Agamben ’ s own perspective may be instructive here, and at least partially so by its demonstration of tiresome blind spots. “ Apparatus, then, is first of all a machine that produces subjectifications, and only as such is it also a machine of governance, ” and vice versa, “ Indeed, every … apparatus implies a process of subjectification, without which it cannot function as an apparatus of governance, but is rather reduced to a mere exercise of violence. ” This violence is another name for what Agabmen calls a “ process of their de-subjectification, ” or of removing the very possibility of subjectivity through a kind of total and standardized form of capture, whereby the contradictions of multiple subjectifications are flattened. He sees this as the political tenor of the apparatuses we work with today. And yet at the same time, he hesitates: “ It would probably not be wrong to define the extreme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses. … We must also immediately consider the apparatuses that crowd the Open with instruments, objects, gadgets, odds and ends, and various technologies. ... This may produce the impression that in our time, the category of subjectivity is wavering and losing its consistency; but what is at stake to be precise, is not an erasure or an overcoming, but rather a dissemination (of multiple subjectivities). ” <sup>41</sup> At once we have both fewer and more subject positions. Now this apparent contradiction — that today ’ s computational apparatuses desubjectify but also multiply subjectivities by their own proliferation — may but just the right paradox to map; more of less and less of more. It may also locate the point where we now abscond with the idea of interfacial apparatus from Agamben ’ s stewardship altogether, if only because it is already quite plainly doing much in the world more than his account can account for (i.e., “ in the untruth of the subject, its own truth is no longer at stake. He who lets he himself be captured by the ‘ cellular telephone ’ apparatus — whatever the intensity of the desire that has driven him cannot acquire a new subjectivity but only a number through which he can, eventually, be controlled ” (emphasis mine, eyes rolling).
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