Top

Published in:

2010 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

(Dis)Connected: Deleuze’s Superject and the Internet

Author : David Savat

Published in: International Handbook of Internet Research

Publisher: Springer Netherlands

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Gilles Deleuze’s well-known essay on societies of control. Here Deleuze argued that digital technologies express new social forms, including a new mode of power characterised by modulation. A mode of power that, unlike Foucault’s disciplinary mode of power, no longer has as its main product the individual but, a form of subjectivity that Deleuze termed ‘dividual’. A form of subjectivity where identity, unlike the identity that characterises individuality, is constantly and continuously postponed. As Deleuze suggested, where the disciplinary mode of power operated like a mold, where the disciplinary machine’s product is the individual, this new modulatory mode of power operates more like a sieve and has no product, at least not in the sense of it being a finished object. It is this suggestion of Deleuze’s, and specifically the formation and organisation of dividuality, or rather, one component of it in the form of the ‘superject’, through its interface with digital machines, including the Internet, that is explored in this article.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

previous chapter Trouble with the Commercial: Internets Theorized and Used

next chapter Language Deterioration Revisited: The Extent and Function of English Content in a Swedish Chat Room

It should be clear by now that any machine is multiple; for example, the train is itself an assemblage of other machines and practices, including control technologies, but all of this is encapsulated in the assemblage that people refer to as the train. The same goes for the internet. Here it is often talked about as if it is a unitary or singular machine, but it is important to recognise that it is a collection of machines and practices, which is not to say that it does not have a unity to it.

Of course, a similar deterritorialisation was experienced with the use of the windmill and the water wheel at its time. Notably, this deterritorialisation resulted in a reterritorialisation of another kind, and took some of the worst forms in terms of how people’s capacity for action became, while more autonomous from the so-called natural world, quite limited in being connected to the machines of the factory.

For example, processes of industrial production, and very importantly, processes of distribution and consumption, have been transformed through the use of digital technologies, including the internet. At the same time, our digital machines run on oil and are produced by the factory form of organisation that is so central to the industrial ensemble. This is partly what Deleuze and Guattari refer to in their earlier quoted text in this piece defining the assemblage. Lines can cross or traverse various assemblages, and an assemblage never stands alone.

See Schivelbusch (1986) on this in relation to the emergence of railroad space and railroad time. Virilio (1986) has argued that this ‘annihilation’ of space was foreshadowed by ballistics technology, to which the development of computing is not simply incidental.

At this point I really want to highlight that for the time being the use of the word ‘space’, or any spatial metaphors for that matter, to describe action in the context of the digital ensemble is increasingly problematic, though, as Kirby (1996) has argued so effectively, a language without spatial overtones may well not be a possibility for human beings.

Deleuze’s work, of course, is worth exploring in terms of building a more critical understanding of the virtual, as Deleuze does not draw a distinction between the virtual and the real, but rather, between the virtual and the actual. On this see Levy (1998) and Bogard (1996, pp. 14–15).

For one thing, fluids do not move. By their very definition, they flow, that is, they have speed. It is a mistake, however, to think of the internet as a series of pipes through which a fluid flows. Instead, it is more useful to think of the internet as a whole as flow, in the same sense that the air we breathe occupies a room, and is both ‘here’ and ‘there’ at the same time. In other words, it does not move.

From such a perspective any human being is always already a form of human–machine assemblage, even if it is only the use of a rock to crack a nut open with. In other words, from this perspective we have always been some form of cyborg, and the more interesting question instead is what sort of cyborgs we are. On this the work of Haraway and aspects of Guattari’s (1992) work are very useful.

When one has to work with a dirty mouse, for example, one can become acutely aware of how this interface is a smoothing device of sorts.

It is important not to treat these flows in the manner that one treats sand as being capable of flowing, as this leads to a misunderstanding in terms of how the internet functions. Information does not ‘flow’ in the manner that an aggregate of solid bodies do (like particles of sand).

This is not to suggest that all forms of work in the context of the digital ensemble are filled with creative joy. Far from it, but simply to suggest, just as one example, that both one’s entertainment and one’s work can come by way of the same machine, whereas with the machines of the industrial ensemble one has to disconnect from one machine and connect to another machine.

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simularcra & simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Bogard, W. (1996). The simulation of surveillance: Hypercontrol in telematic societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Buchanan, I. (2009). Deleuze and the internet. In M. Poster & D. Savat (Eds.), Deleuze and new technology (pp. 143–161). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Carlyle, T. [1829] (1984). Signs of the times. In G. B. Tennyson (Ed.), A Carlyle reader: Selections from the writings of Thomas Carlyle (pp. 31–55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Castells, M. (1996). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Chesher, C. (1997). The ontology of digital domains. In D. Holmes (Ed.), Virtual politics: Identity and community in cyberspace (pp. 79–93). London: Sage.

