The Ideological Algorithmic Apparatus: Subjection Before

Enslavement: Subjection Before Enslavement

Matthew Flisfeder

Theory & Event, Volume 21, Number 2, April 2018, pp. 457-484 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690528

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The Ideological Algorithmic Apparatus:
Subjection Before Enslavement

Matthew Flisfeder

Abstract  This article applies a Lacanian-Marxist critique to

Maurizio Lazzarato’s theories of social subjection and machin-
ic enslavement as they relate to algorithmic and social media.
Lazzarato’s approach has been taken up in recent scholarship
on social media to explain the role of algorithms and software in
subjecting users to capital. In contrast to his approach, this article
argues that social subjection, the interpellation of desire, and the
political dimension of the class struggle must be given priority
over machinic enslavement.

Introduction
The endnote to Jacques Lacan’s paper, “The Subversion of the Subject
and the Dialectic of Desire” explains that the printed version of the
text differs from the original presented at the colloquium on “La
Dialectique” in 1960.1 Lacan notes that the published version of the
paper includes a final section on “castration,” on which he lacked the
necessary time in his presentation to address. In his presentation, the
concluding section on castration was replaced with a few short and
quick remarks on “the machine,” by which, he says, “the subject’s rela-
tion to the signifier can be materialized.”2 This substitution of castra-
tion with the machine, and vice versa, presages the distinction made
by Deleuze and Guattari, and more recently elaborated by Maurizio
Lazzarato, between “social subjection” and “machinic enslavement”?3
On the one hand, “castration” implies the priority of subjection, pre-
cisely in the sense that it is this very cut that produces the desiring
subject within the register of the Symbolic order; on the other hand,
placing an emphasis on the machine seems to displace the centrality
of castration in the desiring-machine, as it is dubbed by Deleuze and
Guattari. The Lacanian parallax, between castration and the machine,
conveniently introduces a topic that I would like to explore in this
essay.

Theory & Event Vol. 21, No. 2, 457–484 © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press
458  Theory & Event

Using the example of algorithmic and social media, I argue for the
priority of what Lazzarato refers to as “social subjection” (and hence,
castration in the logic of producing a desiring subject), and I disagree
with the way that he positions the relationship between subjection and
enslavement. Here, I use social media as a tactical model for making
this argument because of its centrality in neoliberal capitalism, both
as fixed capital, but also as a communications medium. Generally, my
goal is to unravel how we might come to understand the role of algo-
rithmic and social media in the context of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction. Social media overlaps two critical functions, democracy and
surveillance, even as it also superimposes the functions of (exploited)
labor and enjoyment over those states. The nexus of these overlaps
amounts to what Jodi Dean refers to as “communicative capitalism.”4
This is a medium of communications, and therefore plays a role in the
production and circulation of information and meaning. However, my
claim is that ideologically the production of meaning in social media is
tied principally to processes of social subjection, which help to incor-
porate subjects into the matrices of machinic enslavement, and (ulti-
mately) exploitation. In contrast, for Lazzarato, subjection seems to
be a process by which people are interpellated out of the assemblage
of the machine. I argue, instead, that the subject precedes enslavement
in the machinic assemblage, and therefore ideological interpellation
needs to be understood as an instance that takes place prior to machin-
ic enslavement.
My own reference to subjection is located at the intersection of “cas-
tration,” in the Lacanian-psychoanalytic sense, and the class struggle.
The overlapping contexts of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic order,
and her positioning relative to the class struggle, logically precede her
enslavement in the machine, regardless of the fact that the machine
is definitively and retroactively a force of subjection both in terms of
exploitation and the circulation of desire. Social media, as “meaning
machines,” to use Langlois’s term,5 in this respect are not unlike the
ideological apparatuses theorized by Althusser,6 but they are distin-
guished by the way that they also overlap processes of exploitation
and interpellation directly. In other words, the algorithmic logic of
social media attracts the user-subject through the lure of desire, where-
by she is interpellated by the processes of the platform; but at the same
time, it is through this process of interpellation, and searching out her
“lost object” of desire in the matrices of social media that the user-sub-
ject also participates in the production of value that is expropriated by
platform owners, and appropriated more generally by the class of cap-
italists. Nevertheless, without her prior entry into the Symbolic order
as a desiring subject, enslavement would be difficult, or even impos-
sible, since no basis would exist for its ability to draw in her attention.
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  459

By referring to the “ideological apparatus” in my title, I am of

course alluding to Althusser’s theory of ideology, subjectivity, and
his disciplinary technologies of interpellation, which he referred to
as the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs).7 Just as Althusser’s inter-
est was in coming to understand the way that capitalist relations of
production are reproduced, so too do my interests lie in the way that
algorithmic media facilitate both the formal matrix of exploitation, as
well as the modes of interpellation that tether people to these matrices.
Expropriation is still made possible in (neo)liberal capitalism because
of the wage relation and commodity fetishism, which veils the social
relation of exploitation by giving the worker something back; how-
ever, the value of this something remains far below the value of the
expropriated surplus value inscribed into the commodity.8 Although
recent literature proposes viewing capitalist relations of production in
terms of the real subsumption of labor and subjectivity—that is, “the
restructuring of social relations according to the demands of capitalist
valorization”9—and in terms of social production rather than simple
commodity production,10 my claim is that the commodity form, and
hence fetishism, still factors heavily in the precipitous subjection rel-
ative to the class struggle that facilitates the subject’s enslavement to
the machine. The logic of fetishism is key and works at a formal level,
in the exploitation of what Christian Fuchs calls the “prosumer com-
modity”11—a confluence of being both a producer and a consumer of
information—and the exchange of data for meaning/meaningfulness
and enjoyment. How then can we conceive these overlapping and con-
verging apparatuses of exploitation and enjoyment?
My reference to Althusser and the concept of the ISAs also takes
into consideration the way that the Slovenian School of Lacanian schol-
arship has elaborated the notion of interpellation and the differenc-
es between Althusser’s concept of the subject and that developed by
Lacan. Mladen Dolar, for instance, notes that for Althusser, “the sub-
ject is what makes ideology work; for [Lacanian] psychoanalysis, the
subject emerges where ideology fails.”12 Slavoj Žižek, likewise, high-
lights the fact that the Lacanian approach to interpellation reverses the
formula proposed by Althusser: “it is never the individual which is
interpellated as subject, into subject; it is on the contrary the subject
itself who is interpellated as x (some specific subject-position, sym-
bolic identity or mandate), thereby eluding the abyss of $ [the void
or gap that marks the subject within the Symbolic order].”13 My own
understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and interpella-
tion, therefore, draws primarily upon the Lacanian conception, seeing
the subject as expressing primarily the gap or lack within the Symbolic
order; however, for the desiring subject, action revolves around evad-
ing this lack—assuming a subject-position or identity within the
Symbolic order, as Žižek puts it, which remains tied to the subject’s
460  Theory & Event

pursuit of the “lost object” of desire.14 But it is the subject’s entry into
the Symbolic order, the product of “symbolic castration”—that is of
giving up or losing that element which is perceived as “completing”
the subject—which activates desire. Therefore, as I see it, the desiring
subject precedes her own enslavement into the machine, including
smart machines like algorithmic and social media.
Thus, when we look at algorithmic media we find that the inter-
relationship between exploitation and enjoyment are compressed into
a single form. When using a popular social media site, like Facebook,
for instance, we find that it is at once a source of exploitation, expro-
priation, and interpellation. Not only does subjection takes precedence
at the level of the desiring subject; it also, I claim, precedes at the level
of the gap or lack in the social—or in other words, the political at the
heart of the social (i.e., the class struggle). But Lazzarato’s view, which
prioritizes enslavement, or the intersection of enslavement-subjection,
misses the priority of exploitation, and therefore the role of the class
struggle, itself, at the heart of the mode of production. I argue instead
that algorithmic and social media make possible a deeper identifica-
tion between the production of surplus value through exploitation
and the lure of desire in what Lacan referred to as surplus-enjoyment.
Although I believe that Lazzarato goes too far in reifying the subject
in the assemblage of the machine, I still agree that the machine occu-
pies a component part in reproducing both the capitalist processes of
exploitation and interpellation, particularly in the new age of the algo-
rithmic media, like social media, and digital automation. Nevertheless,
it is the context of the class struggle (socially and politically) and “cas-
tration” (psychically), which is missing in Lazzarato’s account, that
positions our understanding of the role played by the machine in
reproducing capitalist class interests and power.

