectively relegated to the margins and cinema’s semiotic diversity is put in the service of the production of centred subjects. These are Brizé’s La Loi du marché, a work already discussed from a different angle in Chapter 3, and Cédric Klapisch’s Ma part du gâteau (My Piece of the Pie, 2011), a social realist comedy hybrid, a film not yet considered. I then explore Lazzarato’s account of the machinic and its relationship to plural semiosis before discussing how it casts light on the films. I move on to discuss Luc Besson’s blockbuster Lucy (2014).