Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era 9781350085824, 9781350085848, 9781350085817

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Arts of Subjectivity

Also Available From Bloomsbury The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Kitsch, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein Deleuze and Guattari: Selected Writings, ed. Kenneth Surin Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, ed. Cheri Lynne Carr and Janae Sholtz Lacan Contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, and Politics, Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel

Arts of Subjectivity A New Animism for the Post-Media Era Jacob W. Glazier

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Jacob W. Glazier, 2020 Jacob W. Glazier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Paul Smith Cover image © iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8582-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8581-7 eBook: 978-1-3500-8583-1 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For MacKenzie.

Λάθε βιώσας Epicurus

Contents Foreword  Preface  1

2

3

4

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A New Subjectivity  Chapter Overviews  An Animistic Revival  Iterations  The Transcendent, Ideal, or Dialectic Subject  The Postmodernist, Linguistic, or Psychoanalytic Subject  The Immanent Subject  Metamodeling  The Etymology of Mediogony  Mediogony as Riddled Monstrosity  The Symbiosis of Horror  The Negativity of the Monstrous  The Metaphorics of the Body  Key Methodological Components  Cosmology  Cosmopolitics in Neoanimism  The Playfulness of the World as the Medio of the Subject and Object Relation  The Chthulucene as Cosmological Landscape  Reconciling the Society of the Spectacle with Neoanimism  The Mechanosphere and Post-Mediatic Subjectivities  Linguistics  Subjection, Subjectivation, and Glossematics  Enunciative Pragmatics  The Impact of Bakhtin  Embodiment, Subjectivity, and the Carnival 

ix xii 1 9 12 15 16 23 32 43 49 51 55 55 61 64 67 68 80 88 93 110 119 119 121 123 127

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Minor Languages and Forms: Cant and Kitsch  Marx’s Hieroglyph, Fetishism, or Riddling Subjectivity  6

7

Aesthetics  Beginning with the Baroque and Subjectivity  Histories of Aesthetic Ignorance and Aesthetic Integrationism  Aestheticizing Subjectivity or Subjectivation  Decolonial Thought and the Baroque  Disavowal and Alethurgic Technics  The Perversion of Détournement  Schizoanalytic Black Holes and Performance Art  Toward a Baroque Self-Fashioning  From Allegory to Illusion and the Body  Subjectivity, Anew  Précis  Monstrosity, Transversality, Neoanimism  The Conflagration of Paranoiac Semiologies  A Wandering Star 

Notes  Bibliography  Index 

132 138 143 143 147 149 152 154 157 160 162 169 173 173 175 178 179 183 197 211

Foreword In 1986, while in New  York for the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting, my former Professor at Columbia University Sylvère Lotringer asked me if I could possibly re-translate a paper that Félix Guattari was scheduled to present at the MLA in two days. Although I would have less than twenty-four hours to do it, it would afford me an opportunity to meet Félix and to become acquainted. The talk itself would be published a few years later in Flash Art under the title “Cracks in the Street.” But for me, what was important was that our “co-translation” initiated a friendship that would continue until Félix’s death in 1992, and that it had directly exposed me at a critical moment in my own intellectual life to Félix’s highly original and politically subversive manner of thinking and writing. Indeed, these features were all strikingly evident in the first publication of his I  had read:  his seminar on “La crise de production de subjectivité” that he had published in Chimères, the journal he had founded with Gilles Deleuze. So, when Jacob Glazier, who had sat in on a graduate theory course I taught at Emory University, asked me if I would write a foreword to his first book on “The Arts of Subjectivity,” I  readily agreed, correctly assuming that it would necessarily have to consider Guattari’s innovative and still inadequately appreciated approach to “the production of subjectivity.” Furthermore, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this involvement would also force me to consider more seriously “the new animism” in the “post-media era,” and what significance it might have. For Guattari, the “post-media era” simply signified the surpassing of mass media by the computer and digital technology. But I’m jumping ahead, which I suppose is what a foreword is supposed to do, in order to set up the reader’s anticipation of what is to come. Early in Jacob’s The Arts of Subjectivity he quite rightly takes up Guattari’s central theme of the “production of subjectivity,” according to which subjectivity is not something given or “naturally” acquired as an endowment, but is variously articulated in and through one’s interactions with others in a specific milieu and cultural environment. Following Guattari and Foucault specifically, Jacob reiterates that subjectivity is produced in two modes:  subjection (assujettissment) and subjectivation (subjectivation). Simply put, we are subjected to—and thereby

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made subjects of—political and environmental forces and, conversely, we subjectify ourselves in and through a range of individual and socially creative responses and self-makings, inventions, adaptations, and refusals. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, our subjectivity is overcoded by capitalism, religion, family and the law, but also decoded in the flows of desire and “lines of flight” that move us toward new creative becomings. Thus, for Guattari, we are always “subjectsin-process.” “Processuality,” in fact, was one of his essential concepts, along with “schizoanalysis” and “meta-modeling,” which in significant ways provide a fruitful conceptual alternative to Lacan and psychoanalysis. In relation to “subjection” and “subjectivation” specifically, Jacob’s The Arts of Subjectivity can be read as a companion piece and alternative to Maurizio Lazzarato’s Signs and Machines:  Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, which argues that under neoliberal capitalism “no new production of subjectivity takes place” (8). Framed this baldly, it is unlikely that Guattari himself would have fully agreed, and in multiple ways and registers Jacob suggests why. But that I will leave to the reader to discover, and instead briefly consider the significance of capitalism and the new animism in the post-media era. An important theme in Jacob’s book is how what Guattari called “Integrated World Capitalism” continues its domination by means of a whole panoply of subjugations. As Guattari’s term suggests, contemporary capitalism now functions as a fully integrated world system, and is thus far beyond the inaugural moments when it depended simply upon finding and exploiting cheap materials and cheap labor so that goods could be produced and sold at a profit. Capitalism now works on all registers—“works” in the sense that it wants (and almost always gets) skin in every game. Like a viral form of Artificial Intelligence or a DeLandian “probe head,” it relentlessly searches for any difference, inequity or imbalance to exploit. High frequency trading on the stock markets is a perfect example, where any fluctuation in value presents an opportunity to buy or sell. Moreover, it is no longer just shares of stock that are bought and sold but elaborate packages of debt, “futures” and a whole panoply of virtual objects that attain value only in and through their ceaseless exchange. To appropriate one of Jacob’s most striking phrases, it is a “riddled monstrosity” indeed! In this context what does the human subject begin to look like? It is impossible to say exactly, for the simple reason that the creature in question can no longer be separated from his or her “extensions,” in the sense that Marshal McLuhan gives to the word in the subtitle of his book, Understanding Media. Jacob’s argument about the new role of media and mediatization—and specifically “the virtualization of the human”—in fact leads him to a central claim that “an

Foreword

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ethico-aesthetic form of self-fashioning [i.e., subjectivation] runs counter to processes of mediatization . . . ” But here we approach the core issue of the book and thus the place to conclude my foreword, leaving in abeyance the question of how and to what degree Jacob’s theory of subjectivation “postulates a kind of animistic revival that is as enmeshed with machines as it is with non-visible, nonhuman, and “indigenous” beings” (17). Yet the question is not as outre as it might first appear, given the manifest interest expressed by cultural critics today in fields such as ubiquitous computing, smart objects and the Internet of Things. (See, for example, Betti Marenko’s essay “Neo-Animism and Design: A New Paradigm in Object Theory” in Design and Culture.) As Jacob himself puts it—to give him the last word:  “. . . the opening-up of non-genealogical, transversal relations, those that try to trace the networked character of beings of all kinds, appear as better models by which to engage with an ever-changing, technologically mediated world. Consequently, and somewhat paradoxically, this theory of subjectivation postulates a kind of animist revival that is as enmeshed with machines as it is with non-visible, nonhuman, and “indigenous’ beings” (17). John Johnston

Preface The ambitious breadth taken in synthesizing a range of ideas and concepts across disciplinary fields represents, not to be put too tritely, the greatest strength and potential Achilles’ heel of the present endeavor. Such an undertaking is certainly not traditional by way of an old guard in the academy, whose rigors may fixate on tracing the most minute of details therein marshaling the literature to diagram its conceptual history and import. On the other hand, an abstract, intuitive, and sweeping sampling runs the risk of losing nuances and particulars to be found in a close reading of a specific text or thinker. Compounding the scopic degree of analysis is the rapid speed available in accessing information and the ease at securing literature changing, structurally, the way research is conducted. These new practices, material gadgets, and technologies of the self, push understanding more and more into the trans—the spanning of disciplines, concepts, beings, techniques, and actors thereby demanding scholarship to be more intercommunicative, collaborative, and symbiotic in nature. In a time when the stakes of political allegiance are becoming more overt, the pace of university practices are surely not far behind. That is to say, does one link oneself to an author on purely conceptual or theoretical grounds, the appeal of an idea or the incisiveness of an argument? Or, are these academic head-nods the gestures of a fading old boys club, the last throes of which are seen in the figure of the police, a kind of apophasis toward an affixed claim to the academic? The same undecidable dialectic finds its form repeated throughout the following pages as I struggle to honor my sense of otherness while engaging with the rich history of Western thought. Indeed, as I have discovered during this adventure, the most subversion practices, it seems, can be found from within the traditional canon itself. The networks of citations one chooses to link their work to undoubtedly speaks to the author’s political status and the likeminded individuals, methods, and paradigms reflected in the conceptual apparatus of the project. On this note, the thinkers who I  am indebted to more than any others with regard to this book are Donna Haraway and Félix Guattari. The brave, feminist scholarship of Haraway is anchored in challenging boundaries, the distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and body and machine. Indeed, the

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limit, for Haraway, is to be looked upon with suspicion, as either a remnant of a disintegrating sovereign or as the return of an unfinished fascism, typically phallocratic, heteronormative, and always anthropocentric. In this way, she has taught me to be limitless in my thinking, going beyond the confines of acceptable academic values by taking risks with my research and therefore has accelerated my understanding of what is possible. Her position as an outsider, most notably as a woman, runs like a vein of gold rupturing open the surface of the mountain that is her academic work. In both an abstract and pragmatic sense, the two are inseparable, and what I take to be exceptional in Haraway is that she is not scared to admit it, explicitly, over and over again. This is surely a much needed and refreshing refrain. If Haraway holds a bona fide outsiders card, then Guattari, on the other hand, is by all accounts an insider desiring the position of the other, especially in terms of his embodied positionality and his sometimes Lacanianism. The latter, distinguishable from Lacan himself, relies on an ossified theory of the Master’s analytic practice, which can be demonstrated with a single rhetorical question: In what possible world does le-nom-du-père (the name-of-the-father) have some kind of pragmatic bearing anymore? At best, it is a bad joke, the consequence of lazy thinking and, at worse, the theory perpetuates dangerously conservative and reactionary archaisms. Compare this, as Guattari has so brilliantly demonstrated, to the schizoanalytic invitation to invent, produce, and construct new forms and concepts. As an advocate for minoritarian groups, Guattari was involved with the gay liberation movement, woman’s rights, and proudly wore the badge of a militant Marxist. His tentacular involvement with these often-subjugated people is evinced by his theorizing:  the development of fringe and neoteric concepts, an impassioned charge to update the psychoanalytic tradition, and, perhaps his most desirable characteristic, a creativity that is bar none. Part of this brilliance shows up in his writing style, seen through the parallelism between schizoanalytic theoretical ideas and the sheer mechanics of Guattari’s grammar, diction, and stylistics. It is as if, in certain Joycean sprit, the Guattarian text does exactly what it says it is going to do, quite literally. In brief, I lastly want to speak to the structure of the text as I have tried to envision and construct a “machine” that follows the logics of reading found in Mille Plateaux. In this way, each section, to a greater or lesser degree, presupposes conceptual tools from the others. If it were not as such, then I would have been hard pressed to get the theoretical assemblage off the ground, so to speak. Such a mode of consuming information intentionally mimes various contemporary

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forms of mediatization via such technologies as the internet, smartphones, and virtual reality. We are after all, as Haraway continually reminds us, the latest versions of cybernetic organisms and writing practices should reflect this for political and subversive reasons.

1

A New Subjectivity

The human has enjoyed a long tenure on planet Earth as a privileged being of contemplation and action. Humanity has been a place to house and launch inquisitive and investigatory practices—be those of the kind found in the arts, the sciences, philosophy, or religion. Going back to the ancient Greeks, perhaps this was most canonized in the texts of Plato (2002) and his Theory of Forms, which held humanness to an ideal, transcendent standard of thinking therein, in a certain sense, dividing the human subject from itself. Even in the pre-Socratics, there can certainly be found a stirring for schematization and ordering, the cosmological postulates of Thales or the mathematical articulations of Parmenides (Waterfield 2000), may serve as excellent cases in point. Perhaps there has always been, at least in a broad colloquial sense, embedded within the human being itself, a desire to reach beyond its own subjecthood to touch something that is greater than its individual existence—to know, feel, or experience an otherness that may be both inspiring as it is awful. Yet, as Nick Mansfield (2000) reminds us, in his book on twentieth century theories about this exact topic, the self is not equivalent to more contemporary terms like the subject in so far as the self fails to capture “the sense of social and cultural entanglement,” nor are these two terms, self and subject, equivalent to subjectivity, which links the subject “to something outside of it” (3). This tangled web of concepts and meanings is trying to ensnare a sense in which to situate how the self is related to an outside or, perhaps put into more contextualized language, how subjectivity, as a very recent concept in the history of ideas, is processed and produced. The very technical deployment of these terms depends on the theorists’ own contextual uses and the ways in which the human, the subject, or subjectivity are being jostled and developed. I do not stick to a cohesive rubric when it comes to the technical articulation of these various notions, although, the phrase “the production of subjectivity” is preferred as it gets at the ongoing and processual nature of subjective creation and advancement.

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

Alternative terms like subject and subjectivity are used when appropriate always being foregrounded by the process nature of subjective formation. This “backdrop” is split into two continual processes of subjection and subjectivation, a key distinction for the present project, which were both outlined and advanced by Foucault (cf. Cremonesi et  al. 2016). Briefly, subjection constitutes the policing, homogenizing, and normalizing forces that work on subjectivity while subjectivation counters those very forces through various means of selffashioning, cultivation, and praxis. To begin to see how this is the case, it may be helpful to examine the theory of alterity developed by Emmanuel Levinas (1999) in as much as he too is placed within the genealogy of ideas that has led to the postulation of subjectivity as a different means by which to grasp what it means to be human. In phenomenological terms that situate the self with reference to an other, Levinas suggests that there intercedes in this space a form of otherness that can never be totalized or appropriated when he writes, in somewhat stark and evocative terms, that “alterity’s plot is born before knowledge” (101), which suggests it to be a relation of freedom or, sticking with the plot metaphor, a place of maneuverability. With acknowledgment to the difference between the ethical and philosophical project that Levinas was undertaking, specifically its scope of understanding with regard to a subject in relation to an other, the technical term alterity may, nevertheless, be fruitful in an updated and more expansive sense, a sense that does not seek to conflate the type of difference that alterity names with divergent theoretical concepts derived from other thinkers, but that merely goes to describe, in perhaps a non-technical manner, the space of difference, one that decenters the subject, allowing for appropriations of diverse kinds to take place. Keeping in this spirit of general description, this space of disjunction, between subjectivity and other, is where something new and different has the potential to emerge and to be molded and crafted to one’s likeness. The term crafted is carefully selected here to refer to “tekhnē tou biou” (τεχνη του βιου) as Michel Foucault (1997: 208) citing Plato called it: literally translated as the craft of life. Such a gesture, it is hoped, intentionally situates the present endeavor within the tradition of self-cultivation, as the Foucault reference goes to show, or under the auspices of launching an arts of existence. It may be that this kind of “crafting” or the forming of the substance, to use an Aristotelian trope, that is the precise means by which the shaping of difference encountered in the world produces such modes of creation as conceptual thinking, technology, and communicativity.



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Following in the phenomenological tradition alluded to with Levinas and that was, by many accounts, an important precursor to Foucault, a difference within a difference exists in such a crafting in that it is not only the alterity intrinsic to humanness that must be taken up, that must be confronted, existentially, every second of every day, but is also the taking up of the ethos of this self-fashioning that the human may feel called to do. The foregoing distinction, borrowed from Martin Heidegger (1962), is otherwise known as the ontological difference, between beings themselves and Being as such, and the oscillatory movement between the two, in some ways, is the precise place of truth, the truth of that particular subject or worldhood, and, it follows, a form of what it would mean to be authentically human. This point is raised not to citationally ally Heidegger with this advancement of a formal theory of an arts of existence but, on the contrary, to render clear the persistent influence this distinction has had on post-structuralist French theory and, over and above, to critique the residues of sovereignty and all the other colonialist problematics tightly bound within presupposing such a clean distinction. Indeed, it is without a doubt that troublesome and even prejudicial consequences arise from presupposing such a barren, universalist logic to humanhood1—prescribing the “good life” and the conditions for human flourishing or what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία). A prescriptive set of conditions which to live by is not at all what is meant by the cultivation of the self, in this context, and would better be relegated to the field of religious studies, moral philosophy, or theology. However, it is not only at the level of the self that technologies of authenticity can be given; indeed, as the body of this text will demonstrate, free choice in these matters is rarely, if ever, the case, especially with the advent of a subjectivity that has been enhanced and booted-up with all of the latest technological links and gadgets. Moving away from phenomenological accounts of the subject, Theodor Adorno (1973) perhaps foreshadowed, along with some of his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, not only the dangers of modern popular culture and technology but also the importance of language for subject creation. Popular culture and mass media were, according to Adorno, the symptoms of a sick economic system, namely capitalism, that lulled and pacified the subject into a state of repetitive consumption. Likewise, in a more philosophical spirit, Adorno criticized the existentialist kind of prescriptive forming of the subject under the general formula of “the jargon of authenticity” insinuating that this approach has relied too heavily on an empty and shared language that is both self-reflexive and totalizing. The point is, in other words, that the two, in a certain sense,

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

must necessarily go hand-in-hand, the paradigmatic shift that Adorno makes by positioning his analysis at the level of language and, equally, the deployment of signs and symbols by mass media and consumer culture in order to create a specific kind of subject, one that is linked to these varying kinds of semiologies. Indeed, the shift à la lettre may be seen as marking a more general trend in later twentieth century philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. This linguistic turn, as it has come to be known perhaps most notably by Richard Rorty (1967), has created arguably the most incisive historical change in conceptions of the subject, which is not to mention the simultaneous convergences and intersections between technology, global capitalism, linguistic theory, literary criticism, and the arts, among other things. The turn toward language and, more generally, a semiotic kind of understand of the subject that this entails primes the subject, just as Adorno suggested, to be hooked-up and plugged into various kinds of networks of signs and symbols. More rapidly than ever before, then, subjectivity has undergone dramatic and transformative changes in how it is entwined with the world, the view it has of itself, and the pragmatic projects that it engages in—within the alterity that exists between self and other intercedes a barrage of new beings with ever accelerating novelty and intensity. In such a way, the human is being increasingly mediatized, taken out of its material embodiment and pushed toward a sociality that is spread around the globe and that participates in networks of meaning, which have historically never been possible before. The term mediatized is co-opted from the work of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1995) and is used to denote the process nature of how the subject is installed into various informational and technological frameworks: “this fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (151). It would be right here to speak more properly of subjectivity since the slipperiness of mediatization, a coding that defers itself continuous from one form to the next, changes such fundamental and basic notions that the subject has about itself, notions as taken for granted as a sense of time and place, relationality, and presence. This effect and, indeed, its ever-increasing quickening is perhaps one of the most pressing ethical and conceptual problems confronting thinkers today. To pose the problematic as a series of questions: What does the virtualization of the human bring to bear on theoretical models used to frame what is means to be a subject? Where does material embodiment end and the process of virtualization begin? What can be said about the ethics of such a process or, in other words, is this new kind of aphanisis, to borrow a psychoanalytic term, inevitable or are their means by which one can reclaim a sense of self? And,



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indeed, would one even want to engage in such a project given the overwhelming pressure technologically mediated images and globalized signs and symbols place on self-maintenance daily? It would seem, then, that the contemporary form of the human is a far cry from its earlier historical iterations. It may even be that a distinction is required to set concurrent modes of living apart from previous versions, which is why the term subjectivity is preferred here to demarcate this. It does not follow, however, that the same claim can be leveled against humanness itself since the body may be a relatively stable site of meaning, which is to say that metaphors borrowed from fields like physiology or biology, a form of stylistics found in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (2013), for example, may be more materially rich or semantically dense than the traces of signifiers that are spatially or temporally removed from the flesh. This is not to suggest that “humanness” is somehow outside the ground of appropriation or cultural entwinement, which is actually far from the case, but it does suggest that the words that are selected matter, on the level of writing, and more generally it would follow, matter for a theory of subjectivation in so far as the body must be accounted for in some important way. Just because one’s sense of otherness has shifted in some way says nothing about the mechanism or the “machine”—to use a somewhat vulgar denotation for the body (Haraway 1985)—that this otherness is tied to. Within this cleft, the void between the body and the other, one can locate the principled place of analysis for this book. Recalling the discussion earlier, the distinction found between self and other, the crafting of alterity is what foregrounds the production of subjectivity. The production of subjectivity is a favored term used by Guattari (1995) to describe processes of subjectivation and the ongoingness of subjecthood in general. That is, the way in which subjectivity is continually deferred toward a horizon of creative possibilities and meanings that it can come to experiment with in a manner that is situated toward the future. The production of subjectivity, in sum, how it is taken up, appropriated, or reclaimed, needs to be contrasted against the milieu of its ever-broadening virtualization. To put the thesis as succinctly as possible:  I will advance a theory of subjectivation that makes the claim that an ethico-aesthetic form of selffashioning runs counter to processes of mediatization, not eliding them in favor of anarchistic or reactionary gestures, but rather hijacking them to produce a space of freedom and agency that would otherwise not be possible. The point is, in other words, that one simply cannot go back to a time when technological appropriation and semiotic virtualization were not as prevalent as they are

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

today or did not exist at all. Rather, it is the task of any revolutionary theory to commandeer the tools, machines, or meanings that it finds itself confronted with, being resourceful in the face of hegemonic obstacles that may threaten to overwhelm subjectivity and, indeed, obliterate it. Jacques Derrida’s (1989) gives a sustained treatment regarding the dangers of going back to an origin or, in this case, the nostalgia for a time when the present state of affairs of the world did not exist. That is, Derrida’s deconstruction of the notion of origin in On Spirit has shown how creation stories perpetuate a metaphysics of presence containing therein normalizing and homogenizing powers built into the Western tradition in order to sustain and keep it intact. Instead of going backwards, in other words, it may be wise to heed the advice of the French renaissance and baroque philosopher Michel de Montaigne, “le grand et glorieux chef d’oeuvre de l’homme, c’est vivre à propos”2 (1836: 625). To construct one’s own masterpiece in the here and now and use the pragmatic means by which to make this a reality. The motif of masterpiece, with all of its literary and metaphorical flavors, is what I hope to unpack under the umbrella of self-fashioning, crystallizing into a theoretical framework that engages with the most pressing and cutting-edge issues facing the production of subjectivity in the current milieu. Collapsing the subjective formation into a technical term that captures the processual nature or constant renewal of the subject itself under modern day regimes of signs and apparatuses of assembly and as alluded to earlier, subjectivation is of key importance, which may be traced by the reader as running like a red thread throughout the entirety of the project (Butler 2011; Ong-Van-Cung 2011; Youdell 2006). The creative vitality of subjectivation ought to be contrasted with its analytic doppelgänger, subjection, following in the Foucauldian (1997, 2008, 2010) tradition, which means the ways in which subjects are constituted by contemporary modes of stamping through apparatuses like capitalism, the juridical and penal system, Oedipal family relations, neoliberal governmentality, and other social institutions or forms of power. Sometimes subjectivation is translated into English as subjectification (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) or used by Foucault (1985a) to refer to a mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement); “the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice” (27). The connection, relationship, link, or mediatization is the mode whereby the subject positions itself aligned to an embedded social norm. The specific kind of interlinking allows permissible various behaviors, actions, rituals, orderings, disciplines, and so on.



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The question of how contemporary forms of mediatization articulate and form processes and modes of subjection can be seen, as somewhat of a foreshadowing to a more technical discussion, in a phrase taken from the tome A Thousand Plateaus, co-written by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and is what they call apparatuses of capture. These are abstract machines, to stick with the jargon the two develop in the same book, that are in league with the powers that be through their policing of networked interconnections and their infiltration of systems of signs and symbols: “what begins with the State or the apparatus of capture is a general semiology that overcodes the primitive semiotic systems .  .  . apparatus of capture—the semiological operation par excellence” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 444–5). An excellent example of a primitive semiotic system, at least to a degree, is the human subject, especially if one uses as a model a developmental or psychoanalytic understanding of human creation with its emphasis on how the infant is inscribed, almost totally, by sociality and intersubjectivity—developed furthest, perhaps, in the mirror-stage as formulated by Jacques Lacan3 (cf. Dor 1998). The differences between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the work of Deleuze and Guattari are clear, and it is often and sometimes unfortunately the case that these two approaches are pitted against each other; the well-known anecdote opposes Lacan’s emphasis on lack and negativity with Deleuze and Guattari’s overflow of being and its immanence. As Nedoh and Zevnik (2017) argue, “contemporary debates addressing the differences between the two [approaches] are largely still structured around the most irreconcilable moments, such as the negativity of castration compared with the positivity of desire” (1). Yet, as the anthology edited by these same authors goes to show, such an oppositional posture does not necessarily have to be the case and, furthermore, it may be the very differences themselves, between the two theories, that generate the most interesting debates and new ideas. With that being said, schizoanalysis, the preferred name here to refer to the application of conceptual tools stemming from Deleuze and Guattari, is one possible mode of intercession in the overcoding of the subject, its ensnarement in apparatuses of capture, in so far as it may throw a wrench in the reterritorialization process and arrest its reuptake into normalizing machines. The production of subjectivity straddles the line between being passively taken up into these virtual systems of reference and being able to intervene on this very process. As such, the current project’s broadest and most expansive aim is to attempt to “update” or bring a theory of subjective formation, more specifically a subjectivation, into its most contemporaneous incarnation leading

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

to the development of new cartographies that may be used to situate beings of all kinds therein developing a specific sketch that is, following Guattari, indicative of the post-media era. I  propose a specific aesthetic style of self-fashioning that may provide the best hope of countering more normative productions of subjectivity and larger apparatuses of capture. In order to illustrate and argue this point, I am trying to answer Deleuze and Guattari’s call in What is Philosophy? (1994) that the work of philosophy, and schizoanalysis by extension, is the creation of new concepts, The object of philosophy is to create concepts that are always new. Because the concept must be created, it refers back to the philosopher as the one who has it potentially, or who has its power and competence . . . they must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature. (5)

This newness is not necessitated out of mere boredom, a kind of capitalist injunction that orders the hopping from one new item to the next unreflectively (Marx 1968), but is more ethically mandated, called for, and required— something that precipitates out of the conditions of possibility present in the current state of affairs of the world. The latter, ethical claim is, in its proper sense, a type of modeling, which is the rigorous use of tropes, ideas, and interlocutors to grind against reality. Alternatively, one may say the opposite: the use of lived experience and existential self-consistency to poeticize reality into an arts of existence, a life that is just as aesthetic as it is real. In order to accomplish this task, the edifice of this book takes its inspiration from the construction of a “machine” that follows similar logics and reading heuristics deployed and found in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). That is to say, each chapter may be seen as analogous to what Deleuze and Guattari call a plateau. A plateau, as Brian Massumi (1987) so eloquently puts it in the translator’s forward to the original Deleuze and Guattari monograph, takes form in the following way, Each “plateau” is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. (iv)

The aim is not to mimic, parrot, or recreate the work’s rhetorical style, the kind used by Deleuze and Guattari, in this project, but merely to follow in a similar



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ethos—one that, if the above quotation is any indication, takes seriously the value of interdisciplinary scholarship and the evocative nature of textuality. Thus, I will pull from a variety of literary, artistic, and academic works and from disciplines including psychology, literary theory, linguistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. In each of the individual chapters, there will be an assumption that the conceptual tools developed in the others are presupposed to a greater or lesser degree. This does not entail that meaning is somehow punctuated at the end or concluding section of the document, representing a complete and self-contained style of narrativity. Rather, the inter-textuality developed here is more circular, in this case, going toward creating evocative and aesthetic effects that open onto new possibilities instead of foreclosing meaning and shutting down the interpretive process. As such, the text attempts to bring disparate domains and interdisciplinary boundaries into dialogue with one another, thereby producing new and very unique structures by which to analyze various aspects of subject formation, hegemony, agency, capitalism, the State, and so on. One need not rely exclusively on Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) to buttress this kind of system since, being in the wake of academic movements like poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, and posthumanism, movements overviewed to an extent by Margaret McLaren (2002), there exists ample justificatory ground on which to stand. This is to say that scholarship practices in the humanities have been drifting away from grand theories or masternarratives, as Jean-François Lyotard (1984) would call them, structures which have be used to uphold certain ideologies and suppress alternative voices. As a case in point, the feminist work of Robin James (2015) is an excellent example of proffering an alternate to the genre of heroic narrativity that places scientists and academics, usually white and male, in a neat historical chronology. This is not to say that she does not cite such canonical figures as Freud or Foucault, but what she does do is use emerging and highly contemporary phenomena to structure her analysis, phenomena that highlight what it means to live in a technological and mass media world.

Chapter Overviews A brief summary and thesis statement from each of the individual chapters may be helpful at this introductory point in order to familiarize and allude to different movements and concepts the text contains. In this spirit, Chapter 2 is titled, “Iterations,” and examines the necessity of the production of subjectivity

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

and subjectivation instead of an isolated or enclosed form of subjectivity—this is due, in large part, to the semiotics of capitalism and the virtualization of meaning through technological means. The chapter structures the discussion using the three categories of the transcendent, ideal, or dialectical subject, the postmodern, linguistic or psychoanalytic subject, and the immanent subject. I construct a critical historiography of the concept of subjectivity drawn largely from the Western academic tradition. This is done with the aim of answering how the concept of subjectivity has changed not only between thinkers, like Plato and Nietzsche, but also through time. Such an undertaking is antagonized by the critical work of Fredric Jameson and Jean-François Lyotard, especially through the notion of master-narratives and postmodernism. It is argued that the traditional method of historiography, at least in its foundationalist form with its emphasis on neat narrativity and easy recapitulation of shared epistemologies, becomes contentious at best and, if post-colonialist theory is any indication, a form of colonization, at worst. Chapter  3, “Metamodeling,” most concretely makes the case for the methodological technique of metamodeling, thereby foregrounding the findings and conclusion of this book. Following Guattari as a lead, the procedure of metamodeling (metamodelization) is articulated as a way in which to read other modeling schemas and systems of meaning. In this way, a metamodel is helpful in deciphering and infiltrating the praxes of the modeling systems it works upon. A metamodel, in other words, is not another iteration of the master-narrative or a claim on transcendence but a strategy interwoven into existing models in order to enact change and create something new, which is accomplished through traversally slicing-open disparate systems of reference that would normally be amenable and agreeable. Following this non-universalist logic, the neologism of mediogony is advanced as a specific kind of metamodel, one that inflects how subjective formations are always mediatized and spread-out among, in this case, popular media, entertainment, and technology. Yet, as an aboutface to these interpellatory machines, the work that mediogony does is to try and traversalize them, adjudged through Guattari’s notion of transversality, by slicing through domains of meaning, stealing their useful ideas, and crashing together these propositions into new concepts. What this amounts to, through dialogue with Deleuze and Bataille, is a transgressive metamodel that is infected with a horror tinged metaphorics, called riddled monstrosity, shading the way it takes-up meaning and the work it does on other theoretical structures. It may be no surprise, then, that the body is submitted, through its intimacy with



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libido, ingestion, and death, as a paragon site by which to model this kind of interventive strategy. Chapters  4 to 6 culminate in a formal theory of subjectivation, using the previous metamodel as a guide and the historical backdrop and historiography given earlier as a context. This arts of existence for the post-media era is created by deciphering the cosmological influences on subjective production, the linguistic influences on subjective production, and the aesthetic influences on subjective production. The central thesis of the first register maintains that a production of subjectivity that is foregrounded by a cosmology based upon an aestheticized animism best represents what it means to counter contemporary forms of appropriation. Such a claim is substantiated, in the beginning and most notably, by using the cosmopolitical work of Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour in so far as their processual use of ontology to understand beings in the laboratory hints at a more underlying animistic revival, which is not cosmopolitan in the traditional Kantian sense of the term, but, nevertheless, reaches beyond anthropocentrism to incorporate beings that are foreign and alien. An understanding of the relationality that this new cosmology entails is given through a form of play, as both Kostas Axelos and Heidegger go to show. This kind of being-with-theother, Haraway referenced it in literary and mythological terms as the trickster, has as its reciprocal and self-reflective function a playfulness and, in this project, is formalized under the sign of the ontiocus, a neologism that means the sense one gets when worlding winks at you. Yet, this form of otherness must be contextualized within a larger cosmological scheme, one that contains the metaphors and tropes necessary in order to illustrate what it would mean to play in the sense intended. The chthulucene, as advanced by Haraway, is submitted as a much better non-anthropocentric alternative to the widely circulated notion of the anthropocene. This cartography of beings, as the name may indicate, welcomes all sorts of creatures and gives them the same playing status, if not more, than their human counterparts. The book then pivots to literary theory and linguistics in order to articulate the way that subjectivation can be understood. That is, using a form of linguistics called enunciative pragmatics, emphasis is placed on the semiotic and practical character of subjecthood and how this may allow for both interpellations as well as subversions. Going back to the Russian Formalist work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which Guattari had known affinity for, helps to ground this theory of subjectivation using concepts like polyphony and the carnival.

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The final register of aesthetics posits the Situationist tactic of détournement as representative of a form of subjective production that starts to initiate an arts of existence by hijacking dominate semiologies and interpellating power structures. This is further unpacked, returning to enunciative pragmatics, schizoanalysis, and linguistics, into a mode of subjectivation that takes performance art as its áskēsis, a disciplined training of self-composition, that following Foucault (1997) has “an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into êthos” (209). In Chapter  7 of the book, “Subjectivity, Anew,” I  chart future avenues of scholarship and research, implications that this theory of subjectivation has for the arts and humanities, while also providing some delimitations and recommendations. This is done in two main ways: it is suggested and partially demonstrated that the new concepts created in the book have prescient bearing on emerging debates in academia and political realities around the globe. Most saliently, this is seen in a movement of the West away from its phantasy of historicity and anthropocentrism and toward more inclusive and excavated animistic models, a new set of global cartographies. Second, in terms of qualitative research and academic scholastic methods, a type of formal methodology may be extracted from the theory put forward herein through a rigorous extrapolation of the guidelines outlined in the metamodel developed in Chapter 3. It is hoped that by providing lines of interconnection and filiation that this will have the benefit of making a theory of subjectivation appropriable and useful to other theorists thereby going toward fostering dialogue and interdisciplinary work within and between fields like psychology, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, and media studies.

An Animistic Revival Leaving the Western gesture of foregrounding, through the ancient Greeks, its knowledges, technologies, arts, and, most relevantly, its model of humanhood behind, as not only blatant colonialist moves, but perhaps, over and above, as simply outdated, the opening-up of non-genealogical, transversal relations, those that try to trace the networked character of beings of all kinds, appear as better models by which to engage with an ever-changing, technologically mediated world. Consequently and somewhat paradoxically, this theory of subjectivation postulates a kind of animistic revival that is as enmeshed with machines as it is with non-visible, non-human, and “indigenous” beings.



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Importantly, such a theoretical move does not suggest a return to the Earth, in the sense that there is some kind of pre-mediated temporality that can be achieved, one that would restore the balance or harmony among the planet’s inhabitants. Rather, the mode of self-fashioning developed herein may more properly be said to work toward a form of cosmological disclosure or unveiling, an apocalypse, which is a kind of showing of oneself to the other, that is ever refreshing and renewing itself in the face of political or intersubjective obstacles. Indeed, such a disciplined mode of training, which is to say of self-cultivation and composition, according to Foucault (1997), “is thus to ‘show oneself,’ to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence” (216). It may follow that the sense of alterity sketched at the beginning of the introduction becomes crafted, under this formal theory of subjectivation, in its very literality—the forging of new material-semiotic beings or the manipulation of the connection between these two categories. Indeed, this arts of existence or existential self-fashioning can only ever be initiated, set into processual and creative motion, since its temporality is predicated on a non-teleological view of time. It would be this sustained ongoingness, the painting of ever new aesthetic effects, that recursively feeds the production of a masterpiece, one’s own great work or magnum opus, which has the ability to fashion the most profound discursive and ontological effects. Yet, it is without a doubt that the hijacking of abstract machines and dominate semiologies represents, in the same maneuver, the reconstitution of identity and one’s own subjectivation status. In other words, it would seem that there is a price to be paid for a fidelity to such a mode of self-fashioning, a price that is not necessarily known beforehand, but that must be confronted and faced along the way. It is at this disjunct—the touch of the brush against the canvas—that the aesthetic becomes ethical and the ethical becomes aesthetic.

2

Iterations

In Chapter 1, a broad prospectus was outlined as it pertains to the contents of this book. Namely, the central theme of the current project is an analysis of what Michel Foucault called an “arts of existence” or, with reference to Plato, a “tekhnē tou biou” (Foucault 1997:  208), a craft of life (τεχνη του βιου). How can one creatively take up forces whose aim is to subjugate? This positions the present work within the Western tradition of self-cultivation stemming from Greek thought, up through the Renaissance, specifically the Baroque, and into postEnlightenment philosophies that more contemporarily extend this heritage into the technologically and semiotically mediated world of today. In order to best understand what an “arts of existence” might look like under present conditions of emergence, the first chapter suggested the term subjectivity to demarcate how the subject or, more broadly, the human being is interlinked with various machines, beings, and others. Pushing this further and taking up a Guattarian (2011) paradigm, the technical phrase the production of subjectivity was proffered as a means by which to apprehend the ongoingness, appropriated, and mediated understanding of modern forms of identity creation and capture. In the consecutive chapter, this key theoretical insight of Guattari will be expanded and situated within subjectivity’s historical antecedents and contemporary uses. As such, a brief history of the very general notion of subjectivity is given with the hope of foregrounding the more technical and erudite discussion of the linguistic, semiotic, and pragmatic nature of subjectivation elucidated later. Importantly, the following overview of subjectivity is not meant to be exhaustive, just as it is not meant to convey some unbiased understanding of how the idea of subjectivity has evolved over the last several centuries. Rather, I try to stitch together various anecdotes, one might even call them certain solidified heuristics, that seem to follow a cogent logic, which is reflective of the narrativity undergirding the Western canon. What this means is that the chapter attempts

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

to explain how different philosophers, theorists, and thinkers have chosen to handle the human subject—even though their work may not explicitly use the term subjectivity. This, of course, represents somewhat of a literary, historical, and linguistic problem:  Can the concept of subjectivity, as it is manifested in modern-day usage, be accurately applied to the texts of Plato? Does Nietzsche perhaps talk about a special kind of subjectivity through his concept of the Übermensch? Or, do the Foucauldian surveilled and docile subjects even exist as a kind of human subjectivity at all? In order to tackle such problematics, this chapter is constructed using three broad categories: The transcendent, ideal, or dialectical subject, the postmodern, linguistic, or psychoanalytic subject, and the immanent subject. The insights of Foucault, Guattari, and Deleuze will be interwoven in these sections in order to bring into relief differences with regard to their conceptualizing procedures, which speaks to their unique and relatively recent take on how subjectivity is produced. The ways in which the various thinkers differ on the nature of subjectivity will be highlighted and particular attention will be paid to the distinction between subjection, an outside disciplinary force that represses subjectivity, and subjectivation, a redeployment of that very norm in a creative and expansive sense.

The Transcendent, Ideal, or Dialectic Subject As an inaugural moment in the Western philosophical canon, perhaps it was Plato and the Theory of Forms that best represents a philosophy that articulates the transcendent nature of subjectivity. This version of metaphysics (Plato 2002) posits an ideality contained within the world of Forms, εἶδος (eidos) or ἰδέα (idea), such that there exists as a certain separate and pristine overlay or other dimension toward which their shadowy manifestations in the world of objects take shape. This ideality, in other words, is importantly separate and distinct from the materiality of objects and other beings like the subject. The Theory of Forms, as is well known, may be best illustrated through the famous allegory of the cave (Plato 1945). In this story, subjects are chained inside a dark cave and are forced to face one of its blank walls where they see shadows on the wall through the movement of objects, which are given life by a fire behind them. In this kind of bondage state, Plato asserts a kind of fallen reality, in so far it is only after a prisoner has been freed that they are able to leave the cave and discover that the shadows do not constitute reality as such but are merely “effects” of something

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deeper or more transcendent—namely, the realm of the Forms. With regard to the present study of subjectivation, a Platonic reading of subjective formation, it would appear, is less anchored in becoming and more in the immutable essence that is inherent to the subject thereby aligning with a process, or a subjection, that falls outside of the subject’s initial control. That is, Plato emphasizes the transcendent aspect of becoming a subject describing this process, through his allegory of the cave, as one of being unchained and of a self-discovery that is located in being able to wrest oneself out of the fetters that the separate and distinct state of the world has placed upon on it. In order to describe further this transcendent nature, there appears a certain Gnostic flavor to subjectivity here in so far as the subject is born into an immoral, alienated, or guilty state—indeed, the historicity of this theory is of import for the magnitude of its duration and reach. In a formal and systematic sense, such an esoteric strand of Platonism conceived the subject precisely in this way, as a being that must go through some sort of purification process, sometimes called alchemy, in order to overcome its original sin and become godlike. The domains of semiotics and mythology that the term alchemy invokes are especially relevant to the present discussion of subjectivity and, perhaps over and above, to processes of subjectivation and, more broadly, the production of subjectivity. If alchemy is derivative of Platonic metaphysics that has helped bear out modernism, as suggested earlier, then it follows that a discussion of the importance of this tradition will help set the stage for an analysis of subjectivity in the proceeding chapters; the connection that alchemy has to the aesthetic of the baroque with its self-referential and encoded emblems will become particularly salient in a theory of subjectivation that takes as its arts a kind of baroque self-fashioning. While alchemy is not directly applicable (at least at face value) to the way political or economic forces shape, mold, and stamp out identities—forces like capitalism and fascism—alchemy, nevertheless, has a teleology that is in line with producing a specific form of subjectivity, one that relies precisely on a mode of subjectivation. This is true not only in the nature of its praxis, the creation of a fresh form of subjectivity, but also in the term’s very etymology: “the name is derived from the Greek archymo, which in Latin is massa. Through this art [of alchemy], corrupted metals and minerals are restored and the imperfect made perfect” (Linden 2003:  101, emphasis in original). In an encoded form, as is the case with most alchemical texts, the corrupted metals and minerals that the author is talking about are the parts of the subject that are impure, parts that remain in a fallen state, and the trope of alchemy, in connection with the baroque, is later developed into a formal theory

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

of subjectivation, liberating or setting-free these parts of subjectivity toward creative and more self-fashioning ends.1 Alchemy has a long history in the Western tradition stemming from the ancient Greek mystery schools, in this case Plato, up through the Renaissance, being widespread in groups like the Rosicrucians, and into the Enlightenment, finding its way into the works of figures like Isaac Newton and continues into post-Enlightenment thought. Typically, alchemy is found in subterranean groups that stand outside or are hidden inside of more mainstream and normative forces (Maxwell-Stuart 2012). Indeed, even Deleuze and Guattari (1987) partake in the metaphorics of alchemy in A Thousand Plateaus, their treatise on the war machine, under the section of metals and metallurgy.2 Yet, leaving Deleuze and Guattari behind for the time being, the important point is that the transcendent theory of subjectivity that Plato helped to create led to a cascade of other such theories that proliferated during the proceeding several centuries. The subjected subject, in the sense of being transcendent in nature, is one of the founding markers of the Western tradition. According to Linden (2003), “alchemy’s existence and credibility depended heavily on ‘platonic’ ideas and doctrines that were readily available” (29). An important text that the author cites is Plato’s Timaeus (1937), which is the key Platonic creation story. An example of a foil to the precipitates and subjective productions of alchemy, the concept of the demiurge (δημιουργός) might be helpful as it carries through Plato’s emphasis on the transcendent nature of subjectivity. This notion is central to the heretical and spiritualist metaphysics of the Gnostics (Linden 2003). The demiurge, taken by the Gnostics from the Timaeus (Plato 1937), was originally used by Plato to refer to the artisan or craftsman who created the universe. More specifically, this is the fashioner of the material world of objects, in their shadowy and fallen state, as opposed to the more divine conception of the essence of these models themselves. In this way, the demiurge has a certain maleficence to it such that, given the lesson found in the allegory of the cave, it acts as a chain, working to keep the subject in a state of bondage. An example of this, with reference to a specific school of Gnosticism, is the monotheistic god Yahweh (‫ )יהוה‬from the Old Testament (Read 2007). The moral dilemmas, universal rules, fear, and destruction that this god creates are cited as evidence of its demiurgic quality. As Read (2007) says, “he is a thief and a rapist, he is jealous and cruel, and he is profoundly ignorant. His name even confers the image of a ‘child god’ ” (144). It would be important, on this account, to not confuse the “image of a child god” with the actual incarnation of such a being. That is to say, the fact that the

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demiurge is the image, or the Platonic shadows on the cave wall, as opposed to the god-in-itself. Contrast the notion of the demiurge, which might be more likened to states of subjection, to processes of subjectivation that do not operate in the above imaginary or idealistic space; again, to speak properly of subjectivation is to break with this Platonic tradition that essentializes the subject at the expense of its ongoing self-fashioning and creation—the demiurge representing an important example of how a “subject” could fall into a state of subjection as opposed to pushing itself forward into more expansive and unthought modes of subjectivation. Post-Platonic thought and the literary and iconographic emblems of alchemy help frame the way the subjectivation takes up meaning and makes sense of its world. To put this into more philosophical language, the relation that the process of becoming has to signification is different for the Gnostics and alchemy than it is for Plato proper. Shifting away from the more subterranean art and science of alchemy and its relation to subjectivity, in its most concentrated modernist form, René Descartes (1989) conceptualizes subjectivity as transcendent as well—bringing with this conceptualization a kind of philosophical dualism. His distinction between res cogitas (mental substance) and res extensa (material substance) set the stage and, indeed, the debate for philosophers that came after him by laying the foundation for theorizing subjectivity as necessarily split, often between what was going on mentally or psychically in the head and the physiological processes of the body or the materiality of the world of objects. As a consequence, it became difficult, if not untenable, for the thinker who adopted this view to give a detailed account of the mechanism—sometimes pejoratively described as an epiphenomenon— whereby these two substances could interact. Descartes’s now famous solution was, of course, the pineal gland, which he likened to the seat of the soul for its symmetry, place in the brain, and physiological characteristics. The way in which this differs from the Guattarian notion of the production of subjectivity has to do with how, for Descartes, there exists a principled break between soul, psyche, or mind and the world as it presents itself to the senses. This is categorically different from the processual nature of how subjectivity is produced under contemporary mediatized conditions of emergence, both in a technological sense, the fact that subjectivity is hooked up to various gadgets, and in an ontological sense, the systematicity of subjectivity, how it is immanently enmeshed with all other beings in the world. Following Descartes, Immanuel Kant reworked the dualistic divide between subject and object, soul and world, by trying to syncretically synthesize the

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

philosophies of the rationalists and empiricists—the approach of Descartes being in the former camp. Kant’s theory worked to constrain the subject such that phenomena became mediated by certain a priori categories. This understanding of subjectivity is more scientific in the sense that Kant instituted normalizing standards by which to judge sense data. Instead of the recapitulated Cartesian binary of res cogitas and res extensa, Kant is famous for his distinction between phenomenon and noumenon—the mental predicates of the mind and the thingin-itself—which is given in his treatise the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 2007). This Kantian critique at the end of the eighteenth century marked a new division in the Western tradition, as Foucault (1989) remarks, in as much as “mathesis was regrouped so as to constitute an apophantics and an ontology” while, conversely, there was a rise of historicization in the “interpretative disciplines” (82). Mathesis is defined by Foucault (1989) as the science of calculation, “a universal science of measurement and order” (62), which remained separate from philosophical endeavors until the Kantian division alluded to above. With its integration into metaphysical matters, the mathesis transformed and gave birth to a kind of correlationism. This correlationism plays out, for example, in trying to analyze the thing-initself, which according to Kant, is strictly forbidden and unknowable thereby allowing for the primacy of the categories of judgment that he articulated as a priori. However, there are certain post-Kantian attempts to rehabilitate the knowability of the thing-in-itself and de facto the correlationism this entails—for example, this has taken place in the recent philosophical school of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011). At stake here for a theory of subjectivation is the principally non-immanent stance that correlationalism entails, according to Meillassoux (2008), maintaining subject and object interdependence upon each other such that this relation invokes the correlation between the two as a necessity in order to keep the dynamic or relationality fluid and not sedimented. Immanentism, on the other hand, would not invoke the correlation, in this context, between subject and other but, rather, as Deleuze (1994) does in Difference and Repetition, pivot to the dice throw and the aleatory contingency intrinsic to every relational instance. Such a latter reading lends support that it is more apropos to analyzing processes of subjective production as opposed to subjectivity as such since a correlation is not required as a means to arbitrate the connection between subjectivity and how it is constituted. After the Kantian intervention, the subject can be said to have become properly dialectical, taken from its earlier transcendent forms, and moved into

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the register of philosophical idealism by Georg W. F. Hegel. This is, importantly, a break with the Cartesian notion of the subject with its equivalence to the mind and is also a break with Plato’s insistence on the beyond nature of subjectivity. Some of Hegel’s work on this matter can be found in Encyclopedia, Philosophy of Nature (1970), Philosophy of Mind (2010), and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (2017). Yet, in his most celebrated treatise, Phenomenology of Spirit (1977), Hegel continues to develop the notion of what he calls subjective spirit and how it is interlaced with objective spirit through a teleological progression that does not reduce the subject down to psychological explanations since its progression is arbitrated using its social and historical trajectory. This is certainly, to use modern language, a brand of dialectical historicism in so far as the mode of subjection, the ways in which subjective spirit is constituted in its embodied forms, is created through its back-and-forth instances of being objectified. As such, one could say that subjectivation on this account represents a certain temporality of postponement, not containing the necessary conditions that would give itself form but, rather, having to continue along its dialectical path in order to pass back into its subjective mode of being, as opposed to how its constituted in objective spirit. The inherent reliance on the dialectical oscillation between subjective spirit and objective spirit is what puts Hegel’s theory of subjectivity in a lineage with other thinkers that have been discussed in this section. That is, the fact that subjectivity starts from a place of not having selfpresence, of being chained to a future event through which and by which it then becomes perceptible in its very form. In a different manner but under the auspices of the same spirit, Edmund Husserl continues this very logic. His methodological philosophy, called phenomenology, came to fruition at the turn of the twentieth century. With the publication of Logical Investigations, Husserl (1970) put forward the notion of a transcendental subjectivity that placed the subject as prior to notions of sense and understanding in so far as the philosopher, reader, or subject employing the method of phenomenology was able to cultivate a transcendental attitude, which required the bracketing of objects in order to secure their essence—for example, through the technique that is now known as imaginal variation. In a Husserlian sense, the subject is always intentional with itself being oriented toward or against some other object. In many ways, this facilitated an understanding of subjective formation that was filled in or connected to the world in a manner that is not based upon positing a separate reality to mathematical or propositional forms. While imaginal variation could, indeed, deduce an essential “form” of its contents, it could never, however, posit this form as outside of itself in some

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objective and nonsubject-based space. One can see a similar process at work in subjectivation in so far as the immanent nature of becoming a subject also cannot claim to have its intuitions filled in from nowhere. To put it simply, the key Husserlian insight of intentionality is an important precursor, the fact that subjects are always about something, to the development of the production of subjectivity. In contradistinction, however, the notion of the transcendental subject with its idealist undertones would become critiqued by theorist like Guattari for not emphasizing the material realities of experience enough. Even though Heidegger, a student of Husserl’s, carried forward his teacher’s methodology in a certain nature, a clear break occurred as it pertains to how each theorized subjectivity. Indeed, the phenomenological axiom “to the things themselves” was still ensnared, as Heidegger attempted to demonstrate, by preconscious investments in things like objects, tools, language, and sociality. Heidegger’s (1962) notion of facticity may help elaborate the differences between the two thinkers. Facticity for Heidegger helps to foreground the self-reflective relationship that subjectivity has to itself. In other words, Heidegger would argue that there could be no possibility of developing a transcendental subjectivity, in the Husserlian sense, because upon existing the subject necessarily takes on the cultural or social heritage into which it has been thrown. For Heidegger, no kind of transcendental essence could be secured because facticity always mediates the subject’s relation to other objects. At the level of the subjectivity, it was in the existential analytic of Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) that Heidegger developed the concept of Dasein (literally, there being), not necessarily as a stand-in for the idiographic human, but as a new paradigmatic model of subjectivity by which to understand how relationality, among other phenomena, produces material meaning. One way to parse the distinction between Heidegger and more immanent thought, exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari, would be to understand how Heidegger’s kind of ontology relies on universal and abstract structures that are not entirely historicized. In other words, the “there” of being, or what Heidegger would call the clearing, is the open space that allows the historicized subject to grasp objects and meanings, even though these beings are independent from it in their factical beinghood. In a way, Heidegger acknowledges the historical nature of objects and Dasein but, nevertheless, asserts the clearing as a place unique to Dasein. However, in later Heidegger, this kind of human exceptionalism is abandoned somewhat for the poetic nature of the fourfold and Being in general (Capobianco 2014). In contradistinction to the universalizing tendencies of Heidegger, specifically the focus on developing a fundamental ontology of Being, Deleuze and Guattari

