The neg’s utilization of assemblage theory re-sutures the subject of modern capitalism

Subjectivity is shameful—"subjects are born quite as much from misery as from triumph" (N, 151). It grows from the seeds of a "composite feeling" made from the compromises with our time: the shame of being alive, the shame of indignity, the shame that it happens to others, the shame that others can do it, and the shame of not being able to prevent it (WP, 108, 225). Existence is the result of a disaster, yet it says very little about us; it does not explain but rather must be explained. This is what makes shame "one of philosophy's most powerful motifs" (108). The subject is always something derivative that "comes into being and vanishes in the fabric of what one says, what one sees," resembling "specks dancing in the dust of the visible and permutations in an anonymous babble" (N, 108). This does not keep some from clinging to their shame. On this account, Deleuze has nothing but scorn for identity politics—"we have to counter people who think 'I'm this, I'm that' . . . arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments" (N, 11-12). Shame is our defense against these people, queer theorists remind us, and it must be put to work on them as a weapon—an affect that acts as a solvent to dissolve whatever binds it to an identity (Halperin and Traub, "Beyond Gay Pride," 25). There are those who have worked to square identity with Deleuze (Donna Haraway, Tim Dean, Jasbir Puar, Edouard Glissant). Their theorizations only avoid the problem of shame to the extent that they make identity's many perforations into points of leverage and transformed differences into a million cutting edges.

For some, the world is made up of assemblages, and all assemblages are subjects. In no time, people, hurricanes, and battles all get addressed in the same register (as all subjects should be afforded proper names)! Although this is, perhaps, technically true, such assemblage-thinking misses the point—it reduces subjectivity to the name we use to pin down the sum of a body's capacities (AT, 256-57). It sanctifies a bloodless world by cataloging the networks that make up its many attributes. This is why assemblage-modeling is a perfect fit in a world where capitalism produces subjectivity "the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars" (AO, 245). Further proof of its noxious conservativsm is arch-thinkers Manuel DeLanda's and Bruno Latour's dismissive rejection of Marxism. Fortunately, Deleuze already warned us by channeling Spinoza on the limits of adequate knowledge, in the often-repeated words that "we do not know what a body is capable of" (NP, 39). The phrase should not be read as an appeal to some evasive essence but simply as applying a principle of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, which holds that the conditions of actual experience are not represented through empirical tracing (DR, 95, 221, 321). This is crucial, because philosophy is too easily thrown back into the transcendental illusions through the personal identitarian experiences built by self-centered habits of mind (DR, 207-8, 73, 119). The pitfall of run-of-the-mill empiricists is that even in the best-case scenario, when they step out of the perspective of the subject, they still reduce existence to conditions of reproduction or chart something's "degree of freedom." For us, then, the subject should be spoken about scornfully as simply the sum of a body's habits, most of which are marshaled to evade thought.

The undoing of the subject is un-becoming. Deleuze withholds praise for the subject but does not deny it a place, unlike Althusser, who theorizes "subjectivity without a subject" (Badiou, "Althusser," 58-67). But subjects are only interesting when they cast a "line to the outside"—in short, when they stop being subjects (with a double emphasis on "being" and "subjects") (N, 99). This process is how Deleuze describes Foucault's subjectivization, which is not a "coming back" to subjectivity to rescue it but the disintegration of the subject as it evaporates into a field of forces where neither persons nor identities survive (N, 93). This is the secret to becoming, for it has nothing to do with "subjects developing into more of themselves." Becoming is really a process of un-becoming. In what Elizabeth Grosz calls "undoing the givenness of the given" of Becoming Undone, un-becoming exercises undoing, a process that works to "undo the stabilities of identity, knowledge, location, and being" (210, 3). But in proposing undoing as an alternative to subjectivity, it is necessary to be specific about how to orient the process. While it is easy for an aesthete to indulge in the powers of the outside like a good after-dinner drink, "letting loose, freeing up, and putting into play," undoing can fulfill the higher purpose of nursing a hatred for this world (55). For it is only when we locate something intolerable outside ourselves that we will "leap beyond shame" and "transform [our] paltry undertakings into a war of resistance and liberation" (ECC, 125).