Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices

Andreas Oberprantacher, Andrei Siclodi, Andreas Oberprantacher, Andrei Siclodi

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137516589
• eBook ISBN: 9781137516596
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book explores, discusses, and assesses the actual and potential sense of subjectivation in a variety of contexts. In particular, it reflects the genealogies, connections, variations, and practical implications of various theories of subjectivity and subjection while providing an up-to-date and authoritative account of how to engage with the 'subject'. Rather than addressing the 'subject' merely in theoretical terms, this book explores subjectivation as a seminal expression of subjective practices in the plural. To the extent that subjectivity and subjection are key terms in a plurality of discourses and for a number of disciplines, Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices advances a trans-disciplinary reading by taking into account relevant debates that stretch from poststructuralism via postfordism to postdemocracy. In this sense, the book introduces readers to current approaches to subjectivation by displacing conventional understandings and suggesting unexpected reformulations. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Andreas Oberprantacher and Andrei Siclodi (eds.)Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices10.1057/978-1-137-51659-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing a Contorted Subject Called ‘Subjectivation’

Andreas Oberprantacher¹ and Andrei Siclodi²

(1)

University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

(2)

Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria

End Abstract

The principal subject of this book is a term that is, philosophically speaking, dubious, and yet indubitably significant: ‘subjectivation’. As a term that circulates with increasing frequency in a number of critical discourses ever since Michel Foucault discussed it in the early 1980s (see Foucault, 1990, pp. 28–32; compare Butler, 1997, pp. 83–105), and that is of theoretical and practical relevance for a variety of academic disciplines ranging from Sociology via Aesthetics to Psychoanalysis, ‘subjectivation’ appears ambiguous to the extent that it designates and mediates tensions. What becomes literally manifest as ‘subjectivation’ is most notably the tension between the promising ‘idea’ of autonomous subjectivity on the one hand and the discouraging ‘reality’ of heteronomous subjection on the other—two opposites that are amalgamated into a unique and confusing term.

In consideration of this elementary tension, it may be argued that the currency of the expression ‘subjectivation’ is raising a number of crucial questions in the wider context of its repeated invocation: does it perhaps make sense to maintain that ‘subjectivity’ and ‘subjection’ are not belonging to separate traditions of reasoning, but instead intertwined in complex scenes—of ‘subjectivation’—that either suspend or cross the fictitious distinction between autonomy and heteronomy? Or is it rather reasonable to assume that ‘subjectivation’ is the monstrous progeny of an illicit crossbreed of conjectural extremes that should better be kept apart and not conflated? In short, how could we engage with the enigmatic subject called ‘subjectivation’ given that it confronts us with an apparent contradiction in terms that concerns the emergence of the subject itself?

A Subject at Risk

Such abstract questions do matter in a concrete sense if we consider that a plurality of scholars are suggesting that what is at risk in contemporary so-called post-modern society is the ‘subject’ itself—a subject that is risking its own exhaustion as much as it tends to ‘burn out’ on the threshold of subjectivity and subjection. Alain Ehrenberg, for example, argues in his study The Weariness of the Self, first published in 1998, that depression is not just a pathological state affecting single individuals, but—paradoxically—a collective sensation of subjective inadequacy prevalent in ‘a society whose norm is no longer based on guilt and discipline but on responsibility and initiative’ (Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 9). Whereas the society in which Sigmund Freud cultivated a psychoanalytic ‘metaphysics of the Subject’ (Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 216) reflecting his seminal thoughts on the conflicted, that is, neurotic structure of the human psyche, was a typically modern society defining itself with respect to laws (inhibition) and hierarchy (obedience), in

a culture of performance and individual action, in which energy breakdowns can cost dearly, and in which we always have to be running at top speed and efficiency, inhibition is pure dysfunction, an inadequacy. The individual has an institutional need to act at any cost by being able to count on his inner strengths. He inhabits initiative more than obedience; he is caught in the question of what it is possible to do and not what it is permissible to do. That is why inadequacy is to the contemporary person what conflict was to the person of the first half of the twentieth century. (Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 217)

In brief, Ehrenberg argues that the ‘yielding of neurosis to depression’ corresponds to ‘a sea change in the subjectivity of modern humanity’ (Ehrenberg, 2010, p. 161)—and, as might be added in the context of Paolo Virno’s study The Grammar of the Multitude, in its subjection too. For the ‘post-Fordist regime’—which, as Virno writes, would be the proper name of this complex re-arrangement of both subjectivity and subjection under the auspices of postmodernity—incessantly demands ‘virtuosic activity’ (Virno, 2004, p. 68) from a growing number of people who are more often than not summoned to commercialize their ‘intellectual labor-power’ (Virno, 2004, p. 107) in favor of the celebrated ‘knowledge society’. This demand invested in Post-Fordism as a neo-capitalist matrix of socialization ultimately ‘shows itself as universal servile work’, argues Virno (2004, p. 68). In this sense then, the radical transformation of subjectivity, to which Ehrenberg primarily dedicates his investigation, involves also ‘a viscous personalization of subjection’ (Virno, 2004, p. 68). It is even the case, emphasizes Virno (2004, p. 63), that ‘[n]obody is as poor as those [“virtuous” post-Fordist workers] who see their own relation to the presence of others, that is to say, their own communicative faculty, their own possession of a language, reduced to wage labor’.