(Re-)Inventing the Matrix

When discussing the convergence of labor and enjoyment in algorith-
mic media, it is difficult not to draw an analogy with the Wachowski
siblings’ The Matrix (1999), in which humans are exploited by the
machines as sustenance, where the humans’ pleasure and enjoyment
provide the main source of energy fueling the machines. Yet, it is this
imagery that frames the contentions I have with the kind of perspec-
tive held by Lazzarato, in which the subject-object dualism is dispelled
with the effect of displacing the centrality of the subject-subject antag-
onism of the class struggle.15 It is in this sense that I place emphasis
on subjection over enslavement, while still attempting to maintain the
significance of enslavement in the apparatus theory of ideology and
subjectivity.
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  461

Social subjection and machinic enslavement encompass the inter-

section of politics and technology. In the history of capital, machin-
ery developed in order to reduce the amount of necessary labor time,
to make processes of production more efficient, and to discipline the
labor force through automation, the threat of unemployment, and
de-skilling. Machinery also proved critical in what Marx refers to as
“relative surplus value,” when the length of the working day was
shortened, and capitalists needed to find mechanisms for producing
the same amount (or more) of surplus value in a shorter period of time
than what was produced in longer periods of the working day (what
Marx refers to as “absolute surplus value”). Machinery therefore made
possible the production of relative surplus value within the limits of
shorter working days, where labor power could only be put to work
for a fixed and given amount of time. Automation in machinery thus
helps to reduce the amount of necessary labor time within the context
of the capitalist mode of production, increasing the amount of surplus
labor as the source of surplus value and profit.
Revolutions in productive technology (from the early-/mid-nine-
teenth century onward) also emerged in parallel with the rise of
new (analogue) entertainment technology and media, from the
Daguerreotype and film to radio and television.16 However, the
machinery that changed everything was the development of digital
automation and information technology, from the desktop computer
to the laptop, the internet, the smartphone and tablet, software, social,
and algorithmic media.17 The latter have converged in ways that now
make possible the overlapping functions required to discipline popu-
lations and enforce contemporary mechanisms of control, so that we
have, in a single device, machinations of enjoyment and labor, but also
of democracy, surveillance, and control.18
When we consider the productive and the consumptive aspects of
algorithmic new media—labor and entertainment—we start to see in
what sense the logics of surplus value and surplus enjoyment overlap.
Surplus value and surplus-enjoyment have a parallax relationship in
the same way that exploitation and ideology, historical and dialecti-
cal materialism, and the subject and object share a parallax relation-
ship.19 We cannot necessarily comprehend the matter at hand unless it
is viewed through an identifying gaze that approaches the object from
the inverse sides of the same problem. To better explain this overlap,
let’s take the example of the episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” from
the Charlie Brooker series, Black Mirror (2011-). In this episode, which
takes place (like all episodes of the series) in the not-too-distant future,
people “work” in “factories” that combine physical labor with enter-
tainment. Workers perform labor by riding stationary exercise bicy-
cles. While doing so, they watch television on a large LCD display
screen positioned directly in front of them. Work stations are lined up
462  Theory & Event

in rows, with each worker cycling side by side. Each has his or her own
television monitor, which they use to select and watch a program of
their choice, or to play an interactive videogame. The purpose of this
labor remains unclear (conceivably it is to generate energy to pow-
er this dystopian society). There is no mention of what kind of val-
ue is being produced and for whom. However, the more each worker
cycles—the longer he or she spends performing their work—the more
they accrue in wages measured in “merits.” A worker’s wealth in mer-
its is displayed whenever they plug into an interactive display, which
are located at various locations on every wall in this claustrophobic
world that only seems to support indoor living.
The episode follows the life of Bing (Daniel Kaluuya), a quiet loner
who goes back and forth, every day, from his small wall-to-wall dis-
play screen bedroom to the cycling centre where he works. In his bed-
room, just like at work, he watches TV and plays videogames. From
time to time, banner ads for pornography websites pop up in the mid-
dle of his viewing. He is able to ignore the ads but is forced to pay a
fee from his merits. If he chooses to close his eyes during the ad, an
alarm bell sounds and red lights flash until he once again continues to
consume. This is truly a society of the spectacle, where people are con-
tinuously enjoined to “amuse themselves to death,” in which enter-
tainment and labor converge in ways that demonstrate the homology
between surplus value and surplus-enjoyment. Ideologically, people
are driven by the superego injunction to “Enjoy!,”20 and even when
they attempt to evade this injunction it is re-enforced through threats
of indirect (punitive) violence (a reference to contemporary postmod-
ern culture in which the prohibition to enjoy has been transformed into
the obligation to enjoy). In this world, media is hyper-personalized—it
is “mass” media, only in the sense that the masses consume simulta-
neously, but personalized because of the direct individualized engage-
ment with the sites of consumption. Materially, then, this engagement
fuels the drive to produce—or, at the very least, it provides distrac-
tion and amusement at the same time that workers are driven towards
laboring activities, not unlike the dangling of the carrot in front of the
horse. This model best explains the overlap in algorithmic and social
media between labor and enjoyment, between the production of sur-
plus value and surplus-jouissance. It demonstrates precisely the way in
which I here conceive the role of algorithmic media in interpellating
subjects through the lure of desire, while they at the same time par-
ticipate in the production of surplus value. But it also encapsulates
the intersection of what Lazzarato refers to as social subjection and
machinic enslavement. Therefore, in the following section I outline
the distinction between these terms. I do so, however, in order to lay
claim to the fact that social subjection takes precedence over machinic
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  463

enslavement. As I have already alluded to, above, such a priority is

tied to the precedence given to the production of the desiring subject.

Lazzarato: Subjection and Enslavement

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari,21 Lazzarato contends that subjectiv-
ity is produced by and within capitalism in two ways, or through two
apparatuses: that of social subjection, and that of machinic enslave-
ment. According to Lazzarato, subjection “equips us with a subjectiv-
ity, assigning us an identity, a sex, a body, a profession, a nationality,
and so on.”22 Machinic enslavement, conversely, “occurs via desub-
jectivization by mobilizing functional and operational, non-represen-
tational and asignifying, rather than linguistic and representational
semiotics.”23 With machinic enslavement, the subject loses her individ-
uality and becomes a mere cog in the machine, or “a component part
of an assemblage,” which includes structures not normally conceived
as “machinery,” such as businesses, the financial system, the media,
welfare state institutions like schools, hospitals, museums, theatres,
and (of course) the internet.24 Subjection, in other words, deals in the
construction of individuals—it is interpellation in the sense attributed
to Althusser; enslavement, however, incorporates people as “dividu-
als”—that is (to paraphrase Deleuze),25 as samples of data and data
sets.26 Machinic enslavement, therefore, refers to the way that people
are incorporated into a human-machine assemblage.
Lazzarato is keen to emphasize the role that machinic enslavement
plays in producing capitalist subjectivity, particularly since, according
to him, several contemporary social theorists, such as Alain Badiou,
Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, and Žižek,27 ignore this aspect, prefer-
ring to focus on questions relating to social subjection.28 Against these
thinkers, Lazzarato claims that unlike feudal society, power relations
in capitalism are impersonal and emerge out of the organization of
machines.29 As he puts it, “capital is not a mere relationship among
‘people’, nor is it reducible to an intersubjective relationship.” Power
relationships do exist, but according to Lazzarato they are constituted
by “social machines”—by which he refers to corporations, collective
infrastructures of the welfare state, and communications systems—
and are “assisted” by technical machines, such as algorithmic media.30
Unlike subjection, (and this seems to be one of his central claims)
enslavement dissolves the subject-object dualism, replacing it with
“ontologically ambiguous” entities, hybrids, or what he refers to as
“subject-object bi-face entities.”31
Theorists that place their focus on subjection, according to
Lazzarato, would seem to draw out too rigidly the subject-object dual-
ism. Lazzarato remains somewhat critical of this stance, particularly
since, for him, this would also seem to be the same process as drawn
464  Theory & Event

