POLITICS OF SUBJECTIFICATION IN LABOR: FROM DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY TO CONTROL

Abstract

Remarkable social and historical changes we witnessed in the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries show that we are facing mutant modes of subjectification, which are directly connected to productive activities. In this sense, politics and subjectivity are two concepts that go hand in hand when labor relations are analyzed, bringing into play the reinvention of ways of living and working. This theoretical study will bring together the concepts of politics and subjectification, having as reference the emergence and expansion of the so-called immaterial labor. First, we will go back in time and address the politics of subjectification in force in the historical moment which Foucault characterized as disciplinary. Then, the historical changes which Deleuze pointed out and named control of society will be described. In the face of these two scenarios, which merge in the capitalist contemporaneity, the following questions will be covered: How workers are historically and politically constituted as subjects in their labor practice? Which subjective components are updated in the productive context of advanced capitalism? Which politics of subjectification are invented and put into circulation by workers? At the end of the study, there will be a discussion about current challenges for workers who constantly move between the two politics of subjectification addressed.