Sean Erwin

Scholars have cited the influence of Lucretius on Machiavelli as important to framing Machiavelli's position on the freedom of political agents. Some scholars like Roecklin (2012) and Rahe (2007, 2008) argue that Machiavelli was a determinist based on Machiavelli's rejection of the clinamen; others argue with Brown (2010, 2013, 2015) and Morfino (2006, 2011) that Machiavelli's affirmation of Lucretian natural principles left room for the freedom of agents. However, this paper takes a different approach by arguing that Machiavelli successfully resists identification with either of these positions. I argue here that Machiavelli affirms a notion of agency that reflects the influence of the Lucretian notion of mixed bodies where human actions emerge from an irreducible multiplicity of subjective and objective factors. I also argue that Machiavelli structures the narratives describing the actions of his agents in a way that supports interpreting their actions as both contingent and necessary.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the earth as a relationship between the flows of a plane of consistency, on the hand, and processes of geological strata formation, on the other.  Anselm Kiefer’s, Die Erdzeitalter, is a 17-foot high sculpture shaped from a seemingly random pile of unfinished canvases and random objects that range from dried sunflowers to books made of lead.  Seen through the lenses of Deleuze and Guattari’s geo-logics of immanence, Kiefer’s installation appears as a project of territoriality – i.e., a living being’s campaign to establish rhythms and coordinate flows within its environmental milieu.

Foucault's disciplinary society and his notion of panopticism are often invoked in discussions regarding electronic surveillance. Against this use of Foucault, I argue that contemporary trends in surveillance technology abstract human bodies from their territorial settings, separating them into a series of discrete flows through what Deleuze will term, the surveillant assemblage. The surveillant assemblage and its product, the socially sorted body, aim less at molding, punishing and controlling the body and more at triggering events of in-and exclusion from life opportunities. The meaning of the body as monitored by latest generation vision technologies formed from machine only surveillance has been transformed. Such a body is no longer disciplinary in the Foucauldian sense. It is a virtual/flesh interface broken into discrete data flows whose comparison and breakage generate bodies as both legible and eligible (or illegible).

For those familiar with Machiavelli’s texts, Foucault’s interpretation of Macchiavelli in his 1978 lecture series Sécurité, Territoire, Population  is surprising. Although Machiavelli figures prominently in five of the thirteen lectures,  Foucault treats Machiavelli as if he were the author of only one book—The Prince—and his reading treats this complex text as if it covered only one topic: how to guarantee the security of the Prince.  Clearly Foucault did not intend his interpretation of Machiavelli as a close exegesis.  Other discussions of Foucault’s treatment of Machiavelli have acknowledged the role Machiavelli plays in these lectures and even note the inadequacy of the interpretation given by Foucault, but most commentators do not pursue Foucault’s reading further.  This investigation is not concerned with whether Foucault got Machiavelli right. Rather, Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli is noteworthy because it is partial and incomplete in a way reminiscent of Foucault’s reading of Hobbes in, Il faut défendre la société.  This fragmentary character of Foucault’s inscription of Machiavelli as a forerunner of the history of biopolitique allows an innovative reading of the Florentine that connects Machiavelli’s thinking, however indirectly, on a trajectory that encounters, for instance, Foucault’s analysis of populations, the police state, and even his reading of liberalism during the 1978-1979 lectures. My argument here is that the specific way Foucault’s inscribes Machiavelli in the history of gouvernementalité, while seeming to reject him, in fact acts to resuscitate, and thereby relay, a reading of Machiavelli as a thinker who articulates encounters among political practices engaged within a horizon of radical immanence.

Most commentators take Machiavelli’s treatment of the theme making use of the arms of others to be aimed mainly, if not entirely, at delivering warnings and offering practical solutions to the problems princes and republics encounter when they rely on troops that are not their own. These commentators therefore tend to dramatically limit the horizons of their interpretations of Machiavelli’s discussion and elaboration of the themes making use of the arms of others and having arms of one’s own.   
However, I contend that these apparently contradictory themes in Machiavelli’s writings—the themes of armi d’altri (arms of others) and armi proprie (arms of one’s own)—are not as opposed as they may seem at first glance. The project of making a people one’s own is a central and recurrent concern in Machiavelli’s works,  and a careful examination of this theme highlights issues ranging from an analysis of the phenomena of discipline and obedience to an account of the genesis and structure(s) of authority.  Along these lines, I will argue that when Machiavelli’s discussions of the arms of others are carefully considered in context, the theme shows considerable complexity and opens Machiavelli’s discussions of the nature of military force to a new and fruitful vantage point.  My contention in this paper is that Machiavelli’s treatments of a certain kind of armi d’altri – i.e., auxiliary arms – articulate the phenomenon from the standpoint of the prince (as is to be expected), where such forces serve as an instrument for the projection of power, but also, surprisingly, from the standpoint of the people; and, further, that Machiavelli’s depiction of auxiliary force reveals the people to be a radically aleatory force on which to rely.  Acknowledging the aspectival function played by the definition of auxiliaries in Machiavelli’s texts offers a new vantage point for re-reading Machiavelli on the nature of authority, power and the conflict of the umori.
http://www.erwinsean.com/portfolio/the-metabolism-of-the-state-instrumental-and-aleatory-aspects-of-auxiliaries-in-machiavelli/