out by capital: “by dividing the assemblage into subjects and objects,
[property rights, for instance] empty the latter (nature, animals,
machines, objects, signs, etc.) of all creativity, of the capacity to act and
produce, which they assign only to individual subjects whose prin-
ciple characteristic is being an ‘owner’ (an owner or non-owner).”32
By prioritizing the assemblage of machinic enslavement in this way,
Lazzarato, it would appear, seems to place the class antagonism in a
secondary position, relative to the machine.33 That is to say, by view-
ing the production of capitalist subjectivity primarily as a product of
dividuals, who are only then interpellated as individuals, Lazzarato
seems to want to do away with the subject-object dualism, which he
regards as central to the interpellation of the subject. This formulation,
in some ways, is not too dissimilar to the Althusserian one, where indi-
viduals are interpellated as subjects. By comparison, Lazzarato sees
dividuals being interpellated as subjects. The interpellation of the sub-
ject is something that withdraws her from the assemblage, forcing her
into a subject position that only then divides us between subject and
object. However, while working to disparage the subject-object dual-
ism, Lazzarato misses, not the dualism, but the antagonism between
subjects. Not an “intersubjective” relationship, but a subject-subject
antagonism; or, in other words, the class struggle. In pointing to the
subject-subject antagonism of the class struggle, my point is not to
ignore the side of enslavement, but to draw out the fact that the techni-
cal object, regardless of the fact of enslavement, is that which is caught
at the intersection of the tension of class power.
If I can put it somewhat differently, I claim that machinic enslave-
ment is in a secondary position, relative to the class struggle, which
does in fact prioritize what Lazzarato refers to as social subjection.
The machine is that object which is caught in the tension produced
by the class antagonism. Therefore, while I agree with Lazzarato that
attention to machinic enslavement is pivotal to any theory of exploita-
tion and emancipation, it must still be understood in the context of the
class struggle. The development of productive machinery is a signifi-
cant component of the class struggle, and attempts by capital to either
increase rates of exploitation, or to replace workers with “labor sav-
ing technology,” are crucial; but these elements proceed from the class
struggle. Machinic enslavement is perhaps a precondition for later
manifestations of the class struggle but is not logically prior. It is with-
in the class struggle, too, that the kinds of subjectivization required
for machinic enslavement are produced, first in the sense of repro-
ducing the forms of inequality (including those that are tied to our
embodiment, i.e., race and sex) that are necessary for the continued
(re-)production of surplus value, and then in the sense of interpellating
subjects by way of enjoyment. Lazzarato is, in fact, quite clear on this
point when he explains that, “enslavement does not operate through
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  465

repression or ideology… [Rather] it takes over human beings ‘from the

inside’, on the pre-personal (pre-cognitive and preverbal) level, as well
as ‘from the outside’, on the supra-personal level, by assigning them cer-
tain modes of perception and sensibility and manufacturing an uncon-
scious. Machinic enslavement formats the basic functions of perceptive,
sensory, affective, cognitive, and linguistic behaviour.”34 In this sense,
Lazzarato’s lineage is fixed precisely on Deleuze and Guattari’s pro-
ductive model of desire in their schizoanalytic methodology, which
sees the signifier so much as a tyrannical territorializing mechanism
similar to the way that, as they see it, social subjection, secondarily,
interpellates the subject out of the assemblage.35 My claim, however, is
that machinic enslavement is only productive as a critical category if it
assumes a prior desiring subject, or a desiring subject that precedes its
interpellation by the meaning machines of enslavement.
However, one of the benefits of using machinic enslavement as a
valence of comprehension is that it helps to renew contemporary ques-
tions about the relationship between smart technologies, such as algo-
rithmic media, capitalist exploitation, and interpellation. In this way,
the logic of enslavement is useful for rethinking the modes of ideology
critique. Rather than conceiving enslavement in the manner described
by Lazzarato, it is worth conceiving it in terms of the subject-ideology
logic introduced by Althusser in his theory of the ISAs, and the rela-
tionship between exploited labor and ideological interpellation. The
two converge in algorithmic and social media, where users are exploit-
ed as prosumer commodities, but are also inscribed into the produc-
tive assemblage through their participation in the production of their
own surplus-enjoyment.

Inside the Meaning Machine

Just as Lazzarato seems to prioritize machinic enslavement in capi-
talist subjectivity, recent approaches in critical social media studies
afford the same priorities to algorithmic media. Ganaele Langlois, for
instance, claims that in the age of social media meaning is no longer
simply a human process—it has become tied to technological and com-
mercial processes.36 What she refers to as “meaning” is not so much
the content of a medium as much as it is the way in which algorithmic
media and technology assigns “meaningfulness” to pieces of content.
With participatory media, governance processes are geared towards
“enabling and assigning levels of meaningfulness.”37 Meaningfulness
involves both processes of “assigning cultural value to information”
and “strategies to foster a specific cultural perception of the plat-
form.”38 Assigning meaningfulness becomes important when consid-
ering the fact that platforms are geared towards fostering as much par-
ticipation as possible.39
466  Theory & Event

Langlois’s central argument is that software itself is a cultural

actor.40 To make this case, she draws on a range of theoretical perspec-
tives, most notably Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Autonomist
Marxism. As she describes it, ANT “defines nonhumans such as tech-
nical objects as possessing agency, as being able to influence, reshape,
and bend to their will other nonhuman and human actors.”41 As an
actor, software is not just “a neutral conduit, or a mirror of our desires:
it can impose a specific will, it can transform us, it promises to reveal
new meaningful horizons, yet at the same time, it is not on the same
footing as human actors in that it neither thinks nor is capable of any
kind of cultural understanding.”42 Langlois defines the user as “some-
one who experiences nonhuman produced meaning and is potentially
transformed by it, someone for whom meaning is directly tied to the
ordering and making sense of one’s existence.”43 This conception of the
user(s) is significant since, ordinarily, we have come to think of social
media as interactive, wherein we engage with other human actors,
agents, participants, and users, in our networks. However, Langlois
is keen to point out that much of our interaction on social media is
not so much (only) with other human participants—we in fact engage
quite substantially with nonhuman actors in the form of software and
algorithmic technology that contribute to the production of meaning
and meaningfulness. For this reason, she dubs algorithmic media as
“meaning machines.”
Langlois’s appeal to ANT and assemblage theory is consistent with
the attempts of these theories to bypass the subject-object dualism. Hers
is an approach that prefers to see us all as human-nonhuman hybrids,
who are transformed into subjects by the “tyranny of the signifier.” In
this, she follows quite closely with Lazzarato, whom she draws upon
in her analysis of social media and subjection. Meaning machines, she
explains, “are assemblages of diverse technological, human, and cul-
tural components that work through signs in order to create not only
meanings, but also effects of meaningfulness and meaninglessness.”44
Meaning, therefore, is not only about language and interpretation, it is
also “technocultural.”45 Langlois highlights a concern not simply with
meaning and meaningfulness, but also with the ways in which the pro-
duction and circulation of meaning are enwrapped in regimes of pow-
er.46 Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s denunciation of the signifier,
Langlois argues that meaning is no longer the product of a signifying
process—it is rather, as she puts it, a plane of existentialization, tied
for her to the “asignifying” semiotics of the platform, the algorithm,
and coding.47 She explains that, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
contemporary capitalism invests directly “into the field of meaning in
order to create ideal conditions of consumption: one wants a consumer
product not only because it is useful, but also because it is meaningful,
because it promises a new sense of existence.”48 Rather than empha-
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  467

