CONCEPT
Homo Sentimentalis Productivus
Illouz's figure for the characteristic subject of emotional capitalism: the person who experiences her deepest feelings as resources for productive activity, without experiencing the experiencing as loss.
Homo sentimentalis productivus is the human type produced by the convergence of therapeutic culture and productive emotional management. She has internalized two imperatives that ought to be in tension—the productive imperative (my feelings should serve my output) and the therapeutic imperative (my feelings should be examined, managed, and optimized as self-care)—and found that the imperatives reinforce rather than contradict each other. The person who manages her feelings therapeutically becomes more productive; the person who channels her feelings productively experiences the channeling as therapeutic self-development. The circle closes. The figure at its center experiences her emotional life as thoroughly organized by the intersection of market logic and therapeutic culture, and experiences this organization as the shape of an examined life.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The figure's genealogy runs from the Hawthorne experiments of the 1920s, which discovered that workers' productivity responded to emotional engagement, through the postwar transformation of American psychoanalysis into a project of self-optimization, to the late-twentieth-century emergence of