Subjectivity and Machines: From Adorno to Deleuze/Guattari

1) Subjectivity: Adorno and Günther Anders

The dividuum is the mockery of the anti-narcissist. It is the spawn of the hyper-dialectic. One divides into two. If the narcissist can only lose himself twice in the mirror image, in that the cause becomes the effect and the whole becomes the part, the divuum is forced to the infinite division. The divine bounds and seals the end of all molecular revolutions. “The revolution was molecular, the counterrevolution was no less so,” Tiqqun declare. We have argued elsewhere, with reference to Deleuze/Guattari, that dividuums are divided existences, integrated into machinic intra-relations on the one hand, and possessing their double in the individual on the other. The anti-narcissist, on the other hand, dis-individuates himself into the generic commonality of alterity. He is a shaman who becomes an animal only to know which things this sees as being and then again to definitely understand the animal as being. The community of anti-narcissists is one of those who have nothing in common, or are parts of no part. It is in this context that the brief comment on the concept of the dividuum in Günther Anders or on the organic composition of man in Adorno should be understood.

In his writing Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen Bd.1, Günther Anders, in the context of the description of the entertainment devices emerging in the 1950s and their techniques of dispersion, pointed out mechanisms which from now on constantly prevent in the individual to still occupy a point or to be “with oneself”, instead always being “ubique simul”, i.e. ultimately nowhere.

Dependent employees, whose work processes are characterized by compulsion and boredom, can no longer be expected to find their way back to themselves in their free time, and even if they only wanted to do so, the mass media and the material they produce and distribute (news, semiotypes, images, etc.) would literally rush at them. Speed and idleness, relaxation and tension would impulsively complement each other even in leisure time, and the didividuals who had become mobile in this way could finally only inhabit the now, i.e. every moment changing time positions, which would lead to a kind of artificial schizophrenia in those involved.

One can now read this as a really black foreshadowing of the dividend oscillating today between depression and ADHD, divided into various partial functions and floating on a wave of light attention and/or manically inspired, indulging in disparate occupations. Anders writes: “The man in the sunbath, for instance, who lets his back tan while his eyes swim through a magazine, his ears participate in the sports match, his jaws chew a gum-this figure of the passive simultaneous player and many-sided nonstarter is an everyday international phenomenon.” And Anders goes on to write that it is antiquated today to still concentrate on one thing in order to want to find oneself or something in it. Thus, it would no longer be possible to speak of the subject, because this would only consist of various organs – ears, eyes and palate – which, with their special functional capability, would stick to something, namely to the radio, to pictures and to chewing gum, and such a dispersed subject would be the divisor or, as Anders writes, the divisum. In its dispersedness or functional dividedness, the divisum in a certain sense still surpasses the dividend, which Anders had mentioned in his early studies on negative anthropology, in which he was concerned with the principled separateness of man from the world. In the course of stating a constantly spreading social division of labor, the concept of the divisum later comes into play in Anders. The functionality of a divisum can be found again today, for example, in Beatriz Preciado, when she describes the sexual body as the product of a sexual division of the flesh, according to which each organ is defined by its respective function.

According to Günther Anders, the new medial device worlds correspond to a divisum connected to them and at the same time divided into numerous perceptions and functions, which in its affective, cognitive and emotional fragmentation can no longer muster a singularity or identity. Concerning this new man, Anders writes: “Scattered, then, not only (as before) over a plurality of world-places; but into a plurality of individual functions.” This division into functions corresponds to a certain lack of attachment, which leads to the fact that one quickly becomes weaned from certain objects or finds them charmless, without, however, giving up the habit itself, which in turn can quickly take on an addictive character; one thinks, for example, of hours of television, which is experienced and played through in the mode of zapping. Accustomed by the work process to being divided into different functions or optionally present in a single task area and thus dependent, the dividend, since it can no longer produce an organizing self, must inevitably break apart into individual functions in its leisure time as well and in turn combine them as best it can. The functional organs must be employed or occupied at the penalty of their demise (if one were not employed, emptiness or boredom would set in). If the occupation is not to consist in work, then one is forced to enjoy; every organ insists in a function that indicates consumption or enjoyment, which, however, does not have to be a positive one for a long time, rather it often enough passes over into the intermissionless or the serial enjoyment, for which especially those products are suitable that do not contain the danger of satiety. The drive for consumption attaches itself to the structured use-value and the structured need, and this black alliance eventually leads to the simultaneous delivery of simultaneous elements – for example, through the matrices of television – becoming the normal state for the individual. Anders sums up: “Until today, cultural criticism had seen the destruction of man exclusively in his standardization; that is, in the fact that the individual, transformed into a serial being, is left with a merely numerical individuality. Even this numerical individuality is now gambled away; the numerical remainder is itself once more “divided,” the individual transformed into a “divisum,” broken down into a plurality of functions. Further, apparently, the destruction of man cannot go; more inhumane, apparently, man cannot become.”

In this respect, the corporate form propagated by neoliberalism would have to be characterized as a particularly schizophrenic form, since it requires precisely from economically dependent and divided dividers the incessant investment in one’s own “self,” always anxious to keep oneself flexible, to reshape oneself even while purchasing the latest enhancement products.

As a mere agent of socialization, that is, integrated into a total functional context, which means the substitutability of all by all, for Adorno, too, the individual still has to be creative and flexible at the same time. Due to the substitutability of all by all, the individual has become objectively meaningless, but in its isolated being-for-itself it remains a monad, which must primarily take care of its own self-preservation. Adorno speaks of the monad of the social totality, i.e. of a social character which, on the one hand, is capable of performing certain services for self-preservation and self-exploitation (possesses a certain identity), but, on the other hand, as an individual who tends to be precarious, has long since ceased to possess the economic independence which supposedly still gave the bourgeois a certain ego-strength necessary for the formation of the monad (“Whatever was once good and decent in the bourgeois, independence, perseverance, forethought, prudence, has been corrupted to the innermost. For while the bourgeois forms of existence are doggedly conserved, their economic precondition has fallen away.” Adorno, Minima Moralia) Due to its adaptation to function, the individual can no longer form the rationality of an identical ego, and in its situationally changing adaptation to what is necessary in each case, it finally comes to the destruction of the self in order to still secure self-preservation at all. From now on, the individual is characterized by qualities such as psychic discontinuity and incoherence, so that the split and disjointedness of the negative whole is doubled in that of the individual.

Adorno establishes a relationship between the individual as a mere agent of the law of value and his “inner composition in itself” (Novissumum Organum). The term “inner composition” refers to an individual who, as a shared “project,” processes whole bundles of properties, motivations, and behaviors. These traits, from the gesture of friendliness to the service smile to the choleric outburst, are on the one hand trained in, and on the other hand serve to actively adapt to the situation at hand. Finally, according to Adorno, these qualities are only arbitrarily transportable material or empty masks of sensations. (Here Adorno alludes to subjectivation as a form of de- and recomposition of consciousness. Consciousness implies the perception of being able to block the brain’s own outputs; it implies a state of attention that accompanies the brain’s activities on a case-by-case basis. All mental content here is counterfactual content, probability distributions represented by the brain, which chooses from possibilities or hypotheses it has at the moment about the external world and its own state. Action and perception are identical here, namely the attempt to minimize prediction errors. Attention would then be a generative model of the brain, permanently trying to reduce uncertainty and avoid surprises by always generating new predictions, testing them, and extracting the causal structure of the external world in this way). Inevitably, pseudo-individualization occurs: the fewer individuals there are, the more individualism.