sizing the interpretive aspects of meaning Langlois prefers a practice

of analysis that looks at the conditions through which meaning is made
rather than the meaning as such.49 Therefore, she places her focus on
the way in which meaning machines “distribute” meaningfulness.
Langlois stresses the economic role that meaning machines play in
contemporary semiotechnological capitalism. Platforms, she explains,
are not simply designed to mine meaningful data from users. They
also play a part in defining and redefining meaningfulness, but they
do so mainly according to a specific profit logic.50 In this sense, I would
argue, meaning machines serve a function that is not so dissimilar to
the classical definition of ideological hegemony, whereby people sub-
mit themselves to the conditions of their own exploitation because
of the way that they are inscribed into the superstructural and cul-
tural logics of meaning and meaningfulness. However, according to
Langlois, meaning machines differ from this more traditional concep-
tion of ideology.
According to Langlois, the process of subjection here is not coer-
cive because users still receive something in return for having their
data mined: what she refers to as “psychosocial satisfaction.”51 Social
media platforms “offer users a way to undertake a work of self-trans-
formation. They do not impose modes of existence; they provoke their
arising within users.”52 She explains further that users’ engagement
with platforms and the role that they play in capitalist accumulation
bears no resemblance to alienation in the Marxist sense of the term.
This is because users get back satisfaction. But in what sense are users
“satisfied”? Is this full satisfaction in both material (i.e., objective val-
ue) and psychical (i.e., satisfaction of the drive) sense? Or, is it closer to
the kind of satisfaction that Herbert Marcuse described as “repressive
desublimation”?53
In repressive desublimation, like the postmodern injunction to
“Enjoy!,” prohibition gets displaced in favour of obligatory enjoyment;
unfortunately, what becomes apparent when enjoyment is prescribed
is that the object of desire, while no longer prohibited, remains impos-
sible to attain and is therefore all the more damagingly repressive. Or,
to put it another way, according to Todd McGowan, with digital tech-
nology the temporal limit placed on locating the object of desire dis-
appears as the object becomes available in the spaces of the database.54
However, every achieved object seems not to even provide the kind of
psychosocial satisfaction that Langlois describes. No longer prohibit-
ed, but still dissatisfying, the objects available (even though they attri-
bute meaningfulness) remain non-satiating, propelling continuous
participation. Recall that the platform is geared toward engendering as
much participation as possible. The more we participate, the more we
contribute to the accrual of data. Lacking the prohibition to enjoy, the
only way to explain the failure of the object/meaningfulness to satisfy
468  Theory & Event

the desire of the user is by attributing this failure as contingent rath-

er than necessary. In this way, users remain able to “acknowledge the
hopelessness of consumption while simultaneously consuming with
as much hope as the most naïve consumer.”55 Approached in this way,
it is possible to argue that psychosocial satisfaction is more a myth, one
that helps also to mask the extent of users’ material exploitation.
Drawing a parallel example, we could say that the claim towards
user satisfaction follows precisely the ideological logic of commodity
fetishism and the wage relation, whereby it appears as though work-
ers receive back a fair “something” (the wage) for the work that they
provide, therefore reifying the fact of exploitation. While I agree with
Langlois that the production of meaningfulness through the platform
and algorithmic media is tied to profitability, my claim is that mean-
ingfulness is here only produced as a lure, to downplay the role of
exploitation (and, yes, alienation—even in the form of expropriation),
and the dynamics of class struggle in the same way as traditional com-
modity fetishism. Regardless of the fact of the role of the fetish form
in obscuring capitalist relations of production, it is worth elaborating
upon the history of technological development within capitalism as a
force driven by the class struggle. The drive towards automation and
the emergence of algorithmic media is a component part in the devel-
opment of capitalist mechanisms of control and exploitation.

Capitalism and Machines: The Drive towards Automation

Automation first arrives due to capital’s drive to reduce its depen-
dence upon living labor.56 This tends to make sense if we put it into
the context of the elementary contradictions of capital, beginning with
competition. Capitalists are in competition with each other and must
find ways to constantly expand and grow their operations to avoid
being overtaken by their competitors. To do so, individual capitalists
need to find ways to increase profits by lowering costs. Historically,
this has meant a greater amount of investment in labor saving technol-
ogy or machinery.
Machinery helps to surmount the barrier of competition at the
same time that it overcomes the barrier of labor. The frailty of the
human body makes labor a barrier to production. But labor also cre-
ates a barrier to capital because of the political clout of organized labor,
which constantly demands from capital the shrinking of the length of
the working day, at the same time that it demands increased benefits,
including the increase of wages. Shortening the length of the working
day means that less surplus value is produced; as well, paying out
more in wages takes away from the potential profits of the capitalist.
The introduction of machinery therefore helps to intensify the rela-
tive amount of surplus value produced within the confines of a short-
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  469

er working day, while disciplining labor through de-skilling and the

threat of unemployment. By “transferring workers’ knowledge into
machines,” capital is able to automate the process, reduce the amount
of necessary labor time, and increase the amount of surplus labor as
the source of profit.57 Automation is therefore the dream of capital, and
“the information age,” as Nick Dyer-Witheford puts it, “has meant,
first and foremost, a leap toward a new, digitized level of automa-
tion,” where capital has in the era of post-Fordism invested in digi-
tal machines and automated services.58 But this still tends to impose a
third barrier to capitalist accumulation: a crisis of effective demand for
commodities in the market. As the working class becomes increasingly
deskilled, loses wages from deskilling and stagnation, and loses bene-
fits as the result of the new austerity regimes of neoliberalism, workers
who are also consumers have less money to spend in the market; and,
since profit is only garnered from the sale of commodities, we reach
a crisis of accumulation or overproduction. These are problems I’ve
addressed elsewhere.59 My present concerns have to do with the role
of machinery and automation as it is tied to new forms of subjection.
In that sense, how can we come to understand the role of algorithmic
media in the context of the capitalist mode of production?
It would be false to suggest that living (i.e., human) labor has
become obsolete in the information age. At the same time that fac-
tory and wage labor have been reduced, relatively speaking, within
the context of the developed world, there has been an expansion in
the areas of service, creative, knowledge-based, and affective sec-
tors of the labor market.60 This is one reason for the use of the term
post-Fordism to describe the post-factory, post-welfare state period of
automated production. It could also be argued that this period, where
we’ve seen the broader integration of automated production systems,
is better understood using Marx’s terms as the greater transition from
the formal to the real subsumption of labor under capitalism,61 where
capital itself appears to be immediately productive as it “puts to work
science, technology, and the embodied knowledges of the collective;”62
or, in other words, fixed (“dead”) capital as opposed to variable (“liv-
ing”) capital in the form of human labor power, itself appears to be the
source of surplus value. In the case of formal subsumption, capitalism
integrates already existing social relations and means of production
into its own valorization process; whereas in the case of real subsump-
tion, capitalism produces its own social relations, or as Jason Read puts
it, capitalism begins to posit its own presuppositions.63 In the transition
from formal to real subsumption, capital must eliminate the pre-exist-
ing legal and social orders antagonistic to its own drive towards profit;
hence, Marx’s statement in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, “every
form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government,
etc.”64 In the case of formal subsumption, labor power still appeared
470  Theory & Event

