#subjectivization

political subjectivization and its vicissitudes

Returning to the legacy of Mills and Hochschild’s contributions, I think their analyses of the impact of immaterial labor markets and processes on individuals and society suggest the ongoing importance of a critical standpoint rooted in a discourse of subjectivity and in relation to some notion of an alternative model of the subject. The expansion of affective forms of labor today only makes these critical investigations into its impact on who we become as emotional laborers in relation to the ‘personality market’ and on the texture and quality of social relations in the ‘great salesroom’ more pressing. Once we recognize the constitutive force of labors in the affective mode, once it is subjectivity that is hired and managed and at work “the prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of subjectivities” (Lazzarato, 1996: 135), questions about how it is governed and who we become are more critical. The problem, it seems to me, is how to focus critical attention on work as a mechanism of subjectification without the conceptual apparatus of alienation and the distinction between existence and essence on which it inevitably depends. How might one formulate a critical assessment of what we are becoming in and through work without depending on a given model of what we truly are? One approach would be to ground the critical standpoint on subjectivity not in a claim about the true or essential self, but in a potential self. What if this alternative model of subjectivity, from the perspective of which existing models can be critically assessed, were to be imagined not in terms of subjectivities that now exist but in terms of those that might come to be? [...] What if the critique that had been developed around the logic of alienation were recoded so that it was no longer about a self to save or to recover but one to invent?”

If certain theses such as ‘the war of each against each’ are elevated to the level of governing principles, it is because they enable certain operations. So in this specific case we should ask: How can the ‘war of each against each’ have begun before each person had been produced as each. And then we will see how the modern State presupposes the state of things that it produces; how it grounds the arbitrariness of its own demands in anthropology; how the ‘war of each against each’ is instead the impoverished ethic of civil war imposed everywhere by the modern State under the name of the economic, which is nothing other than the universal reign of hostility.

What would happen if we saw subjectivization as happening historically, as training in affective sense perception and intuition?

A governmentality is a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits, perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on the same plane of immanence. Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social existence, but on its particular production of truth […] the fundamental understandings of individuals as governed by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured.

Neoliberalism is not simply an ideology in the perjorative sense of the term, or a belief that could elect to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that create subjects of interest, locked in competition

The sense of what is “art” certainly has to be expanded. Guattari’s “aesthetic paradigm” does not refer first and foremost to art, but to forms of social creativity and to the work of Marcel Duchamp, whose most successful opus was undoubtedly his way of “living in the times”, and his way of living, period. I am specifically interested in Duchamp because he practiced a “refusal of work”, which had to do with art.

But what gives power its force, what makes it so hard to get around and master, is that power is positive in its effects. Power invents, power creates, power produces. It produces more than a law that forbids desire--it produces desire itself, power induces and produces desire, power gives desire its objects, power, indeed, is desirable. Power not only produces desire; to an equal degree, and this goes much farther, beyond the law that is imposed on the subject, power produces the very form of the subject, it produces what makes up the subject. The form the subject takes is, precisely, determined by power. Power produces desire and the subject.