Capture Apparatus Research Articles

The State as a Social Relation

Based on the theoretical legacy of Gustav Landauer, this polemic proposes an anthropological critique of the state, which approaches the latter not as Leviathan composed of the bodies of its subjects, nor as mere fiction, but as a social relation and at the same time as a mystification of this relation, which allows it to endure as a pervading apparatus of capture of social relatedness.

Assembling International Development Through Capture: The Management and Accounting Control of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

This study explores the management and accounting requirements that international development Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) adopt to be eligible for grants. More specifically, based on interviews conducted with state funding agencies, international NGOs, and Guatemalan and El Salvadorian NGOs and analysis of their reports to funding agencies, the article describes funding requirements and explores how they are implicated in the transformation of the social justice movement assemblage: components of which are technically and administratively rearticulated as components of the international development assemblage. This transformation is explained through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ‘state-form’: a mode of governing whereby “state apparatus of capture” hierarchically stratifies an assemblage by enrolling components of the social movement (territorialisation), arranging them through homogenizing administrative categories (coding), and enabling an emergent functional totality (overcoding) that has had the effect of, what some interviewees referred to as, ‘disarticulating the social movement.’ There is however contestation, as strategies are employed by NGOs to leak financial and political resources to organizations that would otherwise not be eligible for funding. This study seeks to extend the work that has critically examined the role of NGOs in the social justice movement and the role of state modes of governance in this process. It emphasizes the impact of management and accounting controls on the constitution and transformation of assemblages and NGOs’ advocacy and mission.

The autonomy of gesture: of lifestream logistics and playful profanations

Gesture – the work that it does – reaches deep into human sociality, to its affective and ancient core. (Brian Rotman) With the current integration of gesture-based user interfaces into the material infrastructure of our communicative practices, gesture returns as a conceptual concern in media-theoretical, political, and philosophical analysis. Analyses of biolinguistic capitalism that have focused on the ‘becoming-linguistic’ of labor and the centrality of linguistic conventions in the comprehension of contemporary capitalism should, therefore, be understood to include processes of gestural semiosis. Agamben's account of a gestural ethos and his call to return apparatuses of capture to ‘free use’ through practices of profanation provide a perspective from within which to identify the ethico-political stakes of the ‘becoming-gestural’ of new modes of relation, from touch-based mobile devices to responsive ‘sentient’ urban architectures.

The Birth of the Obesity Clinic: Confessions of the Flesh, Biopedagogies and Physical Culture

The recent construction of a so-called “obesity epidemic” has been fueled by epidemiologically-based studies recuperated by the media and suggestions of the rapid acceleration of obesity rates in the Western world. Studies linking obesity to ill-health have also exploded and greatly impacted our “physical” culture. In this article, I present a series of postcards to summarize the dominant obesity discourse and document the rhetorical terrain of the impending epidemic. I also offer counter-postcards to dispute the postcards’ objective postulations and contextualize the birth of what I call the “Obesity Clinic.” I then characterize this polymorphous clinic as an apparatus of capture sustained by biomedicalization, bioeconomics, and biocultural discourses and speak to its regulation and abjection of unruly (fat) bodies. I conclude with a few reflections about the territorializing nature of the Obesity Clinic as well as what it means for individuals and, more generally, for physical culture and its study.

Apparatus of capture: Fiscal state formation in the republic of Georgia

How did the rate of central government tax revenue more than triple in the (post-Soviet) Republic of Georgia over 2004–2007? This paper investigates fiscal state formation in Georgia using ethnographic fieldwork to document how the reformist government brought to power by the 2003 “Rose Revolution” impelled tax compliance using a set of tactics of anti-corruption, anti-tax evasion, individual accountability, and compromising information collected through extra-legal surveillance. The use of ethnographic methods to examine the recent and rapid process of state formation in Georgia is a departure from much of the extant literature on state formation, which is dominated by historical scholarship that examines relatively long-term processes of political and economic change culminating in the present state. In contrast, the approach taken here uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage to examine how the state is a process of continuous formation. The fast emergence of a historically unprecedented scale of tax compliance in Georgia was the result of the application of particular techniques of government that assembled micro-subjective dispositions into a macro-institutional process of revenue capture.

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.

The Greek Gloom and the December 2008 Uprising

This paper employs the notion of apparatus of capture in the context of the historical formation and transformations of the Greek nation state. The aim is to demystify the overcoding poles of political sovereignty as they are expressed in different chronological periods and to sketch an analysis of the appropriations of social living forms, social movements and war machines into regimes of signs. The term war machine is deployed as a key term for grasping the variables of content and the variables of expression that are encountered in the different historical circumstances. The order word modernisation illustrates not only the machinic enslavement but also new social subjections within a society of the spectacle and global capital. The account given here of the December 2008 uprising in Greece offers an insight into the political event and attempts a pragmatic analysis of the December war machine.

