subjectivity

subjectivity
  ---- by Constantin V.Boundas
  Deleuze abandons the old image of the subject as a fixed substance or foundation stone, in favour of a subject that is the provisional outcome of a process of subjectivation. The Deleuzian subject is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements whose source is not the interiority of the traditional image of thought. Deleuze insists that subjectivity is not given; it is always under construction.
  At first glance, Deleuze's shifting attitudes about subjectivity seem to defy reconciliation. First, in Empiricism and Subjectivity he outlines that 'a subject is defined by the movement through which it is developed' (D 1991: 85, 86). Second, in the Dialogues he explains that there are 'no more subjects, but dynamic individuations without subjects, which constitute collective assemblages. . . Nothing becomes subjective but haecceities take shape according to the compositions of non-subjective powers and effects' (D 1987: 93). Last, in Foucault he writes that 'the struggle for [modern] subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis' (D 1988b: 106). The reconciliation of these positions hinges on our ability to read each one of them as a separate answer to a distinct question.
  In Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze outlines that the intensive, integrative act of our practical interest (extension of an initially intensive - yet narrow - moral sympathy over those who are not our kin), together with the associative rules of our speculative interest, make the organisation of subjectivity possible. Far from establishing the seamless identity of the subject, this organisation shows us that the subject's constitution is a fiction, for the subject is an entity out of joint (cracked). There would be no belief in the subject without the (illegitimate and fictitious) belief in God and the World - illegitimate, because neither God nor World can ever be objects of knowledge. Yet, these fictions act as the horizons of all possible beliefs, including the (illegitimate and fictitious) belief in the subject and its unity.
  For Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, the subject is the tensive arrangement of many larval subjects. A self exists as long as a contracting machine, capable of drawing a difference from repetition, functions somewhere. There is a self lurking in the eye; another in the liver; a third in the stomach. A subject is the inclusive disjunction borne from the contraction of all these selves.
  In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the subject's recognition of itself as subject is described by Deleuze and Guattari as 'retrospective'. It emerges not as the agent of selection but as an after-effect of desiringproduction. Capitalism and the isolation of the nuclear family from society that capitalism facilitates provide a perfect training ground for the ascetic subjectivity that capitalism requires. It also reproduces patriarchy by producing hierarchically gendered subjects in accordance with specific values and imperatives that thrive within the nuclear family.
  Meanwhile, in The Fold a subject is that which comes to a point of view, or rather that which remains at the point of view, provided that the point of view is one of variation. It is not the point of view that varies within the subject; on the contrary it is the condition through which an eventual subject apprehends variation. A subject is a monad that includes in itself and also conveys - the entire World obscurely, by expressing clearly only a small region of the world.
  Deleuze and Guattari propose in Foucault that the inside is an operation of the outside or a doubling up of the outside. Here, the subject is the result of a process of subjectivation in accordance with four foldings. These are as follows: first, the material part of ourselves; second, the folding of force; third, the folding of knowledge; and fourth, the folding of the outside. A person does not fold the forces composing them, without the outside itself also being folded, hence forming a self within a person. Folding is the memory of the outside.
  Further, the 'other' as it is discussed in The Logic of Sense makes possible the categories of 'subject' and 'object'. The other is the structure of all possible worlds: it inhabits the transitions from one object to another; it relativises distances and differences; it forms the background from which forms rise up; and the other spatialises and temporalises. The intensive bracketing of 'the other', therefore, is tantamount to the intensive bracketing of 'the Self '. The familiar world and the subjects that inhabit it, in the presence of others, release and molecularise the elements and singularities that were previously sedimented and stratified inside them. The ideology of 'lack' and negation that kept the subject's desire captive is now shown to be the result of socio-historical processes of subjectivation, rather than the irreducible datum of subjectivity. What emerges after the bracketing of the other as structure of all possible worlds is the 'otherwise other' l'autrement qu'autre.
  Connectives
   § capitalism
   § desire
   § fold
   § memory

The Deleuze dictionary. . 2010.

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