The Autonomy and the Well Adapted Subjects

Abstract

Adaptation to society is today crucial in order to face the current situation. Does it mean we have to abandon the claims of autonomy and social transformation? Indifference and abstraction, as being promoted by acceleration in the digital age, converge with a process of individual capitalization of the subjects. There is a mutual reinforcement between the network society’s technology and the self-entrepreneurship of neoliberal capitalism. On the one side, we carry out a critique of the capitalistic expropriation of the life time as it is taking place in the acceleration of the digital age. On the other side, the critique of neoliberal society in the technodigital age reveals how the individuals, universalized as capital, are finally employees of themselves. The subject is subjected by the hegemonic form of social production, through whichhe objectivizes into society. Such a form is not the result of a technical imposition, but of an historical option. The social production is contradictory: on the one side, production based on waged labor linked to the valorization of capital and its expropriated, heteronomic work time. On the other side, it is the result of the creative form of the autonomy of the living work force, centered on “time as the place of human development”. A neither passive nor technical adaptation to society could actualize the potentialities of this contradictory production. In this way, the autonomy of well adjusted people could become effective, for instance, in the experience of work and of liberated time, which could lead to produce a non capitalistic society, which would limit the expropriation of the life time.