necessary as immediately productive, whereas in real subsumption

the technical organization of labor is intensified and further mysti-
fied.65 Automation reduces the amount of necessary labor, while now
surplus labor is “free” to roam; it has become “liberated” as “entre-
preneurial labor.”66 This is perhaps one way to imagine the “real sub-
sumption of subjectivity” (as Read calls it), or the (re-)territorialization
found in social subjection, which emerges only as part of the ground-
ing needed for machinic enslavement. In this sense, subjects caught
in machinic enslavement are interpellated as entrepreneurs,67 and this
forms the basis of social subjection. But perhaps we are getting ahead
of ourselves here since this still seems to evade the problem of the class
struggle, which as we saw above, is foundational in the very transition
towards machinery and the movement from formal to real subsump-
tion of labor. Where does algorithmic media fit into this new territory?
Algorithms, according to Tiziana Terranova, are examples of fixed
capital. Automation frees up surplus labor by reducing the amount of
necessary labor, which capital then needs to re-territorialize in order to
maintain the process of wealth accumulation and expropriation by the
few.68 Capital, in other words, must find ways to control the time/ener-
gy released: “it must produce poverty and stress when there should be
wealth and leisure, it must make direct labor the measure of value even
when it is apparent that science, technology, and social cooperation
constitute the source of wealth produced. It thus inevitably leads to the
periodic and widespread destruction of this accumulated wealth, in
the form of psychic burnout, environmental catastrophe, and physical
destruction of the wealth through war.”69 Automation and algorithmic
logic are thus caught up in the class struggle in this way: depending
upon who is in control—that is, the class power that programs and
gives them purpose—automation and algorithmic logic can either be
a means of exploitation, or a means of emancipation. The latter point
is argued by Srnicek and Williams in their defence of full automation,
leading towards a post-work society.70 Nevertheless, so long as we
remain within capitalism, it is difficult to see how full automation will
bring anything less than increasing proletarianization as “precaritiza-
tion,” where surplus labor is deterritorialized as unemployed (“entre-
preneurial”) variable labor.
According to Terranova, algorithms are part of a “genealogical
line that… starting with the adoption of technology by capitalism as
fixed capital, pushes the former through several metamorphoses,” the
culmination of which is automation.71 Like Langlois, Terranova draws
upon assemblage theory in order to examine the productive role of
algorithms and automation. As she puts it, algorithms are part of an
assemblage “that includes hardware, data, data structures (such as lists,
databases, memory, etc.), and the behaviours and actions of bodies.”72
Drawing on the Autonomist use of Marx’s “fragment on machines,”73
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  471

and the conception of the “general intellect,”74 Terranova argues that

algorithms are a means of production that “encode a certain quantity
of social knowledge… [but] they are only valuable in as much as they
allow for the conversion of such knowledge into exchange value (mon-
etization) and its (exponentially increasing) accumulation.”75 From this
perspective, there is an advantage to beginning from the premise of
subjection: doing so allows us to subjectivize the conversion of social
knowledge into exchange value through its appropriation and accu-
mulation by the class interests of capital, expropriating the value cre-
ated by users and workers. In this sense, it is clear that the logic of the
algorithm has its origins in a particularly territorialized class subjective
position, and one that builds its power and interests through processes
that include the interpellation of social subjects and the reproduction
of ideological hegemony that inscribes the subject into the machinic
assemblage. It’s from this perspective that we might look at the algo-
rithmic ideology.

The Algorithmic Ideology

Despite all of the attention being paid these days to the impenetrabil-
ity of algorithmic technology, with its manners of “deep learning,” it
is worth being reminded that algorithms are in fact technologies that
originate in social processes. They have the ability to structure human
behaviour, but they do so in the context of complex social processes
and existing political tensions. Algorithms impact users by learning
about and forming preferences, and by impacting decisions about
participation and content production.76 But these technologies are still
refined within the larger organizational, social, and political structures
tied to the capital-class dynamic.
Algorithms, according to Ian Bogost, are like metaphors. They
are simplifications that “take a complex system from the world and
abstract it into processes that capture some of that system’s logic and
discard others.” 77 McKelvey explains that social media platforms,
and their software, represent a set of instructions that guide and
lead towards a specific task, whereas algorithms are, themselves, the
instructions.78 An algorithm is, in other words, “a recipe, an instruction
set, a sequence of tasks to achieve a particular calculation or result.”79
It is worth breaking through their opacity using descriptions such as
these because it allows us to move past the view that algorithms are
these “elegant” objects guiding our lives, into which we blindly place
our faith.80 We should ask, for this reason, how decisions are made
behind the design of the algorithm and the platform. As Finn remarks,
“while the cultural effects of computation are complex, these systems
function in the world through instruments designed and implemented
by human beings.”81 It’s in this way that algorithms are not neutral
472  Theory & Event

arbiters of information, but are inscribed with ideology through and

through.
Algorithmic ideology is inscribed directly by what Finn refers to
as “pragmatist approach,” a method for defining a problem and search-
ing for a method to solve it.82 The pragmatist approach would seem to
posit the existence of a problem in neutral terms. However, as Mager
points out, engineers and designers are employed predominantly
by corporate social media sites, whose motive is primarily based in
profit generation.83 Mager invokes the “California Ideology,” which as
Marwick notes is the ethic of the Web 2.0 era that prioritizes the combi-
nation of creativity and entrepreneurial agency that is characteristic of
neoliberalism.84 The venture capitalism of Silicon Valley bankrolls this
complex system. In order to understand the ideology of the algorithm,
it is necessary, then, to interrogate the discourses employed in defining
the problems and methods used in the design of algorithms, in the
sets of instructions that they establish, and to position these within the
political (economic) context of the capital-class structure.
Napoli points out that “one of the key functions that algorithms
perform in contemporary media consumption is to assist audienc-
es [and users] in the process of navigating an increasingly complex
and fragmented media environment.”85 It could be argued that algo-
rithms aid in the mechanization of human life by automating men-
tal as well as physical labor. Part of the problem is that new media
and the internet have created a sea of abundant content that makes
navigation quite difficult and time consuming. Algorithmic media,
such as Google’s PageRank, Amazon’s recommendation software, and
Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithms, circumvent this problem by learning
about users and making recommendations. In this sense, rather than
escaping the tyranny of the signifier, algorithmic media help to pro-
cure the re-suturing of the signifying chain that Deleuze and Guattari
saw being dismantled by capitalist processes of deterritorialization
and lines of flight. Algorithmic media reconstitute the broken-down
signifying chain that was one of the chief categories of postmodern
deterritorialization.86
Writing about Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, Taina Bucher
applies a Foucauldian approach to question the regimes of visibility
on Facebook.87 Looking at Facebook through the model of panopti-
cism, Bucher argues that the problem with Facebook is not so much the
threat of visibility or surveillance. Rather, it’s the threat of invisibility
that troubles users: “the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not
being considered enough. In order to appear, to become visible, one
needs to follow a certain platform logic embedded in the architecture
of Facebook.”88 It is curious, then, that Bucher sticks to the Foucauldian
paradigm rather than looking towards Lacan. That is, rather than
approach this problem of the threat of invisibility through the prism
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  473