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(1987) offer a metaphysics that is more literary in character and focuses on the becoming of the subject therein affording no special place for subjectivity in this process. Their understanding of the subject is, in this manner, more radically contextualized than what Heidegger calls Dasein. As perhaps a stark contrast to the notion of subjectivation, building on early Heidegger, some of the existentialists in France such as Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized the more solipsistic aspects of the subject. For the existentialist school of thought, it is difficult, if not impossible, to produce meaningful values in a world that takes as its condition of existence the nihilistic obliteration of knowability and relationality—see the publication of Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1956). The upshot for any conception of subjectivity stemming from this means the production of subjectivity rings of tragedy, absurdity, and despair— perhaps even going to far as to take as a given the formula that “hell is other people” (Sartre 1989). This notion of subjectivity is raised in order to illustrate the broad category of paranoia that can find its way into subjective formation, especially a conception that emphasizes the individualistic and subjected forms of the subject. The appropriation of Heidegger by Sartre took subjectivity in this kind of direction, away from its original enmeshment with other beings in the world and toward its enclosed desires and thoughts. On this account, Sartre may be said to have an even more non-immanent understanding of subjectivity than Heidegger in so far as less emphasis is placed on facticity, the encountering of others and shared space with objects, and more emphasis is placed on an introspective model.3

The Postmodernist, Linguistic, or Psychoanalytic Subject At the fin de siècle, psychoanalysis started to come into its own. Sigmund Freud’s psychiatric work with Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer during the 1890s eventually culminated in the monograph Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud 1957). Freud’s theory of subjectivity is foregrounded, almost exclusively, by sexuality, which allows this theoretical gesture to produce such foundational psychoanalytic ideas as libidinal desire and the drives (Freud 1994). Within this purview, forms of subjection take the shape of social and familial prohibitions wherein the subject becomes forced, usually through some traumatic sexual encounter, to repress its libidinal potentialities—that is, its desires, wants, needs, and so on. In contrast, subjectivation is somewhat haphazardly arrested, on this account, in so far as sublimation becomes the means by which the subject is

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able to express such repressed desires in a socially acceptable way. This is a less radical version of subjectivation that might be offered by Guattari in so far as the sublimation still aims for a norm of social consistency. Nevertheless, Freud’s implementation and exposition of the “talking cure” as a means of symptom reduction has become a cornerstone of virtually all of twentieth century psychotherapeutic systems and practices. The exertion of this confessional power that such a process entails has been critiqued perhaps most notably by Foucault (1978) on the grounds that it produces compliant forms of subjectivity—ones that reproduce the exact form of power that subjectivizes in the first place, resulting in disciplined, infantilized, and docile subjects. It does not follow that all versions of psychoanalysis are so amenable to being co-opted by hegemonies like neoliberalism, Oedipalization, or something as taken for granted as the therapeutic dyad. One such anti-normative approach may be Lacanian psychoanalysis. Out of all of the brands of psychoanalysis that followed Freud, from Jung’s depth psychology to Klein’s object-relations approach, and Laplanche’s theory of enigmatic messages, it may have been Jacques Lacan who radicalized psychoanalysis using Saussurean linguistics to debiologize and bring into scientificity what was Freud’s original discovery. Importantly for Lacanian theory, the dual nature ascribed to the sign allows the further positing that “the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary” (Saussure 1959: 67). Such arbitrariness is another name for the lack or void of every speaking subject. The term subject in Lacanian psychoanalysis (Lacan 2006) refers to any being that possesses an unconscious. In the clinic, during the practice of psychoanalysis, this being is referred to as the analysand or the one who desires treatment. More broadly, however, the subject may additionally refer to a set of practices, rituals, and implicit rules that may be bundled together forming symbolic structures (e.g., social institutions, scientific disciplines, families, etc.) that enable and, in some cases, force the subject to navigate the world. Returning to the importance of language for Lacan, the notion of the subject brings up his theory of the signifier, which perhaps most clearly elucidates the approach this version of psychoanalysis takes with regard to language. The signifier is the pure, physical, and empty form that carries information allowing for communication and, what is also called in semiotics, the process of signification. Contrast this to the signified, which is the intelligible meaning itself, or the sense made out of the world by the subject. For Lacan, the subject is inherently castrated through the incisiveness of the signifier, which means that the subject is always lacking in some

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way. Contradistinctively, an immanent approach to subjectivity formation understands the subject as originally possessing an overflow or abundance of its own beinghood, not lacking in order to be fixed but, rather, given a more sociohistorical approach, subjected and taken over by outside forces that are likewise on the same level as its freedom, agency, and vitality. It could also be said that the Lacanian approach, on a theoretical level, is more deterministic than an immanent approach in so far as the subject is originally split from itself. As a point of comparison, the early Foucauldian emphasis on modes of subjection likewise develops a notion of subjectivity that is more disciplined by outside forces than it is by its agential capacities. Guattari, when compared to Lacan, speaks of the production of subjectivity in order to point out that there is not some original or inherent lack intrinsic to the subject itself but, as a counterpoint, constructs a theory that draws attention to the creative capacities of the subject. One of the few things Lacan and Guattari do have in common, however, is emphasizing the importance of language in shaping subjectivity, even though Guattari takes this into the more pragmatic and material territories of linguistics. Cited by Deleuze and Guattari in their final book together What is Philosophy? (1994), François Laruelle represents a culmination of the Lacanian project, pushing it out into other domains like philosophy, aesthetics, and media studies through his development of nonstandard philosophy (cf. Laruelle 2013a). While Laruelle may not necessarily agree with this conception since, as Katerina Kolozova (2014) never ceases to reiterate, there are stark theoretical differences between non-analysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis and, it follows, conceptions of subjectivity; both Lacan and Laruelle are, nevertheless, heretical in nature, anti-normative in their theorizing, and aim to be interdisciplinary in their scholarly practices. Kolozova (2011) contrasts the concept of subjectivity in both Lacan in Laruelle when she writes that “unlike Lacan’s barred Subject, the radical subjectivity (that is the Stranger), as defined by Laruelle, possesses a ‘concrete body’ or a ‘flesh’ which is not ‘empirico-metaphysical’” (61). While abstaining from getting caught in Laruelle’s technical web of concepts, the precise point is that subjectivity for Lacan is not embodied and whole enough, meaning that Lacan places too much emphasis on the metaphysical nature of alienation as opposed to Laruelle who conceptualizes subjectivity in the Real, through the figure of the Stranger. In other words, Laruelle takes that later Lacan and runs with it, pushing non-analysis and subjectivity, for that matter, to take a more immanent path, one that is not based on alienation and the inaccessibility of the Other. Laruelle (2013b) phrases this as “a loss lived as such by the subject rather than a loss affecting a subject” (para. 20). In this sense, then, Laruelle enacts

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a certain rehabilitation of subjectivity, not necessarily in a humanistic sense, but in so far as there is a reemphasis on lived embodiment and the immanence of the flesh, a certain subjectivation that is foregrounded by its encounter with the Real. Laruelle is, however, not a Guattarian in this way. That is to say, if his poetic lamentation on the subject is any indication (cf. Laruelle 1993), the sharp divide between Guattari and Laruelle occurs when conceptualizing the subject:  Guattari ends up being more deterministic in the sense that outside politico-technical powers mostly shape subjectivity. Laruelle, by contrast, tends to emphasize a subject that is more agential and discrete. This specific kind of agency manifests in Laruelle’s work partially through his discourse, which stays close to the contours of subjectivity and how it is confronted by, for example, the Stranger. This kind of rhetorical play by Laruelle is different than Guattari’s in so far as the latter typically tries to bring in economic, political, and sociological factors into the analysis. Laruelle, on the other hand, prefers abstract terms that are explicitly framed by subjectivity—again, in almost a quasi-humanistic sense. This represents somewhat of a bane for Laruelle, if one is to parse his theories through the lens of subjectivation, since such a process requires not only that the subject be aware of how it is constituted socio-symbolically but also that any theory of subjectivation should speak to the interlacing forces that go into producing subjectivity and not just stick with abstract jargon that circles around the subject itself. The linguistic nature of the Lacanian approach and its evolution into nonanalysis speaks to the rise of conceptions of subjectivity that are more oriented toward linguistic or even postmodernist models. Apart from the analytic tradition, it is the early work done by the hermeneuticists that allowed for such an understanding of subjectivity to come to fruition. The study of hermeneutics tackled the problem of meaning and how the subject’s horizon of intelligibility could produce certain truth claims or access texts in a shared or objective manner. For example, such an interpretive problem was tackled by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975) and Paul Ricœur (1993). That is, perhaps it is the case that subjectivity is propelled, by its very nature, to constantly reinterpret its place in the world, whether semiotically, pragmatically, or socially. As a consequence, newer and further revisions and appropriations of meaning would result in a better picture of the subject’s world allowing for it to become better engaged, to push toward its truth, and, indeed, to exist at all. Yet, at stake within the hermeneutic tradition is whether or not further exegetical or descriptive analyses can actually lead one to a better understanding of truth. In other words, the problem sometimes arises that the subject gets “stuck” within the hermeneutic

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circle such the difference between part and whole, identity and alterity, can no longer be judged in a normative or transcendent sense. In large part, this is to say, where to stake a claim or how to enter the cycle of description becomes contentious with debates abounding as to a proper hermeneutic methodology (cf. de Man 1983; Dilthey 1972). What this entails, if the “linguistic turn” of the twentieth century has been any indication, is a certain deferral and relativizing of meaning, not such that all truth claims become absolutely relative, a universalizing principle in itself, but that subjectivity becomes, depending on the specific type of postmodernism:  splintered, decentered, lacking, or nomadic. Contrast this to a transcendent, ideal, or dialectical version of subjectivity that works toward wholeness, contains an inherent essence, or has internal rational principles by which to render universally applicable judgments, and so forth. The two versions are very different and, indeed, challenge and contradict each other in important ways. As a result, this dichotomy between subjectivity after the “linguistic turn” (i.e., linguistic or postmodern subjects) and modern subjectivity4 (i.e., transcendent, ideal, or dialectic) is a useful heuristic aiding somewhat in mapping the basic terrain and topology that foregrounds subjectivity as decidedly linguistic in nature. Despite the differences between modern subjectivity and certain forms of postmodern subjectivities, what they do share is a kind of correlationism in so far as reality itself is only ever apprehended through human capacities. This view may find its most rigorous form in Quentin Meillassoux’s work, especially the seminal After Finitude (2008). By way of sketching a cartography with greater detail and relief, a technical term from the postmodern literature, vis-à-vis Frederic Jameson, the master-narrative, helps set-up a critique of the tendency for modernist thought (in the sense it was used before), and its conception of subjectivity by extension, to colonize that which does not fit within the logic of a presupposed or normatively circulated semiotic framework. That which is unintelligible becomes either assimilated and normativized or it is rendered as aberrant or anomalous. On this account, it will become clear that it is more accurate to talk about the production of subjectivity, both processes of subjection and subjectivation, as opposed to subjectivity in its transcendent or dialectical sense. In challenge to the modernist tradition, the middle of the twentieth century saw a dramatic rupture within the academy. Congruent with other cultural events going on at the time, such as the American civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the student revolution in France, and the assassination

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of high-profile public figures, the social transformation changed, radically, the way scholarship was conducted, the concepts that were allowed to be thought, and, in a negative sense, eroded a progressive and teleological faith in the very tradition from which these changes emerged. Perhaps the most general term that encapsulates such differences under a single sign is postmodernism (Lyotard 1984). Yet, it may not be too much of an overclaim to say that many of the “post”-theoretical tendencies (e.g., post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-colonialism, and so on) that are now found within the academic literature share similar values, at least with regard to their collective critique of foundationalism and modernist inspired theorizing. To be more specific, some of these values include a skepticism of metanarratives and origin stories, the importance of a linguist and performative nature of identity, a certain relativization of science, critiques of capitalist hegemony, and emphasis on the mobile dispersion of power used to shape subjectivities, collectivities, institutions, and the natural world. Nonetheless, divisive and nuanced polemics exist within this “post”-literature regarding what exactly the axioms of this new worldview are, how the various subdisciplines are to be distinguished from one another, and what consequences these differences have for academic and scholarly praxis. Yet, in a broad sense, what sets postmodernism apart from Enlightenment thinking and modernism is an ardent skepticism of the master-narrative, which is a term used by Fredric Jameson in the foreword to Jean-François Lyotard’s important book The Postmodern Condition. This is a take on Lyotard’s (1984) own articulation of the grand narrative and, within the postmodern condition, its succumbing to processes of delegitimization and dissolution. Jameson (1984) explains his notion in that the current state of affairs of the world are not marked by “the disappearance of the great master-narratives, but their passage underground as it were, their continuing but now unconscious effectivity as a way of ‘thinking about’ and acting in our current situation” (p. xii, emphasis in original). Such an understanding of what constitutes the hegemonic ideology of the times, that is to say its covertness and not its going by the wayside, helps explain how and why what would seem to be archaic forms of power, such as phallocracy, anthropocentrism, and colonialism, not only have not been resolved through social and political forces vis-à-vis the civil rights movement, feminism, queer studies, and critical race theory but have actually entrenched themselves in more insidious ways. A clear example of this is how the linguistic nature of subjectivity is produced, either through subjection or subjectivation, which remains ensnared in and arbitrated by these various master-narratives.

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Another way to understand this is through Derrida. He suggests that the linguistic nature of material practices and subjectivity by extension are indebted to their historico-metaphysical tradition. Derrida (1976) goes so far as to make this the case at the level of the grapheme, the smallest mark that could carry information, when writing such that as “an element [the grapheme], whether it is understood as the medium or as the irreducible atom, of the arche-synthesis in general, of what one must forbid oneself to define within the system of oppositions of metaphysics, of what consequently one should not even call experience in general, that is to say the origin of meaning in general” (9). Therefore, it follows that given the emphasis on the linguistic nature of subjectivity, the subject, as a result, is also constituted through the historico-metaphysical tradition, or adjudged through master-narratives to return to Lyotard, in so far as these linguistic factors determine its conditions of emergence. To parse this in terms of the subjection versus subjectivation distinction employed throughout, linguistic subjection would occur when the subject blindly takes on the signified of the Other, its tradition, and so on in such a way that it recapitulates the very metaphysical baggage that is contained therein. On the other hand, subjectivation, on this account, works toward, just as deconstructionist practice does, the emptying of the signified in order to intervene at the level of the signifier, setting to play the polysemic nature of meaning. At the level of the proper name, like those written in standard academic citational practices, Derrida (1995) says, in relation to the more specific act of the signature, that “it is always exercised in my name as the name of the other, and that in no way affects its singularity. This singularity is posited and must quake in the exemplary equivocality and insecurity of this ‘as [sic]’ ” (11, emphasis in original). In this way, the name becomes the property of discourse and shared meanings, it is subjected, as opposed to being under the ownership of the subject toward which it supposedly applies. Such a thesis can be extrapolated and applied to not only citational practices but also to the very possibility of constructing a theory of subjectivity; these proper names never assure the consistency of the meaning that they wish to convey and, over and above, they necessarily carry the indoctrinating force of the Other, subjecting the subject using a specific ideological agenda. In theoretical terms, the proper names, usually last names, or what Lacan (1993) would call the name-of-the-father (le-nom-du-père), act as certain policing sentinels that give structure to and dictate the rules by which one is able to enter into the jargon of a language community. If one cannot speak the jargon correctly, which really means if the syntax of this regime

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does not contain these arbiters, then it follows that the said syntax becomes virtually eligible—a garbled and non-reproducible narrative of scholarship or epistemology that does meet normative standards. In terms of subjectivity, to scramble the meanings of linguistic subjection requires an anti-normative gesture that would render subjectivity linguistically non-interpretable, or at least imperceptible, to the Other. Said simply, the rules would not compute and, as a result, the speaking-subject of a rhetoric that pushes the boundaries of the Other, or merely is deliberate gibberish, becomes banished from the centripetal and mainstream forces that police language, those that ensure its consistency and communicativity. This power differential shows up, in a concrete way, as alluded to earlier, in academic and scholastic citational practices as well as in the production of subjectivity. Yet, this is not just the case with the proper name’s inability to unbiasedly convey meanings or transmute information, as per the Derrida commentary. Haraway (2010) expands such an analysis in more of a sociological direction when she emphasizes the choice the author, thinker, or scientist has when selecting what literature to cite. In this choice, there are all sorts of hidden and presumptive alliances that are formed, exposing the circles that one may have been initiated into, or, at worst, recapitulating tired and old anecdotes that have been stalely circling among a privileged class of academics. The importance of proper names for a linguistic notion of subjectivity shows up in citational practices, but a similar logic may also apply to neoteric and historically constituted concepts, the nominalization process that takes place during the creation and circulation of a concept, for example, subjectivity. That is to say, the sense in which the term “subjectivity” carries with it in the current historical milieu is certainly not the same sense that may have been meant by older generations when using similar terms like human, person, individual, and so forth. This, of course, also brings to the fore the issues of translation, which likewise make overt the mutability of sense not only from one signifier to another but also how meaning transforms through temporality. All in all, it would be egregious to not acknowledge this fact, if not presumptively to assume it a priori. Given the examples of the use of the proper name in the production of subjectivity and the “choice” one makes when aligning oneself to a certain set of authors, ideas, and politics as well as the broader argument about the temperohistorical mutability of sense itself, it follows that the project of ignoring these linguistic modes of subjection becomes contentious, at best, and impossible, at worst. This puts into play the very function of the signifier: or, in more general terms, what exactly is going on with social relatedness such as communication,

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writing, education, and so on? Following the broad theme of postmodernism and the “linguistic turn” that I  have been suggesting, in no uncertain terms, as an alternative or challenge to more modernist practices of understanding subjectivity, it may serve well here to bring in the logic of postcolonial theory to help illustrate what is meant by this claim against being able to somehow elide the linguistic and historical tradition that the subject is obligated to. Slemon (1994), for instance, while denoting the flourishing of postcolonial scholarship in the academy and, at the same time, cautioning against having this uptake be some sort of passing fad, suggests a certain primacy to postcolonial studies, even more so than the historically rooted and so-called broader fields of postmodernism and post-structuralism. He writes, [Post-colonial theory] has been used as a way of ordering a critique of totalizing forms of Western historicism; as a portmanteau term for a retooled notion of “class,” as a subset of both postmodernism and post-structuralism (and conversely, as the condition from which those two structures of cultural logic and cultural critique themselves are seen to emerge). (Slemon 1994: 16)

Indeed, this primacy is well taken in that the geopolitical mobilization of power has certain precedence over cultural or social meanings and epistemologies (the latter, nevertheless, still certainly having a material impact). With regard to the discussion of historiography in relation to subjectivity, what this would amount to would be saying that, first and foremost, it is the present state of coloniality that foregrounds any discussion of history and likewise subject construction, let  alone its institutional sanctioning and proliferation via widely accepted historiographic narratives and, therefore, how these very master-narratives constitute subjects under their respective regimes. Put simply, this is a type of militarization of the territory, the sovereign that works behind the scenes and controls the rules by which the signifier is allowed to function. These metaphors not only apply in a more macro sense to, say, planetary conflicts or border disputes, but also in a much more restricted sense, to the way that meaning becomes circulated and created. It follows that from a post-colonialist point of view, every possible historiography is haunted by its own sovereign, one that makes the act of speaking, writing, and educating in and of itself a kind of colonizing act. This is not to say that one can speak from “nowhere” or that the covert powers of the sovereign can be elided somehow; on the contrary, decolonial strategies first and foremost reflect on and make explicit the biases that have snuck their way into the arbitrating principles that give discourse its consistency, perhaps even establishing their own principles

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by which to adjudicate the veracity of what is acceptable. What this should say about a linguistic concept of subjectivity is that it is much more aware of its determinisms than the spirit of the modernist anecdotes and structures found in histories written on Western philosophers or the narrativizing of the progression of ideas through time. In other words, these things exist precisely because we exist—demonstrating, for the sake of argument, at least some capacity for selfreflection, consciousness, or ethical and spiritual action.

The Immanent Subject The move away from the linguistic nature of the subject and toward an immanent understanding of subjectivity must begin with Baruch Spinoza. The posthumous publication of the Ethics (Spinoza 2002) became perhaps his most celebrated and rigorous work. In it, Spinoza articulated a kind of subjectivity that was based upon affective flows, attributes, and affinities that connect or repel bodies, which is seen clearly in his delineation of extension and thought that are co-constitutive of how subjects are brought into being. Also considered a rationalist like Descartes, Spinoza seemed to maintain that a set of a priori principles existed by which one could interpret or, perhaps better, be and exist in the world. Unlike Descartes, however, Spinoza did not, depending on the secondary literature, maintain an ontological split between the world outside of the subject and its internal experience (cf. as a counterpoint, the debate around the “real distinction”). As such, the inside and outside of the subject was, for Spinoza, interlinked in so far this topology is based on his theory of attributes creating not rigid, impermeable boundaries between self and other, but interactions of exchange and comingling. In terms of a broader notion of metaphysics, Spinoza (2002) equated materiality as a way of being that becomes perceptible through the attributes of thought and extension. The emphasis is placed, for Spinoza, on the aspects of becoming, the immanent nature of the world wherein possibilities and potentialities for thought and action are available in every instance for the subject to appropriate for its own self-becoming. More technically, Spinozist cosmology makes available to subjects the two attributes of thought and extension, which reflect and represent all of the other attributes that are foreclosed to the human mind, natural forces that remain outside of subjective control. In this manner, to speak in terms of subjection, it would be these so-called natural forces that constitute subjectivity, which are not immediately appropriable under the categories of thought and extension. Yet, in every instance this occurs, as Spinoza suggests, a mode of

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subjectivation is available through the apprehension of means of becoming, the putting into being the attributes of thought and extension. The immanent nature of Spinoza’s metaphysics was picked-up by more contemporary thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) and developed into a more rigorous theory. This is to say, an immanent reading of Spinoza conceptualizes subjectivity as an ongoing process of production and creation, not having fixed or static coordinates by which to affix a stable set of subjective parameters. In this way, Guattari (2011, 2013, 2016) will later push the process of becoming that was so central to his earlier works with Deleuze into a formal theory of subjective production and, more pointedly, a theory of subjectivation, the way that the subject is able to elide, frustrate, or overcome passive modes of subjection that are placed on it by alternative forces that are “outside” of it but, nevertheless, still immanent to its formation. Following Spinoza in this immanent tradition of conceptualizing, the thinker who most famously “inverted” Platonism and therefore the transcendent notion of subjectivity is Friedrich Nietzsche. That is, Nietzsche (1995) claimed to have overcome the lingering metaphysics of Platonism, partially, through his concept of the Übermensch and also with help from some of his other ideas like the willto-power and eternal recurrence. Regarding specific reference to subjectivation, Nietzsche shifted the focus onto processes of becoming and self-cultivation. Indicative of this are his aphoristic and literary devices that he employs in many of his texts (cf. Nietzsche 2006), which move the readership and textuality into more of an engaged and playful mode—oppose this to the Cartesian manuscripts with their paranoid search for clarity and authorial intention. Apart from the textual level, Nietzsche’s ideas were important antecedents to some of the key theorists that have developed the notion of subjectivation; most notably, Deleuze and Foucault.5 It is clear that Nietzsche’s wrestling with a persistent Platonism that still infected the Western tradition, in his eyes, lead him to position subjective formation in an immanent sense, as a process of becoming. Nietzsche’s (2017) notion of the will to power, furthermore, speaks to an agential sense of subjectivity that works toward breaking free from its fetters, both social and personal, in order to reclaim itself within its context and historical heritage. The kind of epistemology this entails is different in kind than positivist notions of science or transcendent theories of the subject that strip meaning of its polysemic play of difference and situate truth on the level of propositional statements or logical deduction. This is not to say that Nietzsche was against these kinds of practices. For example, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche (2001) develops a certain science of becoming that incorporates an epistemology of the

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subject that is less philosophical and scientific, in the modernist sense, and more literary and polyvocal. His plays with language and the way he relates this back to self-overcoming hint at his move toward conceptualizing subjectivity as less static and more agential and ongoing. That is to say, subjectivation for Nietzsche (and not unlike for Foucault) represents a certain disciplinary practice, a selfcultivation, that takes as its starting point an aesthetic creation of subjectivity— one need only see, as a paragon case in point, the hyperbolic and evocative textual interventions in Ecce Homo (Nietzsche 2010). Speaking of a provocateur, Michel Foucault was in a certain sense a kind of Heideggerian, if his so-called deathbed confession is any indication (Sluga 2005), even if clear distinctions can be made between Foucault’s more historical analyses and Heidegger’s much more universal and ontological approach (Rayner 2007). Foucault’s archaeological excavation of subjugated knowledge (Foucault 1980), following in the spirit of Nietzsche, has as its aim to lay-bare the presuppositions or axioms that are implicit in various kinds of totalities or systems of dominance—epistemologies that smother or obfuscate other kinds of knowledge. Foucault (1980) articulates this initial procedure as uncovering the “historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation” (81). This is the first sense in which Foucault describes his archeological and genealogical project. Second, however, it is not only the case that new artifacts must be brought to the fore and discoursed upon, but that there are necessarily power effects that are created by this procedure as well as by the overarching meta-epistemologies. Foucault (1980) calls this second act the elaboration of “naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (82). The resulting effect produces, connecting this back to the discussion of the production of subjectivity, counter-hegemonic forms, modes, and understandings of being, identity, and so on. In a general manner, the work of Foucault can be grouped under the axes progressing chronologically from truth to power and, finally, to ethics. The Foucault of “power” understood subjectivity to be always historically and politically constituted; that is, through an intricate web of constructive and destructive power relations. Perhaps the most famous model he provides for this is in Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1995) and takes the form of the panopticon. Appropriated from the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s ideal architecture for the construction of a prison, the panopticon is generally a circular building organizing the spaces for bodies (e.g., inmates) to fit into isolated sections,

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blocks, or cells. At the center of the structure, these subjects can see a guard tower or box containing, they presume, some kind of policing agent who can observe them but the panoptically constituted subjects can never see in. It is not a matter, therefore, whether the guard is “actually” watching the subject at this very moment since the prisoner will never empirically know—this kind of apparatus produces subjectivities that internalize the rule that one may always be under surveillance. As a result, such a panopticism produces, for Foucault (1995), a kind of subjectivity that learns to autoregulate its behavior, actions, and, indeed, even its internal states like emotions, thoughts, and bodily processes. In a certain sense, then, the distinction between what is inside the human body and what is outside becomes irrelevant since these bodies have already been organized, subjected, and disciplined in advance—their timespace being under the jurisdiction of a covert and surveilling Other. In On the Genealogy of Ethics, an interview given by Foucault appearing in a book by Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983), the later “ethical” Foucault is clearly present, which is indicated by a return to classical Greek philosophy and the mining of what it means to be an ethical subject. As specifically relevant to the present project, Foucault raises the following question: “What is the mode d’ assujettissement? It is that we have to build our existence as a beautiful existence; it is an aesthetic mode” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 240). The mode d’ assujettissement or mode of subjugation is equivalent to subjectivation, in this context, begetting a subject that can either choose the norms to take on or refashion them toward its own ends in a certain ethical manner. More particularly, the concept of the subject shifts, for Foucault, toward models taken from Euripides and Greek literature and culture. For example, Foucault develops the notion of parrhesia, or risk-taking and truth-telling when speaking, as formative of what constitutes a certain authentic mode of subjectivity (Foucault 2010). This, along with his work on the care of the self, constitutes a large swath of his later work, developed right before his death in 1984 marking a shift of emphasis in Foucault from analyses focused upon objectification (truth and power) to subjectivation (ethics) in the chronological progression of his work. However, as the following excerpt from Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling may help to demonstrate, the heart of Foucault continues to be preoccupied with spaces of discipline, the creation of clear identities that are acquiescent to ordering, the function of confessional or pastoral speech-acts, and the role that language games play in maintaining sociological and hierarchical alignments and positions of authority,

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era The need for avowal, I believe, is absolutely fundamental to the penal system: one cannot judge—that is to say, the judicial dramaturgy cannot be fully realized—if the accused does not avow in some way . . . it is in large part because and to the extent that this question of subjectivity, of truth-telling of criminal subjectivity, has come to double and extend its shadow, in a way, over the simple question of avowal. (Foucault 2014: 210, 228)

Here, Foucault links the concept of subjectivity specifically with the function of avowal—his archetypal example being the criminal and penal system. This places at the center of the production of subjectivity a demand instituted by an Other that the subject legitimate itself, lay claim to a specific way of naming, but only within the confines that give the sociopolitical apparatus intelligibility in the first place. The Greek sense of parrhesia as risk-taking when speaking in public takes on a different mode in its more contemporary employment within apparatuses of discipline and capture. Therefore, far from being some naïve notion of humanistic or existential authenticity, parrhesia as truth-telling, in this case, produces a subject that must split itself in some way: it must “come to double and extend its shadow” (Foucault 2014: 228). Nevertheless, since the whole thing is grounded by the theatrical nature of this scene of nominalization, then it follows that the subjective doubling or split falls under the register of dramaturgy: as Foucault (2014) says in no uncertain terms “avowal is of the order of drama or dramaturgy” (210). The invocation of dramaturgy by Foucault positions the process of subjective formation in a self-creative and theatrical sense whereby the mise en scène configures, in part, how the subject is allowed to act and constitute itself. In a certain manner, this is an extension of the classical Greek notion of parrhesia into more contemporary modes of performance and identity. Subjectivity is not, for Foucault, ontologically split from its very conception thereby implying that its semiological or pragmatic engagements circle around some form of “lack” that somehow gives it structure or form. Rather, subjectivity is produced as such by the juridical, political, sociological, and other various apparatuses that initiate the subject to avow who or what it is—under the rubric of the categories and signifiers of language that very system wishes to employ. As such, this is a scene that is necessarily dramaturgical, splitting the subject to “perform” in a certain way—for example, as a criminal, judge, prosecutor, and so forth—while also binding that very nominalization to the regime and discourse of power that gives it meaning. The gesture is a thoroughly systematic one in its reach. As Judith Butler says in relation to Foucault’s point, it is not the case that I “just bind myself to the Other

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who demands that I identify myself. I [also] bind myself to the discourse which augments its power and reach through my avowal” (Butler 2014). This, again, speaks to the necessity to talk about processes of subjectivation and subjection or the production of subjectivity as opposed to some discrete, standalone unit that can be christened as subjectivity-in-itself. With regard, specifically, to subjectivation, it would be the disciplinary manner in which the subject is able to perform itself given the staging elements that went into making the avowal possible. There is, to put it differently, always a “personal choice”, says Foucault (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983:  240), for the subject to reconfigure, stretch, or subvert the social role that is handed down to it. One might say here that the repressive power (puissance) feeds into the way that the dramaturgical elements are constituted beforehand and, in an exact same sense, how the subject finally enacts or, more precisely, ends up avowing its social role. Alternatively, the creative function of power (pouvoir) would be the subjectivation process that is the space of freedom in the dramaturgy such that the subject takes on, in a personal way, the social role into which it has been thrown. Continuing this discussion of the function of power, the disciplinary apparatus that Guattari sets his theory of subjectivity in relief against is that of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC).6 He writes that “the installation of IWC in the very production of subjectivity:  an immense machine producing a subjectivity standardized on a world scale has become a basic element in the formation of collective labor power and the force for collective social control” (Guattari and Rolnik 2007: 53). To tease this apart, the strong claim is that, for Guattari being not in a strict sense a postmodernist, IWC comes to replace purely discursive notions of ideology, those derivatives from perhaps Louis Althusser (2001), with a more robust Marxist understanding of the material deployment of a superstructure. This stems, in part, from Spinoza’s influence on the brand of Marxism that Guattari takes to be his own. Much work has been done on the antecedent influence that Spinoza had on Marx, which includes disentangling Marx from Hegelianism as the work of Althusser tried to do (Holland 1998). The move to a more Spinozist Marx as opposed to a Hegelian one reinterprets a theory of capital that does not rely on progressivist ideology and, instead, grounds the history of capitalism as a mode of production and nothing more. Indeed, researching in this exact area, Casarino (2011) suggests that, in a Spinozist spirit, Marx was the first to articulate the defining characteristic of a mode of production under capitalism as “consist[ing] in positing potentiality qua potentiality as the object of exchange par excellence:  under capitalist relations of production, the worker sells not acts of labor—that is, actual forms

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Arts of Subjectivity: A New Animism for the Post-Media Era

of productive activity—but labor power” (216). Labor power, in this sense, is developed from Spinoza’s understanding of the immanent relation between all beings, the sheer fact the upsurge of potentialities molds, shapes, and forms concrete sets of relations in the world. On this account, a Spinozist inspired Marxism prefigures the way that Guattari understands how capitalism operates. As such, Integrated World Capitalism, a Guattarian take on Marxist theory, makes no qualitative distinctions between the ideological power of the superstructure and the labor productivity of the worker or subject. That is to say, the entire system of IWC is dependent upon every other element that constitutes it, to maintain its teleology, hegemony, axiology, and so on therein rendering alienation not as a necessary condition of the proletariat, but as something that exists as “illusory.” Put into more schizoanalytic terms, the sustainability of IWC is dependent upon an ethico-aesthetic pragmatics, the proletariat, and alienation by extension, being just another category by which to produce a specific form of subjectivity. Traditional Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as cases in point, run counter to Guattari’s more immanent understanding of power in so far as they presuppose a form of lack, a divided subject in Lacan’s case, or a form of alienation, not having access to the fruits of one’s labor, for Marx. There simply is no alienation, put bluntly, in a Guattarian sense partially because such a notion is predicated on a prearranged absence and because the mediatization of the world has led to its ontology becoming completely networked—at which point it becomes nonsensical to make distinctions between an alienated subject or proletariat since the hegemony is always being unsettled and upset through forces that it can never control. The abstract machine of Integrated World Capitalism that the above description points to is the hierarchical and arborescent form of control and policing that foregrounds the schizoanalytic concept of the production of subjectivity. That is, there would be no need to talk about the production of subjectivities without IWC incessantly stamping them out, innovating new forms of identity, and incentivizing the creation of alternative modes of being. Hence, this is the second claim wherein the “social control” instituted by IWC is built-in precisely to its modes of subjective production. That is to say, subjectivities are produced under this dominant semiological and spatially organized regime in so far as they can be made more amenable to ordering, disciplining, and surveillance. Importantly, while social control is always a part of the IWC machine, there are, simultaneously, forces in which to challenge this control, whether through tactical, political actions or more micro-political, everyday instances of subversion. The term “forces” is selected here, instead of the word

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“spaces,” in order to align Guattari’s theorizing with its immanentist lineage; that is, as Antonio Negri (2003) has argued, resistance precedes domination, in contradiction to early Foucault, in so far as any creative life force must first give birth to a force of domination that can then turn around and appropriate it. Put into different terms, it is not a matter of haphazardly creating novel, interesting, or alternative subjects. In fact, what actually happens is the opposite since the structures of subject production necessarily dictate a certain form by which these subjects can come into existence; again, a form that follows the rubric of social control. Notably, while the current phenomenon of IWC led Guattari to develop his theory of subjective formation as a kind of necessity in the face of this overwhelming abstract machine, it does not follow that the principles of production, when disentangled from their homogenizing tendencies, cannot be used to produce subjectivities that run counter to or at least challenge the totalizing and interpellating discourse that seeks social control. For instance, when giving a definition of the production of subjectivity, Guattari alludes to this fact by arguing that “the existence of one subjectivity or another depends on whether an assemblage of enunciation produces it or not . . . behind the appearance of individuated subjectivity one must try to locate the real processes of subjectivation” (Guattari and Rolnik 2007:  469). There exists, then, behind the curtain, these so-called “real processes of subjectivation” that, according to the foregoing quote, would be linked to different kinds of assemblages of enunciation as opposed to the one just described under the sign of IWC. While both modes of the production of subjectivity are real in the sense that they create subjects, the process of subjectivation that is non-individuated pushes against the logic of IWC that works to create encapsulated and therefore controllable subjects. Both processes are “immanent” in so far as they are on the same level as subjectivity; it is merely a matter of what kind of subjectivity to create or which direction to take the process of subjective production. Again, the polemic here is against assemblages of enunciation that individuate, isolate, de-socialize, and autonomize. Contrast this, as Guattari often does, with assemblages that are created based upon their sociological inclusion and permeability as well as their adaptability to outside factors. The latter not only challenges the homogenizing tendencies of IWC but also has certain benefits for the participant that becomes a part of these kinds of assemblages—benefits that range from the de-pathologizing of well-being and health to increased creativity and sense of belonging. To stay with the theme of power (puissance) being raised and its repressive function as initiated by Foucault and not unlike his own articulations of

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biopower (cf. Foucault 2013), Deleuze suggests that society has left behind disciplinary apparatuses of subjective production and is now using machinic power to produce subjectivities that are based upon control. Putting this into his own words, in the Postscript on the Societies of Control, Deleuze (1992) argues that “the apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridical life” (5, emphasis in original). The latter conceptualization of juridical life, the production of subjectivity, as produced through limitless postponements speaks to the way in which semiologies proliferate and encode themselves in such a way as to make them accessible only in regard to a key that is au currant with the logic of infinite deferral. That is to say, such a radical dispersion of power, embedded into the materiality and sign-systems of the world, requires, if one has the permissions or administrative rights, a specific password to unlock the resources, possibilities, or authority being sought. As Deleuze (1992) says, “what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords” (5). The implications this has for the way in which subjects become produced is enormous. Instead of discrete and encapsulated bodies that can become interpellated and, indeed, even identified and properly nominalized by a semistatic superstructure or overarching ideological state apparatus, in control societies, subjectivities are always already interlinked by semiological networks and matrices. The important distinction between disciplinary societies and control societies has to do with the unique way the subject is appropriated, the former organizes spaces in which subjects can gather and be ordered while the latter is spatially dispersed, not requiring structured common areas in order to exert power. For control societies, subjects are encoded and commoditized having their lifeworlds placed in exchange networks of information and currency and are only accessible, as Deleuze noted, through some form of encryption—a password, secret code, or special signal. One may, again, see a similarity between Deleuze’s conception of control societies and Foucault’s understanding of biopower. While this is true, on a certain level, the metaphors that Deleuze selects tend to fall under the umbrella of cryptography and are somewhat different that Foucault’s emphasis on biology and industry. For Deleuze, it makes no sense, then, to speak of an individual per se as though one could perhaps escape the prison, institution, or globalized society. Subjectivities have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets or “banks” (Deleuze 1992:  5, emphasis in original). The notion of a dividual is

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helpful in pointing out how the production of subjectivity is, under this new and emerging regime of power, concerned with the dispersion, splintering, and encoding of embodied enactments, subjective affects, and a relationality that is plugged into a planetary and transcendental matrix that feeds off of these subjectivities in so far as the teleology of this totality is pointed toward, as Deleuze so aptly and succinctly called it, control. Using different tropes to speak about this process but still containing its immanent spirit, Guattari saw as a counterforce for the control instituted by the emerging planetary control society, a subjectivation structured by a certain animistic revival of subjectivity. This is not a return to nature or any other such archaic, nostalgic longing propagated by certain strains of ecology, humanism, and even feminism; nor is it a push-through capitalism using processes of mimesis or quickening that the recent philosophy of accelerationism has advocated (Shaviro 2015). Instead, Guattari likens these processes of subjective production to “soft subversions” or micropolitical revolutions that take place locally, sociologically, and through everyday interactions. Most flavorfully, Guattari (2009c) parses such a counter-hegemonic form of subjective production in the following way, All it takes is reinventing [subjection’s] usage, not in a dogmatic and programmatic manner, but through the creation of other “existential chemistries,” open to all the recompositions and transmutations of these “singularity salts” whose secret arts and analysis can deliver up. (306)

The alchemical metaphorics and the attention to pragmatics offer a rather robust languaging that can be found throughout the rest of Guattari’s corpus—therein perhaps representing a useful diagrammatic key for the reader. In other words, subjectivity on this account does not, in a strict ontological sense, exist in so far as the flashes and precipitates are truly singular in nature, therein containing the essence of the subject. Rather, the ontology is a processual becoming that, as Guattari suggests, is both temporally and spatially fleeting thus having no real consistency outside of what the modes of subjective production give to it. The contemporary network theorists and neo-animists, like Latour and Stengers, are aligned with a Guattarian sense of subjectivity. For example, as Bruno Latour has argued, in his book, We Have Never Been Modern (Latour 1993), the division between nature and culture is a certain illusion in both an anthropological sense and on a priori grounds, which has helped keep subjectivity subjected. Latour suggests a version of subjectivity that is distributed among many different actors, somewhat akin to the late Guattari’s (1995) notion of processuality. Both, furthermore, have a certain animist sense

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by which they develop their theory of subjectivity in that humans, animals, material objects, and even unseen actors are given weight when analyzing how subjectivity is constructed. Latour may be more materialist in his treatment such that the actors of his Actor Network Theory (ANT) tend to be within the domain of science studies and therefore are more empirical objects—although, the notions of the quasi-object and the experimental factish (Latour 2010) are notable exceptions. Latour’s ANT approach, while not explicitly focused on the production of subjectivity, brings in nonhuman actors that challenge the notion of a discrete subject. This broadens an idea of agency and, at the level of theoretical development, opens a space in which to develop specifically how nonhuman beings help mold and shape subjective production. By contrast one could say that Guattari’s theory of subjectivity is decidedly more linguistic in nature, however, relying heavily on semiotics and, more specifically, concepts from literary theory, like those of the Russian formalist Mikhail Bakhtin. Nevertheless, it is the case for both Latour and Guattari that premodern society, in its technical sense, did not need the distinction between the natural world and the social world required by the technoscientific and capitalistic machine of today. It is no coincidence that this very recent animistic revival, I want to suggest, has occurred during the time of a quickening in the production of the mediatized subject—its interlinking with innumerable technologies and sign systems. Such a neo-animism, with its acceptance of the gadget into its fold of beings, represents the apogee of immanent modes of subjective production, whether they are processes of subjection or of subjectivation. This is not too far afield from Spinoza’s original metaphysics in as much as the affinities between and among bodies, nowadays, are mediated both semiotically and technologically suggesting that a theory of subjectivation, a sketch of a possible mode of becoming in just such a milieu, is foregrounded by the most contemporaneous modes of subjection.

3

Metamodeling

While Chapter 2 sought to develop a historical perspective founded in a critical tradition of thought as the mise en scène for the rest of the book, the current chapter will turn attention to issues surrounding methods, interventions, and procedures with regard to creating a new conception of subjectivity. Posing this as a series of questions: What kind of standardized guide could help solve the question of developing an arts of existence in the post-media era? What can be extrapolated and potentially applied to other problematics in fields that overlap the concerns of the present investigation? More pointedly, what parameters might structure a formal theory of subjectivation that culminates in the latter portion of this book? The introduction raised the issue of how subjectivity in its current incarnation is always mediatized, interlinked, and structured by signs and symbols that foreground such standard notions as communication, relationality, language, thought, and technology. Picking up this thread, this chapter will aim to more rigorously ground the notion of mediatization while delineating the implications this has for research praxis. In brief, the term mediatization is being used to refer to the media both in the everyday, technological sense of, for example, television, the internet, film, and so on as well as more abstractly in that the medio, the between of the subject–object relation, represents a privileged ontogenetic category of analysis speaking to the ongoingness of how subjectivity is produced. The medio, in may be said, is the “link” that connects and plugs in subjectivity to various frameworks, structures, and machines. This helps distinguish how the term subjectivity and, more accurately, the production of subjectivity is categorically different than more dated notions like the human being, the subject, and the self. Guattari’s (1995) metamodeling (metamodelization) is an approach to research praxis that attempts to analyze, decode, and re-deploy other modeling systems. In this way, it can be said the metamodeling, as the prefix denotes, is

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more abstractly removed from the original model or models that it has been used to address. It is in this sense that the metamodel does work on regular models already in circulation by either introducing a new scheme or “schizing” the existing model such that it deviates from its normal functioning and must work to reorganize itself in an autopoetic manner. In his own words, Guattari articulates that metamodeling is “a discipline of reading other systems of modeling, not as a general model, but as an instrument for deciphering modeling systems in various domains, or in other words, as a meta-model” (as cited in Watson 2009: 8). The process of decipherment is key not only for the construction of a specific metamodel, but also for its deployment at the level of subjective production. Importantly, as this quotation points out, metamodels are categorically nonhegemonic since they are not only used to decrypt models but also to efface them or, better, to transversalize them. In this way, a metamodel in the Guattarian sense works on the side of subjectivation as opposed to modes of subjection since its critical and decryption capabilities are always turned toward normatively circulating discourses, that is, for the present study, the way that subjectivity is produced through subjection, becoming nonagentially compliant with the norms that are foisted upon it. At the heart of metamodeling is the intervention and mechanism of transversality. The term transversality is a technical term in the thinking of Guattari (1995) and was first used to describe transference in group and institutional settings in a sense that did not rely on psychoanalysis. However, extrapolated from the institutional setting, transversality became a central concept for Guattari philosophical work in terms of its import for his larger theoretical apparatus, for his work with Deleuze called schizoanalysis, and for his theory of the production of subjectivity. Genosko (2002), building on the work of other Guattarian scholars, articulates a three-pronged approach to understanding this complex, yet key technical intervention when suggesting that transversality involves, Mobility (traversing domains, levels, dimensions, the ability to carry and be carried beyond); creativity (productivity, adventurousness, aspiration, laying down lines of flight); self-engendering (autoproduction, self-positing subjectivity), territories from which one can really take off into new universes of reference. (55)

These three delineations of transversality help to demonstrate the kinds of work that Guattari’s conceptual tools seek to do. In other words, the traveling through of various discourses and narrative domains by transversality mobilizes

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the forces of mobility, creativity, and self-engendering. Transversality unleashes these forces on the production of subjectivity. Transversality is, in a simple sense, a diagonal cutting across of systems of reference in order to redistribute the sense values that are applied to certain signifiers or tropes. The term value here is used to refer to what Guattari called universes of reference or universes of values. These are encapsulated territories of meaning that contain an internal and coherent logic that necessarily binds them together. A concrete example of a territory of meaning could be any theoretical or artistic framework that is demarcated as separate from other approaches and other perspectives—most specifically, a particular film would contain within itself a certain degree of self-reference that would constitute it as a territory of meaning or universe of reference. That is to say, it would only be within that specific film, its narrativity, textuality, and iconography, whereby a universe of reference could be deduced becoming intelligible for the viewer at the cinema or elsewhere. Transversality, given the three forces that it attempts to marshal, disrupts, destabilizes, and amalgamates the internal logic of the universes of value or it combines disparate universes in order to create a new coherent system of internal rules and values. Importantly, transversality is not just speculative in nature since it “involves calling into question disciplinary boundaries, the solipsistic closure of Universes of value, prevalent today in a number of domains” (Guattari 1995: 117). Coupled with the notion of a metamodel, the transversality inherent in this research procedure critically interrogates the axioms and rules that allow other modeling systems to operate. The relationship between metamodeling and transversality has to do with scope and degree in so far as metamodeling names the larger procedural and research intervention that is being done. In this way, metamodeling is more conceptual and less pragmatic. Transversality, on the other hand, represents more of a practical intervention within the larger metamodeling research praxis. In order to articulate this on the level of subjectivity, transversality falls on the subjectivation side of the subjection/subjectivation distinction by intervening on forces of power that result in normalizing subjectivity—one might say, by confusing, conflating, or decrypting the territories of meaning that contain neatly referential tautologies. Shifting this to more of the conceptual intervention known as metamodeling, the difference in power between a metamodel and a model is delineated by Genosko (2014) when he writes that “a meta-model for Guattari is critical of the model at which it points. The model in this case is signifying semiology,

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which has a ‘limitless hegemonic claim’ ” (24). A metamodel is critical in nature, it follows, since part of its axiomatic construction is anti-normative, not only going against signifying systems that may already be contained within sociality, but also because of the work that transversality does when the metamodel is deployed upon other modeling systems. As such, the criticality inherent in a metamodel is what categorically sets it apart from already circulating models that are in the world therein calling into question the values and meanings that these very models seem to hypostatize. The foundation of the critical nature of the metamodel has to do with how the pragmatic intervention of transversality catalyzes new territories of meaning and universes of reference to precipitate. In other words, the models that are already circulating in the world contain, through their self-enclosed systems of reference, normalizing forces or modes of subjection while a metamodel upsets these normalizing tendencies in favor of unleashing possibilities for subjectivation. The temporal structure of a metamodel is turned toward the future. To give an example in order to distinguish between a model and a metamodel, it might be helpful here to look at Lacanian theory. For Lacan, the subject is largely a historical subject based upon a temporality of après-coup or retroaction— meaning, in other words, is appropriated by the subject always in light of its historical encounters or traumas (Dor 1998). This is not to say that the temporality of subjectivity cannot be positioned such that it appropriates present or future events. The important point is that signification or the meaning that the subject brings to bear on temporality is necessarily historical in so far as it applies an interpretation of its various experiences. The fact that, for Lacan, the subject is a failure in the symbolic order means precisely this fact—its ability to (re)produce signifiers must lead it to an appropriation that is never its own, that is always and necessarily a function of previously encountered events, which are typically sexual and traumatic. By contrast, a metamodeling procedure that aims to discern how subjectivity is produced, in the Guattarian (2013) and schizoanalytic sense, understands the unconscious as positioned toward the future. The unconscious of Guattari is different than the linguistic and traumatic unconscious of Lacan. Guattari envisions the unconscious in terms of desire, vitality, creativity, and production. As evidence for this difference, in AntiOedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) write that, The great discovery of psychoanalysis was that of the production of desire, of the productions of the unconscious. But once Oedipus entered the picture, this discovery was soon buried beneath a new brand of idealism: a classical theater

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was substituted for the unconscious as a factory; representation was substituted for the units of production of the unconscious; and an unconscious that was capable of nothing but expressing itself—in myth, tragedy, dreams—was substituted for the productive unconscious. (24)

The interesting tropes that Deleuze and Guattari use to describe their version of the unconscious, those like factory and production, suggest the energetic or libidinal power the unconscious has to create material and pragmatic effects. This is seen, in the above quotation, in relief against the Oedipus complex, which Deleuze and Guattari suggest is a level of abstraction that has negative implications for the way in which subjectivity is produced—namely, by plugging the unconscious into capitalist modes of reterritorialization like the nuclear family. The forces of the unconscious are called by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) desiring-production and are anchored toward the future where the unconscious is pragmatically engaged in pushing toward realizing potentials and producing ever new forms of subjectivity. This latter characteristic is what Guattari called singularization—the production of a subjectivity that begins working toward a kind of arts of existence. Put in other, simpler terms, another name for this production of subjectivity is subjectivation. Singularities are flashes and instances that escape or elide modes of subjection, ways in which subjectivity is regulated and ordered in sociality and elsewhere. Subjectivation, with its affinity for singularizing development and trajectories, relies on an unconscious that contains the auto-actualization and pragmatic valences found in the conception of subjective production as articulated by Guattari (2009e) when he writes that “if one starts from the transsemiotic unconscious, which is not solely structured by signifiers, and no longer turned toward the past but toward the future, an unconscious that bears the capacity to “engineer” new objects, new realities, then everything changes” (182). In this way, the method of constructing metamodels becomes a profoundly productive, generative, evocative, and creative enterprise wherein futurity is seminal in fertilizing the fruits of the analysis as opposed to a form of subjectivity that is created through its retroactive and temperohistorical reconfiguration of the past. Furthermore, metamodeling is different than a traditional genealogical project that may trace lines of ancestry, excavate subjugated knowledges, uncover alternative historiographies, and trace progenies or etiologies stemming from an antecedent, diachronic chain (Foucault 1989). Genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense, is less concerned with how subjective production creates and produces

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future forms of subjectivity and is more concerned with how the present state of affairs of subjective production have become what they are. This is certainly not to say that the trajectory of subjective production is absent from a genealogical project since such analysis must start from somewhere, from what is given in the present discourse. The key difference lies in how metamodeling understands that the unconscious is oriented toward the future and, in the most literal sense, constitutes the future in so far as the events that it produces recursively feedback into the ongoing creation of subjectivity. Such is the non-nostalgic principle of a Guattarian metamodel—the fact that its understanding of subjective production does not rely on archival accounts but, instead, engages presently with what is available working toward the creation, always, of a reinvigorated version of subjectivity that is yet to come. In addition and within the same movement, metamodeling works toward a hijacking of semiotic and asignifying systems keeping it in line, in this sense, with traditional critical and genealogical analyses since, as Heller (1996) states, “genealogy is, for Foucault, synonymous with the analysis of counter-hegemonic conflict” (95). Thus, a proper definition of metamodeling could be rendered as the creation of an amalgam of pragmatic concepts assembled futurological to produce an event. This kind of monstrous amalgamation will become clearer in the following paragraphs but, suffice it to say, that the stitching together of various “stolen” concepts in order to create a novel universe of reference is not unlike the process of transversality. It may be said that transversality names the forces at work in the structure within which it is contained; namely, what we have been calling a metamodel. A concrete example of metamodeling operation is the therapeutic work that Guattari did with psychiatric patients at the clinic of La Borde staring in the 1950s. At the clinic, he developed a system of group analysis that included communal and shared living as well as peer-to-peer interactions that were less structured by the analyst as expert and more by a creative comingling of the members and residents of the clinic. As Guattari says, “at La Borde, our modelling clay is the ‘matter’ of the institution, which is generated through the entangling of workshops, meetings, everyday life in dining rooms, bedrooms, cultural life, sports, and games” (as cited in Goffey 2015: 235). The synecdoche of clay, in this sense, helps demonstrate the functionality of a metamodel, how it can constantly be molded and remolded into various shapes and forms in order to fit the desire of the craftsman—not to mention also being an allusion to the Platonic formula, the craft of life, given in the inaugural chapter. It, furthermore,

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demonstrates how metamodeling is not confined to one territory of meaning like the therapeutic dyad but, instead, traverses all sorts of activities and instances of relation. Namely, the metamodel that Guattari created at La Borde allowed for less Oedipalized and more unexpected forms of subjectivity to come into being, forms that did not reflexively take themselves to be geared toward symptom reduction and management, either pharmacologically or psychologically, but were rather more structured by teamwork, the working through of group transference by sharing the burden of the task together, and discovering creative and artistic outlets for their so-called psychotic symptoms. It may be perhaps this last point, the ability to evoke new potentials for subjective formation, as Guattari’s work with these patients illustrates, that prototypically represents more theoretical metamodeling activities, anchoring the abstract to the lived ways of being and the cohabitation of material bodies that are literally in the world. In his own words, Guattari echoes this when saying that “subjectivity is always more or less a meta-modeling activity . . . a process of self-organization or singularization” (as cited in Watson 2008: 8). With the general structure of metamodeling in place, the specific metamodeling being developed in the current project, mediogony, is necessarily mediatic, as one may guess, taking inspiration from schizoanalysis in so far as this metamodel is ruthlessly pragmatic, appropriating “power signs” regardless of their genealogical, etiological, and historiographic origins. The possible objects of analysis are paradigmatic such that these models lie precisely in their function as heightened machines of sociological crystallization, that is, mediatization. Therefore, systems that codify, subordinate, order, control, or, put more generally, induce subjective production in large groups of people become the privileged sites of analysis.

