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, dialectically:
(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 value. Your work is worth something because it comes from you. Your creativity is worth something because it's yours. Intellectual property as the institution that legally enshrines that belief.
(2) Generative AI shows that interiority was never a necessary condition. Industrial capitalism had already decoupled the subject from its material production (the alienation described by Marx). The worker loses the object, the process, the relationship with their peers; but the capacity to think, name, and create meaning remained beyond the direct reach of the machine. Marx saw the expropriation of living labor by dead labor, the machine that replaces muscle. Today, through AI, capitalism's own development extends that logic to cognitive labor. The classical alienation said: I take away what you produce with your hands. This says something different, and perhaps worse: you are not (that) necessary to produce meaning. It attacks the reserve that remained; the text, the argument, the judgment, the conceptual synthesis. From the alienation of labor to the alienation of meaning.
(3) Synthesis not found (yet), but I don't think it's going to be either “the human recovers their place” or “AI replaces the human.” Both options keep revolving around the same axis: productivity as the measure. The Aufhebung (?) has to break that axis. I'll venture to imagine a subject that will no longer be able to define itself by what it produces, forced to find another foundation. It's a question capitalism cannot answer, and that in some sense it needs to remain unasked.
One more turn. AI emerges from the archive of (much of) everything humans produced, registered, and left as trace. And if what we called interiority was already technically mediated, archived, iterable from the very beginning (Derrida likes this, and David Gunkel has been working through it from “the death of the author”; worth reading) then AI not only puts the idea of interiority in crisis; it makes visible that capitalism always valued the subject less for being human than for its capacity to produce circulating forms.1
What remains of the subject when it can no longer ground itself in the exceptionality of its language, its creativity, or its capacity for synthesis? Or better: what remains of the subject when it can no longer think of itself as the privileged source of the meaning it produces?
Marx was no Luddite. He didn't want to destroy the machines; he wanted to change the relations of production under which they operated. Following the Fragment on Machines, the fact that a technology operates under capitalism does not imply that capitalism is the best way to organize it. Technology is not the problem; the relations of production are. The same logic applies to AI. Under informational capitalism, its deployment completes the alienation of meaning, but that doesn't make AI intrinsically alienating; if anything, it makes capitalism intrinsically incapable of answering the questions it opens. Under different relations, the same technology could free the subject from the obligation to produce meaning in order to exist. I'm not sure what that would mean: emancipation? disorientation? or simply a new obligation on its way?
— E.
Case in point: this week Standard Chartered announced worker replacements by AI, describing them as “lower-value human capital.” The subject is worth something as capital, and when its value drops, it gets replaced.↩