of panopticism, why not look at it through the Lacanian register of the

big Other—that is, of the Symbolic order itself?
When approaching the question of visibility—or the threat of invis-
ibility—it is worth considering the mediating “gaze” of the Lacanian
big Other: the virtual entity whose agency we assume in order to
confer shared meaning upon an object.89 Although we know that this
agency does not exist—that the big Other does not exist—we assume it
because we remain in the dark regarding the Other’s own self-knowl-
edge of its non-existence—that is: do others know that the big Other
does not exist.90 Because of this, appearances tend to matter since we
find ourselves requiring the acknowledgement of the Other to prove
our existence—that is, to give us meaning. The big Other, in this sense,
is the missing agency of meaningfulness that Langlois (above) discuss-
es. It confers meaningfulness upon us. There exists, then, a precipitous
act on the part of the user to anticipate in some fashion the reaction of
the Other. But this is so at the level of the network, of other users, who
acknowledge our presence conferring upon us our own place within
the network.
As Bucher explains, the algorithm—the EdgeRank algorithm in
the case of Facebook—works towards regulating our relationship to
its regimes of visibility/invisibility. But it is perhaps in this way that
algorithmic logic is built, not upon giving us what we seem to desire,
but by constantly denying us this. It has learned the practice of keeping
us dis-satisfied, rather than satisfying our desire. That is to say, what
if the algorithm learns, not to give us immediately the object of our
desire—the thing we (think) we want—but instead prevents us from
obtaining the object—keeps it constantly at a distance? In doing so, we
continue to search and, in the process, receive back a portion of sur-
plus-enjoyment (not direct [impossible] enjoyment, but a little nugget
of pleasure that keeps us going) at the same time that we generate sur-
plus value for the site. This is the way that algorithmic logic, I claim,
interpellates us as users, and how it mediates between surplus value
and surplus-enjoyment. The more dissatisfied we remain, the more we
are eager to search out the lost object of desire; the more we search
it out, the more we generate in terms of surplus value. This is why
subjection (returning to my initial thesis)—subjection as negation, as
a negative rather than a positive position of immanence—takes prece-
dence over enslavement.

Desiring Machines Redux

According to Lazzarato, capital pays for social production by buy-
ing the labor force.91 However, because he speaks primarily about
the relationship between social and technical machines, it is unclear
to whom precisely he refers—that is, what is the subjective position
474  Theory & Event

occupied here—as the “capital” that buys labor power. He goes on

to argue that, although it appears as though capital is buying labor
power, what it actually purchases is “the right to exploit a ‘complex’
assemblage,” which includes various components of the forces of pro-
duction, including not only machinery, but also wider societal spaces
that include transportation, the media and entertainment industries,
and ultimately the entirety of the urban environment.92 Such a rath-
er “holistic” approach to production and exploitation has, on the one
hand, the ability to foreclose upon the exploitation of labor in the
form of unpaid labor time; and, on the other hand, ties—at least for
Lazzarato—the question of production to that of desire. With a focus
on desiring-production (in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense), Lazzarato
puts this problem in terms of the changing of the valences from the
political to the “subjective economy.” Capitalism’s strength, as he puts
it, includes desire into its very matrix of production. Desire, he says, is
the basis of production.93
This is a perspective that follows very closely to that of Deleuze
and Guattari. With their concept of the desiring-machines, they argue
against the psychoanalytic conception of desire as a force arising from
lack, in search for something: an “acquisition.” They contend that the
psychoanalytic conception of desire, based on the dialectic of lack and
acquisition, is too idealistic. Instead, they claim, desire is a productive
force.94 For them, capitalism is a force that deterritorializes, it decodes
the forces of repression that submerge the positivity of desire.95 Theirs,
then, is a project to maintain the lines of flight against the territorializ-
ing impetuses of the ruling ideology, including those produced within
the psychoanalytic discourse. They seek, in other words, to fight against
the territorializing interpellations of social subjection. Schizophrenia,
according to them, is a product of the capitalist machine’s lines of
flight; hysteria, conversely, is a product of the territorializing machine
of ideological discourses, such as psychoanalysis.96 For them, “desire
can never be deceived.”97 It is an affirmative, as opposed to negative,
force of production, and one that is self-stimulating.98
In the Lacanian paradigm, desire is the result of a lack. But how this
lack is defined is significant for thinking the relationship of the sub-
ject to her desire, enjoyment, and interpellation. Lack is an elementary
dimension of desire since, without it the subject would be complete
and therefore would not need to search out satisfaction. According to
Todd McGowan, this lack is constitutive of the subject and it is impos-
sible to resolve or cure the subject’s lack in order to “achieve a harmo-
nious whole.”99 The goal of psychoanalysis is not to “cure people of
their lack,” but to teach people to embrace the constitutive role of lack.
Lack is the result of “castration,” a controversial claim in the Freudian
literature, to be sure. However, part of what makes Lacan’s approach
innovative is that he reconceives lack in terms of symbolic castration.
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  475

In other words, “castration” is the result of the subject’s entry into the
Symbolic order of language and meaning. On the one hand, lack is
always already constitutive of the subject; however, on the other hand,
it is paradoxical in the fact that symbolic castration retroactively intro-
duces a sense of past wholeness or completeness, when jouissance or
enjoyment was total. Entry into the Symbolic order is castrating to the
extent that, in order to exist within the confines of the social-Symbolic
order, the subject is forced to renounce this totalizing jouissance, and
thereby, in losing a part of herself, is interpellated/subjectivized as a
desiring subject. Desire is born of this constitutive loss of enjoyment.
The act of searching out that object—what Lacan referred to as the objet
petit a, the object-cause of desire—produces a supplementary form of
enjoyment: a surplus-enjoyment. It is in the act of searching out the lost
object of desire (an object that only exists insofar as it remains lost) that
the subject procures a degree of surplus-enjoyment. The act of search-
ing produces this object on the inverse side of lack as surplus. It’s in this
sense that Deleuze and Guattari are correct—that desire is productive;
that desire and production are consubstantial with each other—but for
the wrong reason. And it is precisely the constitutive lack of the subject
that demonstrates the priority of subjection in the psychic or libidinal
economy of power.
To put things somewhat differently, Deleuze and Guattari fail to
notice that repression—far from being a simple restriction on desire—
is in actuality the very condition of desire. Desire, in other words, is
only activated by the obstacle that prevents its full realization. Deleuze
and Guattari therefore precede a similar mistake made by Judith Butler
in her (Foucauldian) description of subjection as “passionate attach-
ment.” According to her, power is constitutive of subjectivity. Power,
she says, provides the conditions of possibility that define the existence
of desire, and therefore we come to depend upon power to preserve
the very “beings that we are.”100 Although Butler is here much closer
to the Lacanian conception of subjectivity and desire, in the sense of
demonstrating the tie between repression/power/obstacle and desire,
she seems to leave no way out—that is, no way of escaping the inter-
pellative call of power. The difference, then, between her conception
of power/desire and the Lacanian conception is that, as Mladen Dolar
puts it, the subject for Lacan emerges where interpellation fails.101
Here, then, we come to the heart of the problem with the conception of
social subjection. While Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, and Lazzarato,
conceive subjection very closely to the Althusserian conception of
interpellation—the interpellation of the individual/desiring-machine
as subject—the Lacanian approach, through the view of the desiring
subject as lack, conceives the subject as marking the point of ideolog-
ical failure. The subject emerges at the point of rupture in the Symbolic
order.
476  Theory & Event

