“The Property-Less Sensorium”: Following the Subject in Crisis Times

This essay is part of a larger body of ongoing research and publication investigating how current shifts in the material relations of money, commodities, and social abstractions shape processes of contemporary subject formation. By moving dialectically through today's landscape of social abstraction, we analyze subject positions under postcrisis conditions starting with that of the entrepreneur, trying to better understand the social and political possibilities foreclosed by contemporary subjectivity. If the contemporary subject is a derelict shell housing data bodies, social commodities, and quantified selves, we need to develop another materialist understanding of the subject that looks to the collective production of affects and rationalities in resistance, which both exhibit and forecast the surpassing of the symptoms of our present.