COLLECTIVE AGENCY PROPER. A MATERIALISTS\' APPROACH (PARALLAX-PARATAXIS-SYNTAX)

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE HISTORICAL MATERIALISM CONFERENCE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT MARCH 10-12, 2017

COLLECTIVE AGENCY PROPER. A MATERIALISTS' APPROACH (PARALLAX-PARATAXIS-SYNTAX)

Thomas Telios (University of St. Gallen)

*

Abstract: Commenting Theodor W. Adorno’s doctrine of the ‘predominance of the objective’ and Wladimir I. Lenin’s ‘theory of reflection’ Slavoj Žižek debunks in his Afterword. Lenin’s Choice externality as regression to the “pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive ‘objective reality’, never able to grasp it in its infinite complexity.” (p. 179) Instead of “clinging to the minimum of objective reality outside the thought's subjective mediation” (ibid.) Žižek argues for an understanding of materialism that insists “on the absolute inherence of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself.” (ibid.) With this understanding of materialism as point of departure I go on to claim that collective agency per se can be understood only materialistically. The latter entails that the source of collective agency cannot be bestowed to a certain individual capacity, since this would coincide with a regression to individualist understanding of agency. At the same time though and according to the above mentioned definition, this external source – that for the same reasons cannot be an individual – has to become inherent to the subject in order to prevent it from unravelling its full identity. Seen this way, I claim, on a second step, that this parameter can be realized only through a theory that acknowledges the subject as a socially constituted entity. Through its creation this subject reproduces the practices that brought it forth and thus it internalizes them as a part of itself. On a first level the subject is being prevented – through its social constitution – to attain its full identity, because it is permanently irritated through the external norms that incessantly make it reconfigure itself. On a second level though the subject is being prevented from becoming an individual because of the clash of discourses, identities and ways of production that encounter each other as a subject through those various processes of subjectivation that culminate in the social construction of the subject. Out of the latter not just (individual) agency is being rendered inherent to the subject; a claim that Judith Butler has already convincingly underpinned in her Contingent Foundations when she asserted that “the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency” (p. 46). Moreover, collective agency seems also to emanate out of these subjectivation processes as an intrinsic agential mode of the subject, immanent to its own constitutional process. In this regard collective agency is materialistic in a threefold way: (a) because it does not require the legitimization of a subject in order to be conceived; (b) because it never allows the subject to consolidate itself; (c) because it is inherent to the subject qua its own process of constitution. The main political gain of this framework is that whereas collective action remains a matter of the Political concerning the domains it can/ought to be implemented, collective agency is to be located at the Social thus becoming an undisputed social-ontological condition of the subject in question.

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TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE

* Given the title of my paper “Collective Agency Proper. A Materialists’ approach”, I think at least three introductory remarks are expected: Firstly, what ought to be understood under the generic term collective agency? Secondly, what is propriety and how is collective agency to be understood in its propriety? Thirdly, what codifies materialism? What is, subsequently, a materialistic approach of collective agency, and – last but not least – why do I speak of a materialists’ approach in plural and not of one singular materialistic approach? Not being sure, which is the most difficult of them, I will try and give – for the time being – some first tentative definitions of those terms. As I hope to make clear by the end of the paper, “materialism”, “propriety” and “collective agency” should be considered not as excluding, but as the only way of reassuring one another.