The Etymology of Mediogony Analyzing mediogony from an etymological perspective yields the following results. The medio- denotes a “middle” from the Latin medius; also, in the sense of being in the midst of beings in the world, from amide (Halsey 1889:  144). The prefix additionally underscores the Anglophone and, by now, planetary understanding of media as a paradigmatic abstract semiological machine. The precise etymology is as follows,

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word-forming element from comb. form of Latin medius “middle” (see medial (adj.) amid (prep.) late 14c., from amidde (c. 1200), from Old English on middan “in the middle,” from dative singular of midde “mid, middle” (see middle); the phrase evidently was felt as “in (the) middle” and thus followed by a genitive case, and if this had endured we would follow it today with of. (See amidst for further evolution along this line). The same applies to equivalents in Latin (in medio) and Greek (en meso), both originally adjective phrases which evolved to take the genitive case. But in later Old English on middan also was treated as a preposition and followed by dative. Used in compounds from early 13c. (such as amidships, attested from 1690s and retaining the genitive, as the compounds usually did in early Middle English, suggesting this one is considerably older than the written record of it.) (“medio” n.d., emphasis in original)

Moreover, the word medium can mean “intervening substance XVI (whence, pervading or enveloping substance XIX); intermediate agency, means XVII; (in painting) liquid vehicle” (Medium 1986: 287). This connotes an arbitrating being standing between two others. This is meant intentionally to emphasize the phenomenon of mediatization, its world forming capacities, particularly in relation to the production of subjectivity, the asignifying components that provide a connective, mediating tissue to the way that subjectivity becomes interlinked with other beings in the world. The term media is further used to demarcate the technological components and social configurations that go into producing the contemporary state of affairs that give rise to subjectivity, which is just to say the ways beings become mediatized. Examples of this mediatization show up in the most everyday lived contexts. As cases in point, consider the mobile phone, computer, internet, or television. More abstractly, other less explicitly technological figures also link beings together, for example, language, community, economies, and art. These devices, technologies, and linkages create possibilities for action by opening novel or reactionary channels for exchange, interaction, consolidation, fusion, and alterity. Thus, intervening at the precise point of mediatization—between subjectivity and other—is timely since these gadgets dominate, in ever increasing increments, life and time. The metamodel being sketched does not purport to explain or cover such a large domain of experience that subjectivity encounters

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with particular attention being paid to a close reading of how, for example, mobile phones facilitate or do not modes of subjection or subjectivation. Rather, the metamodel is a theoretical intervention in the mediatization of subjectivity itself, which is a more abstract analysis of contemporary modes of mediatization and less an analysis of the objects or beings that go into subjective production. The suffix -ogony, to return to etymology, takes its inspiration from Hesiod’s (1987) The Theogony, which is a poem tracing the beginnings of the Greek gods. This poetic-method can also be secularized to develop origin accounts of the universe as, for example, with various scientific cosmogonies—the paradigmatic model, of course, being the Big Bang. Put into more erudite terms, cosmogony (n.) 1690s as “a theory of the creation;” 1766 as “the creation of the universe,” from Latinized form of Greek kosmogonia “creation of the world,” from kosmos “world, universe” (see cosmos) + -gonia “a begetting,” from gonos “birth” (see genus). theogony (n.) 1610s, “the account of the birth or genealogy of the gods,” from Greek theogonia” generation or genealogy of the gods,” from theos “a god” (see theo-) + -gonia “a begetting,” from gonos “birth” (see genus). (“ogony” n.d., emphasis in original)

The foregoing philological unpacking has worked toward developing a sense of mediogony as a new and special kind of metamodel. In no way does the account seek to affix desire to a single analytic gesture, at the expense of others, instead it demands its increased interrogation given not only the semiological flux operating in the world today but also, more saliently, the inherent criticality built into the metamodel itself. In the following section, mediogony is further developed as a kind of riddled monstrosity taking inspiration from a concrete literary figure, the monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (1941), that encapsulates what it means to be a systemic amalgam, a metamodel that is critical of other modeling systems onto which it is deployed.

Mediogony as Riddled Monstrosity The trope of riddled monstrosity that best grasps what the term mediogony connotes is found, in various incarnations, among some of the thinkers in the same ethos as the present undertaking. This is true, for example, in the

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work of Deleuze, Haraway, and Bataille. Riddled monstrosity brings a tinge of caution and even dreadful hesitation to metamodeling in general casting doubt on the hope that one could deduce a standardized set of procedures without subordinating lesser terms, data, and communities. Haraway (1998) raises this issue, quite literally, when she describes methodology as invoking terror: “words like ‘methodology’ are very scary you know!” (82). Not that, as she goes on to articulate, the term commits one to a very specific form of praxis, whether literary, scientific, analytic, or otherwise. It does, however, commit one to a certain axiological and ontogenetic way of production, by way of the reading tools one is willing to employ toward an analysis of an artifact or toward a theoretical metacommentary. Hence, methodology as scary in so far as it is valueladen being possibly generative of very real entities in the world and, moreover, tries to confront the enigmatic and seething threat of the real that, in many respects, struggles to thwart neat theoretical homogenization. In a similar spirit, quite famous by now is the Deleuzian description of methodology as buggery, which highlights not only a sexological deviance (and reproductive impossibility) but also, perhaps over and above, a certain occult sensibility, Giving [the philosopher] a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed. (Deleuze 1995: 6)

Monstrosity is an important trope for both Deleuze (above) and Haraway (cf. 2004b, “The Promises of Monsters”) because it speaks to the threat that methodology in general poses, not only in the sense of how other researchers may take up the procedures outlined, but also how methodology self-reflectively expresses the terror inherent in thinking itself—quite explicitly, the discursive, political, or aesthetic effects that might be created through the deployment of a certain method, procedure, or intervention. With a sense of how monstrosity tropologically represents methodology, the literary critic and theorist Daniel Tiffany pushes this notion further and claims that it casts a cryptographic spell over the beings that it wishes to interrogate. He writes that “the trope of the monster—its true identity undeciphered— extends to the genre of the riddle itself:  a rhapsodic amalgam of epic and incantational verse, a form incognito” (Tiffany 2009:  74). Such a conception places metamodeling, in this context, under the rubric of the riddle in so far as

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monstrosity is foregrounded by its enigmatic lure as unsolvable therein signaling its horror inflected metaphorics. As Tiffany also relates, the amalgamated impulse to cobble together literally pieces and bits of verse to form the riddle holds true for an equivalent process. That is to say, a metamodel that takes as its figuration a kind of riddled monstrosity is encoded in a certain sense, not being clearly expressed to the model that it works on, but, rather, invites these models to engage in reciprocal process of understanding.1 What better figure to represent this riddled monstrosity than the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (1941)? Indeed, I argue this to be true for several reasons. First, the connection between the current metamodel, what has been coined mediogony, and Shelley’s monster is the lack of a proper name particular to the monster as such—the fixity of meaning tied to the circulation of a name leading to all sorts of covert political moves and reifications. Metamodeling is used generally here to name a kind of practice or procedure wherein mediogony is a particular kind of metamodel such that it demarcates a unique approach to conceptualizing the way in which subjectivity is mediatized and interlinked to signs and symbols in the contemporary milieu. Monstrosity, on the other hand, is embedded within the metamodel as a form of transversality. Monstrosity is, simply, more tied to the disruption of normalizing meanings and discourses whereas the schema of this section, mediogony, is the frame by which monstrosity operates. With regard to the Frankenstein monster in Shelly’s story, the monster’s seeming inability to carry within it a point of interpellation and, furthermore, its generative horror laden discourse production are part and parcel of how it represents a certain kind of transversality: the talk about it as terrifying but signification always fails to capture the “it.” It is in this sense that the current approach understands its role as a kind of hideous approach, which is not to say that it is exclusively a minoritarian practice, yet certainly a method that operates on the boundaries, fringes, and darker places of signifying machines. Similarly, the colloquial notion of the Frankenstein monster as an amalgam is a strong analogy for the way in which the present method operates. In other words, by piecing together various concepts, stylistics, strategies, and rhetorical techniques, I  am trying to breathe life into something autonomous and new. This is taking seriously Guattari’s methodological protocol of “being an idea thief ” (cf. Guattari 2009a) such that the stitching together of concepts becomes a methodological craft, adjudicated through its degree of monstrous circulation. Stivale (2009) articulates Guattari’s motivation for his procedural jury-rigging when writing that “the purpose of this strategy is to forge linkages, that is,

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between singularities within a particular field and into a range of components and fields in other conceptual territories, transversally” (10). Thus, in this sense, it is the lines of transversality that are to be prized and used as arbiters to justify, using more of a scientific lexicon, the validity of the organizational undertaking. Specifically on the level of subjectivity, as Watson (2008) articulates, Schizoanalytic metamodeling, then, can be distinguished from standard psychoanalytic and capitalist models in several ways. Guattari’s metamodeling promotes a radical, liberatory politics. It creates a singularizing map of the psyche. It allows one to construct one’s own metamodels. It recognizes, and even borrows from, existing models. It can transform an existence by showing paths out of models in which one may have inadvertently become stuck. Rather than looking to the past, it looks to future possibilities. (para. 11)

Put into other terms, the way in which a metamodel is to be judged has to do with its ability to inspire modes of signalization therein unleashing creative forces that have become stuck, repressed, or inadvertently affixed within other models and, indeed, within subjectivity itself. As for Guattari, the effectiveness of this approach is synonymous with its style, evinced by its ability to spin-off singularities, evocations, mutations, openings, and so forth. Very similarly, Haraway has a reading practice, which is likened to “cats cradle games” and perhaps better highlights the very real political effects produced when citing or “stealing” concepts from sects other than one’s own. In a footnote, she articulates what she means when penning, Knots of citations for me are ways of insisting on messy genealogies lateral, vertical, and patterned in other sorts of cats cradle games—that might include canonical philosophers in the ties, but do not usually originate in their texts, or even know their terms until after the engagement from somewhere else makes me need to read them too . . . The textual reproductive technology of single parent self birthing—a major history-making apparatus of humanism—tends to insist on descent from fathers, a purebred eugenic breeding practice if ever there was one! (Haraway 2010: 53, footnote 1)

Put into other words, the lineages one links oneself to could be telling of “secret” allegiances, relationships, and more vulgarly macropolitical hegemonies. As a result, the author’s positionality develops a subtext just as any other rhetorical strategy does. Hence, its entanglement in any methodological program as such. On this account, to approximate the logics by which the present project understands “methodology” in its sense as a technical, reified, and reproducible

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research technology, the term mediogony helps convey the meaning by which this analytic reading practice is being deployed. The rest of the chapter will further unpack the notion of riddled monstrosity in theoretical terms and delineate what this brings to bear on the practice of metamodeling.

The Symbiosis of Horror This forgoing trope of riddled monstrosity shifts its names and various baptisms inextricably without warning, if the example of the monster in Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (1941) is any indication. Using this figure in an abstract and theoretical way and not in regard to any specific text or author, let us undertake an art of tracking, an apropos metaphor given the content of analysis, the ways in which the nominalization of the monster destabilizes its own category. It is not quite right to say this destabilization is done with the aim to problematize the distinction between monster, beast, human, nonhuman, and so on since the naming of the monster is confined to its very figuration; that is to say, it retains a certain “substance” despite having been positioned as various particulars under the kind of a horrifying alterity. This I am calling the symbiosis of horror. The symbiosis of horror is a process of complexification as opposed to, say, an attempt to challenge its hypostasis as a category. In fact, the opposite (of the latter) is the case such that by spinning the monster into a multiplicity of monstrous beings causes the category to become somewhat of a swarm or a pack (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), not a single entity affixed to its sedimentation but a broader, more ominous and therefore horrifying category; indeed, even becoming entwined with the category of subjectivity itself. It is precisely this disrespect of boundaries and dissent onto the borders of sense where the text finds its saving power—to be precise, in a broad expanse of horrifying energy, typified in the contagion of the monster as a kind of multiplicity.

The Negativity of the Monstrous The semantic spin of the particulars of the genus is grounded in the approach of the method as a whole. That is, the spectacle effects, the method’s performing of substances, results from an ontological disjunction between a symbiosis with a horrifying otherness. The logic of the method operates by way of a specific kind

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of negative approach, inducing a performative failure, one that does follow the nondialectical immanentism of Deleuze and Guattari by complimenting their work in so far as the approach being advanced stresses a process of becoming and not the teleological deferral inherent to, for example, a traditional Hegelian dialectic. This results in a “negative” method that ends up being positive in the sense of containing within it an antagonism resulting in a failure of the spectacle. This kind of failure—that is, failure as a negative feature of the positive, the monster—is invoked by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus in the section on sorcery and, specifically, on becoming-animal when they write, In sorcery, blood is of the order of contagion and alliance. It can be said that becoming-animal is an affair of sorcery because (1) it implies an initial relation of alliance with a demon; (2) the demon functions as the borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or in which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion; (3)  this becoming itself implies a second alliance, with another human group; (4) this new borderline between the two groups guides the contagion of animal and human being within the pack. There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of a Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, at its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established. (247)

The important tropes invoked in the passage contain a darker, more macabre, and, negative sense than what one may be used to finding in literature regarding immanent philosophy. That is, most importantly, the monstrous feature of the demon, that it represents perhaps the ultimate negative figure sui generis speaks to how the currently developing metamodel understands the logic by which it comes to be applied to other systems of signification. More specifically, the contagious powers unleashed by the alliance between the sorcerer and this monstrously demonic creature, how the two lurk on the outskirts of an enclosed system of reference, “infect” it in some way thereby generating what Deleuze and Guattari call a rupture, a kind of failure in the performance of the original modeling system. This is profoundly in line with this current approach being developed such that emphasis is placed on the negative features of obtaining subjective formation,

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even if expanded beyond its theological confines (or not) by Deleuze and Guattari as indicated above. Thacker (2014) echoes the power of negativity, in a somewhat paradoxical manner, when he writes that “there is a sense in which the via negativa is ultimately a kind of performative failure, a failure which ends up serving as this mediation of that which cannot be mediated” (101, emphasis in original). One should understand this “failure” as really exposing the beingness of the performance as opposed to highlighting its ongoingness and processuality. This would be, to stick with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established” (247, emphasis added). Alternatively, to put in terms of methodology, the metamodel would act as a performative failure within the normatively circulating epistemologies. That is, to be precise, the monster as a figure is allowed to come into being only through the precipitates that are produced from intermixing the data, objects, or beings that this process is deployed to amalgamate. One could also parse the naming of the monster as a kind of antiphrasis, which is to say that it is not merely ironic to assume a conjunction with a horrific other, but it is a stronger sense of reversal such that the naming flips the monster into being the subject’s own perceptions that stand before it. As with antiphrasis, the opposite term is employed in order to invoke some ironic or comedic effect; yet, with the figure of the monster, specifically through negativity, it creates not a meta-commentary of the phraseology as such, but rather a very literal mode of becoming. To sediment this as a very specific instance, the amalgamation of bits and scraps that Dr. Frankenstein uses to create and electrify his monster suggest that, on the level of textuality and even literality, if one suspends the fictive logics of Shelly’s story, monstrosity intervenes where becoming enters being or, to say it differently, when a being is nominatively baptized. Such a reading lends support to an understanding of a methodology as largely performative in the sense that its rhetorical strategies are grounded in a certain kind of antiphrastic reversal, which takes the form of a mirroring. Yet, it is not quite right to describe the spectacle in terms of a pure reverse duplication—put idiomatically, as the opposite side of the same coin. Such a reading would be naïve in the sense that it confines itself to the purview of subjectivity and imbeds a diagnostics rooted in subjecthood (specifically, a human subject). In other words, the agency of the horrifying other, and even its ontological status as a being, remains subservient to a kind of anthropocentric appropriation. Once the mirroring motif is extradited from the confines of an encapsulated body, it can be better understood as a process of ocular diffraction, as opposed to a duplicate reversal, a mirroring.

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As such, it can now be said that horror scatters the gaze of the Other resulting in the diffraction mirage, or spectacularization of the text, thereby featuring heavily in molding the space of the encounter. That is to say, the horrific is not exactly the product of a misrecognition such that the subject fails to phenomenologically interpret the alterity of the monster correctly. The method is not claiming, in other words, a kind of hermeneutic failure wherein the monster’s many nominalizations are a failure to its substance, that its name cannot achieve co-presence with its being. Rather, the failure, in this case, is to be attributed to the nature of knowledge as such—the fact that the nature of epistemology for metamodeling is what sets it apart from other methodological procedures. Its theory of knowledge is arbitrated by the shifting, slipping, and slithering of signifiers. There is no proper knowledge that could be sufficiently achieved in order to fill in the empty space for the horrifying other. The taking of the ontological status of the horrifying other seriously, no doubt, represents somewhat of a “pie in the face” to a psychoanalytic interpretation in so far as monsters do not have a psychodynamics in which to decrypt—put somewhat illustratively, let’s Oedipalize the monster! In contradistinction, the very real possibility of a corporeal hybridity of the monster points the way toward a freakish energetics of worlding wherein the monster mimics the larger spectacle in so far as it is a performed impossibility: the monster resists categorization, its embodiment defies biological logic, its ethology is aberrant, and so on. The term “monster” here is being used as a tarrying other in which to articulate a logic by which metamodeling may operate. It is, in other words, in this context, a literary and methodological device being employed in order to illustrate and show how riddled monstrosity can be used to conceptualize the production of subjectivity. It is precisely because the monster is specularized, a monster-in-drag, one could perhaps say, that the initial space of the encounter between the method and object is saved, opened to exchange, interlinking, and transaction. Put differently, the relationship is allowed to continue to unfold, desire remains fluid, and the two do not destroy each other or negate the medio of the subject and object relation.2 While musing on the aporic nature of negativity, how it can produce a substantive and transformational experience, as illustrated by the allegiance between the sorcerer and the demon given by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the way that the prefix a brings to bear on certain concepts and apparatuses, Botting and Wilson (1997), in an introduction to the work of George Bataille, remark that,

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The prefix “a,” which evacuates theology while retaining something of religious, poetic or mystical experience, denotes the headlessness of both the summit and the subject of inner experience, and marks the place of loss, the enormity of which tears a hole that opens up being to the communication that unites beings. (7)

In an analogous manner, the negativity of this basic structure prepares the way for a symbiosis to develop between subjectivity and other beings culminating not in a sublation but in a style employed in a substantively negative sense, a way in which to obtain something positive through a monstrous inversion. Produced is a kind of “too muchness” that engenders not an ultimately entropic cooling but rather an apocalypse, in its strict etymological sense; that is, belying a principled teleology such that the heavens become perverted, through a horrific burst no less. Indeed, the horror of the other and that of the subject share an intimate connection, both equivocally prefiguring a perversion, representing a heart that keeps the metaphysics alive; a heart taken in both the biological sense of furthering the diachrony of life and in a courtly sense as a romantic love to be shared. Here, the method is profoundly anti-romantic such that not only is an instinctive horror installed as an a priori principle, but this is the stronger point, the text must “make fun of ” or perform courtly love as per its own logics. This latter point is resultant from the method’s commitment to the perverse nature of negativity, the means by which it is used to induce the production of subjectivity as in the example of the allegiance between the demon and the sorcerer given by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). As such, this process must specularize the dialogical transference so as to expose its horrifying heart.3 It is precisely this generative difference between the positionality of subjectivity and the otherness of the monster that is the raison d’être for desire as such; namely, desire premised on the paradox of difference, between subjectivity and other, since the method takes this desire to be ontologically anchored in alterity. The monstrosity that the production of subjectivity reacts against, in this theory, goes toward the creation and evocation of singularization, the ways in which subjectivity can come to renew, refresh, and alter itself. Therefore, it follows that this approach is foregrounded by an apophasis (spectacularization), both rhetorically (an erasure of monstrosity) and cosmologically (barred divinity). Helpful here is Thacker (2014) who, building on medieval theological studies, distinguishes an apophatic approach from a kataphatic one, The later [apophatic] approach arrives at the divine through successive negations, as when one describes the divine as that which is not created or not existing in

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While the current articulation of the metamodel under development is not exactly apophatic in the theological sense, therein continuing and carrying through certain strands of Platonism, the above passage does, nevertheless, help describe how “negativity” can pass into being as a certain kind of performative failure. That is, to say no and speak without really speaking, this kind of approach, and others that may be complementary to it, celebrates going below such that the “negative” qualities—in the method, horror most generally—can only pass through signification as performatives, that is, the object of analysis becoming a superficial spectacle. Yet, keeping in mind the disjunction that is constitutive to the spectacularization (the divine as ultimately inaccessible), in the final analysis, the world is primordially set on fire, a hellish landscape populated by roaming passions and appetites congealing into a fantasy based on fear thereby allowing for a reciprocity among beings to develop. Specifically in relation to Deleuze and Guattari, this kind of reciprocity between beings is situated on two levels: namely, with regard to subject groups, these can be classified as either majoritarian or minoritarian. An analysis of group dynamics using this framework would install a process of identification among monstrosity as it has been previously described and minoritarian groups. This is following Deleuze and Guattari (1987) by maintaining that “there is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian . . . there is a universal figure of minoritarian consciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation” (106). The major subject groups can be said, returning to language used previously, to be aligned with the spectacle itself without having been engendered, through monstrosity, into a process of becoming, which is the creation of new forms of subjectivity and identity curation. On the other hand, minoritarian groups are processually reconstituting themselves in light of the way that the performance is allowed to fail. Put into different words, becoming-minoritarian must induce a performative failure in the normativity of the spectacle precisely through its filiation with the generative negativity of the monstrous.

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The Metaphorics of the Body Narrowing the scope of articulation from subject groups to individual subjectivities, the previous metaphorics that fell under the rubric of a symbiosis of horror, those like fire, terror, performance, and mirrors, are abstract and more removed from metaphors that are close to the body. Indeed, if this approach develops a framework by which a symbiosis of horror operates, it would not be complete without connecting this frame to the site it is supposed to engage— namely, the very embodiment of subjectivity. Indeed, it could be argued on strong theoretical grounds, as Bataille (1997) does in his essays on eroticism, that the metaphors of the body are more charged with meaning thereby having greater resonance with subjectivity and how it is connected and interlinked to other beings in the world. As a privileged frame, the metaphorics of the body, those like libido, ingestion, and death, form a semiotic triangle for understanding how methodology deals with an object of inquiry. Even the framing of the encounter with a horrifying alterity is setup in a way as to expect the enactment of something mundane, of something not worth hearing again; presumably because it is not really knowledge or that the lesson the story contains is something so obvious or so banal that it should go without saying, a riddled monstrosity. The so-called “mystery” is, at bottom, not a mystery at all because it is seemingly intelligible to everyone. The fact that it is ultimately superfluous further goes to show how it is simultaneously performative and operates by way of the logic of the spectacle. That is, the analysis is done precisely for performative reasons, in order to appease or evoke a response—being a kind of remainder or scrap thrown out to mollify or a provocation. Given these tropes of food and fantasies of self-devourment, within its own internal structure, the current metamodel engages in an act similar to literary cannibalism (Loichot 2013). That is to say, the metamodel “winks” at the reader thereby drawing the audience into the spectacle it seeks to interrogate.4 To demonstrate how the monstrosity of this metamodel winks or invites the reader into the spectacle nature of methodology, on the level of subjectivity, processes of subjectivation falling under these research auspices can be said to not merely “see through” the interpellating modes of subjection or enslavement instituted by norm binding forces but also participate with these forces in a way that exposes how subjection binds subjectivity to normative structures. This kind of exposure is equivalent to the wink.

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Constellating the performative properties of a text with its ethical ones, Loichot (2013) gives the following definition of literary cannibalism, These textual ingestions include the characteristics of performativity (a text that does what it says) and irony (a text that points to its own gesture with a critical distance). Finally, the act of literary cannibalism is driven by a specific intent— revenge, justice, reappropriation, even homage—and sealed by an ethical contract with the reader. When performing acts of literary cannibalism, writers do not fool the reader into thinking that the consumed text is their own, such as in acts of plagiarism. Rather, the writers wink at their readers, who become their partners in irony. (145)

The “specific intent” or ethical charge found in the method is the drive to overcome, which paradoxically keeps the process unfolding. When the horrifying otherness is consumed, the subject still does not get what it wants, that is, not permitted to grieve the lost object of its desire. In a larger, structural sense, the ethical intent of methodology can be seen to problematize the boundaries between a horrifying other and subjectivity. As Loichot (2013) articulates, “the model of literary cannibalism . . . undermines clear limits between the other and the self, the original and the secondary precisely at the moment in which the image of the ‘cannibal’ is created to consolidate these differences” (144). Thus, there is a certain circular logic the method employs wherein it continually turns itself back onto itself, cannibalistically. This is illustrated by a double movement of performativity and irony. In a way, the method is pointing to the absurdity of its analytic structure in so far as it is impossible, in a very real sense, for the method to interrogate the monster, no matter how methodologically tame it may be. In another sense, the irony connects back to the negativity of the framing of this metamodel wherein the reader should have expected such a fantastical story thereby pointing to its own performative gesture, that is, “winking” at the reader. Returning to Loichot’s other assertion, namely, that to be an act of literary cannibalism the text must also be driven by an ethical injunction, mediogony destabilizes the boundaries of various particulars as per its celebration of performance as a specific kind of failure. Put more specifically, however, the technique operates by way of unleashing the monstrous:  the releasing of a monstrous energy to be taken as subsuming libido, hunger, and death under a single kind. That is, the degree to which the sensual libido is engaged corresponds directly with the symbiotic fluidity between the interlocutors. Oppose this to a lack, which has to do with a form of knowledge getting in the way, for example,

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norms, interdictions, boundaries, and so forth. The method being advanced, however, specifically attempts to surmount any notion of lack by keeping desire fluid; even, one could read, through the necessity of fantasy. This is the need for subjectivity to project onto the monster certain forms of interpretation, imaginary structures, and meanings thereby allowing for the relation to be established and to continue developing into its spectacle nature. Indeed, to be specific, the fantasy of ingestion and devourment strictly does not hinder the relation and, put positively, actually engenders it. Talking about cannibalism, Loichot (2013) says as much, but tweaking this in terms of ingestion proper, she writes that “something remains from the original object as it gets absorbed. The eater and the eaten are both paradoxically preserved and changed by the act. The result is a congregated object in which the violence of the act of devouring remains visible” (148). The act never takes place, however, except at the level of the structure of the procedure of the method, between the object of analysis and the monster. By reading Loichot’s (2013) claim as operating at the level of fantasy as opposed to reality, one can see that both subjectivity and the other are “paradoxically preserved and changed by the act” (148). Namely, a relationship develops that would otherwise never have been possible had the fantasy structure not been in place. In culmination of support for this reading, the time in which this conception fails is not due to some lack in the passions or desire, but rather to the sliding of signifiers. The devil, in this case, is in the gesture of the subject to even attempt to read the signs of the monster. Therefore, in this sense, it would be a procedural failure that goes toward betraying the monster and not the other way around; somewhat counterintuitively, this is a function of interpretation or appropriation as opposed to intentionality or agency. Put differently, the single time lack is introduced into the equation, the symbiosis breaks down, violently, resulting in the obliteration of the object of inquiry. There are two points that have been argued:  on the one hand, a certain fantasy and spectacle configuration is necessary and desirable if there is to be a commensurability between a methodological procedure and an object of inquiry, that is, a horrifying other; indeed, to be precise, a fantasy based on fear and the possibility death. On the other hand, the real insists precisely as a function of untranslatability when, again, the monster is appropriated by the analysis and given meaning—thereby developing a specific kind of ethics of alterity. This metamodel ends up on the side of the monster, in the sense of its axiological commitments to the monster’s otherness; or more abstractly, the horrifying alterity that undergirds the object of analysis and, indeed, the

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spectacular nature of the method as a whole. It follows, then, that the “human being” becomes the ultimate fantasy, not the monster, in so far as subjectivity represents the necessary impossibility for accessing the divine in the first place. Given this hermetic undercurrent, the cipher is not found in any one signifier, but through networks, pockets, and cells of interconnected signs. Part of this totality is the method’s riddled monstrosity such that it takes seriously worlding as a full blown mediatization—the “non” of the nonsemiotic, to stick with the negativity of the approach. The other sense of this, however, is somewhat utopian in that it is ontologically rhizomatic thereby allowing for entry through any number of openings. In simpler terms, the point of entry is mediatization itself, any of its manifold tendrils. As a given condition of existence, it then becomes a matter both of navigation, the dodging, redirecting, moving, and creating in relation to incoming flows, signs, and systems, and of decryption, the application of a metamodel to other modeling systems and the decipherment of its own self-referential correspondences.

Key Methodological Components Having articulated a specific metamodel in this chapter, there are several key components that can be deduced from its overarching conceptualization. The following list aims to summarize these inventions point-by-point with the hope of sketching a cursory framework that will aid in understanding and in eventual application—the rest of the book being this very application process. 1. The metamodel mediogony, as the unpacking of this neologism has gone to show, takes aim at the most highly circulated signs in symbols in culture. This has the benefit of understanding how subjectivity is produced in the most sweeping and global way possible. Said simply, how does popular semiotics, either through subjection or subjectivation, produce subjectivities? By way of such an approach, subjectivity can come to understand its role in these sign systems—how the most highly cathected signifiers in its current milieu either keep it trapped, subjected to apparatuses of capture, or how these same socially charged signs can be redeployed for its own self-creative ends. 2. Procedurally, the intervention of transversality details precisely how a metamodel is able to work on other normatively distributed models. The following formula may help distill some of the abstraction: metamodeling

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(general kind, scheme) = mediogony (specific kind, scheme); transversality (general kind, intervention) = riddled monstrosity (specific kind, intervention). As is noted, the specific kind of transversality advanced here is termed riddled monstrosity and, in the most general sense, aims to cut across domains of meaning and then to re-sew them corresponding to its form. 3. The metamodel takes its tropes from the genre of horror. This represents a more macabre reading of the immanentism of Deleuze and Guattari in so far as it maps the topology of the “underbelly” of becoming, not necessarily tapping the spring of being, its overflow and vitality. Rather, as the figure of the monster has gone to show, the method stresses the demonic as the most negatively substantive creature that can be generated without falling into lack. This is not to say that the current metamodel is dialectical in the traditional sense such that it does not teleologically wish to produce some kind of culminative event, nor even forever defer this very process. The aporic nature of the kind of “demonic” negativity illustrated herein is really something positive—a positivity that is specifically performative, one that inserts an antagonism into the semiologies of the spectacle. Loichot (2013) calls this, on a textual level, literary cannibalism. I have used monstrosity, with all its etymological flavors, and the riddle to indicate how mediogony decrypts, through a process of winking, modeling systems that may induce subjection in the production of subjectivity. 4. The current methodology places the semiotics of the body at the forefront of its conceptual and inventive strategies. This helps to re-negotiate any subjection status that subjectivity may have by reclaiming the sites on the body that have been appropriated or taken away from it via larger networks of meaning. The importance of signifiers on and around the body, those like the face and the erogenous zones, as the ensuing chapters will spell out, have a special place for inducing subjectivation and launching an arts of existence. 5. As a summative point of consideration, the stitching together of concepts and ideas that the metamodel calls for is not haphazard since the threading process requires a certain alikeness between adjacent and alike constructions—resulting, at least here, in an amalgamated monstrous creation. This alikeness is specifically what I have tried to articulate in this chapter, that which undergirds the theoretical findings in what is to follow. One may judge these findings against the parameters outlined in view of this, how pious or not the theory of subjectivation has been about staying true to the criteria set forth above.

4

Cosmology

The previous chapter worked toward positioning a formal theory of subjectivation that is most rigorously developed herein by setting the parameters and protocols that could give rise to its said theoretical maturity. That is, what Guattari (1995) called metamodeling (metamodelization) was used to set the limits that would help guide what a modern-day theory of subjective production could look like and be—this was developed into a metamodel called mediogony that takes a form of riddled monstrosity as its guiding light and cornerstone building on the work of thinkers like Deleuze, Bataille, and Haraway. The central mechanism that gives the metamodel its power to intervene on other modeling systems is the dynamic intersectional nature of transversality, which allows for specific actors or agents in the modeling scheme to break up, reconfigure, or hijack their counterparts in the subsystem. This was demonstrated concretely using the clinical work of Guattari at La Borde. It was suggested that the medio of the subject and object relation is best understood as interlinked to power signs, the most highly cathected signifiers in any given culture, in order to demonstrate the way that subjectivity is produced in mechanized milieus. As a somewhat counterintuitive point, the foundational element that undergirds this kind of metamodel, riddled monstrosity, takes not the technological as primary but, rather, emphasizes the metaphorics of the body as having the most powerful valences in which to discuss subjectivation. Both retaining and building on the previous chapter’s discussion of metamodeling, since neat demarcations between methodology and theory are never really present, the next several chapters will advance a theory of subjectivation that holds up this kind of riddled monstrosity as a frame or, better, a skeleton by which to flesh out the production of subjectivity in the post-media era. I develop a specific kind of metaphysical cartography, in what follows, as it pertains to how the production of subjectivity is situated within the present-day

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state of affairs of planet Earth. The term metaphysical, in this section, has to do with the nature of the world and the beings that are admitted into that very nature. However, this exercise is not meant to be traditional philosophical ontology in the sense of being exhaustive and comprehensive. One may parse this differently by saying that, in what follows, the metaphysical cartography that I  sketch starts to try and unpack what a neoanimist conception of the world could look like. It is hoped, in other words, that the claims being made do not foreclose future conceptualizations or novel avenues in which to pursue new, hidden, or otherwise unknown beings. I begin with a discussion regarding the renewed interest in cosmopolitics by, predominantly, the neoanimists Latour and Stengers and then cycle through various cosmological landscapes that hold together the mechanical, mediatized, and embodied nature of subjectivity and its relationality with other beings in the world.

Cosmopolitics in Neoanimism The concept of cosmopolitics has recently been revived in contemporary debates in science studies, sociology, and metaphysics more generally (Latour 2004b; Stengers 2011). Its genealogy can be traced to the Stoic tradition in ancient Greece and, specifically, to Diogenes of Sinope wherein he defined himself as kosmopolitês or a “citizen of the world” (Szendy 2013: 42). This sense was extended by many Enlightenment thinkers, perhaps most notably, Immanuel Kant (2006), as in his work Toward Perpetual Peace, that helped to frame the Enlightenment project of promoting rationality, universalist values, and progressive teleology. Kant develops a notion of the cosmopolitical within the purview of his other moral and political philosophy stating it in the terms of jurisprudence, rights, and law. In this spirit, he writes that “since the earth is not an endless surface but a finite, contained surface, the two together inevitably lead to the idea of right of a state of peoples (ius gentium) or cosmopolitan right (ius cosmopoliticum)” (Kant 2006: 111, emphasis in original). The Kantian notion of cosmopolitics follows in the ancient Greek sense of the term under the broad rubric of “rights” by extending this privilege to the beings enveloped in the category of Earth, even if the rights discourse of neoliberalism has been attacked in recent decades as well as its foundation in Enlightenment thought (cf. Selmeczi 2015). Latour (2004b) continues the abstract Kantian notion of cosmopolitics when he makes the point that “a Stoic or a Kantian will call cosmopolitan anyone who is a ‘citizen of the cosmos’ rather than (or before he or she is) a citizen of a

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particular state, an adherent of a particular religion, a member of a particular guild, profession, or family” (454). In Latour’s use of the term, the figure of the cosmopolitan is more expansive and less anthropocentric than in Kant in so far as a cosmopolitan is any being who is a part of the cosmos, which is to say inhabits the cosmos as such—this being is not necessarily human just as it is not necessarily confined to terrestriality. The shortfalls of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitics is put by Watson (2014) in the following way, “Kant’s cosmopolitics—and, by extension, today’s versions of humanist cosmopolitanism—construe the cosmos too narrowly, limiting actors to individual and collective humans” (87). Consequently, to tease out the logic behind this, this newer, neoanimist understanding of cosmopolitics is emphatically nonanthropocentric entailing an understanding of worlding that incorporates actors of all kinds, mechanical, nonhuman, artificial, other than human, and so forth. To echo this point, Latour (2004b), borrowing from William James, tries to convey the sense by which the metaphysics of cosmopolitics is to be understood, “if cosmos is to mean anything, it must embrace, literally, everything—including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act. William James’s synonym for cosmos was pluriverse, a coinage that makes its awesome multiplicity clear” (454, emphasis in original). On this account and further, the cosmos is not exclusionary, designating a specific type or kind of itself nor does it encompass every possible world within a set. Rather, in a precise sense, the cosmos designates a point of multiplicity, infinitude, and diversity whereby the process of worlding, the beingness of the cosmos, comes into existence through the co-presence of certain forms of praxis. To put this in the words of Stengers (2005), the cosmos of cosmopolitics is “the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable . . . there is no representative of the cosmos as such” (995). As is evident in this quotation, a cosmopolitan metaphysics does not foreclose the multiplicity of worlding such that the nature of things becomes adjourned through static categories, as in Kant’s a priori, or the transcendental nature of Being in early Heidegger. Instead, as Stengers suggested, emphasis is placed on the potential to become and is not affixed to a single point or a set of prescribed axioms that rigidly map onto the world. The last point should be taken in two senses such that the cosmos is nonrepresentable, in its strictest sense, therein becoming the precondition for ontology in general, even though ontology in its traditional sense is always viewed skeptically by this approach. And, second, there exists no specific being or, more literally, figure that can stand in for or speak on behalf of the cosmopolitical as a whole—hence,

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how the term in its neoanimist incarnation embeds a certain form of criticality that was absent in Kant. For Stengers and Latour, cosmopolitics is more metaphysical as opposed to designating a certain classicist, global, or economic circumscription. That is, rather than setting the rights by which actors are allowed to participate in the global village, the cosmopolitics of neoanimism more abstractly tries to take into account the processes by which beings of all kinds enter into worlds where they are named, encountered, engaged with, and live. To further develop this, Latour (2004a) offers a brief etymology in order to help understand this meaning, Here we are going back to the Greek meaning—“arrangement,” “harmony”— along with the more traditional meaning, “world.” The cosmos is thus synonymous with the good common world that Isabelle Stengers refers to when she uses the term cosmopolitics (not in the multinational sense but in the metaphysical sense of the politics of the cosmos). (239–40)

How then, to emphasize the political aspects of the term, does one reconcile its metaphysical nature with its form of practice? In one sense, cosmopolitics entails a process sense of worlding that is intrinsically laden with the dynamics of power in that the term definitionally contains within it an awareness of subjection, a form of criticality that does not lose sight of how the notion of “world” becomes constituted in the first place. In another sense, though, cosmopolitics can never be reduced to a mere practice or activity due to it being a metaphysical concept. This is problematic of how does activity or modes of being intercede in a cosmopolitics that is far removed from the Kantian theory of progressive incorporation: How are modes of both subjection and subjectivation produced under this neoanimist conception of the world? Speaking in the terms of laboratory practices and the social study of science but still applicable, Stengers puts the political question this way, Every proposition, no matter how utopian, if it is part of our tradition, draws from the inventive resources associated with that tradition . . . The prefix “cosmo-” indicates the impossibility of appropriating or representing “what is human in man” and should not be confused with what we call the universal. The universal is a question within the tradition that has invented it as a requirement and also as a way of disqualifying those who do not refer to it. The cosmos has nothing to do with the universal or with the universe as an object of science. But neither should the “cosmo” of cosmopolitical be confused with a speculative definition of the cosmos, capable of establishing a “cosmopolitics.” The prefix makes present, helps resonate, the unknown affecting our questions that our political tradition

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is at significant risk of disqualifying. I would say, then, that as an ingredient of the term “cosmopolitics,” the cosmos corresponds to no condition, establishes no requirement. It creates the question of possible nonhierarchical modes of coexistence among the ensemble of inventions of nonequivalence, among the diverging values and obligations through which the entangled existences that compose it are affirmed . . . cosmopolitics is emphatically not “beyond politics,” it designates our access to a question that politics cannot appropriate. (Stengers 2011: 355–6, emphasis in original)

Cosmopolitics calls attention to the way in which practices, technics, experiments, apparatuses, and so on are contextualized but specifically through a lens that is not exclusive to humanity. This critical and historically situated understanding is coupled with a metaphysical view without an object, which is to say that there is no sense in which either the universe or the cosmos writ large as a known analytic object to science, circumscribes some field or horizon of meaning on which to adjourn political injunctions. There exists a certain tension in this formulation between making the claim that cosmopolitics does not hold an ontological position while also saying that propositions can be made about the nature of the world itself. Given the above articulation by Stengers, the principled position that cosmopolitics in this incarnation marshals is the holding open of a question in the place of traditional philosophical axioms. Insistence is placed on experimentation and playfulness as opposed to conceptual stagnancy. As a result, such metaphysical work envelopes politics in so far as the theory articulated is subject to revision and forces of power. Said simply, this cosmopolitics is not the universalist cosmopolitics of Kant but, rather, takes its inspiration from the immanent philosophy of the twentieth century and, consequently, fields like science studies and discourse theory. Both terms that construct the word, cosmos and politics, serve as arbiters on each other such that they are to be used to jostle or navigate the beings they delineate. As Latour (2004b) eloquently states, for Stengers, The strength of one element checks any dulling in the strength of the other. The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. (454, emphasis in original)

Thus, bringing the two, the cosmos and the political, together in a certain embodied sense requires a comportment that is grounded in the here and now.

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Such a coming together is put by Stengers (2011) as a “mode in which the problematic coprescence of practices may be actualized: the experience, always in the present, of the one into whom the other’s dreams, doubts, hopes, and fears pass” (371–2). This space of the encounter, no matter what being shows up in it—scientific, literary, mythological, machinic, nonhuman, or otherwise—“has a meaning, and it has nothing to do with tolerance or disenchanted skepticism. Such beings can be collectively affirmed in a ‘cosmopolitical’ space . . . [which is why cosmopolitics] is also a form of ethical experimentation” (Stengers 2010: vii–viii). Consequently, the axiology of cosmopolitics is situated in risk, a radical openness to otherness and, ultimately, the affect of fright since such spontaneous experimentation opens subjectivity to possibilities that put its very beinghood into play. As a point of difference between the Kantian figure of the cosmopolitan, a neoanimist paradigm better understands this figure, as Stengers does drawing on Deleuze, through the character of the idiot. She writes that “the cosmopolitical proposal may well have affinities with a conceptual character that philosopher Gilles Deleuze allowed to exist with a force that struck me: the idiot” (Stengers 2005:  994). Such an understanding demonstrates how the cosmopolitics of Stengers is to be distinguished from the Kantian sense of cosmopolitanism in so far as it does not refer to a figure of the citizen of the world but, rather, a specific mode of being—that is, any sedimentation of a cosmopolitical methodology is foregrounded by a kind of idiotic way of existing, even if it happens to be one of universal brotherhood. In terms of the neoanimist cosmology that undergirds this refreshed cosmopolitics, the idiot helps embed a criticality in the figuration of the cosmopolitan that is immune or, better, rejects the privileging of certain Enlightenment notions such as progressivism, rationality, and human exceptionalism. Haraway (2008), expressing her enthusiasm for such a cosmopolitical proposal and, more specifically, for Stengers’s invocation of the Deleuzian idiot, writes the following, The one who knew how to slow things down, to stop the rush to consensus or to a new dogmatism or to denunciation, in order to open up the chance of a common world. Stengers insists we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world. Idiots know that. For Stengers, the cosmos is the possible unknown constructed by multiple, diverse entities. Full of the promise of articulations that diverse beings might eventually make, the cosmos is the opposite of a place of transcendent peace . . . to get “in the presence of ” demands work, speculative

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invention, and ontological risks. No one knows how to do that in advance of coming together in composition. (83)

The idiot, then, can be said to take the place of the Kantian “citizen of the world” by rejecting a historicism based in a teleological consummation, a globalized citizenry, or universal fraternity—not that these are inherently pejorative or unworthy; it is just that they are effects of the cosmopolitical program itself and not the axioms that would undergird an animistically inflected cosmopolitics. The idiot possesses a certain kind of critical nature by using a specific rhythmic duration, slowness, and, more pointedly, an aesthetics of asignification or code scrambling—the creation of nonsense in order to halt, rework, and then redeploy the subjection process. Saying as much, Watson (2014) articulates the generative nonsense of the idiot when writing that, Taking the term from Dostoevsky via Deleuze, Stengers’s “idiot” is a figure who slows down the process of achieving consensus by refusing to accept the given political idiom as legitimate. The idiot’s obduracy is less an effort at intentional resistance than a stubborn insistence upon continuing to speak what sounds to others as nonsense within a parliament or other site oriented towards consensus or production. (89)

As a process of this slowing down, the affect that generally arises, as Stengers asserts, is fright; that is, as a kind of incisive realization, being reflectively jarred, which calls into question the very foundation of the practices, policies, and ethics, which one has been engaged. Indeed, when there is success in this cosmopolitical sense what occurs is this very felt sense:  “the cosmopolitical proposal therefore has nothing to do with a program and far more to do with a passing fright that scares self-assurance, however justified” (Stengers 2005: 996). Importantly, such an experience is not entirely sufficient since, as Stengers (2005) says, “interstices close rapidly. Worse still, silencing the fright often results in confirming our many reasons with an additional baseness that does away with hesitation” (996). The figuration of the idiot, however, is necessary in so far as it helps prevent a foreclosure of precisely this fact; a cosmopolitical ethics rooted in the affect of fright highlights that a cosmopolitical venture is ultimately risky, involving very real stakes for the actors involved. As such, the idiot helps to demonstrate how one may be able to shift from the register of subjection to subjectivation in so far as the “fulcrum” represented by this figure highlights subjective enactments, effects, and modes of engaging that could

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make this transition possible. Such is not unlike the idiot acting as a sort of monstrous form of subjective embodiment, being an applicable paragon of how one may go about engaging with other models or interlocutors. In other words, the creation of this nonsense of monstrosity incites the other into a space of play and experimentation while cutting the code of signifying normativity. This has the benefit of transversalizing different domains of meaning and reconfiguring the hierarchical system associated with normalizing signification. Stengers ends her cosmopolitical treatise on a somewhat mystical and paradoxical note by claiming that there is something strange in the way in which the cosmopolitical, in its animistic incarnation, necessarily compromises itself. That is to say, to take seriously, as a practitioner of the cosmopolitical is at the same time to run the risk of oblivion in the same way that “ ‘magical’ gestures compromise ethnotherapists” (Stengers 2011:  416). Put differently, the cosmopolitical a priori here is such that it offers no assurance, no point of stabilization to the phenomenon under investigation and actually “forces” an encounter with the being it seeks to explore. This, it would seem, always has the potential of unleashing hidden forces that otherwise would have remained stayed. Indeed, Stengers goes so far as to say that such unfinished business, which she ascribes to the Enlightenment tradition itself, may return to haunt us, But what if it was neither religion nor belief that we lacked but theologians capable of expressing in terms of the logos rather than conviction that which brands all our calculations and judgments with the seal of uncertainty and risk? This is the final unknown of the cosmopolitical question, a practical unknown whose primary interest is its ability to compromise those who allude to it, the way “magical” gestures compromise ethnotherapists. It is the fear that one day we may have to acknowledge that we are not yet finished with a past we were so proud to have put behind us. (Stengers 2011: 416, emphasis in original)

It should be noted quite unequivocally that this version of cosmopolitics does not follow in the Max Weber (cf. 1949, 2005) tradition that may see the world as already having become disenchanted—a reversal of a sort of Enlightenment modernism and skeptical scientism. In order to make this point more explicit, Stengers iterates this by writing that “the cosmopolitical question is not about the ‘reenchantment of the world’ but the coexistence of disparate technical practices corresponding to distinct forms of reciprocal capture [emphasis added], characterized by different logical constraints and difference syntaxes” (Stengers 2011:  359). What Stengers means by the “coexistence of disparate technical

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practices” is how the political functions differently for a neoanimist cosmopolitics than it does for a kind of humanist return to the planet. On the one hand, cosmopolitics stresses a space of multiplicity or co-presence in that beings exists alongside each other in a nonhierarchical way. However, on the other hand, the polity embedded within this worldview recognizes how this balance becomes upset by subjecting forces. There is difference, in other words, but that difference is subject to homogenization when stasis kicks in, when beings become sedimented in relation to their positionality with each other. Attention should be drawn to the interplay between the cosmos and the political, as has been discussed, wherein the one informs the other and vice versa, what Stengers calls reciprocal capture. Just because this version of an animistic cosmopolitics admits beings into the cosmopolitical worldview that are very openly fake, contrived, and artificial (e.g., Latour’s experimental factish, a fabricated fact that grounds certain laboratory practices), it does not follow that this amounts to an ironic postmodern reductionism of science to sociological things and, therefore, does not unfold metaphysics onto beings that may be antithetical to scientific inquiry. On the contrary, as both Latour and Stengers note, cosmopolitics understood in the preceding sense of the term succeeds in doing the exact opposite—expanding the domain of epistemology that science takes to be its own by welcoming beings that have been excluded in the past. One way to see this concretely is to follow Szendy’s lead by understanding cosmopolitics as opening-up a kind of infinite symbolic field of meaning wherein the traditional distinction between truth and fiction is blurred through what he calls philosofictions; that is, a kind of hybridity between rigorous philosophical inquiry, in this case à la Kant, and other forms of mediation such as cinema or television. What I take to be a benefit in Szendy’s (2013) analysis is his risk to take seriously and expand and expound on, in a cosmopolitical spirit, the Kantian motif of nonhuman rational beings, which populate Kant’s philosophical thought quite consistently. By admitting such beings as these nonhuman rational entities into the space of inquiry, Szendy pushes the cosmopolitical proposal toward the future scientifically, technologically, and theologically by re-reading Kant in light of more animistic understanding, which does not adhere to a form of human exceptionalism. The practice of philosofiction that Szendy undertakes expands the rules and axioms that generally go into scientific inquiry through the use of an epistemology that is inspired by, for example, tropes from science fiction and that are used to inform, construct, and frame other practices. In this way, a cosmopolitical world

