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# The Stack On Software and Sovereignty
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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. ” 26 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. 27 “ 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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For reasons that will be clearer toward the end of the User chapter, we take issue with Agamben ’ s rhetorical distinction between humans and machines as two different kinds of things that may enter into only combinatory relationships. In the meantime, however, the open-ended processes of subjectification through the apparatus is useful in how it can be made to link different scales and genres of technologies at the City layer in ways that likely exceed Agamben ’ s own interest and understanding. The apparatus describes architectural envelopes as much as a GUI, and so as a synthetic figure it can represent the complexity of design ’ s assignment as it is defined both by exploring the material plasticity of the world, on the one hand, and the durable codification as a technique of enforcement, on the other. For The Stack, worldly interfaciality includes any operation by which the world is sensed and made sense of; it may form on (or as) the surfaces of User habitat, physical or virtual. The software and hardware of a computational framework and the partitional network of architectural space are both equally “ apparatuses ” and part of the processes of urban subject making. Through the sheer quantity of User interactions, some emergent apparatuses may absorb the roles of others already at work, transforming or displacing them in the process. This transformation is traced by the shift from one program to another, from one dominant apparatus on which such a regime depends to another, and a migration from one institutional isomorph to another. While the drifting transposition of stable discursive technologies — a migratory power/knowledge ( pouvoir/savoir) — from one institutional architecture to another is familiar to readers of Foucault, for example, from clinics, to asylums, to prisons, to schools, it doesn ’ t work only according to his genealogical and archaeological models. The particular subject-making effects of a given apparatus are not only situations waiting for the next authority to arrive. Rather in their immediate physical operations, a specific apparatus regularizes structures of subjectification in its own image in ways that are irreducible to, but never immune to, discursive context and intention. So, yes, in this way, the medium can be the message, and so as the same User hops from one apparatus to another, he moves between variations of subject, geography, and polis, a process that in turn cycles back through the system reforming both the calibration of the apparatus and the User-subject over again.
Linking these, the polyvalence of the word program is again instructive, as already suggested in relation to platforms. In software, the design of a program both enables and configures the quality of a User ’ s agency in relation to particular hardware and sets of actions that might be taken with it. 28 For architecture, program entails a predictive determination of spatial habit sorted and staged in advance by a site ’ s plan. The proposed design of a social organization in space is a techno-anthropological diagram of work, play, violence, and collective phenotypical embodiment, all modeled as functions of particular strategies of sorting, partition, enveloping, interfacing, planning, and sectioning. For the architect, to posit a particular arrangement of activities, of collective access points — of privacy and subjectivity and agency — is to set the stage for some desired organizational-behavioral outcome, including even serendipitous encounters.
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Perhaps today no discipline has more expertise in interface design than architecture, and perhaps someday no discipline will ultimately have more expertise in architecture than some expanded interdisciplinary mode of interface design, because for the City layer, computation is not privileged over cement. The interfacial operations of software and architecture should not be categorized as two distinct economies, but as mutually involved sides of corresponding governing effects, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes antagonistic in their relations. However, under the interfacial regimes of planetary computation, programs that we may have asked architecture to host in the past are now assignments for software, with the latter not only absorbing but sometimes hollowing out the former as well. Meeting rooms become chat windows, store shelves become online databases, places are geotagged, organizational hierarchies become firewalled User access configurations, and so on. This transformation doesn ’ t only dissipate architecture ’ s authority (though in some instances, it does exactly that). Nevertheless, because architecture works as collective interface to urban space and because computation draws our attention to interfaciality per se and its contested governance of systems, then how architectural design will continue to enforce programmatic authority becomes an increasingly pressing question. Architecture ’ s ability to represent systems (idealized, abstracted, mythical, logistical) exceeds any physical mediation of space, and extends its reach beyond the semiotic play of the GUI at hand. At the same time, a shift in design discourse away from symbolization, toward direct material effect, and on political positions that are imminent in a structure ’ s postural embodiment in location, also has to be seen as a disciplinary reaction to the challenges posed by software ’ s virtualizations of architecture ’ s heavier interfaces. 29 It is a way of taking stock of what is left.