When Adorno speaks of the organic composition of the human being, he very quickly arrives at the foreign-referential conditions of subjectivation, at the inscription of psychological, economic, technological, and cultural components, opinions, and codes into the brain of the individual. At this point, however, we should not focus on the word “organism” with regard to the term “organic composition”; rather, the term “organic composition” mediates, after all, between the technical and value composition of capital. Thus, when Adorno speaks of organic composition of the individual, he is already implicitly addressing the individual’s dependence on technology and economy; indeed, he formulates that technology and economy inevitably inscribe themselves into the individual through their codes, languages, and semiotics, whereby certain properties are shared and recomposed in these processes of subjectivation (intention, perception, and imagination). Translated into our language, this would mean that the individual is integrated into the collective sphere of the techno-economic in a complex and divided way, which permanently produces resonances in the mental, while conversely, individual voices produce resonances in the collective body of capital. Both forms of subjectivation remain involved in a techno-linguistic-semiotic dispositif of super-collectivity (of capital), whose serial, automatic chains of behavior function according to the patterns of swarms, which in turn are mediated by specific interfaces and concatenations. And these are shaped by syntactic rules.

2) Social subordination and the individual. (Foucault)

Let us begin in this section with some brief remarks on the notions of the individual and the dividend.
In philosophy, the individual is considered unique with respect to all others and thus indivisible in itself. Thus, as a name, it stands for indivisible, unmistakable, and unchangeable. The individual is a whole, a unity, not arbitrarily composed. It is something of its own. It is an atom in the sense of Epicurus, and this not because no further division can be driven into it, but because it eludes analysis and thus offers no preceding unity. Consequently, the individual must always be constructed. It may still be considered as the lower limit of the divisible, but as the only and irreplaceable it remains, according to Aristotle, contingent in its substantiality and therefore not definable, insofar as there is science only of the necessarily existing, of the general. Much later, Leibniz grasps the monad as the unity principle of the substance, with which the individual becomes fixed and thus more exactly definable. Under the aspect of the already constructed individual, it is then asked for its relations to itself, for its own physical and psychic links as well as for its social chains, i.e. for its relations to the other individuals.
Dividers, on the other hand, are ever already divided existences, which today are especially passively but also actively integrated into machinic intra-relations, that is, affectively and cognitively connected to and integrated into economic, technological, biological, political, and social complexes, but through “multiple participation” (Ott 2015) in the media and through divisions and dispersions of their mental capacities, can also actively produce certain subjectivizations, which, however, are usually not under a good star. The dividend is a dividedness traversed by multiple currents, which is embedded in specific spacetime dynamics of machinic configurations. In his book Dividuum, Gerald Raunig identified the twelfth-century theologian Gilbert of Poitiers as the radical mastermind behind the concept of the “dividend.” According to him, the non-universal dividend is characterized a) by the properties of separateness and separability, and this in the sense of a scattering that does not refer to any whole, b) by a singularizing that is by the same singularity that is in it, and c) by co-formality, in which the divisive singularity is always in connection with others. (Raunig 2015: 80f.) With Michaela Ott’s and Gerald Raunig’s emphasis on the active-libertarian moment of dividuation, the uniformity and conformity implied in the passive mode is relativized and shifted more to co-formality, to specific conformity in form and the sharing of formal components. This co-formality, which is at the same time multiformity, according to Raunig, constitutes the divisible as singularity, as “unum dividuum”. Singularities are then firstly) more than individuals, secondly plural in themselves, constituted by a multiplicity of components, and thirdly, through their co-formality, open to variable, free intercourse and free concatenation. (Ibid.: 82f.)