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view, if anything, runs the risk of outflanking science, in terms of the latter’s cultural lag time, rigidity, and more constrained paradigmatics. Put differently, the danger is not the “introduction” of the social into the objectivity of the sciences; but rather, the complete reverse—the fact that cosmopolitics accelerates the epistemologies of the sciences in so far as it ontologically holds open a space admitting entities that are utterly foreign, alien, or hidden. It is not merely the speculative nature of philosofictions that can drive the kind of epistemological acceleration being referred to above, although this imaginative ability is an important creative impetus; rather, put more strictly, the modeling practices that philosofiction introduces into empirical signifying systems are already ahead of the most widely shared, normative and contemporary science—even if kept hidden and locked up behind epistemic degrees of entry. These kinds of modeling fabulations, in other words, do not just lead normal science along in a speculative way toward what could be in the future. They are conveying, through a procedure of semiotic modeling, subnormative or fringe realities that exist below the purview of the most widely shared empirical gaze. Building on his analysis of Kant’s frequent use of nonhuman rational beings, Szendy concludes that Kantian cosmopolitics as well as its resonances with Derrida’s use of the term, entails a threefold consequence, (1) Humanity is structurally projected toward an extra-earthly space from which it is called to be characterized; but (2) it can define itself there only by undefining itself in a movement of comparison without a comparative term; and (3)  this movement is horizontal rather than vertical, in the sense that it seems a priori to imply none of the hierarchies that traditionally situate the human as a mortal and a rational animal, between the beast and the god, above the one and below the other. (Szendy 2013: 142, emphasis in original)

It may be helpful to recast these points in light of some of the terms that have been developed thus far. Point by point, one could say the following:  (1) The teleology of humanity is such that it both anticipates a cosmopolitics in a diachronic sense such that it has already arrived at an “extra earthly space” in so far as the time-structure is intrinsic to humanity itself. What is meant by this is that the temporality of cosmopolitics withholds any kind of culminative notion of progression. The extra-earthly space, in other words, is the partition of experimentation and fabulation that helps accelerate dated or stagnant paradigms by bringing the future into the now, so to speak. (2) Cosmopolitics abandons the human being as a sufficient condition therein obviating human

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exceptionalism. (3)  If the risk taken by the cosmopolitical venture succeeds, then the beings it admits into its fold are taken up in a nonhierarchical way. This last point, number three, is perhaps the most utopian in so far as it predicates itself on the success of the first two and is therefore decidedly more cosmopolitan than cosmopolitical. Derrida (2005) articulates the paradoxical temporality of the prior point in the ending of his presentation originally titled, “Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!” (with clear allusion to Sade), where he remarks, I also imagine the experience of cities of refuge as giving rise to a place (lieu) for reflection—for reflection on the questions of asylum and hospitality— and for a new order of law and a democracy to come to be put to the test (experimentation). Being on the threshold of these cities, of these new cities that would be something other than “new cities,” a certain idea of cosmopolitanism, an other1, has not yet arrived, perhaps. - If it has (indeed) arrived . . . - . . . then, one has perhaps not yet recognised it. (23)

The final double movement between the ellipses of having arrived and not having been recognized begs the question of perception, or what Szendy (2013) calls the “geopolitics of the sensible”—that if a kind of cosmopolitanism exists today in the world, then why is it so difficult to recognize it for what it is or for what it will become? This deficiency in recognition is, interestingly, the antimony between modes of subjection and processes of subjectivation, which brushes up against the register of aesthetics. According to Szendy (2013), “kosmos means both the universe and a beautiful decoration . . . we need to inscribe a veritable cosmopolitics into aesthetics as a cosmetics” (7). The aesthetics of cosmopolitics is then what is at stake, based on a certain temporal misrecognition of cosmopolitanism. The other that has yet to arrive, on this account, would be a form of cosmetics that falls on the side of subjection, a form of cosmological power that produces subjectivity in lieu of its free will, creative capacities, agency, and so on. Said simply, cosmopolitics that is not registered as aesthetics misinterprets neoanimism and, instead, relies on a logic of Enlightenment progression and Kantian rationality. What Szendy (2013) adds to the cosmopolitical debate that is different than Kant is an etymological and historical re-inscription of the term that would bring back a more fundamental understanding of cosmos

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qua cosmetics and the polity of the notion as not a utopian globalized version of humanity, as it is for Kant, but a synchronic and nonteleological act of enshrouding and revealing, an aesthetic will to creation. Even for Derrida, the other that brings about the cosmopolitical promise is still stretched out into the future, whereas, for Szendy, by playing with aesthetic production, one is able to reveal or decrypt the “promise yet to come”—such a maneuver falls in the lane of subjectivation. By explicitly recognizing the hidden, secretive, or guarded character of the cosmopolitical, which is to say that its accessibility is predetermined by the failure of a certain cosmopolitanism, the term cosmopower may help name the cosmological variable that keeps modes of subjection in place, how its access to the aesthetic register is encrypted, hidden, secret, or guarded. Put into other words, this would be the teleology of the cosmopolitical in so far as its cosmopolitanism remains unintelligible—cosmopower is a mode of subjective production that is structured by a scale beyond anthropocentric apparatuses therein opening-up the production of subjectivity to broader, transversalist forces that escape terrestriality, mythology, signification, humanhood, scientificity, theology, and temporality. As a case in point, while discussing the film Men in Black as a work of philosofiction, Szendy denotes the policing function that such a paradigm might contain, Extraterrestrial presence on earth and the necessity of keeping it secret, even of regulating it through the ad hoc police authority of men dressed in black, are related to stakes that are thus literally cosmopolitical . . . formulated against the horizon of a politics understood in its cosmic dimensions, grappling with interstellar refugees and intergalactic strategies. (Szendy 2013: 113–14)

The men in black are a specific figuration for the way in which a mode of subjection might be enacted. That is, in Szendy’s analysis, the policing function that the men in black serve represents a form of cosmic enforcement that works to homogenize beings through the creation of norms, operating even outside the scope of jurisprudence as a kind of well-organized, mafia agency. Who do they report to? Where are their institutional ties? What is the purpose of such a clandestine group? These questions help get at how subjection works under the above kind of cosmopower, the fact that this policing is mobile, fluid, and guarded thereby creating a production of subjectivity that is subjected, paranoid, and reactive. The men in black demonstrate a hierarchical structure to cosmopolitics, one that is not necessarily envisioned in the current neoanimist paradigm. The

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stakes that are thus literally cosmopolitical are the future versions of what the world can become. Within the oscillation between subjection and subjectivation, given the discussion of the cosmetic nature of the cosmopolitical, the slippage of perception, recognition, and meaning, it would be the aesthetic nature of the cosmological cartography that works on precisely the gestalt node between the two, the men in black being an example when the cosmopolitical can remain hidden from itself. In one sense, this is the ethical risk such an understanding of worldhood runs in covering over its baselessness and fleeing from fright, a certain nonfidelity to the metaphysical stakes as such. Latour (2004b) grapples with this aporia of intelligibility when going back and forth between what he calls a mononaturalism, a metaphysics as a “one cosmos” (which also contains within its logics the Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism), and cosmopolitics in the sense in which Stengers develops it. For Latour, the latter entails the possibility of war since there is no single juridical arbiter, meaning that the very beingness of the cosmos is up for dispute; the former, however, functions exclusively through a kind of cosmopower since the conditions of its being have already been decided in advance. It is “already unified . . . then there are, by definition, no wars but only police operations” (Latour 2004b: 455). These policing operations, or modes of subjection, delineate the internal antagonism within an animistically inspired cosmopolitics and are highlighted by Latour here and other theorists elsewhere in order to contend with the distinction between cosmopolitics, its ontological contestability, and cosmopower, a cosmetic practice within the being of the cosmos itself. This formulation hinges on a similar logic that Foucault (2008) utilized in his Birth of Biopolitics Lectures to describe the ontogenesis of biopower when he articulates how madness, sexuality, delinquency, and other personological modes of subjective production could “come into being” without existing as ideological, illusory, or erroneous. Adjudicating this through a form of praxis, he says they are “not an illusion since it is precisely a set of practices, real practices, which established it and thus imperiously marks it out in reality” (Foucault 2008: 19, emphasis added). The entry into being, marked out in reality, is similar if not the same to the cosmetic operation suggested by cosmopolitics such that the being must not only become intelligible, recognized in the gaze as an aestheticized object, but also set forward a specific mode of practice under the rubric of a “one cosmos.” Or, said differently, cosmopower eddies Foucault’s jeux de verité (games of truth) and delineates a specific set of “rules” by which to play the game, from the top down, and its police function is precisely the

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maintenance and enforcement of these said rules, which is the launching of modes of subjection under neoanimistic cosmopolitics.2 Derrida, in reworking Kantian cosmopolitanism, explains the very real policing, violence, and productions of subjectivity that take place through the exercise of this kind of power. This includes the direct exclusion of peoples, specifically refugees, from the cosmopolitan promise, As Benjamin has already reminded us, in such an age police violence is both “faceless” and “formless,” and is thus beyond all accountability. Nowhere is this violence, as such, to be found; in the civilised states, the spectre of its ghostly apparition extends itself limitlessly. It must be understood, of course, that we are concerned here with developing neither an unjust nor a utopian discourse of suspicion of the function of the police, especially in their fight against those crimes which do fall within their jurisdiction (such as terrorism, drug-trafficking, and the activities of mafias of all kinds). We are simply questioning the limits of police jurisdiction and the conditions in which it operates, particularly as far as foreigners are concerned. (Derrida 2005: 14)

A “jurisdiction” is precisely what is stamped out through the deployment of these modes of subjection, being broadened or contracted until the category loses its consistency, until the jurisdiction takes flight, in other words, and becomes ethereal, planetary, and all seeing. Here, the alien is given less rights than the citizen, whereas, in a different case, the logic could be simply reversed, going to show the power of subjection as a capricious homogenization of borders, boundaries, beings, spaces, and territories.

The Playfulness of the World as the Medio of the Subject and Object Relation Nature emerges from this exercise as “coyote.” This potent trickster can show us that historically specific human relations with “nature” must somehow . . . be imagined as genuinely social and actively relational; and yet the partners remain utterly inhomogeneous. Donna Haraway (1991a: 3)

The beginning epitaph that opens this section foregrounds how nature, within the current neoanimist paradigm being developed, helps unlock a gateway that leads from modes of subjection, detailed in the previous section, to processes of subjectivation that would restore a sense of self-fashioning and

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creative self-cultivation to the formation of subjectivity. More simply, this would be the medio that interlinks that subject and other, the principle of relationality or intersubjectivity that undergirds a neoanimist conception of how subjectivity becomes produced. This may be termed most generally as the playfulness of the world. Perhaps most traditionally in the sense of the Western canon, Heidegger develops the elusiveness inherent within nature in his nondialectical take on Fragment 123 of the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, which is most usually translated as: “nature loves to hide” (Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, frag. 123). Drawing out the etymological inflections and adding his own twist, Heidegger favors a fuller translation and reads the fragment as such: “if we heed the fact that going-up is of itself [von sich aus] a going-back-into-itself, then both determinations are not to be thought somehow only as on hand simultaneously and alongside one another, but instead they mean one and the same basic move” (as cited in Dahlstrom, 2011:  143, emphasis in original). The aporic complexity of the rendition is frustratingly obscure in so far as there seems to be certain antithetical propositions held together within the structure of the idea—for example, the “going-up” (Φύσις) is concurrently a “going-back-into-itself ” (φιλεῖ), bound together at once and the same time by the “same basic move” (κρύπτεσθαι). Such would be a nondialectical reading of the fragment and, in this way, is a more immanent take on an understanding of worlding, the fact that the world is always in a state of becoming. The difficulty of sense contained within Heidegger’s translation of Fragment 123 is not unlike what Tiffany (2009) says of the “riddle of Being” (p.  89). Commenting on the poetics of substance, Tiffany articulates how flirting with the danger of collapse is a necessary risk if one wants to unlock the mysteries contained therein, The “riddle of Being” (that is, the formulation of Being as a riddle, as a verbal enigma) carries within it an apocalypse pertaining as well to poetry itself: for if the riddle or the wayfarer’s song or the rhapsodic question expands infinitely (in substance or in principle) to ground the totality of being itself, then poetry as such risks becoming nothing by encompassing everything—a tautology. (Tiffany 2009: 89, emphasis in original)

The “riddle of Being” for Tiffany is to be taken quite literally such that the structure or framework of Being—what Heidegger may call Gestell or enframing3— operates through the logics of the riddle, which is to say that the manipulation of beings is foregrounded by the fact that “technology is a way of revealing”

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(Heidegger 1993: 318). In general, Heidegger understands the modern epoch as having placed a specific latticework over Being that sets it as a standing reserve, the world conceived of as mere resource extraction and technical manipulation. This is pejorative for Heidegger in so far as there exists a more primordial and poetic way of connecting to worldhood, a way that expresses itself in ancient Greek philosophy, poetry, and art, to name a few examples. What is equivocal for Tiffany’s formula of the “riddle of Being” and Heidegger’s notion of enframing is the kind of apocalyptic space that these conceptions understand Being to be in. That is, both suggest the loss of a more originary relation, for Heidegger, or a decrypted access, for Tiffany, that would allow the world to exist in a fundamentally different way than it does under modern systems such as scientism, globalization, and technologization. In order to resuscitate this different relation one has to the world, Tiffany (2009) puts forward a process of decoding, code scrambling, and hacking. Through what he calls a riddle creature, a very fleshly literality, Being shows as its outside surface a cryptological (κρύπτεσθαι) as opposed to a hermeneutic4 mode of epistemological uncovering, appearing at first as enigmatic, enshrouded, and concealed wherein the danger of nonsense lingers always threatening to conceal the φιλεῖ under the cloud of an impending apocalypse. It may do well here to remember Heidegger’s famous formula:  “technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology” (Heidegger 1993: 311). Primordially foregrounding the technological as a mode of revealing of how nature is construed in the modern milieu contains within itself a certain sense of wandering, the obliteration of sense, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call nomadism or nomadology. This is not just on the level of subjective production but also occurs on a much broader cosmological scale. Szendy (2013) captures this nicely when referring to the wandering nature of the Earth, how under the auspices of the current framing of nature the planet is set toward a process of becoming, Not only as the unworld of error or errancy (Unwelt der Irrnis), but also and most importantly as an erring orb or crazed star (Irrstern). As if our planet, from the point of view of the history of being (seyngeschichtlich), did not have or no longer had a determined place in the universe. (147)

This is not unlike the schizophrenic nature that Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) conceptualize as the state of the world under the control of global capitalism and how they prophesy its return to something other. That is, there is a double movement in the encoding process of capitalism, how it works to

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strip beings of their value while constantly territorialize them, and also how this very process, as a necessary condition, breaks down. Nomadism tries to take advantage of these interstices, the sites in which the rupture occurs. One example that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use in order demonstrate how such instances of collapse can be revived, to put into the current terms in play, and fostered into a mode of subjectivation, is artists of the Romantic period with their unique relationship to the planet. Given their heroic and nomadic like qualities, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) articulate how the Earth appears differently to these artists than it does to the codes of capitalism, The earth is the intense point at the deepest level of the territory or is projected outside it like a focal point, where all the forces draw together in close embrace. The earth is no longer one force among others, nor is it a substance endowed with form or a coded milieu, with bounds and an apportioned share. The earth has become that close embrace of all forces, those of the earth as well as of other substances, so that the artist no longer confronts chaos, but hell and the subterranean, the groundless. (338–9)

As the quotation makes clear, this is certainly not a naïve “return to the Earth” but represents something much more hellish and even monstrous. The planet, for them, intensifies creative forces that are more chthonic in nature, deriving from the mud, soil, and dirt, and harnesses these forces in order to shape an artwork or identity. One need only look at the typology that the passage invokes and the various metaphors that fall under this topos to see the differences between the vision of the world that Deleuze and Guattari seek to develop and the current one that is most normative. Returning to Szendy, the planet as a “crazed star” wanders nomadically, perhaps as Deleuze and Guattari would have envisioned, and is set adrift into a stream of becoming, a kind of nomadology of planetarity. Contrast this to the process of commodification and coding under capitalism, the incessant need to name and order everything under a controlled rubric, one that, importantly, is guarded through technological proliferation like surveillance and finance. The logics of capitalism could not be more different than a neoanimist inspired cosmology. This can be further unpacked by returning to the playfulness of the world in a more proper and less symptomatic sense. Axelos (2015) provides a concrete paradigmatic model for this kind of dodgy elusiveness and calls it le jeu or the play or game. Axelos links himself to a tradition of thought that has tried to conceptualize the world in just such a way when he writes that “almost two-and-a-half thousand years after Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fink

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and I have insisted on this approach to the world as game” (as cited in Elden 2015: 21). Indeed, as if to echo this sentiment, Heidegger makes an exact claim that “the essence of being is the game itself [das Spiel selber]” (as cited in Elden 2015: 19, emphasis in original; also, Axelos 1979). Capobianco (2010) likewise develops the relation that beings have to each other in regard to their rootedness in a more cosmological and immanent substance that relies on a form of playfulness. He writes that “Being understood originality and fundamentally, is simply the ‘play’ of presencing, of emerging, a play without ‘why’ ” (Capobianco 2010: 122). The playfulness contained within this ontological understanding suggests that the “why” intercedes between what we have been calling modes of subjection and processes of subjectivation. That is, if subjective productions are ultimately understood through their relationship to play, then it follows that the meaning associated with the “why” facilitates how subjectivity is subjected to forces and discourses that try and constitute it from the outside, even if the dialectic of inside and outside is a false dualism to begin with in the sense of failing to capture how subjectivity is entwined with the world. On the other hand, through the halting of signification associated with modes of subjection, a form of subjective production has the ability to take root, a subjectivation, as we have seen, that is ultimately engaged in the cosmological playfulness of the world. To further reiterate this point, Axelos insists that the “the world deploys itself as a game. That means that it refuses any sense, any rule that is exterior to itself ” (as cited in Elden 2015: 21, emphasis in original). The distinction between in and of is tantamount in so far as the “play of the world” is necessarily “different from all the particular games that are played in the world” (as cited in Elden 2015: 21–2, emphasis in original). Processes of subjectivation may be more aligned with the play of the world whereas modes of subjection are aligned with the games played in the world. It is important to maintain the distinction between subjection and subjectivation in so far as the line of argument that I am pursuing relies on both advancing this difference while also challenging it in places by subverting the need to think in exclusively dialectical terms. This is to say that while I am “privileging” subjectivation in a certain manner, as a way to launch an arts of existence, the dialectic is problematic from the start. In more immanent terms, it would be appropriate to dispense with this dualism when subjectivity, through its own disciplined self-fashioning, etches out a unique space in which to play with its singularity, pushing its creative cultivation out onto the world. The gaming of the world, though, is not forthright and certainly not legitimate or natural, never assuming kinds of a priori givens such as rules or strategies, how

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many and what type of players, temporalities in relation to moves, and so on; contrast this to the discussion of modes of subjection under cosmopower, which is explicitly a play in the world. The point is not necessarily sinister, but it does beg the question of the conversant, its language, transmission, and pragmatics, since the human is, for Axelos, always in the last analysis “ ‘outplayed’ [déjoué], [and] the plaything [jouet]” (as cited in Elden 2015: 22, emphasis in original). The frame of le jeu, the game, is only helpful in so far as it foregrounds this last point; that is, the way that subjectivity becomes a plaything of the world and outplayed in relation to its own process of subjective production. Becoming the plaything (jouet) implies a specific kind of subjectivation, that which is in its most abstracted form not conceived of as a game in the world, thereby figuring subjectivity into a kind of “toy” through its artificialization. This follows from Axelos’s point that subjectivity is always outplayed (déjoué). Subjectivity is being outplayed, in other words, overcome by the world, due to its sheer existential predicament and, more naively, through its pragmatic projects wherein outplay-ed channels the Φύσις, the blossoming-forth, becoming, unfurling, the prevention of entropic deadening by having already been beaten. One way to say this is that the playfulness of the world exceeds every attempt to neatly control it, to form it into a strategy of subjection, and instead continuously spills this kind of playfulness out onto opportunities for subjectivation. Stated differently, the hierarchical or arborescent ordering of power that is essential in a theory of subjectivity is, as Axelos indicates, outplayed by the more primordial gamehood of the world. In one way, this kind of cosmological conception dispenses with human exceptionalism by recognizing how the play of the world forecloses the capacity of the human being or other sentient beings to control it. In another manner, the being outplayed by the world does not prevent subjectivity from engaging the world in a sort of reciprocal dance5—stronger still, such a reciprocity is warranted and even called for in that the playfulness of the world represents something more original than can be offered by the power of subjection. Put into different terms, a process of subjectivation that takes the playfulness of the world seriously engages in just such a manner of gaming. This is not the neoliberal mentality toward self-help, growth, and progress; “[the] ‘work on the self ’ one must carry out in order to transform oneself into ‘human capital’ ” (Lazzerato 2014: 49). The point is more radical such that the game itself, being understood as le jeu, necessarily outflanks such a mode of subjection in spite of everything, in spite of every attempt to try and govern the primordial playfulness inherent in the cosmology of the world itself.

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Much in a similar spirit, as was witnessed earlier, Haraway (1991b) casts the process of worlding as an uber-trickster such that “protean embodiments of a world [are] a witty agent and actor . . . a coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse” (209). To parse this in the terms of Axelos, subjectivity is ultimately the plaything (jouet) of the trickster, the privileged interlocutor of subjectivity in its relation to the world, which converses as a witty agent and actor. Although Haraway concretizes her ontology by quasianthropomorphizing it, making it intelligible through the figure of the trickster and its playful semiosis, the point is not strictly philosophical in as much as it is figural, for example, coyote. This is not to say that Haraway’s conception is not helpful; in fact, it is since it takes abstract notions about the nature of the world and describes them in terms that are palatable and accessible, even if wily. Yet, such a maneuver, despite the trickster’s best efforts, instills an imaginary that is premised on animality, sexuality, deceit, scatology, humor, and other tricksteresque characteristics. What seems of special salience given Haraway’s trickster mythos is the privilege afforded to artifice in the playful relationship that subjectivity has with the world and other beings that it finds and encounters there. Tiffany (2009) has more to say on the importance of artifice when he positions the riddle as a prime structure with which to understand the nature of Being. As he says, the playfulness of Being, its riddle creature, produces new becomings, which require the introduction of artifice in order to induce these flourishings and unfurrowings, And this is the aim of a riddle: the dark speech veiling the object coalesces—once the riddle is solved—into an image of the object itself . . . we may understand obscurity—what passes for material substance in poetry—to be the erosion of the particular darkness of things by their names, producing a metaphysical compound of language and matter, logos and phenomenon. Naming the dark makes darkness visible, and this conversion from substance to object is always a matter of artifice. (Tiffany 2009: 61, emphasis added)

The passage describes an ontogenesis arbitrated by artifice as an invocation, that is to say, as calling forth the riddle creature through signification, means that would lure out, so to speak, the being that wishes to show itself for some other. This works not just as “an image of the object itself [emphasis added]” therein being in slight contradistinction to Haraway’s trickster ontology, but rather by producing entities with real ontological status, yet still “artificial” in the sense that the creature never reaches a signified and, in other words, lacks a certain

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finitude and therefore is in diachronic deferral but can pass into being precisely because it forges playful links with other beings, signifiers, or subjectivities. Heidegger (1996) calls these things “innerworldy beings” and qualifies that “neither the ontic description of innerworldy beings nor the ontological interpretation of the being of these beings gets as such at the phenomenon of ‘world.’ ” (60, emphasis in original). In other words, these beings are barred from the world, the way in which playfulness gets distributed and domesticated, precisely due to the relationship they have to language. Therefore, as Tiffany insists, this beckoning is necessarily a matter of artifice, which is not to say that the effects that proliferate are any less “real” or profound. Quite the opposite: the degree of artifice, the performative, dramaturgical and even ceremonial scene, is strictly equivalent to the power of the invocation of these innerworldy beings. To make a stronger point, take Axelos’s assertion that subjectivity is always outplayed (déjoué). One way to envision this would be in a pessimistic sense whereby all attempts to “playback” are ultimately futile, incapable of engaging in a reciprocal gamehood. Yet, by introducing artifice into the equation, its cosmetics, if one wants to return to the discussion of cosmopolitics, these beings that occupy the middle in the medio that interlinks subjectivity, can be conversed with precisely due to “the erosion of the particular darkness of things by their name” (Tiffany 2009: 61), thereby rendering the riddle creature, instead, as that which is outplayed (déjoué). To distill down in a technical or philosophical sense, the relationship that the specific mode of subjective production, subjectivation, has with this cosmological conception of the world and its beings as interlaced through connections of playfulness, it would follow that a model of selffashioning would have the structure of a joke, what one could perhaps call an ontiocus, a being-joke. This being-joke is equivalent to catching the wave of transversality, eliding the interpretation pitfalls associated with decipherment, and piercing the sheen and gloss of artifice. When subjectivity has passed through its initiation process that linked it with the signifying conjuration of riddle-creatures, it finds itself laughing. The self-transference generated, not to beat a dead horse, would be akin to “falling in love” wherein the affect should be distinguished from its unconscious blush. To refigure Zupančič (2003) in the cosmopolitical terms of this beingjoke, “What else to do, if, so to speak, a bottom winks at you? What else to do if the object you look at suddenly looks back at you, thus producing an undeniable effect of subjectivation? You either run away or fall, that is, resubjectivize accordingly” (69, emphasis in original). The ontiocus is when worlding “winks” at you; or, put differently, when le jeu is occulted. This sense helps to foreground all

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arborescent, epistemological levels and degrees of the ontiocus, no matter how fraternal or alien. To parody Haraway: “The ontiocus for universal survival!”6

The Chthulucene as Cosmological Landscape Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. H. P. Lovecraft (1999: 9)

The passage from H.P. Lovecraft helps to generate a certain sensibility of the enigmatic and even monstrous desire of wanting to decode an otherness that nevertheless defies its own accessibility. The Lovecraftian invocation also brings in interesting figures with which to think through the animistic landscape that is being painted and precisely how subjectivity can be positioned in such a landscape, especially since Haraway (2015), most appropriately, prefers to call her anthropocene alternative the chthulucene.7 Given that Haraway’s recent scholarship8 has focused on developing this notion of the chthulucene, it would seem justified to continue the discussion of the previous section and expand on the theoretical principles contained therein as well as their kinship apropos other beings within the cosmological landscape of the chthulucene—expanding on Haraway’s insistence that the world is fundamentally playful and wily by nature. This has been developed, in spite of Haraway, without the need to appeal to various anthropological, literary, or iconographic models in order to ground the playfulness of the world, no matter how effervescent and wily she insists the trickster is. This section will advance a cartography that attempts to find the chthulucene cosmologically as a new, revived, and refreshed version of animism leading to possibilities for subjective production that only such a conception could contain—possibilities that include the intersection, interlocution, and interfacing of subjectivity with beings that may be invisible but, nevertheless, just as real as those with corporeality. The chthulucene attempts to respond to the issues associated with what has become popularly known as the anthropocene. The term originated in the geology literature as a way to mark the profound ecological, technological, and demographic changes that the human species have brought about to planet Earth

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in very recent history (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). These massive ecological changes have been felt through environmental, economic, ecological, and other measurable effects that human production has created, the symptoms, one could say, of the industrial revolution, modern mechanization, and the mediatization of daily life. To get a sense for some of these Earth changes, Wark cites Paul Crutzen who provides the dismal statistics, About 30–50 percent of the planet’s land surface is exploited by humans . . . More than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind. Fisheries remove more than 25  percent of the primary production in upwelling ocean regions . . . Energy use has grown sixteen-fold during the twentieth century . . . More nitrogen fertilizer is applied in agriculture than is fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems. (as cited in Wark 2015: para. 3)

The concrete shifts created by human activity are the result of a complex series of systems interacting that have resulted in an untenable model. The anthropocene is, in other words, an epoch of history that has outpaced its ability to sustain itself in terms of resource extraction and regeneration. Wark (2015) puts this into his own abstract words when writing that “the Anthropocene is a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself ” (para. 14). This is a case whereby institutions, corporations, and governments give the impression that current ecological processes and structures are maintainable while also being aware, quite overtly at times, that the present model and its temporal trajectory are categorically unsustainable. Yet, the issue is not the specific naming of a certain “epoch” of historical progression or change. Rather, in terms of the argument being set-forth here, the point is to use the nonanthropocentric perspective of the chthulucene, the kind of criticality this concept contains with regard to subverting human exceptionalism, thereby leaving the anthropocene behind since the latter centers its mode of analysis through human activity, labor, and production. The anthropocene is problematic for many reasons. First, it recapitulates certain Enlightenment notions of anthropocentrism, the sovereignty of the human, Kantian cosmopolitanism, and so forth, all of which are philosophically dubious in light of some of the arguments offered under the neoanimistic framework being advanced. Furthermore, it takes “nature” as a quasi-innocent object whereby the term’s logics presuppose some kind of “even playing field”

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or a return to a more pristine type, which may speak to the success that capitalism has had in operating under this kind of human centered model. Put differently, the picture of the cosmological landscape being painted does not contain a Lockean philosophy of egalitarianism and inalienable rights whereby an a priori flat starting point exists in which subjectivity is equivalent to other subjectivities. Quite the contrary:  the chthulucene is more Hobbesian in the sense of predicating its polity on a supplementary, hellish, or monstrous vision of what political theory should be based upon—how even beyond the human, the cosmos is abjected from the beginning, a theory of theodicy that is a communal and symbiotic being-with. With regard to Earth changes and their relation to the anthropocene, Butzer (2015) asserts that “the anthropocentric vision of our species may be blinding us into assuming that recent, global change through human actions may be unique at the scale of the geological record” (1541). In fact, the author goes on to point out that “Pleistocene glaciations posed a more severe test for biotic evolutionary success than did past or current global change driven by human actions” (Butzer 2015:  1541). The alarmist and even apocalyptic rhetoric that is indicative to the discourse on the anthropocene, the fact that its emphasis is placed on the deleterious effects of human production, is fed by what Wark (2014) terms necropower, a kind of global drive that is blind to its own ecological harmony and sustainability. Wark (2014) further calls the historical threshold we find ourselves at, more accurately, thanaticism denoting an insatiable and compulsive will-to-death, being named as such “after Thanatos, son of Nyx (night) and Erebos (darkness), twin of Hypnos (sleep), as Homer and Hesiod seem more or less to agree” (para. 3). This sleepy and hidden transmutation between historicities understood as thanaticism functions like “a fanaticism, a gleeful, overly enthusiastic will to death” (Wark 2014:  para. 5). To define this in economic and Marxist terms, thanaticism is nothing less than “a social order which subordinates the production of use values to the production of exchange value, to the point that the production of exchange value threatens to extinguish the conditions of existence of use value” (Wark 2014:  para. 6). Flavored in this reevaluation are clearly the necropolitics that Mbembe (2013) has in mind coupled with a culmination of real subsumption9 such that capitalism comes to define an entire epoch of human history (Negri 1991). Putting this into terms that Guattari would use, the asignifying mechanics of capital run-amok and separate from the logics of the encodability of territories, their signifiance. This can lead to the postmodern delirium of the socious à

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la Baudrillard, the divorce of meaning from real social action, that Guattari so laments in so far as a pure specularity via signifying systems arrests their own processual complexification. In this space, the creation of cartographies and metamodels as a way to traverse and complexify different discursive and material registers gets lost in the play of signification, one narrative becoming no better than the other. Such a breakdown is not unlike how subjection ferments sociality into surrendering its own sovereignty, creating a docility predicated on a lame form of protesting since it is intrinsic to the functioning of the system as a whole. To follow the topology of thanaticism that Wark sketches, it could be said that the chthulucene helps to reverse this form of necropower in so far as it pushes the discourse back toward mechanisms that are connected to ecological realities and animistic sensibilities that go against the grain of free-floating mediatization, the use of signifying systems to control and expose subjectivities to modes of subjection. This is not to suggest that the chthulucene is a more “privileged” form of cosmology than the anthropocene in that it would stand out as a kind of transcendental or utopian framework for worldhood. It would be better to say that its positionality, how the chthulucene through its alternative metaphorics and intra- and other-worldly beings, counters the excess and technicity of the anthropocene. Positionality, in this sense, refers to the countervailing forces that a different typology would bring to bear on the states of emergence of planet Earth. In setting up the chthulucene as an alternative model, Haraway (2015) suggests that “the Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge” (160). As has been submitted, the anthropocene, as the term clearly communicates, centers the human, or the anthropos, as the agent of change par excellence placing the universalist category of “nature” as set in relief against human exceptionalism. Power is ascribed to the human species to enact world altering changes while failing to adequately take into consideration other forces and beings that influence the trajectory and the teleology of ecological development (Henning 2016). As an alternative to this linguistic and axiomatic problem, the chthulucene, on the other hand, tries to decenter the human and actually grants, in an animistic spirit, a landscape that places the human as a being among many others, all of which are contributing toward the transformation of this planet, a transformation that is occurring because of more and more rapid changes that are resultant from all inhabits of the world.

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Cast in terms used previously, writing on the syncretic nature of the neoanimist cosmopolitics of Stengers and Latour but more specifically from a subalternist perspective, Watson plays-up the illustrative analogy of creating a new Earth, The twilight of the anthropo-political age has arrived. The coming night will entail a great deal of critical and empirical wandering, tinkering with and within the small corners of a co-inhabited cosmos as we seek to produce more just and livable worlds, worlds with brighter dawns. (Watson 2014: 93)

Consequently, it would do well to keep in mind that “the edge of extinction is not just a metaphor; system collapse is not a thriller. Ask any refugee of any species” (Haraway 2015: 160). There are very real consequences that go along with such a transition and the metaphorics packed into the valences of the chthulucene may go well toward highlighting the ecological changes. That is to say, the “chthonic ones” dwell precisely in this underworld of transformation wherein we must learn to take seriously Haraway’s call for developing a renewed form of symbiosis, a being-with that does not place the human in a privileged position and that does not entail an always pleasant relationship with the creatures that are to be encountered. On the level of signification, the task becomes even more difficult since Haraway (2015) is adamant that “it matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (160). Indeed, the place of subjectivity in the intertwining of various networks of meaning, materialities, and contingencies was inaugurated as a pressing problematic to be addressed in order to discover possible ways of forging these stories that tell stories, or meta-stories in a nonmodernist sense, that might lead to a freeing of the subject from its usual place within normatively circulated narratives—that might, in order words, help envision a mode of subjectivation and self-fashioning that could lead subjectivity to perhaps tell its own story, so to speak. The problem of mediatization, as it has been called, will become all the clearer in the following section: how the society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord (1970) calls it, presents a necessary challenge for any theory that attempts to etch out a space of a self-cultivation and use this space to commune with other nonhuman beings, beings that are not a part of the pervasive spectacle nature that the anthropocene presents for us.

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Reconciling the Society of the Spectacle with Neoanimism The specialization of images of the world is rediscovered, perfected, in the world of the autonomized image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the nonliving. Guy Debord (1970: para. 2, emphasis added)

The phrase “the autonomous movement of the nonliving” has under contemporary conditions of emergence, perhaps pushing conclusively Debord’s own understanding of the spectacle, become a “spectacle [that] is no longer just a form of entertainment for some, but a social relation that pervades society as a whole” (Bottici 2014:  118). The mediatic nature of the spectacle, that autonomized image, intercedes in the states of affairs of every subjectivity, makes it endemic to social relationality as a whole. Indeed, the spectacle carries with it entities, which is to say novel and perfuse machinic relations, that may be nonliving, nonhuman, or otherwise. In this section, I  want to forge an argument that solders, using Guattari, the post-Situationist concept of the spectacle together with Haraway’s own neoanimistic inspired chthulucene, however counterintuitive such venture may at first seem—in the sense that, at first blush, the performative nature of the spectacle may cosmetically appear to undercut any of the real cosmopolitical stakes required of the actors in the chthulucene. However, as will be suggested, the asignificant nature of the modern spectacle, the way that it finds itself into the medio that interlinks subjectivities with other beings, makes such a project worthwhile if one wants to redirect forms of subjection that would force subjectivity into the power mechanics of the spectacle. In a way, to more concretely sketch out this possible cosmology, such a task must presuppose a worlding that is animistic in the sense that it is interspersed with entities, both seen and unseen, physical and nonphysical, terrestrial, and alien—entities that are dispersed in a fractalization of enmeshments, being-withs, and symbioses. This follows the spirit of Guattari’s (2013) desire to “transform this planet . . . into a universe of creative enchantments” (13) but with a slight rub. The term post-media era does not necessarily get us beyond the spectacle, beyond the mediatization of subjectivity but, instead, tries to envision both in tandem: the two, enchantment and mediatization, are not mutually exclusive, in other words. In fact, it is rather exclusively on the basis of their co-constitution

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that anything like a “universe of creative enchantments” can come into being in the first place. A cosmopolitics of this order calls attention to the fact that there has never been a world that was disenchanted, the anthropocene being merely an attempt at subduing the chthonic sensibilities of a more primordial neoanimist landscape, thereby bringing itself to the edge of ecological destruction in the process. Stengers (2011) is, again, adamant that “the cosmopolitical question is not about the ‘reenchantment of the world’ ” (359) but could better be posed as a renewed way to think about how the spectacle can be reappropriated for new ends. This can be read against Max Weber’s teleological metanarrative wherein he critiques certain Enlightenment values and practices that have let to scientific skepticism and the disenchantment of the world (cf. Weber 1949, 2005). Bennett (2001) follows in the Weberian tradition when writing that the disenchantment of the world “describes Entzauberung, or demagification, usually translated into English as ‘disenchantment’ ” (57). Guattari addresses specifically Weber’s Entzauberung and actually goes so far as to render this a kind of enchantment as the sine qua non of analytic experience, It is true that a certain capitalistic, reductionist use of language leads it to the state of a signifying linearity of discrete binary entities which smother, silence, disempower, and kill the polysemic qualities of a Content reduced to the state of a neutral “referent.” Isn’t the test of analysis precisely to recharge Expression with semiotic heterogeneity and to run counter to the disenchantment, demystification, and depoetisation of the contemporary world denounced by Max Weber? (Guattari 1995: 76)

Conceptualized in a more general sense, Guattari argues for an analysis or a form of subjective production, a subjectivation, that takes its expressive semiotic function energetically to produce content that is polyphonic. Prefigured as such, a proper analytic subjectivation works toward enchantment, complexification, processuality, a quasi-Baroque aesthetic, and so forth. All of these signifiers are trying to signal a worlding that vastly more complex, mysteries, and indeed scary in so far as meaning slithers, slides, and swerves remaining flush with a kind of cthulhu sentiment. Casting this in terms of subjective production, Guattari (1995) says that “aspects of this kind of polysemic, animistic, transindividual subjectivity can equally be found in the worlds of infancy, madness, amorous passion, and artistic creation” (101). Again, these few more ruptures disclose the nature of a disputable cosmos, with a polity, containing unbounded and overlapping

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entities, a cosmopolitics that is animistically informed and that takes into account the mediatization of the world, how the power of the spectacle influences the process of subjective formation. In order to get a hold of how this is the case, it is necessary to make a tripartite distinction based upon the work of Guattari. According to schizoanalysis, there are three registers that are used to trace how meaning, information, and less perceptible forms of influence are stored and transmitted. These are the categories of signifying semiologies, asemiotic encoding, and asignifying semiotics. The following list will help to more explicitly structure the precise distinctions between the three: 1. Signifying semiologies: This category is the most traditional in the sense of falling within the purview of disciplinary semiotics. In other words, signifying semiotics convey meaning through signing. As Lazzarato (2014) articulates, they can take the form of “symbolic (or pre-signifying, gestural, ritual, productive, corporeal, musical, etc.) semiologies and semiologies of signification” (74). To stick with Guattari’s appropriation of glossematics and Hjelmslev, the planes of expression and content have linguistic striated surfaces of signifying semiologies transmitted between them. These systems have “semiotically formed substances on the expression and content planes” (Genosko 2002: 167). To use Guattari’s (2011) words signifying semiologies are “systems of expression based on a limited range of discrete elements: phonemes, graphemes, distinctive traits, etc.” (178). Within signifying semiologies, as Genosko (2014) says, there are “symbolic semiologies [which] are a species of signifying semiologies and concern substances of expression that are neither completely translatable into linguistic terms, nor are they able to be overcoded by any one substance of expression among them” (16). Guattari (2011) gives examples of “symbolic semiologies (for example, with the effects of mimetism, transitivism, etc.)” (178), and Genosko states that Guattari never abandons signifying semiologies because they are the “raw material” for building machinic assemblages and other signifying systems. 2. Asemiotic encodings: These appear as encoded structures in the “natural” world, such as “crystalline systems and DNA, for example” (Lazzarato 2014: 67). Put precisely, for asemiotic encodings, there is no recourse to signifying semiotics since they “are in an external relation (outside the expression-content planes) to the intersecting criteria, engaging form and matter but not substance. There is no semiotic substance at issue”

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(Genosko 2002: 166). In a normative sense, asemiotic encodings fall within the purview of science since they are said to be a part of the material reality of sociality as such. These kinds of scientific knowledges are more heuristic than they are objective facts for Guattari and are used to help build a way toward a different world picture. 3. Asignifying semiotics: This category is Guattari’s most important contribution to the understanding of the production of subjectivity; sometimes referred to as post-signifying semiotics, they reveal that “there is no separation between semiotic production and material production because signs continue in the real and vice versa” (Lazzarato 2014: 74). Said differently in Peircean parlance, “they are ‘power signs,’ ‘sign-points,’ of asignifying semiotics, which act on material flows” (Lazzarato 2014: 84). The operations that Guattari describes as diagrammatic or traversal are typically the result of an asignifying assemblage. It follows that, according to Genosko (2014), “asignifying semiotics puts signifying semiologies into play in some manner; in this way, asignifying semiotics are not infected with semiological well-formedness, but it is something to which they may have recourse if communicating in the way that dominant significations require” (16). Guattari (2011) describes how these machines are pragmatically oriented toward “developing connections between transformational systems capable of erasing the effects of signifying generations and in discernabilizing micropolitical orientation which concern all semiotic systems heading toward “molecular revolutions.” Diagrammatic transformations are capable of bringing their effects into any semiotic register” (177). Furthermore, in relation to other signifying semiotics, asignifying systems are nonhierarchical employing “a circular connection, skirting around signifying semiologies, between form and matter, but without leaving—unlike a-semiotic encodings—the expression and content planes . . . the polysemiotic connections established between the abstract machines (form) and material intensities escape the overcoding functions of signifying semiological systems” (Genosko 2002: 169). As such, their diagrammatic function allows them to “free desiring production, the singularities of desire, from the signifiers of national, familial, personal, racial, humanist, and transcendent values (including the semiotic myth of a return to nature, to the pre-signifying world of a-semiotic encodings)” (Genosko 2002: 170). In developing the notion of a diagrammatic empowerment, Guattari makes a distinction between the image and the diagram. Diagrammatic empowerment highlights

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the ability transversality has, as an interventive strategy, to charge up and cathect specific power sings, which is importantly not humanistic since the criticality embedded within such a maneuver negatively undercuts attempts to posit a self-actualized and transcendent nature to subjectivity. In this way, Guattari “extricates himself from the Peircean trap of subsuming diagrams under Icons (within Peirce’s Logic, diagrams are graphic representations—sketches, graphs, drawings, skeletons—in mathematics) and then gains the positive implications of losing ‘aboutness’ as a criterion, bringing him into constructive coherence with a critique of representation. He splits the image and diagram: the former belongs to symbolic semiologies and the latter to asignifying semiotics” (Genosko 2014: 18). This goes toward the creation of machinic sense or the crossing of semiotic and material flows. According to Genosko (2014), “in asignifying semiotics, particle-signs work ‘flush’ (travaillent à même) with the ‘real’; or more precisely, with material fluxes . . . even flushness does not require physical contact, just an indexical contiguity that is not limited to proximity but has connectivity. This underlines the networked nature of asignification with select matters: it could be mycelium or silicon” (18, emphasis in original). The nondistinction between “mycelium or silicon” demonstrates a difference in expression but not content, at the level of asignification. In other words, the cosmetic nature of the material formations may change, but the operative assemblage that undergirds them remains constant at the level of substance. This final category of asignifying semiotics has particular importance in constructing the process of subjective production since it works via pre-structural and proto-subjective formations; that is to say, prior to any signifying meaning, but nevertheless forming a machinic sense. Interfacing this with the schizoanalytic call for artificialization, stylistics, and aesthetics, asignifying semiotics somewhat paradoxically generate a material energetics. Genosko describes this quality as follows: This language suggests there is something quasi-organic about asignification or, put otherwise, that it is not only artificial. Put differently again, the machinic is irreducible to the mechanical. It is what the organic and inorganic examples share by exclusion that interests Guattari. (Genosko 2014: 16)

Contrast this with the way signifying systems operate, which is to say through interpretative, epistemological, and semiotic channels of understanding, which necessarily puts into play juridical, arborescent, and policing functions.

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The example that Foucault (1995) gives of the prison, how it is a historically situated institution that has arisen through specific conditions of emergence and operates by way of embedded, contextualized practices, contrasts with the liberatory power that asignification brings to bear on the current states of affairs of signifying systems. To keep with the example, a form of asignifying semiotics operating in the prison may take the form of encoded, gang talk specific to different social groups or the creation of weapons or objects from parts that they are not usually constructed from, an innovation that arises from the energy siphoned from the hegemonic enclosure. The actual minoritarian talk is not asignifying—rather, the border between the two systems, the language of the police and the language of the other-group, how the police cannot interpret the gang speak but the prisoners can interpret the more normative talk is the precise fulcrum that represents what is asignifying. Put differently, the fact that subjectivity must become initiated into the way the prisoners communicate demonstrates how asignification shrouds access to encrypted forms of enactments, communication, and social bonding. On a more macro level, an example of a signifying system operating politically is the continued proliferation of the myth of the prison as a site of rehabilitation. An asignifying intervention would not only work to expose this myth as a necessary condition for the maintenance of the current white, phallocratic regime but also use the energy released from this kind of social catharsis as an impetus to build a more livable and fair world. The animistic energetics that are inherent to asignifying semiotics connect subjectivity intimately with its environment. Contrast this with signifying systems that rely on part of their structuring being based on a notion of the finite in the sense that they spring from an a priori temporal determination of “life”—that is, the signifier’s signified is stipulated in advance of the subject’s formation (supposedly, by societal, cultural, biological, and other forces, a broader and terrestrial interpellation)—thus, their reactionary, paranoid, and subjecting characteristics. On a much more cosmological scale, conversely, asignifying machines are fibrous, connective, etheric, and quasi-organic such that these properties can imbue the production of subjectivity with alternative temporalities, thereby shifting the discursive coordinates of a plebian sense of life and its temporal axiomatics. The anastomotic ethericity of asignification installs it as a privileged category in subjective production—precisely, here, in the development of an alternative temporal structure opposed to finitude. As a generative point of difference, Guattari’s understanding of a neoanimism attempts to grasp the spectacle nature of the world from the above viewpoint

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while the form of animistic enchantment articulated by Bennett foregrounds an ethics of subjective production in finitude. Case in point, she writes “an ethic centered around finitude pursues this task: it invents philosophical exercises to force confrontation with—and thus eventual acceptance of—the fact of one’s own final demise” (Bennett 2001: 78). This emphasis on finitude is countered by Bottici (2014) in her analysis of the imaginal and the society of the spectacle where she articulates the deep, entrenched genealogical roots such a theory of subjective formation has in Western thought, Most philosophers, at least since Plato, looked at human beings as beingstoward-death. Very rarely did they take the opposite perspective of looking at them as beings-after-birth, a puzzling fact on its own, given the ontological priority of birth over death. For, while it is true that we are beings-towardsdeath, it is equally true that we are so because we are in the first place beingsafter-birth. Philosophers . . . like to remind us of the first truth, that we will die, but tend to forget the second one, that we are born. (86)

Less we forget, following the methodology of Haraway, how entangled and enmeshed the politics of finitude are with other canonized abstract machines and forms of hierarchical power including patriarchy, phallocracy, logocentrism, colonialism, and heteronormativity. The point is not to abandon an attempt to think of subjectivity from the standpoint of its mortality but, rather, to decentralize the notion of death as some guiding or grounding future problematic that takes precedence in anchoring subjectivity to its being therein existing in the states of affairs of the world, as though death represents some sort of terminus for the continuation of subjectivity. Even the Heideggerian (1962) structure of being-towards-death is too conservative on this point in so far as comporting oneself to finitude somehow represents an ethic that may free Dasein from its lostness. The emphasis on mortality, in other words, creates a specific kind of production of subjectivity, one that, on account of Guattari, can be seen as symptomatic of the Western tradition as a whole. The fibrous and energetic ethericity of the neoanimism being sketched, conversely, plunges subjectivity into different lifeworlds that lie beyond embodied finitude and does away with a fixated fascination on one incarnation or another—the fetish of mortality. Again, the need to cling stubbornly to finitude is most clearly evinced in the kind of theorizing on enchantment articulated by Bennett. She understands the end of a subjective production to be an existential given when writing that, Acceptance of the finality of death induces humility—humility in the face of the Other and humility with regard to the possibility of knowing anything

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with certainty . . . And, in a disenchanted world, such love can be only a kind of necrophilia. (Bennett 2001: 78–9)

Indeed, if Bennett wants to position her ethics in relation to the formation of subjectivity that is predicated on the eventual demise of subjectivity, it would make sense, on the level of its meaning-making practices, to foreground subjectivity’s ability to signify through being humble in relation with another being. However, to reiterate a point made earlier, the continual repetition of mortality by Bennet and other thinkers elsewhere creates a specific mode of subjective production that operates in the register of signifying systems, that is, the ability of subjectivity to produce signification and sense out of its own being and world. Even the account that Levinas (1991) gives in Otherwise than Being remains stuck in a pollyannaish, humanistic conception of subjectivity and its relation to language. For instance, the distinction between the saying and the said advances the claim that the saying, the verbal utterances that are enunciated in a contextual relation with the other, are fundamentally “truer” in the sense of bearing stronger resemblance to ontology and the ethical demand faced by interlocutors. The said, on the other hand, represents the sign systems that are in circulation, the kind of epistemologies that are communally constructed and, therefore, are more manipulatable. While Levinas asserts that the saying is a form of playfulness without a why, in its most ethical incarnation, he nevertheless categorically contends that “saying is not a game” (Levinas 1991: 5) in that it is not subject to the same kind of forces of manipulation and betrayal that the said is subject to and, more importantly, because of the ethical demand made upon subjectivity through its encounter with the Other. The kind of humbleness that came to the fore in the analysis of Bennett (2001) is similar to the ethical demand that Levinas articulates in the distinction between the said and the saying. In other words, it would be the production of enunciation in relation to the embodied encounter with another subjectivity that remains closest to the way that Levinas understands ontology—as a play without interest, without agenda, without politics. Yet, as we have seen, signifying systems of all kinds, importantly even before they are uttered, are a part of the gamehood of the world. On account of Guattari, at least, there is no “encounter” between interlocutors that does not contain a form of polity and power. There are always various degrees of pedigree, positionality, and iconographies at work, either behind the scenes, as is the case with institutionalized racism, for example, or explicitly, as indicated in cases of sexual harassment. While it may be true that

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Being in its vitality is a kind of playing without a why, it does not follow that this form of play is not molded and shaped by the actors involved. In fact, as the discussion of mortality in Bennett went to show, belief tout court contains within itself all sorts of colonizing aspects that not only shape how subjectivity is produced but also how the semiotics of the world are constituted. Moving away from signifying systems, what Levinas would call the said, and more into a neoanimist territory:  What would it be like to shift the perspective of how subjectivity is produced to the level of what Guattari calls asignifying processes? The spectacle nature of signifying registers, including the overemphasis on how subjective formation is foregrounded by death, are downplayed and, along with them, modes of subjection, the circumscription of subjectivity by various apparatuses of capture. Entities helpful in analyzing the production of subjectivity from the register of asignifying semiotics can be said, in a neoanimist spirit, to derive from the uncanny and traumatic forces of the real—recalling that for schizoanalysis, the real is the artificial (Goffey 2013). In a somewhat paradoxical and counterintuitive point to Bennet’s theory of death, the influences that asignifying semiotics have on subjective production falls under the genre of horror—a kind of artificialization of horror that raps the traumatic forces of the real in shiny new garments. As Tiffany (2013) says of Adorno, commenting on the artificial and cosmetic nature of kitsch, Adorno pushes kitsch into the realm of fairy-tale horror, animating the “foreign body” of kitsch and describing it as an inscrutable “imp”: “kitsch . . . lies dormant in art itself, waiting for a chance to leap forward at any moment.” Here, we encounter the image of kitsch as an alien thing—a folk creature—buried alive within the precinct of art. (69)

Take, for example, the rise of pop art in the latter half of the twentieth century. The banality of evil, to recall Arendt’s (1964) famous phrase, is ironically put on display by artists like Andy Warhol through the juxtaposition of what was an elitist, modernist form of culture, painting or photography, with the trinkets of capitalism—the plastic items and objects that are ceaselessly abjected from the economic machine. This kind of kitsch hides an imp that lurks within the art itself erasing the realities of labor exploitation that went into its construction. On a more theoretical level, this imp is endemic to the spectacle of globalization as such, a kind of haunt that torments the planet through its refusal to be disavowed. It lies in wait. One need only look at the current state of ecology to see this concretely.

