The crisis of the productive subject: from the alienation of labor to the alienation of meaning

René Magritte, The Human Condition (1933). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. I think: capitalism built the modern subject around the idea of productivity. Modern subject = productive subject (of value, labor, work, discourse, knowledge). Now that same capitalism, through its own development, generated the technology that puts that foundation in crisis. Hegel likes this. Freud would have had something to say too: the ego is not master in its own house. But capitalism operated as if that weren't true, valorizing and institutionalizing the fiction of an “interiority” as the source of what the human being produces. Let me cook: (1) That “interiority” is a historical construction with a specific genealogy. The Cartesian cogito, the romantic genius, the modern idea of authorship, the notion that behind every work there is a consciousness that originates and guarantees it. Capitalism inherited that and reconfigured it: interiority as a source of meaning, but also as a source of…