Locating technology as a means of survival converts it into a “Project” of semiocapitalism, resulting in machinic subjugation --- the dread associated with materializing “the project” leads to repetition compulsion.

Anticipation travels quickly through the bleachers in a stadium of supporters before the teams take the field or in a theater before the curtain is raised.4 Occurring in the midst of an in-between-ness of bodies and minds, and preceding the staking out of definitive positions on the play to come, anticipation is intersubjective and projective. It is an “affect,” conforming to those intensities which constitute “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension […].”5 When an architectural project is met with a flurry of anticipation, it is able to push or pull its audiences gently, to suggest to them a particular direction or angle of approach, to curate their reception of its outcomes in advance, to position them in relation to that which is “not yet.” It is precisely the anticipation that surrounds “projects” that also situates the project as a key operation within contemporary “semiocapitalism”. With roots in the schizoanalysis of Félix Guattari (although it has been more recently popularized via the work of Italians Lazzarato and Franco “Bifo” Berardi), this theorization of capitalism acknowledges the primacy of regimes of signs in the production of products and workers alike. Both Lazzarato and Berardi emphasize the doubled nature of this mode of “subjectivation,” wherein, on the one hand, we encounter the production of individuated subjects by way of language (so-called “signifying semiotics”),and, on the other, we witness the projection of a visceral “asignifying semiotics” oriented towards the production of what Gilles Deleuze termed“dividuals.”6 This latter category of sign can be thought of in terms of indices, diagrams or statistics that “operate ‘prior’ and ‘next’ to signification, producing a ‘sense without meaning,’ an ‘operational sense.’”7 The project, we argue, is just such a diagram. In response to such (asignifying) signs, subjects undergo a form of depersonalization that can be spoken of in terms of a Guattarian “machinic enslavement” – an operation that integrates workers into broader assemblages that can be exploited by capital. Rather than the mass, an aggregate that was so important to the disciplinary societies of the twentieth century, in the contemporary “control society,” we confront arrangements of bodies–minds that form samples, data, markets or “banks.”8 In a project-based economy, we can imagine these banks of labor to be made up of both intensive surplus labor of the kind that produces “surplus value without doing any work” (children, the retired, the unemployed, consumers etc.) and an erratic and extensive, floating labor force that is engaged on a short-term basis under precarious conditions. Through such banks, “cells of productive time can be mobilized in punctual, casual, and fragmentary forms.”9 Whilst, on the one hand, the subject is treated in the abstract, as a “mere theoretical probe or experimental procedure”10; on the other hand, she must be able to be immediately mobilized – to be “driven towards movement.” She must, in other words, be able to be affected. It is for this reason that “the everyday world, the lifeworld, the world of interpersonal relationships” are ruthlessly exploited as “hitherto untapped resources” under contemporary capitalism.11 What we are left with is a Vitalpolitik which, as Joseph Vogl explains, “sets its sights on individuals in their entirety, watching over them from morning to night, in their homes and in their beds, as lovers and as dreamers, in sickness and in health.”12 Our disposition towards the present moment (and, importantly, towards the future) is, as such, central to our ability to be “mobilized,” and this goes some way to explain why contemporary capitalism seems so deeply to obsess over our collective states of mind, our moods, our dreams and our preferences. Under the sign of the project, we are exposed to a diagrammatic operation that sketches a possible future. In anticipation of that future, we are moved. In making the project the site for her work in the late capitalist economy, the architect finds herself displaced; in fact, as long as she continues to work on “the project,” we can pose that she defers the moment of its materialization. She lingers in a state of anticipation, compulsively producing substitutes for a future real. “In societies of control,” Deleuze reminds us: “one is never finished with anything.”13 The blessing and the curse of the project in this sense is that it is always temporary. Reliance on the vagaries of the project reveals the incredible vulnerability and precarity of workers (architects included), who simply disappear “off screen” in between projects, their earning potential deactivated until the next chunk of work is allocated or created. As Lazzarato notes, the cycle of [immaterial] production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle gets dissolved back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. The strength of the project under semiocapitalism thus lies in the fact that it invokes a sense of the finite, a dread and a longing for it to be over, the promise of a succession of fresh starts, of (entrepreneurial)opportunities to remake oneself. It is typical of neoliberalism at large that such precarity is painted in terms of an opportunity. In delimiting a time and a space, the project acts as a kind of “container technology” capable of holding things together.15 It is thus also a way of coping with precarity –of, literally, not falling apart in the face of a world of precarious work and machinic enslavement – which is perhaps one reason why it holds such an unquestioned status as the primary organizational diagram when it comes to the work done by architects (who both work within and on projects). We can speculate, following the work of Boris Groys, that the subjective appeal of the project lies, therefore, in its very boundedness, in the fact that it will, ultimately, end. As Groys notes: Each project is above all the declaration of another, new future that is supposed to come about once the project has been executed. But in order to induce such a new future one first has to take a period of leave or absence for oneself, with which the project has transferred its agent into a parallel state of heterogeneous time. This other timeframe, in turn, is undocked from time as experienced by society: it is de-synchronized. Under semiocapitalism, the diagrammatic “desynchronization” of time itself has, we argue, become a commodity – and the project, in parallel, has attained the dual status of being both the primary product of architectural labor and the primary technique by which such labor is managed.