Deleuze's Postscript on the Societies of Control has been the most common entry point for interrogating the ways in which contemporary digital technologies have altered the social and the subjective from a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective. It is, however, in A Thousand Plateaus that we find the most comprehensive set of resources for grappling with the Algocene, the contemporary digitally interconnected world of ubiquitous computing, drones, data mining, smart cities, social media, automated trading and other data-driven technologies that are heavily reliant upon (...) algorithmic processes and deep learning networks. In this broad survey, I argue that in order to grapple with these new technological assemblages and the implications of their deployment across society, we should posit a new major stratum, the algoplastic, and, along with it, new modes of operation of order-words and the regimes of signs they form part of. I conclude by posing some of the new problems that emerge with the Algocene. (shrink)

This article revisits the concept of the dividual, taking as a starting point Deleuze’s diagnosis about the relevance that dividual practices have gained with the advent of biotechnology and digital culture. Although we agree with this diagnosis, we highlight the intersections between the dividual and the individual both in Modernity and in the present time. The contemporary dividual is in tension with the modern individual, but not as a substitution, division or duplication of the individual. Rather, we state a complex (...) dividual-individual composition, focusing on biotechnologies, digital culture and financial capitalism. Following a Foucauldian approach, we understand this composition as a result of technologies of power and the result of certain modes of subjectivation. In dialogue with Simondon’s theory of individuation, we suggest that the dividual takes part in a new mode of subjectivation which can be named a ‘dividuation’ in the context of technologically mediated experiences. (shrink)

This article analyses the forms of dividuation workers undergo when they are linked to technologies, such as algorithms or artificial intelligence. It examines functionalities and operations deployed by certain types of Talent Management software and apps—UKG, Tribepad, Afiniti, RetailNext and Textio. Specifically, it analyses how talented workers materialise in relation to the profiles and the statistical models generated by such artificial intelligence machines. It argues that these operate as a nooscope that allows the transindividual plane to be quantified through a (...) process known as dividuation. Finally, by way of conclusion, the notion of the dividual is presented as the logic that characterises the human–machine relationship in the case of artificial intelligence and as the horizon of what Felix Guattari called “machinic capitalism”. (shrink)

Deleuze put forth a description of fluid control in computerized society in his text ‘Postscript on Control Societies’. With the help of the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, we can broaden and complexify this view and understand digital systems through the concept of modulation. These modulatory systems intervene in human individuation by controlling individuals as ‘dividuals’. In contemporary digital technologies, like blockchain platforms, the modulatory dividual control can be fierce and even total. Simondon’s concepts of pre-individual, individuation, and transindividuation present us (...) with an ontology for this contemporary mode of control and enable us to better understand the complex relations between the being of humans and technical networks. (shrink)

Este artículo propone una lectura interpretativa de la mutilación ocular como estrategia político-policial sistemática aplicada durante el llamado “estallido social” comenzado en Chile en octubre de 2019. A partir de una elaboración del concepto de “rostridad”, desarrollado por Deleuze y Guattari, sugerimos que dicha estrategia sugiere, por una parte, el reconocimiento anticipado de la potencia subversiva de la revuelta, difícil de desactivar por los poderes gobernantes. Por otra parte, que la mutilación no solo apunta a los ojos sino también a (...) las subjetividades que estos parecen organizar, las cuales aparecen ante el poder como clandestinas o nómades. Por ello, la mutilación ocular puede ser leída como una estrategia político-policial de re-subjetivación utilizada por el gobierno para desactivar una revuelta política que también se define por líneas de resistencia que se fugan de dicha estrategia. (shrink)