The User is constructed through an ongoing and uneven processes of subjectification, itself largely developed by the co-constitution of a subject or an agent who experiences a subject effect and the equipment and machines with which she addresses her habitat. For example, Giorgio Agamben ’ s short essay on Foucault ’ s term dispositif, translated as “ apparatus, ” locates the procedure of subjectification not with any single tool (architecture, software, grid, self) but rather, as Foucault defines it, in the “ network that can be established between these elements. ” <sup>26</sup> That network-between describes governance not in the resolved image of categorical self-idealizations, but in immediate events of world formation and subject positioning, working with or without proper names at first, but which ultimately inspire durable discourses and their secondary enforcements. For Agamben, “ apparatus ” realizes “ a pure activity of governance devoid of any foundation in being. This is the reason why apparatuses must always imply a process of subjectification. That is to say, they must produce their subject. ” He goes on to say that “ an apparatus is 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. ” From this perspective, a subject is an effect of what has been captured, oriented, determined, intercepted, and enabled in the course of these networks, and whose agency is configured accordingly. Agamben proposes a thought experiment to explain the essence of this distinction: the world is divided into beings on the side and technologies on the other. <sup>27</sup> “ On one side, then, to return to the terminology of the theologians, lies the ontology of creatures, and on the other side, the oikonomia (economy) of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide them toward the good. ” The apparatus brings forth subjects that think and do according to the range of possible dispositions it arranges for them. It doesn ’ t make them into automatons; rather it establishes a certain field of enunciation, improvisation, innovation, which, being similar for other Users of that apparatus, also provides terms for cumulative, collaborative work and social systems. For The Stack, we see that these subjectifications are as limited and limitless as the capacities put into play between the “ ‘ creatures ” and their “ apparatuses, ” between “ the substances and the subjects, ” which for Agamben ’ s neomedievalist metaphysics seem to overlap but not completely. In this sense, for example, the same individual and the same substance can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification: the user of cellular phones, the web surfer, the writer of stories. ”
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City Layer