Guattari writes that capital today launches models of subjectivation in the same way that the automobile industry launches a new collection of automobiles. Indeed, certain modes of capital’s functioning-finance and marketing-correlate closely with the construction of subjectivity, to a point where there are multiple overlaps, overlaps, and intersections between the two modes of production. However, to be blunt, if we apply Guattari’s hypothesis, which dates back to the 1980s, to the current neoliberal situation, we may confidently assume that neoliberalism has precisely failed to articulate the relation between the two economies in a stable and coherent way. Today’s neoliberal governance techniques separate the already designed individual and the constructed dividend, but also unite them again. Contemporary governance thus governs at the crossroads of the (staged) individual and the divine. This requires a very specific production of subjectivity, for which Guattari lists the following components in his book Chaosmose: 1) Significant semiological systems such as family, school, art, pop industry, sports, etc. 2) Media system and cinema. 3) A-significant semiotics that do not conform to linguistic axiomatics. (Guattari 2014: 11)
Social subjection takes place in a field that provides roles and places within the socio-economic division of labor, whose occupation by a person is linked to the adoption of characteristics such as identity, economy, gender, profession, and nationality. What Deleuze/Guattari call social subjection also implies, in a sense, the doubly “individualized” subject, namely the linguistic subject of active utterance and that of passive statement. This subject is characterized by a double I, which can also be precisely expressed in French by the words “Je” and “Moi” as designations for the German word “Ich”: On the one hand the active spontaneous I (Je) of the utterance, on the other hand the passive I (Moi) constituted by the statement. (Cf. Deleuze 1992a: 119) However, this sui generis dualized subject can neither be considered the condition of language nor the cause of statements, because what constitutes statements according to Deleuze/Guattari is something completely different. It is, in fact, the “manifoldnesses, the masses and packs, peoples and tribes, the collective assemblages that cross us, that are inherent in us and that we do not know” (Deleuze/Guattari 1976: 115). The multiplicities are what make us speak, and with them we keep delirious new statements. For Deleuze/Guattari, and this has often been overlooked, especially when it comes to the system-stabilizing side of capital , there are mainly collective utterance-structures that incessantly produce statements and utterances, and the corresponding processes and structures of subjectivation; collective enunciative structures by which the individualized subject is produced, think, for example, of psychoanalysis and the familial subject that covetously cultivates the unconscious; think of liberalism and the exchanging subject that possesses options and makes rational choices; or think of sovereignty and the political subject that imagines itself as the holder of individual rights. The constitution of linguistic exchange and the distinct speaker appear here co-existent with the constitution of economic exchange and the rational agent. This kind of subjectification allows, by means of the reduction of a whole series of multiplicities, the establishment of various molar hierarchies and dualisms such as those between man and nature, culture and man, man and woman, child and adult, worker and capitalist, etc. In the process of social subjugation, there is precisely also the personification of the capital relation: the capitalist functions as personified monetary capital, that is, he incorporates a function dependent on the flows of money capital, while the worker represents personified variable capital, i. e. he embodies functions dependent on the flows of variable capital. Social subjection mobilizes a set of signifying semiologies for this purpose, with language always in relation to the individual and his consciousness, so that representation (the linguistically motivated interplay of representation and represented) and subject remain inevitably linked. We can speak here of a semiological triangularity: Reference, Signification, and Representation. One way to escape hegemonic identification (job, gender, nationality, etc.) would perhaps be radical de-individuation, leading to a generic commonality of the many in alterity. Only in this way would one be able to recover one’s real identity, no matter what it would look like in detail, and it would at least be independent of the infrastructures of representation that have defined and limited it so far.
Today, it is financial capital that penetrates deeply into the semiolinguistic flows of money capital and at the same time motivates the exchange of signs, i. e. signs and language are appropriated by the digital financial machines or, in other words, the financialized deterritorialization of the flows of money capital and its effects separate the sentences from their referents in a certain way and the money remains correspondingly separated from the commodities. Although financial capital thus exercises a techno-linguistic governance, as Bifo Berardi rightly assumes (Berardi 2011), today, however, it requires above all a governance that makes use of a-signifying semiotics. This needs to be shown in more detail with regard to the processes of subjectivation. First, however, the following can be stated: Deleuze/Guattari speak with regard to the economic math, whose most important operator is still money (price form), of a-signifying semiotics that directly connect the various human agents, their organs, and their perceptive systems with the economic machines and their signs. In this, the human and nonhuman agents function as moving parts within the material practices of connecting money-capital flows that converge and diverge in machine networks. Money, stock indices and unemployment statistics, algorithms and scientific diagrams, formulas and models, functions and computer languages – they all produce neither discourses nor narratives beyond significations (language, writing) as a-signifying semiotics, but operate and multiply in an abstract-mathematical mode the economic semioses and productive forces of machinery and its networks.
However, let us first return to what can be called, under an extremely fragile assumption, the enactment of the individual. Western sociology names the “homo economicus” as one of the essential forms of social subjectivation, insofar as here the concept of the individual, as presented by John Locke, for example, remains related to the individual, but at the same time is stylized as a type, namely that of the rationally acting subject. In this, the definition of Fichte or, following him, that of Georg Simmel continues, both of whom describe the individual as a rational being par excellence, but not as this or that individual. (The individual oscillates in the bourgeois context between the generality, which posits individuals as in principle equal agents, and the particularity, the uniqueness of the individual). However, in neoliberalism of the monetarist variety, “homo oeconomicus” has decisively changed its form compared to its determination in classical liberalism. Classical liberalism still determines exchange as the general matrix of economy and subjectivity by establishing a homology: thus, exchange relations in markets promise personal freedoms expressed in a set of rights, contracts, and duties, and this connection is still commonly regarded as the basis of modern individualism. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, as Foucault at least puts it, dramatically expands the processes of social subjection by making economic competitive activity, which always pushes for exploitation, the basis of all social, legal, and political relations: neoliberalism thus no longer focuses on exchange, but on competition. (Foucault: 2004b: 233) It conceives the market as an omniscient cyborg or an eternally valid information processor that sends the right information to the right address in real time. (Mirowski 2015: Section 6. Kindle edition) It is still considered part of nature, but of a complex, chaotic, and nonlinear nature, as so conceived by chaos theory and cybernetics. The ideal to be realized is that individuals act exclusively in the context of their own interests directed toward competition, while at the same time attempting to rationalize their actions at the level of general, common sense. The ideal of an individualized, apolitical idea of society therefore demands a political project. While exchange is still imagined as purely natural in liberalism, competition is much more strongly understood in neoliberalism as a relation to be constructed, which has to be permanently positioned against any form of economic monopolization and any intervention of the state that becomes too intensive. According to Foucault, the shift from exchange to competition entails some further weighty effects: in tendency, everything and anything that people intend to realize for themselves, from marriage to crime to the education of children, is now to be subsumed under the purely economic perspective of capitalization, and this according to the economic procedures of calculation and the optimization of costs and benefits. For neoliberalism, then, it is the economy in particular that is model, object, and project all in one. Whereas liberalism posits that exchange, even between labor and capital, is sui generis and equal, competition, which takes place through the market as a supra-individual information processor, leads to efficient asymmetry, inequality, and thus surplus. Some are better than others in processing the uncertainties that the market brings, and therefore they can ask for more. Consequently, current neoliberal biopolitics intend and multiply the constant modulation of risk for the individual and the statistical sorting of the population, namely into those who are successful in processing risk and maximizing interests and those who are definitely not – and nothing else means to be “at-risk”. Biopolitics possesses the task of making individuals receptive to the signals of the market, which is considered a network-like infrmatin processor. Accordingly, neoliberal governance moves from the closed institution to the digital network, from structure to process, from command to (repressive) self-organization. The subject of neoliberalism is called to freedom via the installation of personal risk management, while simultaneously being translated into information. The disciplinary panopticon is extended through the control of subjectivized information shadows to eventually achieve a fully algorithmic enclosure of the same. Comprehensive surveillance and the active enjoyment of freedoms are mutually dependent, just as the old sovereign of surveillance diffuses into networks of economic, technological, and political power. Nevertheless, the disciplining and policing form of state organization is not disappearing. The state has to make its adjustment to the capital economy while continuing to expand its administrative and repressive apparatuses.