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In terms of mediatization, these kind of animistic beings, those like the kitsch-imp, provide a means of binding universes of virtuality to the jouissance of the subject. That is, the various worlds of subjectivity that Guattari designates as either universes of virtuality or reference typically contain signifying systems that gloss over the horrors associated with capitalism and globalization. They are, in other words, kitschy in so far as they hide the abuse of desiring-production, the subjecting forces that create homogenized subjectivities or subjectivities with difference only so long as that difference is commodified. The agitated pleasure of subjectivity that Lacan called jouissance, in a certain manner, recognizes this imposter (the imp in the art) but, nonetheless, falls for the lure of the kitsch. Put exemplary, the abject that the cosmetic nature of kitsch invokes serves as a conductive force energizing the production of subjectivity by turning it into a conduit. Or, subjectivity comes to confront how the plastic surface of its signifying systems keeps it subjected and obfuscates the freeing power of transversality, the deployment of asignifying systems that may induce anxiety by cutting the sense it has to its normative identity. The imp of kitsch is but one example of similar dark and chthonic entities that compose components of passage by, strangely, finishing the business of the riddle, that thing that Tiffany calls the enigma of Being. They aid in the construction of subjectivity, the way in which it is aesthetically composed. Put differently, the launching of a selffashioning or an arts of existence with regard to subjectivity means, at the same time, the smoothing of semiotic hierarchies and striations—the sticky points for meaning—and the asignifying, transversal incision that allows the alien creature to become known. The passage from signifying semiologies to the development of asignifying interventions requires a certain transversalist erasure of sense. Sheehan (2015) talks about this in Heideggerian terms as a leap of abandonment from an event of appropriation (Ereignis) foregrounded by meaning. The plunge into the flesh of embodiment is initiated by a kind of crossing-over, so to speak—moving through the disavowal mechanism installed within assemblages that create the play of the world, that which mediates the subject and object relation. Subjective formation then ceases to be able to operate precisely because the phenomena it creates evaporate allowing for, to use Lacan’s theoretical schema, access to a psychotic imaginary10—images and icons that are disconnected from their referents in the world. The preceding term psychotic is not to be taken in the sense of medicalization wherein it connotes a kind of dysfunction or maladaptation in relation to a norm since the binding of subjectivity with a norm has lost its energy to operate, which is the passage from modes of subjection to a process

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of subjectivation. It could be stated further that the production of subjectivity has ceded its reality status precisely because the norm fails to “make sense” and thereby has no grip to take a hold of the subject. Having pried the symbolic from its privileged place within the psychological structure, the dyadic imaginary– real psychosis, which is may be likened to a schizo flow, appears in subjectivity with the body at center stage. One way to put this would be to say that symbolic connective and relational thinking is “burned away” through a process of anti-disavowal, which is not strictly equivalent to avowal in that subjectivity is not accessing a name or identity, thereby allowing the subject access to latent, repressed and even hidden forces, which are grounded in its “psychosis”. As Nietzsche (1974) so eloquently puts it, “you must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes” (176). The precipitate of this incineration process creates not only the previously outlined “conduit-formeaning” vis-à-vis the unraveling of the symbolic knot, but also an appetitive entity that filters the real through the imaginary. That is, this formation of the subject is not preoccupied by phantasy bounded by the imaginary; free floating or discursively invoked images, icons, emotions, affects, memories, and so on. But, strictly speaking, this is a subjectivity that is occupied with the real in so far as it can be mediatized through a communicative framework—privileged access being given here to the imaginary. Of course, this is not to say that signification cannot be used at this point; however, it requires a layer of hermeneutic interpretation, whereas the imaginary is more a purely immanent appropriation. The latter is closer to the real, in the sense of crisscrossing asemiotic operators and designifying the intelligibility subjectivity has regarding normative signifying systems in so far as it models the psychotic aspects of the subject of disavowal without an additional layer of meaning-making, without the need to symbolically model the access it now has to its imaginary world. Thus, it is the push down into the body of the real, that taps into an upsurge of imaginary content becoming objects, for the subject, of either analysis, heuristics, prediction, and positioning. Therefore, in the strictest possible sense, a subjectivation based solely in asignification is the exact opposite of a signing form of subjection:  the norm and rule binding and stamping of docile subjects. One way a wholly asemiotic production occurs, referring back to the literary trope used by Tiffany, is through the cosmetic-relational object of kitsch. The imp that lies dormant in kitsch reverses the normativity inherent in subjection, a role reversal that hijacks signifying systems by transversalizing them and then obfuscating this

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inversion—a covering of one’s tracks, so to speak. Tiffany (2013) has this to say, “the demon of kitsch is an invert: man become woman, living art becomes dead kitsch, good becomes evil, true becomes false. And no one can tell the difference” (71). Following this logic, then, a theory of subjective production that is foregrounded by cosmetics and, more generally, aesthetics is unbounded from normative modes of creation and making sense since it tests and, indeed, breaks the limits by which these normal boundaries operate. The paradoxical nature of kitsch is how it both exemplifies the apogee of capitalist exploitation and waste while at the same time enshrouding a secret evil that lies dormant threating the territorializing forces and, by extension, the larger apparatuses that keep it concealed. The way that kitsch functions on the level of subjective production, as a relational and theoretical model for subjectivity, quietly creates an arts of existence through inverting the binaries that typically go into identity construction, revealing itself not as something substantive, establishing the connection between the signifier and the signified, but rather as an artifice that hides a secret—the secret is the process of subjectivation itself. In one sense, this creates a horizon of meaning affirming its limit as infinity. Berardi (2012), using schizoanalytic language, extols this virtue, “the creation of possible universes of meaning is infinite. Desire is the field of this tendency of the finite toward a becoming-infinite” (154). By positioning desire as the driving force behind cosmetic self-creation, the construction of the spectacle nature of the world, how in the most general sense subjectivity is always mediatized and interlinked with other beings, objects, and others, the production of subjectivity falls, for Guattari (1995), under what he called an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. He writes that, To produce new infinities from a submersion in sensible finitude, infinities not only charged with virtuality but also with potentialities actualisable in given situations, circumventing or dissociating oneself from the Universals itemised by traditional arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis:  all things that imply the permanent promotion of different enunciative assemblages, different semiotic recourses, an alterity grasped at the point of its emergence—non-xenophobic, non-racist, non-phallocratic—intensive and processual becomings, a new love of the unknown. (Guattari 1995: 117)

Such a conception of infinity, to repeat, targets alterity precisely at its point of emergence, which as has been articulated is the sort of abject-imp that Tiffany likens to the subversive power of the cosmetic nature of kitsch. The horror associated with infinity is not lost with regard to a theory of subjective production.

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That is, the monstrous terror associated with a vast expanse of possibilities does not induce a kind of stupefied inaction in subjectivity, as perhaps Camus (1946) may maintain. Instead, this space of deterritorialization encourages the very possibility for an arts of existence through preparing the necessary conditions out of which subjectivations can be produced. Said simply now, this form of subjectivation is predicated on an asignifying haunt, one that, as an ontological consequence, produces a host of specular, cosmetic, and aesthetic effects. With more to say on this is Graham Harman (2012) who, in his monograph on Lovecraft, advances the notion of a weird realism that elides and escapes objectivity and categorization that certain methodological analyses bring to bear on reality. Lovecraft is the writer whose prose and literary characters attempt to capture this terrifying strangeness, the way in which nominalizations become frustrated by the monstrous upsurge that spills over distinctions, borders, and boundaries. Harman (2012) couches this sense in terms of science when writing that according to Lovecraft, Science is not a destroyer of irrational illusions, but a dangerous probe into truths too terrifying for rationality to withstand. If witches should be burned, then perhaps scientists should as well, and for the same reason: both are direct threats to the sanity of earth-life. But far from treating occult knowledge as a primitive and incipient form of full-fledged science (alchemy and magic are sometimes viewed this way) Lovecraft generally favors the shortcuts of the occult over the slow and tentative progress of the sciences. (93, emphasis in original)

There are two points that deserve further unpacking. When Harman equates the work of witches with the practice of science, he seems to be suggesting that the laboratory, technological, and engineering wonders of today wrought by science could be viewed, at least anthropologically, in a similar manner as some of the magical and invocatory practices of witches. The difference is a matter of historical perspective. The important point is the contact that both witches and scientists have with the odd, strange reality that underlies these forms of praxis. Yet, to take a less transcendental or universalist approach in the sense of comparing disparate phenomenon that are not co-currently hegemonic, is it not the case that Lovecraft’s preference for magic and alchemy is actually intended as in intervention in the hegemony of scientism in the current historical epoch? In other words, it would seem that the occult knowledges that Lovecraft conveys either through literary encryption or fiction and fabulation are categorically distinct than anything that a manuscript or a theory on science can offer. Rather than trying to develop an object-oriented

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form of realism that pays heed to the oddity of reality while at the same time maintaining the possibility of a certain objectivity, the present project sides with Lovecraft’s preference for more occult practices not only as an intervention in the hegemony of institutional scientism and empiricism but also because of the nature of reality itself—a theory of worldhood that has been advanced under the auspices of a neoanimism. To return to the level of subjective production, an arts of existence needs to be animistically informed in its ability to self-fashion and ever renew itself. It is as if, in other words, that mediatization, its metaphorics, those sematic valences that fall under the term and give it its mechanical and technological aura, begin to lose consistency in favor of a more naturalistic semiotics—hence the tactical maneuver toward witches, warlocks, and sorcerers. There is this insistence, by Guattari himself, when referring to subjugated knowledges and peoples, that “primitives are realists, not mystics” (as cited in Lazzarato 2014: 75). The point is not to obfuscate, supernaturalize, fetishize, capitalize, or colonize these terms as this is largely already enacted through contemporary forms of subjection, but to take seriously these native cosmologies, in not just their sociological or anthropological reality but, stronger, as ontogenetic assemblages capable of creating worlds As a case in point, Guattari gives a very literal description of this intermixed ontological character, The primitive body is never a naked body, but always a subset of the social body, traversed by markers of the socius, by tattoos, by initiations, etc. This body does not contain individuated organs: it is itself traversed by souls, by spirits, which belong to the set of collective assemblages. (Guattari as cited in Lazzarato 2014: 79)

Initiation, which for Guattari is just another name for psychogenic development, is a precondition for entry into the socius apropos this conception of worlding that troubles the notion of subjectivity that is on the path of subjection, quite literally, since the body is traversed by other-than-human entities. Conceptualized in this way, subjection with its emphasis on control, order, and power struggles to get ahold of subjectivity in order to render it docile and orderable in so far as the intertwined beings that compose the primitive body imbue it with a form of collective power that is not available on strictly the material or technological level. This is not to say that the primitive body, or what both Deleuze and Guattari would (1987) call the body without organs, cannot become coopted by apparatuses of capture. Indeed, one of central ways this happens is through its

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hypostasis in materiality, the forgetfulness of making oneself like a body without organs thereby haltering a process of becoming-other. The key insights in Guattari’s passage above are both the intermixing of bodies and animistic spirits as well as specifically the markings of subjectivity, the kind of traces that these other beings leave on the subject. Put more specifically, the body is in a certain sense a place of inscription bar none such that it anchors subjectivity in a timespace giving it discursive coordinates but is, nevertheless, as a sufficient condition of it being a part of the larger social body or socius, hailed into an animistic social being through becoming marked. Guattari finds evidence for this in tattoos and other initiatory markings but the claim is much stronger since the collective assemblages that produce subjectivity contain also other souls and spirits that, just as in the sense of a tattoo, inscribe upon the subject a belonging that is endemic to a specific social assemblage. What is more, this entails a process of subjective formation resulting in not only a social belongingness, being-with a communal group, but also very literally a reconfigured subjectivity as such in so far as nonhuman entities that traverse the subject are heterogeneous, bearing different properties, and, as a result, may be melded or fused with the subject during its ontogenetic and mutation process. Following the literary filiations of the chthulucene given earlier, a Guattarian animism may be paired with the specular and “fictive” logics of the Necronomicon by using it as a Lydian-stone to unpack the kind of worlding that is developing. There are several senses in which this is helpful. First, the historiographic, authentic, and discursive aura that surround the book is thoroughly undecided, which is to say it is spectacular in the sense that this term has been deployed so far, caught in a flow of contradictory signifying systems that leave its reality status uncertain. One can see the evidence for this in the way the book is fetishized such that it not only has a particular mystique and, indeed, infamy among certain circles but also more strictly speaking, because its fidelity is precisely toward furthering such affects and effects (indulging in the ascription of intention, for a bit). Compare this to the more general notion of the spectacle, which as Bottici (2014) says, “there is indeed something like a systemic distortion inscribed in the very nature of spectacles. A  spectacle has to entertain, and if it fails to do so it ceases to be a spectacle” (113). In this context, the spectacle refers to the semiotically saturated nature of the current conditions of emergence that give rise to a plenitude of universes of reference available to subjectivity. The spectacle, in other words, sets the predicates of capitalist governance, subjection, and the like by operating in the register of signifying systems

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of value. A  perhaps relevant and contemporary example of the nature of the spectacle can be seen in the rise of celebrity politics in recent history in the United States and elsewhere. That is, the distinction between a reality television show and the news media evaporates, the difference between the statesman and the celebrity becomes blurred, and the content produced overly sensationalizes all in the service of inciting the population through a form of mediatization that is more in the league of brainwashing than it is with any kind of artistic entertainment. By contrast, in place of the docility inherent to the spectacle, the Necronomicon frustrates through encryption, hidden diagrammatic keys, and possibly spurious onto-productions. Therefore, it is not so much that the text is a minoritarian literary form (its collective epistemology position being irrelevant) that adds an additional layer of spectacularization,11 but rather it is the text’s accessibility, ability, or inability to generate machinic sense, that foregrounds it in a speculative way. Second, the diagrammatics of the text are such that, following the logic of Guattari, they are capable of producing new asignifying entities, in the sense of the text’s theogony in the overarching Cthulhu mythos as well as its more “superficial” and cosmetic literary and discursive evocations. These new asignifying entities are invoked or conjured from the text itself and take on a life of their own. In this context, these would be the beings that the Necronomicon encrypts through sigils and other logographic or hieroglyphic ways of writing. This adds a “productive” dimension to Haraway’s chthulucene in so far as it ontologically links the cthulhu monsters to subjectivity, not as tout court tropes, but following the Lovecraftian logic, as dialogical, communal, and indeed uncanny nonhumans that exist in an animistically conceived world. Following Guattari (2013) here, the kind of linking this entails is commensurable with “bodies without organs, or logics of existential Territories, [which] have this particularity: that their objects are ontologically ambiguous, they are bifaced objects—subjects that can neither be discernibilized nor discursivized as figures represented on a background of coordinates of representation. Thus, they cannot be apprehended from the outside; one can only accept them, take them upon oneself, through an existential transfer” (40). This “existential transfer” renders these figures as more than just literary in so far as they can be involved, intimately, with the production of subjectivity. This final point, enfleshing these beings in materiality, resonates with the familiar gesture of grounding Lovecraft’s oeuvre in the affect of fear and draws a clear category distinction between a paradigm that takes seriously the propositions and conclusions being argued here, and other more humanistic,

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liberal, utopian, and idealistic conceptions about futurity, symbiosis, animistics, and semiotics more generally. Case in point, Bennett (2001) argues for a revived understanding of the modern world on the basis of enchantment approaching a similar position to the present one but ultimately falling into what could be called a “smooth ontology of symbiosis”—notice her immediate gesture to repress fear, But fear cannot dominate if enchantment is to be, for the latter requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience; it is a state of interactive fascination, not fall-to-your-knees awe. Unlike enchantment, overwhelming fear will not be calm and intensify perception but only shut it down. The mood I’m calling enchantment involves, in the first instance, a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that you did not expect and are not fully prepared to engage. Contained within this surprise state are (1) a pleasurable feeling of being charmed by the novel and as yet unprocessed encounter and (2) a more unheimlich (uncanny) feeling of being disrupted or torn out of one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition. (Bennett 2001: 5, emphasis in original)

The above quotation suggests a certain logical antagonism in Bennett’s definition of enchantment. That is, it seems as though she wants to restrict fear to the exclusionary register of affect that would preclude giving it any ontological or existential primacy. This claim is grounded through the sensuality of perception of the sensory-psychic-intellectual apparatus of which fear seems to be an abjected form of erotics—simply, fear shuts down enchanted experience. Bennett’s enchantment lacks any kind of specularity by foregrounding sensual experience as a priori. One could read this as resultant of the motivation to repress fear: spectacleimage production is antithetical (disconnected from) an enchanted being-with, that is, anything manufactured, artificial, or produced is to be feared. As a counterpoint, Bottici (2014) reworks the concepts of the imagination and imaginary and the spectacle into her own idea of the imaginal that “emphasizes the centrality of images, rather than the faculty or the context that produces them; therefore, it does not make any assumptions about the individual or social character of such a faculty” (5). Thus, the imaginal is a kind of given featuring more so than sensual experience in any kind of world making therein giving it its spectacular character. This is in contradistinction to Bennett’s “one’s default sensory-psychic-intellectual disposition,” which is foregrounded by a sensual, put more precisely, embodied experience. As the name suggests, the chthulucene, in an animistic sense, takes fear, dread, alterity, monstrosity, and so on as necessary conditions for the production of

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enchantment and for the place that subjectivity has in this neoanimistic world. It seems appropriate to link the chthulucene with other Lovecraftian sites of inspiration. Indeed, I have proposed the Necronomicon as a privileged literary and historical artifact that captures the specular logics of the chthulucene. This begets what could be called a spectacular animism. The term spectacular centers animism in a mediatized sense such that it is radically engaged in a semiosis that reorganizes signifying systems through an invocation of asignifying diagrammatics (glyphs, blueprints, games, and so on, a process of divination in regard to subjective formation) while simultaneously taking seriously the ceremonial and performative power of this very process—as a global media spectacle in the Situationist sense. Indeed, this occurs not just on a planetary scale, but on a literal cosmological scale through the incorporation of beings of all kinds, intraterrestrial, interterrestrial, extraterrestrial, supraterrestrial, and so forth—the semantic valences found around the signifier entities becoming processually “knotted-up,” intermixed, apportioned, initiated, and melded. Terrestriality is already a failed category.

The Mechanosphere and Post-Mediatic Subjectivities Machines are not totalities enclosed upon themselves. They maintain determined relations with a spatiotemporal exteriority, as well as with universes of signs and fields of virtuality . . . constitut[ing] a mechanosphere surrounding our biosphere—not as a constraining yoke of exterior armor, but as an abstract, machinic efflorescence, exploring the future of humanity. Félix Guattari (1996: 267–8)

If the prior section sought to chart a cartography using tropes that are derived from a more monstrous subset of mediatization, in what follows, the mechanical will be given further substantial treatment. This analysis will take its lead from the present state of affairs of the planet, its ongoing population with machines, and the connection that subjectivity has to the technological. The concept that names such a problematic is what both Guattari and Deleuze called the mechanosphere. The mechanosphere is another dimension connected to and covering over the biosphere of the planet that is strictly technological and mechanical. The interaction or interlinking between the biosphere or, more specifically, subjectivity with the mechanosphere represents the most pressing ethical and significant issue facing not only theoretical or conceptual problems

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but, with regard to the production of subjectivity, also material and embodied subjective enactments in the world. In order to first get ahold of how the biosphere and the mechanosphere are interlinked, the notion of what Guattari (2011) calls assemblages of enunciation is helpful. For Guattari, subjectivity is never a static or enclosed being but is, rather, a bundle of assemblages that are plugged into and connected to other assemblages, which are held together by the fibrous nature of asignification. Importantly, the production of subjectivity is interconnected to such an extent with its outside world that it undergoes ever increasing diachronic reconfigurations that remain in tandem with developments and advances in science, technology, and culture. In fact, a lack of fidelity to remain abreast or “immanent” with these advances begets a subjectivity that is not only reactionary, in the sense of slipping into paranoiac and regressive formations, but is also subjected or enslaved by these very technoscientific modifications. Thus, subjective production contains within itself a certain inherent motivation to forge assemblages of enunciation that interface with the processual complexification of the technoscientific apparatus in a way that will allow for lacunae of singularity and liberatory practices to emerge. In this way, a progression toward the post-media era and the neoteric subjectivities that go with it, envisioned by Guattari (2009), must be charted through and beyond current postmodernist waters whereupon it arrives at a “pour une éthique des médias” (Genosko 2002:  38)—an ethics of the media. Late in his life, Guattari turned his attention to the creation of this post-media era. In the 1980s, Guattari saw the technoindustrial dominance of capitalism come to fruition, how the invisible and insidious tentacles of globalism, with its abstract semiological machines, took over the globe and, by proxy, its citizens, which must have had a profound impact on the theoretical contributions that he wanted to make. The final portion of his work is concerned with a new and animistically inspired post-media era that is foregrounded by ecological health and the well-function of the planet’s natural and nonhuman systems. As Guattari (2009), at least at the time, understands the temperature of academic discourse, citing Jean-Francis Lyotard, the postmodern condition is constitutive of the collapse of the grand narratives of legitimation that have sustained the teleological progress of modernity through the use of mythoontotheological frameworks that bestowed meaning, purpose, or even utility to sociality and programmatic projects of the collective. Likewise, Guattari reads Jean Baudrillard in a similar critical and skeptical way. That is, for Baudrillard, the social and political spheres are traps, structurally language games, that entail

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a certain determinism and resignation with regard to current hegemonic powers and modes of subjection. By contrast, Guattari’s position is unequivocal here in that he laments what he calls the suspicion of the socius inherent in philosophy such that it fails to adequately articulate both the animistic and mechanical nature of subjectivity. Put more technically, Guattari sees the problem with the type of theorizing germane to postmodernism as not anchored in realism in some way (neoanimism is a kind of realism) and as being fundamental to processes of subjective production that have beset upon subjectivity paranoiac formations that individuate, isolate, and segmentize populations ultimately making subjectivity more amenable to commoditization and subjection. It is precisely in this sense that Guattari (2009) defines postmodernity as “nothing more than the final spasms of modernism, that it is a reaction and, to a certain extent, a mirror of the formalist and reductionist abuses of the latter, from which it ultimately isn’t really any different” (292). That is to say that instead of being a restructuring, revision, or correction of the modernist project, postmodernism is actually its logical conclusion whereby the narratives of legitimation alluded to earlier are fully and utterly debased of their power thereby rendering assemblages, especially signification and coding, amenable to capitalistic capture (cf. similar arguments made by, for example, Habermas 1998; Jameson 1991). To state it in more technical language, the insidious adeptness of capitalism has thoroughly deterritorialized all local and particularized systems of value and meaning while, simultaneously, re-inscribing market worth in their stead. Is not the unprecedented erosion of minoritarian produced signification and other various assemblages ominous of the accelerating efficiency that globalism has managed to deploy? And, further, is not this erosion process akin to some strands of postmodernism, which, according to Guattari (2009), constitute “the paradigm of all submissions, of all compromises with the current status quo” (294)? The pernicious bed fellowship that postmodernism has with capitalism helps frame what Guattari means by the post-media era in a twofold sense: first, for Guattari, molecular pockets of revolution or transversalist assemblages are “structurally” always available within any given machine but only on the basis of their collective intensities. In other words, the suspicion of the socious visà-vis a postmodernism detached from all predicates that would give it material consistency never totalizes in enveloping sociality and, furthermore, this remainder of totalization is the precise engine by which a line of flight might become hyper-cathected and jettison off. The symptoms of the postmodern condition belie something other that has not been territorialized by the coding

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process of capitalism. These secrets, the alterities in capitalism, how it is blind to its own logic in a certain manner, contain an asemiotic intensity that can create a “power-sign” launching itself thereby going toward creating a process of subjectivation—such would be the monstrosity embedded, yet disavowed within normalizing signifying systems. Second and building on this first point, the post-media transition strictly does not mean an abandonment of informatic, telematic, mediatic, and so forth assemblages of enunciation—rather the exact opposite! It will be exclusively through the channels of technological and cybernetic proliferations and interweavings that will give birth to the post-media era along with its unique assemblages of enunciation, subjectivities, and processes of subjective formation. This is in firm contradistinction to conservative polemics within the humanities and the academy, which reactionary position themselves against technological complexification, for example, a return to the Earth, a nontechnological anthropocentrism, subjective innocence in regard to alterity (cf. Bennett 2001). Guattari’s point is that these latter (ab)reactions, while understandable in a sense, are nevertheless paradigmatic of the postmodern milieu and its implicit and therefore all the more cunning cynicism, docility, and conservativism. As an antidote, Guattari develops the concept of the post-media era or post-mediatic subjectivity strictly not in the sense that postmodernism gives to the “post” but as an ironism and way out of the mass mediatic alienations that proliferate via these very postmodern discourses. As Genosko (2002) wits in the following example, this means to subvert “the cliche of television as a plug-in ‘hypnotic drug’ ” (38). To put it plainly, post-media assemblages of enunciation create a space from which “singularity may emerge from the reigning seriality” (Genosko 2002: 23) and out of alienative mediatic machines. In contradistinction to the deterministic circumlocutions that proliferate surrounding machines like television and computers, Guattari (2009) is adamant “that human freedom and creativity are [not] inexorably condemned to alienation by mechanical procedures” (297). That is to say that not only are so-called molecular revolutions possible but also even stronger, that the determinism of postmodernism is a last-ditch attempt to cover over and therefore foreclose such revolutionary potentials. How, then, does one go about “transversalizing” mediatization wherein its oversaturation with apparatuses of capture unceasingly bombard singularity emergences from all sides? Guattari parses this aporia nicely when asking: “How can the singularity of mediatic expression be recovered? Here’s the paradox: if it is mediatic, it is not singular. And yet it is necessary that it is at once mediatic and singular” (as cited in Genosko 2002: 23). Teasing an answer whereby such

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revolutionary practices might arise, Guattari (2009) places his bets on “minoritary groups which are the only ones, even today, that have become aware of the mortal risk, for humanity” (300). Minoritarian groups are social formations that have not yet become fully coopted by the coding process of capitalism and its powers of subjection, even if their commodification is almost a principled certainty under globalization. Examples of these kinds of groups include the lesbian, gay, and transgender community (Sedgwick 1990), fringe spiritual groups that have their roots in the African diaspora (Glazier 2019), and especially groups other than these that have remained subterranean, unnamable, and esoteric. In this way, it is precisely those collective assemblages of enunciation who have not only managed to shake loose from the mediatic trace but, moreover, who use these very machines as a way of singularizing and, in some cases, transversalizing the formations of power that aim to keep them subjugated. Take, for instance, the frustration that the deferral inherent within the LGBTQ+ acronym creates in the nominalization process of subjection—pushing this frustration further provides but one example of how to begin launching an arts of existence, carving out a unique identity within signifying processes that want to categorize and understand, a kind of refusal to be named. On the level of theorizing subjectivity, there is a twofold process unfolding for assembling subjectivity into a post-mediatic structure: first, the infiltration of corporatism into hitherto latent or untapped fields of experience is not only not blocked, arrested, nor deflected, but is actually welcomed in so far as its energetic deployments into these pockets of libidinal resources can be siphoned toward a futurity that subsumes itself into nourishing singularizing subjectivities instead of upholstering institutions. Second, this “welcoming” is binding such that a lack of fidelity to its processual unfolding throws subjectivity back into the collective mediatic cesspool of alienation, regression, and paranoia. The message, here, is clear: post-media subjectivities will have an unconscious that is oriented toward the future and, along the way, be amalgamating and forging singularization out of the conceptual tools at hand—the ones which have the most socioenergetic power (Guattari 2011). This singularization is the uniqueness that subjectivity has apart from normalizing sociality and forces of subjection. Through creating an identity out of signs that have the most social power and binding these signs to one’s own being using the fibers of asemiotics, one is able to traversalize signifying systems and ascend beyond the intelligibility that obscures their more encrypted meanings. This latter claim of “socioenergetic power” begs the question of adjournment. That is to say, what instruments constitute the “best” means of singularization in

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a given society? It is precisely because of the way in which technology, how it is taken up, intermixes the actual and virtual that impregnates it with such a faculty to disrupt molar processuality; namely, by bringing into accord the actual and virtual in an expansive and speculative way. On such a configuration, Deleuze states, “the relationship between the actual and the virtual is not the same as that established between two actuals . . . [it] forms an acting individuation or a highly specific and remarkable singularization which needs to be determined case by case” (Deleuze and Parnet: 152, emphasis added). This “highly specific and remarkable singularization” is resultant from “pure virtuality” particularizing itself into the actual while, simultaneously, allowing the material realities of the environment to “work on” and “direct” this very particularization process.12 Guattari (1995) comes to call this process transversality, which may or may not result in singularities. That is not to say that every interface with technological apparatuses results in a transversal relationship between the apparatus and subjectivity. In fact, most of the time, the exact opposite is that case; namely, with the plenitude of technologies propagated by corporatism, the actuality of the machine “grounds” the actual–virtual circuit in capitalist recursion, to use Deleuze’s terms. That is, the circuit can be completed in two ways wherein “the actual refers to the virtuals as to other things in the vast circuits where the virtual is actualized; sometimes the actual refers to the virtual as its own virtual, in the smallest circuits where the virtual crystallizes with the actual” (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 152). In the majority of cases, the production of subjectivity is under the sway of the former, which is reinforced by capitalistic territorializations, for example, of innovating and selling new versions of the self in order to make a profit. An example of this can be found in the kind of credentialism intrinsic to professionalism under late capitalism. One must continually pursue further training or education in order to maintain or achieve specific licensure that then gives subjectivity access to a more reputable and profitable world. Yet, this pursuit is always empty in the sense that its telos is tied explicitly to the furthering of subjectivity’s professional attainments—oppose this to a temporality that remains more in the register of the virtual and therefore more malleable by the desires of the subject. But even more dangerous than this iterative formation of the actual– virtual circuit are the reactionary assemblages of enunciation that are created such that, in a sense, the circuit is barred altogether. While an immanentist ontology necessitates an always already interface between the virtual and actual, singularizing kinds of assemblages are different in degree than the recursive loop created by the corporatism of technological proliferation, which produces

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assemblages of enunciation that are most typically capitalist, incentivist, or self-serving. That is, the latter subjectivities exile themselves to a quasi-pure virtuality, thereby inducing a certain idealism that fosters the conservativism of their position, for example, a return to wholeness, the flesh-technical distinction, television as a hypnotic drug, and so on. In this way, the actual is “pergatorized” in so far as such a banishment results in a paradoxical kind of reification of the actual. This purgatory state freezes the original play of the world, the access that subjectivity has with regard to its animistic entwinement with other beings, such that instead of placing emphasis on the process of identity creation and subjectivation through a kind of interpretative decryption process, subjectivity becomes consumed by normalizing signifying systems including the pursuit of profit, the service of goods, and the desire to become like others. Where do these assemblages of enunciation, which it to say the polyvocality of subjectivity, ultimately derive their ability to produce and reproduce themselves? Given the actual and virtual distinction laid out previously, how is it that subjectivity is able to maintain its virtual nomadism while still having an actual presence that does not fall back into a virtuality that is not its own, that is, in other words, a mode of subjection? The kind of virtuality that is immanent to the becoming of subjectivity results in singularities that uniquely give subjectivity its own ways of being in the world. By contrast, a virtuality that is not one’s own, that has become coopted by apparatuses of capture, interlinks subjectivity through prevailing and normalizing social and technological forces with a hegemony that siphons the energy of singularity away from subjectivity and toward its own perpetuation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call this source, as alluded to earlier, the mechanosphere. In A Thousand Plateaus, they describe the mechanosphere as a specific kind of biological, yet structurally mechanical, source of becoming that is plugged into assemblages of enunciation covering the globe. They write, There is no biosphere or noosphere, but everywhere the same Mechanosphere. If one begins by considering the strata in themselves, it cannot be said that one is less organized than another. This even applies to a stratum serving as a substratum: there is no fixed order, and one stratum can serve directly as a substratum for another without the intermediaries one would expect there to be from the standpoint of stages and degrees (for example, microphysical sectors can serve as an immediate substratum for organic phenomena). Or the apparent order can be reversed, with cultural or technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 69)

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The mechanosphere, as the above quotation indicates, is so interchangeable and transposable as to make natural kinds not necessarily obsolete since naturality still exists as one assemblage of enunciation among others, but at least subservient to the mechanic fluidity that goes into connecting beings of all kinds on the planet. This is, importantly, not merely a conceptual intervention that both Deleuze and Guattari make with regard to the ecological, economic, or cosmological discourses. In other words, what they are describing is to be taken very literally, the fact that subjectivity is plugged into this overarching ur-abstract machine. The production of subjectivity, as it relates to modes of subjection, becomes arbitrated by the capriciousness with which the mechanosphere operates. In a very similar spirit, Dukes (2016) articulates such a changeability in the following way, “the networks of machines (real and abstract) that now cover the Earth intervene in its systems, rendering obsolete any rigid demarcation between these strata. Instead, there are only flows (semiotic, social, material) that constitute interpenetrating bodies” (517). One is tempted, here, to invoke the tropes of electricity and energy with regard to the term flows. Namely, specifically on the level of subjectivity, what is clear is that the virtuality of the mechanosphere, that it is dimensionally overlaid on the normative modes of subjective production, suggests the extreme difficulty in overcoming processes of subjection—not that the mechanosphere is totalizing therein forbidding subjectivity to escape its adeptness at virtuality, but that in order to actualize itself in an immanent manner, induce a subjectivation, subjectivity must pass through the actual–virtual circuit that the mechanosphere arbitrates. The post-media era, to return to what Guattari called a time yet to come, would be an animistic rebirth of the mechanosphere. This rebirth would be a dawning that no longer creates hierarchies within the ever-sliding assemblages of enunciation that cover the planet. Those forms of control that went into using the mechanosphere to ecologically suffocate and siphon the life energy from beings on the Earth would be overturned and reappropriated. The production of subjectivity, in other words, would proceed not from the mechanical down but, rather, would gather its energetics from its animistic entwinement with others and through its ability to self-fashion and renew itself against the backdrop of its place in time and space. This would truly be a “New Earth.”

5

Linguistics

This chapter will attempt to trace the linguistic influences that feed into possible modes of subjective production. The first task will be to utilize the distinction between modes of subjection and processes of subjectivation and then to trace how this distinction plays out through some of the literary and linguistic antecedents that have informed this theory with regard to how subjectivity is produced.

Subjection, Subjectivation, and Glossematics The editors of recently published anthology on Foucault called Foucault and the Making of Subjects (Cremonesi et  al. 2016) suggest a relatively hard and fast distinction between subjectivation (subjectivation) and subjection (assujettissement). What this entails is that this couplet is often played out in some version throughout Foucault’s writings. In his earlier work, as an example, the philosopher seems to be more interested in modes of subjection, which are the repressive, constraining, and policing forms of power used to control and manipulate subjectivity. In his later work, Foucault shifts more to an analysis of subjectivation, the creative and self-fashioning modes of power or how subjectivity re-deploys forms of subjection. The authors of the anthology are careful to note, however, that where there is subjection, there is also subjectivation, and vice versa. They write, with certain resonances to Guattari, that “from a Foucaultian [sic] point of view, we suggest that the issue of autonomy—not as a condition or a status, but as an ethico-political engagement—cannot be thought of detached from the twofold process of subjection and subjectivation through which subjects are constituted” (Cremonesi et al. 2016: 3). The subject’s capacity for freedom, what these authors have technically conceptualized as autonomy, is dictated by the

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vacillations between subjection and subjectivation, then. It is not the case that subjectivity is hopelessly at the whims of the social, cultural, or institutional power of subjection because, just in the moment of molding subjectivity in this repressive way, there appears a space of creative potential—namely, subjectivation. To put the thesis succinctly, in this space, subjectivity results from a “strategical interplay between techniques of government and techniques of the self ” (Cremonesi et al. 2016: 7). Guattari is much more interested in subjectivation, as developed above, as opposed to an early Foucauldian understanding of modes of subjection. In a stricter technical sense, regarding formal disciplinary boundaries, Guattari’s theory of subjectivation falls under the patronage of a linguistics of enunciation or sometimes called enunciative pragmatics. To submit evidence that hints at this, there are the citations, by Guattari and Deleuze, for Louis Hjelmslev and glossematics in Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987). In the former monography, they write that “Louis Hjelmslev’s linguistics stands in profound opposition to the Saussurean and post-Saussurean undertaking . . . he tends to fashion a purely immanent theory of language . . . that causes form and substance, content and expression to flow according to the flows of desire” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 242). Glossematics, while lauded in both of these works as an alternative to structuralism, must also be understood, or imported, within the overall and general theory deployed by the texts. Glossematics would need to become reappropriated toward more pragmatic and less analytic or scientific ends. Perhaps one way to get at this is by referring to the famous first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus simply called “Introduction:  Rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In it, Deleuze and Guattari make attempts to name exactly what they are doing thereby helping the reader to situate their project within certain academic and disciplinary coordinates. They give us the following homologies: “RHIZOMATICS = SCHIZOANALYSIS = STRATOANALYSIS = PRAGMATICS = MICROPOLITICS” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 2, emphasis in original). It is clear from this formula of homologies that their approach contains a strong drive toward pragmatics or an analysis of the contextual and most contemporaneous phenomena possible. Later in the introduction, they, indeed, pair the following: “RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4, emphasis in original). All of these equivocations are not meant to obfuscate or frustrate the reader since what Deleuze and Guattari are doing is so profoundly new and different it requires an alternative practice of naming, one that does not adhere to a single signifier and a quick catchphrase. As a result,

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Deleuze and Guattari are hoping that these various attempts to christen their approach will guide the reader by providing at least something to hold onto as one delves, further, into the meat and bones of the theory itself. Returning to the earlier emphasis on linguistics and now linking it with the pragmatic dimension of their approach, it becomes clear that glossematics is, in itself, not sufficient to describe or furnish the concepts for what Deleuze and Guattari want to do. Consequently, and the later work of Guattari is a strong indication of this, a more accurate way to talk about how this theory understands subjectivity, the means by which it is produced, is through a linguistics of enunciation. This contains both the pragmatic aspects of schizoanalysis as well as the inherently linguistic or polyphonic nature of subjectivity.

Enunciative Pragmatics One way to advance a Guattarian notion of the production of subjectivity is through parsing it with a branch in the field of semiotics and linguistics called enunciative pragmatics or the linguistics of enunciation (énonciation). Such an approach can perhaps be outlined, at least cursorily, by contrasting it with what it is not. Angermuller (2014), in a properly methodological textbook and manual called Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis:  Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics, writes that this field, Can be said to be directed against three theoretical adversaries: the humanist, who believes in autonomous subjects as the source and origin of social and linguistic activity; the realist, who believes in objective realities that exist independently of discourse; and the hermeneuticist, who believes in a world of transparent and homogeneous meaning. (Angermuller 2014: 5)

There are, certainly, nuances to be found not only within the linguistics of enunciation but also within these three so-called adversaries, for example, a Guattarian take on enunciative pragmatics is going to be idiosyncratic and, therefore, slightly distinct from, say, Angermuller’s version. What is more, given the strong psychoanalytic antecedents that shaped Guattari’s thought, it may be helpful to place Lacan at the head of Guattari’s theoretical interlocutors. One look at The Anti-Œdipus Papers1 (2006) will go a long way toward spelling this out. Indeed, many of the preeminent French theorists during the middle of the twentieth century became disillusioned with the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure (1993). Part of the contention was with the universalizing

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tendencies of Saussure’s theory such that the logical structures that could be discerned from disparate phenomena could continually be pushed-out toward articulating larger and larger metalinguistic frameworks making such analyses all the more generally applicable. In this same vein, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) anthropological comparative approach applied certain structuralist concepts to understand indigenous sociological communities and how logical types might be said to be the same among and between various tribes or groups. The desire to move away from these approaches contributed to a new form of linguistics and semiotics that relied on a more discrete, local, or agential form of analysis. Enunciative pragmatics is one such alternative to structuralism. A linguistics of enunciation aims to be more pragmatic in nature. This means that, according to Angermüller (2011), such an understanding of pragmatics “deals with meaning-producing practices (including symbolic acts and interactive processes) as well as with knowledge mobilized in the interpretive process (including genres, contexts and settings)” (2992). Thus, the focus is taken off grand or metatheoretical constructions in favor of the ways in which the utterance is produced or constructed within the moment. At the level of the concept of subjectivity, then, enunciative pragmatics can be said to break with, in a broad and historical sense, more essentialist traditions by placing the emphasis on the enacted nature of subjective formation. Such an emphasis brings with it a metaphorical taxonomy that includes words like gesture, speed, flow, and affect. This is different than the more universalist ontology found in Heidegger and the abstract structures of lack located in Lacanian theory.2 Enunciative pragmatics understands subjectivity distinct from modernist traditions, partially, because it does not situate the subject in relation to universalist structures found outside of its being; rather, on account of a linguistics of enunciation, subjectivity is roaming, networked, and multiple. According to Angermuller (2014), given this account, “discourse is considered to be a linguistically encoded practice of positioning oneself and others and creating discursive relationships with others within a play of polyphonic voices. As opposed to a structuralist vision of a grand discourse from above” (4). In a similar poststructuralist spirit and as a helpful phrase to understand the polyphonic voices of discourse, Angermuller (2014) says that “generally speaking, enunciative pragmatics asks how utterances (énoncé) mobilize sources and voices, speakers and points of view, locutors and enuciators at the moment of enunciation” (1). In this way, it is not the case that all of these many languages arise from the subject itself, but rather the opposite is true. Namely, subjectivity as such is these very voices; or, in other words, the function of subjectivity is to

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mobilize these voices, pulling them from its sociological, ecological, historical, and so on environments and co-constructions.

The Impact of Bakhtin To anchor this a bit, both Angermuller (2014) and Guattari (1995) agree on the importance of the Russian Formalist work of Mikhail Bakhtin as foundational to the field of enunciative pragmatics and this field’s conception and understanding of subjectivity. Enunciative pragmatics employs pervasively Bakhtin’s technical term of polyphony (полифония) (cf. Angermuller 2014). In the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin (1984) makes the case that what sets Dostoevsky apart as a great novelist and literary figure is the way that he employs and artfully constructs, in his writing, the instances of polyphony—a special case of polysemy or the many-meaning disseminatory nature of words and language. In the following excerpt from the just mentioned book, Bakhtin offers a definition of polyphony with regard, specifically, to the Dostoevsky’s texts. Bakhtin writes that, A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. (Bakhtin 1984: 6, emphasis in original)

It is in this way, then, that a traditional philosophical conception of the “event” or to rephrase this within linguistics, the utterance, is the product of equal and intersecting lines of meaning, each with its own world. Indeed, it is interesting that Bakhtin selects the word “consciousness” as a cornerstone to his definition of polyphony in as much as it implies a somewhat animistic or proto-subjective element to the utterance. Guattari (2013), living within this same ethos, no doubt, calls each of these discrete interstices universes of reference or universes of values. Contrast this with, as its most extreme inverted form, a positivist or strictly mathematical discourse whose implied axioms work toward stabilizing, homogenizing, and communicating meaning in its most linear, causal, and objective way. Bakhtin’s point, however, is not just that polyvocality is hallmark

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of a philosophy of aesthetics with regard to textuality or literarity; but, rather, that polyvocality is, on principle, the way in which language, meaning, worlds, and objects function and interact with each other. To state it differently, the strong claim here bypasses an aesthetic judgment and moves toward stating an a priori structure about cosmology as such. This is an important point for the reason that polyvocality grounds the way in which different worlds can come into being in the first place. Such a claim arises out of Bakhtin’s literary perspective in the sense that he sees the play of language in textuality as comparable to the way in which materiality is constructed. Even though Bakhtin did not explicitly relate polyvocality to the production of subjectivity, Guattari takes up this thread and advances a theory of subjectivity that is based upon assemblages of enunciation that are necessarily polyvocal in nature. Maurizio Lazzarato (2009), a neo-Guattarian and theorist of capital, among other things, reiterates the very real material stakes that polyvocality entails, not merely its relegation to a purely discursive register of polysemy, but the incorporation of the agential speaker with the other universes of reference. He argues that, In the theory of the speech act, speakers are not first and foremost linguistic or psychological subjects, but “possible worlds”—(singularities or existential cristallisations—in the language of Guattari). They occupy “chronotopes” (blocs of space-time, “existential territories,” in the language of Guattari), and these are absolutely irreducible. (Lazzarato 2009: para. 6)

The chronotope (xронотоп), that Lazzarato mentions above, is a concept taken from Bakhtin (1994a) and his philosophy of language and theory of literature. It is often used to refer to how discourse molds and warps spacetime to fit and to produce a specific and contextualized form of situatedness. To put this in terms that Guattari would use, a chronotope helps name the universes of reference or value that the world of subjectivity inhabits and, furthermore, how these signifying systems are normalizing and subject to revision. That is to say, in contradistinction to an Enlightenment project of producing a maxim or law that could be applied in a universal sense—for example, Kant’s categorical imperative or Newton’s theory of gravity—Bakhtin, perhaps because of his literary filiations, was astute to the circumstantial and material malleability of spacetime. In this way, the “possible worlds” that Lazzarato (2009:  para. 6)  mentions above are mobilized by the polyvocality of the subject into a possible chronotope, into an existential world that is created by the many voices and meanings that speak through it. The material aspect of polyphony comes through in the very moment

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of the speech act, when the subject consolidates the voices into an enunciation, making itself an interlocutor in a language community. This shared aspect of polyvocality thereby goes toward solidifying the chronotope of that particular space and time. How this interacts with polyvocality is through the current epochal enframing generated out of planetary activities, human culture, and the shifting but not necessarily progressive politics of the cosmological situation in general—what Foucault (1971) called an épistémè. More specifically, the popular chronotopes that may have been in circulation defining that era’s concepts and cartographies, do not just suddenly disappear; instead, since they too are by their very nature polyphonic, they may quiet down, receding into the background, but, nonetheless, always remain accessible as possible universes of reference, a resource to be called upon if necessary. Pam Morris (1994) says just as much but also emphasizes how these chronotopes are still axiologically charged (e.g., national socialism, the commodity fetish, etc.), therein making their return a political threat to the current chronotopic regime:  “[Bakhtin] argues that [the chronotopes] migrate into subsequent literary forms still preserving their ideological values and retaining the capacity to revitalize themselves in response to conducive historical conditions” (18). Bringing this back to enunciative pragmatics and the concept of subjectivity more generally, one can see now why a linguistics of enunciation focuses specifically on the production of subjectivity:  even some of the Enlightenment’s most privileged categories, like place and temporality, are necessarily subject to interpretation, appropriation, and political forces that dictate the rules by which—indeed, the spacetime by which—subjectivities and utterances are allowed to unfold. In Marxist terms, Lazzarato describes that this mechanism is internal to the utterance such that the polyvocality of subjectivity is precisely the subject’s attempt to mobilize or appropriate all of these different voices and this attempt is strictly equivalent to the production of the utterance. He writes that “what makes us turn words and linguistic propositions into complete utterances, into a “totality,” are pre-individual affective forces and social and ethico-political forces that whilst being external to language are actually inside the utterance” (Lazzarato 2009: para. 4). And, to emphasize this point, Angermuller (2014) concludes that “enunciative pragmatics prolongs the anti-humanist intellectual heritage of structuralism and poststructuralism and breaks with subjectivist conceptions of meaning-making” (4). In this sense, then, a Guattarian understanding of the production of subjectivity is both a systemic kind of theory, taking into account

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the layering of polyphonic voices that construct subjectivity, while also initiating, by its very constitution, a counter-hegemonic mode of subjectivation. We can see this, returning again to one of Guattari’s favorite literary theorists and our previous interlocutor, in both the staging of the carnivalesque and the phenomenon of heteroglossia, as developed by Bakhtin. The latter of the two, heteroglossia (разноречие, different-speech-ness; Bakhtin, 1994c), represents a challenge to currently ensconced chronotopes or privileged and preferred voices coming out of the polyphony of the subject. That is, heteroglossia is a feature of language and meaning that counteracts the centrifugal forces that work to hypostatize ideological structures and ways of being. What is meant by chronotope in this context could, on a broad scale, be the outdated paradigms of Newtonian physics—how the heteroglossia of quantum theory, for instance, shifted the common way of understanding place and time. With regard to privileged voices in the polyphony of assemblages of enunciation, heteroglossia cuts modes of subjection through the new voices or differences that it injects into the routinized way subjectivity is produced. In this way, heteroglossia “allows speakers to achieve a similar position of outsidedness to a language. It is possible to recognize the ideological contours of one social discourse by outlining it against other discourses” (Morris 1994: 16). This is important for Guattari, or any theoretical and practical system that desires to be revolutionary or critical in nature, since it permits the possibility of re-appropriation, of changing the system specifically at the level of subjectivity or interpretation. Contrast this with the grand revolutionary theories of Marx or Hegel who may or may not conclude, depending on the follower that you talk to, that subjectivity has the power to resist enormous ideological forces that work against it. As a contrarian figure, perhaps it is the ethico-aesthetics of the clown that most paradigmatically express this revolutionary potential for Bakhtin. He writes that “on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth [emphasis added], ridiculing all “languages” and dialects . . . where all “languages” were masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face” (Bakhtin 1981: 279). Ridiculing by no means means mocking or making fun of; instead the clown, through the fact that it has an outside and satirical distance, unleashes a heteroglossia that slices and stratifies the stasis and normativity of the most popular language and meanings in play. The clown either renders these significations as non-sovereign—following Foucault’s (1980) order that “we need to cut off the King’s head” (121)—or paints a face on them, dressing them up in a way that “authenticates” them, exposing the farce through a certain subjective positioning.

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The figure of the clown represents an interesting case study for a theory of subjectivation and enunciative pragmatics in so far as it enacts a mimesis of the subject that is unequivocally not subjectivist (as per Angermuller 2014, earlier) but is really the exact opposite:  rejecting any kind of identity sedimentation and, instead, issues forth the edict, via its very embodiment, that “subterranean” significations are the cornerstones of the entire ideological and linguistic framework. What is more, given the pragmatic and material nature of the linguistics of enunciation, it follows that the clown, and its existential scripts and technologies, follows suit in terms of it being a very real form of embodiment that can be copied, appropriated, or put toward one’s own political or sociological agenda. This creates a heteroglossia that can “wash over a culture’s awareness of itself and its language, penetrate to its core, relativize the primary language system underlying its ideology and literature and deprive it of its naive absence of conflict” (Bakhtin 1981: 368). The foregoing is in contradistinction to linguistic theories that are more literary in nature such as structuralism and even semiotics as properly understood by the Frankfurt school (Adorno 1991). As further support for the linking of subterranean practices with heteroglossia, in queer studies, for example, Judith Halberstam (2011) in the book The Queer Art of Failure, urges the adoption of “low theory” work that would challenge what has historically been hegemonic standards operating not only scholastically, within the academy, but also culturally, through heteronormativity, phallocentrism, and so forth. Such a thesis comes very close to the anti-normativity of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. As a case in point, for Bakhtin (1981), “a certain latitude for heteroglossia exists only in the “low” poetic genres in the satiric and comic genres and others” (287). One way to talk about this kind of latitude that Bakhtin insinuates here is by placing it within the Foucauldian regime of disciplinary societies and how the degree of power is directly correlated to the need to police precisely in order to maintain this very power. In other words, these so-called “low genres” are able to escape, or at least elide, surveying and normalizing ideological power by not becoming intelligible to the language of the hegemonic structure—simply, by not being taken seriously.

