Notes on alienation

informational capture of juridical subjectification

Abstract

This paper offers a conceptual cartography which reviews the classic problem of alienation, based on a materialist critique drawing on Etienne Balibar’s concept of the objective imaginary and Louis Althusser’s theory of reproduction. With the aim of developing rigorous categories for an analysis of the current conjuncture, the theses that predict a tendency toward desubjectification based on progressive total alienation are discussed and replaced by the conjecture of a crisis in the humanist historical modulation of alienation coextensive to the tendential material deployment of new concrete modulations of subjectivation, of an informational nature. This complex process finds its material conditions in the historical alliance between financial capital and information technologies, and generates new trends in the reproduction of capital. These tendencies operate by erasing and reorganizing the boundaries between the economic and the political that used to underpin the imaginary device of the alliance between capital and the law. The dislocation of the boundary that separates social experience, politics, and economics highlights the historical nature of the structural articulation between economic individuation and legal subjectivation, and tends to undermine the combined effectiveness of labor exploitation and humanistic subjectivation.