Deleuze and Guattari, then, conceive subjection as akin to the erec-

tion of obstacles to desire. But, as McGowan is keen to point out, the
problem is that “capitalism’s contingent obstacles obscure the necessi-
ty of the obstacle. Capitalism’s deception consists in convincing us, as
it convinces Deleuze and Guattari, that desire can transcend its failures
and overcome all barriers. We don’t need more desire, but rather the
recognition that the barrier is what we desire.”102 Or, as Samo Tomšič
puts it, capitalism strives to reject castration, and therefore Deleuze
and Guattari are correct in claiming that capitalism is “anti-Oedi-
pal.”103 However, capitalism imposes a perverse position on the sub-
ject (i.e., through fetishism: fetishism disavowal/commodity fetish-
ism), and therefore creates the deception that we desire the eradication
of the obstacle, when in fact it is the obstacle that we desire since it
creates the semblance that the lost object (the objet petit a) is conceiv-
ably attainable.104 The precedence of castration assumes the priority
of social subjection prior to the subject’s enslavement to the machine.
A desiring subject is assumed as always already existing in order for
enslavement to become active. Furthermore, what the logic of the bar-
rier in the subject’s libidinal economy recalls is the very same logic in
the expansion of capital, which constantly strives to overcome its own
self-imposed obstacles: that is, “the limit to capital is capital itself.”
This again demonstrates the homology between surplus value and
surplus-enjoyment.
It is therefore possible to agree with Lazzarato, Langlois, and
Deleuze and Guattari, that algorithmic media are desiring-machines
of sorts. Algorithmic media combine automation and entertainment
into a perpetual motion machine that produces surplus value through
the luring combustion of surplus-enjoyment. In this way, algorithmic
media are a response to the potential suffocation of desire tied to the
digital spatialization of time, whereby the sea of abundance of available
objects begins to show the phenomenal impossibility of the lost object
(the objet petit a). Algorithmic media, however, enjoin us in a constant
search for the impossible lost object. This is the way that the objet petit a
is inscribed into the algorithmic. The power of the algorithm is its abil-
ity to constantly stage and then displace desire. Algorithms therefore
assign, not meaning or meaningfulness (pace Langlois); instead, they
reproduce the lack constitutive of subjectivity. It is the very opacity of
the algorithm that veils the surplus entity: the fact that the search gen-
erates its own object(s): surplus value and surplus-enjoyment.

Class Struggle as Real

In the closing pages of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write:
“Those who have read us this far will perhaps find many reasons for
reproaching us: for believing too much in the pure potentialities of art
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  477

and even of science; for denying or minimizing the role of classes and
class struggle…”105 Indeed, for them, “revolutionary action is no lon-
ger considered in terms of ‘real’ components of society: relations of
power are no longer interpreted in terms of the class struggle.”106 Since,
according to them, the intersection of enslavement and subjection pro-
duces new subjects—even in terms of what Jason Read refers to as the
“real subsumption of subjectivity”—the antagonisms that inhere in
late capitalism can no longer be understood in the more traditional
language of the class struggle, that is in terms of the agencies of capital
and labor. Instead of the class struggle, “revolutionary transformation
occurs in the creation of a new subjective consciousness born of the
reconfiguration of the collective work experience.”107 Class struggle
(and “classes”), like the subject as lack, is for them too idealistic since it
assumes a transcendental teleologism that conceives struggle accord-
ing to the dialectical logic of historical materialism. Class struggle and
the desiring subject, both as lack, correspond as negative correlatives
of each other, but it is precisely this fact that, as I’ve tried to show,
affords them their priority in the logic of the machine.
As we have seen, class struggle is the motor that, itself, drives tech-
nological innovation and transformation within capitalism. In order to
confront the barriers of competition and labor, capital invests in new
machinery, large scale industry, and in recent times, digital automa-
tion technologies. Even as Antonio Negri explains, “the antagonistic
element of subjectification is sometimes missing in Deleuze.”108 The
machinic element, too, according to him, is “moved by the class strug-
gle, which belongs to the technical composition of antagonistic labor
power.”109
“Class struggle,” according to Žižek, “designates the very antag-
onism that prevents objective (social) reality from constituting itself
as a self-enclosed whole.”110 Žižek’s conception of the class struggle
is particularly negative. It does not delineate a positive antagonism
between directly evident groups (i.e., the working class vs. the bour-
geoisie). Rather, class struggle functions, according to him, in its very
“absence”—that is, in its very absence, it represents the “unfathom-
able limit that cannot be objectivized, located within the social totality,
since it is itself that limit which prevents us from conceiving society
as a closed totality.”111 Class struggle, therefore, is Real, according to
Žižek, in the Lacanian sense. It is “a ‘hitch’, an impediment which gives
rise to ever-new symbolizations by means of which one endeavours to
integrate and domesticate it… but which simultaneously condemns
these endeavours to ultimate failure.”112 Class struggle, then, is “not
the last signifier giving meaning to all social phenomena… but—quite
the contrary—a certain limit, a pure negativity, a traumatic limit which
prevents the final totalization of the social-ideological field.”113 It is out
of this limit point, this point of negativity, that the radical agency of
478  Theory & Event

the proletariat (not simply the “working class”) emerges. But it is also
in the process of displacing this limit, in the attempt to subsume and
move beyond this limit, that capital is driven to ever higher orders
of its own self-transformation. This, as we have seen, too, is the logic
that is formulated within the trajectory of the lacking subject, as she
disavows the non-existence of the impossible lost object of desire. It is
in this way that class struggle as limit, and the subject as limit, overlap
as points of negation that fuel and propel the material and machinic
transformations of capitalism.
Part of our conundrum lies in the difficulty of thinking, today,
in neoliberal conditions, the separation between work and leisure;
between the production of surplus value and the pleasure garnered
in surplus-enjoyment. The context of the real subsumption of labor
in capitalism shows that such a line of separation may potentially be
overly archaic, whereby all activity is value producing activity—that
is, as social production as opposed to mere commodity production. At
the heart of the divergence between the logic of proletarianization and
that of the general intellect is, as Jason Read points out, the different
arguments found in Capital Volume I and the Grundrisse.114 The former
presents proletarianization as the force that destroys capital; the latter
sees this as the result of socialization—that is, of the forces of produc-
tion surpassing and transcending the relations of production. But how,
in the case of the latter, do the capitalist relations of production “wither
away”? My claim is still that the story of proletarianization in Capital
provides for us the scenario of the class struggle as the political in the
relations of production as the force that realizes the subsumed social-
ization in the “general intellect.” It’s in this sense, again, that subjec-
tion takes precedence over enslavement.

Subjection and Enslavement: Coda

The relationship between social subjection and machinic enslave-
ment as I’ve tried to show is dialectical, based primarily in the over-
lapping lacks of the subject and the class struggle. But each overlaps
components of the traditional topography of base and superstructure.
Subjection has to be understood on two levels—in terms of the rela-
tions of production (i.e., class struggle) and in terms of the ideolog-
ical interpellation that draws people back into and reproduces their
position within the existing relations of production. There are simi-
larly two levels to machinic enslavement: that of the forces of produc-
tion, where the subject as labor power participates and is inscribed
into an assemblage of production, of which they remain the conscious
operators and therefore the creative component of the new. However,
machinic enslavement also operates at the level of meaning produc-
tion, which fastens individuals into the matrix of production. The lat-
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  479

ter is an equally creative component element since it is driven by the

combined and accumulated interaction between participants in com-
mon. Nevertheless, if we are to truly understand the political at the
heart of the capitalist mode of production, the side of subjection needs
to be given precedence. Doing so makes it possible to comprehend the
intersection of exploitation and ideology in the algorithmic apparatus.
Therefore, I propose the following schema as a way of mapping the
expanded topography of subjection and enslavement, giving prece-
dence to the left side as a prior instance.