Social subjection in this context implies an individualized subject whose paradigmatic form is human capital or the entrepreneur of oneself. (Foucault 2004b: 312) This kind of subjectivation, characterized as human capital, a fundamental redefinition of the worker as producer: the worker himself becomes human capital when salaries and wages mutate into income flows to be realized in the future, and at the same time labor is consumed, although increasingly permanent investments in skills, knowledge, and abilities still have to be made; any activity that leads to higher income – think, for instance, of the cleverness of outdoing one’s work colleague – is considered an investment in one’s own human capital. Of course, parts of human capital-body, brain, and genes-are initially given and cannot be readily improved and made effective, but, Foucault argues, even these parts of human capital can still be transformed through certain technologies and procedures: plastic surgery, neo-Buddhist mental designs, and genetic engineering construct the neoliberal individual (a bundle of investments, qualifications, social traits, and body parts) so that he or she continues to transform and make effective his or her investments, thereby constituting himself or herself as human capital. Such an individual, however, is in tendency already a dividend.
Second, the neoliberal “homo economicus” is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself; he manages not only his own life, but also his respective social relations, participations, and appropriations, and thus contributes his share to the distribution and affirmation of entrepreneurial dispositives in the various socio-economic fields. (Ibid.: 333, 210-211, 246) It is necessary to calculate one’s relationship to oneself and to others by simultaneously subtracting from the quality of things or condensing them into a single financial project. To do this, the actions of “free” individuals must be linked or interconnected with the requirements of capital, markets, and the commensurations they generate. In addition, the calculating entrepreneur must pay attention to specific “ideas” necessary to interact with others, from his or her own decision-making ability to the administration of responsibility to the ability to lead others. And consideration must be given to the assemblages within firms and in other organizations in which calculating agents intervene, finally to the territories they seek to occupy. These territories can be physical spaces such as factories or hospitals, but also abstract spaces of divisions, profit centers, or even the error of calculative instruments by which designs of objects and their governments occur. Last but not least, it is about the way the calculating agents or entrepreneurs can travel or be mobile.
According to Mirowski, it was Foucault who first turned his attention to certain debates of liberal and neoliberal think thanks, starting with the German ordoliberals and ending with the Chicago School around Milton Friedman, paying little attention to the foster father of neoliberals Friedrich Hayek, of all people. The fragmentation and division of identity takes place through the entrepreneurial shaping of the self, through a multiplicity of enterprises that flow into one another. Entrepreneurial activities are extended to all social fields. According to Foucault, the model of homo oeconomicus, who now becomes fully governable, concerns not only the economic actor, but in general an actor who, for example, cultivates his love life as if it were a dating machine, who calculates the benefits of crime or evaluates his friendships as he evaluates and assesses a job. He is no longer a classical entrepreneur, but a bundle of mental properties, with his calculus of interests embedded in an extremely gossipy economy of feeling.Foucault conceives of neoliberalism, on the one hand, as a new regime of truth, a new way of making people truthful subjects, and, on the other hand, as a paradoxical mode of governmentality, a method by which people are governed and govern themselves at the same time. According to Foucault, it is as this new mode of governmentality that one must actually understand neoliberalism in all its paradox: it governs without governing. For this, the subject must necessarily be granted a certain potential for active participation in social processes, so that it can regulate the exercise of its freedoms itself, at least choose between different strategies of multiple participation in economic forms of traffic and in digital media, in reflexive consumption and in jobs and knowledge. If not the multiplication of freedom is called for, which essentially consists in the realization of optionality through the use of opportunism and cynicism – coupled with the imperative to increase one’s own productivity, come what may, along with the belief in oneself not to give up despite all the defeats suffered.
The operational parameters of this governance are not so much the law or the law, but interest, investment, normalization and competition. In this process, the state, sub-state institutions and private marketing/design constantly try to code or channel the flows of interests and desires, for example by making desirable activities cheaper and undesirable ones more expensive, trusting that subjects will permanently calculate their interests correctly in order to ultimately generate market equilibrium and economic growth at the same time. For this purpose, neoliberal governance no longer directly marks the bodies through sovereign power and its disciplining measures, but rather it acts in particular on the conditions that constitute the neuronally stimulated activities of the subjects and at the same time calls on the subjects to self-responsibility, self-valorization and self-control, asks them to act as entrepreneurs creating risk and managing it at the same time. Nevertheless, this kind of individuality is already measured by means of statistical surveys and prognoses, by racial divisions and risk materializations, and this measurement identifies the individual as part of the statistically recorded population. Individuality then means precisely that the economic risk potentials and the possible states of illness and income of individuals are recorded as data and transformed into information in order to produce rule-conforming behavior – to forecast, evaluate, and channel. It seems that the moment of passivity, which consists of communication technologies and media networks controlling and optimizing the timing of individuals, and the moment of activity, which shows as a result the production of the competitive individual, are intertwined. It will have to be shown in future studies that, in addition to the parallel processes of individualization and division, a kind of sewing together of the two processes takes place, which leads to a third type of subjectivation, namely the divided and at the same time individualized risk subject. As the bearer of “human capital,” the risk subject is supposed to optimize the returns of his actions (self-optimization) precisely by following guidelines, evaluations, and economically set objectives that are formulated and prescribed by the institutions of financial capital. To do this, it requires a knowledge of how to save and/or incur debt, take out mortgages, and handle loans, taking into account certain rules; indeed, it manages life itself as a business to be optimized. This kind of subjectification is valorized, tapped and optimized at the same time, according to the objective imperatives of capital. Credit scoring agencies such as the U.S. companies Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion make assessments of risk subjects based on criteria such as payment history, loan amount, duration, credit type, etc., setting in motion across the social field, including social media, “behavioral scoring,” the comprehensive control of risk subjects, all of whom are supposed to be high-performing centers of cost and profit.
Neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajectory of intensification of labor, information, and communication. And there is a fundamental paradox running through this trajectory: if power governs less restrictively and targets the body less, it simultaneously becomes more intense, saturating the entire field of social activities and potentialities of neuronally and mentally fixed individuals. From this perspective, it is a matter of a) improving the conditions of the economization of governance and self-governance, b) producing a performative economic discourse that permeates all modes not only of jobexistence but of everyday life, and c) producing a common sense that values every action, be it crime, confession, marriage, or higher education, according to the calculus of capitalization, i. e. that calculates (discounts) a present value (of an economic unit) of the gains to be expected in the future. Even more than the liberal legal subject, the neoliberal economic subject is characterized by the claim to absolute sufficiency, so that it seems to have lost any hint of inadequacy or the claim to another life. Ethically, contrary to this ideological disposition, the neoliberal subject is a thoroughly depraved subject, to which François Chatelet has given the status of the “swinish.” (Cf. Chatelet 2014)
Nevertheless, in the course of the neoliberal de- and reterritorialization of subjectivity, no new production of subjectivity actually takes place anymore. According to Maurizio Lazzarato, the neoliberal subject remains entirely dependent on socio-economic structures, in particular dependent on its debts – it is an increasingly indebted subject. (Cf. Lazzarato 2012) Thus, neoliberal propaganda aimed at the ubiquitous corporate form cannot hide the fact that for the majority of the population, the call to become an entrepreneur of oneself means nothing more than being forced to accept falling wages and incomes, precarization, flexibilization, and indebtedness, and then to manage them like the balance sheet of a company. In this context, the conceptual figure of the heroic entrepreneur (Schumpeter), whose genius, consisting in the potential for creative destruction and at the same time for innovation, supposedly even inspired the masses, has long since been replaced by the figure of the clever financier, arbitrageur and hedge fund manager, who covetously and continuously, second-by-second and cleverly stalks new opportunities for investing money and capital. And this mentality construction implies the call to self-provisioning and personal responsibility by posturing as part of a “mass investment culture” (Bischoff 2014: 41), where today it is essentially the financial industry that provides access to consumer goods, real estate, education, and pensions through the various credit and investment transactions. Contemporary financialized biopolitics include the constant modulation of socio-economic risk and the statistical sorting of the population. A monstrous financial industry has long since developed that calculates, treats, and evaluates actors’ accountability and “libertarian” strategies toward their respective at-risk-ness (from consumer credit to privatized public goods like schools and prisons to the profitable machines of measuring and monitoring money capital). Sloterdijk, for all his metaphor, got to the heart of this precisely when he wrote: “What is called consumption here denotes the willingness of clients to participate in credit-based games of accelerated enjoyment – at the risk of spending a large part of their lives in redemption transactions.” (Sloterdijk 2006: 309) And he also registered this: “This transformation (toward a new psychopolitics) cannot be achieved without a far-reaching depoliticization of populations – and connected with it: without the progressive loss of meaning of language in favor of image and number.” (Ibid.: 312)