Subjugated to the ‘apparatus of capture’: Self, sex and public health technologies

The aim of this paper is to discuss how public health/epidemiological surveillance of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) contributes to and reinforces the subjugation of self, body and sexual pleasures, and thus acts as an apparatus of capture. Surveillance, which carries the connotation of policing, is validated, structured and supported by power/knowledge; indeed, infectious disease surveillance, particularly that of HIV and STIs is a powerful disciplinary technology that monitors the ‘ill’, the ‘transgressors’ and the ‘deviants’. In economic terms, it is the reconnaissance of information about the unproductive or pending ‘burden’ on power. Therefore, we posit that mechanisms of epidemiological surveillance of HIV/STIs inscribe and subjugate the self, the body and sexual pleasures into governed ‘practices’, not just of the self, but of social and cultural communities and places.

Deleuze and the Contemporary World

This volume of essays aims to bring Deleuze's thought into a critical and analytical relation with the contemporary world. Taken together, the essays offer a robust defence of Deleuzian philosophy against charges that have recently levelled against it, namely that it is overly abstract, idealistic and otherworldly (Badiou, Hallward) and that, in offering an anarchic model of desiring production, it is ultimately complicit with contemporary capitalism and the ideology of neo-liberalism (Žižek). The aim, then, is to offer a range of discussions that make use of Deleuzian concepts in order to ‘describe, analyze, critique, and evaluate the tone, timbre and rhythm of the contemporary world’ (p. 18) with a view to rethinking, and offering theoretical alternatives to, the political problems that manifest themselves today. The volume covers a wide range of issues from the question of political community and ‘minor politics’ as thought by Deleuze, through to questions concerning the structure of the modern state, European identity, the legacy of colonialism and the Holocaust, Israeli identity, the desiring flows of capitalism and the question of culture in the age of information technology and cybernetics. At their best the analyses given do succeed in offering insightful critiques of contemporary political problems and their historical underpinnings. A good example of this is Paul Patton's excellent analysis of the legacy of colonization in Australia and issues of contemporary law relating to land rights. Patton's piece draws on Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the ‘event’ and of the state as an apparatus of capture in order to show that such concepts can both allow for a critical-philosophical thinking of the colonial event and its legacy and open up concrete possibilities for envisaging a post-colonial society. Like all the best pieces in this collection Patton's essay demonstrates that Deleuze's thought can offer unique insights into political problems which other modes of thinking cannot. The use of Deleuzian concepts appears less convincing when they seem to be grafted rather too quickly onto an assumed political consensus or an assumed givenness of the empirical realities of the contemporary world. For instance, the discussion of Deleuzian axioms, US power and the international system given in the introduction uses the issue of oil and of oil reserves as an illustrative example while relying on highly selective sources (pp. 5–6) and apparently ignoring some of the key questions in the debate about remaining global oil supplies (see, for instance, David Goodstein, Out of Gas (London, Norton, 2004)). Despite such occasional shortcomings, this volume succeeds in demonstrating very convincingly that the charge of otherworldliness levelled at Deleuzian philosophy falls far short of the mark. Questions may remain about the extent to which Deleuzian analysis can foster direct interventions and create concrete possibilities for change. Nevertheless, the essays of this collection clearly show that the creation of innovative philosophical concepts that allow us to think complexity and multiplicity in new ways offers the best hope of understanding the complex political realities and challenges of the contemporary world.

"Gently Caress Me, I Love Chris Jericho": Pro Wrestling Fans "Marking Out"

"Gently Caress Me, I Love Chris Jericho": Pro Wrestling Fans "Marking Out"

Flexibility foils filter function: structural limitations on suspension feeding

Suspension feeders rely on filter structures of a variety of forms to capture food particles. Much effort has been devoted to examining the operation of such filters, but mechanistic evaluations have generally represented filter elements with artificially stiff cylinders. We extended this previous work to investigate how bending affects the function of flexible cylindrical filter elements. Scaled models of filters were constructed from materials with elastic moduli comparable to material stiffnesses of invertebrate appendages (1-177 GPa). These models were mounted on a sled to mimic the protrusion of filters away from an animal's body or from the substratum, and were towed through a vat of syrup to generate relative fluid motion at low Reynolds numbers (Re <10(-3), based on cylinder diameter and tow speed). Flow between filter elements was quantified at multiple positions along their lengths, and a hydrodynamic index of filter performance ('leakiness') was calculated. Leakiness generally increased with cylinder Re and distance from the filter base. At higher flexibilities, however, streamwise bending and lateral narrowing of the filter reduced projected area and slowed flow between elements. This effect decreased leakiness and reversed the otherwise monotonic trend for increased leakiness at higher cylinder Re. Additional experiments showed that filters composed of stouter elements were less susceptible to bending but experienced lower leakiness because of their reduced ability to transcend boundary layers formed over surfaces to which they attached. These findings indicate that filter bending can strongly alter the performance of particle capture apparatus in suspension feeders.