In similar terms, also Maurizio Lazzarato stresses in recent publications that the rampant economy of debt, which regulates local as well as global interdependencies in terms of a devastating financialization of all sorts of transaction, is cruelly ‘creative’ in a double sense: it valorizes subjectivity—what Lazzarato (2012, p. 34) calls ‘the primary and most important form of production, the “commodity” that goes into the production of all other commodities’ in his essay The Making of Indebted Man from the year 2011—and, parallel to that, it experiments with ‘new forms of subjection’ (Lazzarato, 2012, p. 86) too. The novelty of this debt economy, which disrupts the everyday life of people as much as it interferes in the balance of states, consists in a set of imperatives that paradoxically require the subject to permanently invest in its own subjection in the name of a ‘managerial’ subjectivity, as Lazzarato claims in Governing by Debt (2013):

The order and command must appear to issue from the subject, because ‘you’re in control!’ because ‘you’re your own boss!’ because ‘you’re your own manager!’ Contemporary subjection subjects the individual to ‘infinite’ evaluation and makes the subject his own primary judge. The injunction to be a subject, to give oneself orders, to negotiate permanently with oneself, is the fulfillment of individualism. (Lazzarato, 2015, pp. 186–7)

It is against the background of such diagnoses that Luc and Christian Boltanski initiated a joint project—involving poetry, photography, and discourse—that explores the contemporary situation as an ordinary ‘limbo’ (see Boltanski/Boltanski, 2006). In a short reflection at the end of what may be called a paradigmatic ‘cantata for plural voices’ (cantate à plusieurs voix), Luc Boltanski notes that contemporary societies resemble a limbo (in the plural), since countless people are nowadays living a marginalized life on permanent ‘stand-by’: people who are waiting to be selected (after a unfavorable job interview), people who are expecting a verdict that hardly ever comes (in an strenuous asylum procedure), people who are forced to adapt to niches (as they have no valid permits at hand), people who are abandoned to misery (in fragile shadow economies)—people, in short, who are treated as if they were ‘unbaptized infants’ trapped in a nebulous zone besides ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. As Luc Boltanski further comments, such limbos, in which people are enduring life at the margins of society, are ‘unfortunate’ zones disjoined from modernity with its utopias and dystopias, with its teleological transition from the past to the future, and also with its emblematic confidence in the subject.

In a short essay entitled What Is an Apparatus? from the year 2006, Giorgio Agamben too comes to the conclusion that ‘in the current phase of capitalism’ (2009, p. 20) the—typically modern—tension between subjectivity and subjection, which resulted in the generation of a range of subjects, is irrevocably severed. Whereas ‘in a disciplinary society’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 19), such as the one repeatedly investigated by Foucault (see, e.g., 1978, 1995), the apparatus (dispositif) is ‘first of all a machine that produces subjectifications’¹ in the sense that it ‘produces, as a more or less unforeseen consequence, the constitution of a subject’, current apparatuses are rather corresponding to what Agamben refers to as ‘processes of […] desubjectification’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 20). In other words, they are void of subjects. As much as contemporary societies are not anymore capable of evoking particular subjects, ‘except in a larval or, as it were, spectral form’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 21), also an entire tradition of politics is at risk of falling apart, concludes Agamben:

Hence the eclipse of politics, which used to presuppose the existence of subjects and real identities (the workers’ movement, the bourgeoisie, etc.), and the triumph of the oikonomia, that is to say, of a pure activity of government that aims at nothing other than its own replication. The Right and the Left, which today alternate in the management of power, have for this reason very little to do with the political sphere in which they originated. They are simply the names of two poles—the first pointing without scruple to desubjectification, the second wanting instead to hide behind the hypocritical mask of the good democratic citizen—of the same governmental machine. (Agamben, 2009, p. 22)

Such concerns, shared by others more (e.g., Crouch, 2004; Michelsen/Walter, 2013), are disturbing insofar as the various critiques of an impending exhaustion of the subject inevitably call into question the traditional inventory and institution of politics (see, in this respect, especially Virno, 2004, p. 51), and, with it, subjective chances of communicating, negotiating, and disputing political interests. If it is truly the case, as scholars like Ehrenberg, Virno, Lazzarato, Boltanski, or Agamben are respectively contending, that it is more than ever dubious what a subject is or could be, given that contemporary economic conditions are so depressing, then we can no longer assume that politics is what it—supposedly—once was: a privileged domain of inter-subjective agreements.

In consideration of said risks that need to be taken seriously, we shall thus return to our initial questions regarding the enigmatic subject called ‘subjectivation’ and explore responses that challenge current discourses of de-politicization, but without favoring an uncritical narrative of the survival of ‘the’ subject after its demise. Perhaps an alternative discussion of contemporary struggles that are globally interconnected vis-à-vis the declared crisis of the subject will allow us to provide a more nuanced comprehension of the theoretical and practical significance of the term ‘subjectivation’.

Unruly Subjects

Following a magnitude of recent events—exemplified by, but not limited to the San Precario-movement in a number of Italian cities, the Arabellions throughout the Arab world, the Movimiento 15-M in major cities of Spain, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations all over the USA, the Cost of Living Protests on the Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the various Refugee Strikes and Refugee Tent Actions, be it in Austria or in Germany, the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul, the assemblies on Syntagma Square in Athens, or the Hong Kong Protests—that have gained momentum and eventually also challenged...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introducing a Contorted Subject Called ‘Subjectivation’
• 1. Re-Tracing Subjectivation
• 2. Subjectivation in a Variety of Contemporary Practices
• 3. At the Limits of Subjectivation
• 4. For an Other Subjectivation