Beyond technological determinism: body and subjectivity in the digital age

Abstract

Contemporaneity is produced by new digital technologies, whose most prominent representatives are social networks and artificial intelligences. This new industrial phase of capitalism entails the conditioning of modes of subjectivation, given the inseparability between technology and human existence. This work aims to analyze a certain fatalistic notion according to which the outcome of this relationship would be the complete domination of humans by the machines. The hypothesis is that there exists, in the subjects, ways for the technical developments beyond the notions of automatization as the exponent of progress. If the latter perspective is true, then a certain subjective contingency can modify the relationship to the technical systems. It is proposed that the body, as conceived by psychoanalysis, shelters the potential to subjective productions and constitutes a way out of the deterministic views of the technique over the modes of life. The body as the harbor of the drive represents the contingent potential for the making of inventive activities, even through its symptoms.