Subjection and enslavement relate to each other in a way that is like

the parallax gap described by Slavoj Žižek. They relate to each oth-
er, also, in a way that mirrors the parallax of historical and dialectical
materialism. If we begin on one side, we end up back on the other,
without being able to detect the causal relationship between them, as
in a Möbius strip. However, if our interest is political, then we must
proceed from the premise that subjection is prior to enslavement.
When we begin from the perspective of class struggle and ideological
interpellation then we are better equipped for understanding exploita-
tion in terms that include the expropriation of the commons produced
in the assemblages of enslavement—otherwise, how are we to under-
stand the direction of wealth privatization, whether by the corporation
or by the capitalist class, as such; as well as the interpellation of indi-
vidual subjects in (or out of) the production of meaning in the matrix of
enslavement, which remains a condition of our continued submission
to the processes of expropriation that establish, reproduce, and main-
tain our collective submission to capitalist class power? Just as overly
mechanistic economic critiques of capitalism miss the centrality of the
political class struggle—the political at the heart of the economic—so
too does the assemblage theory of enslavement lose sight of the nega-
tive core of subjection, which is the site at which to locate the negation
of capital, not only as substance but also as subject.
480  Theory & Event

Notes
1. Jacques Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.” In
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Bruce Fink, trans. (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2006). Thanks to Clint Burnham for reminding me of this
passage.
2. Ibid, 701
3. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Brian Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987); Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism
and the Production of Subjectivity. Joshua David Jordan, trans. (Los Angeles,
CA: Semiotext(e), 2014).
4. Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). See also Dean, Democracy and
Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), and
Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2010).
5. Ganaele Langlois, Meaning in the Age of Social Media (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014).
6. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes
Towards an Investigation).” In On Ideology (New York: Verso, 2009).
7. Ibid
8. See Christian Fuchs, Digital LaborLabor and Karl Marx (New York: Routledge,
2014).
9. Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003), 104.
10. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2017).
11. Fuchs, op. cit.
12. Dolar, 78
13. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of
Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 73–74.
14. I take up the differences between the Althusserian and Lacanian concep-
tions of interpellation in my book, extendingŽižek’s reversal of Althusser’s
formula, arguing that instead ideology interpellates subjects as individu-
als. Matthew Flisfeder, The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory
of Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Jodi Dean also makes a
similar argument in “Enclosing the Subject.” In Crowds and Party (New
York: Verso, 2016).
15. The historical materialist analysis of capital demonstrates the contradic-
tory logics of capital and labor, where capital, in order to secure its own
interests, is logically and rationally required to pursue profit by whatever
means necessary. This includes the contradictory requirement to displace
human labor-power, which is also the source of value production in com-
modities. Likewise, to best secure its own survival, labor must continu-
ously challenge the interests of capital. It must act according to its own
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  481

rational and logical imperatives for survival, which is ultimately antago-

nistic to the interests of capital since it can create a barrier to the further
appropriation and accumulation of capitalist wealth. It’s in this sense that
I refer to the subject-subject antagonism as “class struggle,” rather than
refer to other struggles to overthrow existing power, such as anti-racist
or feminist struggles. Or, to put the matter differently, while there is noth-
ing contradictory about being a capitalist feminist, or capitalist anti-racist,
capitalism is incapable of negating its logical requirement for exploiting
labor and remaining intact.
16. See Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1993).
17. See Jay David Bolster and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding
New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture:
Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: NYU Press, 2008); and, Lev
Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
18. See Greg Elmer, Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information
Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
19. See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
20. See Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.
2nd Ed. (New York: Verso, 2002).
21. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 456–457
22. Lazzarato 2014, 12
23. Ibid, 25
24. Ibid
25. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992):
3–7.
26. Lazzarato 2014, 25
27. The same charge can be levelled against these thinkers in that they often
neglect the critical political economy analysis of capitalism in their theo-
ries of subjection and interpellation.
28. Lazzarato 2014, 13
29. Ibid, 29
30. Ibid, 28
31. Ibid, 30
32. Ibid, 35
33. Although he seems at times to suggest that enslavement and subjec-
tion intersect in the production of subjectivity, Lazzarato does claim
that “machinic enslavement (or processes) precede the subject and the
object and surpasses the personological distinctions of social subjection”
(Lazzarato 2014: 120, emphasis added).
34. Lazzarato 2014, 38, emphasis added. Such a description of enslavement
recalls Michel Foucault’s criticism of the terms “ideology” and “repres-
482  Theory & Event

sion.” See Foucault, “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader. Paul
Rabinow, ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 60.
35.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, trans.
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
36. Langlois, 24
37. Ibid, 44
38. Ibid
39. Ibid
40. Ibid, 46
41. Ibid, 52
42. Ibid
43. Ibid, 53
44. Ibid, 55
45. Ibid
46. Ibid
47. Ibid, 62
48. Ibid, emphasis added
49. Ibid, 64
50. Ibid, 87
51. Ibid, 97
52. Ibid, 94
53. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1955).
54. Todd McGowan, Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
55. Ibid, 29
56. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-
Technology Capitalism (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 93.
57. Ibid
58. Ibid
59. See Matthew Flisfeder, “Debt: The Sublimated Object of Capital.” TOPIA:
Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 30–31 (2013/2014): 47–63.
60. Dyer-Witheford, 94–95
61. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1. Ben Fowkes, trans. (New York: Penguin,
1990), 1019–1038.
62. Read, 104
63. Ibid, 109
64. Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Martin Nicolaus, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1993),
88.
65. Read, 110
 Flisfeder | Subjection Before Enslavement  483

66.
See Matthew Flisfeder, “The Entrepreneurial Subject and the
Objectivization of the Self in Social Media.” South Atlantic Quarterly 114.3
(2015): 553–570.
67. See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man. Joshua David
Jordan, tans. (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011).
68. Tiziana Terranova, “Red Stack Attack!: Algorithms, Capital and the
Automation of the Common.” In #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader.
Robin Mackay and Armin Avanessian, eds. (Windsor Quarry, UK:
Urbanomic, 2014).
69. Ibid, 385
70. See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism
and a World Without Work (New York: Verso, 2015).
71. Terranova, 381
72. Ibid, 382
73. Marx 1993, 690–712
74. See Paolo Virno, “General Intellect.” Historical Materialism 15.3 (2007): 3–8;
and, Carlo Vercellone, “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect:
Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism.”
Historical Materialism 15.1 (2007): 13–36.
75. Terranova, 383
76. Philip Napoli, “Automated Media: An Institutional Theory Perspective
on Algorithmic Media Production and Consumption.” Communication
Theory 24 (2014): 340–360.
77. Bogost, Ian. 2015. “The Cathedral of Computation.” The Atlantic. January
15th. Viewed. April 3rd, 2017. Web.
78. Fenwick McKelvey, “Algorithmic Media Need Democratic Methods: Why
Public Matter.” Canadian Journal of Communication 39.4 (2014): 597–613.
79. Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 17.
80. Ibid, 7
81. Ibid, 16
82. Ibid, 18
83. Astrid Mager, “Defining Algorithmic Ideology: Using Ideology Critique to
Scrutinize Corporate Search Engines.” triple-C: Communication, Capitalism
& Critique 12.1 (2014). Web.
84. Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the
Social Media Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
85. Napoli, 345
86. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism.” New Left Review I 146 (1984): 53–92.
87. Taina Bucher, “Want to be on top?: Algorithmic power and the threat of
invisibility on Facebook.” New Media & Society 14.7 (2012): 1164–1180.
88. Ibid, 1171
484  Theory & Event

89. See Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 93.
90. Ibid, 35
91. Lazzarato 2014, 42
92. Ibid, 43
93. Ibid, 51
94. Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 25
95. Ibid, 33
96. Ibid
97. Ibid, 257
98. Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2008), 47.
99. Todd McGowan, Psychoanalytic Film Theory and The Rules of the Game (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 41.
100. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 2.
101. Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation.” Qui parle 6 (1993), 78.
102. Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 49.
103. Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious (New York: Verso, 2015), 151.
104. Ibid, 150
105. Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 378
106. Phillip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to Their Politics
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 120.
107. Ibid
108. Antonio Negri, Marx and Foucault: Essays Volume 1. Ed Emery, trans.
(Malden, MA: Polity, 2017), 190, emphasis added.
109. Ibid
Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology. Slavoj Žižek, ed.
110. 
(New York: Verso, 1994), 21.
111. Ibid, 22
112. Žižek 2002, 100
113. Žižek 1989, 164
114. Read 2003