Potentiality, or the Agamben/Deleuze Connection

In the movie The Matrix, there is a predominant tension between Neo (who disbelieves he is ‘The One’) and Morphius’s crew (who believe Neo to be ‘The One’). The augury provided by the Oracle concerning the ‘One’ is a prophesy about a hybrid being: essentially a human, who has surpassed the threshold of machinic enslavement and social subjection; a human that has become one with the enslaving computer program, the Matrix: a human that has become immaterial machine. The Matrix tows its audience through the conventional cinematic tropes of doubt, frustration, surprise, and eventually triumph on the part of Neo—how can one forget the scene where Neo finally surpasses his limit: he becomes raining code: his optifiliation to the program is realized: Neo now has eyes.

Indeed, I now have eyes as well: I now see raining code: my theoreticofiliation is becoming realized. Realized = real eyes. Theory can become ritualized, but what becomes ritualized becomes ritual lies. Maybe ‘lie’ is a strong word, since I mean misunderstood. I misunderstood, but now I see raining code. I can no longer see theory as ritual.

In an interview, Michel Foucault once said, more or less in these words, that, like physicists who see little or no need to cite Newton in their work, he saw little need to cite Marx in his work because Marx was all pervasive—‘Marx’ wrote through Foucault. Most contemporary theorists, particularly Giorgio Agamben, obviously feel the same way towards Deleuze and Guattari; why cite when Deleuze and Guattari when they write through you? Paradoxically, the importance of Agamben becomes apparent is amplified only after reading D & G.

Potentiality: A central element in Agamben’s writings on sovereignty is a sovereign power that is at once topological and potential—a state of exception that captures zoe, naked life. Agamben understands potentiality to be ‘the presence of an absence; that is what we call “faculty” or “power” (Potentialities 1999: 179).’ Potentiality, according to Agamben, is intimately related to the ability—the faculty—to say ‘I can,’ without the action being materialized. To have a faculty, argues Agamben, means ‘to have a privation. And potentiality is not a logical hypostasis but mode of existence of this privation (1999: 179; my emphasis).’ Thus, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the faculty is immanent, anticipated, potential. Potentiality is reverse causality without finality: ‘it is not at all in the same way [what] appears in existence; it preexists in the capacity of a warded-off limit; hence its irreducible contingency. But in order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a ‘presentiment’ of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of existence (D&G: 431; my emphasis);’ i.e, it is the existence of a privation.

How does this relate to the problem of sovereignty? Agamben and D&G are fundamentally concerned with constituting and constituted power as political/ontological concepts. The central tension for Agamben in Homo Sacer is how the constituting/constituted power become indistinguishable, and Agamben looks to Aristotle’s two potentialities—the potential to be actual, and the potential to be im-potential—as central for understanding sovereign power.

If potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia) (Homo Sacer 1998: 45).

This potentiality, argues Abamben, ‘maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality (1998: 45).’ Thus, the ban, that sovereign rationality of power that marks the exception is topological in that it has the ability not to be: it is potential; it is the zone of indistinction between constituting and constituted power.

Potentiality is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding it or determining it other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself (1998: 46).

This formulation plays through ‘Apparatus of Capture.’ Capture, knotting, and nets are potential. A point of similarity between Agamben and Deleuze and Guattari is their conception of threshold. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is an intimate relation between limit and threshold, with the function of threshold being the moment when what is potentially anticipated taking on ‘consistency or fails to, and what is conjured away ceases to be so and arrives (D&G 432). D&G discuss threshold in two instances (both interrelated): (1) the macro convergence or emergence of forms of agglomeration/central power (States, towns, international markets, etc.) that were in tension with groups that sought to ward off such thresholds; and (2) micro overcoming of a limit, which leads to a change of assemblage, accumulation of stock, and eventually gives rise to the macro convergences of (2). After outlining the ‘three headed apparatus of capture’ (land, labor, money), D&G determine capture to be the ‘difference or excess constitutive of profit, surplus labor, or surplus product (446).’ What is interesting about this section on capture is that it is immediately followed by a brief discussion of state violence.

We have a moment when the mechanism of capture constitutes the aggregate of land, labor, money, which is transcended (in both the imperial and modern formations) by the State (which taxes and partitions). Deleuze and Guattari argue the ‘naked’ worker is faced with a violence that ‘posits itself as preaccomplished’; i.e., potential, and is signified by the master-signifier of the State (450). Law, in this sense, becomes tactical: it consists of ‘organizing conjunctions of decoded flows’ (451). But why would this be violent? It is precisely in the capture, the potentiality of topological violence on the part of a sovereign, that keeps the worker in line, disciplined, and ultimately leading to a ‘society of control’ predicated on violence. This is how law becomes indistinguishable from life, but we could never get this out of Agamben unless we understood the tactical/tactile law of D&G: a law that organizes but lacks content; a law in force without significance; with nomos, the presupposed power of the sovereign/State, ‘precisely the law beyond the law to which we are abandoned.’ I now see raining code: ‘I’ now have eyes.