Coyne, R. (1998). Cyberspace and Heidegger’s pragmatics. Information Technology & People, 11(4), 338.CrossRef

De Landa, M. (1991). War in the age of intelligent machines. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59, 3–7.

Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Leibniz and the baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1977). Anti-Oedipus (R. Hurley, M. Seem., & H. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Der Derian, J. (2001). Virtuous war: Mapping the military-industrial-media-entertainment-network. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Giese, M. (1998). Self without body: Textual self-representation in an electronic community. First Monday, 3(4). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_4/giese/index.html

Guattari, F. (1992). Regimes, pathways, subjects. In J. Crary & S. Kwinter (Eds.), Incorporations (pp. 16–35). New York: Zone Books.

Guattari, F. (1993). Machinic heterogenesis (J. Creech, Trans.). In V. A. Conley (Ed.). Rethinking technologies (pp. 13–27). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm (P. Bains, & J. Pefanis, Trans.). Sydney: Power Publications.

Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. London: Free Association Books.

Haraway, D. J. (1995). Cyborgs and symbionts: Living together in the new world order. In C. H. Gray (Ed.), The cyborg handbook. New York: Routledge.

Hardt, M., & A. Negri. (2001). Empire. London: Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hayles, K. N. (1993). The seductions of cyberspace. In V. A. Conley (Ed.), Rethinking technologies (pp. 173–190). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Heidegger, M. (1993). Martin Heidegger: Basic writings (D. Lovitt, Trans., D. F. Krell, Ed.). New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.

Kirby, K. M. (1996). Indifferent boundaries: Spatial concepts of human subjectivity. New York: The Guildford Press.

Levy, P. (1998). Becoming virtual (R. Bononno, Trans.). New York: Plenum Trade.

Lyotard, F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.

Marx, K. [1857] (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft). London: Penguin Books.

Marx, K. [1867] (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Books.

Mihalache, A. (2002). The cyber space-time continuum: Meaning and metaphor. The Information Society, 18(Check Proquest), 293–301.CrossRef

Mumford, L. (1995). The Lewis Mumford reader. D. L. Miller (Ed.). Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

Nunes, M. (1997). What space is cyberspace? The internet and virtuality. In D. Holmes (Ed.), Virtual politics: Identity and community in cyberspace (pp. 163–179). London: Sage.

Poster, M. (1995). The second media age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Poster, M. (2001a). The information subject. Amsteldijk: G + B Arts International.

Poster, M. (2001b). What’s the matter with the internet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Poster, M. (2002). Everyday (virtual) life. New Literary History, 33(4), 743–760.CrossRef

Romanyshyn, R. D. (1989). Technology as symptom and dream. New York: Routledge.

Savat (2009). Deleuze’s objectile: From discipline to modulation. In M. Poster & D. Savat (Eds.), Deleuze and New Technology (pp. 45–63). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Schivelbusch, W. (1986). The railway journey: The industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. Leamington Spa: Berg.

Simkin, M. (2003). South Korea – Computer games. Foreign correspondent. Canberra: ABC. Broadcast August 19, 2003 [Where ABC refers to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation].

Smith, A. (1986). Technology, identity and the information machine. Daedalus, 115(3), 155–169.

Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso.

Stone, A. R. (1995). Split subjects, not atoms; or, how I fell in love with my prosthesis. In C. H. Gray (Ed.), The cyborg handbook. New York: Routledge.

Stone, A. R. (2001). Will the real body please stand up? Boundary stories about virtual cultures. In D. Trend (Ed.), Reading digital culture (pp. 185–198). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Virilio, P. (1986). Speed and politics: An essay on dromology (M. Polizzoti, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

Virilio, P. (1991). The lost dimension (D. Moshenberg, Trans.). New York: Semiotext(e).

Virilio, P. (1995). The art of the motor (J. Rose, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Virilio, P. (2001). Speed and information: Cyberspace alarm! In D. Trend (Ed.), Reading digital culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Title: (Dis)Connected: Deleuze’s Superject and the Internet
Author: David Savat
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Book: International Handbook of Internet Research
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-9788-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-4020-9789-8

Copyright Year: 2010
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_26

Springer Professional

Abstract

Please log in to get access to your license.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Premium Partner