a) With collective agency I understand the ability to engage in collective actions, whereas this ability comprises of several different distinctive moments: It addresses the question of (a) the grounds that make collective action possible; (b) the reasons that weigh over such a decision making process; (c) the actors in question; (d) the anticipated goals; lastly, (e) the ways in which those goals are to be realized. My intuition is thereby that in the history of ideas very little amount of work has been invested in trying to define collective agency per se. What we rather have is a proliferation of attempts to ground – by affirming or by questioning – individual agency in order to derive collective agency out of it, instead of looking at the modalities and the ways of being of collective agency. Should the latter diagnosis be correct, there is threefold to observe: (a) firstly, that collective agency has to be separated from individual agency as the former being contrasted to the latter; (b) secondly, that collective agency can be asserted only as a second-order ability: one, that on the one hand does not exist independently, but solely as an extension of individual agency and on the other hand can be made plausible only after the agency of each one of the participating individuals has been sufficiently substantiated; and thirdly (c) that with the primacy of individual agency as starting point and with collective agency as a derivative of the primary individual agency, collective action – which is the materialization of collective agency – needs analogously a legitimization ground in order to be justified as a political tactic; a tactic, that comes into question only after every individual action has proven to be insufficient. b) Seen this way, a notorious lack of propriety in qualifying collective agency is to be ascertained, since all we know about collective agency is at the end interceded by the practical faculties of the individual subject – hence my suspicion that collective agency has always been idealistically reasoned, instead of materialistically conceived [2]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE of. No matter if propriety addresses the being before it becomes thought, the deferment and processual character of being through thought, the impossibility of being without thought, or the continuous inauguration of being through thought and the eventful character of being qua thought, collective agency – even in the most advanced: that of Jacques Derrida’s undermining understanding of propriety – should then be the one determining collective agency and not vice versa. Should individual agency be – as metaphor? – what we have to engage in order to be transferred to collective agency, then there is still an astonishingly very little amount of work invested in defining the primary “Eigentliche” that should be then collective agency. In respect thereof, of the fact that collective agency has always been dealt with through the individual agency, I think it wouldn’t be farfetched to speak of a – till now in the history of ideas – more or less idealistic way of attending to collective agency. Under the latter I term concepts that – independently of the argumentation they engage – disavow at the end any other foundation of collective agency except for through the presupposed agency of the individual. Concerning this point a suspiciously remarkable congruency between constructivist theories of subjectivity – according to which the subject is regarded as socially constituted – and essentialist understandings of the subject – where the subject figures as bestowed with certain pre-existent qualities – can be observed. The former tendencies are still desperate in search of a ground upon which collective agency could be found, since after they have let the subject together with its agency eclipse, they have consequently disallowed it also its ability to act collectively; Judith Butler’s most significant recent attempt in this direction (cf. Assembly) ended in a terrific reessentialization of the Body bereft of any performativity and extrapolated as constituent of and not constituted by the Political that this times takes the upper hand over the gender-producing Social. The latter tendencies, the essentialist ones, – no matter in what kind of socially cultivated mode of deficiency they present the subject – they always tend to – at the end – attract an external reason (be it a political objective, a reconciliatory language potential, incommensurable ethics etc.) upon which – even in a last instance – collective agency could be predicated. Out of this perspective subjectivity – as logically necessary preexistence or in its essential qualities – still infiltrates collective agency by deflecting a conceptualization of collective agency per se to forms of – primarily individually derived, and just jointly accomplished – collective action. c) Coming to – undoubtedly the most complicated – notion of the three, that of materialism, little do I need to point out – especially in front of such an audience – how obscure and misleading this notion is, has been and can be. Taking the delineations followed up to now it is obvious that – at least for the time being – a materialist understanding of collective agency should, at a certain degree, be opposed to the aforementioned idealistic ones. Concerning collective agency, a materialist understanding of it should not necessarily oppose or take off from a [3]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE constructivist notion of subjectivity, nor proclaim or be reduced to an essentialist one, since – as detected – neither of them manage to disentangle itself from subjectivity as the origin of collective agency. A materialist notion