This paper examines the notion of the biopolitical body from the standpoint of Foucault’s logic of the security mechanism and the history he tells of vaccine technology. It then investigates how the increasing importance of the genetic code for determining the meaning and limits of the human in the field of 20th century cell biology has been a cause for ongoing transformation in the practices that currently extend vaccine research and development. I argue that these transformations mark the emergence of a new kind of medical subject – the stabilized and infinitely reproducible human cell line – and that the practices and markets exploiting this new form of organism have had a destabilizing effect on the very biopolitical structures that engendered them and, in fact, mark a new way of conceiving the possibilities of cellular life. I call these new ways of organizing power that intervene in the logic of the security measure by mediating the relationship between populations and persons the microbiopolitical.

The panoptic architecture described by Michel Foucault in, Discipline and Punish (1976), has been a dominant paradigm in surveillance studies since its inception as an organized field of inquiry in the 1970s.  However, over the last decade this paradigm has come under increasing criticism.  As Kevin Haggerty (2006) states:
“Foucault continues to reign supreme in surveillance studies and it is perhaps time to cut off the head of the king.”
An increasing number of commentators argue that the model of the panopticon fails to account for the programmed character of smart surveillance technology.  They argue that these technologies do not seek to discipline behaviors as much as they aim to route bodies through different surveillance environments by events of in and exclusion on the basis of massive searches of databases.

Seeking a paradigm better able to account for the relationship between software algorithms with big data, some commentators have turned to Deleuze and his 1992 critique of Foucault in the, “Postscript on Societies of Control”.  They frequently adopt Deleuze’s notion of the rhizomatically structured, surveillant assemblage, as a model better adapted than the panopticon to account for the capabilities of today’s digital networks.

In this paper I argue that Deleuze’s notion of the surveillant assemblage may in fact be better adapted to account for the networked character of electronic surveillance than Foucault’s panopticon.  However, I argue that Foucault himself was very aware of the limits of panopticism and that his contribution to surveillance studies must not be limited to that model alone. During his 1978 lectures, Sécurité Territoire Population, Foucault introduced a new paradigm – les dispositifs de sécurité.  This paradigm exceeds the panoptic paradigm and overlaps with Deleuze’s model in four important ways: 1) security mechanisms operate at the level of populations (both human and non-human) and do not depend on closed spaces like the prison, classroom and barracks in order to function.  2) Security mechanisms function in tandem with disciplinary regimes.  This allows Foucault to account for the fact that the disruptive effects of electronic surveillance networks do not replace disciplinary spaces.  In fact they capture disciplined bodies in the process of virtualizing them.  3) The security mechanism is a non-hierarchical form of governance.  Those engaged in the activity of electronic surveillance are as much subject to surveillance as those whom they observe.  4) For Foucault and Deleuze, the ‘meaning’ of the security mechanism is a function of both the intended and the unintended effects of the system.  This gives the paradigm the flexibility to explain the significance of both false positives and false negatives in the routine functioning of surveillance networks.

The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy will sponsor several panels at the 2019 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Toronto, March 17th to 19th, 2019.  We welcome proposals on any relevant theme, but we are especially interested in the following topics:
· Medieval and Renaissance accounts of language.
· The transmission of Medieval and Renaissance authors in Early Modernity.
· Discussions of critical receptions of Medieval and Renaissance authors
and the interpretive effects these readings engendered.
· Themes linked to work on Machiavelli and Lucretius and their transmission.
Please download the attached CFP for more information.

We are happy to announce the call for submissions for the 2017 edition of The Humanities and Technology Review. The HTR is a double-blind, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal that explores the impact of technology on human life from a broad range of perspectives. We welcome papers that investigate the cultural interaction of the humanities, science, engineering, and technology. The theme for this year's journal is, Morality and Creativity in a Technological Age. Possible themes for submissions include the ethics of coding technologies; the ethics of gene technology and human engineering; the use of GMOs and questions of food security, along with papers that address how changes in technology carry implications for social and political thought. All papers examining vital issue areas at the juncture of technology and society will be considered.