Embodiment, Subjectivity, and the Carnival Humor, then, and its offshoots like revelry, bacchanalia, and subterfuge, become key practices in challenging the centrifugal and solidifying forces of

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dominant languages and meanings therein renewing normal and standardized subjectivities, by extension. This is the first point that Bakhtin wants to make in terms of the sheer power of the heteroglossia contained within these kinds of phenomena. The second point, is again, the fact that these are not literary motifs or devices, tout court—they are, over and above, embodied and material practices that have some kind of pragmatic or utilitarian end, even if that end is the pure pursuit of pleasure, laughter, or the mocking of high culture. The ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia (Rawson 2011) provides a concrete example of what Bakhtin articulates in theoretical language. During this festival the roles between slave and master were reversed such that the masters provided slaves with food and hospitality. The slaves were even permitted to issue orders and use obscenities. This all occurred around a great banquet that was created to show devotion to the god Saturn.3 Given this brief description of the festival, one can begin to get a sense of what Bakhtin means by the more theoretical language of the clown, heteroglossia, and the carnival. This is not just theory, in other words, since material practices that engage in these kinds of inversions and celebrations exist anthropologically and historically. As Morris (1994) points-out, the “carnival itself is not a literary phenomenon at all . . . [it is, rather] a symbolic network of concretely sensuous forms accumulating over a centuries-long tradition of popular festivals, carnivals, celebratory and seasonal rituals, market-place spectacles” (21). The carnival and the carnivalesque in Bakhtin shifts, then, the so-called “linguistic turn” that transpired in the arts and humanities during the transitional twentieth century back to embodiment and sociological materiality while still maintaining the importance of semiotics; the clown was given as an archetypal example of this. Returning to enunciative pragmatics and the production of subjectivity, Lazzarotto argues, in the spirit of Bakhtin, for the primacy of the body, which certainly can be talked about through its various psychoanalytic metaphors like drive, desire, partial-objects, and so on, but nonetheless is, by its very nature, a kind of “catachresis” of these metaphors—an absolute and privileged place or starting-point by which to construct a metaphorics in the first place. Lacan would certainly agree with this and, as Lazzarato seems to suggest, Guattari would by proxy, Linguistic exclamations that we learn can never replace or substitute the cry of pain of the body. Here lies the difference between linguistics and the philosophy of language:  pre-signifying corporeal semiotics (gestures, postures, moves, attitudes), the “universe of values” and existential territories, are part and parcel

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of the components of the utterance. They are, notably in Guattari, an autonomous power of the production of speech. (Lazzarato 2009: para. 13–4)

Perhaps the corporeal semiotics, listed above, is why Guattari, neo-Guattarian’s like Lazzarato, and linguists working on an enunciative pragmatics are able to invoke the quasi-humanistic notion of subjectivity at all. That is, and Bakhtin is unequivocal on this point here, the body of subjectivity is the site par excellence where the utterance is produced rendering the kind of metaphors, motifs, or signifiers that spill forth from it less and less energetic, containing less and less meaning, depending on the degree to which they are removed. Morris (1994), supporting this very claim, states in no uncertain terms that “Bakhtin stresses the sensuous, concrete forms of carnival gesture and ritual because its whole meaning derives from the physical materiality of the human body” (21). Indeed, this must connect, in some profound way, with the passing comments Guattari makes about his theory’s animistic sensibilities—perhaps, in its most sweeping sense, best understood through his concept of asignifying semiotics. Lazzarato, however, staying with the body, parses these animistic flavors through the voice. He writes that, “in the voice, we find again the ‘animism’ rivendicated [sic] by Guattari, that is to say, the taking sides in an ethico-political way in relation to others and the world” (Lazzarato 2009:  para. 10). The voice, on this account, has a certain power in pulling and stringing together the various polyphonic lines of meaning that go toward constructing and producing subjectivity. Remembering the nature of the clown, how its artifice injects a kind of monstrosity into normal subjective productions, reveals how the voice is never one’s to begin with, always being spoken through the subject by some mocking or terrifying other. In this way, subjectivity is really never human in any conventional sense that would give the category “human” consistency. Rather, the voices that go into an enunciative utterance are more overtly to be described as artificialized since they had to pass through the multi-vocal coming together of assemblages of enunciation. This process of artificialization is precisely what is “monstrous” in the constitution of subjectivity by the Other, the imp hiding behind the gloss of the kitsch, to refer to terms used previously. To stay in this cosmopolitical vein, what is idiotic in the clown also gives it the ability to elide the slipperiness of language in favor of a transversality that splices the signifier away from its referent therein escaping the play of discourse inherent to a conservative reading of postmodernism. Such would be a sort of posthumanism that still takes seriously the category of subjectivity as worthy of study all the while injecting this site with an other within the human,

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something that speaks out of the sheen of signifying systems and universes of reference. When meaning is created, at the level of the utterance, in this sense, the polyphony of subjectivity is collapsed into, what is known in schizoanalysis and other poststructuralist theories, a singularity, that is, “singularity arises from the evenemential nature of the utterance” (Lazzarato 2009: para. 16). Singularities allow subjectivity to speak on its own behalf, in a qualified sense, and go into the creation of its arts of existence, its auto-process of subjectivation. As such, social bonds can form and sociality can begin to take shape therein reifying the normativity of the signifying systems in circulation. Yet, in order to re-induce another instance of subjectivation, the carnivalesque is needed. This can be seen when Bakhtin suggests that there is a certain cosmopolitan or transegalitarian nature to the spectacle, a suspension of ideological strata, hierarchies, and caste lines and, indeed, even sometimes an inversion of these social roles whereby the lower classes are given political power and sovereignty for the duration of the event. With regard to the former, Bakhtin talks about this in terms of footlights, which are the lights that separate the audience and spectators from the actors and performers on the stage. He says that, the “carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators . . . carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates” (Bakhtin 1994b: 198). This messy and intertwined nature of carnival (messy in many senses of the term) blurs within its own chronotope or lived-experience stratifying lines by which to judge others, either in terms of social status or even, Bakhtin would argue, in terms of their literal positioned embodiment, that is, their clothing, faciality, gestural scripts, and so forth. Morris (1994) makes the point that “the notion of carnival is properly chronotopic in that it offers a spatial and temporal envisioning of human existence in the world. It is, however, an understanding quite different from the modern perception of human life” (21). As a point of difference, the chronotope that is deployed by capitalism is used in a strict ideological and economic sense in order to “schizophrenize” subjectivity such that time and space become categories that are used to dualistically divide and appropriate subjects. Chronotopes exist as a multiplicity in that they are not related historically to an epochal sense of progression, as with Foucault’s epistêmê wherein certain epistemological frameworks structure the way in which bodies and spaces are ordered. Rather, chronotopes are more immanently available to subjectivity since time and space are malleable in the foregoing sense, being able to be stretched and contracted depending on the way in which bodies interact with each other, the way in which

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subjectivation has been launched. As opposed to the immanent nature that is possible with chronotopes, capitalism, by contrast, produces subjectivities that are not only homogenized in their chronotope, all thinking in terms of separate planes of space and time as per the logic of the proletariat workday, but also attempts to shut up aberrant or anomalous chronotopes, like the carnival, in so far as they interfere with worker efficiency, productivity, or conformity. Guattari (2016) phrases this, in Lines of Flight, using more theoretical terms, when he states that “the categories of time and space, generally known as a priori and universal givens, despite the efforts of relativity, are the basic instruments that lead the capitalist mode of thought to polarize, to binarize, to ‘determinize’ its logical, scientific, and political approaches” (192). Thus, it would follow that the chronotope that can claim hegemony in the current global milieu is none other than the schizophrenic logic of capital since, as Guattari just reminded us, virtually all other approaches, logical, scientific, and political must follow from such an entranced way of envisioning space and time. As a mode to counter a prevailing chronotope, Guattari (2016) suggests that “a ‘machinic’ rupturing with this mode of thinking would begin by refusing the dichotomy between semiotic and material processes, would be led, if needs be, to deploy time and causality ‘in reverse’ ” (192) going on to point-out specific concepts in quantum theory, such as quarks and partons, as examples of challenging a modernist chronotope and its privileging of serial causality and “vulgar” timekeeping—to take a term used by Heidegger (1962). The undecidedness of some of these particles, when used as models or political fictions, helps to upset established and positivist theories that have become solidified into the dominate chronotope. What I am suggesting as the dominate chronotope contains the economics of capitalism and the hegemony of scientism. To use heteroglossia to challenge the solidification of these ways of approaching the world creates, much as quantum theory tries to describe, a spooky reality whose metaphorics would better be mined from the occult literature and the genre of horror than from engineering manuals or math books. What this entails for the production of subjectivity is the shifting of its producing chronotope toward models that work in a similar fashion as those delineated above. Deleuze and Guattari attempt to do precisely this, articulate a way in which to understand how subjectivity is produced. In their theory of rhizomatics or schizoanalysis, they describe how the refrain and faciality grant access to, through their decryption, a different topos that is ghostlier in nature. Guattari writes that “refrains, those crystals of time, facialities, those catalyzers of space, belong at one and the same time to the trees and the rhizomes constituted by intra- and

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inter-assemblage relations” (194). Therefore, the former, refrains, are more closely associated with the Enlightenment category of time while the latter, faciality, is closer in kind to space. Furthermore, as he indicates, it is not the case that a theory of the refrain or faciality could be developed to account for an a priori chronotope, one that would be applicable across every possible world. Instead, both the refrain and faciality demand, by the nature in which they are setup, to be analyzed in particularized and situated assemblages. Or, as Guattari (2016) says, “we repeat: faciality and refrain components do not fabricate space and time ‘in general,’ but this time, this space lived in such and such an assemblage, in such and such an ecological, ethological, economic, social, political context” (193). It seems, therefore, to be more in line, if one wants to compare this to Bakhtin’s theory, with the chronotope of the carnival whereby the strata and segmentations that typically make up the socius are erased, reversed, or absent. This leads in the opposite direction of a homogenization of space and time, via capitalism, and toward a chronotope that is blurry and flexible—indeed, it becomes somewhat difficult, during the carnival, to discern, in a discrete sense, space and time at all. Think, for example, of the funhouse and its hall of mirrors or how the expiration of the carnival is always met with a sense of disappointment, looping one’s anticipatory sense of time back to the start of the carnival again. In fact, both the refrain and faciality, on their schizoanalytic level, seem especially apropos for the staging of the carnivalesque that Bakhtin describes. That is, the clown, while unleashing a heteroglossia that relativizes dominate languages, also has a certain challenging or unique faciality. This, no doubt, goes toward producing interesting effects in regard to the way it subjectivizes beings around it but also toward how the clown itself has become produced. This would represent, for Guattari (2016), a subjectivation that does not “move as much in the direction of conservative stratifications as in the direction of creative lines of flight” (194). In as much, it sets free certain fixities or non-carnivalesque modes of being therein producing a heterogeneous subjectivation as opposed to the ideological production of subjectivity that is fed through modes of subjection described earlier under capitalism.

Minor Languages and Forms: Cant and Kitsch Indeed, both the initiate (who understands cant) and the stranger (who does not) may participate in powerful social and expressive networks based on the secret tongue. Daniel Tiffany (2009: 5)

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Without any knowledge, Tiffany reminds us that the circulation of an encoded symbology persists precisely because of its guarded accessibility. Such a claim threads through the post-epistemological polemic that has been developed in regard to Foucault’s games of truth and falsity, the way in which subjectivity is cosmologically mediated through the playfulness of the world and policed by modes of subjection. Indeed, the carnivalesque nature of cant, that it is an exclusionary language historically used by thieves to communicate secrets, links it with the production of subjectivity and, more strictly, subjectivation in as much as it has linguistic power to get around normativity. Guattari (1995) notes this structural relation when stating that “subjectivity is in fact plural and polyphonic” (1), miming and recapitulating the same infinite productive mirrorings of signification, embodiment, and subjective production. The politics of signification that the example of cant highlights incorporate diction, style, and substance into the way that it is created and made accessible— that is, by constructing an “inside,” a semantic and syntactic space of signaling, and an “outside,” an exclusionary and obscure Other. The dialectics of this politics precipitate through the intermixing of the minoritarian4 forms of language, which include, more broadly now, cant, argot, jargon, and other nonnormative forms of language. All of these forms of producing signification require a mode of subjective production in order for its minoritarian status to exist in the first place, prefigured into the term’s pragmatics, that is, an encoding upon subjectivity the logics or norms of the inside, the ability to read the code. The problematic circles around the additive nature of this linguistic accessibility, which is the je ne sais quoi, quite literally, such a rhetorical strategy divines. Difficult as the text may be, its “accessibility of entry” prefigures an exclusionary politics. What is more, it becomes even wider when the polity of text expands once the author is read in relation to its semiological positioning as part of a social group, historical period, and so on. As Tiffany (2013) says, “diction is always a matter of particularity, determined either by policing or relaxing the boundaries of specific vocabularies and syntactic constructions” (31). Guattari echoes this point when writing that “a rule of grammar is a power marker before it is a syntactical marker” (as cited in Lazzarato 2014: 74). Put simply, what are the borders of this policing function and, consequently, the trace of the political that these “minor” forms of language serve? In other words, to turn a critical eye toward a dictatorial style is, at once, to condemn a specific kind of subjective formation, to call into question a whole series of ethical rituals and practices. Goffey (2013), in his introduction to Schizoanalytic Cartographies, commenting on Guattari’s style, makes a broad claim as to the necessity of jargon; he writes, “actions generative of machinic sense ‘flush with the real’ always take

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precedence over any kind of contract, ideal speech, situation or tacit (and tacitly exclusionary) consensus about meaning, a theoretical claim of critical, even decisive, importance” (xviii). There are two points Goffey is arguing: first, the premise of “machinic sense” would appear to replace other semiological systems (e.g., structuralist, scientific, capitalist, etc.) and, second, this becoming justified through the sufficient condition of being “flush with the real” (travaillent à même). Such a condition is most clearly met, according to Goffey and, indeed, Guattari himself, through the function that artifice plays, which is to be opposed to the Lacanian notion of the real as the impossible (Goffey 2013:  xxi)—put formulaically, the schizoanalytic “real” is the artificial.5 Such an insistence, quite plainly, places style over substance. Becoming increasingly artificial, according to Genosko (2014), “Guattari didn’t shed any ‘humanist tears’ over those illadapted to such change, rejecting anti-modern and anti-machine recapitulations of humanism” (18). Instead, he saw the artificial as an opportunity to capitalize on how subjectivity is formed through normalizing forces that typically work toward creating reality, assuring the subject of its axioms, beliefs, values, and affects. Berardi (2008) makes the claim that it is precisely this inversion, of privileging style over substance, that opens the impasse between hidden semantic forms and alterity when he writes, Style is the relation between language and its outside; or rather it is the way that the outside makes itself language. The environment, the body, clothing, the mask, the game, the relationship, seduction, power:  through this system of dissymmetrical yet intersecting planes, sense becomes manifest, is placed in motion. We can call style the particular rhythm with which this whole machine of dissymmetrical planes moves: the gesture of enunciating, projecting worlds. Sense is in this style, in this reaching toward the outside. Sense, in effect, is the act of moving in a certain direction. (46)

The deployment of stylistics allows the schizoanalyst to “traversalize” domains of meaning that previously would have been incommensurable. With regard to theory, this function can construct metamodels helping to map the linkages between disparate modeling systems. So, it is not that artifice arrests substance by emptying it of meaning. Rather, it makes substance dynamic through a process of artificialization or, as Lazzarato (2014) writes, “in a machine-centric world, action on the real requires artificiality, an increasingly abstract artificiality” (88). In relation to cant6 and to put the formula succinctly, the schizoanalytic logics of artifice are used to “send the major language racing” (Deleuze and Guattari

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1987:  105, emphasis in original). Indeed, by refusing an intelligibility to the hegemony of the major language, the real qua artifice, positions schizoanalysis as a subversive and border dwelling entity in so far as its discourse copies itself on an artificialized major form. This is not unlike how a metamodel traversalizes other signifying systems. In other words, the creation of an artificialized nonsense halts the way in which the major language is able to appropriate the minor form and, moreover, actually does important analytic work, even modeling, upon the system toward which it is deployed. Goffey (2013) notes this at work in relation to Guattari’s writing, which “often bears the marks both of its circumstantial occurrence and its partially unfinished quality in a way that render consideration of it in canonic terms problematic” (xvii). Herein is the queer bending of the border between a jargon-infused, difficult to penetrate text and the political effects it unleashes precisely due to its perplexity. However, just because the practice inhabits the fringe does not mean that it cannot be, and indeed is not, generally applicable and pragmatically appropriable. In fact, a “cant of schizoanalysis” can be constructed through the most global and sweeping forms in so far it creates a process of subjectivation, the passing from the outside into the inside, maintaining a fidelity to the formula: the real is the artificial. What is more artificial than the spectacle nature of the world? Within that spectacle, what model could provide the most universal access to virtually all of its nodal points of discursive creation? What object could establish a kinship between an inclusionary signifying system and its exclusionary outside? Putting a finger on the specific kind of artifice that schizoanalysis has in mind, this answer is kitsch, in its abstracted, theoretical, and relational sense. Indeed, Tiffany (2013) goes so far as to align kitsch and schizoanalytic cant with Deleuze and Guattari quite explicitly: “kitsch thus subscribes to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of a ‘minor language’ . . . kitsch converts the exalted phrases of poetic tradition into the abject substance of automation and monotony: the quintessence of poetry” (12). This is somewhat counterintuitive in the sense of the plethora of kitsch available under global capitalism—case in point, the excess of kitsch permeating any shopping center, small plastic simulacra, assembled with interchangeable parts, and so on. Certainly, this concretized version of kitsch has already been encoded by capital and therefore is not the precise superficiality that has the ability to create “machinic sense” being already a part of a semiotic exchange system and, therefore, easily purchasable. I take Tiffany’s (2013) lead here and prefigure kitsch in terms of its theoretical capacities when he writes that “the term ‘kitsch’ as designating not simply a particular kind of artifact, but a distinctive relation to artifacts (which can

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indeed influence their design and production):  a relation that is consistently negative, derogatory, paranoid” (4, emphasis in original). The appeal to design and produce are the conditions for the deployment of a battery of asignifying semiotics whereby kitsch falls under the rubric of components of passage and diagrammatic machinery. The “diagrammatic” is an asemiotic process whereas “the diagram [as such] is a semiotic system and a mode of writing that fulfills the conditions of power signs” (Lazzarato 2014: 86); thus, strictly speaking to be asemiotic is to be a pre-diagram, which is to say the components through which a diagram is allowed to come into being. The category “diagram” as per Lazzarato (2014), “derives from Piece and encompass images . . . (also called “icons of relation”)” (86). In this sense, kitsch serves as a privileged “icon of relation” in so far as it has mass, global, and planetary appeal. Capitalizing on its ubiquitousness, its power of subversion as a very dispersed signifying system, Tiffany (2103) interrogates its obscene underbelly, “the ‘evil’ of kitsch acquires an array of sinister qualities: it is said to be at once parasitic, mechanical, and pornographic; a ‘decorative cult’ and a ‘parody of catharsis’ ” (Tiffany 2013: 1). This so-called “evil” is foregrounded by kitsch qua contagion, prototypical, asignifying components (“decorative cult”) being aligned into an intelligible diagram, which is to say given meaning, but only as a “parody of catharsis” through an “underlying” asignifying machine. The last point draws the lines directly to subjectivity itself such that, one could say, a kitsch process of subjective formation, a subjectivation, is this very artificial “parody of catharsis.” Such a process is likened by Tiffany (2012) to “poetry in drag: not cross-dressing but something akin to female female-impersonation or male male-impersonation, a cosmetic distilling of lyrical expression, a poetic doll” (12, emphasis in original). This is a production of subjectivity that configures a relation to the Other that is consistently negative, derogatory, paranoid.7 The allusion to Lacan should not be missed. That is, the well-known Lacanian axiom that the “the psychoanalyst is only authorized by himself ” and the Guattarian counterpoint that “the schizoanalyst is only authorized by the group.” Of course, siding with Guattari on this is Tiffany who places kitsch as exclusively readable by a “decorative cult” thereby slicing up its sociological accessibility. This is the schizoanalytic emphasis on social groups and group transference, as for example in group psychotherapy, as opposed to isolating the subject within the dyad of the therapeutic alliance, which ignores the contextual, embodied, and environmental factors that go into the construction of symptomology. Tiffany suggests that one way transference can be interpreted is through the reading

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of a sociality via the relation of kitsch resulting in what he terms a decorative cult. A decorative cult in this sense would be the minoritarian social group that guards specific kinds of significations behind encoded signs and symbols. This demonstrates how kitsch, as it is used in its relational and theoretical sense, introduces a problem for theories that would try and relegate it to merely an abjection of capitalist production. On the contrary, kitsch as it has to do with subjective production represents not even an inversion of the abuse of labor (an irony), but rather a secret code that remains to be deciphered, especially as it pertains to the sense it has in signifying chains and normal semiotics. Indeed, transmissibility therein, in a strange way, forces the schizoanalytic micro-groups into a larger category, one may even be tempted to say universal, such that the “decorative cult” really becomes a globalized Other, ascribing to it a totality: “the sovereignty of poetic diction—the trademark of kitsch, at the expense of meaning and prosody” (Tiffany 2013: 129). Tiffany, in other words, pushes smaller group formations, such as those found in the therapeutic or pedagogical setting, into a more abstract third term, an Other that produces subjectivity and that gives these more micro-groups their very ability to be cohesive and intersubjective. The institution, by Tiffany, of a universe of value operating through figures of sovereignty encodes a somewhat fanciful imaginary, cf. the iconography of crowns, coronations, courts, kingdoms, rituals, royal bloodlines, guillotines, regicide, wealth, and so forth—representing at least a system of control in so far as these symbols are very much explicitly power laden being a virtual inversion of neoliberal biopolitics, with its dispersed and mobile deployments of power. The decorative cult of this much larger Other, to use different words, relies on a sovereignty and it follows by extension a mode of subjection that employs these very props, those listed above, in order to establish an intelligibility that is arbitrated by the emblem of kitsch. This is done because the emblem is encoded, a kind of mediatization that hides in plain view, so to speak, parading around the commons as though it were a helpless piece of plastic, all the while containing an encysted and alive imp that monstrously lies in wait desiring to be unleashed. On the other side of the coin, what I am calling a kitsch subjectivation, the qualifier’s détournement, Tiffany details as follows, The negative attribution of kitsch is uninflected, without irony or critical selfconsciousness. At the same time, because kitsch is always an object of disdain as well as affection, it is never simple (or simply benign), as convention suggests. Rather, kitsch is indeed a toy, a mere prop, but it is also unsettling, subversive: a treacherous bauble. In contrast, then, to the identificatory appeal of camp, the

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alternating configuration of kitsch supports a notion of trifling negativity, of shallow subversion. (Tiffany 2013: 4)

Here is a valuable formula for a politics of both inclusion and difference with regard to sovereignty as opposed to the milder “camp” and its politics of identification. A subjectivation process that binds itself to these norms, that is “uninflected, without irony,” belies paradoxically a secret, hidden or, at best, an encrypted code, even though the lines of meaning kitsch inscribes are purely on the surface, operating at the cusp of its signification. Thus, it would appear, that kitsch offers an entry way, a pathic divination, into an unfolding process of subjectivation, or to return to Tiffany’s words, an initiation into a “decorative cult” that is the hegemony that lords over subjectivity and pushes it out into either modes of subjection or subjectivation depending on the emblem’s readability. With regard to signifying systems, this would constitute a quasi-epistemological “connecting the dots” or to phrase it in a stricter sense, an understanding of subjectivity’s role in the minor semiological apparatus. Yet, concurrently, kitsch blocks access, as a gatekeeper, acting on the border between a subterranean “supposed” secret and the world of pure plastic, “the cosmetic nature of kitsch invites us to think in terms of sham materialism, or sheer materialism:  an orientation, a signature, marking the enigma of the surface” (Tiffany 2012:  39, emphasis added). Indeed, the “sham” nature of signifying systems, especially ubiquitous and totalizing ones, does not negate the “enigma of the surface” (as if there were an “invisible hand” coordinating them). This enigma operates by way of machinic redundancy, generating new building blocks for signifying semiotics, “by acting in place of things themselves” (Lazzarato 2014: 87), all the while standing in for an Other, the hegemony of the decorative cult of capitalism, for example, hence, its semiological ubiquity and non-signifiable uncanniness, depending on one’s subjectivation status of course.

Marx’s Hieroglyph, Fetishism, or Riddling Subjectivity Lacan . . . was an event in my life. Félix Guattari (2009d: 166)

How are we to take the ellipses (the dots)? As a reflective pause, a moment of reservation, a deferral of a meaning that cannot be said yet, or as a syntactical

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norm? The quote reflects the profundity of the relationship, that between Lacan and Guattari, the latter of course being the analysand of the former. The structure of this model provides the precise kind of signature that leads one to utter “ . . . was an event in my life.” It is clear that, by proxy, the logic of the fetish is already at work, which is to say its metonymy with the object cause of desire. Of course, for Freud, the fetishist is a result of a missed Oedipalization, or put more thematically, a concurrent retention and abjection of the desirable: “the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (mother’s) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego—we know why” (Freud 1963: 205). Indeed, troubling Freud is not specifically the maternal phallus, presumed to be imaginary by everyone but the fetishist, nor even the fantasy it anchors; rather, the conferral upon the fetishist as an enunciative operator is at stake, given with it a specific kind of speaking (cf. the structural sense of disavowal). That being said, it would be a mistake to picture Freud’s etiological analysis as a technical diagram whereby the “why” is presupposed already in its articulation, upon a horizon of meaning, that is, vis-à-vis sexual difference. The boy daydreaming about his (hidden and secretive) own mother’s penis. All of these are but possibilities in regard to the logic proper of the Freudian insight, and even Lacan will come to, despite and in spite of his structuralism, canonicalize the displacement, in a nontechnical sense, of desire into an other the fetish rightfully entails. On its most abstract level, this analysis, as is well known, reflects Marx’s basic critique of commodities. That is, the commodity retains a power of appeal, even though, or put better, precisely because it has no real value, in the sense of a significance that is intrinsic to itself. To get to the heart of the matter, Marx thus parses it this way, “the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom” (Marx 1987:  83). Here, he is making a category distinction between the value, or put in Freud’s terms the “erotic gratification” (Freud 1963: 204), and its already having been castrated, having been severed from an “original” identity. As a special case, the castration stops exactly halfway such that the commodity retains its erotic charm (the secretive mother’s phallus) and still operates at the level of fantasy, via of course, a substitute object. The Marxist point adds an instrumental (counter) understanding to Freud’s Oedipal one, while still situating the fetish in the register of the drive. In other

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words, it is necessary but not sufficient that commodities abase their own usevalue thereby, this is Marx’s (1987) characterization, retaining their “mystical character” (82). Thrift describes the safekeeping of a use-value through what he calls “technologies of glamour” that enact the allure, cosmetic, and magically effects of the commodity. The commodity fetish is, thus, a “spell which is both erudite and occult but which can also encompass the nineteenth century meaning of ‘a deceptive or bewitching beauty or charm’ ” (Thrift 2008:  14). A proverbial Siren’s call. Does not this beg the question of intelligibility such that the commodity is at once practically useless but necessarily exchangeable, that is, a problem with transmission? Freud (1963) one more time: “the fetishist has no trouble in getting what other men have to woo and exert themselves to obtain” (206). Presupposed in the Freudian statement is the answer, which can be put as the enunciative relation the fetish has to all other semiological components in the network, as a kind of cathexis-node. In a certain way, this gets ahead of the present analysis by failing to show, carefully, how the object is always social; indeed, to be more specific, how it comes to gain its intelligibility as a fetishized object. Marx is not far behind Freud: “[a commodity’s] value is realized only by exchange, that is, by means of a social process” (Marx 1987: 96). The desirable thing, on this account, must first position itself in relation to other social subjects, granting it value as such, per Marx, and therefore rendering it translatable, exchangeable, and ultimately transmissible. The obscurity, nevertheless, could predetermine specific temporalities for the actors involved—meaning, a logic that is germane to the object of worship. In regard to this logic, one must be sure to read Freud carefully: “it is not the whole story to say that he worships [the fetish]; very often he treats it in a way which is plainly equivalent to castrating it” (Freud 1963: 209). Thus, the contractions of duration, known in psychoanalysis as either the Freudian Nachträglichkeit and the Lacanian après-coup (translatable as afterwardness or retroaction), unveil necessarily an erotic and sufficiently a traumatic dimension to the fetish, which is to say castration demands by the subject, that is, trying to deny the object of jouissance, yet never succeeding. Marx was first in saying that, “it is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic [emphasis added], to get behind the secret of our own social products” (Marx 1987: 85). (On a stylistic note, in fact, it would be interesting to trace the figure of the hieroglyph Marx employs here, both literarily and historically; and, again, even post-colonially.) This is most certainly not to deny the inevitability of the

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fetishizer’s desire to break the code since, in the last instance, or at least after the fact, the secret can be known, according to Marx.8 What is barred, however, to the said epistemological subject is precisely this Marxist secret wherein the “magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes . . .” (Marx 1987: 87). Fantasy does not, at least clinically, support the subject to “get behind” the fetish and finally satiate its desire. Lacan was a master at this, “the object [one could read between the lines here and conclude a fetish] and, as we have shown in Freudian experience, the object of desire where it proposes itself in its nakedness, is only the slag of a fantasy in which the subject does not return from his syncope. It’s a case of necrophilia” (Lacan 1989: 67). Herein is the impossibility the real of the fetish evokes. To put it formulaically, a switch from the other to the Other. The inflections of the classical Freudian definition of fetishism are quite apparent; the desire for a sexual relation, between the little boy and his mother or the subject and an other (he is only allowed a body), wherein it cannot exist—il n’y à pas de rapport sexuel—in spite of this injunction, the fantasy is maintained. In both Marx and Lacan there is the figure of the necro-fetish; this is to say, a paradoxical dead figure—corpse and specter—inciting communion, through love or prophecy, which is a deadpanned commodity, “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it” (Freud 1963: 206). Of course, what is more castrating than death itself—the representational scene for the obliteration of the signified? Hence, the appeal by all to colonize death through supernatural means, that is, the “slag of a fantasy” whose desire is to reanimate the deceased, an imaginary populated by a sexual cadaver. As if that was not enough, the temporal intonations of the fetish come, again, to the fore both through this, initial, impossibility and the a posteriori prophetic power predicted by Marx—the commodity retroactively positing meaning after-death, not as a discursive copy, but in the strictest sense as the ghost of the original. For if it were merely a copy, the fetish would retain some use-value, and not gain its status as a commodity such that it quite literally must be killed, completely castrated, in order to be erected as a pure signifier. Gold, as either an economic or alchemical trope, is an excellent performative example of this. It is first an economic trope in the sense that it stands as an impasse for the fiat system of finance and monetary policy that has been in place since the 1960s therein subverting the free-floating signifying systems that capitalism would like to deploy. Secondly, given the importance that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) give to alchemy and metallurgy, gold represents the conversion

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and purification of a base substance, usually by fire, into a more perfected form. To take a literary example, encoded in La fille aux yeux d’or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes, Balzac, 2012), according to Felman (1993), is “[gold] which makes society go round” . . . as “the very fetish of desire” (60). A grand claim, she supports via a “principle of substitution”—a transposition, in a certain sense, of desire and gold, signifier and signified, “the very principle of endless circulation of screening substitutes and their blind fetishization” (Felman 1993:  61, emphasis in original). Problematizing her reading is my foregoing analysis in as much it is not enough to presume a logic of replacement, since the thing must be literally destroyed and its incorporeal essence resurrected in its stead. Gold, in this theory of textuality, posits the fetish as a devilish dramaturgical inversion whereby its commodification as a readable text is turned inside out. What is clear is that we are dealing with the fantasy of a cloak-and-dagger, unique in its construction to spin backwards. Lacan has a well-known matheme9 for this: $◊a where $ is the barred-subject and the a, the object cause of desire. “The stamp is read ‘desire of,’ ” (Lacan 1989: 62) thereby situating an objet a as the “desire of ” the divided subject. What is particular to Lacan’s Sadian text, barring his analytic perversion of Kant, is an implicit reading of Freud against the grain. The relation that sustains the fetish is, again, turned inside out or, put into the technical phrase I have been using, undergoes a dramaturgical inversion. I take Lacan’s (1989) advice by reading the matheme “identically in the retrograde direction” (62). Starting with Freud, this would mean “reclaiming” the penis, the harder it is to do, the stronger the fantasy. After all, “fantasy constitutes the pleasure proper to desire” (Lacan 1989: 62), all the while signaling two concurrent processes; one sustaining the fixation on the mother’s phallus and the other denying castration—in the clinic, the mechanism is disavowal (Verleugnung). Put this way, start here, read backwards, and you would end up with the dots again. The commodity persists, certainly at least today, and by that logic, the totality of the fetish, for example, late capitalism, neoliberalism, and so on. It is the psychoanalytic insight that the fetish, especially in the final analysis, is empowered by the fantasy. On that note, Freud (1963) says it best: “one need not suppose that these persons had sought analysis on account of a fetish; the devotees of fetishes regard them as abnormalities, it is true, but only rarely as symptoms of illness” (204). What would it be like to take on the non-symptomology of the fetish, both analytically and as a form of subjective production? Would such a strategy succeed in deciphering its code? Is it possible, in other words, to get behind and finally decode Marx’s hieroglyph?

6

Aesthetics

This theory of subjectivation perhaps finds its culminative form, the crafting of one’s life into an arts of existence, under the general domain of aesthetics. In what follows, the notion of self-fashioning and the creation of subjectivity will be traced through various philosophies of aesthetics and, ultimately, find its way home in the specific genre of the baroque.

Beginning with the Baroque and Subjectivity The baroque, as an artistic genre and mode of expression, captures a broad range of aesthetic phenomena ranging from artworks starting in the seventeenth century to present day styles that attempt to capture the ornamental surplus that this term tries to communicate. As a case in point, Gian Bernini’s sculpture and setting in Cornaro Chapel called L’Estasi di Santa Teresa (Ecstasy of Saint Teresa) may best introduce some of the themes of the baroque approach (Mormando 2011). Namely and perhaps most importantly is that religious iconography takes center stage in the baroque but with a certain overdone or decadent twist. That is to say, as the Bernini piece illustrates, the rapturous (or even sexualized) nun is indicative of the baroque’s emphasis on a certain tortuous extreme, the taking of pleasure, perhaps, to its limit. This, it goes without saying, does not exhaust the meaning of the baroque perspective, the blurring of pleasure and pain in the above example, since other qualities of this genre exist like amorphous perspectives and the intermixing of the macabre and the sacred. Yet, one need not view formally rendered artworks in order to develop a sense of the term baroque. In its less systematized sedimentation, the baroque, as Conley (2006) suggests, can be found in everyday experiences, Under its rubric are placed the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, intense taste for life that grows and pullulates, and a fragility of

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infinitely varied patterns of movement. It could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble, and atomize when they crack along an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of a shoreline; in following the curls and wisps of color that move on the surface and in the infinite depths of a tile of marble. (xi)

The attention to detail is not as important as the appreciation of detail, the intricate and crocheted patternings created by the world or the baroque artist. This is a marveling at complex arrangements and their ornamental breaking apart, which does not, strictly speaking, destroy form but, rather, processually re-creates original, unique, and unexpected forms. If the foregoing has tried to articulate a general sensibility of the baroque, albeit briefly, then the following will attempt to formalize, more technically, what the baroque brings to bear on self-fashioning or the production of subjectivity. In other words, by taking the self as an object of artistic creation, what parameters or guidelines would structure a baroque mode of subjective production? Such a theoretical discussion does not describe a “baroque subjectivity” per se but, to emphasize the point again, cuts the garments that might be used to dress-up a subject that takes seriously a mode of baroque self-fashioning, the baroque as its aesthetic style, so to speak. Or, to invert this, as Walter Benjamin (1998) perhaps warns, “the function of baroque iconography is not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked” (185). The role of aesthetics features predominantly in Monique Roelofs (2014) recent book The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic holding the space of mediator and relational joiner between such diverse phenomena as race, colonialism, instances of address, politics and, given the topic of analysis, the beautiful. Taking Roelofs lead and focusing on what she calls the aesthetics of relationality, the central overriding principle of her work, the following discussion will try to apply the principles of this approach to subjectivity. Put into better terms, I will argue that aesthetics helps foreground processes of subjective production or, simply, subjectivation relying on a distinction taken from Foucault between subjection (assujettissement) and subjectivation (subjectivation); and, more specifically, that a unique baroque form of aesthetics, what Glissant (1997) referred to as détournement, sits at the heart of this very process acting as a catalyst for change. In this way, the aesthetic represents a sort of key unlocking the production of subjectivities; as Guattari (1995) articulates, “the paradox which aesthetic experience constantly returns us to is that these affects, as a mode of existential

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apprehension, are given all at once, regardless, or besides the fact that indicative traits and descriptive refrains are necessary for catalyzing their existence in fields of representation” (93). The crystallization or bringing into being a subject capable of self-composition, as opposed to a subject of subjection, is keeping in line with the relational and processual nature of Roelofs thesis; namely, not a nonpolitical apprehension, innocence with regard to its power relations or genealogy, but an instance in which to both make these constituting effects intelligible while, at the same time, being able to challenge, up end, or rewrite them. One of the ways to get at the import the aesthetic has for subjectivation is to look at the modes where it makes itself known, which is, again, in that paradoxical instance of apprehension unique to aesthetic experiences alone. In order not to know, in the sense of learning how to judge the values of an aesthetic experience, for example, becomes the central motif of Roelofs’s (2014) work on the cultural and pedagogical import and weight that strategies of aesthetic, as opposed to practical, rational, or even theoretical modes of critical engagement bring to bear on epistemology and epistemic productions. Indeed, if the literal and non-idiomatic translation of je ne sais quoi is any indication of this, the “I don’t know what” but nevertheless there exists this quality that escapes naming, then it would appear that the hope of securing solid footing on a properly aesthetic form of ignorance is lost from the beginning. However, this is precisely Roelofs’s point; namely, the term she tactically places in her discussion of ignorance and aesthetics, again, je ne sais quoi, quite literally gets at the heart of the problem being raised: How are aesthetic events commingled with non-knowledge and its ontogenesis or ongoing productions? There are four ways outlined that do not exhaust but, nonetheless, helpfully schematize the overlaps and links between ignorance and aesthetics. (1)  The first maintains that an aesthetic not-knowing resides exclusively in the domain of meaning therein falling short or usurping, depending on the perspective, normative knowledge practices, such as communicativity, transmission, and pedagogy. (2) The second way posits the aesthetic of the je ne sais quoi as an “unknowing toward ignorance” in so far as it rests upon a species of knowledge that satisfies certain norms and criteria. (3) The third works toward confounding binary oppositions between knowledge and non-knowledge thereby leading to new epistemic possibilities. (4) Finally, the fourth means, perhaps the most radical in terms of substantive knowledge claims, collapses the distinction between theoretical and aesthetic artifacts whereby the egalitarian and ubiquitousness of

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their aesthetization results in emphasizing the local, contingent, and reciprocal conditions of emergence that give rise to these objects. The important point for Roelofs is that the foregoing modes of relation between the aesthetic and (non)epistemologies suggests that no approach here is untainted in the sense of being privileged, separate, universal, transcendent, and so on from the other, even if the aesthetic necessarily marshals critical models of analysis. Roelofs (2014) writes, “these [aesthetic] integrations prove to be able to generate as well as contest forms of ignorance. While the aesthetic possesses critical resources, it is steeped in ignorance itself ” (102). Again, I think this vacillatory movement between aesthetic sensibilities and experiences and the creation of beliefs and of knowledge forecloses any claim that Roelofs is somehow advocating for a relational aesthetic approach at the expense of, say, the creation of new scientific knowledge. Put differently, the kind of social intelligibility that the aesthetic has the potential to deploy seizes everyday modes of communicativity such that the aesthetic represents a more encrypted and enshrouded form of information transfer. This is the kind of ignorance that is contained within the aesthetic process itself. The hijacking of common idioms in order to repossess their meaning and, more importantly, in order to create effects turns the “aestheticization against itself to critical effect” (Roelofs 2014:  102). This kind of criticality is central to Roelofs argument in that the aesthetic has the power to introduce forms of ignorance into standard sense while also furthering a kind of knowledge practice that has no recourse to transcendence—in other words, that is immanent in how it mediates and deploys the aesthetic to critical effect. Furthermore, this critical effect, what Roelofs calls an aestheticization of ignorance, may represent a sort of reclaiming by the author, to use a decolonial perspective, the taking back of co-opted meanings by alien or foreign interlocutors or, conversely, the safeguarding of more indigenous forms of signification, an aesthetic way of talking to only those who are in the know, so to speak. This kind of aestheticized crypto-signification, cryptic in the sense that the nonsense safeguards it against hegemonic appropriation, creates pockets of sociality that are initiatory in nature, that require a certain “eye” for seeing the beautiful in the contextualized situation. An example of this that will be elaborated upon later are the emblems unique to the aesthetic of the baroque. Such a means of epistemic unsettlement, to reiterate, works at a level that is importantly not on the same plane as regular knowledge practices and modes of understanding. Indeed, the subliminal, to use a somewhat generous term, or the pre-conscious experience rooted in an affective being with the world, might

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better describe how important the invocation of “ignorance” is for Roelofs—this would be an artistic modeling practice of criticality that challenges conventional or straightforward notions of meaning-making. Roelofs (2014) puts such a process in the following terms:  “this means that the realm of the aesthetic also furnishes prolific devices enabling us to adjust aesthetic idioms that we (not typically consciously) deploy to conceptualize and inhabit instances of knowledge and ignorance” (106). The aestheticization of ignorance is not unlike what Guattari calls asignifying semiotics. The critical nature of both operates by way of a traversing the normativity of already circulation models through cutting or “schizing” the bridge between referent and signifier therein letting lose a force—namely, transversality—that can be harnessed for subversive or creative effect.

Histories of Aesthetic Ignorance and Aesthetic Integrationism In contrast to this criticality, Roelofs uses the popular reality television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a demonstrative foil to her own theory of aesthetics. For Roelofs, the show is an analytical artifact that deploys an “aesthetic script [using] elements of eighteenth-century models of aesthetic relationality, including promises of happiness, developmental trajectories, and exclusionist pattern of address, to circumscribe a morally and politically regimented field of ignorance” (Roelofs 2014: 115). In the early 2000s version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the show assigns rigid roles to the “fab five” that constrain their identity typecasting them into easily understandable gay roles: a fashion guru, an interior designer, a chef, a cosmetologist, and a culture connoisseur. These pre-assigned stereotypes had the aim of furthering what was typically a straight, cisgender, male’s neoliberal status in the world. In other words, the goal of the show was to “help” the contestant of the show become more successful in terms of the values that late capitalism has outlined, those values like wealth, professionalism, efficiency, property ownership, and so on. As Roelofs notes, these more concretized values of capitalism have their roots in Enlightenment culture and modernism such that they rely on presupposed patterns of aesthetic address. The rigid and non-imaginative importation of eighteenth century scripts by Queer Eye is lamented by Roelofs for its reinforcement of normative aesthetic structures and its siphoning of queer potentials into static and mainstream, neoliberal models. This is contrasted

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with a more experimental or adventurous mode of aesthetic collaboration, one that categorically does not fall into the purview of theories of aesthetics taken from Enlightenment thinkers. As perhaps a consummative thesis statement regarding this particular reading, Roelofs (2014) writes that “stereotypical male homosexuality serves to recharge heterosexuality, updating it as an ingredient of a consumerist urban economy” (115). Indeed, the kind of criticality that Roelofs champions, as was indicated previously, is blatantly absent in Queer Eye; instead, the show somewhat artfully utilizes the relation between aesthetics and ignorance necessarily to drain the energies that could be used to upset the figure of the heterosexual male. He is just dressed up and given new names (i.e., metrosexual and perhaps hipster in a more updated sense) underneath which the wolf still lurks. The reading of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy sets up a space in which to contrast Roelofs’s approach with the more traditional school of thought known as aesthetic integrationism. Allusions to aesthetic integrationism are peppered through Roelofs analyses of her discursive artifacts but become fully fleshed-out toward the end of her book. Following in the tradition of Addison, Baumgarten, Schiller, and Hegel, aesthetic integrationism maintains that the “aesthetic experience occupies a middle ground between dichotomies of mind and body and related oppositions” (Roelofs 2014: 128). In other words, aesthetic integrationism follows in a dialectical method such that it relies on a “third” in order to arbitrate the relationality it establishes thereby creating a new synthesis, a new aesthetic relation between the two dipoles. By contrast, it would be this middle ground, the arbitrating third, that creates an aesthetics of relationality situating Roelofs project within a certain genealogy of thinkers. However, Roelofs (2014) does not seem to be following in this tradition per se, since the aesthetic for her serves an ambiguous function, which she articulates when writing that, Crafting points of connection among these dualities, the aesthetic fulfills a complex normative task. Unifying functions that have been comprehended as disparate, aesthetic practices interrupt Enlightenment oppositions they straddle. But they also help to secure these dichotomies. Both of these strategies enter into the production of knowledge and ignorance. (110)

The version of aesthetic integrationism that Roelofs seems to ascribe to may better be called an immanent aesthetic integrationism since the arbitrating relation is cast not as a third opposing term that mediates the two dipoles, as in Hegel, for instance, but is structural to the opposing sides. Put simply, Roelofs

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is developing an immanent theory of aesthetics, which allows for a space of auto-critique through a mode of epistemic unsettlement. In this way, the critical nature of the aesthetic, as was discussed earlier, takes on more of a strategic, situational, and positional nature. Roelofs even contrasts her version of aesthetic integrationism with some of her fellow feminist colleagues by charging that, “in bridging realms whose alleged divisions underwrite social distinctions, the aesthetic, thus, does not simply counter established Enlightenment binaries—as proposed by Kristeva, Irigaray, Lorde, and Anzaldúa—but also props up normative effects unleashed by these separations” (Roelofs 2014: 111, emphasis in original). This dual nature is key for Roelofs in so far as it sets her approach apart from the tradition while, at the same time, granting her a novel contribution to aesthetic theory. In the final analysis, Roelofs (2014) commits to, in no uncertain terms, a view of the aesthetic as privileged in so far as it is “in a unique position to counteract the hierarchical and differentiating functioning of the relevant dualities” (135). The power the aesthetic experience creates has the ability to challenge hypostatized models, in other words, older signifying systems that have become static and outdated. In this way, it works in a kind of cosmopolitical spirit to equalize borders, not in a homogenizing sense like capitalism, but by the introduction of difference therein breaking down hierarchical alignments and bringing new beings into the fold of its worlding field.

Aestheticizing Subjectivity or Subjectivation While the above has attempted to make the case that the aesthetic is a powerful and perhaps privileged frame by which to examine a wide range of phenomena, the following will more precisely situate the aesthetic in relation to subjectivity and, more pointedly, the process of subjectivation, a term that allows Foucault to pose:  “the question of subjectivation, conceived as the set of techniques of the self that can be practiced by individuals in order to shape their subjectivity” (Cremonesi et  al. 2016:  8). Revel (2016) suggests that shifting “subject to subjectivity, and then from subjectivity to subjectivation—is a very decisive one in Foucault’s work” (163). Indeed, subjectivation is not equivalent to modes of subjection (assujettissement), the creation of subjects from forces that work against the expansion of its agency or its own self-flourishing. Subjectivation (subjectivation), on the other hand, “is the name of an overturning that generates the common from action and that, by producing it, relaunches it always further,

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where experimentation opens breaches within the real” (Revel 2016: 172). Such an experimentation is precisely one of the alternatives proposed by Roelofs (2014), a mode of aesthetic strategy that does not as easily lend itself to cooption by forces that would seek to subdue its power. Less theoretically, nonetheless, one may look at instances of self-naming or, more technically, the distinction between avowal and disavowal, as places where the subject becomes interlinked to broader significatory and institutional structures therein engaging with processes of both subjection and subjectivation. Responding to a form of address that requires, forces, or expects a response from the subject is a form of avowal. This is found in the courtroom, for example, when one is required to submit an admission of guilt or innocence and, in a less structured sense, perhaps, when a social situation pressures the subject to claim a sexual or gender identity. Strictly speaking, it is not the force, affect, or pressure the subject feels, that which may induce an avowal, but the strategy (or not) used to render a response to this tension. With reference to Foucault, Lorenzini (2016) places practices of avowal under the rubric of subjection when he writes that “the (historical) emergence of the obligation to discover the truth of ourselves in ourselves, as well as to manifest it through a discourse of avowal, is nothing but the effect of a series of techniques of power” (66, emphasis in original).While avowal can function in both processes of subjection and of subjectivation, the dramaturgical positionality that the name christens determines the flow of power and force.1 A discourse of avowal ensures the smooth interlinking of subjectivity with appropriating and conscripting networks that are not necessarily hegemonic in the Gramscian (2014) sense, an invisible or merely idealized form of power, but are, rather, on the ground, material, immanent and within the subject’s aesthetic horizon of experience. Remembering Roelofs (2014) discussion of the relationship between aesthetics and ignorance, the epistemic production issued by avowal would be necessarily participatory, a creation of subjection, in as much as the subject fails to produce the aesthetic possibility of challenge that likewise exists in the same instance. Speaking on this same topic, Butler (2016) contends that if the subject avows a certain kind of self-naming it therein “bind[s]‌myself to that name and to that identitarian truth of who I am. Whatever heterogeneity characterizes experience for me is consolidated, and my experience becomes my experience as this identity that I am” (84, emphasis in original). It may go without saying that the consolidation process Butler speaks about, a form of subjection, to be sure, is precisely the lack of an aesthetic criticality developed by Roelofs (2014).

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To offer an alternative to acts of avowal, which is not the same thing as claiming that one should preferably avoid avowal or that this is ever possible, is not as easy as citing its opposite, disavowal, the repudiation of any identity whatsoever. Foucault is more nuanced on this point by following in a tradition of thinkers and artists that develop means and modes by which to self-cultivate or launch an arts of existence, a form of subjectivation. The importance of the aesthetic in subjectivation is advanced substantively by Davidson (2016) in the following quote, According to Foucault, a mode of subjectivation is sustained by practices or techniques of the self, and in the 1980s he stresses the independence and the relative autonomy of these techniques of the self with respect to techniques of power . . . It is in such a context that one finds the essential role of the care of the self and of the arts of existence; Foucault’s ethics requires an art, a tekhne, not a science . . . The art of living is a creation, the invention of a way of life, of a cultural form, and all things considered, it is the creation of oneself . . . the art of living is the creation of a new mode of subjectivation, of a new culture of the self . . . both a strategic political struggle and an inventive ethical work are necessary in order to transform our relationship with others and with ourselves. (59, emphasis in original)

Subjectivation, then, on this account, is most specifically an art (tekhne) and a craft, a form of self-fashioning that is through and through aesthetic in nature. Just as Roelofs (2014) collapsed the theoretical into the aesthetic, so too does Foucault distinguish between sciences of subjection and an art of the self, a subjectivation that is as engaged in political and ethical struggles as it is with the necessity of avowing itself. It is in this way, then, that aesthetics is given precedence in this theory of subjectivation over and against modes of subjection—the latter, in fact, may be marked by its solidifying and routing of the aesthetic as was delineated, as a case in point, in addresses of avowal. Subjection, nevertheless, requires the production of various degrees of subjectivation in order to perpetuate itself, meaning that aesthetics, here, has the last laugh, so to speak, able to generate a surplus of possibilities while, at the same time, being the foundation out of which processes of subjection are able to take their form. Cremonesi et al. (2016) reiterate this exact proposition, the a priori status afforded to the aesthetic in modes of subjectivation:  “the always-present potentiality of the subjects to alter, unsettle, and invert the power relations they are shaped by is not the side effect of techniques of subjection but, on the contrary, their very condition of

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possibility” (2). The surplus the aesthetic carries is perhaps the very thing that sets Roelofs more immanent theory of aesthetic integrationism apart from other thinkers in that the aesthetic has the force to both induce subjection and subjectivation and it is, indeed, the aesthetic in the latter that allows for the critical deployment of aesthetic experimentation.

Decolonial Thought and the Baroque As a specific type of crafting, the aesthetic of the baroque demarcates a unique strategy that may be in line with the kind of critical aesthetic engagement developed in the Roelofs text. In this spirit, baroque forms of self-fashioning would color the conditions of emergence that lead to both processes of subjection and subjectivation, representing a primary aesthetic mold out of which subjectivation becomes formed. Indeed, the creole, post-colonial, and Caribbean thought of Édouard Glissant (cf. 1997, 1999, 2000, 2010) suggests the baroque as just such a unique way to unsettle, upend, and engage with forms of colonization. Situating the baroque alongside the technical term Relation lifted from Glissant’s monograph Poetics of Relation (1997), which means the link between the interconnective and multiplicitous network of beings, he argues that the baroque has undergone a naturalization from its historical birthplace during the counter-reformation in so far as it has been extended “into the unstable mode of Relation; and, once again in this full-sense, the ‘historical’ baroque prefigured, in an astonishingly prophetic manner, present-day upheavals of the world” (79). To better understand how the baroque has been naturalized and what this means for relations between subjects, Glissant uses the example of language and traces the genealogy of how it is intermingled and co-opted by colonialism. In this context, the baroque works on the structural weakness inherent in the colonizers edifice, the perhaps prevailing language in any given territory, such that it “becomes our advantage” (Glissant 1997: 75), and he points to the plantation as an exemplary model from which such a challenge might arise. In order to seize on this advantage, Glissant uses the precise term rerouting, or in the French, détournement, which unpacked means the turning back or the hijacking of colonialist strategies that were once used as forms of subjection. According to Glissant (1997), the hallmark of the naturalized baroque is that it takes this détournement as “its only norm, or its fundamental nature” (40), a repurposing and re-forging of colonialist tactics while inverting their normativity and commandeering their material presences.

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Part of how this more contemporary form of the baroque is able to accomplish such a feat is through the way it signifies reality. Baroque speech is, in its essence, “inspired by all possible speech” (Glissant 1997: 75, emphasis in original) making for a heteroglossia that returns a form of agency to the oppressed precisely because of its counter-normative intelligibility. Importantly, this naturalization of the baroque, the displacement from its historical frame in formal art to being intrinsic with Relation, may be seen as somewhat concomitant with colonialism itself, a certain planetary symptom that, through the naturalization process, is trying to say something about current states of affairs, the ongoing neocolonialism in the Middle East or the globalization of capital, as less interpretive examples. At this point, Glissant (1997) suggests a certain kind of retrieval of what he calls an “aesthetics of the earth” (150). Importantly, this is not in an anachronistic or reactionary manner, which he cautions against, and, keeping in line with his post-colonial paradigm, not even a return to indigeneity, a colonialist move in itself, but, to recall the discussion of the naturalization of the baroque, a reclaiming, a détournement, of the colonialist machine. The “aesthetics of the Earth” is not unlike the kind of neoanimism that was first outlined under the format of cosmopolitics in the sense that such a conception does not “return to enchantment” but, instead, re-envisions the entwinement between naturality, technicity, and the world. What Glissant brings to the discussion is how the aesthetics of such a paradigm creates a process of subjectivation that derives its power from a baroque hijacking (détournement) of already operating signifying programs. In other words, by using the baroque as a generative artistic model, a new vision of cosmology has the potential to emerge, a picture of the world that enjoys a reciprocity of mutual playing, the co-creation of possible universes of reference, and value that beings can inhabit together. This is different than normalizing modeling systems since the stance that subjectivity takes is one that tries to transversalize signifying systems precisely through this kind of hijacking. Put differently, a détournement in this respect unleashes a kind of nonsense or asignification such that it is not merely the play of signification at stake but, rather, the very real way that subjectivity is being produced in the current milieu. The baroque speaks in this way as a genre that has tapped into the complexity and intricate manner in which the metaphorics of nature deploy themselves in discourse. This is to say that Glissant is using the baroque, in this specific gesture, to both artificialize the natural, a privileged category for the colonizer, indeed, while bringing to bear on the exploitative apparatus tropes that would upset, trouble, or halt its ongoing progression.