Nutritional ecology of sea urchin larvae: influence of endogenous and exogenous nutrition on echinopluteal growth and phenotypic plasticity in Tripneustes gratilla

Summary 1 Marine invertebrates use egg nutrients to develop the functional feeding larva and then enter a facultative feeding period (FFP) when development can proceed without food because larvae are supported by maternal reserves. Facultative feeding reduces starvation risk and so is important for larval success. It may also influence egg size evolution because FFP length correlates with egg size. 2 We quantified energetic lipid (triglyceride, TG) utilisation in unfed and fed larvae as an index of larval nutritive condition in the tropical echinoid Tripneustes gratilla during the FFP to determine if fed larvae would use the buffer provided by endogenous provisions to improve their condition or accelerate development. We predicted that: (i) the condition of unfed and fed larvae should diverge before egg TG is exhausted and/or (ii) that the size of fed larvae should outstrip that of unfed larvae. 3 Temperate echinoplutei exhibit phenotypic plasticity, increasing the length of their food capture apparatus (arms) in nutrient-poor conditions. We examined the generality of this phenomenon in a morphometric analysis of growth in the tropical larva of T. gratilla. We hypothesized that plastic arm growth in starved larvae would occur before the FFP ends as a bet hedging strategy to prepare for hard times ahead when lack of reserves may render this response impossible. 4 We found that fed larvae diverged in condition (higher TG) but not in size compared with starved larvae before egg energetic lipids were exhausted. In addition, unfed larvae showed plastic arm growth before the end of the FFP. 5 Lack of divergence in growth of unfed and fed larvae suggests there may be an imperative to maintain a nutrient storage buffer against starvation due to unpredictable future planktonic food supply. The FFP of T. gratilla exceeds 8 days, considerably longer than that of other echinoids with similarly sized eggs, emphasizing that egg quality may be more important than egg size as a predictor of the FFP in fecundity-time models of egg evolution.

Creating physically embodied agents using realistic human motion models

Many simulations are populated with physically embodied agents capable of taking physical actions in the virtual world. Creating these agents, or virtual humans, is demanding; not only must the agents demonstrate visual verisimilitude, but they must plan and act in a way that is consistent with that of humans, especially for training simulations in which the participants are attempting to learn real-world skills. This article discusses an approach for adapting agent decision-making techniques to accurately model the physical capabilities of human subjects. To achieve this, the authors rely on human movement data acquired with a motion capture apparatus to build physically realistic models of human movement. To aid agents' planning, the authors construct a physical capability model for the agents, an accurate estimate of the time required for a real human to perform various movement sequences. A cost map over the space of agent actions is calculated by creating and stochastically sampling motion graphs assembled from the human data exemplars. The agents can use this cost model during the planning process to select between equivalent goal-achieving plans. This technique leverages highly accurate movement information acquired from human subjects to create agents that plan in physically realistic ways.

Failure Notice

Failure Notice

Choreography as Apparatus of Capture

This second installment of TDR's continuing series on choreography and philosophy addresses dance and temporality. Paula Caspão describes the economy of movement and language as a stuttering, relational, affective field. Frédéric Pouillaude argues that contemporaneity links dance and scène, which in French means both an abstract place for an event and, more concretely, the stage. In a dialogue, Danielle Goldman and Deborah Hay follow up on Goldman's considerations of how improvisation offers “escape routes”—for and from dance, theory, and time.

