Source: Soul Machine by Sunflower Soul
Enzymatic Knowledge Machines
“A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function.”
Deleuze and Guattari [2].
This theory of the precarious contemporary position of subjectivity is intended as a symbolically textured tool, an “enzymatic knowledge machine” (EKM), aimed to enhance and intensify subjectivity through alerting it to its precarity. EKMs can be defined as abstract machinic assemblages of functional conceptual elements that are designed to be “plugged in” to psychic systems with the explicit goal of transformative catalyses that are reproduced outwards from subjects to culture. The EKM aims to borrow the stimulative operationality of technocapitalism to turn it against itself.
Of course, EKMs are not intended to be dogmatic statements of truth, an orientation that would undermine their spirit. They are rather modes of knowledge catalysis that may help to provide a means to resist degradative manipulation by the anaesthetizing information machines (AIMs) of the market, which encourage us to outsource our cognitive capacities, and which bureaucratize our mental states and degrade our semantic salience.
“Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection.”
Foucault [4].
A theory as EKM then is an epistemic protective that aims to catalyze active reflection against passive reflexivity. In doing so, it offers resistance to subsumption by higher level systemic processes through the establishment of thought and behaviors that enhance and intensify contextual understanding and creative activity on the autopoietic level of subjectivity. This creative activity, or ethic, amounts to subjectivity taking a stand across the hierarchy of systems by consciously situating itself as a locus around which other systems ought revolve rather than submitting fully to their respective pulls. Here, freedom is leveraged to protect the subject against being socially instrumentalized. The subject resists being hijacked by technocapitalist consumerism in order to maintain its ontological force in its refusal to be defined by “freedoms” whose exchange-based forms merely stage us as players in a game that is not played for our benefit and that we can never win.
…
“The philosopher is not wise, but an “idiot”, since he does not possess wisdom as a given but rather seeks it as something that does not pre-exist”
Deleuze and Guattari [3].
Whether or not we can turn this situation around and create social structures based around the fostering of subjectivity is open to debate. And, as mentioned, any theory espousing this, even as a potential, must stand against self-dogmatisation in order to present itself seriously as a path towards self and social transformation. This necessitates a form of ironic self-awareness whereby the theory acknowledges its transient symbolic situatedness in and dependence on the very structures it seeks to change. Theory must preach but also mock itself as an “idiot” in the church of the sacred—never a denizen but always a refugee. And so enzymatic knowledge machines must always inhere a note of self-deprecation, a nod towards their discardability in contexts that are always in the process of change and retransfigure theory in accordance with circumstance. This particular theory of freedom as precarity—with the modest aim of presenting a grounds on which to catalyse knowledge of the dangers of taking human values, meaning, and creativity for granted in a technocapitalist culture—is one such refugee of the sacred that requests only the provisional respect of reflection on its claims.
Source: Freedom, Precarity, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines – Paul R. Buckle – Academia.edu
