ABSTRACT
As sites of hybrid play, makerspaces are particularly important because they operate at the intersection of multiple contradictory logics shaping contemporary processes of subjectivation. In the makerspace, subjectivation can go many ways; depending on the combination of logics at work, certain capacities are activated, while others are suppressed. In this chapter, we consider university makerspaces as sites where capitalist, institutional, and State logics dominate, but where playful experimentation may also lead to the emergence of more open, active, and unruly subjectivities. We put our concept of synthetic subjectivation to work in a comparative analysis of two different makerspace events: a corporate-sponsored, industry-focused “Make-A-Thon” competition organized by the library; and an experimental play session carried out by one of us (Elam), in which some of the same machines, materials, and bodies were arranged to make a very different composition. Drawing on participant-observation and autoethnographic data from these two experiences, we reflect on the differences between entrepreneurial logics and more playful, polyvocal logics, mapping the ways in which desiring-production is “piloted” by discourse. In this context, we see the proliferation of discourses of hybridity as a symptom of the broader post-human condition that is unsettling received understandings of the “human” and “nonhuman,” “online” and “offline,” etc. Hybrid subjectivations express our contradictory positioning within two media epistemes. They arise when discourses derived from an older media episteme, the typographic, attempt to make sense of a radically new media-epistemic context, the digital post-human.