In his influential essay, “ The Politics of the Envelope, ” architect Alejandro Zaera-Polo proposed a political theory of the (normative) architectural interface based on a simple formal typology of the building ’ s envelope and of the different kinds of social spaces that each gathers into its midst. His model seeks to index the political effects of the architectural apparatus not in terms of what it might represent ideologically, but how it directly organizes publics (or subjectivizes Users of the City layer) as functions of the spatial networks in which it and they participate. In their different ways, envelopes structure and express links between the building and the world and introduce the segmentation, hierarchy, division, compression, massing, or adjacency that is, in the last instance, the reality of architectural micropolitics. 30 Through a close reading of building face and volume, Zaera-Polo directs us to see the envelope apparatus as a medium for the actors, networks, and assemblages that it might arrange, as well as a kind of master actor within the networks and assemblages in which it is itself situated. In the terminology of The Stack, the interfaciality of different architectural surfaces enables platform sovereignty through repeated access to networks and concrete images of those networks. Zaera-Polo ’ s scheme characterizes the envelope beyond architectural expressivity, and treats it instead as a material interface of polities and geography in situ . He writes, “ A general theory of the building envelope aims to draw a direct link between spatial typologies and political modalities of forms of political organization through the identification of a series of concrete domains of architectural performance with attached political potentials. ” 31 One structured micropolity is pressed against another and linked by the fuzzy membranes that make and unmake publics in different shapes and sizes. At the same time, however, his summary schema is limited in some of the same ways as interface theory in general, namely, the abstraction and individuation of one envelope from its contextual neighborhood of envelopes, which combine with others into urban-scale landscapes of competing envelopes and the polities they convene. 32 In groups, multiple architectural envelopes provide an interfacial rhythm that can be monotonous, dissonant, or catalyzing. No one interface interfaces in a vacuum: a fact regularly overlooked by normative interaction design methodologies that overindividuate Users, forever atomized and psychologized, instead of seeing them as part of larger and less frozen subject-apparatus networks.
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The interfacial problematics of the City layer include both the micropolities configured by architectural envelopes and the equally complex virtual envelopes that organize mobile Users as they meander past the gathering confines of any single building form. Like the hard envelopes Zaera-Polo describes, software envelopes are also sites of convergence between function and representation, linking program and figuration, and so design of the City layer (and the programmatic envelope in particular) draws from architectonic and urban formats alike, but no more so than from the diverse media of planetary-scale computation. The mutual economy of software and architecture is one of programmatic drift, but the interfaciality of software is of particular interest for The Stack in large part because, as said, software is now asked to structure flows of social organization that had once been the assignment of architecture in the modern era. For the moment, hard-into-soft is the more trafficked direction of programmatic transposition between the two, though that may reverse in unexpected ways. While the virtual envelope may be amorphous and invisible, it is not structureless or infinitely permeable. Software envelopes also conform into typological envelopes, sometimes even in the manner described by Zaera-Polo, and according to their own spatial politics, they can straddle the material and the immaterial, variously enforcing, augmenting, or negating the hard architectural envelopes he describes. As physical and virtual envelopes overlap, the clarity of a singular sharply defined exterior is less certain; hard and soft interfaces leak information into one another through their perforated skins. This suggests a need not only for a parallel typology of software envelopes individual performances, but also for a composite matrix describing the differing ways that physical architectural and virtual software envelopes interweave within the other to form the hybrid platform apparatus that in turn produces the subjects and polities of the City layer. 33
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39. Designing for Mixed Envelopes, Mixed Programs
Toward drafting that matrix of mixed envelopes as part of the design brief for The Stack, we may want to consider our own thought experiment: half of all architects and urbanists in the world should, as of now, stop designing new buildings and new developments altogether. Instead they invest their training into the design and programming of software that provides for the better use of structures and systems we already have. It is a simple matter of good content management. The other half, the control group, may continue as before. Very likely the first group, steered toward virtual envelopes, would quickly focus their attention on mobile handsets. Their design brief might state that the essential function of the city is proximity — to people, markets, goods, transport, information — and that the handset condenses the City itself into a remote control apparatus. For ambulant bodies moving through active world, the handset is part of an active network linking site to speech and data and gesture to affect. 10 Mobile device plus city equals a composite read-write medium, allowing for real-time communication, linking a User not only to the City layer of The Stack but to the Cloud infrastructures that provide the cheap vapor of on-demand computation as translated through the little glass screen. Its immediate functions can be modified in relation to App platforms that transform the same machine from handheld telephony into a homing beacon, high-definition video camera, music collection, Geiger counter, magic antenna, virtual goggles, scanning X-ray filter, field recording microphone, medical monitor, or magic window that makes invisible things appear. Ambient urban networks become in-hand animations with which to communicate with (or at) immediate and remote environments. This changes not just how people interact with cities but how they see them as well. With the release of the first iPhone in 2007, a critical mass of Users could envision interaction-in-the-wild as a new genre of computing, not as a variation on a desktop or telephone experience but instead a personal interface to ambient sights, sounds, and words. This would change how people see the device at hand. The shift from point-and-click to multi-touch gesturing represents a kind of substantialization of data, now embodied in tangible interfaces activating a living infor mation substance that you directly grab and manipulate. Enclosed in sensate glass, an onyx frame of immanence, the device interface and hardware blend into what the User takes to be a single dynamic form or field. Older genres of GUI offer menus and contextual options but rely on an instrumental distance between signifier and signified; with iPhone, the mobile interface became filled with things more than with metaphors for things. Couched in a face-like shell and illuminated from within, Apps possess a prehensile tangibility to be pushed and pulled as organic, rubbery stuff. This tangibility and anthropomorphology are what make this apparatus work, socially and psychologically, as an urban interface, making it seem to link not virtually into a deferred realm of the iconic, but directly to the physical world itself.