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Weaving Glissant’s naturalized baroque in with the distinction between modes of subjection and subjectivation results in the installation of a baroque inspired détournement at the heart of subjectivation, that very process that Foucault called an arts of existence or what Guattari called existential self-fashioning. Such a maneuver would take the discourse of avowal, detailed earlier, and apply a unique, baroque pressure, which is really a form of disavowal that, as Glissant suggested, issues forth a type of heteroglossia that troubles and frustrates the intelligibility of the colonizer. The baroque helps the subject encode the necessity of its avowal, the addressed positionality requisite of social action in general, by rerouting the signified into a more nuanced, refined, or intricate sign that it is supposed to be anchored by.

Disavowal and Alethurgic Technics Yet, what more can be said about the importance of disavowal for this process? Returning to the cosmological influences on subjective production and, more specifically, the playfulness of the world, the following quote from Axelos, “the world deploys itself as a game” (as cited in Elden 2015: 21, italics in original), echoes Foucault’s concept of the dispositif, which is itself a kind of distribution of devices, mechanisms, and apparatuses. Indeed, as if to correspond with Axelos, Foucault even appeals to “games of truth” (jeux de verité) (Foucault 1985a: 6) as an explanatory model for diagnosing the open strategies of regimes of truth and falsity that are operating through normatively circulating discourses. The matter of precisely how these regimes come into being and proliferate themselves in an ontogenetic way, materially and not just semiotically, is somewhat cryptic. Foucault (2008) indicates this methodological lacuna in his Birth of Biopolitics Lectures, It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices—from the moment they become coordinated with a regime of truth—was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality, etcetera), nonetheless become something, something however that continues not to exist. That is to say, what I would like to show is not how an error—when I say that which does not exist becomes something, this does not mean showing how it was possible for an error to be constructed—or how an illusion could be born, but how a particular regime of truth, and therefore not an error, makes something that does not exist able to become something. It is not an illusion

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since it is precisely a set of practices, real practices, which established it and thus imperiously marks it out in reality. (19)

Bracketing for the time being his insistence on praxis, which is to say the enactments, scripts, techniques, or more generally signifying practices, there is a more primary process Foucault alludes to that foregrounds these practices in the first place. These games of truth and falsity are, in other words, undergirded by what is psychoanalytically known as disavowal (Verleugnung) that operates at the heart of how these modes of subjective production come into being. This supports Foucault’s claim to not an error or illusion but a mechanism that “marks it out in reality,” which is to say as a set of material practices. Disavowal, in the sense above, is a kind of asemiotic operator or attractor for signifying enactments and forms of subjective production. This is the case because of the psychoanalytic structure of perversion. In various ways, this has been expounded upon by Žižek (1989) on his critique of ideology, Kristeva (1989) in her analysis of language, and as a symbolic mechanism in relation to the perverse diagnostic structure (Fink 2003). In Lacanian psychoanalysis, disavowal separates the psychodynamics of the pervert, clinically, from both neurosis and psychosis such that disavowal (Verleugnung) is the structural solution to the Oedipal riddle. This mechanism is contrasted with the psychotic’s foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the name-of-the-father and the neurotic’s “Che vuoi?” One way to understand the connection between disavowal and the setting into being various discursive constructions is through the relationship the pervert has to pleasure. Fink (2003) reports his clinical case notes as follows, “the pervert . . . does not hand that pleasure over, does not surrender his pleasure to the Other. Freud insists again and again that the pervert refuses to give up his pleasure, that is, the masturbatory pleasure related (in his fantasies) to his mother or mother substitute” (45). The jouissance found in disavowal binds itself to fantasy such that the pervert, strictly speaking, has no epistemological relation to the fantasy, having already found the lost object, therefore pushing this “knowledge” into the Other’s fantasy. This form of subjectivity has a structural relation to the symbolic that is structured like a ruse, so to speak, in so far as it maintains its discursive consistency. Shepherdson (2003) relates the Freudian insight that “in fetishism, ‘repression’ characterizes what happens to the affect, whereas ‘disavowal’ is what happens to the idea or ‘belief ’—what Lacan would call the symbolic representation, the order of the signifier” (123–4). As such, disavowal purges from the speaking subject narcissistic identifications, enabling a jouissance of this lack of affect and

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concurrently an awareness of the trauma but as stripped of meaning, as a pure signifier put into play. There is a danger here for the pervert in that by raising the signifier to the level of pure artifice, a plasticity that can be just as easily exchanged for any other, such a maneuver positions this particular diagnostic structure at the whims of the Other. Or, to put this in more Guattarian terms, the perverse structure attempts to model normalizing signifying machines instead of using asemiotic metamodeling as a way to traverse these very machines. That is to say, there is the possibility of becoming consumed by this signification, the loss of subjective self-consistency and the obliteration of singularity into homogenization (even though the pervert might think it is getting away or hiding). Such would constitute a mode of subjection. Yet, on the other hand, the perverse position likewise recognizes, through its structural relation with the Other, the equivocations of such semiotics in that by fetishizing the signifier, the pervert can play back, so to speak, redeploy or hijack signifying systems in order to carve out a place of singularity, a process of subjectivation for itself. Equivalently, cannot Foucault’s jeux de verité be seen through the exact same lens, as a double-movement pregnant with both possibilities? Is it not disavowal that structures not a lie, ideology, or mistake, for Foucault, but the very real creation of discursive entities marked out in reality? Finally, is it not the “games of truth” that circulate these “pure signifiers” becoming anchored, given existential consistently, precisely through a fidelity to a symbolic disavowal? Read as such, disavowal is the process by which these regimes are launched, enacted, and proliferated, not as illusory or ideological but, as Foucault says, as real sets of practices, as modes of subjective production. Foucault (1985a) remarks that there is “no forming of the ethical subject without ‘modes of subjectivation’ and an ‘ascetics’ or ‘practices of the self ’ that support them” (28). In the final lecture series before his death, Foucault comes to call these practices alethurgic, which is a form of a non-epistemological praxis. Gros (2011) writes that “what Foucault calls “alethurgic” presupposes a principle of irreducibility to any epistemology” (344). Insisting on the alethurgic as a set of practices, they are thus set in relation to parrhesia2, which is to say a risk-taking and truth-telling, pertaining to signification:  “ethical transformations of the subject, [make] the subject’s relation to self and others dependent on a particular kind of truth-telling [i.e., parrhesia]” (Gros 2011: 344). It is through this process that subjectivity becomes part of an event or ethical rupture, by breaking with the norm-binding process of subjection and siding with subjectivation therein generating revolutionary possibilities. Subjectivation is defined by Foucault as a

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truth-telling, not an avowed-(moral) operation, but one that is at once stylistic, ethical, and “disavowed” thus making one’s “life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria. These “arts of existence,” these “techniques of the self ” . . . (Foucault 1985a: 10–1, emphasis in original).

The Perversion of Détournement As a specific instantiation of a Foucauldian alethurgic technique, the key stratagem developed by the Situationists, détournement (cf. Wark, 2013), means the hijacking and redeployment of the very semiotics of the spectacle that were originally intended for oppression, homogenization, and subjection. Bottici (2014) echoes this, by making a call to arms, when she writes that it is “precisely because the spectacle has become a relation that pervades all social relationships, we cannot escape from it, but what we can do is to fight the evil with its own weapons, answering the spectacle with another spectacle” (p. 121). The guiding question for the production of an “arts of existence” then becomes: what alethurgic mode of being launches a subjectivation unbinding it from its interpellated norms and formations? Indeed, in practice and in theory, we should heed Guattari’s (2011) optimistic claim that “within any situation whatsoever, a diagrammatic politics can always be ‘calculated,’ which refuses any idea of fatalism, whichever name it may take on” (174, emphasis in original). Building on this, the following develops a process of subjective formation that self-reflexively mimes, which is to say deploys the logics of disavowal thereby initiating an ontogenetic détournement, a specific kind of aesthetic and embodied practice. In fact, Guattari goes so far as to claim that détournement is the mediating practice sine qua non for such an “arts of existence” by prefiguring it as essential for the development of an ethico-aesthetic process of subjective unfolding. He writes, “what allows us to grasp the force involved in the production of subjectivity is the apprehension through it of a pseudo-discursivity, a detournement of discursivity [emphasis added], which installs itself at the foundation of the subject–object relation, in a subject pseudo-mediation” (Guattari 1995: 25–6). Indeed, he renders it a sufficient condition for apprehending the production of subjectivity in the first place, not as a self-reflexive contemplative pondering or even as a kind of ready-to-hand crafting, but as the very possibility that allows subjectivity to enter into a relationship with itself and become interlinked with beings, objects, and others.

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This is a mediatization that is characterized by its political retooling of discursivity—using the master’s (mutant) tools to dismantle the master’s house, so to speak. Bottici (2014) notes this in terms of the society of the spectacle, “as in Debord’s détournement, you have to reuse parts of the spectacle already going on in order to subvert it” (122). Such a maneuver is adamantly not reactionary in the sense of positing some ideal outside, nostalgic return to an origin, or more generally other nonpragmatic responses that carry many times covert fascistic ideologies and programs, for example, deep ecology, neoliberal economics, humanism, and so on. Détournement takes the spectacle and incites a play of heterogeneity. Saying as much, Vaneigem (2001) describes détournement as “an all-embracing reinsertion of things into play. It is the act whereby play grasps and reunites beings and things hitherto frozen solid in a hierarchy of fragments” (264). In this sense, détournement introduces change into the system through not only a (re)appropriation and hijacking of the signifiers, tools, icons, and images of hegemonic modes of subjection, but, most importantly, reintroduces them back into the system though a playful feedback loop. Such an account of détournement connects directly to the dodgy, cagey, or less pejoratively playfulness of the pervert in the psychoanalytic clinic. Case in point, relating this explicitly to disavowal and the analytic encounter, the pervert thwarts symbolic interpellation by never bearing witness to a key Lacanian therapeutic technique. Miller makes note of his own experience in regard to this impasse, “the effect known since Lacan as the ‘subject supposed to know’ doesn’t arise with a true pervert . . . you need a certain void or deficit in the place of sexual enjoyment for the subject supposed to know to arise” (as cited in Dean 2008: 101). The lack of the sujet supposé savoir that exists, in relation to structural disavowal, can easily be spun off into a détournement such that “disavowal implies a certain staging or making believe regarding the paternal function [i.e., the Other]” (Fink 2003: 44) in order “to make the Other pronounce the law, or to indicate oneself the place of the law” (Fink 2003: 48). Somewhat paradoxically, the pervert is able to force the Other into being, as a juridical and policing formation, all the while structuring its fantasy as dramaturgical, that is to say, as disavowing its authority as anything other than relative. The forcing of the Other into being represents the playful relation intrinsic to perversion such that, at least at the unconscious level, signification is more akin to artifice, to a play (in the sense of a stage with actors and in the sense of a power move), that is strictly not arbitrated by the paternal function, the name of the father. This plasticity of the phallus, so to speak, creates a relation

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to epistemology that is unique in its ability to model the unconscious of the perverse structure, a kind of auto-modeling relying on alchemical signifiers to cut the code and release the power of this repressed libido. A détournement persists in being able to straddle these two positions simultaneously, the positions between playing and authority, and at least as it pertains to the psychoanalytic apparatus, the pervert is never really subjectivized. Put differently, within the structural relation that the pervert has with the Other, there exists a kernel of transversality that can be unleashed on subjecting systems in order to cut the sense they have with subjectivity thereby launching a new relation the subject has with its own intelligibility. Drawing on a long history of clinical experience, it seems reasonable to quote Fink at length here. He journals about his frustration in the following passage, This explains why it is so difficult to do analytic work with perverts: the pervert casts himself in the role of object a, expecting to play the part of the object that can satisfy (plug up) the analyst’s desire. The analyst may be hard pressed to maneuver the transference in such a way as to become the cause of the perverse analysand’s desire, when the latter works so hard to occupy the position of cause of desire. The pervert would rather serve as the cause of the analyst’s anxiety and desire than let the analyst become the cause of his own musings. It is thus quite difficult to do genuinely analytic work with perverts, to get them intrigued by unconscious formations and by what the analyst underscores in them, and to get their desire in motion. (Fink 2003: 50, emphasis in original)

Using the model of the pervert in the psychoanalytic clinic—admittedly, by Fink, as the objet a—illuminates a contextual and specific kind of détournement. To follow Fink’s logic, if the pervert’s détournement were to persist in the psychoanalytic clinic the roles between analyst and analysand would not only reverse, but also in a stronger sense the entire analytic apparatus would start to breakdown since the pervert’s disavowal throws a wrench in the analytic machine. Yet, to push this logic further, there also exists the possibility that this détournement3 may model the desire of the analyst wherein the pervert actually becomes the analyst for the analyst! Hence, the very common axiom one hears circulating among many Lacanians: “perverts do not seek out analysis.” Extrapolating this provides a blueprint for a détournement of subjective production in a much broader sense, while still resting on the logics of disavowal and the Other as spectacle. These last two points are necessary to understand Foucault’s alethurgic praxis and the production of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call the ritournelle, the refrain. A schizoanalysis of refrains relies precisely

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on the kind of hijacking of structure being developed such that, and this has been detailed in relation to Foucault’s theorizing of discursive regimes, a détournement throws off machinic nuclei that may or may not coalesce into an existential consistency in an ontogenetic fashion. Again, to stress the point by revisiting the way in which subjectivities become formed, as Lazzarato articulates, the mode is not one of a “rationalistic” correspondence, The enunciation of the relation to the self and the existential territories that support them always depends on a détournement of narrative whose primary function is not to produce rational, cognitive, or scientific explanations, but to generate complex refrains (“mythico-conceptual, phantasmatic, religious, novelistic”) which give consistency to the emergence of new existential territories. (Lazzarato 2014: 211, emphasis in original)

Such a tactic exists as a pre-subjective relation and foregrounds a launching of the Foucauldian arts of existence. As intrinsic to the mechanics of subjective production, détournement gathers together various structural elements of a specific kind of subjectivation. Yet, what is its aesthetic mode of relating? In other words, is it just the spectacle as such that becomes its relation to understanding?

Schizoanalytic Black Holes and Performance Art Performance art is a very real material practice that highlights how the aesthetic can become embodied. Furthermore, performance art is a paradigm for processes of subjectivation, as opposed to subjection, since it is inherently anti-normative in nature. Indeed, Watson (2006) points this out as well saying that “contemporary performance art, cinema and theatre call for theoretical paradigms that are less Oedipal, less ‘personological’ and less discursive” (267), which situates performance art within the schizoanalytic purview of less subjective structurings that are based on rigid refrains. Guattari (1995) directly likens this sensibility to a machinic processuality that acts on a proto-subjective level before the meaningful ritual or redundancy takes hold, “[performance art is] a forward flight into machination and deterritorialized machinic paths capable of engendering mutant subjectivities. What I mean by this is that there is something artificial, constructed, composed— what I call a machinic processuality—in concrete poetry’s rediscovery of orality” (90). Performance art, then, is a paradigmatic model par excellence that brings

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together the artificiality of the schizoanalytic real, its enacted poetics, and a détournement against hypostatized refrains, specifically not as it relates just to the artist but more dramatically to the public as such. The performance artist is engaged in a subjectivation of stylistics, to borrow a category from linguistics, whereby the cosmetic configurations, their performative and glamoring qualities, paradoxically introduce a real into the symbolic matrix. As Guattari says, Performance art delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this extraction of intensive, a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity. It shoves our noses up against the genesis of being and forms, before they get a foothold in dominant redundancies. (Guattari 1995: 90)

This talent to inhabit that a—the a-temporal, a-spatial, a-signifying, and so on— is a privileged mode of subjectivation such that it requires a certain divestment of normal modes of subjectivity. In the Lacanian sense this is a subjective destitution requisite of analytic practice or of subjective (re)formation during the analytic process—precisely, the reconfiguration of the subject’s lack. Yet, for schizoanalysis, that castration demanded by Lacanians is completely absent. In fact, in a very fundamental sense, it is the exact opposite: the performance artist never “accepts” castration because the artist simply becomes the (Oedipal) theater itself. The artist mirrors the lack of the Other which is not just purely a void, but also imminently generative. Schizoanalysis calls this a black hole. The initial encounter with a black hole can be detected through its “artificial” absence from itself, never having a stable self-presence: “[the] exploit consists in reterritorializing a black hole resting . . . on nothing. Consciential components turn nothingness around itself and, by doing this, exacerbate the process of subjectification which starts to spin around itself ” (Guattari 2011: 211). Thus, the performance artist develops a relationship to the public that draws-in the latter’s consciential components around the artwork machine, creating a fetish infused aesthetics, which is to say its “success” degree is adjudicated through its production of discursive, energetic, stylistic, and other material effects. As a case in point, this can be seen in some of Marina Abramović’s (Abraham et al. 2012) pieces such as The Artist is Present that took place at The Museum of Modern Art in 2010. In this staging, Abramović sat across from willing participants for almost three months and for eight hours a day. This was intended to show, in some ways, the impassioned commitment and stamina that

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is required to engage in performance art while also demonstrating the power of empathy, the gaze, and intersubjectivity. What was so interesting about this artwork, with regard to present purposes, is the large crowds and media attention that Abramović created—so much so that she was featured in the music video Picasso Baby by Jay-Z (2013) in the years following this performance. There is a sense in which this kind of subjective production induced by the black hole creates a scene of both terror and grace such that “the process of subjectification . . . starts to spin around itself ” (Guattari 2011:  211). There is always, in other words, a constant threat the performance could institute an entrapment of subjective formation such that the public “falls into” the black hole thereby failing to see the art as such, activating a production of subjectivity that is foregrounded by identification, transference, attachment, or Oedipalization. Conversely and all the while, the black hole produces sign particles and machinic nuclei that form novel assemblages of subjective formation thereby jettisoningoff newly created entities. Such a Janus-head property inherent to the black hole and performance art as such is described by Guattari in the following way, This black hole effect is produced by the node of resonance that emerges when a point of recentering is constituted between semiological redundancies. It tends to attract and isolate redundancies of every nature from their substrate, emptying them of their contents. It constitutes a point of semiological powerlessness in the same way that it constitutes a point of machinic superpower, because beginning from this, diagrammatic signs-particles will be emitted . . . (Guattari 2011: 210– 1, emphasis in original)

What Guattari is suggesting is that the assemblage the performance artist creates, including a vast array of networks, materials, timespaces, and so forth, if it is done well, will produce a black hole effect. While the theoretical concept of the schizoanalytic black hole can be given in the concrete figure of the performance artist, one might wonder what form of aesthetics such a literal figure dons itself with. Models from baroque paintings, sculptures, and other artworks fill in this very representational void.

Toward a Baroque Self-Fashioning With regard to history, the baroque style appeared on the scene in the seventeenth century, mainly in Italy, and was driven in large part by the Catholic church’s

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counter-reformation, which pushed toward the infusion of a renewed sense of emotionality and religiosity into the motifs and themes of this style. The baroque, however, is not just religious for the sake of being religious in that this aesthetic marks a decisive shift away from representationalist and correspondence art, paintings, architecture, or sculpture that aim to model reality as faithfully as possible. On the contrary, as Deleuze (2006) argues in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, the baroque does not retreat from representationalism, perhaps moving toward a more abstract aesthetic that might be seen in surrealist or modern art, but, instead, actually plunges more into reality, paradoxically, by exposing and inhabiting the premises on which that reality is founded. The question of trying to save a theological worldview when, as Deleuze (2006) says, it is in this precise historical time period that theology is under attack is answered by the baroque in saying that, We shall multiply principles—we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs [emphasis added]—and in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that ‘perplexing case.’ (77)

The genius of the baroque lies in this ability to ceaselessly and perspectivally multiply its principles in a way that are adjudged through their pragmatic use. That is to say, it is no longer the case that artists must remain true or pious toward some object keeping the hope that the meaning of the artwork will somehow uphold this correspondence and communicate it accordingly. Rather, the baroque’s experimentation with representation somehow changes the depiction of the very object being portrayed. In other words, the baroque always seems to have its cards face-up, to flip Deleuze’s formula given above, thereby showing its object of art through a peculiar way of hiding it. The import this has for self-fashioning, specifically on the level of subjectivity, is essential, especially if Guattari (1995) is to be taken at is word when he writes: “the work of art, for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment, which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself ” (131). However, before sketching a form of subjective production that is foregrounded by a baroque sensibility, it may be helpful to more rigorously ground what this sometimes elusive, sometimes aporic method of modeling actually means. Samo Tomšič, in a chapter that attempts to bring Lacan and Deleuze into conversation with each other, is worth quoting at length here not only for the etymological

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unpacking of the term that he accomplishes, but also for the added layer of analysis. Tomšič (2017) writes, The expression “baroque” originates from the Italian barocco, used by scholastic philosophers for describing an obstacle in propositional logic. The first point would then address a linguistic hindrance or irregularity, a particularly complex and sophisticated syllogism. In later periods the meaning of “baroque” was extended to designate “any contorted idea or involuted process of thought” (which remains in line with linguistic deviation). Another potential source is the Portuguese barroco ‘used to describe an irregular or imperfectly shaped pearl; this usage still exists in the jeweler’s term baroque pearl’. In this second meaning another feature is added: the incorrect or deformed shape is the opposite to the ancient ideal of the sphere, which obtained its scientific expression in cosmology and premodern astronomy. (Tomšič 2017: 137, emphasis in original)

The baroque has its roots, then, following the above excerpt, in logic and scholastic philosophy, specifically the term was used pejoratively to describe an obstacle within propositional logic. That is to say, the antagonism, rupture, or, better for present purposes, anomaly that somehow interceded in deductive statements about the world, that interfered with conclusive truth claims. It might be said, following in this sense, that a production of subjectivity that models itself after a baroque aesthetic, at least to a degree, likewise remains both inside the syllogistic pattern, as a necessary reminder, while at the same time frustratingly antagonizing this exact system. What is more, given the interesting literary and metaphorical semantics the baroque contains, that it was used to describe something that was involuted or contorted, it might be more correct to say that such a subjective production does not just frustrate its social positionality, using the trope of contortion here; instead, this is a word that invokes something that would be more in line with the genre of horror. Indeed, Chiesa (2017) likens this to tortured forms that the baroque produces that create a paradoxical satisfaction such as the anamorphic skull of baroque painting and, using Lacanian theory, states that this is “nothing else than an evocation of jouissance as absent” (Chiesa 2017: 146, emphasis in original). The mannerist paintings of Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), whose works followed in this very baroque aesthetic, aim to say something about the way that the subject is embedded within the world while, at the same time, addressed by something that cannot be properly rendered as a figure within this very world. Most pointedly, La Tour’s use of the technique of chiaroscuro, the embellishment of the contrast between light and dark to create three-dimensional forms, is a

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hallmark of his artistic depiction of the form, the body, and how it is situated or called by the other features of the painting and how, almost always, these features are foregrounded by something other that is absent from the painting itself. In other words, to use the trope of hearing, for example, the point is that the addressee does not hear, audibly, that which is being told or said; but, rather, that which is heard originates from having already been in communion with the world, the ways that La Tour situates the objects in the painting on and around the body. As Judovitz (2006) articulates, The attainment of spiritual insight is a response to a call, an awakening of the voice of conscience that overcomes the artful seduction of images. Hearing the divine Word implies not only the recognition of being its addressee, but also the obligation to incorporate this address into the flesh. The mystery of Christ’s incarnation, of the Word become flesh, thus haunts both the fate of the representation of the body and the painterly world it inhabits. (148)

This “haunting” is perhaps the signal par excellence emboldening the character with an ecstatic, torturous kind of mandate to self-cultivate, which means, in this context, to heed the call of the divine, quite literally, on the flesh. St. Jerome, in La Tour’s versions c. 1628–1630 and c. 1630–1632 are not only indicative of the way that a certain voice of conscience or the call of guilt, perhaps, manifest within the subject, as insight, or on the subject, as self-flagellation, but also demonstrate a kind of baroque playfulness in so far as the canonical depictions of St. Jerome, usually showed him beating his breast with a stone, are retooled by La Tour using a bloodstained rope, which shifts, as Judovitz (2006) points-out, to his back. In this way, the beholder, to move to the register of vision now instead of hearing, is barred, in a certain manner, from witnessing the act of flogging. What this amounts to is not so much a more violent form of inscribing the call of the divine on the flesh, the substitution of the stone for a knotted rope, but an intentional decentering of the vision, its self-presence, and its relation to a beholder. Indeed, sticking with the painting of St. Jerome for a little while longer, La Tour seems to be critiquing the mode of vision as a privileged modality by which to comprehend the world, vis-à-vis his other motifs of blindness and hearing, and, instead, makes the move to more of a musical or rhythmic model. According to Judovitz (2006), “St. Jerome’s self-administered reprimand redirects the divine address as a violent imprint, retracing the resounding conviction of the Word through the rhythmic rupture of the skin on his back” (148). This fetishizing of self-flogging does not go toward a representation of

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the self that is safely contained within the religious parameters that demarcate this process, paying penance for Christ, as a case in point, or even toward an asceticism, a form of self-discipline that might be extrapolated as a lesson for right or just action. La Tour may actually be criticizing these modes of selffashioning partially through, as was previous alluded to, his passage to musicality and an enfleshed form of speech—objects that “talk” or address—therein he interweaves notions of figuration and its iterations with the very means by which they become manifest: “it is as if light was presented in the mode of an utterance, since its reiterated radiance with small variations in tonal scope illuminates in different ways the manifestations of the visible” (Judovitz 2006: 147). Interestingly, the bridging nature, between human and divine, found in the stylistics that La Tour employs, the chiaroscuro, has a profound bearing on his representations of subjectivity and, more specifically, its formation. That is, the conditions of possibility that foreground the production of subjectivity or its ongoing self-fashioning, as evidenced in the St. Jerome paintings, necessitate a split, the subject being estranged from itself, the double-bind, so to speak, of a subject in the throes of an impossible act. As Judovitz (2006) writes, His gaze averted and meditating on a cross held in the left hand, St Jerome’s right hand exacts painful penance in the presence of the Word. The split embodied in the difference between these two hand gestures functions as the mark of the divine address that subverts subjectivity from acting as a unified consciousness. St Jerome’s submission to the divine Word dispossesses the worldly logic of his body, redefining it as the ecstatic site of spiritual transfiguration. (148)

The two emblems that St. Jerome holds in his hands signify an attempt of trying to interpret the call of something that speaks to him while, at the same time, remaining pious or faithful to his own subjectivity, even if this representation is caught in a process of arising out of its very conditions of possibility. The mirroring of the self from within embodiment, in a similar gesture, is likewise captured in La Tour’s paintings that depict Mary Magdalene, entitled The Magdalene with Two Flames and The Magdalene at the Mirror. The figure of the body, in these sets of pictorials, is switched on, aimed at contrasting itself with its surroundings through the light it emits, which, in a certain anecdotal gesture, makes sense given that Mary Magdalene is often described as the “lightgiver” (Judovitz 2006:  149). The motifs of the mirror and the skull, found in both of these works, model how the subject is always split from itself, how the rapturous extreme of divinity is traversed by the fragility of the flesh. In other words, the mirror represents the “spiritual emblems of Christ’s double nature,

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in so far as the material opacity and darkness of his mortality subtends the brilliant clarity of his divinity” (Judovitz 2006: 152). La Tour deploys the mirror as a means by which to comment on the seductive nature of the visible therein challenging its alluring character, the fact that things may not always be what they seem, to put it tritely, and that it is this “fallenness” into a world of glint and glimmer that threatens to undermine, interestingly, the body itself as mode of expression and cultivation. The religious Christian iconography is thus appropriated by La Tour to suggest not a renunciation of the flesh for the sake of a world to come but, somewhat inversely, the presence of the divine in the unseen, in that which communes with the body, silently uttering a message of sacred interconnection. In a proper sense of self-cultivation, this demands a type of fidelity to one’s conditions of emergence, a self-narrativity that pushes the body to an excruciating extreme, amounting to nothing less than a loss of self-consistency. Judovitz (2006) argues that such a process “entails a going back over oneself, a retraction, even contradiction of one’s former conditions, that leads to the ecstatic dispossession and ultimate loss of the self ” (155). Introducing an antagonism into innerspeech may be the very means by which the beholden challenges the beholder, frustrating the subject with the invisible utterances stemming from its supposed mode of self-reflexivity. The baroque style of La Tour depicts representations of subjectivity that, as his stylistics and placement of emblems demonstrates, envisions the subject as caught between two possible extremes that threaten to tear the subject apart while ecstatically delivering the subject over to itself. The move to worldly utterances, that they haunt and torment precisely because they are invisible, calls into question self-presence and typically held notions of subjective agency (Judovitz 2006). It follows, then, that modes of self-expression, as the St. Jerome example goes to show, are given form more violently than any inscription upon the body could ever account for, thus enabling a certain refined and, indeed, divine hearing of the self out of the cacophony of voices that remain invisible but, nevertheless, painstakingly present. The kind of displacement between excessive pain or pleasure and the actual actor involved goes a long way toward describing how a form of subjectivation might situate or handle its potentials to evoke. In other words, revisiting the tropological of horror alluded to earlier, it is the performance of these tropes, which is not the same thing as the tropes themselves. Schizoanalysis recognizes the parallax this creates, and baroque by extension, through its emphasis on the surface nature of materiality and the paintings of La Tour illustrate this point

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precisely; that is, the kind of limitless stretching of the surface of the body in order to write on the flesh something of the divine that monstrously shows signification as pure artifice, pristine syntagmatic chains that need no recourse to a signified eliding subjective self-presence, and, by extension, interweaving subjectivity with that which fashions it—an alterity that is as infinitely terrifying as it is plastically seductive. Indeed, Chiesa (2017) captures this nicely, using the genre of the baroque, when writing that “the distinctiveness of baroque architecture would be its plastic ‘effort towards pleasure,’ which, however, only makes baroque architecture ‘shine’ to the extent that it produces ‘tortured forms’ ” (147). The flip-flop between a plastic effort toward pleasure, the topological sheen, its artifice, and its horror tinged metaphorics brings into accord the aporic nature this aesthetic conjures. Deleuze (2006), of course, agrees on this point, if the introductory discussion was any indication, and formalized this under the axiom:  “a texturology that attests to a generalized organicism” (131, emphasis added). What better way to describe the baroque than by placing it under the rubric of texturology? Certainly, the tactile nature of this approach is not limited to the skin but is more akin to a certain texturology of being itself and this is precisely what gives the baroque the ability to tickle its object while, at the same time and maybe in the same sense, torturing it. Instead of pivoting to the motif of plastic, Deleuze (2006) uses clothing to convey this point when arguing that “matter is clothed, with ‘clothed’ signifying two things: that matter is a buoyant surface, a structure endowed with an organic fabric, or that it is the very fabric or clothing, the texture enveloping the abstract structure” (Deleuze 2006: 131). What Deleuze does is to introduce the very texturology of being, it’s surface nature, in so far as he sees this as a first principle, to stick with previous terms, than the matter itself. In other words, the point is that the truth of the matter is not at stake, nor even the process of finding the truth, deduction of logical principles, for example, but the plastic or surface nature of materiality itself. This troubles, in many ways, approaches that may try and colonize being, either through tightly bound logical systems or through apophantic claims. It does not matter, that is to say, what the true nature of being is, a positionality rooted in a Cartesian skepticism perhaps, but rather the baroque calls for the ongoing ornamentation of materiality, its decoration and embellishment, even. As Tomšič (2017) hints at, what gets purposefully excluded or, more technically, disavowed, is the lack of being, the void, which is dressed in “the overblown and over-decorated bodies and buildings” of the baroque (138).

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From Allegory to Illusion and the Body Disavowal, a term that we have seen is drenched in psychoanalytic connections, in a certain qualified sense may most clearly get at the communicativity that results from baroque modes of expression (Deleuze will later prefer the word illusion). To put this more clearly, as Benjamin (1998) notes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, “if starting from the concept is objectionable in art, then we shall not be able to approve, when a work of art is intentionally and avowedly chosen to express a concept; this is the case in allegory” (161, emphasis in original). This kind of allegorical modeling, the use of signs or symbols to express a quasi-hidden meaning, is exactly what Tomšič was describing when articulating how the baroque creates a surplus of meaning to circle the void thereby hermetically sealing it through a posturing of smoke and mirrors—a funhouse effect, revisiting the genre of horror, again, that can be as disorienting as it is enticing, decadent, and tasty. While the importance of allegory, in its proper understanding, was central to baroque painters and craftsmen of the seventeenth century and, it would follow, the form of self-fashioning being developed here, Benjamin is careful not to associate allegory, as it is conceived through correspondence, with strict baroque forms of artistic expression since the allegorical in the baroque works more through intensity, affect, and evocation. Indeed, there may be nowhere clearer an example, according to Benjamin (1998), than in the esoteric hideaways of secret societies or cults such that it is “the fragmentary, untidy, and disordered character of the magicians’ dens or the alchemists’ laboratories [that are] familiar above all to the baroque” (Benjamin 1998:  188). Such a form of conveying meaning, if the model of highly allegorized and poeticized alchemical texts is any indication, produces both intentionally and purposefully a failure of signification in order to, on the one hand, make accessible the meanings to only those that may have been initiated and, on the other hand, to create some kind of “experience” in the subject that finds itself faced with a properly baroque object, an experience that may mime or create a secondary quality to the actual experience of the object itself. As suggested previously, this is an allegorical mode of self-fashioning that disavows its correspondences, that, in other words, tries to push itself to a rapturous and frustrating extreme, one that leans off the ledge of a wall and finds itself confronted by a field populated by monsters. Being in stark contradistinction to classicism or abstraction, those kinds normally found in

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allegory, it, instead, conjures up metaphors of the body, abjection, and a fierce, fire-ridden literality. Similarly, Steiner (1998) interprets Benjamin’s analysis of the baroque as tracing “the irrational but perfectly congruent network which knits blackness in the individual soul or complexion to planetary maleficence, to bile and, above all, to that proximity of literal hell which haunts baroque reflexes” (19). The tropes of knitting and proximity map on somewhat nicely to Deleuze’s own terms of texturology and clothing drawn out earlier. The baroque, on this account, then, is a kind of tactile contact with ghosts, a spectrality that is clothed by a “garment” used as the precise means by which it is able to reach out and communicate anything to the world at all. Likewise, a mode of self-fashioning that creatively appropriates the baroque must stylize itself using a similar structure. The paradox of this, the production of the self as something that is absent from itself is the highest form of subjectivation and is found in the impassioned commitment to, as Deleuze says, “use illusion in order to produce one’s being, to construct a site of hallucinatory Presence” (Deleuze 2006:  188, 6). Importantly, this proliferates profound aesthetic and discursive effects of ornamentation and embellishment while, also, allegorizing, which is to say communicating, a disavowal, a secret that cannot, but nevertheless, must be named. The “name” of this secret is strictly equivalent to the illusion. The illusion, in other words, is the motor or generative interlocutor that sits at the heart of the being of subjectivity energizing creative potentials and launching possibilities for self-fashioning. This is not the same as saying that the illusion, the name, and so on are nothing since the baroque nevertheless communicates, pushes something along, forming substantive, affective evocations and even, in a certain gesture, claims. Perhaps it is here that one is able to see most clearly the Deleuzian (over) emphasis on the vitality or overflow of being, which may be juxtaposed, as it traditional is, with Lacan’s ontology of lack. Yet, the two intersect at this point and one might even say agree:  the intersection is the nature of allegory, within the present framework, or more generally, communicativity, the transmission of knowledges, and the nature of language in general. Sticking with self-fashioning and the production of subjectivity, the baroque means of showing or perhaps better, demonstrating, given the term’s etymological traces of monstrosity and fortune-telling, is not an abstract correspondence, constellation, or the failure of the symbol to signify but is, rather, a collapse that “combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world” (Deleuze 2006:  143), which is a temporal-spatial style of being, in other words, that knows presence is as malleable as absence,

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that self-reflexivity is the greatest illusion of all. In this way, the baroque has an intensity that eddies toward the imaginary but an imaginary that is out in the world, so to speak. To use Benjamin’s words, the baroque, “both externally and stylistically—in the extreme character of the typographical arrangement and in the use of highly charged metaphors—the written word tends towards the visual” (Benjamin 1998: 175–6). It is not so much the logical and symbolic cogency of characters or neat typographical standards that marks the baroque as something wholly other, returning to Deleuze’s emphasis that the baroque has a presence that is hallucinatory, but its overdetermined stylistics, the shifting of the nature of allegory to signify that which is kept hidden. On the level of the written word, Benjamin (1998) reminds us that “it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaseless, without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification” (179). This is a process of hystericizing the text, in a certain manner, whereby the properties of the words, how they are arranged, their syntactic construction, and their flowery and overdone prose look to leap off the page precisely because the baroque uses normative structures of diction as a means by which to electrify its textuality. The exact same principle applies to subjectivation and modes of selffashioning. The trope of electricity is, however, slightly modified on the level of subjectivity in so far as the subject’s textuality would be foregrounded by the body, not having the same free-range access as linguistic utterances or artistic modes of expression. The nonsense produced by the erogenous zones located on the surface of the body and inside of it, especially the rims, create esoteric words, as Collett (2017) following Deleuze calls them, or, grounding this process in the theory being developed, are phonetically unintelligible ciphers that connect to and unlock a much larger network of signifiers and meanings available only to that particular subject. The networked interconnections that this special babble establishes may best be described as “baroque” such that the associations are webbed, ornamental, and knitted. Clearly, this says nothing about the physical world the subject inhabits, since this is only on the level of interpretation and, even more precisely, the body, but it does, nevertheless, go a long way toward demonstrating taking seriously the self-fashioning of an illusion for one’s own identity. The surfaces of this self-fashioning are foregrounded by texturology, the fold as Deleuze more abstractly called it, that “abolishes the topological divide on the inside and the outside” (Tomšič 2017: 136), and it follows that it would be the

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“touching” of the special places around the body that bring out and then collapse down the ciphers that give the subject existential-consistency. The latter process, that of hallucinating one’s own being, may result in arguably the pinnacle of a properly baroque style of subjective production, one that penetrates the world and uses its scraps, or raw, leftover materials to artistically reconstruct and renew old forms of being and resubjectivize hegemonic powers that helped launched the subjectivation in the first place—a recursive form of power, such a mode of artistic self-creation would require, “a power inseparable from the infinite act of folding” (Chiesa 2017: 141), that never gives ground relative to its creativity or, perhaps better, that does not ever stop overcoming itself. Picking or choosing what one wears for the day is not the same as engaging in a process of baroque self-fashioning, even if the clothing one selects meets the standard requirement for a baroque aesthetics. Although, it would be fair to say that clothing does do a lot of work for this mode of subjective production, both in its material, everyday sense and as a privileged, textual trope. Perhaps it may be seeing the body as “stripped naked” (185), to return to Benjamin’s (1998) warning at the onset, that provides the best glimpse of how to begin to engage in this mode of self-fashioning. This is a specific motif of nakedness, however, one that is exclusive to this genre and, as Deleuze (2006) says, “radiates everywhere, at all times, in the thousand folds of garments” (139). Such is the paradox of the baroque:  on the one hand, its stylistics engage in a decadent play of ornamentation and joyous adulation while, on the other hand, it keeps guarded a torturous limit that forces signification into ever new intensities of modeling that very thing that haunts its being. What one might experience about the accessibility that such art contains would certainly bring about a recapitulation of the work that went into its original, baroque construction. Namely, it is not merely the waving around of plastic texturality as artifice that would signify nothing less than the surface nature of its materiality, say form without content, but the initiatory nature of the emblems themselves, the precise way in which they interconnect, or in literary language, their baroque inter-textuality, that is the real transmission of content, preparing the ground for an event yet to come. This would be indicative of a mode of selffashioning that beckons subjectivity, in a repetitive yet always renewed manner, to enter into the art it has created, an invitation into its curation and infinitely ongoing process of self style. As Deleuze (2006) says, this is to “entr’ expression, fold after fold” (35, emphasis in original).

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This final chapter of this book will bring together several sections that will attempt to punctuate the forgoing discussion of the production of subjectivity, how it can be situated in the modern-day milieu, and, more pointedly, what it means to cultivate an arts of existence, a process of subjectivation, with an eye toward the future. The chapter will proceed in the following ways:  (1) an overview will be given as it pertains to conceptualizing in a summative spirit the theoretical work done herein; (2) a discussion will proceed from this and sketch of the consequences of inquiry as it pertains to the conclusions of the document will be developed; (3) implications will then be discussed in relation to the broader academic discourse and what impact and contribution this venture has made to various fields within the academy; (4) the final section will demarcate specific limitations that the present project has run-up against or, in other words, what might be some conceptual pitfalls that were not accounted for in the foregoing analysis? Finally, recommendations will be offered for future thinkers who wish to pursue a similar line of inquiry.

Précis Michel Foucault (1985b) once said, in difference to modes of subjection and their influence on subjectivity: I became more and more aware that in all societies there is another type of technique: techniques which permit individuals to affect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power. Let us call these kinds of techniques technologies of the self. (367)

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This passage serves well to highlight the starting point for the central thesis of the preceding analysis—namely, the theoretical articulation of a specific kind of technology of the self that is placed within current prevailing and up-and-coming strands of discourse as well as how this technique of the self is mediatized thereby positioning subjectivity within the global and mechanized state of affairs in contemporary society. This has resulted in a theory of subjectivation. The work done under the auspices of the present endeavor has followed in the Western tradition of self-cultivation, albeit with a critical perspective on the colonialism inherent within this heritage, and has tried to develop, unpack, and extend the original Platonic formula: τεχνη του βιου (techné tou biou), the crafting of one’s life into an arts of existence. The extrapolation of this formula was troubled by contemporary modes of mediatization, the way in which subjectivity is plugged into and interlinked with others, semiotic systems, and the larger media spectacle. Such a challenge to Antiquity’s notion of how a life should be lived was shown to be not necessarily antithetical to the Western tradition of developing an arts of existence but, instead, called for an “updated” version. As a result, the guiding problematic that has allowed for such a mode of self-fashioning to be articulated was posed as follows: this book advanced a theory of subjectivation that makes the claim that an ethicoaesthetic form of self-fashioning runs counter to processes of mediatization, not eliding them in favor of anarchistic or reactionary gestures, but rather hijacking them to produce a space of freedom and agency that would otherwise not be possible. In the second chapter, I  sought to provide a historical and critical context to the notion of subjectivity. This was done by tracing the concept’s evolution along three axes: the transcendent, ideal, or dialectical subject, the postmodern, linguistic, or psychoanalytic subject, and the immanent subject. These three demarcations helped to demonstrate how each genealogy of thought differs from the other. This is important for the reason that differences do exist between these schools of thought and these differences go into producing specific forms of subjectivity, which may or may not be amenable to capture by larger policing frameworks or apparatuses. While due diligence among the particulars creates a conceptual roadmap by which to engage more rigorously and technically with actual theoretical construction, I  wanted to relax conceptual and disciplinary boundaries in order to smash together concepts and create something new, a process similar to amalgamation. It follows that this form of literature review, while still parsing subjectivity into different heritages and disciplines, marshals what Guattari called transversality. That is, exploiting the alikeness between



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different thinkers and how that alikeness can go into the formation of something autonomous and neoteric. Most evidently, the thread of transversality that began in the literature review found its climax in the following chapter on new methods and new subjectivities. The procedure developed therein took a lead from Guattari’s process of metamodeling and represented in and of itself just one such metamodel. The key driving engine of this process is transversality. Its more literary sense was highlighted, in contrast to the work that Guattari conducted at La Borde with psychiatric patients, in so far as the development of this metamodel was aimed on the level of conceptual intervention while still having import for embodiment and materiality and, therefore, the production of subjectivity. The central motif of riddled monstrosity that helped to undergird the metamodel emphasizes the darker and more occult aspects of the immanent philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari such that tropes taken from the genre of horror, those like fire, the demonic, and sorcery as well as others, foreground the signifiers that this interventive strategy is able to apprehend. At its core, this metamodel privileges metaphors located on and within the body as having the most charged affective valences available, that have the most energetic means by which to launch an arts of existence. This paradoxical “return to the body” while still taking into account the mechanized and technological conditions of emergence that give rise to subjectivity sets up, nicely, a neoanimism that has found its way into many prominent thinkers’ recent works and was championed by Guattari himself. Such a new philosophy of animism is not a reactionary return to pre-coloniality just as much as it cannot be said to celebrate indigeneity. Rather, it necessarily takes into account how the planet has become mechanized and mediatized and how animism can either challenge or complement this ever-accelerating process.

Monstrosity, Transversality, Neoanimism The three registers which helped map subjectivity onto a process of subjectivation and self-fashioning have been the cosmological, the linguistic, and the aesthetic. Each of the three have consequences for the future as it pertains to extending and developing the findings of this endeavor. In terms of the cosmological findings of the theoretical development, the dawning of the chthulucene, as Haraway has called it, can be further conceptualized in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari call the mechanosphere.

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In other words, it is not enough to merely challenge the centering of the anthropos as a kind of endemic pathology of the anthropocene, its human exceptionalism. Additional work needs to be done that positions subjectivity not as caught between the animistically inspired chthulucene and the barren, mechanized world of the mechanosphere—rather, how is it that these twodimensional worlds intersect at moments when the subject comes to fashion itself? It may be the case that, as Shaviro (2015) has suggested, the accelerationism inherent within Deleuze and Guattari points the way toward a future that is divested of capitalism perhaps therein also being stripped of the all-pervasive mechanosphere that is layered onto and siphons the energies away from the biosphere of the planet. A reinvigoration of the biosphere that such a process of passing through capitalism quickly by using its mechanisms to subvert it might create a more vibrant Earth that is no longer constrained by the sliding and transposable totality that the mechanosphere epitomizes. With regard to the linguistic influences on subjective production, it was shown that the novel approach of Bakhtin differed in kind from the structuralist endeavor of Saussure in so far as Bakhtin emphasized a kind of corporeality that relies on polyphony in order to bring itself into being. This multiplicity is more in line with an immanent kind of thought than the more dualist or dialectic distinction between the signifier and the signified can offer. As such, several key concepts were submitted as indicative of how this theory of subjectivation forms itself. The reliance on the faciality and refrains of the clown helped demonstrate the heteroglossia that is prevalent in the carnival and, moreover, how the centrifugal forces of this embodied interlocutor aids as a heuristic in modeling for subjective formation, how to get underneath the sliding of sense contained on the surface level of the most widely shared signifying systems. The performance artist, likewise, represents another powerful figure by which to think through the process of subjective formation in relation to mediatization. This was captured by returning to the post-Situationist concept of détournement, also highlighted by Glissant (1997) in his development of post-colonial and creole strategies of resistance, and how this is necessarily an aesthetic process that highjacks and redeploys normally operating universes of value in order to carve out a space of either subversion, freedom, or agency. In culmination of this endeavor, the baroque modeling practices of encryption inherent to the emblems found in the artwork of that period paved the way for the releasement of hidden sense that is not immediately apparent and required the use of a metamodel in order to decipher. Not unlike the baroque aesthetic and its practices of producing unique systems of reference, the theoretical



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findings of this project likewise attempted to create similar emblems or nodes— those like the idiot, the clown, or the performance artist—in order to structure a kind of epistemic unsettlement that would induce a subjectivation in the readership; not the conveyance of knowledge per se but an evocation of textual effects and an initiatory experience that would aid in breaking through the gloss of the spectacle therein penetrating to something that may lie deeper, that may be more encrypted. Given the discussion detailed above, the results can also be interwoven thematically between the different sections in three ways: 1. Monstrosity undergirds the sort of post-human endeavor essential for this arts of existence. Specifically, as the various subjective productions have gone to show, the idiot of a neoanimist cosmopolitanism, the clown as paragon of the carnivalesque, and the performance artist as an aesthetic actor share a similar of a kind of monstrosity—the imp in the kitsch—that elides modes of subjection in so far as they either halt, hijack, or re-deploy normative signifying systems in novel and interesting ways thereby creating a unique space within which an arts of existence has the potential to be born. More generally, the cosmological landscape that the present project finds itself in is likewise populated with monsters of all kinds, with darker and more chthonic entities that act underneath the gloss and sheen of mediatization, the spectacle nature of hegemonic and shared epistemologies. 2. Transversality, as it pertains to a conceptual and practical interventive procedure, comes to the fore as a key tool for subjective production. This has taken the form of asignifying semiotics, which contain a paradoxical form of fibrous ethericity, a sort of realism that more animistically tries to get at the world through the way that beings intersect and interact with each other. By slicing through the everydayness of the most widely shared epistemic signs and symbols, the diagonal cutting across scrambles codes and opens-up the surface nature of mediatization bringing into existence a theory of subjectivation that continually curates its subjectivity, the way that it jostles processes of subjection with its own desires, habits, and ways of being. 3. Neoanimism, in relation to subjective production, acts as a powerful frame by which to envision subjectivity under the current technological and globalized milieu. As indicated, this is not a return to the Earth just as much as it is not a return to enchantment since the kind of cosmology advanced here is more pessimistic with regard to hegemony and its deployment of subjection, what has been termed more generally as

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cosmopower. Perhaps by thinking in a metaphysical frame that entwines all beings and takes seriously the way that these beings overlap, how they can be either layered over one another, connected spatially, and held by unique temporalities allows for greater conceptual space where dated limits and habits of thinking can be shattered and fresh forms of theorizing can be developed. This is not to discard the technological in favor of some kind of “naturality”—as the discussion of the mechanosphere has gone to show. Rather, by seeing how the technological aids and abets modes of subjection, subjectivity is in a better place to reclaim the way that the machine has siphoned off singularities and has dimmed down subjectivity’s horizon of possibilities.

The Conflagration of Paranoiac Semiologies The implications of these conclusions have specific bearing for the so-called “post-truth” world that we now inhabit. More precisely, the fevered pitch with which signifying systems are now circulating, the paranoia endemic to this ever-increasing mediatization, may end in nothing other than a conflagration of the distinction between what is real and what is not.1 This would represent the apex of what Deleuze (1992) so presciently called the society of control, where everything becomes subordinated to coding and is only accessible via a credentialed password that is granted, not in a hierarchical manner, but through a calculated, dispersed, and networked web. “Who controls this kind of matrix?” becomes the leading question in this kind of hyper-institutionalized hegemony, something beyond the Foucauldian surveillance State in as much as the gaze and its power to induce auto-regulation is replaced by a mode of subjection that literally and materially encodes and encrypts bodies, enclosures, minds, identities, and the commons as sites of hegemonic appropriation. As is evident, this neoanimism is as far as one can get from the pollyannaish conception of enchantment as articulated by Weber (1949) and Bennett (2001). Perhaps this is why the creature of the monster is invoked with such precocity, as an emblem that has the hope of combatting a subjection that is as hubris as it is omniscient. Excavating the monster from its entombment in the crypt, with specific allusion to Abraham and Torok (1986) here, is paradoxically the most abstract figure by which to shift the topos of commodification, consumerism, and subjective homogenization into one that brings out the inhuman within the human, a form of subjectivity that has found a way to produce the nonsense of asignification and use this discovery to both subvert the ways in which it is



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policed while becoming something other-than-human, an arts of existence that guards a secret. Under these conditions, schizoanalysis is submitted as the best model by which to map and conceptualize, in an academic and pedagogical sense, a theory of subjectivity that is as flush with signifying semiologies as it is with the real itself. Consequently, this troubles psychology’s ability to adequately parse itself out of the spectacle nature of mediatization in that psychology conscripts subjectivity into forms of identity and knowledge practices that prepare it for either medicalization, disciplinary readiness, or most insidiously conceptual schemas that are then self-reflexively taken to be one’s own. This general argument is of course not new, as Foucault has a lot to say on this issue (cf. Hooks 2007). Yet, in difference to Foucault, the breadth of the theory being proposed aims to situate subjectivity in a positive sense as among beings rather than offering an endeavor to critique, deconstruct, or better understand the way that the psychological apparatus imposes modes of subjection. Psychoanalysis, even with its powerful analytic tools for understanding drive, desire, and libido, remains stagnantly caught in an era that too narrowly envisions subjectivity from a theoretical level and recapitulates this lack of insight in the clinic. While it is easy to see how the dangers of institutionalization are clear in the latter, the theoretical system of reference prevalent in the psychoanalytic literature employs a metaphorics that is either stuck in a structuralist tradition that requires a rigid adherence to the registers of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary (RSI), as in the Lacanian strain, or begets a form of developmentalism that is central to Freudianism and its various offshoots. Put more simply, subjectivity is conceptualized from a perspective that is not multiplicitous enough. Not enough attention, in other words, is paid to that way in which subjectivity is enmeshed in a world with other-than-human entities. Hence, as an alternative, I  have invoked speculative fabulation, science fiction, horror, and philosofiction as genres whose imaginaries are much more plentiful with figures that tap into the monstrosity inherent to the seething nature of the chthulucene and, thereupon, have the potential to upset, disgust, or invert that plasticity and kitsch-gloss that is temporally present the most.

