CONCEPT
Social Subjection
The mechanism by which capitalism produces individual subjects — worker, consumer, citizen, entrepreneur — who experience themselves as autonomous agents making free choices within a social field.
Social subjection is one of two distinct mechanisms through which capitalist production integrates human beings into its operations — the other being machinic enslavement. Social subjection operates at the level of the individual subject: at the level of consciousness, identity, and the experience of making choices. It produces individuals who experience themselves as free agents. The achievement subject who drives herself toward unlimited productivity, experiencing her own exploitation as self-expression, is a product of social subjection. The mechanism is more effective than the disciplinary subjection it replaced precisely because the control has become invisible — the subject experiences motivation, ambition, creative drive, rather than constraint.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept draws on Félix Guattari's machine theory and Foucault's analysis of power, distinguishing the level at which subjection operates (individual consciousness, self-understanding, experienced choice) from the level at which machinic enslavement operates (below conscious awareness, integrating capacities directly into technical assemblages).
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