Friday, August 18, 2017

Beyond Enslavement and Subjection: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari

Paper Presented at the above conference. 
Since publication plans have fallen through 
I am posting a draft of it here

One of the minor theoretical interventions of A Thousand Plateaus, minor because it seems to retrace and recapitulate arguments made by others, is the distinction between social subjection and machinic enslavement. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

There is enslavement when human beings themselves are constituent pieces of a machine that they compose among themselves and with other things (animal, tools), under the control and direction of a higher unity. But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a new exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. [1]

This distinction is made in the plateau titled “Apparatus of Capture”, and it is subordinated to the larger focus of articulating the relation between the state and market. It makes up no more than two pages, and in many senses seems to borrow from its general theoretical milieu of the sixties and seventies. Machinic enslavement would seem to carry with it the entire history of alienation of dehumanization that makes the individual part of the machine. Social subjection bares traces of Althusser’s famous declaration that “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,” or of the general “critique of the subject” developed through Althusser and Foucault. Its only innovation, the only point that goes beyond a general citation of concepts that are the general background of Deleuze and Guattari’s particular conceptual innovations, is in presenting these concepts less as theoretical alternatives, pitting humanism against post-humanism, than as different aspects of the same machine, the same apparatus of capture. That is perhaps not the only philosophical innovation and transformation, the distinction between enslavement and subjection carries with it a larger series of references, not just the immediate precursors of Althusser and Foucault but more distant antecedents of Marx and Gilbert Simondon, but its implications exceed the distinction between part and whole to encompass not only the already mentioned division between the state and market, but also the intersection between technology and politics. Far from being a simple terminological distinction the division between enslavement and subjection opens up a way to think the history of different formations of subjectivity, and the tensions internal to them in their historicity.

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Pop Nazi: History and Repetition

In The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates writes the following about HBO's plans to create a show called Confederate about an alternate reality in which the south won the civil war,

Knowing this, we do not have to wait to point out that comparisons between Confederate and The Man in the High Castle are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

Monday, August 07, 2017

Three Interpretations In Search of a Proposition: A Sketch of Spinozist Materialism

As I have stated on this blog, and elsewhere, a materialist reading of Spinoza perhaps begins with EIIP7 and its related demonstrations and scholium. "The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things." In place of hierarchy and causal impact Spinoza places ideas and things in a relation of identity and non-identity. How exactly to articulate this relation has lead to multiple interpretations. I would like to highlight three, Deleuze, Macherey, and Jaquet. The selection and order of authors reflects my own encounters and reading, the seemingly contingent order of nature, and not a necessary conceptual progression.