Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity (2024)

Communication Theory, 1997

Globalizations, 2014

tripleC: communication, capitalism & critique, 2019

In recent years, various descriptions of subjectivity related to the era of neoliberal capitalism have been offered. These descriptions assume uncritically that there is both a subjectivity of this time and a qualified subject to which it corresponds. The contrast of these descriptions with the claims of postmodernist authors regarding the death of the subject posits a contradiction. In this article, a solution to this problem is provided by the support of the dialectic of Sartre's realistic materialism. The application of the dialectic sheds light on the neoliberal individual, who, integrated as a negated subject in the totality of the neoliberal order, shows itself as a reified individual without subjectivity, or rather, with a negated subjectivity. From that it follows, opposed to a rather widely accepted definition, that subjectivity is not a positive characterisation but rather the negativity of the reified form of life within neoliberal capitalism.

Toward the end of their lives, both Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari sought to develop a mode of the production of subjectivity that unbinds itself from hegemonic norms thereby launching what Foucault called an arts of existence and Guattari called existential self-fashioning. This dissertation attempts to update this form of subjectivity curation and creation and bring it into the present-day by taking into account the way that subjectivity has become mediatized and interlinked with various gadgets, beings, and other-than-human entities. The analysis relies on the procedure of metamodeling, derived from schizoanlaysis, in order to construct traversally a system of reference that would slice open the normal sense and gloss that is intrinsic to normative semiologies. This methodology undergirds and guides the theoretical findings of this project, which argue that the now networked nature of being human calls for a neoanimist cosmology that not only decenters the anthropos from its privileged place in the most epistemologically shared sense of the word world, but, even stronger, horizontalizes its privilege on power, obviating its move to raise itself above other beings that it finds in the environment it inhabits. By undercutting the propositional nature of human exceptionalism, it follows that the production of subjectivity can be pushed into channels that are not caught in subjection, policing and hom*ogenization, but into modes that induce processes of subjectivation, the creative self-fashioning of one’s life. Figures like the cosmopolitan idiot, the clown from the carnivalesque, and the performance artist are submitted as prototypical models that help subjectivity mold its being away from subjection and towards a reclaiming of beinghood in the contemporary, mediatized milieu. The way that these embodied tropes and existential scripts are arranged and ordered exposes an encrypted system of reference that deploys the same logic as emblems found in the aesthetic of the baroque. Subjectivity is, paradoxically, a kind of artifice that is more real than the predicates that would make it fake.

A critical analysis of the genesis, emergence and crisis of individualism in modernity, Focus is on the dialectics of two moments : one related to the human nature and the essence of the subjectivity and the other to the historical developments-especially in modernity.

Subjectivity, 2008

Transcultural Psychiatry: Invited Commentary, 1999

Ethos, 2010

Anthropological Theory, 2006

Despite the eclipse of the New Left as an active and visible political force on the American political scene during the transition from the 1960s to the '70s, the concern with subjectivity, self-development, and personal awareness has remained a conspicuous feature of the undertow of mainstream society. Indeed, the period during which radical activity was virtually extinguished on American campuses was simultaneously marked, not simply by the continuing presence of the human growth and human potential movement, but by its efflorescence and expansion. In part, the growth of this "fetish of subjectivity" can be accounted for by the continuing operation of the "dialectic of scientism and subjectivism" in American culture. But it must also be traced to the failure of the American New Left to, on the one hand, keep itself from being caught in this dialectic and, on the other, to politicize 1 and redirect the deeper foundations of this search for a new selfhood, x Thus, even as much of the "remnant" remains skeptical of the radical potential of the new subjectivity (seeing in it the familiar tendencies in American political culture toward inner escapism and subjectivism), it must maintain an openness toward the possibility, as Marcuse has recently suggested, 2 that even in its present distorted forms the new subjectivity may take on new expressions and unfold new needs which cannot be satisfied within the liberal-capitalist and increasingly technocratic-corporate totality of contemporary America. While the more apparent and sensational forms of the new subjectivism associated with the counterculture (hard drugs, esoteric religions, biofeed-back, etc.) have been exhaustively examined and critiqued, a new and disguised form of the new subjectivism infecting middle-class society has gone virtually unnoticed: the developing preoccupation with ethics and morality in

Parallax, 2023

'Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-11.

Introductory chapter to the edited volume 'Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-11.