3) The machinic subjugation and the dividuum (Deleuze/Guattari)

Social subjection, however, represents only one form, strategy, and method for constituting the modern subject. Let us therefore turn to the second important form of subjectivation, the dividuum. This process, different from social subjugation, which divides, splits, and recomposes subjects, makes them more fluid, flexible, and variable, and transforms them into dividuals, is what Deleuze/Guattari call “machinic indentification” or “social subjugation,” which can only function with the help of the new operational, non-representational, and a-signifying semiotics. In the mode of machinic enslavement, the individual can no longer be understood as an individualized subject, as an economic subject, or as a citizen, but must be described as a part or as a component of the assemblages of corporations, financial systems, the media, and the state and its collective institutions. (Cf. Lazzarato 2014: 23ff.) Deleuze, in the postscript on societies of control, has even set a historical date for the emergence of dividuum; he relates this date to the media-technological upheaval from the analog to the numerical, the transition from systematically contoured and mutually exchangeable entities regulated by norms to continuums of variations in the numerical itself, whose instrument of control is statistical normalization. The medium of control is no longer disciplining, but modulation, which incessantly enforces from individuals behaviors such as flexibility, incessant learning, and adaptation to socio-economic machines. (Cf. Deleuze 1993b).
Whereas in Fordism workers were still temporally fixed at the site of the factory and integrated like cogs into the assembly line machines, their coupling with the cybernetic machines is to be understood more as a machine interpenetration that takes place more often than ever at the non-site of the enterprise, which today is characterized less by products than by distinctive business ideas that can in principle spread anywhere, be divided into different production processes, and be executed by flexible work groups. This kind of coupling between machine and man refers to the cybernetic figure of communication, which regulates the traffic between organisms and machines. According to Deleuze/Guattari, the machines of cybernetics serve a system “that restores a regime of general subjugation: retrograde and reversible ‘man-machine systems’ replace the old, non-regressive and non-reversible relations between the two parts. The relationship between man and machine is based on reciprocal, internal communication, and no longer on use or activity.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 635). Not coincidentally, Deleuze/Guattari use the term “communication” here, and this can first be placed in the context of what is called “structural coupling” or “interpenetration” in systems theory. In systems theory, one speaks of the fact that as the medium (writing) through which communication and consciousness are coupled varies, there is a change in the structures of communication with which consciousness interacts. For Deleuze/Guattari, however, it is not a matter of the interaction of separately determined systems, but of the co-existence, co-production, and co-variation of human-machine complexes and semiotic-material apparatuses and practices; indeed, it is a matter of heterogeneous and processual mixtures, interpenetrations, and concrete symbioses. The apparatuses themselves consist of specific arrangements that result from foldings, cuts, and exclusions and are at the same time intraactions that produce specific phenomena. (cf. Barad 2015: 92) The co here makes it impossible to refer to the origin, to the before, and to the unilateral presupposition, insofar as the “social machine” (Deleuze/Guattari) that overforms the technical machines is itself constructed from machine mixtures. Thus, the question of determination remains unresolved, so that the danger of a circular conception is not averted. From an economic point of view, the specification of the relation between variable and constant capital has to be examined (including the surplus, the production of which tends to be accompanied by the increase of the capital intensity or the organic composition of capital: the constant part increases in relation to the variable part). If, as noted above, the assembly line, where workers had to integrate along a line, was the starting point for the emergence of operations management, with cybernetic machines we get to deal with the machine relations between people-machines and machine-machine complexes, which require even more flexible management in relation to the enterprise economy. Cybernetic management grasps the assembly line less as a static cost factor, but sees it in its dynamics or as the potential of the production lines to endlessly extend the algorithmized exploitation process. Within these relations, the moving design of lines takes place, with each component of the system (including the human agent) pressed into service for the optimization of the processes of capitalization, not in terms of a static product but in terms of the ceaseless optimization of the lines themselves. (Cf. Raunig 2015: 87ff.)
The machinic indienstnahme must always resort to a-significant semiotics (diagrams, plans, schemes, indices, currencies, equations, software, etc.) that do not so much address the consciousness of the agents or rely on representation, and therefore, in the last analysis, do not need a subject as a referent to be addressed. In general, both subject and object are characterized here by ambiguity, for both concepts, according to Guattari, can be conceived as hybrids, as parts of subjectification-objectification complexes, with objects losing their objectivity and subjects losing their subjectivity. Objectless objects are parts of vectors capable of generating something like a kind of proto-subjectivity, and this also means that machines, objects, and signs suggest, enable, or prohibit certain actions to divides, encouraging and instigating them to do so, thus we are dealing with relations of power in Michel Foucault’s sense, in which actions act on other actions. (Cf. Lazzarato 2014: 39f.) These power relations by no means express intersubjective relations, but rather include actions on actions within machinic agentcements, in which machines, objects, and signs not only act like agents themselves, but increasingly determine the practices and activities of dividers. In the mode of machinic indentification, the divividuum forms a complex social body with the machines. For this purpose, machinic enslavement qua machinic processes activates a number of pre-personal, pre-cognitive, and pre-verbal forces (perceptions, senses, affects, desires) and in turn binds them to supra-economic forces (economy, knowledge, technology, sociality), which in turn take up, regulate, and manage the various potentials of the dividuum. In the process, dividuals are pushed more than ever to the periphery of techno-economic systems.
Deleuze/Guattari, after all, relate their concept of machinic servitude rather vaguely to cybernetics and the sciences of automation, in a narrower sense to operations management or the governance of all components of a machinic system. The machinic indienstnahme is to be understood as a mode of entanglement, connection, and coupling, even merging of ever already biologically divided dividers with machine complexes that operationalize the control and regulation of dividers, whereby this kind of coupling tends to function without repression or ideology, but rather requires the techniques of modulation and modeling to guarantee a functional interpenetration between humans and machines. (Ibid.: 55ff.) In the mode of machinic enslavement, the person no longer functions as an entrepreneurial subject (human capital or corporate form), but rather co-exists with the machines as their functional part or co-varies with the machines as a variable component of the even more variable machinic assemblages. These structures are also to be understood as machines of subjectivation, which functionalize the interpersonal relations of the subjects among themselves, the family complexes, and the forms of participation in the digital media. In this context, Guattari refers early on to the modes of operation of modern finance, to mass media and computerized dispositifs, but also to the reference universes of music and to universes that express themselves in the moment of creation beyond chronological time, and indeed as singularities-it is always already a matter here of technologized complexes that are called non-human or that couple the human to machinic semioses, to ritornelle. (Cf. Guattari 2014: 18)
