From “subject” to “project”. Subjectivity’s transformations in workspaces

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate, through a theoretical analysis, the transformative processes that invest subjectivity in its relationship with the working dimension, starting from the consideration of the centrality of capitalism for contemporary society and of the performative role it plays with respect to human and social experience. The subject has often been analyzed form an “object” perspective, in that the analyses mainly focused on how much capitalism makes the subject an object. Currently capitalism is not limited to this type of exploitation but affirms even more its performative dimension by shifting the perspective from the subject as an “object” to the subject as a “project”. What is the social actor’s role in this way? The impression is that some resources, such as trust, creativity and sociability are used, but not respected in their constitutive logic, nor reproduced. The point is that the question is not on the analysis of the processes that involve exclusively the economic sphere, but in the examination of the processes that risk producing important effects on the social life, as demonstrated by the colonization of every vital area by the economic logic, which advocates efficiency, incentives and speed as the criteria to be used no longer and not only in the economic sphere, but even in the most private areas of the personal dimension.