of subjectivity should – seen this way – be able to propose a notion of collective agency beyond subjectivity in a twofold sense: that while an actor has to be withhold that is capable of expressing and materializing collective agency to action, this actor cannot be a certain substantialist subject of some kind or its qualities. Secondly, and also according the delineations followed up to now, a materialist understanding should not allow for a thinking of external normativity to provide the ultimate ground from which collective agency could be operatively discharged. I think that Slavoj Žižek’s notion of materialism seems to fit a number of those criteria and it is to one of his readings of materialism that I now turn to. ** Commenting Theodor W. Adorno’s doctrine of the ‘predominance of the objective’ and Wladimir I. Lenin’s ‘theory of reflection’ Slavoj Žižek debunks in his Afterword. Lenin’s Choice externality as regression to the “pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive ‘objective reality’, never able to grasp it in its infinite complexity.” (Lenin, 179) Instead of “clinging to the minimum of objective reality outside the thought's subjective mediation” (ibid.) Žižek argues for an understanding of materialism that insists “on the absolute inherence of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself.” (ibid.) The latter entails that the source of collective agency cannot be bestowed to a certain individual capacity, since this would coincide with a regression to individualist understanding of agency. At the same time though and according to the above mentioned definition, this external source – that for the same reasons cannot be an individual – has to become inherent to the subject in order to prevent it from unravelling its full identity. This is a necessary preliminary point of what Žižek – a couple of books later – will coin as the parallactical moment, inherent to every sense of materialism propre. Such readings of materialism – like that of Adorno or a certain Lenin – that Žižek designates in this later book as “historical” ones, resolve – in their attempt to overcome externality and redeem subjectivity from the necessity of having to assume the existence of pre-social qualities – in proclaiming “thought (‘consciousness’) as an inherent moment of the very process of (social) being, of collective praxis, as a process embedded in social reality […], as its active moment.” (Parallax, 6). By contrast materialism withdraws from an attempt to overcome external reattachments or attractions by hierarchizing or facilitating the one over the other in favor of “how, from within the flat order of positive being, the very gap between thought and being, the negativity of thought, emerges.” (ibid.) Materialism’s proper question is in other words: “how is it [4]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE possible, for a living being, to break/suspend the cycle of the reproduction of life, to install a non-act, a withdrawal into reflexive distance from being, as the most radical intervention?“ (ibid.). Echoing Kierkegaard, Žižek will assert that what is at stake here is “not to overcome the gap that separates thought from being, but to conceive it in its ‘becoming.’” (ibid.) By that Žižek breaks the tie and in lieu of an externally self-mediated subject he imposes a subject that “is not the direct assertion of my [the subjects; T.T.] inclusion in objective reality” (Parallax, 17). Rather, the subject “resides in the reflexive twist by means of which I myself [the subject; T.T.] am included in the picture constituted by me – it is this reflexive short circuit, this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to my ‘material existence.’ Materialism means that the reality I see is never ‘whole’- not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it. Nowhere is this structure clearer than in the case of Lacan’s objet petit a, the object cause of desire.” (Parallax, 17-8). As Žižek puts it, “the first critical move is to replace this topic of the polarity of opposites with the concept of the inherent ‘tension,’ gap, noncoincidence, of the One itself” (Parallax, 7) in order to “designate this gap which separates the One from itself with the term parallax” (ibid.). The parallax is not one determinate moment or instance or discourse in due course of the subject’s transition to being, nor the assertion of its heteronomous production, but the chasm, the gap, the void opened between the subject’s production and the perceptive movement of its thought to conceive of it and itself in the aspiration of not having to take into account the reality of its production. Necessity – herein contra Kierkegaard (cf. Parallax, 79) – is constitutive for such a subject formation, since – unlike the externalist, idealistic approaches exposed earlier where the external presides over the heteronomous subject – both the subjectified Subject as well as the subjectifying instance are tangent to it and both of them have to succumb to this relational processuality of necessary replenished efficacies imposed upon them by the materialist process. The presumption of something external, capable of regulating its self-rehabilitation, is being condemned by Žižek, herein in accordance with Badiou, as being not only idealistic – this wouldn’t be a mentionable accusation, but rather as being incapable of providing sufficient explanations of what it was mounted to explain, i.e. how to access thought and being when conditioned by each other (cf. Parallax, 166-7), since when external to the productive process it is also absent from the process that will produce the subject and will embody itself in the subject before appearing as the subject. Seen this way Žižeks understanding