In the context of social subjection, the individual remains dependent on external objects (machines, money, communication) that he or she uses as a means or medium, and does so within a human subject-object logic. In the mode of machinic servitude, on the other hand, which Deleuze/Guattari introduce as a distinct logic and at the same time as a logic complementary to social subjugation, one no longer needs to worry about the dualisms of the old humanism. Indeed, the modes of operation of machinic servitude know no essential distinction between humans and machines, between human and non-human agents, or between subject and object, nature and culture, etc. It is now strongly advised to speak of “dividers” instead of individuals, which are adjacent or contiguous to the machine, indeed even more, the dividers and the machinic complexes form qua the modes of coupling, entanglement and fusion a machinic apparatus (condensation of material-semiotic practices), a machinic agencement. (Ibid.:80f.) What is at stake here is a very specific positing of a ratio or relation, which is only inadequately named by the system-theoretical term “interpenetration,” but even the talk of attaching or connecting the human to the machine does not quite capture the facts. The machinic service-taking is more and more about the envelopment of the dividend by a maschial environment, i.e. a specific dependence of the dividers on the machines, qua division, integration and fusion, about a machinic magnetism and its attraction, which, combined with a power of surveillance, no matter whether starting from smartphones or NSA networks, incessantly sucks the human actors into networks, clouds and machinic apparatuses. At this point, Gerald Raunig speaks of ubiquitous access to data taps whose protocols and orders remain largely invisible.(Raunig 2015: 144).
The dividend functions as a dividedness in these processes in much the same way as the non-human components, be they technical machines, organizational processes, semiotics, and so on. In these human-machine apparatuses, in which the machine complexes increasingly communicate with each other even independently of the human actors, both components are recurrent parts of production, communication, and consumption; processes that mostly aim at producing profitable inputs and outputs. Both human and non-human agents (agents are not persons and semiotics are not representational) function in machine processes as (moving) points within the connection, conjunction and disjunction of flows that flow in networks, be they economic, social or communicative networks.
Dividers constantly change their functions, take on the drive, transmission, transformation or tool function in the machine structures, function as raw material and product, as means of labor and object of labor at the same time. In doing so, the dividuum does not behave statically at all; rather, they are transformed and modulated in the machinic processes by the modes of operation of looping and sampling, even glitching, and this refers both to the aspect of passively operating on oneself and to being operated on by the machines; to a certain extent, the dividend also activates these functions itself. (Guattari 2014: 96f.) One thinks, for example, of the typification or self-activated adaptation of one’s own person to mass-produced entities or profiles. In this respect, the dividend is always also a type of … (citizen, consumer, patient, producer, etc.) At the same time, the dividend remains coupled to a machinic “outside,” more precisely sutured to the forces of the “outside,” such as dispersed labor with the silicon of cybernetic machines or life with the exogenous factors of genetic engineering. For Deleuze, the dividend possesses a mosaic-like, a recombinant “soul”-if soul is even still the right word to use in order to form, inform, and reform itself with some degree of variation in relation to the metastable strands of corporations, education, and bioinformatics ecosystems. The dividend today must not only co-exist with all technologies and techniques, but also co-vary. This notion, incidentally, is not so far removed from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, but what is crucially new in Deleuze/Guattari is simply that, with respect to the problem of the coupling of humans and machines, the diagrammatic notion is introduced as a superfold, as a double helix, as a fractal rather than a simply folded topography.
Another constitutive dimension of the dividuum is that it is connected via diverse affordances – production of consciousness, specific temporal techniques, and cognition – to the diverse machines of the economy, communication, and the state – machine complexes, all of which are now inseparable from digitalization. Dividuals have long since ceased to be integrated into the machinery and its lines through direct supervision, control, and scientifically organized disciplining, as they were in Taylorism; instead, they are increasingly finely divided via far more flexible and effective methods, tied to digital lines and binary codes, and thereby connected to the machine complexes (crowdsourcing, online presence, etc.). (Ibid.) However, this kind of connection by no means generates only passive dividuals; rather, it promotes peculiar subjectivizations to eventually even achieve the active mobilization of dividers via their multiple participations in social networks, which, however, always remains shaped by the codings of capital and science, so that via the optimization of one’s own self-modeling, the optimization of the socio-economic system is made one’s own business. A specific sensory system of digital apparatuses joins perception, sensation, and thought, fuses, so to speak, with the neuronal microstructure and directs the competence of time and affect, binding the dividuum qua mail and telephone traffic into the relations of network environments, which in turn are saturated with objects and semiotics that generate a pervasive and accelerating connectivity and complexity. In this context, Luciano Floridi speaks of a “hyperconnectivity” (Floridi 2015: 43) determined by the “L-law” that captures the utility of a network’s complexity (the possible connections between a number of nodes plus the speed; growth of utility proportional to the square of the number of connecting nodes; ibid.: 42). Under these technological conditions, the new “inforg” (ibid.:129) emerges, built into networks as a module, if they still need the detour via the subject at all, to process operating and communicating objects in a modular way. (Network interconnection devices that are molecularly divided store and process diverse digital operations and anticipate events in terms of their usability).
Divided modes of functioning connect seamlessly to the cybernetic disposition of a neutral person without interiority – an ego without I – constituted primarily by through its exteriority, relations, and prepositions. Think of a person who, equipped with the Apple Watch, can second-by-second review her behavior and performance by means of reading statistics that ultimately generated each of her behaviors. Think of a quantified “I” that tries to control, measure and especially optimize its gestures, affects and emotions. And not only that, this “I without ego” wants to permanently communicate itself to the others in order to generate an exhibitionistic participation in the networks. The “Invisible Committee” writes about this: “‘I’ share my location via GPS, my mood, my view, my report about what I saw today that was unbelievable or incredibly banal. I ran; I shared my run, my time, my accomplishments, and my self-assessment instantly. I’m constantly posting photos of my vacations, my parties, my get-ups, my co-workers, what I’m eating and what I’m cruising for. To all appearances, I’m not doing anything, yet I’m constantly producing data. Whether I work or not, my daily life remains fully analyzable as a storehouse of information. I am constantly improving the algorithm.” (Invisible Committee 2015: 109-110)
And even functions such as enjoyment, which were previously more on the passive side of consumption, are now fed into the circulation of capital in an activity-postulating way. Enjoyment, for example, becomes part of a 24-hour speculation on the free life with one’s own home as the first goal and price by means of a consumer loan. If one now begins to celebrate the constraints to which one is subjected as freedom, then the system of freedom is a perfidious one – think of the self-tracking of people who equip their bodies with all kinds of sensors to measure their blood pressure, blood sugar level and fat percentage in 24/7 mode and then post this data on the web. Such social optimizations, which Sloterdijk sarcastically refers to as “modes of verticality tension,” function today by means of sensors that take measurements, by means of smartphones that provide, absorb, and visualize data, and generally by means of computers that give memory to self-optimizations cast in terabytes – and one organizes these optimizations today analogously – and this is not too far-fetched – to the processes of digitized securitization and differential derivative price movement.
Companies are ceaselessly stoking competition between dividuals by paying them not according to wage groups but according to personal performance, so that each individual must be concerned with maximizing his or her performance, which goes hand in hand with adaptation to new techniques and changed social constellations. This kind of subjectification is executed by monetary-technological machines, which themselves still incessantly shape the sub-individual, molecular flows of cognition, emotions, and sensibilities by sharing them. The machinic enslavement works with decoded flows (abstract labor flows, money capital flows, signs, subjectification flows, etc.) that do not revolve around the individual and human subjectivity, but set in motion enormous social machines that diagrammatically organize the distribution of bodies, cognition, gazes, and light. This kind of subjectification is homogenized by capitalization, but at the same time new differences and new multiplicities are generated; niche markets that afflict dividers in increasingly small-scale participatory processes (targeting advertising by creating interest profiles that supposedly express desire potentials).