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The City, as seen through the medium of that face, oozes with living data to be touched and rewritten all over again. It doesn ’ t only represent its world, but affects it as well; interaction is recursive, as a single User action is itself also new information aggregated into a living whole, informing what everyone else sees as their map. This recursion can cause one person to change his path and decisions in accordance with the actions of another User as indexed by the App, which is itself read as a real physical event, happening as part of the urban fabric, not floating “ on top of it. ” In this way, the virtual envelope of the mobile apparatus is, as much as the architectural envelope, a real circuit of movement primary to the City layer. But that equivalence also complicates programming strategies. Architectural programs and interfaces can be fixed or unfixed and can be designed into permanent structure or as shifting furniture; the same is true for software programs, which can be immobile site-specific installations or mobile applications in the urban wild. 34 For both architectural and urban projects, “ program ” provides material support to social activities that repeat themselves within predictable zones and partitioned locations, but as that material support is provided by software, the spatial “ program ” becomes itself as mobile as the handset device, which, for one or many Users at once, transposes that support into different locations at different times. As the functional organization of people across location and duration is coordinated by software as much as by walls and zones, urban functions are translated into applications, and as those are activated at a moment ’ s notice by different Users, each application provides a different interface to the same location for each of them, and so also a different urban program for each of the Users who happens to be in the same spot at the same time. Unlike the architectural envelope that coheres a polity by arranging its place just so, for the virtual envelope of the mobile apparatus, program becomes less of a fixed posture rendered in plan than a setting of parameters of access, improvisation, and opportunity. In other words, for mixed physical and virtual urban envelopes, the program itself becomes the platform.
Surely, however, the most interesting design questions are not to be drawn by the artificial separation of physical and virtual envelopes (such as my proposed experiment) but by reorienting software and urban programming to mix and merge in more clever ways and, through this, to express emergent sovereignties more explicitly. The two are drawn together as architecture becomes a staging plane for software programs, just as software envelopes organize how urban space can be framed and activated. Whose assignment is this? Computer science is not nearly ready to take this on alone (perhaps someday), and architecture ’ s critical expertise in composing, replicating, condensing, and mobilizing the small and large interfaces of social space is woefully underused and underfinanced. A properly interdisciplinary design of the City layer would be both mechanical and dramaturgical; it would systematize the possibility of particular events occurring, both on schedule and off, and would draw the scenarios by which those events become richly woven languages. As the channels of the City are compressed and revealed by the handset ’ s interfaces, the virtual envelope ’ s augmentation might dissolve the gravity of architectural programs, or it may harden it. Either way, for architectural representation, the sectional stacking or planimetric allotment of discrete zones for spatial-social behavior to take place within a single envelope, gives way to interior and exterior encounters that can be activated in any number of different ways by different people using different software in hand, and so from minute to minute, as different Apps augment given spatial programs for different Users, any single architectural envelope is, to that extent, relieved of some of its programmatic responsibility and specific purpose. The same is true (more so) at the urban scale, where multiple architectural envelopes combine and compete, and where the distribution of formal programs is also finally bound to formally restricted legal-spatial zones (e.g., residential, manufacturing commercial zones). But at this scale as well, when multiple Users interact with a section of the City differently depending on what software they are running, zoning in the traditional sense becomes a much more problematic urban design trick; it becomes a less enforceable and perhaps also self-defeating sort of rule making. For the User, “ use ” is always mixed use, and so the design of the City layer requires a new way to represent program, not one that resembles an OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) sectional diagram or the iPhone deck, but instead some kind of image that can trace the interdependent contingencies of hard and soft envelopes across lived network time. 35