A Wandering Star This theory of subjectivation presents us with continued theoretical and conceptual challenges. While the metamodel that undergirds the three topoi of the cosmological, linguistic, and aesthetic was necessary in order to advance

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the interventive procedure of transversality and how the subsequent chapter is really a metamodel that acts, just as baroque artworks do, as an initiatory and encrypted signifying system, it, nevertheless, reduces what can be thought under the auspices of “the monster”—being perhaps a necessary and equalizing gesture given the efficiency and lostness that subjection foists on subjectivity. Furthermore, the registers, while helpful aids in parsing out what a theory of subjectivation could look like given the proliferation of technicity, still takes a bird’s eye view, so to speak, in so far as a more nuanced discussion could be developed if one were to be less ambitious about sketching a neoanimist cartography. As an example of how this could be done, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offer a more detailed discussion of a process of becoming when modeling the relationship between the sorcerer, demon, and the wolf. While such examples and case studies could be extrapolated from the present endeavor, the lack of particular instantiations may be more of a starting, halting, and sputtering to something that is yet to become, a first attempt to re-envision subjectivity under the rubric of mediatization. Furthermore, the process of what has been called amalgamation or the stitching together of concepts, is not without its pedagogical hurtles. That is to say that the construction of a metamodel in this way is a fringe or minor academic practice, one that is not widely shared and understood (Watson 2008). When metamodeling is undertaken there exists the risk that the procedure will be lost on the readership as the methodology remains somewhat esoteric. As a result, it is at the behest of the researcher to explain exactly how schizoanalysis constructs and deploys metamodels to do work on other signifying systems. With regard specifically to the present endeavor, there is a sense in which further explanation of how the metamodel works to decrypt, scramble, and encrypt, for its own purposes, signification is still left presupposed to a degree. Further background work needs to be accomplished in order to conceptually and schematically sketch-out the difference in universes of reference between normative semiologies and what has been called a metamodel, how the latter contains the power of asignifying semiotics and exactly what that means. On the level of subjective production, one may have noticed the privileging of subjectivation over and above modes of subjection. This is true in the sense that the project had the aim of developing an arts of existence or a process of self-cultivation within the purview of technicity and mediatization. On both a practical and theoretical level, however, both subjection and subjectivation are ongoing ways of molding, creating, and forming subjectivity—concurrent forces that are always already present in the existential constitution of the



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subject. It may be fair to suggest that not enough theoretical attention was paid to this fact, to the immanent co-constituting effects and simultaneity intrinsic to the production of subjectivity. Nonetheless, it could also be suggested that the  theory of subjectivation that has hitherto been articulated was necessary in the sense of trying to balance the scales, so to speak—a counterweight that equalizes the pervasiveness and hegemony of subjection. Even this statement, as alluded to earlier, betrays the kind of totality ascribed to Integrated World Capitalism and the paranoia that this creates in this theory of subjectivity and subjective development, an interesting fact in and of itself, saying something, no doubt, about my positionality as an author and perhaps the society of the spectacle as a whole. As a possible future avenue of inquiry, it would be interesting to extrapolate the reflections of metamodeling and apply those formal concepts to other qualitative or literary analyses. As such, I  argue that monstrosity, in both its generalized form as a trope as well as its incarnated form as a being, challenges human self-consistency thereby perhaps aiding analytic research in being able to slice open its object of study in order to see what is inside. The kind diagonal cutting basic to transversality creates an analysis that amalgamates or, perhaps better, smashes concepts together therein electrifying and breathing life into a new universe of reference. While a delimitation pointed-out the pedagogical challenges confronting metamodeling practices, in the future, perhaps, this methodology could become more widely shared and available to researchers in the social sciences, media studies, and even more traditional empirical inquiry. This would not only have the benefit of (re)introducing a kind of neoanimism into the laboratory, in the sense that Latour (2010) and Stengers (2010, 2011) suggest, but also would help scientificity self-reflect on its signifying semiotics in a way that decenters its taken for granted forms of veracity. Subjectivity, how this term has come to replace other terms like the human being and the subject, those categories that try and hold a sense by which to talk about what it means to exist, develop, and flourish, captures the ever-quickening nature of being plugged into various apparatuses of capture and assemblages of enunciation. This is strikingly the case in the contemporary climate that has pushed mediatization and the society of the spectacle to its near paroxysm. What would be the predicates that could give this strange form of accelerationism its final form? That is, how would the globalized state of affairs of the planet be different if, when thrust into being, a new Earth was born out of a paranoia that could no longer sustain itself, that could no longer induce a form of subjection that it had relied on so heavily in the past? Such questions not only beg for

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further theoretical consideration, but also may come to see the light of day, their instantiation in materiality, once this very hegemony has been exposed and become intelligible to the commons. Aside from the metamodeling that has gone on in the foregoing pages, a kind of mirror that has tried to reflect a selfsame logic of the larger initiatory structure endemic to the most highly cathected signifiers in epistemologies, those coming out of popular culture, the news, music, and so on, the larger question of how this new vision of mediatization and its relationship with subjectivity and technicity remains to be answered. It is not enough, in other words, to assume at a theoretical level the various ways in which the mechanosphere, for instance, reduces assemblages to transposable parts while drawing-off subjective singularities. One must actually carry out the task of disassembling the network nodes that do this precise action by, as has been suggested, introducing a kind of asemiotic détournement into the mix thereby hijacking these very modes of subjection. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) never cease to maintain, once deterritorialization has taken place in this way, the empty space of freedom that is produced is always reterritorialized by other forces that try and take-up residence in the newly created opening. Consequently, they issue a warning, not only for Marxist revolutionaries that want to see the end of capitalism, but with regard to the production of subjectivity such that self-fashioning is never a finished process, one that does not result in a teleological punctuation. Instead, as Deleuze (2006) has said in relation to texturology, the illusion that sits at the heart of authentic self-creation and curation must be instantiated as a kind of artifice that is more real than the predicates that would make it fake. Such an aporic gesture casts subjectivity, at least within its setting in mediatization, as a kind of encoded enigma containing a temporality that has not yet found its way home. Subjectivity, put illustratively, is a nomadology whose errancy is not yet fixed to a certain point in space, a wandering star wherein that which is above likewise possesses that which is below.

Notes 1  A New Subjectivity 1 I am not claiming that Heidegger necessarily does this as the progression of his thought, like any thinker, is varied and nuanced. In general, it may be fair to state, as Campbell (2012) does, that the earlier incarnations of Heidegger’s thinking like the Freiburg courses and his dissertation Being and Time (1962) remained indebted to an existentialist and phenomenological tradition that gives a certain primacy and privilege to a mode of human understanding. Yet, even in Being and Time, the authentic resoluteness of reclaiming oneself from “the They” is necessarily social, through the structures of hearsay and gossip, and also intersubjective, through the existential being-with that interweaves the self with other. It would, therefore, not be exactly correct to afford a form of solipsism to Dasein, as the very nature of the term connotes, since it is spread out spatially and temporally along these various interconnections. In other words, Dasein emerges only out of the conditions that give rise to it and these are, as stated, both in the world already and of the world to come. The problem with Heidegger, relegating the discussion to philosophy strictly, often seems to be with the term Being, with a capital B, and its demarcation or privilege away from beings or objects in the world. The point is that Being as such exists precisely because there are beings at all, without which there would be nothing. In my estimation, Heidegger’s more mature theorization resolves some of these misconceptions and opens Dasein up to what might be called broader cosmological and otherworldly sources. This is seen in his radical reworking of Dasein into the event of appropriation or Ereignis, which decenters any notion of a “phallic” subject and gives over meaning to the subject through a form of enowning (a translator’s neologism) or event of appropriation. Likewise, the broader cartography of the fourfold may help map how this process of finding one’s place in the world or of reconstituting oneself though a process of releasement demonstrates or, maybe even, recuperates the category of authenticity. In sum, I am not making the claim that the ontological difference totalizes in parsing up the world, just as much as I am not purposefully aligning myself with Heidegger for “unknown” political reasons that my citational practices would reflect. Rather, I want to hammer-home how canonical the Heideggerian tradition has been in Europe and, specifically, in the alliances I am trying to forge here with, as of right now, the ancient Greek tradition, Foucault, and, later, Derrida.

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2 Translation: “Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately” (Montaigne 1965: 851). 3 I invoke the mirror-stage as, perhaps, Lacan’s attempt at originating a theory of subjectivation, one that, nevertheless, must rely on a developmental logic or a teleological arch that traps the subject in history, as Deleuze and Guattari (1983) point-out in Anti-Oedipus; namely, with the metaphors that are derived from the triangle, mommy–daddy–me. This is not putting words into his mouth, on my part, in the sense that Lacan is clearly connecting subjectivation with the psychoanalytic experience when he says, “we have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term” (Lacan 1989: 1, emphasis in original). Identification or, in plainer terms, the binding of the self to an other, like the imago in the mirror-stage, is no doubt the “beginning” of a process of subjectivation, a beginning that has no origin but, nevertheless, continually works to maintain that specific kind of identification, the one being talked about here.

2 Iterations 1 I am trying to use this detour into a discussion of alchemy as an exemplary model by which one can better come to understand what Guattari means when he speaks of subjectivation. This is not to say that I am drawing a direct comparison between the two, alchemy and subjectivation, insinuating that I am using them in an almost identical sense. Rather, I am hoping that by invoking alchemy, the reader will be able to see how subjectivation is based upon a notion of subjectivity that is essentially semiotic, linguistic, and affective in nature. In a likewise sense, the rich tradition of alchemy is rife with esoteric and encoded symbols that require a certain process of initiation in order to decipher. One might compare, here, a theory of subjectivation that also requires the unlocking of what Guattari (2011) called “diagrammatic keys” (147). Furthermore, Guattari (2009c) himself made the connection to alchemy when using a metaphorics that could have come right out of a seventieth century alchemical manuscript suggesting the transmutation of “singularity salts” in order to launch a subjectivation that is not constrained by controlling powers and modes of subjection. 2 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest a re-visioning of alchemy in its literality as opposed to, as sometimes it is taken up in its symbolic or referential terms. They pose the phylum of metallurgy as a means by which to envision the materiality of the transmutation of certain minerals into other types. They write that “the relation between metallurgy and alchemy reposes not, as Jung believed, on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality in all matter, and on the esprit de corps accompanying

Notes 185 it” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 411). The communalism that is intrinsic to this conceptualization is much more egalitarian than a symbolic initiation into the meaning behind other understandings of alchemy. In fact, it would be this supposed “secret signified” that is being elided here in favor of, as they seem to believe, the creative life force of all matter. It is as if, in other words, interpretation is shelved for the sake of celebrating embodiment as such. 3 It is worth noting the important influence that Sartre had on Guattari’s thought and the affinity that Guattari had for some of the Sartrean lexicon; most specifically, Guattari’s continued raising of the existential consistency of the subject in many of his later works such as The Machinic Unconscious (Guattari 2011) and Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari 2013). As further evidence for this, in an interview entitled “Institutional Intervention” (Guattari 2009b), Guattari relates that “like so many young people of my generation, I was a Sartrean, at least until the encounter, so decisive for me, with Lacan and his work” (39). Indeed, there have been attempts to develop the secondary literature on the relationship between Sartre and Guattari over the last several decades. For instance, see Gary Genosko’s first two chapters in Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (2002) and also the discussion of Guattari in the book by Nik Farrell Fox entitled The New Sartre (2003). 4 The phrase “modern subjectivity” is being used to refer to Enlightenment and postEnlightenment notions of the subject that generally stem from René Descartes and the mathematical schematization that he uses to undergird rationality (cf. Discourse on Method, Descartes 1988). This “modern” subjectivity is mapped as the rise of the subiectum, by Martin Heidegger (1977) in The Age of the World Picture, which is a word for subjectivity as an underlying and persistent substance that appropriates the world through a mathematical projection. Such an ensconced modern way of being makes itself known in numerous ways: for instance, schematizing nature as a means for only resource extraction, the calculated and mechanic death of humans and animals, and the withdrawal of relationality in favor of productivity and efficiency. 5 While continental theory has, in large part, been influenced by the literary and philosophical work of Friedrich Nietzsche, the extent to which this is true varies depending upon the specific thinker. Certainly, Foucault’s methodological extraction of genealogy can see its antecedent in its less systematized version in On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1969). Deleuze has also written extensively on Nietzsche not only in his personal, philosophical endeavors, for instance in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), but also has devoted an entire monograph to the thinker, appropriately entitled Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze 2002). Yet, more generally, the intertextual style and interdisciplinary work of Nietzsche has, no doubt, gone onto inspire generations of theorists and academics that have followed him.

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6 My other interlocutor for developing an arts of existence, Michel Foucault, may at least at first blush be taken aback by the hegemonic designation conveyed by the word “integrated” in Guattari’s favored phrase for the globalization of capitalist economies and the colonization of the rest of the planet by the abstract, semiotic machine of this very totality. Granted, for Foucault, one may suggest his more nuanced analyses of contextualized and historicized relations such that one could never name a structure that would sit on top of or dictate the rules by which other beings come into being contra a certain Marxist sense of a superstructure. One need only look at Foucault’s (1983) preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus in order to understand the emphasis he places on the particulars of power, his claim that the monograph is a book of ethics taking as its strategic adversary “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (xiii). Yet, it would not be entirely fair to place Guattari on the side of conservative Marxists with their revolutionary utopianism and monolithic view of capital. Let us not forget that in Soft Subversions, Guattari (cf. 2009a, 2009c) uses the exact same phrasing as Foucault, the microphysics of power, in order to call attention to the physical spaces where bodies interact and produce instances of freedom, agency, and political action.

3 Metamodeling 1 I would invite the reader to see the discussion on the aesthetic genre of the baroque for more understanding of how the components of meta-reflection are built into various paintings and emblems found in the baroque and similar systems of reference. In a likewise fashion, the metamodel that is being sketched is also calling for a type of allegorization, one that contains within its representations a meta-reflection that points the way towards its decipherment. In other words, a metamodel can be said to be engaging in a similar modeling practice as baroque works of art. The reason the baroque is not raised in this chapter has to do with its direct influence on the theory of subjectivation being developed. This present discussion, in contradistinction, is more abstract in so far as its aim is to provide a methodological procedure for the more formal theory of subjectivation. 2 One may notice, here, that the “negativity” inherent within this conception of desire is not the same as the negative desire of Lacan critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari (1983) in Anti-Oedipus and elsewhere. That is, the desire produced by subjectivity is not negated from the start as an a priori axiom wherein subjectivity must come to somehow recuperate and de-alienate itself. An immanent theory of desire stresses, from subjectivity’s very conception, an abundance and overflow of

Notes 187 desire that only later may become subjected—cutoff or redirected from its initial nonalienated state. Specifically within the current metamodel, the word “negative” is chosen to represent somewhat of the obverse side of Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent philosophy of desire and subjectivity. This can be witnessed from the tropes employed by the metamodel such that they derive most explicitly from the genre of horror. Furthermore, the monstrosity of the demon, articulated by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in their treatise on sorcery, suggests that this is not an approach of lack since the demon is still a substantive figure, a being that one can get ahold of and conceptually, at least in this case, apply. This kind of monstrosity is, in other words, not the lack inherent in the split subject of Lacan. The shifting to this more macabre reading of immanent philosophy is not unlike what Andrew Culp has recently proposed in his book Dark Deleuze (2016). 3 As indicated previously, becoming-animal is an excellent entry point into a process whereby subjectivity becomes produce through an absolute negative encounter that, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) indicate, falls exclusively under the purview of sorcery. Indeed, the counter-normative metaphors involved with sorcery, those like blood, sacrifice, invocation, and so on, help to illustrate how negativity can be understood in its presently employed context. Namely, the meaning of negativity here is to be taken in a broad and substantive sense such that it is not merely an epistemological exercise of negation, as for example in dialects, but an actual encounter with a substantive form of negativity that creates a rapturous moment of nonsense, alterity, or horror. 4 The difference between a metamodel and literary theory has to do, at least in one sense, with how the two position their semantic registers. The latter tends towards reading practices and techniques, derived from literature and historical texts, that are self-referentially unfolded in order to analyze the play of tropes and rhetorical effects of other texts. Metamodeling, on the other hand, may more materially engage with actors and objects through the use of bodies, beings, and others such that its metaphoricity contained therein no longer becomes confined to intellectual inquiry because it spills out onto existential territories. This is an important point to consider, especially at the level of subjective production and, even more specifically, if one is to develop a theory of subjectivation.

4 Cosmology 1 The other in this instance refers to Derrida’s (1994) theory of hauntology and messianicity as outlined in Specters of Marx. While out of the purview of the current project, it is worth noting that, in this context, this small other as opposed to the big Other represents a specific anticipatory temporality or waiting, the coming of a

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future event, that would bring about the kind of cosmopolitanism with its predicates of hospitality and asylum. This represents a messianism that is emptied of all content such that this future event is tied to a site of justice. For present purposes, the quotation given by Derrida helps to signal how the neoanimistic cosmopolitism being developed relies on a similar kind of temporality; that is to say, that the notion of cosmopolitanism contains within itself a future-yet-to-come in the sense of being teleologically anchored towards a not-yet planetary event. The other that Derrida refers to in this quotation does not signal alterity per se, the space of difference between subjectivity and an other, but rather hints at a form of subjectivity or, for our purposes, a particular process of subjectivation, that would herald just such a cosmopolitan moment. However, as Szendy (2013) details, the kind of waiting that Derrida articulates is really a misrecognition (and not a waiting after all) such that the event and its messenger are here being merely obscured or covered over by subjecting forces that work to enshroud the arrivant therein keeping the kind of cosmopolitical promise away from the commons. 2 A privileged trope for Foucault, the “games of truth” that are inherent in any strategical situation mark out a pivot point in the production of subjectivity. This gives the subject space in which to play with its existence in the world, through the development of a new relation with its context, environment, and self-reflexivity. It is important to note that Foucault never extrapolated this concept to include anything other than human relations with modes of production and the extraction of labor. Yet, it does not follow that a claim cannot be leveled using a similar logic and be applicable for other than human entities. Stated more simply, the playful space that the games of truth and falsity admit into subjective formation penetrates a more fundamental relation with regard to the neoanimism of Latour and Stengers—the risky, experimentation that is a part of a cosmopolitical ethic. 3 In his book The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, Andrew J. Mitchell (2015) prefers as the translation of Gestell not enframing, which is its more typical rendering of the notion in the secondary literature, but rather positionality. Such a choice is interesting for the fact that it aligns Heidegger, at least linguistically, with some of the poststructuralist thinkers that place emphasis on the place of the subject within discourse, the positionality of subjectivity, where and how it is constituted by forces of power or narrative agendas. This, of course, makes for a nice connection between the privileged distinction being discussed in the current project, the difference between subjection and subjectivation, in so far as the current epoch of Being is ordered and set-up as a standing reserve, resources that are to be used and consumed for the sake of consumption itself, just as subjectivity is to be produced, subjected to the same forces of power that stabilize nature as a field of raw materials. 4 There is a lot to be said regarding the differences between what the current project is proposing and the literature on Biblical exegesis, hermeneutics, and the process of

Notes 189 interpretation more generally. To be categorical, I am not suggesting a hermeneutic theory of epistemology that would return repeatedly to source material in order to unpack it or develop a sense between the part and the whole. As is well known, Heidegger’s student Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975) took many of his teacher’s insights in Being and Time (1962) and developed a more precise form of hermeneutic inquiry. I would suggest that a different reading of the late Heidegger, at least, reveals that he abandoned this project and instead is more aligned with a mystical-poetic method, which may even be amenable to the current method I am outlining. At least in terms of demarcating an epistemological stance, the position being proffered here is more in line with what Derrida (1986) calls hermetics or what Abraham and Torok (1986) call cryptology. This method arises from psychoanalysis and bears an alikeness to Derrida’s own theory of hauntology—the staging of an absent presence, a specter, that haunts and even lies and deceives. 5 One is tempted to invoke the earlier Heidegger’s (1962) structural relation of Dasein that he designated as being-guilty-for. That is, the call of conscience pulls Dasein out of its falling-prey to the One because within its being there exists a “higher calling”—the guilt that indicates this—and this more primordial relation is not situated within sociality and not even the existential world of subjectivity but is, rather, inherent to Being itself. Moreover, the playful dance that invites subjectivity into the gamehood of the world may not be unlike the later Heidegger’s understanding of the mirror-play of the fourfold. Such an analog would need to be sustained since the poetics of this period of thinking are somewhat at odds with the calculated modeling (or meta-modeling) procedures being developed and deployed in the current project. While poetry may set free signification into an interpretative dance, metamodeling more precisely and even scientifically tries to traverse and create cartographies for other signifying systems therein being more structured by teleology and initiation than the openness of poetic iconographies and word games. 6 It is not exactly correct to attribute the parodied phrase—cyborgs for earthly survival—to Haraway per se although she can be credited for raising its visibility considerably. Haraway originally credits the slogan to Elizabeth Bird, a peaceactivist and science studies scholar (cf. Haraway 2004: 118, footnote 23). 7 Importantly, Haraway (2016) insists that “her” cthulhu monster is not directly inspired by the Lovecraftian oeuvre in so far as such a direct connection would imply a certain phallocentrism and xenophobia that some scholars have accused Lovecraft’s novels of containing or even the man himself of exhibiting. The most situated and exhaustive account ascribed to this kind of environment, the chthulucene, Haraway gives as follows: “I am calling all this the Chthulucenepast, present, and to come. These real and possible timespaces are not named after SF writer H.P. Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-nightmare monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference), but rather after the diverse earth-wide tentacular

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powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, and many many more. “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages-including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.” (Haraway 2015: 160)   Deployed, again, is a pseudo-iconographic mythos to ground the chthulucene’s cosmopolitics, being of course ironic, in typical Haraway style, in so far as it reappropriates the politics of Lovecraft’s monster while still leaning on its power as a figuration. Coupled with this sleight-of-hand and the monster’s hybridity as an amalgamated body, the ontogenetic-symbiotics of the chthulucene, if it is to be extracted from its mythopoetic characterization, is really, at bottom, a new version of the trickster trope found throughout Haraway’s thinking: the cthulhu monster is a horrified version of the coyote. Support for Haraway’s chthulucene is found in her methodological commitments to get away from the emptied abstractions of traditional metaphysics such that they string along a specific genealogical line of power. This latter reason motivates her (and this is quite clear if you read her work) to disengage from the philosophical tradition’s very exclusionary identity politics; instead, aligning herself with more minoritarian theorists, such as fellow feminists, queer theorists, biologists, and so on. In a similar way, she prefers the fleshy stories of biology to the abstractions of theory in the sense that they are less abstruse, thereby making scholarship more immediately accessible, which in turn may help to challenge various hegemonies, the tending towards abstraction being such a hallmark of much of Western philosophy. 8 For additional writing on the chthulucene see, Haraway, 2015, 2016; other work on the chthulucene has been proliferated through conference presentations and lectures, some of which can be found on YouTube (Haraway and Tsing 2015) and Vimeo (Haraway 2014). 9 There are interesting parallels between the theory of real subsumption developed by immanent Marxists and Guattari’s articulation of asignifying semiotics. The danger for both is that capitalism and its progressive mediatization and mechanization risks becoming so good at mining and mimicking the real that it actually becomes mistaken for reality itself. This would be a sort of apotheosis of forces of subjection, the creation of subjectivity that is so interconnected to signifying systems that it is unable uniquely to tell itself apart from the world it inhabits, a virtual reality without the need for technological assistance. In a contrary spirit, the dark playfulness that the chthulucene injects into the passage between formal subsumption/real subsumption and the culminative acceleration of the latter strips processes of encodability of their power to bind to asignifying systems,

Notes 191 whether DNA or credit card numbers. In other words, the world spills over and frustrates these neat attempts to quantify and interpret thereby also upsetting the homogenization process of subjectivities and beings that secretly lie at the heart of systems of control like capitalism. 10 The reliance on Lacanian (1983) terms in this section is primarily used to help the reader map the asignifying process that I am articulating—what can be said in different terms as the transversalist function of the overall metamodel. Guattari is not anathematic to these, after all he was Lacan’s analysand. By way of brief definition, the Borromean knot of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary (RSI) is the topological theory that Lacan uses to describe psychoanalysis and subjectivity. The Imaginary register contains iconography and images—and affects like empathy— that are loosely connected with each other through early, primary, and narcissistic associations. The Symbolic register encapsulates words, logic, and the signifier that are typically devoid of affect but include the polysemy of language. Finally, the Real is the traumatic, retroactive force that uniquely sets subjectivity apart from others in the world. While the notion of the Borromean knot is a topological way to entwine all three registers in an immanent sense, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) would argue that the hypostatization of these terms is not immanent enough in the way they affix a specific topology that does not continually complexify itself. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari propose a more literary inflected methodology that works to prevent just such a fixity through a theorizing that never reaches completion, always trying to stay abreast of the dynamic and ever-changing nature of the world. 11 Indeed, there is a certain parallelism that I am trying to develop between what has been called the general spectacle nature of the world in the post-Situationist sense and the heuristic of the Necronomicon. It is not as simple as placing subjection on the side of the former and subjectivation on the side of the latter since it depends on the decrypting prowess of the subject in its singularity (as well as, of course, its initiation status). That aside, I would suggest that the semiotics of the spectacle also offer an alike kind of encoded symbology that the Necronomicon mirrors in its more micro way. This parallel is not unlike the accusations of accelerationism that have been leveled against Deleuze and Guattari (Shaviro 2015). As a way to jostle this aporia, by returning to the etheric and animistic fibers of asemiotics, as Andersen (2016) suggests, it is more appropriate to place Guattari’s thinking in line with neoanimists like Latour than it is with the accelerationism of Nick Land and other post-Marxist theories that advocate taking capitalism to its paroxysm. 12 The distinction between the actual and virtual that Deleuze (1994) uses in Difference and Repetition is based upon the earlier work of Henri Bergson (cf. 1998). To articulate the connection between Deleuze and Bergson in a very cursory manner, Deleuze comes to favor the insight that the virtual is co-existent with the

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Notes actual rather than pre-existing the actual as possibilities or potentialities that then become actualized. This co-existence forms a multiplicity in that what is taken to be “real” is both that which is manifest and that which is alongside being as a process of what is to come, the virtual. Deleuze places emphasis on the virtual in so far as it contains the power to challenge the actualized state of affairs of the world precisely because it envelopes becoming as such.

5 Linguistics 1 Guattari’s obsessional scribbling about Lacanian theory and, perhaps more pointedly about Lacan himself, can be found in The Anti-Oedipus Papers (2006), which represented somewhat of a workbook for Guattari while writing the culminating monograph Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) with Gilles Deleuze. In it, Guattari relates several anecdotes that are both theoretical and personal in nature. Of the former kind, it is interesting to note that when talking about theoretical adversaries, as Angermuller (2014) has with regard to enunciative pragmatics, for Guattari, it seems that the dispute over the nature and function of the unconscious and how it relates to linguistics and semiotics is of most importance. As a case in point, Guattari writes that, in relation to Lacan’s privileging of structuralist linguistics, “once we have gone through the wall of linguisticogestural representation, we fall into a-subjective and polyvocal productive power. (This is the texture of reality in the sense of DNA-RNA “writing” changing things while it inscribes them.) . . . Lacan was wrong to identify displacement and condensation with Jakobson’s metaphor and metonymy on the level of primary processes. He is turning everything into linguistics, and diachronizing, crushing, the unconscious” (73). The “a-subjective and polyvocal productive power” is what Guattari will later formalize under the category of asignifying semiotics, a central component of the schizoanalytic unconscious, using this theoretical insight as a wedge between his theory of schizoanalysis and Lacanian psychoanalysis. But also, in a more personal sense, by way of an interpretation of the text’s performance of transference, the antagonism between Guattari and Lacan becomes palpable, even coming to a head, during a dinner they had together to discuss the upcoming publication of Anti-Oedipus in France. As Guattari (2006) tells us, Lacan inquires in the following manner: “so what is schizo-analysis?” The beginning of the meeting was very hard. I messed up a reference to a sacred Lacanian formula, and tried to redeem myself as well as I could. Unbelievable authoritarianism with the maître d’. I was hot and not very hungry… the point is to know if analysts will be agents of the established order or if they will stand up to their political responsibilities. Then, in the middle of a sentence, he came back to that—“you know, really, I don’t care if

Notes 193 there are any analysts, I’ve spent my whole life denouncing them.” A second wave of emotion. But it was too late! Something had already broken. Maybe things had always been broken between the two of us. But also, has he ever accessed anyone, has he ever talked to anyone? I wonder! He sets himself up as a despotic signifier” (344). The whole scene ends with Guattari watching a tellingly “stooped, evidently exhausted, [and] limping” Lacan “imperceptibly… [disappear] into the night” (345). Certainly, if this scene says nothing else, it sets-up Lacan as a central interlocutor for Guattari, perhaps the interlocutor, in so far as the text plants a residual seed of transference that motivates, or perhaps better, antagonizes the majority of the work of Anti-Oedipus and, most saliently, Guattari’s later theoretical and schizoanalytic scholarship and practices. 2 It is important to note that both Heidegger and Lacan have nuances in the trajectory of their careers that are being somewhat glossed over. In a general sense, the reference to Heidegger is a gesture towards his pursuit of a fundamental ontology of Being during the early portion of his thought, a project that places Being transcendentally as that which gives sense to Dasein. The pragmatic hermeneutics found in early Heidegger, with regard to the analysis of facticity, place too much emphasis on the working nature of language, how it functions or fails to function in the environment of subjectivity. By contrast, enunciative pragmatics focuses more on the dramaturgical and performative nature of language and not necessarily the way in which referents grind on the world. It should be cautioned, too, that Lacan’s ideas were intended for a specific audience, namely analysts, and only later were they extrapolated into Lacanian theory by cultural critics, literary theorists, and other psychoanalysts. This is to say that the Other in the Lacanian clinic needs to be distinguished from the Other when doing theoretical work. 3 An astute reader may not miss the connection between the example issued herein and Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope. Being the god of time, Saturn, in its mythical incarnation as a deity and its material reality as a planet, guards the malleability inherent to the chronotope, how diachrony as it is normally experienced as illusorily obfuscates how time is just as pliable as space. This is not to suggest that there is a master-chronotope that can somehow be broken into or stolen; rather, it would be the proliferation and multiplicity of virtually an infinite number of ways of experiencing time that is kept encrypted and hidden by subjection. This has profound implications for the creation of subjectivity with regard to how forces of subjection seek to keep it boxed in, so to speak—constrained to the paradigmatics of normalcy that the festival of Saturnalia demonstrably inverts. 4 This term is somewhat misleading in that, as we will see, the universal consumerability of a language’s semiology (viz. kitsch) will trouble it as a “minor” form, which is to say as a quantity rather than quality distinction.

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5 The terms immanent and artifice need to be distinguished here. Immanent is used more often with regard to work done by both Deleuze and Guattari as, for example, in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). It was also used extensively in the last essay written by Deleuze (2013) late in his life while he was very ill, which is entitled “Immanence: A Life”. Therefore, the term immanence may be more Deleuzian than it is Guattarian. Artifice, on the other hand, is developed by Guattari in his solo work such as Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013) and The Machinic Unconscious (2011). The current project is more aligned, at least regarding its theoretical lineage, with Guattari in so far as his psychoanalytic training makes his insights pertinent to an updated and advanced form of analysis and, by extension, an advancement in understanding subjectivity. I am using the well-known Lacanian formula of “the real is the impossible” and juxtaposing it against the Guattarian formula of “the real is the artificial” in order to show very clearly how these two approaches differ. For Lacan, as it was similarly for Derrida, the real is a paradoxical impasse that frustrates Symbolic interpretation, an aporia that slices the symbol and the sense it has to its signified. By contrast, for Guattari the real is the baroque artificialization and ongoing complexification of signification, a vital creativity that surges forward into new forms of being. On a theoretical level, one need only look at the stagnancy of Lacanian theory with its pious adherents to witness what Guattari would say not to do, become an acolyte of signifying systems that foreclose new avenues of thought and theory. 6 The signifier “cant” was chosen to remain pious toward Guattari’s autobiographical description of himself as an idea thief (Guattari 2009a). That is, I wanted to align, more precisely, the philology of the word, as in thieves’ cant, as opposed to what Goffey (2013) calls the jargon of schizoanalysis. Daniel Tiffany (2009) has an excellent exposé on the literary and poetic historiography and tradition of cant in Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance. 7 This is not typical drag one may witness in normal signifying circuits, through a club, parade, or television. Rather, the kitsch drag of artificialized signification ironizes the very ideal that it wishes to become and therefore makes it distinct from camp. Take, as a cinematic example, the character Alien from Harmony Korine’s motion picture Spring Breakers (2013). I have analyzed this film elsewhere (Glazier 2015) with regard to how its identity politics demonstrates the processual complexification that schizoanalysis seeks to do. Yet, I would also submit, as a kind of coda, that Alien could be just such a “male male-impersonation” that Tiffany (2012) articulates in relation to the way that kitsch parodies its own authenticity. That is to say that the embodied positionality of James Franco’s character in the film casts him as a kind of apotheotic actor, one that dramaturgically sets the predicates for the narrativity of the plot but does so in a way that the imp of kitsch remains disavowed. He is in drag as himself, one could say, and that drag conceals a secret, which is satirized through his death at the end of the movie.

Notes 195 8 An example of this would be to excavate how subjectivity has become alienated from itself with regard to its production of labor. Typically, according to Marx, alienation is always a given in the sense of requiring a revolutionary stance with regard to one’s own placement within the capitalist machine. Alienation is, in other words, never self-evident from the beginning requiring a process of re-envisioning one’s relationship to the labor being produced. The kind of retroaction that I am connecting between Marx and Lacan takes the form of an intelligibility that must decipher a kind of normalizing modeling system that is already circulating—for Marx it would be the logics of capitalism and for Lacan it would be the symptom. In both cases, the important point that I am trying to stress is how retroaction is different in kind than knowledge and epistemology since the process in an ongoing subjective re-constitution and not the accumulation of facts. 9 Lacan famously claimed that psychoanalytic insights could be rendered in formal mathematic symbols. Consequently, beginning in 1955 when delivering Seminar II, Lacan (1988) developed his first matheme called the L schema that attempts to demonstrate the different kinds of relations that arise during analytic treatment. This initial formulation is later expanded and refined into the matheme that is found in the Sadian text spoken of here.

6 Aesthetics 1 It might be helpful to return to the structure of disavowal in the Lacanian clinic to see how there is not a simple conscious selection being made with regard to “choosing” either subjection or subjectivation. Rather, the foreclosure (Verleugnung) that is structural to perversion creates a kind of split within the ego and its relation to the unconscious such that the ego does not consciously choose to non serviam, falling away from its unconscious investments and towards a kind of psychosis that is arbitrated by the reality principle. Instead, the point is much more complex in that the oscillation between subjection and subjectivation, its progression in the sense of an alchemical molding perhaps, would yield a subjectivity that does not repudiate an agency that was hiding within the unconscious. 2 While much can be said on the notion of parrhesia developed by Foucault late in his life, it is important to note in this context how such a risk-taking and truthtelling is to be situated within a specific épistémè or time era demarcated by normative knowledges and practices. Taken from ancient Greek philosophical schools, those like the Stoics, parrhesia was used as a model by Foucault (2014) to illustrate what it would look like to create an arts of existence or a mode of subjectivation. While this model was situated in the épistémè of ancient Greece, the current theory of subjectivation attempts to take this model and its roots in the

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tradition of self-cultivation inherent in the Western canon and extrapolate what an arts of existence would look like today, given the rise of technicity, capitalism, and semiotics. 3 I am not suggesting that this is how analytic training works nor how the infamous Lacanian practice of la passe functions. Rather, I want to draw out the unique relation to sense that the perverse position creates and, as a result, am using the analytic clinic as merely one concrete example of where this could play out. As indicated elsewhere, what may be helpful is to consider how the unconscious of the pervert establishes a unique asignifying modeling procedure that is not found in any other diagnostic structure. This is more akin to a mode of auto-modeling sense and, at its best, metamodeling other signifying semiotics. This is why one could envision the monstrosity inherent in this libidinally riven unconscious as analogous to the pre-established texturality that undergirds the rites of the present endeavor.

7  Subjectivity, Anew 1 This is, of course, not a new idea in post-structuralism concentrated in its most incisive force in Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard (2014)—that is, the argument that semiologies, their meaningfulness, have come to replace a traditional philosophical sense of realism, that there is an external world out there. In contradistinction to Baudrillard, I am not suggesting a kind of dialectical “switchout” between reality and symbols, the taking more seriously of one over the other, but rather a specific kind of “burning away” or conflagration such that the flaming of the fire is what is at stake, not the end result or the fact that certain shared epistemologies are being incinerated.

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Index academic literature 28 accelerationism 41, 176, 181, 191 n.11 actor network theory (ANT) 42 Adorno, Theodor 3–4, 101, 127 aesthetic criticality 150 aesthetic integrationism 147–9 aestheticization 146 of ignorance 146–7 aesthetics 97, 143 allegory to illusion 169–72 baroque and subjectivity 143–7 baroque self-fashioning 162–8 decolonial thought and baroque 152–4 disavowal and alethurgic technics 154–7 ignorance, integrationism, and canon 147–9 perversion of détournement 157–60 schizoanalytic black holes and performance art 160–2 subjectivity or subjectivation 149–52 aesthetization 145 After Finitude (Meillassoux) 27 alchemy 17–19, 105, 141, 184 n.1, 184 n.2 alethurgic technics 154–7 allegorization 186 n.1 allegory 169 to illusion 169–72 alterity 2 amalgamation 180 Angermuller, J. 121, 122 animism 11 cosmopolitics 75 enchantment 99 energetics 98 incarnation 74 revival 12–13 antagonism 56 anthropocene 88, 89

anthropocentrism 11, 12, 89 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 46, 120, 121, 184 n.4, 186 n.1, 192 n.1 antiphrasis 57 antiphrastic reversal 57 apocalypse 59 apophasis 59–60 appropriation 102 artificialization 97, 129 of horror 101 arts of existence (Foucault) 2, 3, 8, 11, 13, 15, 43, 47, 65, 84, 102, 104–6, 114, 130, 143, 151, 154, 157, 173–4, 179, 180, 186 n.6, 195–6 n.2 asemiotic encodings 95–6 asignifying semiotics 96–7 authenticity 3 auto-actualization 47 autonomous movement of nonliving 93 Axelos, K. 83, 86, 87 axiology of cosmopolitics 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 42, 123, 129–30 heteroglossia 128 impact of linguistics 123–7 baroque decolonial thought and 152–4 self-fashioning 144, 162–8 and subjectivity 143–7 Bataille, George 58–9 Baudrillard, Jean 111 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 23 Being and Time (Heidegger) 183 n.1 being-withs 93 Benjamin, Walter 144, 169 Bennett, J. 94, 99–101, 109, 178 theory of death 101 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures (Foucault) 79, 154–5 black hole effect 161, 162 body without organs 106 Breuer, Josef 23

212 Camus, A. 105 cannibalism 63 capitalism 3, 6, 17, 82, 131, 135 codes 83 coding process 3 late 142 logics 83 capitalistic territorializations 115 capitalists exploitation 104 hegemony 28 Capobianco, R. 84 capricious homogenization of borders 80 carnivalesque 130 casting 92, 94 catachresis 128 Chapel, Cornaro 143 Charcot, Jean-Martin 23 chiaroscuro 164 chronotopes 124 chthulucene 11, 88–92, 93, 107 citizen of the world 68 classicism 169 colonialism 99, 152, 174 commodification 178 commoditization 112 commodity fetish 125, 140 communalism 185 n.2 comparative literature 28, 122 conflagration of paranoiac semiologies 178–9 Conley, T. 143–4 conservativism 113 consumerism 178 contingencies 92 continuation of subjectivity 99 cosmetic-relational object 103 cosmetic self-creation 104 cosmogony 51 cosmology 67–8 chthulucene 88–92 cosmopolitics in neoanimism 68–80 mechanosphere and post-mediatic subjectivities 110–17 playfulness of the world 80–8 spectacle with neoanimism 93–110 cosmopolitanism 70–1, 87 metaphysics 69 misrecognition of 77

Index in neoanimism 68–80 cosmopower 78 cosmos of cosmopolitics 69 writ large 71 counter-hegemonic conflict 48 counter-normative intelligibility 153 craft of life (tekhnē tou biou) 2, 48–9 creativity 44, 45 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 20 Crutzen, Paul 89 cultural entwinement 5 Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, The (Roelofs) 144 cultural studies 3, 5, 22, 28, 31, 68, 120, 181 culture connoisseur 147 and mass media 3–4 and technology 3 cybernetic proliferations 113 cynicism 113 Dasein 22 Davidson, A. I. 151 deathbed confession 34 Debord, Guy 92 decipherment 44 decolonial thought and baroque 152–4 deconstruction 9 decryption 64 degree of self-reference 45 degrees of pedigree 100 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 16, 18, 46–7, 58–9, 72, 82–3, 120–1, 175, 182, 184 n.2 Deleuzian idiot 72–3 demagification 94 demiurge 18–19 Derrida, Jacques 6, 29, 77, 80 Descartes, René 19 desiring-production 47 deterritorialization 105 détournement 144, 152, 157–60, 176, 182 diagrammatic empowerment 97 diagrammatic keys 184 n.1 Difference and Repetition 191 n.12 Diogenes of Sinope 68 disavowal and alethurgic technics 154–7 disavowal (Verleugnung) 155

Index Discipline and Punish 34 discourse of avowal 150 disenchanted skepticism 72 docility 113 Dukes, H. 117 embodiment of subjectivity 61 enlightenment 18 enunciation 124 enunciative pragmatics 120, 121–3 épistémè 125, 195 n.2 Ereignis 183 n.1 erotic gratification 139 eroticism 61 ethical experimentation 72 ethico-aesthetics 104, 126 ethico-political engagement 119 Ethics 32 etymology of mediogony 49–51 eudaimonia 3 evil 136 existential Territories 108

213

global capitalism 4 globalization 114 glossematics 120 Gnosticism 18 Goffey, A. 132–3 “going-back-into-itself ” 81 Guattari, Felix 7, 16, 18, 43, 46–7, 58–9, 67, 82–3, 94, 110, 120–1, 123, 131, 138, 161, 175, 184 n.1, 184 n.2 Guattarian metamodel 48

facticity 22 fanaticism 90 fascism 17 Felman, S. 142 female female-impersonation 136 feminism 9, 28, 41 finality of death 99 Fink, B. 155 Foucauldian surveillance state 178 Foucault, Michel 2, 3, 6, 15, 16, 20, 24, 34, 79, 98, 144, 154, 173, 186 n.6 Foucault and the Making of Subjects 119 Fourfold, The: Reading the Late Heidegger (Mitchell) 187 n.3 fractalization of enmeshments 93 Frankenstein or, the Modern Prometheus (Shelley) 51, 53, 55 Freud, Sigmund 23, 140 Nachträglichkeit 140 function of power 37

Halberstam, Judith 127 Haraway, Donna 72, 86, 91, 99, 189 n.7 Harman, Graham 105 Hegel, Georg W. F. 21, 126 theory of subjectivity 21 hegemonic appropriation 178 hegemony of scientism 131 Heidegger, Martin 3, 22, 99, 182, 183 n.1, 185 n.4 Heraclitus 81 heteroglossia 126, 154, 176 heteronormativity 99, 127 heterosexuality 148 Hjelmslev, Louis 120 homogenization 52, 75 homogenization of borders 80 homologies 120 homosexuality 148 human capital 85 human exceptionalism 72, 75, 76–7 humanhood 3 humanist cosmopolitanism 69 humanistic conception of subjectivity 100 humanity 76 teleology 76 humanness 1, 5 humbleness 100 humility 99 hyper-institutionalized hegemony 178 hypnotic drug 113 hypostasis 107

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 26, 189 n.4 Gay Science, The 33 gender identity 150 genealogy 47–8 geopolitics 77

iconographies 100 idiot 72–4 ignorance and integrationism 147–9 imaginal variation 21 immanentism 20

214 Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) 37 intensification 171 intermixed ontological character 106 intersubjectivity 7 interweavings 113 James, Robin 9 James, William 69 jeux de verité (games of truth) (Faucault) 79 jouissance 102, 140 Judovitz, D. 166 juridical and penal system 6 jurisdiction 80 Kant, Immanuel 19–20, 68, 70, 124 cosmopolitanism 72, 80, 89 cosmopolitics 68–9, 76 theory of progressive incorporation 70 kitsch subjectivation 135, 137 Kolozova, Katerina 25 kosmopolitês 68 Kristeva, J. 155 labor exploitation 101 Lacan, Jacques 7 après-coup 140 Lacanian psychoanalysis 7, 24–5, 46, 155 Lacanian therapeutic technique 158 Latour, Bruno 11, 41, 68, 69, 70, 71, 79 la Tour, Georges de 164 Lazzarato, Maurizio 95, 124, 160 L’Estasi di Santa Teresa (Ecstasy of Saint Teresa) 143 Levinas, Emmanuel 2, 3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 122 linguistic exclamations 128–9 linguistics 119 Bakhtin, impact of 123–7 embodiment, subjectivity, and carnival 127–32 enunciation (énonciation) 121, 122, 127 enunciative pragmatics 120, 121–3 Marx’s hieroglyph, fetishism, or riddling subjectivity 138–42 minor languages and forms 132–8 structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure 121

Index subjection, subjectivation, and glossematics 119–21 linguistic theory 4 linguistic turn 4, 27, 31, 128 literary cannibalism 61, 62, 65 literary criticism 4 literary theory 9, 11, 42, 187 Lockean philosophy of egalitarianism 90 logocentrism 99 Lovecraft, H. P. 88, 105 low genres 127 Lyotard, Jean-François 9, 28 Machinic Unconscious, The (Guattari) 185 n.3 maladaptation 102 male male-impersonation 136 maneuverability 2 Mansfield, Nick 1 Marxism 8, 126, 139–40 Massumi, Brian 8 materialities 92 material substance 19–20 mathesis 20 Mbembe, A. 90 McLaren, Margaret 9 McLuhan, Marshall 4 mechanosphere and post-mediatic subjectivities 110–17 media 50 media studies 12, 25, 181 mediatization 4, 43, 50, 64, 92, 102, 113, 137, 174, 179 of subjectivity 93 medio 43, 58 mediogony 49, 64, 65, 67 etymology of 49–51 as riddled monstrosity 51–5 Meillassoux, Quentin 20, 27 Men in Black (film) 78 mental substance 19–20 metamodeling (metamodelization) 10, 43–9, 64, 67, 175 etymology of mediogony 49–51 mediogony as riddled monstrosity 51–5 metaphorics of body 61–4 methodological components 64–5 negativity of monstrous 55–60 symbiosis of horror 55

Index metamodel mediogony 64 metaphorics of body 61–4 methodological components 64–5 metonymy 139 microphysics of power (Foucault) 186 n.6 minoritarian groups 98, 114 misrecognition of cosmopolitanism 77 Mitchell, Andrew J. 187 n.3 mobility 44, 45 modernism 74 modern subjectivity 185 n.4 molecular revolutions 96 mononaturalism 79 monster-in-drag 58 monstrosity 52, 53, 58, 59, 65, 175, 177 moral philosophy 3 Morris, Pam 125, 128 mystery 61 national socialism 125 naturality 178 naturalization 152 “nature loves to hide” 81 necronomicon 108, 110, 191 n.11 necrophilia 141 necropower 90 negativity of monstrous 55–60 neoanimism 98, 106, 175, 177 society of spectacle with 93–110 neoanimist cosmology 72 neoanimistic cosmopolitics 80 neocolonialism 153 neoliberal governmentality 6 neoliberalism 24, 142 neologism 64 Newtonian physics 126 Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze) 185 n.5 nominalizations 58 nondialectical immanentism 56 (non)epistemologies 146 nonhuman rational beings 75 normative identity 102 objective spirit 21 object-oriented ontology 20 Oedipal family relations 6 oedipalization 24, 139 On the Genealogy of Ethics 35

215

On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 185 n.5 ordering 1 parrhesia 35, 36 pathic divination 138 patriarchy 99 performance art 161 perversion of détournement 157–60 phallocentrism 127 phallocracy 99 phantasy 103 phenomenology 21 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 21 philosofiction 75, 76 philosophy 16, 21 defined 8, 25 nonstandard 25 phenomenology 21 Picasso Baby (Jay-Z) 162 plateau 8 Plato 1, 15, 16, 18, 99 Platonism 17, 33, 60 playfulness of the world 80–8 Poetics of Relation 152 pollyannaish 100 polyphony 123 polyvocality 125 positionality 91, 100 postcolonial studies 31 posthumanism 9 post-media era 8, 11, 93 post-mediatic subjectivities 110–17 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard) 28 postmodernism 10, 27–31 postmodern literature 27 post-signifying semiotics 96–7 post-situationist concept 93 poststructuralism 9, 125 Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis: Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics (Angermuller) 121 “post-truth” world 178 power 91 pragmatic valences 47 pre-individual affective forces 125 primitive semiotic systems 7 prison 98 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 123

216

Index

production of subjectivity 1, 15, 125, 144 immanent subject 32–42 postmodernist, linguistic, or psychoanalytic subject 23–32 transcendent, ideal, or dialectic subject 16–23 progressivism 72 proto-subjective element 123 pseudo-mediation 157 psychoanalysis 7, 9, 12, 23–5, 24, 44, 179 psychoanalytic interpretation 58 psychoanalytic literature 179 psychosis 103 psychotic symptoms 49 quasi-Baroque aesthetic 94 Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam) 127 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy 147 realism 20, 105–6 Real-Symbolic-Imaginary (RSI) 191 n.10 rehabilitation 98 reinvigoration 176 religious iconography 143 renaissance 15, 18 replenish refuge 91 repressive power 37 reterritorialization 7 Ricoeur, Paul 26 riddle creature 82 riddled monstrosity 10, 51–5, 65 “riddle of Being” 81 Roelofs, Monique 144, 150 Roelofs thesis 145 Rosicrucians 18 Saturnalia 128 Saussure, Ferdinand de 121–2 Saussure’s theory 122 schematization 1 schizoanalysis 7, 8, 44, 95, 101, 130, 180 schizoanalytic black holes and performance art 160–2 Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari) 133, 185 n.3 schizoanalytic metamodeling 54 secondary literature 32 self-cultivation 2, 81, 174 stemming 15

self-engendering 44, 45 self-fashioning 17, 19, 80, 117, 119, 144, 152, 174 self-flagellation 165 self-maintenance 5 self-referential correspondences 64 self-transference 87 semiological systems 96 semiologies 95 semiotics 24, 180 sexological deviance 52 sexual harassment 100 sexual identity 150 sham materialism 138 Shaviro, S. 176 Sheehan, T. 102 sheer materialism 138 Shelley, Mary 51 Shepherdson, C. 155 signifying semiologies 95 singularities 115 singularization 47, 49, 59, 114 skeptical scientism 74 slag of a fantasy 141 social and culture entanglement 1 social and ethico-political forces 125 social belongingness 107 social heritage 22 sociality 7 social relationality 93 society of control 178 socioenergetic power 114 spectacular animism 110 spectacularization 58, 108 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 187 n.1 Stengers, Isabelle 11, 70, 71–3 Stivale, C. J. 53 structuralism 125 Studies on Hysteria 23 stylistics 97 subjection (assujettissement) 2, 6, 114, 119, 144 norm-binding process 156 subjectivation (subjectivation) 2, 5, 6, 11, 17–18, 39, 45, 119, 144 auto-process 130 mode of 151 process 102–3 singularizing development 47

Index subjection and processes 84 subjective homogenization 178 subjective production 85, 87 subjective spirit 21 subjectivity 1, 5, 30, 85, 94, 149–52 circumscription of 101 defined 25, 86 Guattarian notion 19 humanistic conception of 100 mediatization of 93 polyphonic nature 121 polyvocality 116 post-mediatic 110–17 systematicity of 19 temporality of 46 transcendent 19 subject/subjectivity 2, 9–10, 12 supernatural 141 symbioses 93 symbiosis of horror 55 symbolic semiologies 95 Szendy, P. 77, 78, 82 tactile contact with ghosts 170 tekhnē tou biou 15, 56 teleological consummation 73 teleology of humanity 76 thanaticism 90 theme of power 39 theogony 51

217

Theogony, The (Hesiod) 51 Theory of Forms (Plato) 1, 16–17 thing-in-itself 19–20 Thousand Plateaus, A 7, 8, 18, 56, 116, 120, 194 n.5 through the necessity of fantasy 63 Tiffany, Daniel 52, 81–2, 86, 101, 104, 132–3 Timaeus (Plato) 18 Tomšič, S. 164 Toward Perpetual Peace (Kant) 68 transcendental subjectivity 21 transversality 44, 45, 64–5, 67, 174, 175, 177 universal fraternity 73 universes of reference 45 virtualization 4, 5 Warhol, Andy 101 Watson, J. 54 Weber, Max 74, 94, 178 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 41 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 8, 25 worldhood 91 Žižek, S. 155 Zupančič, A. 87