Agamben uses the example of the cell phone to illustrate what he calls “desubjectivization.” He writes: “Whoever allows himself to be captured by the dispositive ‘cell phone’ […] therefore does not acquire a new subjectivity, but merely a number by means of which he can be controlled if necessary” (Agamben 2008: 29). For Agamben, there is currently no longer a moment in which the individual is not “shaped, contaminated, and controlled by some dispositif.” Thus, precisely when Agamben refers to these processes as de-subjectivization, one must rather speak of divisification. Or at least of simulated individuals who are perceived by the organizations of administration and surveillance mainly as statistical quantities and risk factors, as potentials for rebellion and addressees of a biopolitical self-care, as celebrity derivatives and casting participants. Michaela Ott has pointed out that the concept of the subject always already resonates with the Althusserian Unterworfensein, so that de-subjectification can also be read positively as de-subjugation, and this is then precisely contrary to Agamben’s original intention here. (Ott 2015: 27)
The individual also remains divided with respect to its pre-individual affects, its sensory systems, and its neuroplasticity. Adorno already spoke of total socialization, which leads to an ever deeper weakening of the ego, to the decomposition of the individual, i. e. the ego falls back into the state of dissociation and ambiguity as a quasi schizophrenic ego. (Cf. Breuer 1995: 95)
Deleuze’s thoroughly libertarian call to develop new capacities and affects, ways of thinking and perceptions, would now actually be reduced to the adaptation and connection to medial machines and technologies in the case of the dividend – up to the integration of various digital devices into the body, the connection of smartphones to the sensory organs, and the growing together of the human with its technicized operators of desire. Here we can speak of concrescence (cf. Ott 2015: 31), when dividers receive images, texts, and sounds largely unfiltered within digital media, absorb advertising copy, and affirm contradictory information, even absorbing it in the long run. It is easy to see that the kind of machinic agencements and their a-signifying semiotics described so far not only needs the dividers as (divided) parts, but literally tears them apart; at least there is a continuous division as far as the intelligence, cognition, physis and memory of the dividers are concerned, and from this it can be concluded without further ado that the dividers no longer need or possess an I as a referent configuring them. Nevertheless, this kind of permanent modulation requires a certain cohesive power of the dividers, which, however, does not lead to the assembling of an individual, but at best statistically re-generates it as a machinized individual.
While disciplinary societies were structured around the relation between the individual and the mass, societies of control articulate themselves through the dyad of “dividers and databases.” On the one hand, institutions of enclosure; on the other, processes of control operating in open milieus. On one side signatures and administrative numbering, on the other codes and passwords as conditions for access. However, there is now a third technology that uses both the signature as part of the political semiotics of the discipline and the codes in the open milieus or apparatuses of control. This technology is more focused on “individuals” conceived as indivisible spatiotemporal entities, but which, when it comes to their constitution, remain dependent on the mobilization of a divisional material aggregated in databases and algorithmically processed. These technologies thus belong neither wholly to the disciplining of individuals nor wholly to the dividing by control. And here, the divisive and the individual are not in correlation or even opposition to each other, but can be continually combined. Such a synthesis becomes possible when business practices produce structural forms that address quasi-individuals, who in turn are integrated into a divided whole. What is at stake here is a highly structured individuality, woven primarily from statistical dividualities and constantly reassembled in strands of reticular activity so that it can be registered and controlled as a distinct entity by digital machines. In the quantified-self movement, there is a constant self-assessment of individuals and the production of divisional data that is fed into social networks to produce control effects regarding individuals through the various feedback mechanisms there. (Raunig 2015: 163) The production of this form of individuality belongs neither to discipline nor to control, but to targeting, to target group-oriented and precise access, as we find it today, for example, in the police, military, and marketing. In special testing procedures, methods are now being used to select and control behavior on the basis of “large-scale anomaly detection” programs. The results of these tests depend on what is currently defined as normative division or normality, which is not about normative imperatives but about (empirical) normalizations without a norm. This kind of normalization is learned by the machines, as it were, by analyzing the frequencies and repetitions within given sets of activities (subject-directed advertising qua statistics, as in Amazon). And normalization correlates with the dominant ideology, which sees individual freedom affirmed when individuals follow their ego paths through life, though they are certainly exposed to the danger of being considered suspect precisely by doing so. The above figures of normalization do not follow any logical model of standardization or uniformity. By using temporal patterns to filter behavior, the various instruments no longer possess particular model-like trajectories.
Thus, the dividuum or the “new” de-individuals today primarily incorporate a statistical existence that is recorded, controlled, and regulated by various private companies, opinion institutes, and the institutions of the state. One classifies the dividuals as biopolitical and -genetic existences with the help of statistical procedures or probability calculation and classifies them into different population groups. At the same time, risk profiles indicating the affective, physical, and mental capacities of the dividduals are constantly regenerated, recombined, and subjected to various tests. The diviuals now exist as bundles of traits, behavioral patterns, and relations. The resulting taxonomies allow the modularization of performances and at the same time the participation in economic and social procedures – they call for the construction of so-called risk subjects. At the same time, the registration of the recombinative potencies of life and death, which one records in the statistics as risk factors, requires neither the construction of a social subject nor social intelligence. (Cf. Braidotti 2014: 121) Baudrillard points precisely in this context to a dispersed individual that continually branches out and multiplies qua cloning in constantly tested and testing lines of individualization. (Baudrillard 1982: 45) This interpretation perhaps already shows the new statistically-dividually organized de-individual. If, however, we continue to speak of the dividend at this point, then such a one, as a differentiated and divided subject-object, must certainly be capable of multiplication, that is, it must participate in dividendism, it must actively pursue its own calculation and performance as a risk factor, and it must do so within the framework of a determination that financial capital performs in the last instance. As a thoroughly active part of an electronic body, the dividend exists today in the “sampler spectrum of media force fields that navigate (it) with the aid of communications satellites positioned in orbits far out in space.” (Kroker/Weinstein 1997: 35). In the context of the appropriation and consumption of a differential sign system, Baudrillard speaks of the location of individuals in a spider’s web of negative, positive, uni- or bilateral relations (Baudrillard 2015: 250), whereby individuals are urged to be permanently flexible and mobile in order to establish optimal sociability, so that a compulsion to mobility is established. Compatibility mixes with comptability. Furthermore, Baudrillard speaks of an individual becoming a computational variable and integrating into a sociometric computational program. (Ibid.: 251) This is precisely what makes up the dividend.