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An integrated platform design would seek to modulate conditions of appearance rather than attempting to script or contain what finally emerges. As discussed above, the urban street grid platform itself works this way as the urbanite calculates his own movements by the grid ’ s network. If the street grid were irregular and idiosyncratic, it would not mediate the maximal churn that it does. But now the rational programming of urbanist modernities and developer-driven postmodernities converges with software and hardware application programming interfaces and protocols with names like GeoRSS, GML, GPX, KML, EXIF, and OpenSearch Geo. As these cohere in and as the City layer of The Stack, our design concern should be with how a mixed interfacial regime could support a loquacious multiplication of outcomes impossible for either hard or soft systems alone. Some mixed platforms are already encoded into isomorphic software suites, some of which are the lattice on which designers might conjure and implement forms across multiple scales. The Stack ’ s layers arrange open and closed channels of access, manipulation, function, and irrelevance, and through these designers designate where to situate interfaces, speculate how to capitalize undervalued interactions to come, and, if they work on behalf of established Cloud platforms, extend and enforce the centripetal advantages of those particular services. Today some designers are trained to design for inside the glowing glass rectangle of the screen and some for the outside spaces in which screens are situated, but many of the most pressing opportunities of the City layer demand amphibiousness. For savvy urban designers, equally adept with physical and virtual envelopes, it ’ s not difficult to make up long lists of possible projects: augmented reality Apps for ambulance paramedics and open-air surgical theaters; a mash-up of post-Twitter microblog Apps linked to post-Siri voicecontrol interfaces and trans-Google translation software, together posting anything you want to say to anyone anywhere always; citizen activists using GIS, mass-market geobrowsers, and modified drones to streaming real-time C3 video to 3D-printed phones; mining composite crowd-sourced behavioral data to optimize the recycling of postpurchase prosaic junk; real-time flu outbreak visualization and private microgovernance of microbiopolitical swarms (a premium upgrade only for club members); traffic control sensor and smart tollbooth hacks; individually reconfigurable robotic building interiors collapsing rooms and even floors serving different programs in morning and at night; anonymized parking markets based on bitcoin and namecoin; building exteriors featuring networked cinema, not on thirty-second loops but on eighteen-month lunar cycles; lifelong syncing of car-phone-home- Clouds platform allegiance chosen at birth like football team fandom; Google Office per-minute commercial office leasing apps; personal RFID managers; rock star privacy consultants — all driven by (at least partially) open APIs enabling other applications to build further on their existing traces. Insert your own schemes and nightmares here.
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Regarding the experiment suggested above, for two groups of architects assigned to tackle the virtual as well as the physical envelope, it ’ s certain that even this is fraught with risk, not only because of what it would leave behind but because of what it might accomplish and quickly lose the ability to control. The experimental half turning its attention to the virtual envelope should consider several admonitions in advance. First, the computational city activates human-object networks that are both new and primordial at once. You should anticipate the rapid coevolution of urban behavior and urban software, such that the mobile handsets themselves and their capacities will appear to be evolving more in relation to each other than to us. This fast Darwinism of the device will make it seem as though we are their media, and not the other way around. Such appearances may prove to be true. The explosion of hyperlocal and hypervisual information will both amplify and multiply the intensities of social interaction, but will also reveal the scale and complexity of communication between nonhumans (animals, ecologies, infrastructures), such that at just the moment at which our collective urban cultural cognition comes online, it will be exposed as a hopelessly outflanked minority discourse, a dying language even. Quite clearly the computational intensification of the GUI interface will make it more animated, more speech-based, and more seemingly factual, exacerbating everything we already know about the instability of cinematic diegesis (memory, action, projection, pixelation, repetition, juxtaposition, correspondence, false causality) now brought deeper into everyday life. The social-psychological results of all this will be complex and contradictory, as pervasive computing makes inanimate objects see, hear, and comment on our interactions with them. This experience may, in many cases, be observationally indistinguishable from a psychotic break or from the affinity rituals of animism. In a recent interview, Virilio notes that today ’ s qualities of technology — instantaneity, ubiquity, immediacy — are those associated with the divine. 36 As we ’ ll examine in the more detail in the Interface chapter, the killer application of pervasive computing is not advertising to the hipster fl â neur; it is closer to something like religion, and its impact on non-secular polities and monotheisms will be turbulent, existential, and fertile.