of materialism leaves us better off, when questioning the subject’s production, since it asserts relationalism over solipsism, processuality over transcendentalism and immanence over externality, but at the same time it is unsatisfactory when scrutinizing its collective agency. The fact that he – when paying homage to another Hegelian figure, the rabble – cannot but exult the slam-dwellers as [5]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE the “the new axis of class struggle” (Parallax, 269) is symptomatic both of his lacuna to theorize collective agency, as well as of the direction that the interrogation of collective agency needs to hence appropriate. The emancipatory potentiality of the slum-dwellers lies in the fact that their defining feature is neither epistemological (like Lukács’), nor fideist or psychoanalytical. Žižek’s favorable emancipatory movement in Parallax is the “psychoanalytic collective” (Parallax, 306), because the materialistically refined edition of the subject he offers is at the very end an essentially and not just a methodologically psychoanalytic one, and therefore it can be overcome only by a psychoanalytic collective. Furthermore, the defining feature of the slum dwellers is not just a singular one like labor, gender, ecological consciousness, anti-statism etc. out of which uniquely universal claims can rise. As Žižek rightly asserts, the defining feature of the slum-dwellers “is sociopolitical” (Parallax, 269). By that he correctly professes the one-sidedness of the Political as preponderant over any other way of the subject’s production; nevertheless, Žižek himself does not seem to be able to provide an alternative framework of how to grasp collective agency apart from the void of the subject that can be bridged through Žižek’s political normativity of the party; a normativity equally external to the ones mentioned above – as absent from the subject's structuration – and thus equally refutable. The sociopolitical bears with it the modular moments of Žižek’s analysis of the subject (relationalism, processuality and immanence), without retracting at the same time the substantialim of the psychoanalytical gap as sole origin of subjectivity. This does not mean that the Sociopolitical does not comprise of a psychoanalytical moment, but rather that the Sociopolitical does not suffice in just that, as it cannot be exhausted in only one regime of production like the aforementioned production regimes of labor, gender, state, religion etc. If the parallactic subject has not succeeded in offering a prolific alternative of how to define collective agency in a materialist way, maybe the sociopolitical paratactic subject will prove to be of a better outcome. *** The notion of parataxis is one also encountered in Žižek; not in the Parallax View, but in his more recent Less than Nothing. Hegel and the Shadows of Dialectical Materialism. The word Parataxis appears only once, in the title of the 5th Chapter “Parataxis: Figures of the Dialectical Process”. In this chapter Žižek intends to corroborate his assumption that materialism is opposed both to Kantian synthetic a priori, as well as to systemic epistemological closures of a misread Hegelian provenience. On the level of form it should also struck as no surprise that Žižek avails himself of the paratactical scheme as a rhetorical medium in order to sustain his political intervention, as Sharpe and Boucher have persuasively argued (Žižek and Politics, 21). Parataxis is not a newbie in the tradition of anti-systemic thinking. Adorno has pointed out in his comments on Hölderlin's late poetry that parataxis, as [6]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE expressive medium, is capable of illustrating “the caesura between the halves of life” (Parataxis, 133), how “language appears paratactically disordered when judged in terms of subjective intention” (Parataxis, 135) and how at the very end parataxis designates a “revolt against synthesis” (Parataxis, 136). Jean-François Lyotard, comments in his Differend the paratactic idiom as follows: “Conjoined by and, phrases or events follow each other, but their succession does not obey a categorial order (because; if, then; in order to; although…). Joined to the preceding one by and, a phrase arises out of nothingness to link up with it. Paratax thus connotes the abyss of NotBeing which opens between phrases, it stresses the surprise that something begins when what is said is said. And is the conjunction that most allows the constitutive discontinuity (or oblivion) of time to threaten, while defying it through its equally constitutive continuity (or retention).” (Differend, 66, Fn. 100) And in the most recent past Catherine Malabou has acknowledged the force and disseminating functionality of paratactic writing in order to promote confusion and horizontal structures. As she states in her Ontology of the Accident: “An asyndeton is a sort of ellipse in which the conjunctions that combine the propositions and segments of the sentence are removed. […] It belongs to the class of disjunctions and it telescopes words, which come one after the other, one on top of the other, occurring as what amounts to so many accidents. They dent each another, lose all flexibility, surface, grease, society. The asyndeton is linguistic alcoholism. Use of asyndeton may cause interpretative difficulties, confusion. This rhetorical figure removes any conjunctions whatsoever from the sentence: the copula (the verb to be), chronological conjunctions (before, after), logical conjunctions (but, for, thus), deictics and adverbs. The main effect is an expression of disorder, which is why the asyndeton is frequently used in dialogues to convey a speaker’s confusion.” (Accident, 61-2).

