La Deleuziana (Apr 2015)
Biopolitical Immanence or Whether Foucault and Deleuze Still Matter
Abstract
The dream of control is to be, simultaneously, absolutely generic (beyond individuation) and absolutely singular; seeing all and seeing every “person” in her singularity, purely immanent to her very life, her bios: a prosthetic God. The Cybernetic Organon, the “second schema of intelligibility” has enabled (through feedback mechanisms) this transition between the generic and the singular by short-circuiting individuation and the universal-individual continuum. The works of Foucault, Deleuze, and many more recent philosophers are based around the inherence of individuation to all control and government (Foucault’s fine-graining, on the one hand, and his “population” theory on the other) and the conception of control as necessarily transcendent (for however fine-tuned and specified individuation may be, the singular always escapes it, as Deleuze teaches – the singular being the pure immanence of life, the bios). I will argue, with Rouvroy and Stiegler, for the immanence of cybernetic control as embodied most recently in Big- Data. But while Rouvroy separates the bodily and the affects from the domain of cybernetics and even proposes embodiment and affective desire as antidotes to cybernetic control (seen here merely in its capacity as “psychopower”), I will show how the immanence of cybernetics actually extends to the pure, bare life of individuals by allying itself with their body, affects and drives, the sub-subjective and the infra-personal. The fact that the latter have been championed for so long as the ultimate battlefronts against control, especially by Deleuze (and Guattari), gives us all the more reason to question them. In trying to re-evaluate the Deleuzian philosophy of immanence, I have engaged two (very different) philosophers whose conceptions of the latter greatly influenced Deleuze, namely Hume and Ruyer.