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40. Programs, Subjects, and Zombie Jurisdictions
But first, I turn back to how the City layer and its platform apparatuses can generate accidents of sovereign subjectivization and how platform megastructures at this layer do and do not work to envelop stable Cloud polities. Well before smart cities evangelism, the modernist call for a more intense technologization of design ’ s disciplinary doxa, blending urban and cybernetic programs, was a predominant discourse. 6 For a century now, it has asked us, in one way or another, to recognize the network city as a shared nervous system, connecting each of us on its terms. Today, however, mastery and transparency are not the only values in play. The accelerated rupture of computational forces up from the Cloud through urban orifices, out into the open view, relies not only on formal piloting of a User along his course, but also on her capacity to proprioceptively map her own displacement in real and imagined geographies. 37 That self-directed — if also still tethered — drift is not antithetical to control and its spatial governance of unwalled User subjects, but at the same time, the legal neutrality with which its ambient interfacial infrastructures address those subjects can result in unexpected, and even disruptive, new demands for access and recognition by those Users. As envelopes compose the urban landscape, the work they do aggregates into regular networks of open and closed centers, pathways and clusters, which in turn combine to give form to territories and larger geographies, but as often as not, the territories produced make conflicting claims on the same User. The generative accident of the mobile apparatus, within the City layer, is the spawning of unintentional sovereign positions into which Users can step, even if they are at odds with formal scripts of jurisdiction.
For example, in the specific case of the elongated wedge envelope-interface of the US-Mexico international border, its geopolitical disciplinary intrigue spins out as many exceptions to its control assignment as it manages to enforce. As a jurisdictional membrane, many parts of this border are less like the tightly packed machine of a customs zones in an international airport, coding every centimeter with the neutralizing authority of the legal grid, than a wide liminal expanse where the legal transition and translation from one national status to another is vexed, intangible, and dangerously ambiguous, even as the resolute bluntness of the wedge tries in vain to remain unperturbed by that ambiguity. An exemplary fundamentalist reinscription of Westphalian geography, this border tries to cohere and filter control over production and consumption chains between North and South into a single horizontal line. It encapsulates a specifically programmed regime of differential mobility, in which some things are heavily sponsored flows (goods and services) and other things (human bodies) are heavily restricted, the latter then driving the gray and black economies that sprout in the border ’ s cracks. The border is an architecture of both systemic wealth centralization and provincial immiseration. Its geography writes both integration and severance, from the disembedding of local and regional economies to maquiladoros (globally owned factories along the border) and formal kleptocracies, to a cannibalistic drug war feeding the chemically induced mania of American cocaine users (where a neurochemical event inside the head of one person in Los Angeles results indirectly in the decapitation of another person in Tijuana), all operating under the sign of modulated flow: flow of capital, flow of risk, flow of commodities, flow of drugs, flow of serotonin, flow of trucks, flow of tourists, flow of cash, flow of vegetables, flow of electronics, flow of chemical waste products. 38 Along the border zone, where everyday emergency is unexceptional, the rule of law is either comically overenforced or tragically under enforced, both outcomes ensured by a principle of flow along paths of least resistance. As a case study in how the architectural envelope and the virtual envelope can work at productive cross-purposes, it is worth considering in some detail one design project that toys with the paradoxical transformations of the User-migrant-subject status as she moves across this particular jurisdictional melange. 39 Some colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, B.A.N.G. Lab, directed by Ricardo Dominguez, earned the vitriol of local nativists by developing an App called Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBIT), which, when installed on cheap and recycled handsets with GPS, is designed to aid those traveling by foot across the treacherous Sonoran and Mojave deserts from Mexico in the United States (or perhaps the other way around) by directing them to nearby water stations set up by other Samaritan organizations. 40 The migrant humans against which the border wedge defends jurisdictional order can get stranded in a dry sea of sun and sand, neither here nor there. But as far as the device apparatus is concerned, their presence there and their use of the Interface is neither legal nor illegal; they are just a User, and that ’ s good enough to provide full infrastructural and territorial access.
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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). ” 41 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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