All those thematizations have one common denominator: That the structure of parataxis is one that encroaches horizontality upon systemicity, impinges incommensurability against modular hierarchies and infringes openness against closure. Should the subject be only a psychoanalytic void, then it would suffice to tackle it in a parallactic way. The same if the subject was produced by conditions of labor, structured linguistically, was reflected solely upon its gender, was the product of ideological state apparatuses, religious beliefs etc. The subject is not only the outcome of each one of those ways of production, but also all of them together. Taking up the notion of the Sociopolitical mentioned before, the subject is the product of different ways of production located throughout the different layers that the Sociopolitical consists of. It is not only labor, language, gender, the state, religion, economic ways of production, biopolitics, a certain logic of accumulation, domination or empire, that bring forth [7]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE subjectivation processes. In the earliest cartography of such production mechanisms, in Marx' EconomicPhilosophical Manuscripts, “religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc.” figure also as ways of production of subjectivity. This list can be expanded so as to include also such various spheres (like the private, or the public), cognitive registers (e.g. the ethical, the ontological), public domains (like the national state, the market, the school or the church) and deliberative discourses (like the Social, the Political, Race or Gender etc.) that form the Sociopolitical which in its turn will become the defining moment of the new emancipatory subject. The approach demanded in order to decipher such a structure must be a more elaborate one than the parallactic one suggested by Žižek. Then this understanding of subjectivity is not only paratactic. It is paratactic when we take into account each one of those subjectivation processes in regard to one another. At the same time the paratactic subject is also a syntactic one when taking into account that all these different ways of production find themselves condensed in the subject's body. Seen from this perspective the opening questions remain untouched: In what degree does this parataxis of ways of production of subjectivity as well as their syntax in the subject's body remain materialist? And how such an understanding of subjectivity correlates with collective agency? **** When taking into account Quentin Meillasoux’ understanding of materialism, then it would seem that such a syntactic understanding of subjectivity is not – at least at first sight – capable of overcoming the individualist residua that Meillasoux debunked through his “Correlation-Thesis”. Meillasoux coins “Correlationism” “every philosophy that maintains the impossibility of acceding through thought to a being independent of thought.” (Iteration etc, 2). Seen this way, “correlationism” signifies “every form of de-absolutization of thought that, to obtain this result, argues from the closure of thought upon itself, and its subsequent incapacity to attain an absolute outside of it.” (ibid.) On the contrary “speculative” is “every philosophy that claims […] to attain such an absolute” (ibid.), whereas “materialism” now describes “every thought acceding to an absolute that is at once external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity.” (ibid.) Anti-materialist thinking, according to Meillasoux, is distinguished not only through presupposing and thus absolutizing solipsism in form of Sensation, reason, freedom, perception, will, wills in their mutual conflict, the self in its initial germ state – to name but a few of his examples (cf. Iteration, 3). Well noted, Meillasoux’ rejection of those conceptualization of a metaphysical subjectivity is in accordance with the notion of the syntactic subject I promulgate here, then the subject – in my account – is a socially constructed one and therefore it cannot be presupposed to possess any of the aforementioned qualities. (Should that be not the case, then there would be no case for a materialist collective agency, since as we [8]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE know from the theories around collective intentionality there is enough material to content that the subject disposes of collective intentionality and thus of collective agency). For Meillasoux though, anti-materialism seems to be cloaked, besides metaphysic universalia, under another connotation that he coins subjectalism. As “subjectalism” defines Meillasoux “every metaphysics that absolutizes the correlation of being and thought, whatever sense it attaches to the subjective and objective poles of such a relation.” ( Iteration, 8).With this neologism Meillasoux intends, as he declares, “to put into the same camp” such currents like Hegel, Nietzsche and Deleuze for whom at the end what exists can only be “the subjective - minds and their ideas, human spirits or divine spirits.” (Iteration, 6). What all of them have in common – beginning with Berkeley – is, as Meillasoux’ puts it, that all of them fought “the same combat: that of abolishing the idea of de-subjectivized matter.” (ibid.) Concerning this point allow me to make two tentative remarks before summing up by coming to the collective agential competences of the syntactic subject I have tried to sketch so far: As Žižek states: “The critical implication with regard to Meillassoux is that the true problem is not to think pre-subjective reality, but to think how something like a subject could have emerged within it; without this (properly Hegelian) gesture, any objectivism will remain correlationist in a hidden way–its image of “reality in itself” remains correlated (even if in a negative way) with subjectivity…. it is not enough to oppose transcendental correlation to a vision of reality-in-itself–transcendental correlation itself has to be grounded in reality-in-itself; i.e., its possibility has to be accounted for in the terms of this