Agamben

In "What is an Apparatus?", Agamben defines and then traces the genealogy of the Foucauldian apparatus by looking at Jean Hyppolite's analysis of Hegel's "positivity". He then connects the definition of the apparatus to his theological genealogy of economy, which allows him to propose a caesura (made possible by the terminology of the theologians that separated praxis from God's being) that puts living beings or substances on one side and the apparatuses that capture them on the other.

Agamben situates the apparatus in a new context of "the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live" (15). In this expansion on the Foucauldian apparatuses, Agamben defines an apparatus as "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings" (14). The struggle between substances and apparatuses results in the formation of subjects. Agamben argues that we are now incessantly acted upon by multiple apparatuses, and thus are sites of multiple subjectivities. He also explains that apparatuses are "rooted in the very process of humanization" in that man "attempts to nullify the animalistic behaviors" with the apparatuses (gadgets, instruments, various technologies) that crowd the Open. In order to understand this argument, we may have to look back on Agamben's The Open and his analysis of Uexküll's Umwelt. For the animal, whose environment-world is limited to certain "characters of significance" or "marks", there is no possibility of apprehending or unconcealing of its environment. There is only instinctive behaving. Because man can be separated from this "immediate relationship with its environment", he is aware of, creates, and uses apparatuses.

Agamben's look at the apparatus in the context of capitalism and modern technology raises a few interesting questions. More and more, humans are now the substances being captured or controlled by apparatuses, especially technological ones. We have seen a proliferation of apparatuses that control animals as well. Just consider shock collars for dogs or the beef feedlots, also known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. Do these sorts apparatuses separate animals from their immediate relationships with their environments? What can we say about animal subjectivity? Agamben writes that "every apparatus implies a process of subjectification, without which it cannot function as an apparatus of governance, but is rather reduced to a mere violence" (19). If this is the case, then can we not say (if we agree that the application of apparatuses on animal is not subject-forming) that the capture of an animal by an apparatus is simply violence?

Agamben also points to a "massive process of desubjectification" without real subjectification that has occurred through an (over)proliferation of apparatuses in our current phase of capitalism. He writes of the citizen of postindustrial democracies

[He] readily does everything that he is asked to do, inasmuch as leaves his everyday gestures and his health, his amusements and his occupations, his diet and his desires, to be commanded and controlled in the smallest detail by apparatuses (23)

Is this totalizing "capture" of man similar to the capture of the animal? At what point does this desubjectification and overstimulation of man by apparatuses (which we could say act like "carriers of significance"?) reduce man to acting only on something similar to an instinctive behavior?