Punch-Drunk Love

Punch-Drunk Love

VEmpire, Glocalization, and the Melancholia of the Sovereign

multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only o. the vitality of the multitude--as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only o. the blood of the living.--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 62. What is thus put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic is nothing else than the existence of the world, of the itself.--Jacques Derrida, Le concept du 11 semptembre, 98-99. (2) Who or what will come out of global? Who or what is global, and who or what is to come out of it? From the word go, the questions multiply. There are several regimes that one can hear in the phrases global or going One is the admonition to go global, now that everybody or everything else has. An encouragement, an invitation, a welcome: go global, release yourself from national or other boundaries of identity, be free! A shipment, an envoi, is global, a letter without destination or a preprogrammed itinerary and without assured delivery. Going might be precisely this possibility of never arriving or never arriving properly; but also might be never having departed from a certain, designated space in the first place. other sense, the other direction, of global, is quite the opposite, a warding-o. of the global: Go, go away global! should go away with all its misery, the political and ecological devastation that follow globalization like a shadow. No less a figure than Hannah Arendt warned, almost sixty years ago, in Origins of Totalitarianism, that The danger that [is] a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages (302). That danger of will be or will have been a reverse potential of any global. Is going global good to go? Who or what will come out of it? One should hear in going global an almost poetic beauty, an alliteration of g/gl, gl/g, go, go, goo, goo, gl, gl, al/la, la/al, la/la, a poetic equivalence, to speak in Roman Jakobson's terms: a language in its infancy, with all the future and the potentiality of senses, meanings, combinations, and directions open to it. Going would be the very glottic opening of language and into language, a pleasure of a glossa, of words, an enjoyment in and of the words, a glottal-global, globetrotting experience that is almost literary--poetic, unpredictable, free to go anywhere, the of and dissemination of the global, the is/as global, g-o-o-o-o global!, and, Heidegger would have it, the worlds. Going would be the becoming of the totality of senses, senses and meanings that go in every direction, towards what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the creation of the world, or globalization: La creation du monde ou la mondialisation (2002). Going a pleasure, a jouissance of global, as an exercise of an infinitely finite and insatiable signification which is the act of being in a sense of being placed in the world (l'exercice insatiable et infiniment fini qui est l'etre en acte du sens mis en monde) (64). By the same token, one should not forget that this alliteration, global, this glottic repetition, and the meaning for which it stands and it stands, is possible only in English, and that is on at the expense of other languages and cultures. You cannot go in French, Russian, German, my native Serbo-Croat, or any other language. Going sentences other cultures not to a poetic but to a generalized equivalence, a forced translation of an English-dominated globalization. Going may be seen, thus, the slogan of a generalized erasure of all alterity, singular difference, idioms, and idiomaticity. …

Distributed Terror and the Ordering of Networked Social Space

Truth be told, the “Y2K bug” was quite a disappointment. While the technopundits wooed us with visions of network failures worthy of millennial fervor, Jan. 1, 2000, came and went without even a glimmer of the catastrophic. Yet the Y2K “bug” did reveal the degree to which the American apocalypse now took the form of the network itself. The spaces of everyday life in America and elsewhere in a developed world produce and are produced by network structures that Manuel Castells has called “spaces of flow.” As such, Catastrophe today is marked more by dispersion and dissipation, rather than breakdown — a dis-strophe of social forms, structures, and experience.The dissipation of enactive networks does not, however, equate with a system failure. With the Internet “bubble burst” of March, 2000, the very exuberance of market flows were very much the conditions of possibility for both the irruption of a new economy and its sudden evaporation. It is not the ephemerality of these social forms and structures that disorients activities of everyday life in a network society, but rather our lack of control over distributed processes. The bubble burst, then, by no means sounded a death knell for distributed network functions. Rather, it marked a moment of increased misrecognition of the forms, structures, and practices that were the conditions of possibility for the event itself, as an ideology of authentication eclipsed a rhetoric of emergence and flow. Billions in capital disappeared in a matter of weeks, but the network forms and structures that allowed individual users “direct access” to the flows of capital remained in place for a normative virtual class, articulated as personalized and privatized spaces of control.

Hindu Temples in the Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict: Capture and Excess

Developing Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of territorialization and the apparatus of capture, this article explores the role that Sri Lankan Hindu temples have played in the formation of ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Analyzing three contemporary events, the article introduces ways in which many different Sri Lankans (Sinhalese and Tamil) interpret their country's predicament and seek to resolve or prolong it. The events also reveal how scholarship becomes entangled in ethnic nationalism. I then examine in greater detail a village in which temple construction was a critical feature of identity formation during the creation of Sri Lanka as a colonialist and capitalist bureaucratic space. Through this account, I argue that the formation of polarized ethnicity in Sri Lanka is the product of multiple refractive forces, of which temples are one, and not the end result of a singular colonialist bureaucratic agency.

Illegal drug markets in transitional economies

The rise of illegal drug markets in transitional economies is usually conceptualized as an effect of economic transition. With the emergence of new understandings of transitional economies and contemporary thinking about global capitalism, drug markets can be understood to have a different function. In global capitalism, the illegal drug market is an apparatus of capture that choreographs a quest for pleasure, liberation, freedom and the hope for consumption promised by global media. Capitalism thrives on its own incorporative processes such that the limitative becomes constitutive. Global capitalism is defined by the dissolution of limitative boundaries such as sovereign borders, sovereign bodies, sovereign ethnic groups, and the subsequent deformation/reformation of the very boundaries to commodity markets. Illegal drug markets mediate this function through capturing bodies, markets, dreams of freedom, and the social order and subsuming them to productive capital. In transitional economies, the illegal drug market is both an effect of transition and a cause. Illegal drug markets create the possibilities for a market economy based on the capture and mobilization of affects; the introduction of new forms of consumption, and the redirection of flows of capital in an environment where capital flows are malleable and labour markets are easily re-defined. Rather than being parasitic, the modern illegal drug market is constitutive of modern liberal democracies emerging from transitional economies. The roles of harm reduction organizations are discussed in light of this theory.