The various control mechanisms that serve to stabilize the respective processes of subjectification require the coupling of the dividual to the test that permanently evaluates them as potential risk factors – a technique that Foucault has classified as racist, insofar as by means of the technologies of power qua statistics the population is grouped on specific scales on the basis of their genetic characteristics and their physical-cognitive abilities. A test, in which the answer is already generated by the question, in reality no longer represents a questioning at all, but, if it is sometimes still carried out within the framework of a binary yes/no game, it pushes for scaling: in biogenetic terms, the test leads to the classification and scaling of the dividuum (carriers of financially calculable and usable data) into those who embody healthy life and those who embody human garbage, which, however, appears to be absolutely necessary as a spare parts store for the healthy strata of the population in order to guarantee their life. The object of the test today is the individual, its result perhaps even a new de-individual, who as a sample is not only functionally characterized, but throughout his life, when he performs tests, is asked by the machines to comply with the referendum or ultimatum that he, as a statistical risk factor, is precisely able to represent and perform life worth living, above all as a consumer. It is immediately noticeable here that one can index the processes of differential normalization and control with terms like growth rate, cost factor, opportunity and degree of freedom. The integration of the dividuum into a digitized system architecture, whose fundamental modes of operation are probabilistic and statistical, is apparently almost unstoppable. In principle, any part can be interconnected with any other if a suitable standard or code is available to exchange the respective signals in a common language. One is no longer a consumer, but is consumed. The divisive and affective relations are processed as data by economic machines that have specific mapping and tracking programs. These systems know the desires, the affects, and the divisiveness of individuals very well.
Google and Facebook, social databases that transform users into data generators and at the same time offer them free services that are in turn financed by the sale of the data supplied by the users, are today probably the most current and effective machine complexes that collect, share, select, and exploit data and thus at the same time regulate and control the behaviors, reading modes, and leisure preferences, tastes, clothing, and opinions of the dividers – and this qua processes of informationalization in which the dividers, whose profiles are composed qua algorithms, are themselves relay stations or as inputs and outputs of production-consumption machines. Finally, we know that workers today are no longer chained to the factory floor; rather, precariously employed or temporary consumers carry around their chains in the form of laptops, smartphones, tablets, and their modes of operation. These devices are necessary utensils, even when it comes to the fact that temporary workers, who today are gladly talked up as individual employees, are often deployed below their qualifications as parts of mobile work groups in this or that position as needed and find themselves entirely in the low-wage sector, without pension benefits, protection against dismissal, etc. However, smart technologies not only enable control, but also the instigation of freedom – they are to be understood as materializations of machine indentification in the structures, they enable processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, so that the assessment of these technologies can only ever be made in the context of a specific socio-economic structure.
Dividers today are increasingly condensed to typing fingers, spastic bodies, and attention-reducing yet nervously exhausting information intake as they cryptically surf social networks in a desperate attempt to keep up with information speeds and masses. Guattari’s use of the term spasmus (spasm) in his latest writing, Chaosmose (Guattari 2014), is intended to refer to the excessive and compulsive acceleration of the rhythms of the economic, the technological, and the social, to a forced vibration of all rhythms in the everyday spaces of social communication. Guattari refers here in particular to the realm of cognitive labor and the nervous strain associated with it, to which dividers in machine networks and systems are currently increasingly exposed. Accordingly, the spasm is to be understood as an effect of the violent penetration of capital into the field of communication and information technologies, which in turn incessantly affect the spheres of cognition, sensibility, neuronality, and the unconscious. Here, indeed, a) the notion of interaction between economy and technology must be relativized, insofar as we are dealing with capital as a determination in the last instance, and b) one can speak of an onlife experience, insofar as the online world increasingly penetrates the offline world (ubiquitous computing). (on the latter, Floridi 2015: 67).
The vibration that arises in post-Fordist capitalism from the digitalized acceleration of economic and social processes, leading on the one hand to an increase in nervous tension and on the other hand to the loss of basal attentional capacities, is, according to Bifo Berardi, the spasm. In a cocktail that leads to over-excitement and exhaustion at the same time – to be tense and over-tense – it finally becomes the task of life to permanently balance the respective current elasticities between the two poles and to search for fictitious equilibria. Berardi is fully aware that the semiotizers of the social brain have long since lost their ability to produce collective, shared meanings (without universals) in other spaces; the collective refrains can no longer resonate with the infotechnical environments, this too is the spasm. (Cf. Berardi 2011)
It has often been pointed out in neurobiology that the human brain processes far too slowly to be able to make sense of the exponentially increasing amounts of information streaming through the infotechnical-semiotic machines. Bifo Beradi has repeatedly described how the velocities of capital permanently challenge and overtax the neuro-physical energies of individuals, calling upon their cognition and emotion to follow the current net productivity unconditionally. Cyberspace, as a basically boundless sphere, exceeds individual cyber time; the latter understood as a time of attention, memory and imagination, which has only limited potentials. In the face of the flood of information and its acceleration, human psyches and brains reach their limits, resulting in an oscillation between nervous energies mobilized by overexcitement and inner withdrawal. (Ibid.) However, it is not only about the amount of information, which could possibly still be managed by a new collective navigational intelligence, but about the innovational lack contained therein. In this respect, the abundance only conceals how pathetic the content of much of the information produced and consumed today is. What we are experiencing is to be understood more as a crisis of the new than as a crisis of abundance production per se.
Recent research in the neurosciences confirms that the incessant imperative to constantly choose, indeed to demand to know, to choose and to decide, far exceeds and exhausts the cognitive-emotional capacity of individuals. And this is especially true when the distributed and at the same time exhausted brain, which is clocked quite differently from the automatically running digital processes, is permanently connected to them via the smartphone. Therefore, according to Berardi, in the face of the stress generated by the accelerated hyperproductivity of the network, individuals must at some point simply collapse, or at least lose themselves in panic attacks, and then display the corresponding psychopathological reactions (burnout, depression, ADHD, suicide, etc.).
The exhausted social brain is thus the result of a whole series of attacks that produce panic. Kroker identified panic as early as the 1990s as the underlying psychological mood of digitized culture, “a melange of melancholy within, blended with a lot of madness on the surface.” (Kroker, Kroker, Cook 1999: 22) Panic, which in turn is followed by depressive slumps and/or manic-depressive phases. And even quasi-pathologies like Internet addiction still produce a kind of excess, regarding the imperatives of productivity, which, however, are not solely about accessing future exploitation, but about colonizing the present. The present today is also overly saturated with the past, so that the past is no longer perceived as such. This leads to the flattening of time and, complementarily, to the loss of the idea of a future that could be different from our present. (The prefix “hyper” stands for both acceleration and exhaustion: hyper-accumulation, hyper-speed, hyperventilation, hyper-activity, hyper-burnout – hypervirtualized and at the same time supervised, over-medicated, over-communicated, etc.).
In the catastrophic, even apocalyptic visions of Baudrillard, Kroker, or Bifo Berardi, one may recognize a way of rethinking the current processes of subjectivation, as turning away from an energetic-affirmative subjectivation that had still inspired the revolutionary theories of the twentieth century, and turning toward a theory of implosion that refers to processes of subjectivation that culminate in the depression and exhaustion of dividends. But this theoretical operation, to add another remark on a black Deleuze, could also open the way for stratagems aimed at a new subject of creative subtraction, with which the exchange between life and capital is adopted. Behind this, an autonomous power could be hinted at that no longer makes demands, and this implies that nothing at all is said about power. Instead, an interruption of the power cycle is sought via a political non-participation that renders the colorful and diverse new (digital) worlds irrelevant, after all, productivist modernity is stuck with its subservience to the imperative of the new, even if this is mostly, to use Adorno’s phrase, the new of the same old thing, to the progress of the development of productive forces, to rising profit rates and the latest gadgets. One does not have to add anything to this world, rather one should subtract oneself from it quite actively in the collective.

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