Abstract:This rather suggestive and altogether speculative essay began as an attempt on our part to use a model of bio-chemical signal-transduction (Howard Rasmussen's schema for 'synarchic regulation') to explain, beyond the boundaries of cell-transduction in molecular chemistry, transduction in cell-phone applications: the 'synarchic regulation' -and rather remarkable reticulation -of 'cellular transmission' in the techno-communicational rather than bio-chemical field. It was to be a complement and/or an alternate perspective to our conference-paper and subsequent book-chapter on the 'app-alliance' both of which had been written in and for the event of the Apps and Affect conference in October 2013. It became something slightly different, unmoored from mere cellular transmission as such and suggestive of a much more general and more comprehensive techno-scientific, marketeconomic and politico-military -or 'synarchic' -network, operating as the regulative engine for an emerging and overarching planetary system of algorithmic governance. In what follows, we offer an 'app'lication of the principles of 'synarchic regulation' to the field of 'algorithmic governance'.issue 25: Apps and Affect.

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's argument that the matter—the materials —of materialist historiography are the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child's play and children's playthings a potential 'playing out' and 'recollecting' of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed messianic history The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the 'New Janitocracy'.

This paper advances the argument that Foucault's notion of 'bodily inscription' can be found in more rudimentary form in the Nietzschean notion of 'bodily descent'- the path qua pathology of 'going under' first outlined by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The argument is set within context of the ongoing debate in Foucault studies about whether a non-discursive dimension of the body can be posited or whether the body is always already and inevitably discursive. Following Judith Butler's assessment that there is in Foucault's work the presence of a body outside of signification, the present paper argues that Foucaultian bodily inscription is akin to Nietzschean bodily descent: both are predicated on and depend upon the occluded presence of an inherently 'indecent' or 'undisciplined' body, one that disrupts the discursive economy of subjectivization (assujettissement). Through the detailed reading of an exemplary tale by Franz Kafka ('In the Penal Colony'), we attempt to describe the structural axes or disciplinary matrix that descends and is imposed upon 'undisciplined' or 'indecent' bodies, revealing in so doing the 'indecent' body subject to this descent, the body 'crossed over' and 'crossed out' - 'double crossed' - by these axes, by this matrix. We suggest that it is at the crossroads or the crossing of these axes, precisely at the point where the indecent and untidy body is 'inscribed' and 'disciplined', that Foucault, like Nietzsche, locates a point that points beyond the structure, beyond axial and axiomatic binaries, to a body of inherent possibilities, affective virtualities, and spirited resistance.

The topic of this essay, as the title suggests, is Endgame's “dramatis non-persona” Mother Pegg, and how this non-persona functions as the focal point not only of that play in particular (Endgame), but figuratively – or rather, figurelessly: that is, as a function (functionally) rather than a figure per se – more generally in Beckett's work. As early, indeed, as 1935 (when Beckett attended a lecture at Tavistock and thought that he had heard a comment about someone who had “never really been born”), Beckett, in his works, began to delve or dig (“claw,” as he once put it [Disjecta 107]) deeper and deeper into his personae – and “the persona” more generically – in order to come into contact with (if not, in fact, to come to terms with) the non-persona obscured by the persona, the non-being “masked” or “covered over” by being itself (which, thanks to the work of Beckett's contemporary and fellow ‘Parisian immigré’ Émmanuel Lévinas, is, in this article, designated as the “illeity” – ill-seen, ill-said – beyond the individual persona qua “ipseity”). In Endgame, Mother Pegg is this ill-seen, ill-said illeity (non-person) displaced – replaced – by the “personae” present and presented in the play; personae who (as we come to learn in Endgame's diegesis) are presented – illuminated – onstage by dint of a denial: viz. the denying of any light to Mother Pegg. At a critical point in the play, indeed, we are told (by way of the character Clov) that the light which shines upon the stage shines by the grace of a prior disgrace: the death by darkness of an absent other, Mother Pegg (who “died … [o]f darkness” [75], which explains her non-appearance in the play – her “existence by proxy” as Samuel Beckett would say [qtd. in Harvey 247]). This absent other or “être manqué” (Harvey 247) is, I argue, the focal point qua vanishing-point of the play itself and of Beckett's writerly gaze en générale (poetic and dramatic) from the late 1930s or 1940s onward.

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