reality.” (Less than nothing, 642-3) Though Zizek cannot avoid but to let his political normativity make itself discernible once more when he asserts that transcendental correlation „has to be accounted of in the terms of this reality“ and – as seen – this kind of political consciousness is normative as external to the occuring nascent subject as knot of different ways of production, he is nonetheless right when he acknowledges that thinking thought irrelevantly to its sociopolitical embeddedness is a tricky and even a highly anti-materialist endeavor. The problem here is that we would have to assume that there is a materialist way of thinking thought that precedes the reality of thought and I cannot see how Meillasoux is able to avoid an application of his subjectalist argument against himself, since will, reason, perception, etc. may not be the absolutizing vectors that try to suppress being to thought, but a presupposed materialist capacity of addressing itself outside being and thought has to be presupposed as inherent to the subject. Meillasoux' point is a valid one and therein he is in accordance with Žižek when opposing historical materialism, that we should not address thought as derivative of being. He succumbs nonetheless at bestowing the subject with such a capability of thinking itself without itself. The model of the syntactic subject is - I think - capable of providing an answer without falling back to metaphysical transcendentalism. ***** [9]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE Through the processes of its subjectivation the subject-to-be lets different processes of internality and externality unravel. Collective agency, the ability that enables subjects to engage in collective actions with other subjects, does not belong strictly to the subject, for it can not be controlled by it. It arises with the subject, during the emergence of the subject and ultimately as the subject, but it does not belong to the subject in order to switch it on or use it as desired. The subject does not precede this agency, but collective agency and subject co-originate. This excludes the possibility that subject and collective agency are interrelated in a relationship of externality, thus rendering such an accusation obsolete. In contrast to a normative and therefore external justification of collective agency, the collective agency of the syntactic subject is the result of historical, social-ontological processes that is being set in motion through the historicized, socio-political, origination of the subject. The negative answer to the manifest question if the social production of the subject does not in its turn contest externality as origin of the subject's collective agency is that the existence of the external ways of production – that act through the subject and construct it to a subject – are at the same time testified as existent through the actions of this subject, whereby those ways of production become – this time – constructions of the subject in question. Collective agency belongs – seen this way – stricto sensu to the subjectivation process and not to the subject being produced at the very moment. This process is not external, because it is made apparent, present and real as a subject. At the same time, there is no subject outside these processes and these processes themselves constantly happen and force the subject to reconstitute and reconfigure itself continuously; there is no fixed subject to which collective agency could be attributed as a property or quality, in order to fall back to the subjective essentialism of Meillasoux' critique of subjectalism. Last but not least, this process is initiated by the ways of production located in the Social that inform one another, are able to be identified incommensurably in themselves (labor production, speech acts, gender construction, national or religious identities, geographical determinations etc.), at the same time though all of them „haunt“ to use a – Derridean term – spectrally and in a collective way the totality of the subject. In this sense not only agency emanates but also collective agency is being imprinted on the subject as part of its becoming a subject. Seen this way collective agency is the subject and it needs not to be legitimized. On the contrary it is rather individual agency that has to cancel the laying at hand potentialities of collective agency in order to legitimize itself, since – in this framework – individual agency is a latent exponent of immanent collective agency.

To sum up: Collective agency proper is to be conceptualized if we take a collectively socially produced subject as starting point. The horizontal paratactical structures that arise through those processes give birth to a subject that [10]

TELIOS, THOMAS 10.3.17 DRAFT! – DO NOT CITE OR CIRCULATE is not arbitrarily either the one or the other of those identities, but the Syntax of simultaneously all of them together. Collective agency rises as result of this ways of production that incorporate the subject with the means to be able to act with more than one identities; identities that at the same time allow not for pluralism, but for collective codetermination of one another through the other.

Works noted: Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Malabou, Catherine. The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay On The Necessity Of Contingency, London: Continuum, 2008. Meillasoux, Quentin. “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign”. Paper held

at

the

Freie

Universität,

Berlin,

April

20th

2012.

(Last

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https://cdn.shopify.com/s/.../Meillassoux_Workshop_Berlin.pdf) Morin, Marie-Eve. “Are we postmodern? On capitalism, fluidity, and parataxis.” Draft (Retrieved March 4th 2017 from https://www.academia.edu/4397562/Are_we_postmodern_On_capitalism_fluidity_and_parataxis) Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2006. Žižek, Slavoj. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, London: Verso, 2012.

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