All things emerge at midnight, shrouded in darkness and lacking the power to show themselves as something new. They may be anticipated before this, but they can only be known once they appear in the light of day. The dawning of control means we can begin to glimpse its potential dangers even if only partially. The most pertinent of these dangers we can currently glimpse is what Gamez calls the exhaustion of subjectivity (Gamez 2023). This is the condition where the interiority of the human mind is made unnecessary through the ever-expanding ubiquity of information technologies and their powers of recording, stimulation, and prediction. This chapter explores the nature of this problem. First, I recount Gamez’s description of the problem, and the work on surveillance capitalism that it is based on. I then use Simondon’s account of psychic individuation to explore a possible mechanism of this exhaustion. Third, I argue that the exhaustion of subjectivity is an example of the wider phenomenon of technological deskilling. This both grounds its possibility and allows us to connect our concerns with work on subjectivation in continental political philosophy and virtue ethics.

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The Exhaustion of Subjectivity

  • Michael J. Ardoline

摘要

All things emerge at midnight, shrouded in darkness and lacking the power to show themselves as something new. They may be anticipated before this, but they can only be known once they appear in the light of day. The dawning of control means we can begin to glimpse its potential dangers even if only partially. The most pertinent of these dangers we can currently glimpse is what Gamez calls the exhaustion of subjectivity (Gamez 2023). This is the condition where the interiority of the human mind is made unnecessary through the ever-expanding ubiquity of information technologies and their powers of recording, stimulation, and prediction. This chapter explores the nature of this problem. First, I recount Gamez’s description of the problem, and the work on surveillance capitalism that it is based on. I then use Simondon’s account of psychic individuation to explore a possible mechanism of this exhaustion. Third, I argue that the exhaustion of subjectivity is an example of the wider phenomenon of technological deskilling. This both grounds its possibility and allows us to connect our concerns with work on subjectivation in continental political philosophy and virtue ethics.